Despite being Danny Cohen's friend for several months now, she knew nothing about Danny Cohen other than the fact that he was once in the LSF secondaries and currently works with the [LN]’s ESRD. Apparently, he was noticed by the ESRD when he conducted an exchange of information with an agent of the BDM| [LINK]. He also attempted to pre-empt a terrorist attack by a suicide bomber on a Waran in front of Manhattan once, but he was too late and the attack proceeded. Nevertheless, the intended assassination target survived, even if Cohen’s ship went down. The terrorist was named MOAB, not much is known about him. There are rumours that he was found by a gang of Coalition-funded terrorists in Liberty and taken under their wing. Apparently, he was a survivor of the Freeport 7 disaster and developed schizophrenia and an addiction to Nova torpedo fuel to the extent where oxygen was no longer enough for his body to survive on.
“I hired Vove to create a scanning algorithm to find certain keywords within the Neural Net. One keyword just kept leading to another keyword and-”
“Danny, this story about Hindmarsh, it’s not real. It’s just a legend, it did’n’t actually happe-”
Danny was getting done with Perry interrupting him. “God damn it Perry, shut and listen.” Danny was sitting at a café in Freeport 9, looking out of its windows. He took a sip of his coffee, the first of the day. He had just made this discovery when Vove had sent him an email with her latest findings. “Look we both love liberty, we’re from there and we’ve bled for it. But it’s not perfect. It’s corrupt. And the timing of Hindmarsh’s story, it happened right in the middle of the Nomad War. Nomads must have had something to do with this, and that’s how I think it possibly happened.”
Perry could sense his annoyance so she let him continue.
“Vove was able to find a woman who was in a Special Operations team during the Nomad War. All records of it has been lost but she swore she knew Hindmarsh and she was part of the team that captured him.” He took another sip, but he took it a bit fast, it burned his throat a little. “Excuse me. Anyways, she kept filing reports about him but she eventually got told to shut up otherwise the LSF were going to remove her from duty and put her in an asylum. She swears he was still alive, even as far as 808 A.S. Anyways, the bottom line is that she’s in a retirement facility at Freeport 9. Apparently she found out her family was going to put her in an asylum too so she just came here instead to get away from them.”
“Jesus Christ,” Perry looked at her kids. She told them all to come back to her trolley and gave them a quick, tight hug.
“I’m going to go speak to her right now, I’m already at Freeport 9 anyway.”
The woman who led the special operations team that captured Hindmarsh was Erin Genoa. She was elderly now and needed assistance to walk. Danny held her arm as he took her for a stroll and allowed her to recount her story, about Hindmarsh’s background, corruption, his capture, his participation in the Battle of Toledo and the Battle of the Dyson’s Sphere during the Nomad War. She was there when the torpedoes killed her team leader in 808 A.S., but she survived because she wasn’t in the building. She was doing recon on Das Wilde target that they were sent to eliminate. She did pick up his transmission though, but it was a corrupted file.
Danny Cohen and Adrienne sent the file over the Vove who began to reconstruct the video transmission. After several weeks, the video had been reconstructed, and Perry and Cohen saw the face of Briarson Hindmarsh for the first time. For Erin Genoa the woman in the Special Operations team that captured him, it not her first time seeing his face. She confirmed it was him.
Vove once again spent the next several weeks developing and deploying an algorithm which would scan for that face on as many cameras that were in Sirius. Eventually they geolocated him to a Core military base out of Planet Nauru. He was alive and well, under the name of Mike Hoare. He command a squadron of bombers. More specifically, he commanded a bomber squadron that was known to have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity on Zoner civilians in the region.
“Perry, this isn’t right. I know Mike Hoare…he’s one of ours.” Danny had never seen Mike Hoare, but he was familiar with his work. “Mike Hoare is….he’s one of our assets. I know of him from my time in the LSF.” He took a short pause, just trying to process what he had learned. “He had a reputation for volunteering for … morally questionable operations. We sent him in to infiltrate terrorists, mass-murderers etc. He always had a way of doing this well. There was always a trail of bodies left after each long term infiltration operation he ran. But he always got us the intel we needed.”
“Danny, it sounds like he would get the trust of terrorists by being worse then them, just to take them down. You sure this is true?”
“Yeah… I always thought his measures were stronger then they needed to be but based on what I knew about Mike Hoare I…always thought he only did it because he felt it was necessary. I mean, I’ve read some of his post-mission reports. It genuinely sounded like he felt guilt after these undercover operations. He’s with the Core right now, but he’s undercover. There’s no way he’s ever going to be able to come back to Liberty, Perry. If he does, he’s going to be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for what he’s done with the Core. And I’m 100% sure he volunteered for this. He’s got everything to lose here Perry, he still volunteered for this operation…but it looks like he just enjoyed killing.”
She took a deep look at Mike Hoare’s face. Erin, the woman from the special operations team that captured him nearly three decades ago chimed in. “He’s a traitor, a psychopath. This is exactly what he’d do. He sold us out, let’s not forget that.”
