Bag of Blood
Essense region – Peccanouette constellation
Arnon System – Planet IX – Moon 3
Sisters of EVE Bureau station
9 August YC 127
It was the morning after a Friday night which I spent celebrating the end of the work week. Not that I had specific working days or hours, but it was a tradition that I cherished from my programming days. Understandably, I planned to sleep off the worst effects of the hangover and turned on Do Not Disturb mode on my commlink. Imagine my surprise, when the damn thing started buzzing around 8 o’clock. There was only one person who could call me at any time — Aura — and she would not do it without a reason. Well, it had to be a bloody good reason, I thought darkly, picking up the device.
“Wassup?” I mumbled into the camera.
“Cap…” Aura started brightly, then saw my groggy face and checked herself. “Um, I better call later. I think it can wait…”
I yawned and sat up, still in the twilight zone between slumber and wakefulness.
“Well, you wouldn’t call me if it could, eh? Spill it.”
“Oh, Cap, it’s Sister Alitura. She’s been trying to reach you from 6 am but you didn’t answer.”
I snorted, “That’s what ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode is for. The best invention since sliced bread!”
“But then she called me and demanded to connect her to you immediately.”
I winced, “Did she say ‘immediately’? That very word?”
Aura nodded, “She did.”
I dropped my head into my hands and rubbed my face.
“Hey, Cap, are you okay?” Aura asked in a concerned tone.
“I am not but I will be. Just tell Alitura that I’ll be in her office in 10, no, make it 15 minutes,” I said and ended the connection.
I went to the bathroom to freshen myself up, wondering what was so urgent that the agent had been chasing me for two hours. For that matter, why wouldn’t she simply walk down the corridor and knock on my door? I imagined the picture and shook my head in wry amusement — no, Alitura wouldn’t be seen dead banging on a man’s door at 6 am. Instead, it was me who was knocking on her office door at 8:15 on Saturday morning.
“Come in,” Alitura said brusquely.
When I saw the agent’s face my grouchiness turned into a kind of a compassion. I didn’t think I could feel any sympathy towards her, but boy, did she look bad. Black circles around sunken eyes framed by a disheveled mop of hair told a story of a woman who worked two, if not three days straight and needed a good night’s sleep more than I.
I swallowed a prepared witty greeting in which I not so subtly hinted at my displeasure of being rousted at this ungodly hour, and said in a neutral tone, “Good morning, Sister. How can I be of service?”
“Picking up your commlink when I call you would be a good start,” she replied caustically.
That was a fair expectation from agents if a contractor intended to build a good working relationship them. The thing was, I didn’t, but it was not the bone that I wanted to pick with her at that moment.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said noncommittally. “Now, I understand that you have an urgent mission for me. What is it?”
Alitura shook her head in exasperation, “It was urgent two hours ago! In fact, I had two urgent missions for you. Now there is no time for both of them. In each case, it is a matter of life and death, but I won’t be the one making the decision,” she said bitterly.
The grievous look on her face sobered me up.
I swallowed hard and said, “Tell me the details.”
Alitura sighed resignedly and started the briefing in a monotone, “In the last two weeks, I’ve been tracking two leads. Unfortunately, the persons of interest found themselves in a serious trouble before I could get information from them. I thought I would wait for them to extricate themselves from the tricky situations, but the circumstances only got worse.
“The first person is Corin Risia; he is a reporter with The Scope. He was working on a story about Mordu’s Legion when his monitoring equipment recorded the rogue drone that we are after. I sent him the holos that you had got from my colleague, and he confirmed it was the drone in question. It appears that he has also dug out some very sensitive information about the Legion, and now they want him dead. The last message from him was today at 5:30 am. He said that he holed up in service tunnels in the Legion’s outpost, but the mercenaries were doing a full security sweep of the station. He must be extracted ASAP if we want to get the drone tracking data from him.”
Alitura made a pause and opened a can of energy drink. She gulped it down and threw the empty can into a trash bin which was overflowing with used coffee cups and takeaway food containers. Then she continued.
“Have you heard of a guy called Wolf Burgan?”
I shook my head, “No. If I did I would have remembered such a stupid name.”
“The name may be stupid but he is the best tracker this side of EVE Gate. He’s been all over New Eden and hunted damn near everything at one time or another. As you can imagine, one doesn’t get that good without making a few enemies. Right now it is the Serpentis who want his head. I, on the other hand, need that Burgan fellow alive so that he can track the rogue drone for us.”
“Do you want me to kill the pirates chasing him?” I asked.
“You can’t kill them all. It’s not a personal vendetta — the whole Serpentis organisation is after Burgan. No, we need to get them off his tail. I have a plan but it requires his blood.”
I raised my brow, “Is it not exactly what we are trying to prevent — spilling Burgan’s blood?”
“No time to explain the details,” said the agent. “What I need, to start with, is a sample of his DNA, and I know where to get it. Some time ago, Burgan ordered a personalised vaccine from Poteque Pharmaceuticals lab in Attyn. Naturally, he had to send them a sample of his DNA for that purpose. One of my contractors managed to steal that sample from the lab, but was unable to securely send it. The sample must be picked up at the Poteque station and delivered to me.”
Alitura made a pause and looked me in the eye, “Now, Captain Korff, you have to choose whom to save — Corin or Wolf. We don’t have time for both.”
I felt a chill creeping up my spine. It was a hell of a decision to make, and Alitura knew it. I understood that she was pissed off because I didn’t respond to her call, but still I did not appreciate how she twisted the argument so that the death of one man would become my fault. For a time, I was paralysed by that thought. Then I did something that helped me get on with my life in the past — I accepted the inevitable: one man would die. The loss of either life was immeasurable, incomparable and would not serve our purpose. I refused to contemplate it. The preservation of life, on the other hand, was easier to think about. Still, I didn’t know whose life was more valuable for our cause, and Alitura did not give me any indication.
Stripped of empathy and bereft of data to make a rational decision, my mind turned to what little I knew of the men’s circumstances — I considered their opposing parties and my relationship to them. Mordu’s Legion was a mercenary outfit. By all accounts, Muryia Mordu was a decent guy who cooperated with Caldari State. I didn’t have any beef with him. In fact, I had a positive standing with the Legion and wanted to keep it that way. If I helped Corin Risia, I could find myself in the Legion’s black books.
Serpentis, on the other hand, were pirates through and through. The only reason why my standing with them was neutral was the fact that I didn’t normally operate on their turf. Although the Serpentis primarily targeted Gallentean people and assets, and thus were ‘enemies of our enemies’, my hate of piracy went deeper than politics. Anything that could stymie the pirates bore my seal of approval.
In the end, the choice was subjective, uninformed and egoistic.
“Wolf,” I said tersely.
Alitura stared at me silently for a time, as if inviting me to elaborate on my decision, but I’d be damned if I was going to explain myself to her. Having realised that she wouldn’t get any further details from me, Alitura typed something on her datapad and pushed it to my side of the table. The mission was called A Bag of Blood. I pressed my finger on a sensor and accepted it.
Attyn was just two jumps away from Arnon and I did a roundtrip in no time. Soon, I was back in Alitura’s office with a small parcel. The agent immediately sent it somewhere with a courier drone.
“What now?” I asked her.
“Now, we wait,” the agent replied and gestured towards a guest chair.