Luki had tidied and rearranged his van since Emz's last visit. The rear desk had been moved forward to the midpoint, and in its place were custom storage compartments at floor level, along with a broad, bulky unit hanging from the roof. The change had shortened the living area—or guest area, from Emz’s point of view—but with the tech clutter cleared away, it actually felt more spacious.

  “Thank you for coming,” Emz said quickly to the scruffy techie sitting behind his desk. “Do you know Beata Rutkauskait?—”

  “Yes, of course. She is well known in tech circles,” Luki answered. “She lives here.”

  “Yeah. Well, armed thugs just attacked her place and took her partner. They’re forcing her to write a hack for something bad.” Emz explained. “I need your help to track them down and get her partner back.”

  Luki looked stunned and cast his eyes roughly in the direction of Beata and Asta’s apartment.

  Emz dropped the nylon duffel bag of guns on the floor with a heavy thud and unzipped it, revealing a collection of jet black weapons. “You can have these or hold them as collateral until I sell them as payment,” he gestured. “We just need to move fast.”

  Luki nodded vigorously. “Yes, of course I will help. No payment needed.”

  “Great,” Emz said, stepping closer to the desk. “Did you see the footage from my taxi? Was there anything?”

  Luki threw an image onto a large screen mounted on the side of his van, displaying every camera angle from Emz's previous ride. “I do not know about multiple vehicles in a convoy, but possibly these three cars were driving close together,” Luki said, highlighting one of the forward-facing recordings. “They all turned north onto Hendrix, while you came from the south and turned onto Hemingway. Or there is this grey van driving west along Hemingway.” He highlighted another recording. “Or this big SUV that you passed along—”

  “It’s the van! The SUV is too small, and the spacing of the three cars doesn't feel right if they were traveling together… Where does the van go?”

  Luki enlarged the recording, which showed the dark grey van taking a north turn onto Ellington.

  “Let’s go. Follow it as quickly as you can.”

  Luki called out an instruction to his digital assistant. “My?, move to Ellington Street.” Immediately, the van pulled away from the kerb, heading west along Hemingway.

  “If they didn’t take the another turn, then they were heading into Theatre Mile. That would have slowed them down a lot with all the drop-offs and pick-ups along there… so go north on Franklin instead. It’ll be much quicker.” Emz scratched his jaw in thought. “They’ve got about seventeen minutes on us. We need to work out where they are heading. Can you access any taxi cameras from Theatre Mile around that time?”

  Luki frantically typed away. “I will also run a network graph of social media posts that have the van passing in the background.”

  “Great idea. There’s probably a lot of selfies along there.”

  While Luki focused on that, Emz tapped away on his wrist screen.

  “Bamba, I need you, buddy! Something bad is going down, and you owe me. You must be all healed by now. So get off your arse, get in a car, and get over to me as soon as fucking possible. Lots of people to kill!”

  He then sent a pin so Bamba could track his location.

  “I found the van,” Luki announced, throwing up more windows onto the big screen.

  Some were social media photos and recordings, showing the dark grey van slowly passing behind smiling people enjoying the glitz and glamour of Theatre Mile, alongside additional taxi camera angles. It was a hodgepodge of moments in time and space, piecing together the recent past from multiple perspectives. Luki methodically aligned the clips on a map, trying to wrap his mind around the van’s movements, but Emz had already assembled the continuity in his head.

  “That’s Hamilton. It's playing right at the top of the mile,” Emz pointed at a selfie of a couple merrily leaving a theatre, the blurred grey van passing behind them. “They drove the whole stretch.” He checked the timestamp. “That was only nine minutes ago. We’re catching up.”

  Some images gave a clearer view of the van—a plain, dark grey, almost black, panel van with heavily tinted windows, including the windscreen. Unusual. That only reinforced Emz’s suspicion they had the right target.

  “Is there an angle all the way north? We need to know which way they turned on Austen.”

