Also involved in this story is Dashiell. Click here to link to the perspective from his characters
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DeVirgo looked at the data crystal in his hand. It was the one recovered from guildmaster Stoat's Bottlenose by the crew of the Mary Celeste. Flipping the crystal into the air, he watched the factets sparkle as it span.
"Jackson!" he bellowed, as he caught the falling crystal. A sharp suited young woman appeared at the doorway.
"Sir?"
"Get this crystal to Barnes. I want all the data on it transferred to my station within the next hour. No excuses." He threw the crystal at the aide, who caught it deftly.
"Yessir!" She turned instantly and headed out the door.
****************
Jim Barnes looked up as the door to his office opened.
"Morning Jim," said Laura Jackson cheerfully. "Got a job for you from the boss. He wants the data from this crystal transferred to his station within the next hour. I believe his exact comment was no excuses." She placed the crystal gently in front of Barnes, smiling broadly. "Don't screw it up like last time, eh? You'll be cleaning toilets if you do."
As Jackson left his office, Jim sighed deeply. He glanced at the crystal sat on his desk, wondering if he should delegate the work. He sighed again. DeVirgo had apparently specified he do it, and that meant he'd better do it if he wanted to keep his job. He picked up the crystal, and headed out of his office for one of the labs.
"Right, out you lot," he ordered as he entered the lab. "Got a job from DeVirgo to do, and that means it's classified." The two technicians nodded silently and vacated. Jim walked to one of the terminals, and inserted the crystal into a reader, settling down to recover what data he could.
Forty five minutes later he transmitted what he'd recovered directly to DeVirgo's terminal.
****************
DeVirgo looked over as the data feed from Barnes arrived.
It appeared that guildmaster Stoat had travelled out to Omega-56 to enable some repairs to the gunship to be carried out, and to fit the new line of turrets to the vessel. The return journey through Dresden, Omega-11 and Omega-7 was uneventful, until approaching Freeport 1 in Omega-3. An unidentified vessel dropped out of the trade lanes, and immediately took up an aggressive posture. A scan performed shows the following detail.
Recognisable energy spikes trigger automatic alarms within the gunship. Despite the outward appearance of a Rheinland military vessel, certain energy signatures associated with the Wilde are detected, alerting the guildmaster. As the two vessels move in an attempt to gain a tactical advantage, a second vessel appears within scanning range. This vessel is a known Nomad ship.
Visual recordings are lost at this point. Some sort of jamming signal, apparently emanating form the Nomad vessel, render the data useless. Audio appears to have been able to survive mostly intact.
Data retrieved from life support shows guildmaster Stoat suffering what appears to be an epileptic fit. Brain wave activity leading up to the incident becomes increasingly erratic, and adrenalin levels go through the roof. As the guildmaster passes into unconsciousness, the automatic distress signals are triggered. It appears that a number of vessels are detected by the ships heavily damaged sensor arrays, but none of them stop to provide assistance.
At this point the sensor arrays detect a single transport class vessel attempting to perform a docking manoeuvre with the gunship. Further data is irretrievable as power levels within the gunship drop off.
Doctor Reed sat in his office and studied the report on his most recent patient intently. He was no stranger to treating some of the most unusual cases Bretonia had to offer - Queen Carina's on Leeds was generally considered the finest hospital within the house. This was different though. Different enough for him to have ignored the missive from Max DeVirgo, head of the Bounty Hunters Guild. Rather than immediately place Stoat into suspended animation, Reed had attempted to find out what was going on with the guildmaster. So far, guildmaster Stoat had been diagnosed by six different specialists. Each diagnostician had come to the same conclusion. Stoat appeared to be suffering from a progression of extremely severe, predominantly neurological diseases, each seemingly lasting for a few hours before regression, or cure, and the guildmaster reverting to a comatose state.
First up was trigeminal neuralgia, a disorder usually affecting people of at least 50 years of age, characterised by extreme pain in the facial area. The guildmaster had come out of the comatose state he had been admitted in, and started screaming in pain. Four hours of investigation had identified the condition, and a microvascular decompression, a relatively simple surgical procedure, cured it. Stoat had come round from the anaesthesia long enough for the doctors to see that the procedure had been successful, before slipping back into a comatose state.
Eight hours later the guildmaster reawakened, and immediately started to complain of tingling, crawling, and pins and needles in his left leg. His right leg showed numbness and tremors, and any attempt to walk showed a considerable gait abnormality. More tests were run and this time peripheral neuropathy diagnosed. Administration of a tricyclic antidepressant had all but instantaneously removed all symptoms, but the guildmaster slipped back into a comatose state approximately fifteen minutes later.
