Gamma Protocol (111)

[111]

The room had been an office once. Now it was cracked concrete and stripped wiring, the windows boarded from the inside with scavenged sheet metal. Someone had dragged in a few plastic chairs and a broken couch. The rest of us sat on crates or straight on the floor, backs to walls that’d been cracked for probably as long as the building had been standing, every space otherwise looted down of anything useful or valuable weeks ago.

“Split?” Quinn asked from their nest of cables on a busted desk, soldering two pieces of electronics that’d come out of the damaged cars. “What do you mean split? What do you think this is, some horror movie trope?”

“Our priority is getting as many of the supplies to the bunker as we can,” Vesper said. She stood under a sagging ceiling panel, eyes moving across Saints and Paws clustered around the room. “We cannot afford to leave food and meds sitting out here. That means some of us stay to fix whatever can be fixed so we can bring the rest.”

“I can agree that we can’t just sit and wait.” Bear had her shoulder against a cracked column, one boot on a fallen chunk of masonry. Her arms were folded, but her fingers kept drifting up to the faint blue horns curving from her temples, pretending to fix her hair every time they brushed them. “But splitting up?”

“If whoever attacked us thinks you are on the convoy and not here…” Vesper flicked a hand at the people listening. “They might gamble on easy pickings. It would be a shame if you were waiting for them instead.”

Bear chuckled. The sound bounced off bare concrete. Faces turned toward her, then toward me. The implication was obvious. If Bear stayed with the salvage, Caveman was the one left to make sure the limping convoy did not get peeled open halfway home.

“I like the idea,” Bear said. Her grin showed a little tooth, head tilting as her thumb traced the tip of one horn. She looked at me, unreadable. “And you?”

I pointed at Quinn. “We hire an AI video service and fake the stream. Make it look like I am staying here. You do the same, pretend you are riding shotgun on the convoy.”

The software would draw us into the footage well enough for casual viewers. Neither of us would be doing anything flashy on camera anyway, so it would be easy to fool most viewers.

Vesper’s eyes flicked my way, then back to Bear. “To sell it to outside observers, the Paws go with the first wave,” she said. “Saints stay here until the patchjob is finished and we roll out with the rest.”

That finally put a crease between Bear’s brows. She studied Vesper for a long second, then nodded. “Fine. I can live with that.” She jerked her chin at the gathered crews. “Let’s nail down the details, everyone else, get out.”

Boots scraped, people shared tired yet hopeful looks as they filed out past the gutted reception desk and down the stairwell. Quinn had several people help them put their electronics work into a box and carry it out.

I started to follow until both women hit me with the same look.

I stayed.

As soon as the last set of footsteps faded, Bear let herself sag, dropping onto a pile of broken plaster with an ungraceful thump. The scowl that followed could have stripped paint. “Do you think I am stupid?” she asked.

“No,” Vesper said, flat. “That demolition should have taken hours to wire. Unless you published our route and schedule on a fan page, that means either they guessed perfectly and got extremely lucky, or we have a mole.”

Bear clicked her tongue, eyes shifting to me. “Then what is the real plan?”

“I take the storm drains,” I said. “With Isia and maybe two others, people the Paws won’t realize are missing.”

I didn’t like the intensity of her gaze, whatever she was thinking about, it wasn’t about the convoy. Vesper seemed to have noticed too, her frown deepening. “Officially he will be in one of the trucks, hidden in the cargo,” she cut in. “We tell the others he’ll sit in the back of one of the trucks, tell each of your captains he’s in a different truck. If someone takes a shot at one of the trucks, then we can potentially shorten the list of suspects.”

The meguca’s shoulders tensed before she turned to look at me. “And you’re ok with that?”

“With what?” I asked.

“You were sitting at the front of the convoy earlier, then we got attacked, and you’re now going to be seen going to hide at the back like cargo,” she said, shifting from me to Vesper, for a moment it looked like she wanted to say something more but didn’t. Instead, the meguca turned back to me. “What do you think everyone will see that as?”

“There are thirteen dead, their bodies aren’t even cold.” My voice came out as a growl I hadn’t intended, but did not take back either. There was a tight heat in my chest. “And we currently don’t know who did it, or if or when they’ll try again.” I frowned. “That’s my only priority right now.”

There was also the possibility of having someone dress up as me. It wasn’t exactly hard: shirtless, skull mask, sit them at the front and hope they didn’t die of a heatstroke. But doing that defeated the purpose of testing whether there was anyone in the convoy who was giving information to our attacker.

And I didn’t like putting someone’s life needlessly at risk.

