Jade Imperium

Action, adventure and drama - In Space!

Jade Imperium - 81X Interlude - ICEBREAKER

I - The Cold Opening

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There were a hundred ways to have fun at the Silver Mountain Resort on Khabosai, as promised in the jingle for their holo-adverts. Yono Oketim wasn’t experiencing any of them. Her hands and shins were bloodied from the rocks she was scrambling across on a very much unsigned way downhill, away from the resort and the Kansat and the body her knife was left stuck in.

She had been careful, which was the same as saying that she was Bashakra’i. Her job at the Silver Mountain Resort was to serve bored nobles overpriced cocktails and to thereby minimize the friction of lats wandering from their pockets into the resort’s and from there to Stewart Ogea’s. She had been on this job for three months now, from the start of the season to almost its end. Her assignment had occupied her starting two months earlier, to serve as Bashakra’i eyes and ears where the Who’s Who of noble families dumped off their less illustrious members. That meant quick preparatory classes in mixology and noble genealogy and play-acting the level of vapidity expected of a pretty girl hired to serve boozy drinks.

Briros was dead. Hei Briros, to be exact, second cousin to the clan’s current all-but-brain dead patriarch. In the Briros clan, power shifted quickly among those who sought the favor of the Old Man and his inner circle, and Hei Briros dreamed himself one of the leading contestants for the grand prize. Yono had clocked him as a target on his arrival where he had almost casually walked right up to the resort’s reception and demanded their best chalet, immediately. There was a man who considered it an insult to his statute to trouble himself with making reservations anywhere. His boorishness aside, though, Hei’s specialty within the clan was contract negotiations, which put him at the center of many of their murkier deals as the go-between.

Yono hadn’t learned any of the things she wanted from him. Instead she had killed him. Her fingers were losing their strength now, the winter wind blowing up from the distant valley below cutting right through her. The edges of the rocks dug into her where they didn’t outright cut her. Still she hung on, somehow, bare feet reaching out into the darkness to find whatever hold they could.

She hadn’t been proud to come on to him, but not ashamed either; you used what weapons you had, and if Hei’s brief infatuation with the symmetry of her face was the most effective among them, so be it. The details of the flirting didn’t bear thinking about at this point. She just remembered thinking that she had him where she wanted him when he dismissed his bodyguards from the room. That feeling had lasted until he put his hands on her neck. Fighting him off once, then, he had dismissed with a laugh and called her spirited; honestly Yono had hoped to be thrown out by his bodyguards right then and there, but no. Hei told her all too calmly that he would enjoy this and she would, too. All she had to do was let him.

The blood on her face now wasn’t hers, but cold against her skin all the same. She was pressed against the freezing rocks, as close as she could to keep from plunging down, because there was nothing down there. No matter where she put her foot on the sheer wall, she found nothing to rest it on, no crevice to put it in, not even a roughness to brace it against. Drawing together the last of her strength, she pulled herself by her bleeding hand over the wall, letting go of her toehold with the left foot in the blind hope that wherever she could shimmy to would be safe.

She had let him throttle her, finally. The only way to fulfill her assignment had been to play along. He had cooed to her, told her that it would take so and so many seconds for the lack of oxygen to make her actually feel wonderful, and how sorry he was for the pain, and…somewhere in there she had realized that she wasn’t willing to die for the assignment. Not like this. So she freed her knife from its hiding place and set to saving her life. She was Bashakra’i, after all, which was the same as saying she was handy with a knife and never without one. It plunged into Kei’s belly and again and then into his neck as he let her go, all precise jabs that killed him before his nervous system could translate the first sensation of pain into a scream for help. From there the tale was straightforward to any survivor type: the only way out was the balcony, a drop of three meters into the powder snow below. She cast aside all thoughts of the jagged rock or frozen-over ice hiding beneath and let herself drop on it. By some miracle she was still able to run after the landing, and run she did, the shouts from Kei’s bodyguards growing distant behind her.

The Kansat Manta passed overhead again, briefly lending the pitch dark around Yono a bare shimmer of light from the impeller exhaust. This time it wasn’t flying an orbit above the resort, Yono reasoned, but following the slope down to the lowermost skimmer station. That meant she had a minute, maybe, before they swung back around towards the resort. There the thermal scanner would finally catch her, frozen to the bone but still a clear enough heat signature against the rock face. What they’d do to her didn’t bear thinking about, either. She shimmied further, then. Maybe, her survival brain lied to her, there was a crevice in the rock ahead big enough to hide in, just long enough for the Manta to miss her again, and then it might stop its aerial search, and then she could find a place down into the forest, find shelter for the night, dress her wounds and rest. With any luck the on-foot manhunt for her would be delayed until the morning, by which time she might have hiked far enough to slip their search cordon, and then back to civilization somehow, the gateport ten klicks away somehow, signal for extraction somehow...

She didn’t lose her grip on the rocks so much as it just seemed to melt away underneath her hands. She didn’t scream on the way down and hit the rocks underneath head first. She hadn’t been wrong about the search pattern, at least. It wasn’t until noon the next day that they found her cold body.

---

“Which is where we come in,” Deungjeong ‘Jimmy’ Jiwoo said.

