Hours passed before Brad felt daring enough to leave the tavern. To keep his nerves he just took the occasional scotch. Just enough to relax but to still keep his wits about him. Just enough to keep him from getting thrown out of the establishment for loitering. Just enough to not look completely suspicious or paranoid as he constantly checked the door as it opened, just waiting for his stalker to make an appearance.

After one hour of this, he let his guard down a little.

After two hours, he stopped checking the door so frequently.

After three hours, he felt comfortable enough to leave his seat.

Finally, after four hours, he settled his tab (which was significantly more painful than he’d planned for this evening) and walked out the door.

He tried to contact Elaine once again, only this time receiving the notification that the user was unable to be reached, meaning she’d had her communicator switched off. Hopefully. Hopefully the line itself wasn’t disconnected.

Okay, where to now?

Brad needed to have the hard drive examined, so he quickly shot a message out towards an old “acquaintance” of his.

Not long after Brad had arrived on the colony, one of his first contracts was for a woman named Sonia Ray, a computer programmer who had joined the colony with one of the founding corporations. Sonia had gotten fired from her post following accusations of abusing a programming error to embezzle thousands of credits from the company’s account. It wasn’t a particularly cheery case. She was totally innocent, and it turned out that her supervisor was behind the whole thing, setting Sonia up to take the fall for her. While there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict Sonia, which kept her out of prison there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict her supervisor either. Eventually said supervisor skipped the colony and the company went under due to the loss as well as the high expense of starting the colony to begin with.

Sonia was able to find freelance programming work to keep herself employed but the loss of such a lucrative position following the company’s failure was a sore spot, and she likely wouldn’t respond well to the sudden contact from Brad.

The message was simple. “Hey, it’s Brad. I need some tech help. I’ll pay.”

Before too long, a voice call rang over his communicator from Sonia. Brad answered, trying to hide any uncertainty in his voice.

“Hey, Sonia…”

Sonia’s curt voice snapped back, “What do you want?”

“Okay okay, I’ll cut straight to the chase. Vince and Jill Cortez are dead and I’ve got a hard drive that has some information that people really seem keen to keep under wraps.”

“Okay Asher, slow down. First off, what? Secondly, who?”

“Look, I can explain when I get there. I’m still trying to process everything myself. Can we please just set up a meeting?”

The line went silent for a few seconds, before Brad frantically shouted, “Hello?!”

“Calm down, I didn’t hang up on you. Try to swing by my office this evening…say…8 o’clock?”

Brad quickly checked the time. That would give him about two hours. Just long enough for him to swing by his own office and try to get all of his information organized. “Yeah, that should work. I’ll try not to get followed.”

“What are you—you know what, never mind. You better make this worth my while.” And with that, she ended the call.

Well, the clock’s ticking. I better get back to the office.

Winding his way through the streets in the direction of his office, Brad noticed a police barricade with a bunch of officers huddled around an abandoned vehicle. Strange sight, but there was no time to rubberneck, and unless he was stopped to offer his completely uninformed opinion, there was nothing for him here.

No, the big surprise was sitting right outside his office: Elaine with a hurt arm sitting across from another officer, this one, a redhead, was cuffed and looking more than a little upset.

“Elaine!” Brad shouted, rushing to her side. “Why are you here? Why haven’t you answered my calls or messages? What’s up with your arm?” He looked at the other officer. “And who is this?”

“It’s a long story. Can you let us in so we can lock the door and sit down for a bit? Also do you happen to have any ibuprofen? This arm is killing me.”

Once everyone was seated and the door freshly locked, Brad asked if his guests wanted any food. Not that he had much to offer, but let it never be said that Brad Asher didn’t try to be a good host.

“This is Officer Jolene Morris,” Elaine began. “She’s relatively new to the force here, but wouldn’t you know it, she’s already got assault and attempted murder of another officer of the law under her belt.”

Jolene opened her mouth. “What about your excessive use of force?”

Elaine shot a glare back in Jolene’s direction. “Oh don’t you start with me when you know it was 100% in self-defense. You’re lucky I didn’t just gun you down like I probably should have!”

“Well you didn’t so I’m going to make you regret that choice as early and as often as I can!” Brad almost imagined the young woman sticking her tongue out at Elaine.

“Ladies, ladies, let’s back up a bit,” Brad pleaded. “Now, why were you trying to kill Elaine?”

Jolene quickly responded, “She’s a dangerous criminal who needed to be put down. She killed our only lead in the Valentine case!”

Elaine rolled her eyes. “This again? I told you that wasn’t me! I discovered the body but I sure as hell didn’t kill her. And what about you? What was up with the mask?”

“I wasn’t about to go down over you!”

“So it wasn’t under anyone’s orders?” Brad butted in, hoping to steer the conversation away from the world’s most uncomfortable cat fight going down in the middle of his office.

Jolene paused for a second, and then said, “No. But Jill was my friend. I heard what happened as I was going off-duty. Everything after that is a bit of a blur, to be honest.”

“A blur?” Elaine asked incredulously. “You expect me to believe that you tried to kill me in a fit of rage?”

“I…I don’t know.”

Brad, watching the exchange go back and forth like he was trying to judge an extremely tense tennis match on the razor’s edge of devolving into a brawl, noticed something on Jolene’s neck. A small puncture wound. One that wouldn’t have drawn much blood, but perhaps could have been large enough for a syringe of some kind.

“Hey, Jolene, what happened to your neck?” Brad asked.

“My neck?” She felt around for the wound.

“That might explain the sudden snap to violence. Let’s start from the top.”