  Luki finalised his alignment and expanded a taxi camera feed, capturing the van in the distance. They watched intently, waiting to see if it turned west towards the bay and possibly Norton Marina, or east, bringing it closer to Luki’s van. Instead, it did neither—continuing north on Ellington Street, which soon phased into North Ellington Drive, a country road that arced around the bay, connecting Poyz to Sch?newik.

  Sch?newik was the suburbs of Baltic City, home to many workers from the Baltic City Centre. Unlike Poyz, it was old, steeped in a violent history. Once sacred pagan land, it had been taken by the Prussians, who built the Sch?newik castle, which grew into the medieval town of Fischhausen. After World War II, the Soviets renamed it Primorsk, but with the fall of the Russian Federation in 2035, it—along with the rest of the Kaliningrad Oblast—came under UN control. The disconnected oblast was reimagined as a new country, as Newland, shedding its Russian name. Money and redevelopment followed. Primorsk was gone and the Sch?newik name returned.

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  “Follow them, as fast as you can.”

  “My?, move to Sch?newik at full speed,” Luki called out to the air. The van surged north, soon leaving behind Poyz’s concrete jungle for the burgeoning greenery of the spring countryside. To the right, dense woodland stretched alongside the road, while to the left, a patchwork of trees, bushes, and wild scrubland ran down to the edge of Baltic Bay.

  Time and space. The journey to Sch?newik took around fifteen minutes with a steady flow of traffic, so the nine-minute gap meant that if the kidnappers’ van was moving at a constant pace, keeping a low profile, they’d be more than halfway there. With Luki’s vehicle moving faster, overtaking when possible, they should catch up and visually acquire the target before it reaches the junction with the Vía Fangio highway. From there, the van could either continue west into Sch?newik’s suburbs or turn north-east into the rural Sambia district.

  “I found a taxi heading towards Poyz,” Luki announced, casting a live feed onto the screen. Its forward camera soon caught sight of the dark grey van, a third of the way along North Ellington Drive. Luki switched angles as the taxi passed, showing the target van from the side, then the rear.

  “Good, they are keeping pace with traffic,” Emz noted. “We’re closing in—about six minutes behind now.” He scoured the interior of Luki’s van, frowning at the clean space. “Do you have a drone we can send out the door? If they turn into Sch?newik’s side roads, we could still lose them.”

  Luki’s face lit up. He stood and tapped the bulky overhead unit. “Yes! My new drone bay.” He pressed a button, lowering a storage panel to reveal a folded drone. “Had it installed in January. Now I can send and receive deliveries directly. The roof above opens up.” He grinned. “I also upgraded the van’s battery storage and installed a new air filtration system.”

  Emz breathed in through his nose and nodded. He hadn’t noticed until then, but the usual musty, sour smell was gone. “Great. Quick—send it up.”

  Luki re-secured the panel and activated the drone. A motorised hum came from above. The screen switched to its camera feed, showing the van’s roof, then the road ahead. With a whir of rotors, it lifted off, soaring forward.

  Emz relaxed slightly when the drone caught sight of the dark grey van.

  “I have slaved it to follow them wherever they go. We will know exactly where they end up.” Luki confirmed.

  Pleased, Emz sent a reminder message to Bamba, ensuring the mercenary remembered his debt and prompting him to reply. He then retrieved a stubby submachine gun—an HK MP7FT—from the weapon filled bag, along with the bulky mobile gun cradle. He took a seat on the guest chair opposite Luki and set the weapon on the desk.

  “I need to register my prints. Can you do that?”

  Luki nodded and began configuring the cradle with his system, while Emz adjusted the unit to fit the SMG’s form.

  “Your van upgrades look good,” Emz said as they worked.

  “Yes. Gary Lutzinger made the modifications. They work well.”

  “Gary?” Emz asked, surprised. “I thought you hated him.”

  “He came and apologised—and did the upgrades at a discount.” Luki connected the cradle and illegally synced it with the National Gun Registration database. “Gary tells me his leg still hurts where you kicked him.”

  “Pffft. It was a knee not a kick, and not even that hard. He’ll be fine.”

