After killing Chin-beard, Bamba moved over to the shot-up grey van they had driven and began wiping down everything he and Emz might have touched. While he did so, Luki returned to his own van to complete his data search, leaving Emz to inspect the third van that had held Asta and the mini-copter. Careful not to leave evidence, he found nothing noteworthy and so checked the shot-up van while Bamba finished his clean-up. In the rear storage area, he discovered boxes of rifle, pistol, and shotgun ammunition, along with a black metal case.
‘??: ?? ??’ was stencilled on the top in bold red letters.
According to Emz’s wrist mobile, it translated from Korean as ‘Danger: Handle with Care’.
Emz did just that, carefully popping the lid and swinging it open to reveal four precision-moulded foam slots, each cradling a circular polycarbonate puck with a heavy-duty physical switch on top. Two of the pucks appeared used and warped, squashed back into place, while the other two were pristine. He lifted a pristine one, which felt slightly heavier than expected. Underneath was a flat surface bearing a simple painted logo of a lightning bolt.
Bamba finished his quick yet thorough clean of the front cabin area, reholstered the automatic shotgun over his shoulder, collected Chin-beard’s discarded rifle from the road, and then joined Emz to see what he’d found.
“Dispositif IEM,” the African identified. “I’ve seen them used.”
Emz scowled at the direct translation in his earbuds, then realised. “Ah, an EMP?”
“Oui,” Bamba replied. “A single charge that can wipe a computer or disable an electronic safe.”
Emz nodded and suggested, “Or an apartment door lock.”
“Oui,” Bamba confirmed. He leaned past Emz, grabbing boxes of rifle ammo and magnum shotgun slugs, then strode off and climbed into Luki’s van.
Emz slipped both pristine pucks into a couple of vest pouches, wiped the case for prints, grabbed the remaining ammo boxes, and boarded Luki’s van too. A moment later, they pulled away, continuing north, leaving the two wrecked dark grey vans and the dead mercenary behind on the silent country road.
“I found the two dead men from Beata’s apartment,” Luki announced, displaying two bios side by side on the big screen. “The white man is Malcolm Douglas, formerly of the British Army, and the Asian man is Than Kyaw from Myanmar, previously with the Tatmadaw Yay, their navy.” He glanced down at his smaller desk screen. “Both have been operating as mercenaries, but in different places at different times. I can find no clear connection before this incident with Beata.” Luki looked up to gauge Emz and Bamba’s reactions, wrinkling his nose at a spicy aroma as he did so.
Bamba sat reloading his weapons, pushing each bullet into the magazine with a clink, glancing only briefly at the screen before returning to his task.
“Okay,” Emz replied with a nod, standing and leaning against the van’s interior wall opposite the screen. “What about the house?”
Luki rubbed his nose as he returned to his screen. “Yes, that was more interesting. It has been leased through several layers of shell companies, ultimately tied to a small South Korean logistics firm based in Sokcho.” He looked up again, smiling as if he’d pulled off something clever. “However, I dug much deeper and found that this company has links to North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau, their special operations unit.”
Bamba paused his reloading, and Emz pushed himself off the wall as he processed the information.
“Fuck. The North Koreans are the bigger fish,” Emz stated, touching a puck bulge in his vest as he spoke.
“Why would the North Koreans need this robot code? I would expect they already have their own killer robots,” Bamba asked.
“They probably do, but this code would let them turn every commercial robot in the West, South Korea, or anywhere else into an instant weapon,” Emz replied. “Fuck. This is for a terrorist attack.”
“Merde,” Bamba agreed, his voice carrying more emotion than usual. “We need to stop this code transfer,” he added, then resumed reloading with increased speed—clink-clink-clink.
“Should I contact the robotics companies to warn them of plans for an attack on their products?” Luki asked. His nose wrinkled again. “What is that smell?” he added, pressing the back of his hand to his nose.
“Chilli,” Emz answered, pointing to Bamba’s heavily stained vest, then looked up at the van’s ceiling in consideration before addressing the first question. “Yeah, it’s worth a try. But not on public channels—we don’t want to cause mass panic just yet.”
