Chapter Text
With an average hue of a shade above brown, the Budapest Orbital Station has been built and rebuilt so many times that its corridors and catwalks can disorient even those who have lived there for sweeps. The administratorturers are closer to green than teal and are all in the pockets of the shifting factions of psionics and psychics.
Laws are almost nonexistent, except for those imposed by the factions that are continually fighting over the gases extracted from the gas giant it orbits. It’s at the top of the “colonies that need to be cleaned up or possibly just destroyed” list but nothing ever comes of it and, unless Her Imperious Condescension herself makes it an issue, Budapest will probably remain as it is indefinitely.
Your name is Marksman Hawkeyes, and your mission is to find the anti-tyrian insurgent or insurgents known only as the White Dowager. All intel indicates that they operate out of Budapest, so that’s where you are now.
*
As soon as your shuttle docs with the station you feel the almost inaudible nails-on-chalkboard screech of a psychic reaching for your mind. You brush the contact off with a thought and stab at the door release button. Dealing with psychics always leaves you irritable.
You’re glad you’re going hemononymous for this mission as you step out into the throng of rustbloods. As it is now, you don’t stand out but a single cut would change that.
You follow the holographic map in your dark grey contacts to the nearest official office—a cargo manager going by the plaque on the door.
You let out a breath you didn’t realize you’d been holding as soon as you enter the less-crowded office and size up the greenblood sitting at the desk. Short and nervous, but affluent: paid off, but only since recently.
He quickly captchalogues stacks of papers and a pile of imperial bartering chits before looking over his glasses at you. “Yes?” he says, trying to appear bored.
You hand him a cerulean imperial access card and say, “I’m looking for an individual on this station whom we have reason to believe has been dodging the imperial drones. I’ll need access to your general personnel records.”
Dodging imperial drones is often used as a catch-all to put a troll in jail for a short period of time or to gain access to general records without getting many questions asked, and both you and the green know it.
“Fine,” he says, and pulls out a computer from his sylladex. He copies the files onto a datagrub and hands it to you. You nod and take your card back.
As you stand, he puts a hand out and pulls it back quickly before he outright asks you for a bribe. You smirk as soon as your back is to him, and leave.
*
This data will probably give you a good place to start but you’ll need to analyze it. Already you’re starting to feel suffocated by the sheer number of bodies pressing in on you.
You need somewhere to think.
You scan the area around you. This part of the station, close to the main port, is relatively open and has been converted to an open public space between clusters of blocks that rise up. It’s surprisingly open for a space station.
It was probably once the space between two or three added modules; you can see parts of the surrounding walls that still have heat shielding and small portholes, though the rest of the walls have since been rebuilt into the thinner usual walls.
Up a level or two, there are probably ventilation shafts or unused dead-ends that you can sit and think at. Meandering toward the edge of the square, you take a good look at the inhabitants of the station.
About half of the rustbloods have symbol sashes around their upper arms, in shades of maroon with white symbols embroidered in. You’re surprised; you thought symbol sashes were a thing of the past. You can’t fathom why anyone would want to legally and socially bind themselves to someone else so completely, even if the slave gained the master’s blood standing.
And here you see browns and yellows wearing maroon sashes, so there’s not even the reward of higher status.
Leaning back against the edge wall, you look more closely and realize that most of the sashes are for the same seventeen-odd bloods and symbols, with Cygnus, Dracones, Lyris, Boreali, and Pavona the most common. Then it hits you, and it’s dead obvious: the symbol sashes show allegiance to the factions.
You’ve made it to a ladder on the edge of the square and you ascend to the highest point you can find, which is in this case an old maintenance walkway tucked in between the edges of different additions to the station, and viola, there’s a perfect spot in the shadows that you can sit and watch everything from.
You upload the datagrub onto your husktop and set it to do the initial data crunch while you wait, and watch.
*
You’ve been sitting in your impromptu nest for less than an hour (given time and a more permanent location you could do far better but the few cushions and spare clothes you have out are good enough for now) when you hear a slight muffled clang of a footstep banging warped mesh against the structure. You captchalogue your husktop and turn around, ready to draw your bow if necessary.
After a second, all that appears is a girl and you relax a hair. She’s small, both in stature and in build, and she doesn’t look a night over eight.