  Luki gave Emz the go-ahead to grip the SMG and register his biometrics. As he did, Emz watched the drone camera feed, the target van clearly visible in the centre of the image.

  “What are they forcing Beata to do?” Luki asked, monitoring the digital health of the sync—a delicate operation to ensure the exploit went undetected by the government agency enforcing gun registration.

  “They want a downloadable hack in twenty-four hours to override the DRAI protocols for robotic safety. Basically, turning any robot into a killing machine on command.”

  Luki raised his eyebrows. “That is a lot of encryption and alignment protection to overcome. Incredibly difficult. Almost impossible. Though Beata is very good.” He shrugged. “It would be much easier to build a custom robot and secretly install it somewhere if they wanted it to do something illegal. There are always rumours that the American and Chinese governments have sleeper assassin robots—cleaning toilets or something—until commanded to kill a target.”

  Emz watched the screen as the target van turned onto Vía Fangio, heading west into Sch?newik. Above, the drone tracked it smoothly, hovering high and unseen in the night sky.

  “They probably do,” Emz said. “That’s why I think this is bigger than a one-off. Why bother unless you’re aiming for maximum terror—or making a huge statement about global reliance on robots?”

  Luki thought about it and then nodded agreement. “Yes, just imagine if people could no longer trust robots—if they suddenly feared them. That would damage the world’s economy.”

  “More than that, I think. Who has the skills to farm at scale anymore? Maintain power grids? Heavy industry? Perform surgery? Care for the elderly? A billion other things? We’d be looking at famine, chaos—maybe wars. We’d recover, but the days of Citizen Basic Income, social services and easy living might never return.”

  Luki blew out a long breath, then wrapped up the sync. “All done.”

  Emz loaded a clip into the HK MP7FT, watching the dim red display register 40. He hooked the weapon's sling over his neck and shoulder, then cocked the gun with a crisp metallic snap.

  About 7 km apart, both vans rolled steadily along Vía Fangio, a major thoroughfare that ran parallel to the bay at the lower edge of Sch?newik. Though the area had a long history, it had been redeveloped and gentrified, with only a few old brick buildings and winding side streets serving as reminders of its past. To their left, rows of trees and large modern housing units obscured the bay, but they could just make out the towering Forum skyscraper of the Baltic City Centre in the distance, its illuminated windows and blinking aviation lights clearly visible at the summit. On the right, they passed a vehicle charging station that looked like a modern temple, its sleek, self-contained bays glowing in electric blue, with a taxi getting a charge and undergoing internal cleaning by robotic arms. They also passed a few chain restaurants with large parking lots, a craft grocery store with warming green and gold signage, and a shopping plaza housing offices for dentists, lawyers, a karate dojo, and a hair salon, where two teenagers raced each other on scooters along the covered walkway.

  At a big junction, where a south turn led to the Brunel Express—descending into tunnels beneath the bay to reach the Baltic City Centre, floating on its artificial island—the target vehicle veered north instead, onto the Keynes Bypass. The drone continued its pursuit. Five minutes later, so did Luki’s van.

  The dark grey van soon veered off the Keynes Bypass onto an old side street on the west side of Sch?newik, twisting through the suburbs and taking turn after turn past relatively new housing developments. Keeping a discreet distance, Emz and Luki relied on the drone for guidance until the target van finally drove onto Hepburn Road and pulled into the driveway of a large detached house. The property sprawled behind a wall of thick evergreen trees, offering ample seclusion.

  The grey van rolled up to a wide garage set slightly back on the right side of the house. As its door folded open, a similar looking vehicle was revealed inside. Moments later, the grey van disappeared from the drone’s feed as the heavy door slid shut.

  Luki parked his own, much larger van on a nearby residential road, nestled under the canopy of a leafy tree. The two men sat in silence, the only sound the gentle hum of the new air filtration system. Emz scratched his jaw thoughtfully, his eyes fixed on the drone footage of the house as he weighed his next move.