Luki nodded, then turned to Bamba. “I need you to clean that up; it smells awful in here,” he told the big mercenary, pointing to the door of the small bathroom unit up front.
Bamba looked down at his vest and nodded. He placed Chin-beard’s Heckler & Koch MR600T rifle on the techie’s desk with a light thud. “And I need you to register this weapon for me.” He then stood and slipped out of his armoured vest.
“I thought you already wore armour under your clothes?” Emz asked.
“Non, it was too degraded after you shot me three times. I had to throw it out,” Bamba replied stoically, stepping into the tiny bathroom unit to wash off the spicy food stains.
Luki glanced enquiringly at Emz as he locked the rifle into the biometric-registering gun cradle. “You shot him three times?”
Emz slumped into the vacant guest chair on the other side of Luki’s desk. “He’s being dramatic. The third shot was just a tap to get his attention,” he said with a grin. “In fact, it saved his life and is why he’s here helping us.”
Luki scowled at the admission, then his thoughts shifted from the talk of shooting. “My drone was destroyed. You need to pay for that.”
Emz gestured towards the big bag of guns. “Luki, I’ve already told you there’ll be all the coin you need when I sell those.” He tapped the desk as a thought struck him. “Did you get an image of the guy before the drone was shot down?”
“Yes. I am already running a search, along with trying to locate the small VTOL craft using available satellite imagery and other data sources.”
“Great. Send it over to me, and I’ll call Beata.”
Emz left the abruptly ended video call with Beata, his face etched with confusion. He noticed he was now blocked and lowered his wrist mobile.
Bamba returned from the bathroom unit, wearing damp armour—scrubbed as clean as he could manage—and moved over to where Luki was set up with the cradled rifle. He placed his index finger on the trigger for Luki to register his biometrics and glanced at the fixer. “What is wrong, Emz?”
“Beata just blocked me… She knows him.”
“Did she tell you his name?”
“No, but as soon as she saw the drone image I sent, she changed. She got angry, said she’d take care of this, and then blocked me.”
“She can not give them the code, Emz.”
“I know, I know,” Emz agreed. “Luki, add Beata as a reference point in your search for Blazer.”
Luki, midway through registering the rifle for Bamba, nodded, a flicker of stress crossing his face as he juggled the multitasking.
“You have worked with her a long time—do you not know him? Possibly an old client?” Bamba asked.
“Nah, not that I remember… Maybe back in the early days when I first arrived in Newland and started helping her with deliveries, but I don’t recall anyone like him.” He shrugged.
“How did you meet?”
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Emz looked down, thinking back. “I came over from London about six years ago, during the Newland Decennial, with one of those low-skilled work visas they were handing out to boost the population.” He rubbed the back of his head as he recalled. “I wasn’t in a good place then and hated the delivery job I’d been assigned. But I did this one legit job for Beata, we got talking, and she asked if I wanted some coin for delivering something off the books. I said okay, and that’s how it started. I quit my proper job, did some running for her—she paid well, seemed to trust me. Her girlfriend Asta was lovely and kept giving me food to eat. It was the closest thing I had to a family at the time.”
Emz shrugged and stood, a bit embarrassed at revealing more than intended. He turned his damp eyes away from the other two, focusing on the map on the big screen. As he studied it, pushing the emotional memory aside, a scowl formed while puzzle pieces twisted in his mind, struggling to slot into place.
The country road they were on had taken them relatively north for a while but was now curving west towards the coast, skirting the Sambia Golf Club to their left. It was the same road Blazer had told his mercenary Chin-beard to take—if his word could be trusted—and it headed northwest as mentioned. But where were they ultimately going? Soon, their road would meet a coastal road running from the Golf Club north past a few small guesthouses, private estates, the big Amber mine, and up to the Rauschen district—the resort stretch along the peninsula’s top, packed with large hotels, spas, and casinos. But that seemed too far. Why bother with a safehouse in Sch?newik if the rendezvous was up there? No, it had to be closer.