His hand was gesturing about somewhere in the free-floating controls of the holo from Bashakra’i intelligence. His presentation space, such as it was, occupied half the small conference room 81X had been assigned for their current briefing. Deungjeong hoped that sooner rather than later, they would have their own annex apart from the Bashakra’i facilities, with a room that was a more comfortable fit for three humans, a Wherren and a Sheen, but everybody was trying to pull construction resources on Atea their way and at the end of the day, 81X just didn’t rank that high in the priority list. Maybe if they earned themselves a name of their own rather than running around with the ‘like 815 but other people’ moniker that already seemed stifling before their first field op.

Deungjeong fully intended to do that with said first field op.

“Yono was one of three Bashakra’i field operatives at Silver Mountain,” he continued. “Since her death, the resort’s been on a soft lockdown. None of the employees have been cleared to leave, while the guests who were already present have been asked to extend their stays for the duration of the investigation. If this drags on long enough that the background investigations into the field ops can report in, they’ll in all likelihood be made.”
“So how do we get in?” Marta Jimenez asked. She glanced past the so-far silent older Bashakra’i to her left at the Wherren warrior sitting cross-legged on the floor. “From my reports, the resort doesn’t employ Wherren workers.”
”We’re bringing our own,” Deungjeong said. His Whirrsign was still a bit rough, but given Hulor’s rather less…flowery way of speaking compared to Hug’sh, it was good enough for 81X business. “We’ll be going in as new resort guests, with Hulor as our house servant.”
”How goes learning Naranai'i?” Marta asked Hulor.
“Is accept-able,” Hulor replied in half-falsetto. “I train very much. We serve, we don’t speak. Yes?”
Marta nodded to that. ”Yes,” she said. She smiled. ”Not like my Whirrsign is any better.”
“We’ll all have to hope that we can get by without dialect coaching,” Deungjeong said. He looked over to the Bashakra’i woman. “I’d like to leave the talking to you, Dor.”
The woman - Dor Homa - nodded. “Figured as much,” she said. “I’ll have to make it work.”
“I know that’s asking a lot for your first outing,” Deungjeong said, “but -”
“I’ve spent enough time killing these fuckers from afar,” Dor said. “Getting to look them in the eyes is why I’m here now.” She kept her eyes locked on Deungjeong’s. “But we’re going there to save lives, right?”
“That’s the mission,” Deungjeong confirmed with a nod. “Go in, extract the remaining Bashakra’i and exfil before we’re made.”
“Right,” Dor said.
“Sorry,” Deungjeong said, “you were probably expecting more explosions and high-speed chases from 81X.”
“I can wait,” Dor said coolly. “Right now I just want to get out there and do something. I’ll pad my killcount some more next time.”
“Glad we’re on the same page, then,” Deungjeong said. “Right. Now, the bad news is we’re on the clock already. Turns out we’re not just up against local Kansat. There’s a team of Khiraba on station. BONESAW, if you would…”
“We have positive ID on two of them,” BONESAW said, its saboteur shell descending from where it had previously been clinging to the room’s top bulkhead. “Both ex-Turai.” It threw the pictures onto the holo, crowding out the briefing for the moment. “The charmer on your left is Mauon Tanas. Dumped into the Arena, Khiraba recruited him from there. The muscle isn’t for show. His record was 5-0-1, including three wins against Wherren fighters. On your right, Ita Raa. Shortlisted for Emperor’s First, no official reason for her recruitment into the Khiraba, but reading between the evals she’s not the most…stable personality. We’re working on the others.”
“So those two and four more unknowns,” Deungjeong continued. “Anyway, the resort still has incoming guests with existing reservations and we’re lucky the Bashakra’i already had one set up as a contingency for possible HVT sightings. Once we’re in, though, we’ll be on our own. Make contact with the operatives via dead drop signals, arrange a way for them out of the resort, then we exfil.”
“Hrm,” Dor said.
“Thoughts?” Marta asked.
“...I’m not the planning type,” Dor admitted. “Just tell me what to do and where to go. You said we’re going in as a family, so who are we going to be, specifically?”
“The Viis clan from Abena,” Deungjeong said. “I’ll go in as Toest, a dandy with fancy biomods, Marta’s my new flame, you’re my aunt Sauni.”
“Got it,” Dor said. “What is Sauni Viis like? Any details?”
“Personal details of your legends are in the briefing files,” Marta said.
“But in person, whatever comes naturally to you,” Deungjeong said. “The legend’s wide open and Abena’s got enough gateway bounces that any direct inquiry will take at least a week to get back to Khabosai. Marta’s gone into some detail, but just so we have our stories straight if anyone probes.”

Dor nodded.

“So, about those Khiraba,” she said. “Any good reason they shouldn’t be dead by the time we leave?”
”I also look forward to killing Khiraba,” Hulor chimed in. ”Mauon sounds like a worthy hunt.”
“We’re on a mission, not a hunt,” Deungjeong said, "but no one's gonna feel too sad about us taking out Khiraba - if we do it quietly and get everyone out. Our primary objective is the extraction of our friends."
“Of course,” Dor said.
“Yes,” Marta said automatically.
”I will follow your lead, warmaster,” Hulor said.
“Lima Charlie,” BONESAW said.
“Fantastic,” Deungjeong said. “Marta and BONESAW have prepared your gear. Everybody check your pack lists and then get in character. Meet up in 40 minutes at the gateport.”