Play 2 Wage: Linked

I climbed the pallet of stones and jumped clean over the torn up bundle of lumber we had been previously hidden behind, then dashed across the now well lit floor of the garage towards Tevin’s limp armored form. The vehicles were still crashing around at the back of the shop, and the occasional familiar buzz of Jorn’s massive rifle sounded off amongst the chaos, but the return fire had entirely cut off in the havoc Max had stirred up to save our asses.

I slid to the ground next to Tevin, looking over his back and seeing multiple chips and scratches on his armor, but nothing that looked fatal or even serious. There was a small splatter of blood on the concrete beneath him, so I rolled him over to check his front. His mask was down and his armored form was rigid, which made rolling him over difficult but not impossible thanks to my improved strength. Once I got him rolled onto his back I checked over his faceplate, and saw that too was intact and opaque.

“Max!” I called out. “Can you let me see him?”

“Uh. I’m a little busy, but I’ll see what I can do.” he replied, and a second later his reflective faceplate shimmered like the glowing quest markers before his helmet disappeared. “It’s a digital representation I cobbled together with sensor data from the internal scanners, with a dash of artistic interpretation. He’ll have a new, especially gnarly, scar and needs surgery or a day in a full Link booth at some point, but he’ll be alright.”

I examined my oldest friend, and tried not to empty my stomach. A bullet had torn into his cheek, mangling his face and jaw and narrowly missing his eye. The shot must have bounced off of his skull or something, because the exit wound looked like it had torn one of his ears clean off before the bullet was caught by the interior of his helmet.

“Did you see who shot him?” I growled at Max, feeling my anger flare up again.

“Yeah, it was Andy, which was lucky. He had a pistol and beat Bree to the punch. If she would have hit him with that rifle she picked up I don’t think he’d have made it. They took off once things started going tits-up and are barricading themselves in the basement of the house. Hah. They think they can hide. Want me to overpressure the gas lines and blow the place up?”

“No.” I replied harshly, patting Tevin’s shoulder and watching as the helmet reappeared. I leaned over and picked up his giant-sized rifle with my good arm and rose to my feet. “I need to talk to them.”

I worked my way through the burning line of crashed and destroyed vehicles to the back of the building, looking for Jorn. I found him behind the building near the equipment van I had smashed the awning off of earlier. He had found a surviving ambusher and was holding him at gunpoint while the unarmored and unarmed man cowered on the ground next to the open sliding door of the van.

“Who are you working for!” Jorn growled with intonation of a man who had repeated the question too many times and was losing his patience.

“The people!” The man replied. He looked like he was a little older than me, and was tanned and lined by a life spent in the sun. He was laying on his back with his hands held up over his face to block his view of Jorn’s rifle only a few feet away.

“You should tell him.” I cut into the conversation as I approached, noticing Jorn’s helmet swivel slightly in my direction before locking back onto the downed man.

“I did!” He insisted, giving me an angry look with hard determined eyes. “I work for the people. For the lifeblood of the land!”

I frowned, unsure how to proceed. If he was spouting off slogans like that and the menacing power armored trooper couldn’t intimidate him to say more, I figured it would take some actual torture to get him to say anything else. That was a bridge I was not willing to cross, even in my anger.

“Barney Gondsun, 25. He’s a drone mechanic for one of the big Ag corps by day, and a freedom fighter for whatever the hell ‘By Blood for Home’s Glory’ is. From the info I’ve managed to scrape off the internet, they seem to be some kind of homegrown terrorist cult bent on overthrowing the government and reinstating the old constitutional union. The other guys call ‘em BHGs and they argue a lot with the more religious ones.”

I scrunched my face up at Max’s intel, he could really be useful when he had a mind to help out. I squatted down next to Barney, resting the oversized rifle I was carrying over my knees and looking him in the eye.

“Alright, Barney, you don’t have to tell me who you work for. Just tell me what your job here was, and maybe we’ll let you slink back to your real job wrenching on drones in the fields, and not report your actions back to whoever oversees the hole in the dirt you crawled out of.” I said coldly, only feeling slightly guilty for my implied threat to the man's family or community.

The guy's eyes flared with surprise and anger at my words. “I work for the people. Our people, you have to understand, you were one of us.” He repeated.

I shook my head and traded a quick look with Jorn. “I may be a worker, and not some nepo-tastic appointed bureaucrat, but I’m not like you. I worked hard to get where I am, and happened to get lucky. I never picked up a weapon and waged war on my neighbors because I thought life wasn't fair. Life’s not fair, plain and simple. We’re all just doing what we have to, and these guys,” I jerked my chin towards Jorn, “don’t care about your blood or glory, or your life and family.”

I lowered my voice and narrowed my eyes. “Tell me what you were doing back here, or I’ll give him the greenlight to make you tell me.” I bluffed.

Truthfully, I was unsure if Jorn would even follow a request I made of him, let alone an actual order. I was hoping the sprinkling of facts I’d gotten from Max, combined with the threat of the well-known brutality of the Shepherds, would push him over the edge.