Once again, eight hours later, he reawakened, this time his body completely taken over by tremors, hypokinesia, rigidity, and postural instability. Tests finally showed conclusively that the guildmaster was suffering from full blown Parkinson's disease, a condition not seen in the Sirius sector since the very earliest days of colonisation. At a loss for suitable treatments, Reed had administered an MAO-B inhibitor, and within five minutes all symptoms of Parkinsons had receded, and again Stoat slipped into his coma.
The cycle continued every eight hours. Stoat would awaken showing the symptoms commonly associated with a patient suffering from the diseases for several years, if not decades. Myasthenia gravis was then followed by basal ganglia disease. As soon as a suitable drug was administered, or surgical procedure carried out, all symptoms and trace of the disorder would recede and then disappear, and the guildmaster would become comatose again.
That was until yesterday. Stoat had awakened showing symptoms including loss of muscle coordination, muscle weakness, visual problems, hearing problems, mental retardation, heart disease, liver disease, kidney disease, a respiratory disorder and autonomic dysfunction. Seventeen hours of tests and analysis showed signs of drastic mutations within his mitochondrial DNA. He was at least stable, but Doctor Reed was out of time. Representatives of Max DeVirgo would arrive in approximately four hours, and the guildmaster now had to be put into suspended animation.
He was secretly relieved that the representatives of the Bounty Hunters Guild arriving to reclaim the guildmaster. What they thought they might be able to achieve that Queen Carina's could not was beyond him. Still, it was their problem now. He had more than enough on his plate dealing with all the wounded that continued to pour in from the war with Kusari. He pressed a botton on his communicator.
'George, prepare guildmaster Stoat for transit. He's due to be collected in four hours. Full suspended animation please, George.'
'Yes doctor,' came the reply. 'Will do.'
**************************************
Captain Harding landed the Armoured Transport, PTS Last Chance, softly on the landing pad of Queen Carina's. As the vessel powered down he made his way to the cargo bay and opened the doors. There, waiting for him, was a single white coated doctor, along with two orderlies with a suspended animation chamber between them. He moved to the doctor, holding out his hand.
"Doctor Reed?" The man nodded in affirmation. "This is the guildmaster I take it?"
"As requested by your Mr DeVirgo. He's safely in SA, although there were several," Reed paused as he searched for the right words, "oddities we had to overcome before he could be safely out under. His condition is stable, but critical. As I told DeVirgo, I think moving the guildmaster is a grave mistake. I cannot believe he will be any better off being shipped out to the Omegas."
"Not my problem, Doc. I'm just here to carry the poor bastard, nothing more. You got something for me to sign?"
Reed nodded, and handed across a clipboard holding the release papers. Harding signed them and passed them back. Turning to the orderlies he shouted
"Right lads, get him on board then. No need to be hanging around!"
The orderlies hurried to push the SA chamber onto the transport as Harding turned back to the doctor.
"Cheers, doc. Been a pleasure." He nodded once and moved into the cargo hold himself. With the chamber secured, the orderlies left and Harding secured the doors and returned to the bridge. Strapping himself in, he opened a comms channel.
"Volke, Gilgamesh, Amber, I am launching now. Get your birds ready."
The transport powered up into the Leeds cloudbase.
**************************************
Finally safe aboard Rostock, Captain Harding relaxed and let out a long deep sigh. It had been a long time since he had come that close to death. As the sweat on his forehead dried, his comms snapped into life.
"Harding! This is DeVirgo. I hear you ran into some trouble. I want your logs now, Captain. And arrange for guildmaster Stoat to be transferred to Capetown immediately."
The comms closed before he could respond. Jerk, he thought, as he transferred all of his logs through to DeVirgo....
The data sent, he moved to arrange for the transfer to Capedown. He'd be glad to get rid of this particular burden.
**************************************
DeVirgo looked up at his terminal as a datastream arrived. It was the feed from Captain Harding. As he read through each item of the logs, his eyebrows raised slightly.
"Jackson!" he shouted, as he finished examining the final details. His aide appeared immediately, gliding across the floor towards him.
"Sir?"
"Get a message to Dales on Capetown. Guildmaster Stoat will be arriving there shortly. I want full quarrantine lockdown, he's got a possible nomad infestation coming his way. And not a damned word to leak out of his department this time! Tell him it's his head otherwise."
**************************************
Guildmaster Stoat tossed and turned on the hospital bed. It was no good, he was never going to get to sleep. He sat upright, looking around the murkily lit room he was in. Two weeks he'd been here now. Two weeks of white coated doctors and neurosurgeons and nurses and psychologists and pyschotherapists and other, far more shady "scientists" all prodding, and poking, and questioning, and suspecting, and querying, and accusing. They'd not yet resorted to out and out torture, but he could feel the edges of his sanity fraying already.
Frustrated , he grabbed the glass of water at his bedside and hurled it across the room. The plastic glass failed to shatter, and bounced noisly across the floor.