Emz gazed out the nearest tinted van window at the tall, tree-lined fencing that hid the Golf Club’s upper edge from view. It was a little past 3 a.m., the sky still ink-black. The mini-copter had initially flown west away from the road, roughly along the Golf Club’s lower edge towards the coast, until it vanished from sight. Blazer couldn’t have known their van would be intercepted where it had been, so Emz and Bamba had assumed he’d banked north once out of sight to align with the road’s direction—over the Golf Club and up the coast. Yet they’d seen and heard nothing to confirm that.
Emz returned his gaze to the map. They were nearing the coast and would soon have to decide: head to the Golf Club, the the nearest rendezvous option, or north along the coast. They’d considered the bigger fish meeting might be on a boat, so Luki had a search running, mapping transponders with satellite imagery, but his bot hadn’t flagged any vessel large enough to land a copter waiting offshore, in the Gulf of Gdańsk. Emz mentally traced south from the Amber mine along the coastline, eyeing each building as a potential location. The nearest was a private estate set back from the road—a large house with smaller outbuildings on a secluded plot, which was plausible. He wrestled with whether that outdid the Golf Club, but something else nagged at him, some obscure connection waving like a flag in his mind. He broke it down: Beata, the past, the coast, Asta, robots, a Russian guy in a blazer, a copter—no, that was cold. Back to Beata, the past, the coast, Asta—no, not Asta, that was cold again. Beata, the past, the coast, robots… robotics… programming…
Emz suddenly stepped closer to the map and jabbed his finger on the screen, well south of their position, landing on a complex of buildings hugging the coast further down: Newland Technology University, or NewTech as it was commonly known. It lay west of Sch?newik, actually slightly northwest of the safehouse.
“Fuck!”
The other two men turned as Emz swore loudly.
“We overshot,” Emz explained quickly. “Blazer’s no pro—he panicked. He sent the Merc driving on the wrong road or planned to circle back.”
“Are you sure?” Bamba asked, testing the logic for himself.
“Yeah. That’s why we haven’t heard the copter. It’s so quiet around here, we should’ve caught some sound in the distance if he’d come this way. He banked south, not north,” Emz replied. “Beata used to work at the university about a decade ago. I remember her telling me she was a professor who taught Computer Science. I always found it funny because she barely talks to anyone, let alone the idea of her giving lectures.”
Emz turned to Luki. “Add the university to your search for Blazer.”
Luki, finished with the rifle, tapped away swiftly as instructed.
“See if he worked there too at the same time and interacted with Beata—”
“I’ve found him,” Luki announced, displaying a bio photo on the big screen. “Viktor Morozov. He was a professor of AI alignment and ethics when Beata was there.” The image depicted a man ten to fifteen years younger than the drone capture—without grey hairs or ageing lines, yet still thin-faced, handsome, with intense ice-blue eyes.
“Fuck yes, we’ve got him,” Emz declared. “We need to get to the uni now.”
“Oh,” Luki said suddenly.
“What?”
“I was looking at why he left the university,” Luki continued, paraphrasing a memo transcript he’d found. “Morozov had several complaints about his growing extremist views on injustices done to the KPA, encouraging native Russian students to join the New Workers Party movement to push for abolishing capitalist robotics in favour of people’s rights to purposeful labour, and finally sacked for publicly striking his wife during a heated argument.” Luki looked up, meeting Emz’s gaze. “His wife was Beata Rutkauskait?.”
“Fuuuck. They were married!” Emz exclaimed, stunned. “She knows it’s him. She’ll be heading to the uni too. We’ve got to get there before her.”
Bamba studied the map. “We should cut through the Golf Club—it will be quicker than turning back.”
They pulled up to the large, ornate double gates of the exclusive Sambia Golf Club, reserved for the privileged few. Bamba stepped out with his shotgun and approached one of the motorised compartments that operated the gates during daylight hours.
Boom-clang.
The blast from his shotgun briefly illuminated the scene as it tore through the first motor. He kicked the gate back, now free from the shattered mechanism, then crossed to the second gate’s compartment.
Boom-clang.
The area lit up again for a moment. Bamba kicked open the second gate and returned to the van, which rolled through into the overly manicured gardens of the club.
