“Follow them but don’t engage till I give the order, you know how it went down on Yin. These guys are ready to kill, but we still have to make it public enough to meet minimum recovery standards.”
“Yes, Boss,” growled Lovat, his trademark mirth now gone and replaced by the edge that had seen him through his stint as a warden for the Grotto penal system before joining the bond recovery unit. “Aeomi I’ll be back and to the left.”
As Aeomi voiced her acknowledgment, Trask braced his feet against the edge of the building and then leaped backward, using his hands to feed line through the rappel clip for a few seconds before his momentum carried him into the wall of the building. He pushed off once more and this time let the line out further, which made his landing a hard one but reduced his descent time by several precious seconds. He could already tell that he was going to need to pop a few more of his med tabs the moment this recovery was over, but these days that had become something of the norm. He had been at this a while, and though his own life bond was paid off, he still had an adult daughter with special needs and her own life bond, so there was no rest to be had for him.
The recovery agent disconnected his clip and drew his poncho’s hood over his head. He knew that if the gangers turned they’d see his helmet, there was no hiding that, which was why Lovat and Aeomi were using comm beads and going rig free. The Chiodo brothers had proven themselves to be tough customers, who for all their righteous proselytizing had turned on the people of Grotto rather quickly when faced with a prison sentence.
Trask moved through the crowd, doing his best not to draw too much attention to himself, though with the helmet that was difficult. Thankfully his hunch was right about this place, and like most other depressed urban environments, people just minded their own business, even if it appeared that something interesting or deadly was going down around them. Folks would duck for cover if shooting started, but beyond that, everyone was too busy with the struggle for basic survival to bother caring what was going on.
Which was why when the bond recovery agents did finally engage the Chiodo brothers, it was part of their job to make it something of a spectacle, to remind the citizens of Grotto what awaited them if they attempted to skip on their debts. Doing so without dying in the process took a certain amount of finesse.
Trask used his head’s up display to place a visual tag on Aeomi once he caught sight of her umbrella, and then on Lovat when he saw him moving through the crowd, the tall man standing easily a head above most of the populace. His agents were following the brothers on either side of the street, giving Trask the middle, which he skirted just to the right in order to stay out of the path of the occasional vehicles that trundled past.
He watched as the brothers stopped at one of the former luxury vehicles turned storefront and purchased what appeared to be a hot gruel or soup of some kind. Aeomi and Lovat hung back, and Trask moved slowly into the shadows of an awning near the mouth of an alley. He strongly considered attempting to take them here, and normally he would have, had the prey not been the Chiodo brothers.
In his experience, most bond skippers were desperate people fleeing debtors prison, and generally not all that skilled in living life on the run. Grotto corporate life was so regimented and overbearing that the average citizen did not know how to hide, or how to stay in motion without being prompted, much less do so without leaving some kind of trail for agents like him to follow. Factory workers, line laborers, and service people had little in the way of functional experience of life outside of their corporate bubble, and so were generally not difficult to hunt down.
In fact, most bond skippers never made it out of their home system before enforcers scooped them up. It was only those that made it out of that first level of population containment that triggered the transfer of responsibility and jurisdiction from the local enforcers to bond recovery agents. The skippers who made it onto the list of agents like Trask were usually the beneficiaries of overcrowding, bureaucracy, and neglect, and only slipped through the enforcer’s nets thanks to something like luck as opposed to any sort of skill. Even so, in the vast corporate society of Grotto, there were many billions of people, and even the tiniest of percentages yielded enough bodies on the run to keep Trask busy for the last twenty years, and his team was one of only several score.
There were dramatically fewer skippers now that the Reaper strike had triggered a reduction in the life bond, but it was a gradual change that would be implemented over decades, and plenty of people facing prison sentences today were still choosing to make a run for it.
Skippers like the Chiodo brothers were rare, though because of the sheer volume of skippers, Trask had dealt with a few ‘hard targets’ like these men in the past.
The brothers were former union bosses from Trigag Prime, a hellish forge world that supplied a significant percentage of Grotto’s heavy equipment machine parts.
In a corporate empire as vast as Grotto, the work stoppage would not have generally been felt so swiftly, that is, until the authorities were forced to take note of the fact that without these critical parts there would be a corporate-wide issue. The union movement on Trigag came to a halt over the course of a single night, and Trask knew from experience that the enforcers had dealt with the union leaders quietly and with extreme prejudice. The Chiodo brothers, however, had managed to escape from the Trigag system, and their case made its way to Jared Trask.
“This is a good place, Boss, nice and public, but not too crowded,” observed Lovat from his position across the street, the tall man working to remain part of the scenery by using some of his stash of local chits to purchase two power cells from a street vendor offering refurbished models.
“The food stall forces Aeomi to come around it, and is possible cover, not to mention a potential hostage,” responded Trask, keeping his head down and turned away slightly to avoid the brothers taking notice of his helmet.
“These guys didn’t hesitate to shoot their way off Yin station, and killed three Grotto citizens in the process, even if two of those were corsec who had assumed the risk when they signed up. We’ll hit them once they’re on full open ground again.”
The brothers were excellent rabble rousers when it came to whipping the workers into a union frenzy, yet abandoned the movement one step ahead of the enforcers. They’d murdered a dock staffer for his ident keys and had disappeared into the black. That was years ago, back during the height of the Ellisian trade war, and it was only a few months ago that the old ident key popped up on Yin station. Even for a case as cold as theirs, it was not the way of Grotto to allow a debt to go uncollected, and the agents were activated. Trask had tracked them there, learned quickly that they’d been working and living as long haulers.
Nobody could hide forever, finally, they slipped up, made a mistake like swiping the wrong ident key while in a rush to board, that’s when Trask and his recovery agents showed up to make an example of them.
The brothers finished their food, and instead of paying for it, could be seen revealing the pistols they carried on their hips to the shopkeeper. The man in the stall swiftly dumped a handful of chits on the counter, and Trask could see that he was visibly scared.
These men had likely joined one of the local gangs, which Trask had to admit was a decent cover and were making a life for themselves as thugs. Perhaps not the life the brothers had imagined for themselves back on Trigag Prime, though anything was a preferable alternative to the gulags of the Grotto penal system. Trask hoped they had made the most of freedom while they had it.