The Wild Ba’Neesh Chapter Four ©2019 Fay Thompson All Rights Reserved

Eric paced the confines of the rented room. His team had brought in their own generators and tech so they were able to piggy-back the existing investigation from a distance. It wasn’t optimum. The local city-state had deployed their own Anti-Terrorism Team within minutes of the event operating out of an underground city bunker that wasn’t tied into the local electricity towers. All cities now had such units after the event in San Francisco demonstrated how a totality event could be devastating even without secondary targets. All city grids were now considered first level targets.

What annoyed Eric was the conventional strategy of the Anti-Terrorist Team and its limited intel. The team was thinking the boy was a disaffected youth, possibly in league with other disaffected youth, likely trying to steal something protected by the grid. He was clearly a misfit. It wasn’t a great surprise to discover he had been placed on a watch list from primary levels as he didn’t make friends easily and kept too much to himself. It didn’t help that his adoptive parents had coddled him with several attempts to use mental health intervention for a noted gaming addiction which seemed to consume most of the boy’s free time.

Eric found he was a double-dipper when his team wound their way into the personal records of the boy to re-run the most recent blood sample taken just after the boy turned thirteen when he was injured in some kind of bedroom accident. All personal records were backed up by non-local data storage to prevent total data loss in the event of electrical failure. The file stated the boy presented with a round blistered injury. The medical analysis described the injury as a round burn. When the boy could not detail the exact cause of the burn, bloodwork had been taken. At that time, the mechanical medical system checked his blood for chemical traces and found nothing. The summary of the medical file was that the burn source was non-conclusive, the boy was noted to present with elevated blood pressure and behavior the testing equipment identified as deceptive. New mysteries.

Arjan suggested the first visitors to the boy’s medical record an hour before them had to be DireSec although they had gotten in and out leaving only a minor auto-notation registering a file access. Who else could it be? Arjan couldn’t tell if DireSec altered any of the data. It appeared to be intact but that too could be deceptive.

When Arjan resampled the boy’s blood it wasn’t a great surprise to detect the genetic markers of a Soek. They had guessed that from Germany. Unless the blood was run through specialized testing he would appear to be fully human and generalized medical equipment did not do that kind of testing.

“Why haven’t they caught him yet?” Eric rounded on Arjan. “It’s been three hours.”

“They are tracking his locator beacon. It has been actively moving in a green area roughly north and east of his residence. He hasn’t activated his onboard locator although multiple prompts have been sent to him. From their perspective he is a young male with no criminal history hiking along a public path after a local disaster. He could be disoriented and innocent. His device may have been compromised by the event although our tech shows hundreds of thousands of locators that were not affected by the surge front.”

“They know the event originated from his residence, from within his bedroom, according to the team’s chatter. That makes him more than a person of interest.” Eric argued back, knowing his frustration wasn’t going to move the investigation along faster. His team couldn’t show up in the middle of the situation as they had zero legal status for being in the area, much less involved in the investigation. His only solace was that DireSec was equally hampered. Both were waiting for the capture, for an opportunity to acquire the boy or eliminate him. Either would do. Neither of them wanted to reveal their presence because to do so would catapult the event into a real International Crisis, a situation neither of them wanted to create.

“Coincidence is insufficient evidence of causation.” Arjan quoted aloud, knowing it would annoy his boss. “They don’t know what we know.”

“You mean the local team. DireSec knows.” Eric came to stand behind the images his team had managed using nightsight drones. Not only did he see a lone figure hurrying down a lit path, he could see the Anti-Terrorist Team close enough to likely have him on a movement scope if not within visual range. The capture should happen within a few minutes. There was nothing to explain his own rising anxiety.

Arjan pointed out two other drones, no doubt belonging to DireSec also following the hunt. The most logical approach was to let local enforcers take the boy down, subdue him and take him in. Getting to him inside their containment could be done with spider-mites, tiny robot killers that could crawl into a building carrying a lethal dose of Norso. Untraceable. A boy dies in custody. End of story. Would they prefer to get him alive where he could be properly analyzed? Sure. How he had managed the city-wide event begged such an interrogation. But, a quick kill remained a viable option, particularly if DireSec was better positioned to take him alive. He had to be one of theirs. Some kind of sleeper hidden inside a bureaucracy. To what end seemed clear enough.

It bothered him that his scenario smacked more of Tule Soc policy than DireSec. Tule Soc used low powered Soek mules to deliver targeted Vrill-based diseases as weapons, it was their primary product. If the boy was a mule, it was the first evidence that DireSec was altering their policies. The electrical disruption smacked of their expertise while the mule aspect aligned more with Tule Soc. Could there be a viable third player that remained hidden? Someone using both techniques in a unique new way?