Barney looked down and whimpered for a moment, and I nearly lost my resolve. My anger had carried me this far but was slowly being chipped away by the pity and sympathy I felt for the man who could have been a coworker or classmate if circumstances had been a little different. Still, I held a hard look on my face and waited for an answer. I’d come this far and wouldn’t back down while it might still work.

After a tense few seconds, he mumbled something. “What was that, Mr. Gondsun?” I prodded, waiting for a moment as the man shook and tried to hold back tears, averting his eyes from both Jorn and myself and instead staring down at the blood spattered and trampled earth.

“I’m a tech.” He mumbled. “I was in charge of setting up and maintaining the rig.” He clenched his jaw and balled his fists before continuing. “You bastards intercept anything that goes through normal channels. Radio, landlines, satellite, even most of our runners get picked up. Your damned council has an iron grip on everything, so we use the wretched Links.”

He paused and rubbed his side for a moment, but seemed to be unable to stop once he had started. “The zealots hate it, but it’s the only way we’ve been able to get anything organized. We’ve been planning for months, years, and then we get word that you are about to start pulling in more and more alien gear and funding, and we had to act before your city stronghold became too important.”

He spat down on the ground and glared at me for a second, his eyes burning with impotent and hopeless fury.

I held his gaze, unsure what he was seeing in my face but not wanting to look away. I’d gotten what I wanted from him, and was given a spark of hope for my own plight by his words. The anger in his eyes grew and I realized I must have given away some sign of satisfaction at his answer.

“So you have a Link? That must have been expensive.” I stood up and looked into the open door of the van, seeing more complex looking equipment cabinets and banks of small screens. “Is it in there? How’d you afford a piece of tech like that if you all are suffering under the boot of the council?” I asked as I stepped around the man and looked into the van.

Evidently my reaction and tone had gotten to him, because he did not reply. When he refused to answer after a few seconds, Jorn took it upon himself to jump back into the interrogation. “Tell him, and we’ll leave you here for the QRE to pick up and take in. Or not, and you’ll be loaded into the biohazard trailer when it finally has the time to come through and clean up this mess, probably in a few weeks after everything that might be identifiable is already too rotten to care about.”

I let Jorn take over, not really caring about anything else the man had to say. My mind was already whirling with the hope that all of my effort to join the dwarves might not be a total waste of time after all. In the back of the van was a bulky box containing the recognizable spinal sensor, half-helmet, and saddle of a Link. I leaned back out of the van and took a few steps back, then walked around the vehicle and inspected it for damage.

When I had swept the bucket through the awning attached to the side, it had ripped a couple of connection points out of the body near the roof line. Yet despite everything that had gone on around the van, other than those ripped out areas and a few bullet holes through the body, it seemed intact and ready to roll. I looked at Jorn, feeling a tight grin return to my face.

“He answered what I really needed to know, I’ll let you make the call Jorn. I’m going to check on the others and let you finish this. When you’re done, I need your help at the house. The rats burrowed in, and I think they’ll have more interesting things to say than this guy here.” I said before turning back to the garage to let the rest of my allies and friends know it was safe enough to come out.

After checking on Tevin again and not seeing any real difference, I skirted around the growing fires and found Rin and Ali where I had left them. Ali flashed me a loopy yet strained smile as I kneeled down next to her, and Rin gave me a deadpan stare that warned of an impending interrogation.

“Hey, are you two good to move? We need to get you out of this building before it comes down or something.” I asked.

“Of course, sir.” Ali said with a little salute, which caused her to lose her balance and start to slide over before I reached out and caught her by the shoulder, pushing her back into a sitting position.

“I would have already moved, but she is too heavy for me.” Rin answered, giving me a bit of a glare for having put him in charge and taking off like I had.

“I can carry her, I think I found a vehicle to take off in too. We just need to load up Tevin as well.” I replied as I scooped Ali up into a fireman's carry. She complied but also complained.

“This isn't how you’re supposed to carry the wounded, sir.”

I just grunted in reply and rose to my feet, gesturing to Rin to hand me Tevin’s rifle that I had set down so I could pick up Ali. Rin looked at me, to the rifle, and then back to me.

“I can’t lift that thing, it weighs like 80 pounds.”

I sighed and squatted down, awkwardly picking it up and barely managing to keep Ali in place on my shoulder, only succeeding because she grabbed onto me and stopped herself from sliding off.

“Have you seen Katie? I lost track of her after the shooting started.” I directed my question at Rin, who shrugged. Instead, Ali surprised me with a slightly muffled answer from her perch over my shoulder.

“She’s two pallets back, sir.”

I thought to myself, I’d have to give her a raise after all this. Injured, drugged, loyal through a deadly situation she could have avoided by turning on me. Her being assigned to me might be the luckiest thing to happen through this whole messed up situation.