Bear’s jaw worked for a moment like she was chewing on the idea. “So your people lie to my people, my people lie to yours, we both stream lies about what’s actually going on,” she said at last, fingers tracing her glowing horn one more time as if to reassure herself of something. “And everyone gets to be bait, with nobody knowing which hook you are on.”

“Welcome to leadership,” Vesper said. “This is why I prefer dealing with monsters.”

Bear’s eyes stayed on me, gripping chunks of concrete from her rubble pile and slowly turning them into dust. “After we get this shit solved, you and I should have a proper sitdown.” Not waiting for a response, she stood back up. “Go find your rats, let’s play this farce out and see if anything bites.”

---

Playing with multiple levels of deception was, as expected, a headache.

It all came down to Vesper and Bear micromanaging everyone while we were loading things onto the functional trucks. All the while, Quinn and Bear’s social-media team had set up AI-generated streams of what was going on, something I was sure would be a fresh level of hell in of itself. Thankfully, all I had to do was hop on to the back of one of the trucks, get off, wait, then do it again when a different Polar Paws captain was watching.

Rinse, repeat.

Everyone had their heads down and were moving practically on command. We knew there were potentially shooters in the area, so everyone was paying more attention to our surroundings than to me.

Once I removed the 3D printed mask and put on some normal clothes, I might as well have turned invisible.

By the time the trucks took off, I’d just needed to remain out of sight and then sneak off. Isia was already waiting for me, accompanied by two other Saints, Rigs and Lolo. “The nearest entrance to the storm drains is this way,” Isia called out, looking around tensely, hand resting on her pistol.

“We have shit sightlines over here, I don’t want to stick around and wait for a surprise,” she said.

“I should take point.” My Bulstra was tucked away at my hip. I was carrying an improvised riot-shield Vesper had acquired from the spare gear they’d brought. She’d offered a handgun too, but I’d turned it down, the storm-drain was going to have short sightlines.

Isia considered it for a moment, then nodded. “After you.” Her lips curled into a smirk as she gave me a quick once over. “Those pants definitely don’t fit.”

I could only sigh and nod.

Following Isia’s directions, we reached the entrance to the storm drain while keeping our heads low. The “entrance” was a hole that’d been clawed out of what had once been a house. One of the walls was missing, the floor had a gaping hole, and the whole place had so much graffiti it was impossible to tell the original color of the room.

“Don’t turn on any lights yet,” I called out as I peeked inside.

The tunnel led to a junction chamber with a low ceiling and three tunnel mouths. They were worn out, cracked, and dry as bone. The air felt mildly less hot than up above, but the smell carried rot. I vaguely remembered I’d been here before, when I’d been trapped in my alternate form. I’d spent a lot of time prowling the underground of the fourth district hunting monsters. It was the only way I could keep my sanity in between food-raids.

“Clear,” I called once I was sure there were no signs of anyone having touched anything recently.

They followed one by one, turning on their lights to look around. “That way. Cityline Eighteen.” Isia pointed at one of the tunnels. “We’ll have to climb out a few clicks east, and then hop back in at a separate junction.”

“You got night-vision augs?” Lolo asked as he adjusted the straps for his backpack.

“Something like that,” I answered vaguely.

Isia I trusted, or at least I trusted she wouldn’t willingly give away information that might compromise the gang. It was hard to imagine she might be selling off details. But the two others were people I’d barely seen a few times in passing.

“Isia cover the rear, I’ll stay in front.” I gave a short nod. “If you lose neuralink signal then give a head’s up. Might be the tunnel, might be jamming, better to be aware of it. Otherwise, try to stay quiet.”

We fell into line.

The ceiling forced us to hunch as we moved forward.

Every footstep was too loud, echoing all around us and making my teeth ache from the tension. I kept looking at the walls, floor, and ceiling, hoping that if this place was boobytrapped, then they hadn’t bothered to hide the signs of tampering. The stale air made the smell of rust claw at my nostrils, here and there we’d stumble onto bits of trash that made everything worse.

“Signal’s out,” Rigs called out after what might have been a few hundred meters.

“Same.”

“Here too.” Isia added from the back. “If you’re going to merc us, now’s the chance.” She laughed, though the other two shared worried looks.

“That’s not funny.” I began moving again. Though I was starting to count the minutes now. According to Vesper, the route we were taking would remain a deadzone almost the whole way until the junction.

Fifteen minutes more, and the tunnel finally began to widen enough for us to walk properly.

I checked my memories of the area until I found what I was looking for.