Luki’s van glided quietly along the winding internal roads, typically busy with golf carts and robotic caddies sparing plump golfers any exertion, but at this early hour, it was devoid of movement. Though the area was blanketed with cameras, Luki had deployed malware to the club’s systems, successfully disabling them and erasing any digital evidence. Bamba stood ready by the van’s door to confront any private security, but they were either asleep or watching from afar, likely waiting for the police. Armed guards were a visible necessity for guests, but heaven forbid one got injured unless directly protecting a client.
“I believe I’ve found something,” Luki announced suddenly, his voice tinged with concern. “I expanded the search range, and there’s a ship out in the Baltic Sea without an active transponder.”
He displayed a satellite image on the big screen—a large vessel adjacent to Newland.
“My My? bot identifies it as an old Ivan Gren-class large landing ship. My? traced its travel through satellite passes, and it sailed from Kronstadt Naval Base in St Petersburg, Ladoga Republic.”
“I thought former Russian territories had to decommission their military by now?” Emz asked.
“They are permitted a small defence and rescue force,” Bamba replied, leaning closer to the image. “There are no visible armaments, but I can see two transport helicopters on deck, each capable of carrying a fully armed squad.”
“Do you think they’re working with the North Koreans?” Luki asked.
Emz shrugged. “Maybe.” He looked to Bamba for his take. “Seems a long way from Ladoga for defence purposes, doesn’t it?”
“Oui,” Bamba agreed, stepping back from the image. “Emz, we can not take on two squads of special forces units alone.”
“Should we contact UNIFIN?” Luki asked urgently. “They could fly here quickly from Insterburg.”
Emz pressed a fist to his lips, deep in thought. The situation was escalating. Beata would finish the code—she was that good—and would likely head to the university to confront her unhinged ex-husband, a man with a history of sympathising with the now naturalised Kaliningrad People’s Army terrorist organisation, steeped in extreme left-wing nationalism and a record of violence against women. He’d hired mercenaries to kidnap his ex-wife’s partner, extorting Beata for deadly code to hand over to either a former Russian territory, the North Koreans, or both. This was huge. They should call in the United Nations Interim Forces and the Territorial Police Force, but Beata and Asta’s safety wouldn’t be their priority if a foreign terrorist incursion was imminent. Emz just needed time to rescue Asta and take out Morozov. The man was alone, his plan in tatters—Emz was confident they could handle him if they acted fast.
“Yes,” Emz said at last. “We’ll be at the university soon. Once we confirm Morozov’s there, we anonymously tip off UNIFIN and the police with all the details. By the time they arrive, we’ll have slipped in, got Asta out, and put Morozov down. He’s alone and better for everyone if we end him quickly. UNIFIN can deal with that ship when they get here; we’ll be long gone.”
Bamba nodded slowly in agreement.
Luki didn’t look convinced. “What if the university is not the meeting point and Morozov is not there?”
“You keep an eye on that ship. The moment those helicopters move, contact UNIFIN—that’s our backup plan.”
The techie shook his head. “The quickest satellite constellation only revisits every sixty minutes. They could move in that window, and I would not know exactly when they took off.”
Emz took a deep breath. “Luki, think outside the box. What else can you use? Can you tap into another ship’s radar, hack footage from a weather drone, a medical supply drone, or even hijack a fucking delivery drone and send it out there? Wouldn’t that work?”
Luki nodded, a slight pout on his lips. “Yes, maybe that could work if I can find one.”
“Great,” Emz gently said, instantly regretting his previous snappy tone.
After exiting the Golf Club on the southside with two more shotgun blasts to another ornate gate, they sped down a coast road, then turned inland. A short time later, they pulled into the main university car park. An empty taxi was just departing, and the mini-copter stood vacant to one side of the lot.
There was a brief pause before Emz cocked his SMG with a crisp metallic snap. 40. “Luki, contact UNIFIN and alert the robotics companies again. Bamba, let’s go.” Both armed men leapt from the van and dashed across the dark concrete expanse of the parking lot towards the broad university building. Constructed from brownish-yellow bricks, it was fronted by a large brushed copper sculpture of a stylised angular tree. Its straight branches extended to spherical nodes, sprouting thinner branches to smaller nodes, and finer still, reaching up towards the heavens.
