“Listen up, people,” said Trask, keying commands into his raptor drone, moving in response to the brothers turning with their newly acquired chits and walking further down the street in the general direction of the derelict starport.
“Confirmation that they are armed, and with all that gang furniture it’s possible that other members of their organization will respond. We create the spectacle as always, but we need to crunch our extraction time. I have the Raptor One inbound. Aeomi, keep Raptor Two on the surround.”
“What about a sanctioned kill window?” asked Lovat as he stuffed the power cells into his pocket and kept pace with the brothers. “I know Grotto loses the meat, but the public still gets a show.”
“Negative, Lovat,” said Trask while he marched into the middle of the street, slipping his arms inside the slits of his poncho to prime the force shotgun slung over his chest armor, “Incapacitate setting only. We haven’t had to retire anyone for a year now and I want it to stay that way. The bond commission plus hazard bonus on these two is more than we’d bank in six recoveries.”
“I have plans for that money, Paul,” snapped Aeomi as she skirted around the stall and sped up to close in on the brothers, slipping her force pistol from its holster, “Don’t blow it for us just because you want revenge.”
“These guys are bound for a penal legion, I guess that can be enough,” grumbled Lovat as he relented, just like Trask knew he would the moment Aeomi gave voice to her dissent. “Give the word Boss and let’s get paid.”
The trio followed the brothers for another thirty seconds, just enough to move a modest distance from the food stall. Trask took note of the crowd, and though it had thinned somewhat since they’d started shadowing the brothers, there were easily several dozen individuals in the area.
Determining when and where to take recovery action was a balancing act between a public display of Grotto’s power and tactical effectiveness. Trask would have preferred at least five or six more witnesses, though he was not willing to let the brothers get any further. He could see that the tightly packed, makeshift, hab-stack community ahead would give way soon to empty roads and jagged rock terrain.
“Initiating recovery, time now,” stated Trask as he pulled his hood back away from his helmet, revealing himself to the crowd while using his voice to activate the recording functions on both their comms channel and his helmet’s ocular hardware.
The helmet Trask wore was a recon model that most of the hereditary soldiers for the elite houses used, though it had been heavily modified for recovery duty. In place of the solid armored visor used by stormtroopers, the recovery agent leader was protected by an iridescent plate of plexiglass that had inlaid screens and circuitry. Not only did Trask have access to a number of tracking and communications tools, but the baleful orange glow that the visor now emitted was something of the hallmark of bond recovery agents.
Trask dramatically threw off his poncho to reveal his fully armored self and pressed down on a button on his wrist that activated a series of iridescent lighting strands laid into the edges of his armor, so that parts of him there glowed as well.
Trask keyed his voice caster and started the show.
“Citizens Uri and Martin Chiodo! You are bound by law to stand down!” Trask bellowed through his caster, the device making his voice so loud that the sound of it cut through the patter of the rain and sloppy trudge of boots and wheels through mud, his words were punctuated by the sight of his weapon’s wicked muzzle being leveled at the two gangers. “Hands where I can see them, skippers!”
If the booming voice wasn’t enough to attract the full attention of everyone in the area, the sight of a man wielding a shotgun and wearing a suit of glowing combat armor certainly was. Most of the Grotto population lived their entire lives without ever seeing a bond recovery agent in the flesh.
In a corporation of hundreds of settled words and billions of people, the ninety or so agents in the field were in an extreme minority. However, when the agents revealed themselves, their armor, weapons, and tactics were intentionally designed to serve as displays of corporate power.
As he peered down the iron sights of his force shotgun, the agent considered how intimidating it must appear in this moment, to see such a thing in the midst of an already dark and depressing place as this. Trask knew that more than anything, he was an instrument of fear, but he had just as many bills to pay as the next person. It was like the Reapers were always saying, this is the job, and Trask did not back down from that harsh reality.
Unfortunately, neither did the Chiodo brothers, who went for their guns the instant Trask revealed himself in the middle of the street.
Uri bolted to the left, not even bothering to turn around, his mind already filled with the image of a glowing bond agent closing in on him.
Trask squeezed the trigger of his weapon as he swung it to track the fugitive, sending a blast of chambered energy from the barrel. The force shotgun was a potent weapon, though Trask had intentionally engaged his targets from just inside its effective range, and the moving field of concussive energy widened as it plowed through the rain towards its target.
Like a standard shotgun, the force weapon was meant for close quarters use in order to take full advantage of its potency and accuracy. Trask had done this many times and was aware that by using the weapon at distance it would cause more visual chaos than it would physical harm.
The field caught Uri’s right shoulder and part of his back spinning him around from the impact and depositing him haphazardly into the muddy street.
At the same time, Lovat cast off his own poncho, and though he only wore the modest headgear of a standard agent, his armor glowed with the same fierce light as the Boss. The tall man exploded from the crowd, shoving past two onlookers, and sending them sprawling to the wet ground. His force pistol was out and leveled at Uri as he approached the fallen ganger.
“Uri Chiodo you are bound by law to stand down!” shouted Lovat, his voice nearly lost in the splatter of the rain, but loud enough that Uri’s head turned towards him.
Gunfire ripped through the street as Martin Chiodo, his nerves hard as steel, quick-drew his pistol, ignoring the oncoming threat of Agent Trask and going for Aeomi.
The young woman had not yet revealed herself, though the look in Martin’s eyes was filled with recognition. He must have made Aeomi back on the street corner somehow, or at least noticed her and then done the math when he saw her face in the crowd after Trask initiated the recovery action. While Lovat and Trask were known to the brothers, Aeomi had been in the guard shack monitoring security feeds when the brothers gunned down officers on board the Yin.
Martin was fast on the iron. In the blink of an eye, he’d cleared the leather of his holster and squeezed the trigger. His weapon was a small caliber machine pistol, with what looked to Trask to be an extended magazine that held at least thirty additional rounds. Even as Trask worked the pump of his shotgun and continued marching forward, Martin’s pistol spewed a hurricane of rounds in Aeomi’s direction.
Aeomi was still among the crowd when Martin drew on her. She was able to push one woman passerby out of harm’s way, but two others paid the price for being near her.
Bullets tore into a man and a woman who had been walking past Aeomi but had stopped to stare once Trask initiated recovery. Of the four people who had once occupied that side of the street, one hit the muddy ground, thanks to Aeomi, two collapsed in a bloody heap, and the agent herself was knocked back into the wall of a building.
The small caliber rounds were unable to penetrate her armor at the modest range, though enough of them pounded into her that Aeomi passed out from the multiple impacts. Her back slammed against the wall, her head snapped back to crack against the hard surface, and then her knees buckled. More bullets chewed into the empty space where her unarmored head had been a split second before Martin cursed as he fought the kicking recoil of his powerful, but difficult to control weapon.