The unforgettable graffiti of a five-headed dick-hydra.

I stopped and turned to look at them. “Go back to Vesper and tell her I ran off.”

“What?” Rags frowned. “You serious? She’ll have our hide!”

“You’ll slow me down,” I said flatly, gripping the riot shield and keeping my eyes on the shotgun. “She’ll understand you couldn’t stop me.”

“But-!” Rolo began to form an argument.

“Axel,” Isia spoke up. “You’re going after the fuckers that attacked us, right?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

Isia gripped Rolo’s shoulder and spun him around. Her fist met his jaw hard, catching him completely off guard. Rolo stumbled, nearly falling down but Isia’s grip held him steady and eased him to the floor. “There.”

“What the fuck!?” he cried out.

“Better me than him,” she said, pointing at me with her thumb. “I’ll take the fall, say I couldn’t convince him. You’ll tell Vespi you tried to restrain him when negotiations fell through, and that he threw you off.”

I glanced at Rags, and he raised both his hands. “I just watched.”

“Thanks.”

With a nod, I turned towards the tunnel and broke into a full sprint. I spared only a glance over my shoulder before I took a sideway tunnel and broke into a different direction. My goal wasn’t to get to the bunker but to confirm whether there’d been a sniper in that building or not, and whether they were still there.

And if there was someone there…

My jaw clenched, the heat that washed through me tightened in my throat.

As I rounded the corner and reached another junction chamber, I checked the area to be sure there wasn’t anything or anyone nearby, and began my transformation.

Hunting Mode (1):

-1 AP / Second
* -1 Senses / Second *

I stripped as the changes began, putting everything I’d been carrying into a plastic bag, ignoring the way the creaking sounds became louder with every passing second. My focus was on trying to remain small, or at least not as large as I usually became. I wanted to be able to move through doors without much concern, and for that my form had to be as compact as I could make it.

The system seemed to catch on to my intention, though as usual I couldn’t really tell what it was doing. The only thing I was sure of was that the reek of dried rot and long-since desiccated trash was becoming more intense.

Leaning against the wall, I kept my attention firmly on not getting too dizzy under the sensorial assault. I wasn’t entirely certain how far I’d need to push this, so as much as I wanted to cut it off early, I allowed my senses to continue heightening. At some point I got the achievement, but I kept it going just a bit further, until I could hear cracking coming from the floor, from the very soles of my… paws? Claws? I was vaguely certain they were padded, but everything was spinning a little. At least I wasn’t hunching over, so that was good news.

Recovering from the disorientation took a while, until I could start moving without threatening to topple over.

Then, I switched to bolstering agility.

The relief was immediate, as if my brain had suddenly gained a proper adaptor for the cacophony of scents and sounds and everything. I wasn’t too sure what, exactly, the system considered “agility”, but I was suspecting it had a lot more to do with the brain’s information-processing capacity than any actual physical coordination… something to sit down and think about later.

I let the Agility mode run until my AP stocks ran dry, then reoriented myself and began to walk as I catalogued everything. I’d originally wanted to use Shimmer, but that would, ironically, make me visibly easier to spot.

Now that I was paying attention, the “dried rot” had layers to it. Like smelling a meal and being able to pick out each individual ingredient. Not that I could tell what each individual scent meant, none of them were familiar to me beyond “trash smell”. I’ll need to train this at some point and learn what each scent means, though it’s definitely not something I’m looking forward to.

I padded over to the nearby entryway, climbing the rusty ladder and removing the manhole. The space was almost too tight, but still manageable under my compact frame.

The street was empty, but the sound of gunshots made me duck.

It took me half a second to realize the gunshots were happening at least a kilometer away.

Careful to keep myself hidden behind cover, I located the building I’d been looking for and began carefully making my way over. Here and there I’d stop to scent the air and ground. There were smells that were fresh, less dusty than everything else on the street. Gun oil, something with protein, and a bunch of other things I had no label for.

A faint buzz near the door gave me pause. Though I couldn’t be sure the source of the electric noise was a trap, I preferred not taking chances.

So I went for plan B.

Parts of the building had been blasted, likely during the monster rush, leaving its outer walls cracked and oftentimes missing entire sections. So I just  used that to climb my way up instead. My target was a hole on the fourth floor, one large enough I could fit my body through.

Inside, the place that had once been an apartment was barely recognizable as such. With most of the floor missing, navigating it proved tricky, needing to stick my claws into the walls for purchase. I made my way to the central concrete stairwell and followed the scent of half-burnt rubber and cheap gun-oil upwards.