“Hi,” she says brightly, and you finally find her symbol, almost completely obscured by a shoulder-slung belt. She’s a high yellow, a Cerpio. Her eyes flick over you, looking for a sign somewhere on your clothing. Not that you have one on you.
“Sorry, am I intruding?” you ask, not wanting to rub anybody the wrong way on your first night here.
“No, it’s fine,” she says, plopping down on the edge of your nest. You prickle at the casual intrusion. “I don’t usually have company up here is all.”
“Come up here often?” You definitely want an ally here on Budapest, someone who knows the terrain.
“Sometimes,” she says, like it doesn’t matter. You can’t tell if she’s air-headed or hiding something, and that bothers you. “Oh, by the way, I’m Nataya. Nataya Basimu.”
“Clyntr Barton,” you say, and realize that you accidentally told her your real wiggler name rather than the fake one you’d planned on using. Real smooth, Hawkeyes.
You pull out your husktop, angling the screen away from Nataya, and start looking through the connections it’s found so far; she looks over the railing with wigglerish delight, legs swinging idly over the edge.
There are obvious clusters in the above-board transaction records that are probably factions, but nothing to suggest a trace of the White Dowager. The transit records from the port are too incomplete and numerous to give you much information; at least a dozen trolls came and went at the same time as the White Dowager probably did.
Well, at least you know that they’re not allied with a specific faction. The White Dowager has made that clear enough, willing to assassinate any faction member for the right price.
You close and captchalogue your husktop, stretching back against the wall of your nest. You’ll need to find a more permanent nesting site if you’re going to be here for very long, preferably deep in the bowels of the station. You’d prefer to work (and sleep, if you’re here more than a few days) in a more defensible position.
Captchaloguing your nest materials, you stand and offer a hand to Nataya. Her hand is warm but not very—in fact, she’s quite cold for a yellowblood—as she takes your hand, pulling on it as she stands.
“I’m off,” you say, beginning your climb back down to the square. “Bye, Basimu.”
“Bye, Barton,” she says.
*
You spend the rest of the night and part of the next day (not that Budapest ever really sleeps) looking for clues in the crowds of the station. Most open public places are packed around the clock so you have to slip off into an alleyway periodically to get some breathing room, even if it means you have to avoid a stabbing or psychic assault each time.
You’ve ordered some food when you notice, in the overhang of a hive hanging over the street, three trolls with different symbol sashes talking, heads down and backs to the main flow of people. One of them passes another something and then they break up, walking away without a backward glance.
Cursing the lack of up-to-date info about Budapest’s factions, you grab your food—some kind of processed meat—and start down the street. You hadn’t seen any overt socialization between sashed faction members earlier, but then you spy another group of them, between just two factions this time, exchanging a case for a datagrub.
What was it that the White Dowager was wanted for? You pull up the report: The White Dowager is now classified as an indigo-level risk because (1) their abilities and lack of discretion on kills may be used to attack the empire and (2) their actions as a mercenary have begun to destabilize the Budapesti factions.
You look around quickly, thinking up and discarding half-baked ideas on how to figure out what’s going on with the factions. You’re standing still, caught in indecision, when you see a familiar face walking down the street.
“Basimu!” you call. “Hey, Nataya!”
She stops and looks around, eyes scanning the crowd until she finds you.
When she walks over you step to the side of the street. “I’ve been trying to find information on the current state of the factions here but there doesn’t seem to be much recent info on the net. Would you happen to know anything?”
“You a newspaperishioner?”
“Something like that.”
She looks you up and down and it’s a surprisingly hard look for the somewhat carefree troll you’ve seen so far. “They’re gearing up for war,” she says, matter-of-fact.
“Normally they can’t trust each other for long enough to ally for long but some of the more contentious members have been killed off and the White Dowager’s given them a common enemy. There’s two main groups, led by Lyris and Boreali. This place’ll be a bloodbath soon. But first they’re going to kill the White Dowager. You’ve heard of her, yeah?”
“Her?”
“’Swhat I’ve heard,” she says with a shrug.
“Do you know anything else about her?”
“Only that she can and will kill anybody for the right price. One of Death’s own handmaidens, people call her.”
“How poetic,” you say dryly. “Well, I’m going to see if I can find anything else out.”
“I’ll be in touch,” she says, and melts into the crowd.