"Bloody, damned, sodding platic bloody glass!!" he screamed. Throeing off the sheets he leaped off the bed, tearing the matress up and sending into the same wall as the glass. He turned to the everpresent security monitor bolted safely out of reach.
"Get me the hell out of here! I've had it, I tell you. No more bloody tests. No more probes. NO MORE DAMNED DOCTORS!"
As he raved at the camera, three burly orderlies burst into the room, tackling him to the floor. He struggled in vain against his opressors. A syringe pressed into his neck and he drifted off into insensibility.
**************************************
He awoke again several hours later in the same room, the same bed and the same sheets, but this time he was strapped down and gagged. A doctor entered the room, looking at the various monitor readings. Stoat struggled and tried to shout, but only managed a muffled grunting and a slight ruffling of the sheets. The doctor looked over at him impassively.
"Quiet down, guildmaster. Save your energy." He left the room without a further word.
The fight drained out of Stoat. He knew what was coming. He'd been involved in a close encounter with the Wilde, and they'd left him alive. That meant one of two things. He was infested already, or they wanted him to be. Judging by the tests he'd already been subjected to, he supposed it was the latter. If it was the former he'd be dead already. All he could do was relax, wait, and hope that DeVirgo didn't want him dead - when he finally made an appearance.
A voice came from the speaker set into the corner of the room - the voice that Stoat had both wanted to hear and feared hearing. The voice of Guildmaster Max DeVirgo.
"Stoat, old boy, seems like you've gotten yourself into a bit of a pickle."
DeVirgo as the Exalted Guildmaster was still a bit of a puzzle to Stoat. With Graves, you always knew where you stood. DeVirgo at times seemed quite human, while at other times...
"You going to go off your nut if I come in there and have a bit of a chat with you?"
Stoat shook his head no.
The door opened up. DeVirgo held his hand up, telling his guards to wait at the door. "Stoat won't give us any issues, men. Doctor, let's get this gag off of him, and loosen his restraints a bit. Raise the bed up a bit, too, so we can have us a chat."
DeVirgo stood silently by while his commands were carried out, and while everyone left. Stoat watched silently as DeVirgo reached into his jacket, and pulled out a gun. Max looked at Stoat, then at the gun, twisting it in his hands. A wry smile crossed his face, and he put the gun back into his jacket.
"I don't think we'll have any need for that bit of our business today, my old friend." His hand moved to another pocket, and then pulled out another device - something Stoat recognized as one of the best jammers available to the Guild - capable of blocking all recording devices. DeVirgo flipped the switch, turning it on. One of the machines hooked up to Stoat made a plaintive beep and then went silent.
"I've read your doctors report three times. You have some problems, and the way I see it, there's only a binary solution set. The simple question that I have for you is this - do you want to live to see your next birthday? That'll shape which solution we can offer you."
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
Stoat licked his lips nervously. The little display with the gun had shaken him more than he liked to admit. He noticed the beep as the recording device was deactivated by the jammer, which did nothing to allay his worries. What the hell was DeVirgo about to say to him that he didn't want anyone else to possibly know about? He was the top dog, after all.
He bought himself a few more seconds thought by stretching all the aching muscles in his body.
"Well, that makes my response fairly easy, boss. I like birthdays, my own at least. I want to see as many more of them as I can. But I kind of get the feeling I'm not going to be exactly cock-a-hoop about whatever it is that you seem to be planning."
DeVirgo pulled up a chair and sat down - close enough that he and Stoat could talk, not close enough that Stoat could get to him quickly.
"Whole lot of medical mumbo-jumbo involved in your case, Stoat. And a lot of scientific crap thrown in just for good measure. You know you were found, in space, and unconscious, after having had an encounter with both a Nomad AND a member of the Wilde."
Stoat shifted in bed nervously. "Ye... yeah, I know." His eyes grew wide as the implications of that sunk in.
"Well, no need to be unnecessarily cruel to you, so let's get this straight right now. You're not infected. Yet."
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
It was bad enough having to think about the implications of what having the Wilde and nomads interested in him meant. But the deafening silence that followed DeVirgo's final word hung between them. Stoat had never quite known just how much threat, insinuation, obligation and fear a single word could contain, until now.
He looked DeVirgo straight in the eye.
"Yet." he repeated. "I really don't like the sound of that, Max." He studied DeVirgo intently, but DeVirgo stayed silent, letting all the implications sink in.
"Max, you're a bastard, you really are. You want me to let the bloody Wilde infect me, don't you? Why the hell would I want to let that happen, eh? Dammit, Max, all the evidence we have shows that once infected the human host is buggered. I think I might actually prefer to take the option of the gun! Give me a bloody good reason to consider it, or just shoot me."
"That's exactly your reason, Stoat. You either do it, or I shoot you."