Two floors up, I caught it: breathing.

I slowed down, the world narrowed to that singular rhythmic sound. Slow, controlled, focused. Leaning slightly forward, I used my claws to distribute more weight, trying to hide the sound of my own heartbeat as it drummed against my ears.

Something shifted, the breathing hitched for half a second, then the sound of a wrapper, followed by chewing.

I froze.

One second, two, three, four, five.

I moved forward at a glacial pace, hyperaware of everything, from the faint hum of electronics, to the scent of half-burnt rubber, to the way the chair they were sitting on was slightly rusty and squeaked with every shift of their weight.

There was no door leading to the room, only the ruined remains of the hinges hinted at the violent fate that had come to it. Leaning forward, I peeked inside. The livingroom had been thrashed at some point in the past, and then repurposed. The table had been moved to the back away from the window, with a chair and a small table on top. A man sat on the chair, his rifle resting comfortably, cheek resting against the stock and looking down the scope.

His finger was not on the trigger. The man was eating a nutrient bar as he kept his eye down the scope. It was a perfect sightline to where the ambush, yet there was nothing else in the room that might tie him to it. No spare drone parts, no explosives or wires. Just his rifle.

Then I spotted the synth-leather jacket with the Polar Paws logo painted on the back. It was well worn, frayed and patched up at least a dozen times. Was he part of Bear’s crew? Had he been put here as overwatch, without telling the Saints? Or was this something else? Should I attack? Change back and try to talk? Was this guy a threat?

The questions kept piling on, and I wasn’t going to get any answers watching passively.

Dammit.

Vesper was right, dealing with monsters would’ve been easier.

What would a meguca do?

I moved closer, tensing as I calculated the distance.

He finished the nutribar, shifted in his chair, glanced.

His eyes met mine.

I pounced before his brows had started rising, crossing the distance in an explosion of movement. My body plowed through the table his chair was on, and my hand slapped the rifle out of his grip before he could get the finger on the trigger.

The man screamed as he fell flat on his back, hitting the floor before I could change direction.

BANG BANG BANG

The explosion of sound hurt more than the bullets on my back. I cringed through the ringing, protecting my face with one arm as I hurried towards him. 

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!” He screamed

He got two more shots off before I’d gripped the gun and twisted it out of his hand, using my paw to pin him to the floor and tossing the firearm out of his reach.

“Sssstop.”

Of course he hadn’t listened, instead pulling out a knife which I promptly caught.

“STOP.” I barked the word an inch from his face, flaring fangs and snarling.

This time, he froze, pale as chalk and practically hyperventilating. “Fuck, fuck, fu-”

Ignoring his panicked muttering, I took his hands and placed them over his head, where he very rightfully kept them. Then proceeded to pat him down in search of anything he might be carrying.

A keycard, two more nutribars, and… aha.

A wallet.

There were some credchits, some coupons, a driver’s license (I memorized the address just in case), and a picture of himself in a group of others. All of them wearing Polar Paw paraphernalia.

So he was part of Bear’s gang.

“Why. You. Here?” I very carefully enunciated the words, layering it in between growls, glaring him down.

“I don’t-”

“NO LIESSS!” I snapped my mouth close to his face, letting my humid breath wash over him. I didn’t have any real means of knowing whether he was lying, but figured the threat would help.

“I-I-I was just paid to sit here and watch! I swear!” He fumbled through the words, eyes wide and fixed on my fangs.

“Who?”

“I don’t know! Please don’t eat me!”

My nose wrinkled at the thought.

Ew. “No eat,” I hissed.

That didn’t reassure him, but I wasn’t going to try to right now. I released the pressure from his chest and proceeded to yank him up to his feet. “Follow,” I commanded, keeping one claw on his shirt and pulling him out of the room and down the stairs.

When we reached the more destroyed part of the building, I looked around until I found a promising piece of rebar.

Then tore it off the wall.

“What are you-”

“Do. Not. Move.”

I moved his hands behind his back, then proceeded to twist the rebar into an improvised set of cuffs. To the guy’s merit, he’d made sure to stay perfectly still, which made the process easier. I then used a second set of rebar to do the same to his ankles.

“Sssstay.”

Leaving him there, I went back up to check on the room he’d been in.

I found a backpack that’d been tucked away out of sight, it had spare magazines for both the gun and the rifle, a grenade, and some rope. This didn’t look like the sort of thing you’d bring “just to watch”, but then again, you could encounter monsters in this portion of the district. Maybe I just didn’t know what to expect.