“Alright, let’s get her and go.” I said to no one in particular and we went off to look for the bossy lady.

We had a brief moment of confusion when we searched the whole corner and came up empty. We looked in the last place Ali had seen her, then did a few circuits through the little maze of pallets and leaking bags and boxes that were stacked through the area, all without finding a trace of her. After a wasted minute and a half of searching while the fires continued to grow around us, I thought I noticed the soft sound of someone snickering near the corner.

I turned my head to look in that direction, straining my ears to listen over the noise of the fire and occasional cook-off of ammunition from dropped rifles. I zeroed in on an empty space between a bullet pocked and palletized appliance of some kind, and a tall stack of boxes of tiles that had been shot up and splattered around on the floor. Between the two there was an oddly circular spot clear of debris in the gap that the sound seemed to be coming from.

As I got closer, the quiet laughter got a little louder and I could distinctly make it out as male, which confused the hell out of me. Who else would be in here and laughing through a situation like this?

“Do you hear that?” I asked my companions.

“It’s all burning, sir.”

“No.”

I frowned, wondering what was going on when the quiet snickering grew to a loud guffaw before I realized it was Max that I was hearing. The bastard was laughing for some reason, and just as I was about to lay into him, the cleared spot shimmered and wavered for a moment before a sort of holographic ghostly image of a scared looking Katie appeared huddled in the gap.

“She popped a stealth shell, an expensive little item the Gon sells that creates a cloaked and shielded bubble. She can’t see or hear out of it, and doesn't know it's safe to turn off yet. They only last an hour and are a single-use item, so she’ll snap out of it eventually. They’re tech is good, it took me a min to pick up on it.”

I scowled, stuck on what to do next. I couldn’t just tell Rin and Ali what Max had just told me, I had no good excuse to know any of that. Maybe Jorn would know and have a solution?

“Screw that guy, he’s busy trying to get more info out of Barney back there. The field is moveable, you could just roll her out of here like she was in one of those hamster balls.”

That mental image tipped my scowl nearly back to a grin. The idea of Katie rolling around and tumbling along as we pushed her through the burning building was certainly appealing, and would have been enough to make me laugh on another day. Right now though, that didn’t seem like the right answer, it still didn't explain how I knew she was even there to my friends. Maybe I could coax one of them into coming to the same conclusion I had been given? Ali was an ex soldier who might have come across something like that before, and Rin seemed to know everything.

I looked around, feigning confusion and giving Ali a view of the spot I knew that Katie was invisibly hiding in.

“Could she have used an item or something to hide? Jorn had stealth built into his armor, maybe Katie has something like that?” I mused, hoping I wasn't being too obvious.

Ali made a long ‘hmmm’ noise that had a note of musicality to it, while Rin gave me a searching and serious look.

“It is possible, she would certainly have the funds to afford some items for personal defense and safety.” Rin answered after a beat, eventually looking away from me and searching around the area. After a few seconds, he reached down and picked up a piece of broken tile and tossed it at the clear spot of flooring. We both watched as the tile bounced off of the air and landed on the floor, shattering into a few smaller pieces.

“Interesting.” He said, while staring at me pointedly.

I knew right then that Rin was definitely starting to question what was going on with me, but I didn't have the time to get bogged down in whatever explanation I’d have to give him, so I quickly changed the subject.

“Right, see if you can get whatever that is out of there. We have to drag Tevin to the van too.” I said, gesturing clumsily with the rifle while trying not to drop Ali.

Rin stared at me for a moment longer, his sleep deprived and intelligent eyes scrutinizing me as I watched the lightning fast gears turn in his head. Luckily, instead of pressing me for answers immediately, he turned and began to feel around in the corner to find the edges of the invisible shell. It only took him a moment to realize that whatever shield she was in was rounded, or rather a sort of oval shape, like an egg, with a small flat bottom.

As he rolled her out of the corner, I watched the ghostly Katie being tumbled around as he rocked the invisible shield onto its side and got it rolling towards the entrance. The whole image was probably fabricated by Max, but it still got a grin out of me as I followed him towards one of the closed garage doors near where we had entered the building.

It took a few extra moments to realize that the garage doors had been locked down, but Rin quickly figured out how to bypass the jams they had put on them, and the fires at the back of the shop were growing large enough that we didn’t want to exit that way again. I worried a little for Tevin as he lay in the middle of the cleared floor, but figured his armor would protect him for now. I could go back in for him after I got Ali safely outside of the smoky building.

A few seconds later, we circled around the outside of the building and I set Ali down on some of the broken equipment cabinets next to the van. I was relieved to discover that Jorn had bound the man we had interrogated, tying his ankles and feet to the bumper of a completely smashed car nearby. He gave Rin a strange look when he noticed he was miming rolling an invisible barrel to us, and a look of recognition flashed over his face after a moment.

“Dammit. That's the CLE?” He asked, giving me the most concerned look I had seen on the man's face through this whole situation. “She’s going to be pissed.”