Stoat looked shocked, and Max was grim-faced.
"We have a serious issue here. You're still human, but ... something inside you has changed. I don't know exactly what they did to you, but you're ..." Max stopped, reached inside his jacket and pulled out several pieces of paper. "For security purposes, I can't download this directly to your neural net anymore, sorry, you have to look at this the old fashioned way."
He held them up for Stoat to read. "What is this crap, Max, I don't know what this medical stuff means any more than you do."
"Here's the last page, Stoat. Doctors summary. Blood chemistry on patient shows basic alteration as seen in past infected cases. Patient has not been infected with the symbiote at this time. Patient is at risk of being infected with ANY Nomad or Wilde exposure. Risk of infection - 100%."
Max threw the papers onto Stoats bed. "Dammit, man. You're a Guildmaster. You know ALL of our secrets. The physical things, like our security codes, I've already had changed. But our long term goals? You were in our planning sessions. You're one of the brotherhood! What would you have me do? It's not a case of whether or not you could get infected - it's simply a matter of WHEN!"
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
Tentatively, Stoat reached across and picked up the papers on his sheets. He studied the final pages repeatedly, and the colour drained from his face. DeVirgo was right, at least so far as the papers suggested. Stoat knew that DeVirgo wouldn't hesitate to forge any documentation he required to further the ends of the guild.
Stoat sighed, leaning back into the bed. He was in an impossible situation, and knew his options were extremely limited. Well, they were being made for him, right here and now.
"Okay, Max, okay. Damn you, you're right. So what's your plan?" As DeVirgo started to talk, Stoat raised a hand, cutting him off. "Don't try and tell me you haven't got one, I know you too well to believe that kind of crap. I want the truth, at least, if I'm going to sacrifice myself for the Guild. As much of the truth as you deem you can tell me, anyway. You owe me that. But I tell you this, I'm not going to be walking into infestation. If it's going to happen I'll be going down fighting!"
He sat up, and swung his legs off the bed.
"And I'll tell you another thing. I'm not spending another minute in this bloody bed. Get me out of here Max."
"Plan? Of course I have a plan - now. Why the hell do you think you've been kept in here for so long? I had to figure something out that didn't end up with the solution like what Graves would've done."
Stoat snorted as he started getting his clothes on. He remembered that George tended to have very simple solutions to his problems - fatal ones for the people involved.
"Seriously. You know how well we study people. Remember that crap with Captain Mimic a while back? If we weren't sure about what had happened to you, we wouldn't be having this conversation - you'd be back on duty. The Lords know that the situation in Bretonia is going to hell in a handbasket, what with the new threats from Gallia, in addition to the usual stuff."
Stoat nodded. "So what does this all mean?"
"Well, for one thing, you're locked out of our neural net. One of the things the doctors did was physically clean your implants. So while you're still on base, you're going to have to have someone escort you round the clock. Deal with it. As for the infestation stuff - how many Wilde prisoners have we processed through here, do you think?"
Stoat shrugged. "Half dozen, maybe? You know I don't keep up with that part of the business."
"You're off by a factor of 10. So far we've had over 43 infested humans that we've done studies on. With them, there's both good news and bad news. The bad news is that you become part of the Nomad collective. The good news is ... well, the Nomads seem to be learning a bit, and with some of their infested, they're not quite as controlling as we've seen in the past."
(11-21-2013, 12:53 PM)Jihadjoe Wrote: Oh god... The end of days... Agmen agreed with me.
Locked out of the neural net. Well, that was his position as Guildmaster gone, right there. All the work, all the years just gone for a circumstance out of his control. DeVirgo kept on talking, but Stoat didn't really hear what was being said. He was thinking of his father, dead these long years, who had taught him to hunt. His mother, long since remarried, and now living in peace on Planet Denver. He'd not spoken to her in three years. He sighed deepely as he wondered whether he'd get the chance now. Then something DeVirgo said caught his ear, and he looked up sharply.
"What? Say that again."
DeVirgo stopped short. "Hmmm? Not paying attention already? As I was saying, you're off by a factor of ....."
"No!" Stoat interrupted. "Not that! The last bit you said. Something about control."
"If you'd listened the first time, I wouldn't have to repeat myself, Stoat! The nomads don't seem to be taking complete control in quite so many cases recently. Now whether this is deliberate, or just coincidental, is unclear, but you wanted an optimistic angle, as I recall. That's about as optimistic as things get for you."
Stoat kicked the bed angrily. "You might have got to that a bit bloody sooner, Max! So, there's a chance for me right? That I might not become no more than a walking corpse?"
DeVirgo smiled grimly. "It looks that way, unless, as I said, it's just coincidental. But let's get out of here and into somewhere a bit less ........................ terminal? You look like you could use a drink."
Stoat nodded, and followed DeVirgo through the door.
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