Moonshadows (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
moonshadows) wrote2013-01-25 08:53 am
moonshadows) wrote2013-01-25 08:53 am
Arrival
The cheap, third-floor room I'm renting in an Argentinian slum has been used for dirtier purposes than mine. There's a stained and beat-up mattress in one corner, and filthy drug paraphernalia among the trash in the others. The dilapidated building has no security to speak of, unless you count the stairs that creak like the shrieks of the damned - which I do. An empty socket glares blindly at me from the cracked ceiling, suggesting that at one point the room had light, but even if I'd brought a bulb the burn marks in the walls would make me wary about having any current running through them.
Because the wiring is so shoddy, I've had to bring a signal amplifier as well as the throwaway pad I'm using to hack into the Talon base three blocks over. It isn't anything vital, from what I can see. Just a staging area for moving materials. But I've methodically hacked into what feels like half the Talon bases in South America already, leaving enough clues that someone very smart and very suspicious would know all the intruders were a single person. To that end, I'm being deliberately clumsy as I fish around in their systems, following orders up the chain of command, leaving the local base and entering a bigger network. The amplifier makes it child's play for anyone to track me to my rented room. Or at least, it would be something I could have done easily as a child. I have to assume any halfway-competent Digital Security Officer would be able to find me. Shortly after I start moving around Talon's main network, orders go back down the chain to the local base: go to coordinates that correspond to my location, find and detain the source of the digital intrusion.
Me.
I flail around for a minute longer before disengaging - make it seem like I didn't overhear the orders. By that point, troops are already chattering to each other over a secure channel. It buzzes across the top of my visualization, encrypted data translating to voices, an address being read out and grunts wondering if there will even be anyone there by the time they arrive. Plenty of time for me to send a short message.
THIS IS IT. GOING IN. The message is encrypted and bounced around a few satellites before reaching its destination.
The van is parked outside and the first painfully-loud steps have been taken up the stairs when the encrypted reply from my sponsor bounces back through the satellites and unfolds in the corner of my digital sight. GOOD LUCK, LITTLE SHADOW.
I'm halfway to the stairs, pad and amplifier abandoned in the room, when armed Talon grunts boil out and cover me with their firearms. Slowly, I raise my hands in a nonthreatening gesture.
"What's up, amigos?"
=
The van I've been silently hustled into has no windows and I can't see out the windshield without making it obvious, but that doesn't keep me from knowing that I'm not being taken to the local base. Even without accessing any systems and potentially giving away what I can do, I can feel the buildings pass and the satellites know where I am. It's an hour and a half of tense silence before the van stops, and then I'm hustled into a troop transport ship so fast that I can barely glance around the hangar before I'm on board. They don't quite blindfold me or put a burlap sack over my head, but helmeted heads block my view pretty effectively. Everyone's been given their orders already; there's no chitchat even on secured channels. I'm strapped into a seat in the belly of the ship, the troops follow suit, and then the ship's engines hum to life.
We're in the air for four and a half hours, going east and sharply north across the Atlantic. It's boring. I can't even sleep, because the soldiers to either side coincidentally jostle me if I look like I'm nodding off. When we finally land, the satellites tell me we're somewhere in Morocco. I'm handed off to another group of armed Talon goons and hustled into another windowless van where we sit in awkward silence for close to 40 minutes before the van pulls into a depot or warehouse or something - the security systems register entrances fairly spread out from each other, with almost nothing in between. Well, at least the chances of me getting shot are vanishingly small. I doubt they'd haul me across an ocean if they were just going to interrogate and shoot me.
I'm hustled out of the van and into the echoing warehouse dock. The goons are silent, their leader an older, sour-faced man who had to have been in the front seat with the driver. He reminds me of a slightly-younger Tarkin, only instead of leading stormtroopers through the halls of the Death Star, he's leading Talon soldiers through the halls of what is unquestionably a warehouse complex. Why am I here?
Tarkin's younger brother stops in front of a door and punches in a key sequence. "You work for Talon now," he says in a no-nonsense tone that carries an undercurrent of washing his hands of me. "You will live here, and report to Reaper. All your needs will be seen to."
Before I can ask who Reaper is or who to talk to about my needs, he pushes the door open and steps out of the way with a smirk. It's clear that's my cue to walk into the dimly-lit room, so I do before one of the goons formed up around me decides to give me a shove.
It's big and mostly dark. That's about all I can tell before the figure standing a few feet in front of me grabs my attention. He's tall, easily six feet plus and solidly built, dressed in black leather armor broken up by pointy bits of metal and a mask that looks like someone had a fascination for owl skulls.
"So you're the new recruit?" he asks, arms crossed. From behind the angular skull-mask, his voice is gravelly and resonant and clearly irritated by my very existence.
Big deal.
I give him a cheeky grin. "Weeeellll...it was more like they made me an offer I couldn't refuse when I was looking to make a career change anyway."
"Hmmph." He's not impressed by my Latina bravado. "What can you do?"
"Tch. What can't I do?" The rhetorical question is a set-up for a skeptical invitation to boast, but he's not taking it.
"Whatever. Don't get in my way, or I'll kill you."
Right. Clearly "Reaper" is taking his persona a bit too seriously. Well, I'm not impressed, either.
I give him the big eyes. "You can't kill me." Hands spread innocently. "I'm already dead!" And let him make of that what he will.
Silence, and what I assume is a scathing look.