Eric would have been even further disturbed had he known that Jordy and Elias were having a nearly identical discussion. They too identified Mick Huxley as an unknown Soek in the wild. They puzzled over his medical files, burn history and psychiatric diagnoses. There was nothing exceptional about the boy. His social awkwardness, while putting him on a watch list, hadn’t risen to more heightened attention. He was average. He was acting like a mule. Running. What hope could he have of evading top security? They had watched him losing that escape attempt over the last two hours as the local team closed in on his location. Why had he paused so long near a rocky outcropping, wasting valuable escape time? He was not logical and illogical behaviors suggested an aptitude for non-linear thinking that over the long term, could be problematic. They needed to acquire him fast.

The local Anti-Terrorism Team had found evidence left behind. A tiny amount of powdered bone left on top of a rock, a nutrient bar packaging, empty.

Jordy dearly wanted to run testing on the powdered bone. Where had it come from? His team had managed to analyze all of the forensic matter left in the bedroom by snooping into the investigating files. There was no mention of bone. In fact, the only curious notation centered around several old burn holes and one fresh burn hole in the carpet. They could track the relative age of the earlier burns to retrieved conversations the boy’s adoptive mother had made to a repair service, going back more than two years. The forensic team could find no device capable of creating the burns, nor could they explain the failure of the carpet fibers in the latest burn to re-harden in the time since the event. They remained soft.

“Have we got an ETA?” Jordy asked Elias.

“They should reach him within twenty minutes. He is slowing slightly and they are closing the gap.”

“Tule Soc?”

“Likely the source of those other drones. We are running operatives in a large ring around the local team. No trace of Tule Soc operatives on the ground between us and the capture location.”

That was the critical factor. Jordy wanted the boy alive. WiBo Tech wanted to know how an untrained Soek boy could disrupt a city grid and leave no real trace of the device that had been used. All they had was that arc of visible light. That hole. That bone dust and the ineffectual low-rent ongoing escape attempt.

They watched as the boy stood still and then used a blade to cut his shoulder. His scream was audible even to their remote drones.

“He’s ditching the locator.” Elias leaned toward his display in excitement. He approved of the device removal action and his estimation of the boy’s intelligence increased slightly.

“You’ve got him visually locked?” Jordy knew he really didn’t need to ask, but he couldn’t help himself. He was getting a bad feeling and some of it was due to the two Ba’Neesh waiting off to one side, whispering.

“He has no where to go.” Elias said with confidence. They watched the boy pick up the pace running across gravestones, patches of grass and around statues in a straight line toward nowhere special. Between one moment and the next, he vanished.

Jordy cried out. “Where is he?”

The drones closed in, trying to reacquire the heat and visual signature that had been there moments before. Nothing.

“Find him.”

The Anti-Terrorism Team was having even worse problems. Suspects didn’t vanish into thin air when you could see them and hear their hard breathing. Their voices rose, orders flowing as each man scanned a part of their visual grid. He had to be there. “Last location mark.” The leader yelled out.

Eric in his rented room and Jordy now running toward the perimeter as close to the physical spot where the boy had vanished as he could get, were equally upset. Only the Ba’Neesh found the chance to run exciting and fun although they looked strange running as humans when in reality they were running on fours and the illusion constrained what they looked like to upright humans.

“Is there another hole?” Jordy gasped out to Elias who didn’t like running with his devices powered up. It was hard to look where his feet were going through a holographic display.

“Can’t really tell without stable analysis and more energy to power my system. Not like we have a high-powered generator along on this easy trek.”

Another thing Jordy mentally added to his growing list of new tech, a portable high-powered generator.

“He can’t have gone far.” Elias reasoned aloud. “What do you think, some kind of illusion sigil?”

Jordy groaned internally, they were not in a secure location and possibly some of his nearby men could hear Elias’ words. Worse, could this kid do a sigil? If so, when and where could he have learned one? Tule Soc favored non-activated Vrill work, finding real work placed too much power in the hands of Soek. What did that leave? A Soek boy whose DNA wasn’t showing up in the Order database, at least not directly. Elias had said there were old factors. That meant the boy was related to someone but no one currently alive. Another mystery. His team slowed well outside the perimeter being set up by the Anti-Terrorism Team.

It was frustrating. They could see the military-dressed men clear enough to pick out individual identities. They could see Tule Soc’s drones and the local team pointing at them and having unhappy words over who was running the drones over their investigation site.

Jordy kept his drones back far enough to remain out of easy view as his sported long-range lenses that should be able to see a tick on a mole’s butt from a half-mile away.

The Ba’Neesh didn’t like being told to hold back. It was clear the action was down near the cluster of human males. But, they had agreed to obey Jordy in order to be allowed to participate in this hunt and it was too early to cause real trouble. Besides, both of them were nearly as curious as Jordy and Elias. Where was the Soek boy?

They had felt him as soon as they entered the Greenzone. Perisee told Jordy the boy was healthy. He knew that meant the boy was running juicy Vrill. That alone might exclude him from being a Tule Soc mule as they didn’t allow Soek of strong Vrill to survive.