I’d been half sure this was a dead end until the guy could be more properly interrogated, until I noticed there was a lingering scent on the backpack.

It was a mix of motor oil, tar, and something bitter, almost like almonds.

It was the scent of plastic explosives.

Taking the backpack, I went back down to my prisoner of choice, and showed it to him. “Where. Explosivesss?”

Seeing his face go from pale to gray felt like proof that I was on the right track.

“They’ll kill me.”

I huffed in frustration, this was going nowhere, and I definitely couldn’t trust him as a source of information. Best case scenario he was screaming through his neuralink right now. Did he have backup willing to come save him? I had my doubts, but at this point there were too many unknowns.

Ignoring his cries for help, I gripped his head with one claw and very gingerly applied pressure to the sides of his throat with the other. I wasn’t trying to suffocate, just cut blood flow until he passed out. The guy kicked and tried to wriggle his way out, but after barely a minute he’d gone limp. I waited a while longer before letting go and slinging him over my shoulder like a sack of protein-powder.

Going back the way I entered, I returned to the storm-drain, looked for the area I’d last seen Isia, then dropped him there. He’d probably be waking up soon, in the dark, and cut off from comms.

Getting back to the surface, I pulled out my datapad and sent Vesper a quick message to come pick the guy up, and that he was related to the attack in some way.

I had one more possible lead to follow before I called it quits.

With the guy’s backpack in hand, I compared the scents coming off of it to the ones lingering on the street near the building. And started the very tedious work of tracking down the route he’d taken to get here.

This was going to take a while.

---

The Banker watched the clip again.

Then he fed it through every scanner he owned. Image forensics, noise analysis, artifact sweeps, three separate AI detectors that hated one another on principle. He even tossed in a couple of his own programs meant to catch the slightest hint of VFX or any of the innumerable other ways to falsify a video.

It had to be fake. Had to.

He rewound. Played it again from the top.

A workshop. No windows, no outside line, buried three floors down in a dead building whose legal owner had died twelve years ago. A bench. Four 3D printers in the back, each halfway through spitting out another drone frame. Plastic explosives stacked on the center table like someone’s very illegal birthday cake.

It had been meant to be an untraceable workshop, set-up through third-party contractors who did not ask questions. Everything perfectly in place to create the factory that would turn any guerrilla green with envy.

And yet when the door opened the one to step through was not one of the four agents he’d painstakingly coerced into this endeavor.

It was a monster.

Bipedal. Wrong proportions. Too light on its feet. It had big bat-like ears furred in black and a face that would haunt the Banker’s nightmares. It also had a backpack, carrying it with the same comfortable ease a human would.

The Banker’s mind snagged on that detail and refused to let go.

Monsters did not carry backpacks.

The creature took its time. It padded along the tables, paused at the printers, lingered on the explosives. It moved like a foreman, not a beast, checking workstations, staring at every object in the room but touching none of them. Every look was measured. Evaluating.

It finished its slow circuit of the room.

Then it turned.

Not toward the door.

Toward the camera.

The microscopic, pinhole lens, triple shielded, neutrally tinted, calibrated to be functionally invisible unless you’d been the one to install it.

The thing raised one claw to its mouth in a shushing gesture.

The feed cut in a burst of static.

The Banker was already moving, fingers darting across the console. Purge commands jumped across his private mesh and pinging through eight separate networks. The detour cost a full second, but by the time the instructions reached the corresponding node devices, they’d be impossible to trace back to him. The pre-loaded programs would tear through buffers, scrubbing logs, wiping caches, killing anything that had ever so much as cached the workshop’s coordinates.

And one more thing to be sure nothing useful would be left behind.

He jumped to the feed from a nearby shop camera, one that had poor protection, the sort of CCTV that was not really “closed”, and that anyone could enter with just a keystroke.

The ruined building he’d turned into an operation nexus point was there.

Then it was light.

The blast hit the shop camera hard enough to turn the feed into white noise and dead pixels.

In the silence that followed, he realized he was shaking.

“What the fuck are you,” he asked the empty air.

This had been a ghost site. No registered power draw, no mesh chatter, no human staff who could talk. Every disposable grunt who had walked through that door had carried a neuralink wired to fry itself, and their brains, if they ever whispered a single word about the operation.

No one should have been able to find that room.

No one should have looked straight at that camera.

He stared blankly at the wall until he felt like he’d been transported to an alternate universe that made no sense. A cold weight settled in his chest. Some stupid hopeful part of him wished that was the last time he would see that shape, that smile, that absurd little shushing gesture.

The rest of him, the part that kept him rich and alive, knew better.