Danny was still shocked at the revelation. “Yeah…alright. He’s one of our’s Perry, so I can’t do anything about that because I’m still actively ESRD, but you-”
“I know. I’ll take care of it.” They needed to capture Hoare, or as he was formerly known, Briarson Hindmarsh. The technology his ship had was primitive, but it was cost efficient and it could be improved for their own use. Perry operated outside of the system. She was formerly =LSF=, but she wasn't one of their officers anymore. She could go after officers of the Liberty forces, which Danny Cohen, as an active agent of the [LN]-ESRD, could not.
“Hoare…Hindmarsh.” Briarson Hindmarsh woke up. He was tied to a chair. The last thing he remembered was going to bed at the barracks. Now he was tied up in a chair and there was a Blonde woman in her forties in front of him. It was Adrienne Perry. She spent weeks cultivating a slave at Planet Nauru as an asset and smuggling in drugs into Hindmarsh's home there so she could drug and kidnap him. The slave was later extracted, having earned her freedom.
“You know…you know the thing is, good guys, they always die a hero.” Hindmarsh said in a raspy voice, the drug still hadn’t worn off but he was fighting through it. “But guys like me, the ones who unleash terror on the world, who kill their own, we survive.” He coughed harder, still trying to fight off the drug and get his head up so he could look Perry straight in the eyes. “And we live…we live the rest of our lives in Hell.” Now he got his head high up enough that he could see his captor, Adrienne Perry. “…But, we’re still alive…and the fact that we’re still alive, is proof that we were good!” Hindmarsh let out a cackle. He was probably born in the 770’s A.S. which meant he was probably around retirement age at this point.
“How can someone so ignoble… enjoy a full life?” Erin Genoa, the woman in the Special Operations team, walked slowly towards Hindmarsh. Perry, Hindmarsh and Genoa were all at an abandoned warehouse at Freeport 9.
Perry took Erin to a corner and respectfully asked for her patience. She then went back to Hindmarsh.
“Your ship, its technologies. We all thought they didn’t exist. But it turns out you exist. And Erin corroborated your story. Tell me everything about the Nighthawk” This was not Perry's first time running an interrogation. But she didn't know this man, she didn't know how to get inside his head.
“What makes you think that piece of trash is still usefu-” Hindmarsh got cut off by Perry mid-sentence.
“I can make those technologies useful in today’s world. I can figure it out. Now tell me everything about project Nighthawk, from 793 A.S. till today.”
“You know, I don’t owe you anything. What the hell does it matter if I tell you anything about that ship? You can’t make me.” Hindmarsh was ready. He’s mostly lived a full life. He survived and he was old now so there wasn’t much point being left alive. But he could die on his own terms and f*** everyone else over.
Perry got up walked towards hi and lowered and softened her voice. Hindmarsh still only had one eye. He never bothered going to the H+ Clinic to get himself a new eye. He lost his eye nearly three decades ago, when the Special Operations Team Leader tortured him in anger after capturing him. There wasn’t any reason to it, he just didn’t bother getting a replacement eye because it wasn’t worth it. His one eye was good.
“You don’t want to die like this.” It was simple. Hindmarsh was nihilistic. But Perry knew how to handle Nihilists. It wasn’t her first time and there was a point in her life when she was one as well. But she healed from that. “If there is some meaning to this universe out there, then tell me what you know. I will do good things with that technology. Everything in your life has been horribly selfish, but you won’t have lived a full life unless you’ve been selfless at least once.”
Hindmarsh shared everything he remembered about the ship, its specifications and capabilities. He remembered his days as a test fighter pilot when he flew the Nighthawk as his personal weapon as a mercenary. The muscle memory was still there. It was part of his body. Whatever evil he had done, this ship, that wasn’t alive, was strangely his best friend. But nobody else needed to understand that. And it didn’t matter if he was insane for feeling more for a ship then he did for people. For several weeks, Perry interrogated him on the ship and its location. The ship was still somewhere out there. Hindmarsh never destroyed it.
After several weeks, the interrogation was done. Perry wouldn’t be able to squeeze anything more out of him.
Erin returned to the warehouse. She had a weapon on her. Her life had been consumed by trying to bring justice to this … survivor, Hindmarsh. Everyone understood what was going to happen next.
Perry left the warehouse and went to the next room where a one-way mirror showed her Hindmarsh and Erin Genoa together. Erin brought a chair and put it in front of where he was cuffed and seated. She then slowly loaded a single bullet into the handgun. In her age, she was slow and felt deplumated. She brought a camera with her, and took a photograph of Hindmarsh. There was also a recorder that recorded all the conversations in that room these past few weeks. These recordings were going to be the proof she would take back to her family to prove to them she was not insane. Finally, she raised her handgun and aimed between his eyes.
![[Image: 2-jun-2020-sig-FINAL.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/fL6Vx1Sp/2-jun-2020-sig-FINAL.png)