Now the two Ba’Neesh argued in their native tongue. It was terribly exciting that the Soek boy had vanished, while they were watching too. It was the second new trick they had witnessed and they wanted to know the secret of both tricks or really three tricks. The hole, the arc of visible Vrill and the vanishing. No Soek should be able to evade the detection of a Ba’Neesh. Yet, ring scan as they might, his tasty flavor was almost completely gone. Both of them puzzled over the very faint trace that remained. He was here, and not here.

The Anti-Terrorism Team was doing a grid search examining every inch of land in the area from where the boy had disappeared. Elias, listening in on their chatter reported their frustration to Jordy. The only highlight they noted was the retrieval of the boy’s locator and some evidence of blood on the ground. A report that had the Ba’Neesh excited. What was less clear was why the blood wasn’t producing the genetic structure that could trace it to the boy’s existing sample. The forensic team member ran the tests half a dozen times before stating that the small amount of blood spatter had undergone some kind of accelerated degradation. It would be no use as a matching media. They couldn’t prove the boy was the boy. A new mystery. Were they actually chasing a boy or something else?

Arjan pointed out the cluster of five individuals watching the scene from just outside the official perimeter. Now they knew where DireSec was and it didn’t make any of them comfortable. He pulled his own drones back when he saw official drones approaching the scene. He noted the DireSec drones were flying high and wide using better lenses than those he had. He cursed. Tule Soc needed to improve their surveillance gear if they hoped to compete with DireSec directly.

“They can’t get any closer than we can. Their position limits their tech so let’s use our stable location to analyze what just happened. Have the drones switch to Vrill trace and start running grids. That boy was running Vrill so we should be able to reacquire him.”

Arjan thought that statement was optimistic considering they didn’t know how or why they had lost a visual on the boy in the first place. There was no where in an open graveyard to hide. That suggested some kind of casting activity but his home-based techs were telling him of no Channel spike.

“Take your system back to our transport and plug in.” Jordy told Elias. “With the boy’s locator gone, we will have to try to triangulate on his molcom. It will take a lot more power but we should be able to use satellite signaling to find him.”

Nearly every citizen was implanted with a molcom at birth. They were molecular computers that attached to the nervous system to run a low-level check on the health of the individual. The molcom allowed an individual to stand near a medical services machine to transfer critical data about the health of the person. They could also signal early problems to prevent illness and disease but their signal was low and weak as it ran on residual bioenergetics that were not accessible to conventional electronics. These computers allowed for Vrill-based memory limiters and other functions carefully hidden from the population. They were not supposed to act as locators. But then, DireSec had designed the devices and every device had a backdoor, if you had sufficient Vrill-based power to access it.

Tule Soc wasn’t so lucky. They knew the molcom could be accessed but their policy limited Vrill strength so getting a molcom to talk to them would require locating a Vrill source capable of opening those back doors. Their best option seemed to be to wait for DireSec to do the work for them and then steal the retrieved data. They set visual tags on the cluster of four DireSec operatives within view and switched to intel gathering rather than direct acquisition of the now missing boy.

Perisee turned on Jordy. “He’s still here.” She said, gesturing to the scene they were watching. “He’s hiding. We can smell him. You will let us go find him?”

Jordy flinched. He could readily imagine the two holographically attractive human females walking into the military situation perimeter below them to sniff around. Sure, they wouldn’t be noticed. Not at all.

“Not now, Perisee. Find him from here.”

Perisee frowned. “He’s hiding.” She complained.

“Show me where, and how.” Jordy countered, guessing they didn’t know either.

“He crossed a border.” Lemista announced, “That’s when we stopped seeing him. That means he is on the other side of the border.” She nodded, pleased with her analysis.

“What kind of border?” Jordy pressed.

“Like a big circle.” Perisee answered.

“A sigil?”

“Not one we recognize.” Perisee admitted. “We can only tell it is there. But, we won’t be able to taste of it until we are in it. We need to be in it.”

“Then we wait. You know we can’t reveal our presence to the locals.”

“Waiting is boring.” Lemista whined, sitting down on a headstone. “This cemetery is very weak.”

Jordy looked around. Elias had already run tests on the cemetery, no big hidden channels. Like Lemista said, it was weak. But, it was a cemetery. It worried him. The Ba’Neesh relationship to graveyards was notorious and not well understood.

“Is it stronger in other areas?” He asked, more to keep her busy than to learn anything new.

“Oh yes, there are better areas. It is this area that is weak.” She was cuddling with Perisee. They looked bizarre sitting on the ground, ignoring their appearance. No human female would sit like that.

Better areas, Jordy thought. Why would the Soek boy intentionally run to a weak area?

(Thank you so much for deciding to become my reader and hopefully my newest fan. You will begin to see art popping up #anime #gamer style here and there as I figure out how to do that here. I hope you like the novel as much as I like writing it.)