Boss King and the Blade

Sleep-Inn Motel, Washima District

Chalky Hammer

It was nearly midnight, the streets quiet around the motel except for a couple of roving Auto-cabs waiting for clients. Hammer was perched on the roof of a warehouse across the road, the sounds of automated machinery moving and loading trucks beneath him. His artificial eye zoomed in on the upper floor of the motel, spotting the room that Savage Adam had identified.

Lights were on in the room, shadows moving across the curtained windows. The rooms to either side were dark and quiet, only the dim lights of the exterior staircase giving any illumination.

“Looks like somebody is home” suggested Irongrim, viewing the scene via his electronic rifle scope. “Do we go in?”

“Dunno” admitted Hammer. “I don’t see the black vans they are supposed to be using in the parking lot”

“Could be around the back, hidden from sight” proffered Grim. “That would make sense to me”

Hammer frowned and activated his communications link to Sunset.

“Any sound you can pick up from the upper floor, Sunset?” he asked her softly.

“Just some TVs playing and some kind of noisy machine” she responded, crouched beside their bikes at ground level. “Nobody talking that I can pick up so far” she added.

“Alright, we need to go in and see what’s happening” he decided. “Sunset, you’ll be with me to provide a Sound Blast into the room. Grim, stay here and provide covering fire if we need it”

“Copy that” his partners agreed.

=====

Martina De Morgen

Martina, or Marty to her friends, was glad this was the last room she had to clean tonight. Her shift started at noon and she had been working hard tidying vacated rooms, washing floors and scrubbing toilets for hours. In between she bundled all the dirty linen into the auto-washer, then loaded the sopping sheets and pillow cases into the tumble dryer.

Her boss was too cheap to buy an ironing mechanical, so she had to feed all the dried bedclothes into the heated press by hand. At the end of her twelve hour working day, she was truly exhausted.

The rooms on the upper floor had been vacated suddenly, her boss only telling her the clients had paid extra for them to be fully cleaned before morning. Martina had told her boss, George, to clean the damn rooms himself until he offered a twenty Panda cash bonus.

She suspected he had been paid a lot more than that for the surprise cleaning job, but it was still a lot of cash. So she had stopped grumbling and set to work, promising her aching body a good dose of her favourite Vodka when she got home.

Martina was running her vacuum cleaner over the floor as a final touch, singing softly to herself as she ran the machine back and forth.

Then the door had burst open and the world exploded.

=====

Bloody Sunset

“I am so sorry about that!” Sunset told the woman, putting a damp towel on her forehead. She had laid the stunned cleaning lady on the bed with Hammer’s help, then fetched the towel from the scrupulously clean ensuite.

The whole room had been remarkably clean and tidy, at least until Sunset had unleashed her Aeromancy on the interior. The Sound Blast was designed to stun and knockout any opponents, kind of like a Stun Grenade, but was more controlled and could be aimed. In such an enclosed space, the effects had been spectacular.

All the mirrors, glass windows and TV screen had shattered. The thin plaster walls were cracked and the central light fitting had exploded in a shower of tiny plastic fragments. Luckily the room’s sole occupant, the cleaning lady, had only been deafened and knocked out for a brief few minutes.

“Once again, please let me apologise for my mistake” Sunset said wholeheartedly. “I thought you were one of the agents we have been tracking”

The woman had regarded her initially with shocked and dazed eyes, yet when they roamed over the devastated room they flared with anger.

“You stupid girl!” she had snapped at Sunset. “Those men left more than an hour ago! Do I look like a guy in a suit?” The angry woman had levered herself off the bed, muttering angry words under her breath that Sunset chose not to listen to. She suspected she would have been even more embarrassed if she did.

“Martina” interjected Hammer, having seen her name tag Sunset realised, “We really need to find those men. We are truly sorry about this mistake, but can you give us any leads on where they were headed?”

Martina had stopped her swearing and regarded Sunset and Hammer with suddenly keen eyes.

“You’re Freelancers, aren’t you” the woman guessed. “We’ve had a few teams like yours stay here before. They all flash a lot of money around when they want something, isn’t that right?”

“Err, not in our case Martina” Hammer apologised. “We can’t afford to pay for the damages we caused here”

“Who cares about the damages?” Martina declared. “That’s George’s problem and he should have insurance. I mean a few Pandas for me, to tell you what I know about those guests. And don’t take too long to decide, because George will have called the Police Auxiliary already”

Sunset grinned at Martina and turned to Hammer, who met her eyes with a grin of his own.

“You’ve got a deal, Martina” Hammer announced and fished out his wallet. “How does Fifty Pandas sound?”

“Perfect!” Martina agreed.

=====

Chalky Hammer

They were seated at an all night diner in the Wash, their bikes resting beside an open stretch of patchy grass that pretended to be a park. In the distance they could hear the sirens still sounding around the motel, a couple of big Police drones humming overhead to assist their earthbound colleagues.

Hammer sat hunched over his coffee, his jacket hood up over his thinning white hair. Grim sat opposite, a dark black cap jammed down low over his thicker hair to hide his face. Sunset sat between them, eating an icecream cone filled with swirled white frozen stuff that claimed to be Vanilla Ice Confection. Whatever it was, Hammer could see she was enjoying it immensely.

“Port August, hey?” Grim asked again. “Are you sure she said that’s where they were headed?”

“Martina said she overhead their leader, some guy they called Mister August, sending one of the vans out there” Sunset confirmed. “They were so focussed on clearing out of the motel they didn’t see her near the parked vehicles. She had been emptying some rubbish bins into a dumpster so she was hidden in the shadows”

“What about this Mister August?” Grim continued. “It sounds like he is the guy we want. Was he going someplace else?”

“Yeah. His van went in a different direction but Martina didn’t hear anything about his destination” Hammer replied, taking a sip of his remarkably good coffee. “The only lead we have is the second van going to Port August”

“So where do we go from here?” Sunset asked him, licking the last of her ice-cream out of the cone.

“Anyone fancy a road trip to Port August?” Hammer asked his partners. “I hear the beaches there are really nice this time of year”

“Where will we stay?” Sunset demanded. “We can’t afford anywhere good”

“It’s Okay” Grim told them both. “I’ve got some old fishing buddies out that way. They’ll be happy to give us a bunk”

“What? Like on a boat?” Sunset said in alarm.

“Yeah. Is that a problem?”

“Well, I’ve never been on a boat” she answered. “I think I may get seasick”

Hammer clapped an arm tenderly around her shoulders and gave her a fatherly squeeze.

“See, that’s what being a true Freelancer is all about. You get to discover all kinds of new experiences!”