Fine, I'll run with it. "So Reaper...you're like Death, right? The Grim Reaper? Hey, if you're Death and I'm dead, does that make me like your child? Can I call you Papi?"
"No," he says shortly, and disintegrates into a black mist that flows from the room.
Interesting.
Form a small message, encrypt it and toss it up to bounce around the satellites until it reaches my sponsor, where it will be decrypted.
I'M IN.
Because the wiring is so shoddy, I've had to bring a signal amplifier as well as the throwaway pad I'm using to hack into the Talon base three blocks over. It isn't anything vital, from what I can see. Just a staging area for moving materials. But I've methodically hacked into what feels like half the Talon bases in South America already, leaving enough clues that someone very smart and very suspicious would know all the intruders were a single person. To that end, I'm being deliberately clumsy as I fish around in their systems, following orders up the chain of command, leaving the local base and entering a bigger network. The amplifier makes it child's play for anyone to track me to my rented room. Or at least, it would be something I could have done easily as a child. I have to assume any halfway-competent Digital Security Officer would be able to find me. Shortly after I start moving around Talon's main network, orders go back down the chain to the local base: go to coordinates that correspond to my location, find and detain the source of the digital intrusion.
Me.
I flail around for a minute longer before disengaging - make it seem like I didn't overhear the orders. By that point, troops are already chattering to each other over a secure channel. It buzzes across the top of my visualization, encrypted data translating to voices, an address being read out and grunts wondering if there will even be anyone there by the time they arrive. Plenty of time for me to send a short message.
THIS IS IT. GOING IN. The message is encrypted and bounced around a few satellites before reaching its destination.
The van is parked outside and the first painfully-loud steps have been taken up the stairs when the encrypted reply from my sponsor bounces back through the satellites and unfolds in the corner of my digital sight. GOOD LUCK, LITTLE SHADOW.
I'm halfway to the stairs, pad and amplifier abandoned in the room, when armed Talon grunts boil out and cover me with their firearms. Slowly, I raise my hands in a nonthreatening gesture.
"What's up, amigos?"
=
The van I've been silently hustled into has no windows and I can't see out the windshield without making it obvious, but that doesn't keep me from knowing that I'm not being taken to the local base. Even without accessing any systems and potentially giving away what I can do, I can feel the buildings pass and the satellites know where I am. It's an hour and a half of tense silence before the van stops, and then I'm hustled into a troop transport ship so fast that I can barely glance around the hangar before I'm on board. They don't quite blindfold me or put a burlap sack over my head, but helmeted heads block my view pretty effectively. Everyone's been given their orders already; there's no chitchat even on secured channels. I'm strapped into a seat in the belly of the ship, the troops follow suit, and then the ship's engines hum to life.
We're in the air for four and a half hours, going east and sharply north across the Atlantic. It's boring. I can't even sleep, because the soldiers to either side coincidentally jostle me if I look like I'm nodding off. When we finally land, the satellites tell me we're somewhere in Morocco. I'm handed off to another group of armed Talon goons and hustled into another windowless van where we sit in awkward silence for close to 40 minutes before the van pulls into a depot or warehouse or something - the security systems register entrances fairly spread out from each other, with almost nothing in between. Well, at least the chances of me getting shot are vanishingly small. I doubt they'd haul me across an ocean if they were just going to interrogate and shoot me.
I'm hustled out of the van and into the echoing warehouse dock. The goons are silent, their leader an older, sour-faced man who had to have been in the front seat with the driver. He reminds me of a slightly-younger Tarkin, only instead of leading stormtroopers through the halls of the Death Star, he's leading Talon soldiers through the halls of what is unquestionably a warehouse complex. Why am I here?
Tarkin's younger brother stops in front of a door and punches in a key sequence. "You work for Talon now," he says in a no-nonsense tone that carries an undercurrent of washing his hands of me. "You will live here, and report to Reaper. All your needs will be seen to."
Before I can ask who Reaper is or who to talk to about my needs, he pushes the door open and steps out of the way with a smirk. It's clear that's my cue to walk into the dimly-lit room, so I do before one of the goons formed up around me decides to give me a shove.
It's big and mostly dark. That's about all I can tell before the figure standing a few feet in front of me grabs my attention. He's tall, easily six feet plus and solidly built, dressed in black leather armor broken up by pointy bits of metal and a mask that looks like someone had a fascination for owl skulls.
"So you're the new recruit?" he asks, arms crossed. From behind the angular skull-mask, his voice is gravelly and resonant and clearly irritated by my very existence.
Big deal.
I give him a cheeky grin. "Weeeellll...it was more like they made me an offer I couldn't refuse when I was looking to make a career change anyway."
"Hmmph." He's not impressed by my Latina bravado. "What can you do?"
"Tch. What can't I do?" The rhetorical question is a set-up for a skeptical invitation to boast, but he's not taking it.
"Whatever. Don't get in my way, or I'll kill you."
Right. Clearly "Reaper" is taking his persona a bit too seriously. Well, I'm not impressed, either.
I give him the big eyes. "You can't kill me." Hands spread innocently. "I'm already dead!" And let him make of that what he will.
Silence, and what I assume is a scathing look.
Fine, I'll run with it. "So Reaper...you're like Death, right? The Grim Reaper? Hey, if you're Death and I'm dead, does that make me like your child? Can I call you Papi?"
"No," he says shortly, and disintegrates into a black mist that flows from the room.
Interesting.
Form a small message, encrypt it and toss it up to bounce around the satellites until it reaches my sponsor, where it will be decrypted.
I'M IN.