(all art by Paul Benjamin)
Swift Spark's contact Ana checked in with an offer.
Ana has a contact in the Polish resistance army, the Armia Krajowa, a surviving - maybe the only surviving - member of a unit that was decimated in fighting inside the city of Szczecin.
The contact, whom we would learn later was going by the code name of Braun, needed help from people like us to find a weapons cache that had been stashed and then lost during a previous operation.
The location, Ana told Spark, was a true war zone still, even a few months after the initial frantic fighting that broke out on November 2, 2062, when the Russians invaded. Well, it was according to her admittedly outdated intelligence.
We'd need to get our hands on some type of paperwork (physical or digital, that was up to us) to be able to move around the city without getting hassled by the Russians, or worse the guns come out.
If we wanted the job, we could meet Braun in Hamburg, the German city where I've lived the four years since my parents had us smuggled out of Poland. Ana told Spark: "Let me know .... well, I'll know if it goes well."
Swift Spark
I went to collect Spark, a Russian Elf of indeterminate age. It's hard to tell how old Elves are, and she's no different. I'd ask but I haven't really known her too long, less than a year since I helped get her and Blitz out of the Ukraine before whatever was chasing them caught up. She looks to be in her mid 30s, so that means she is probably closer to 70. She tries to hide most of her cyberware, but it's there. She's some kind of scientist, I haven't really asked too many questions. It's probably what landed her in a situation that required she flee in the night with the help of an Ork smuggler. Blitz, the Ork younger than me, was with her at the time, and has been hanging around in Hamburg ever since we got here. I'm supposed to help them either get on their feet and go where they want or keep them moving on to a new place until something safe can be found. He's a spell slinger, though I admit I don't know much about the arcane arts. But he's impressionable and tails me like a puppy sometimes so I have to play big brother and help him along.
We all congregated at The Jaguar, a dark dockside bar full of dock workers, paramilitaries and 'Runners. Or wannabes. We had a photo of Braun and he was there at the bar by himself.
We are a motley group so I never know what a potential employer will think of it all. There's me, Topo, real name Feliks Nikolaiczyk, 20 years old, Ork since birth, a short Mohawk hairdo currently dyed the blue of water at night. There's the aforementioned Spark, athletic, and Blitz, who is about a 0.2 meters shorter than I am and built thicker compared to my lean, tall build. Different Ork meta-types, ya know?
We collected Braun after a quick introduction, and spirited him off to a booth where we could see the doors and have cover if things went sideways. He speaks Polish, his native language and mine as well. He and I exchanged hellos and he became visibly more at ease. I had to translate for Blitz but we all agreed that our middling abilities with English made it the language for this conversation.
He got to the background right away. During General Andrzej Woskoi's First Barrage his unit, known in the streets by the locals as the Black Star, took major casualties to a man. Braun, unsure if anyone else in the unit had survived, fled the city. But, he said, he needs to recover a cache. The best bet, he said, is a member of the unit, possibly the last still alive and in the city, a soldier named Powzu. If he's still alive and in the city, Braun said, he's the one who will know its fate. Any others who survived the initial slaughters went mad or fled back to civilian life and hid their involvement even to their own psyches. Braun slumped in his chair. "If we can find my man, find these weapons, maybe we can fulfill our mission."
Braun asked more about our backgrounds, starting with me as the obvious fellow Pole. I was born in Rzeszow to an American mother and Polish father who met through Amnesty International. They worked with local political prisoners (and possible future targets), getting them out of the city and even the country with the help of smugglers and pathfinders, often members of the military. When they themselves became targets, they fled with me with a lot of help from the same contacts they'd used on behalf of others in need. We got to Germany. I chose to stay and do the same thing I'd seen those who helped save us do, and I have ever since. They headed back to North America. Braun approves, offering his respect for the work I do now.
Topo
Blitz told his story next. It's a tale cloaked in the veil of a teen who still doesn't understand how it all went wrong but he had to flee the military academy he was enrolled in that was connected to his mother's research company.
Blitz
"How about you, ma'am?" he asked Spark. Her answer, like every thing else about her, was clinical. She studied applied sciences in Russia before the Russo-Ukrainian war. She was hung out to dry in a secure site in the Ukraine for two decades, escaped and now looks to help her comrades, brothers and sisters of Russia in similar straits.
"I don't have too much for payment," Braun admitted, as the discussion turns to how much it would cost to obtain our help. "But, if this goes well, there will be much more to do." He offered us 3,000 Nuyen each. It will do, I assured him. Perhaps later the job will yield us some military tech, contacts and future work. He said that could be arranged.
Here's the basic plan: Braun has a helicopter that can get us across the Germany-Poland border and drop us at a private air strip outside Szczecin in the early morning two days from now. We walk in, set up shop, find the contact, find the cache and get out.
"Hey, I got the next round," Blitz said enthusiastically. He looked to me for some spending money, I gave him enough for the drinks and he headed off to the bar. I know what's going on though I can't explain the facts of it. Just that I've seen him do this stuff before. He got out of sight and cast a spell on Braun, telling me and Spark later that he was getting in his head to find out just what he wasn't telling us about the mission. Turns out it was that Szczecin was a "really bad scene," with mental images of violent massacre that messed Braun up in the brain and the heart.
Once the Ork and the drinks arrived, Braun answers some questions. The cache? It's two foot lockers, though he declined to go into detail on the contents, saying it's classified. He switched gears, locking in the terms of payment that include incidentals and the promise of future work. We all agreed to take the gig. He'd meet up with us for the chopper ride out of the city in a day and a half. That ends the meeting.
Now we needed to hustle and get some documentation. I know that in situations like we're headed into the preference is paper IDs, a driver's license or a passport. Get some grainy head shots of each of us, pasted to good paper stock with all the right things printed in the right places, including the stamps. Blitz went to work finding a contact in the Hamburg underground who can do the job on short notice.
The lead was a gang that works in illegal tech that includes forgery. The Tirpitz. I've heard of them, they hang at a dive bar near the one we met Braun at. We headed there, arriving in front of a row of motorcycles of all varieties, most sporting the insignia and colors of the gang. They're predominantly Orks, so hopefully me and Blitz being there would help. Inside a heavy metal band composed entirely of Orks thrashed away on stage. Virtually everyone inside was standing around, with barely a table to speak of.
There's a ganger of some stature posturing near the stage, and I approached, speaking English and trying to exude confidence. 'I belong here' is the message of the body language I used.
This guy, Luther, said he'll send someone out to handle the request. I stressed that I was prepared to pay a premium for the rush job. He nodded.
Soon after we get the call to go upstairs for a meeting. Blitz had just recently come back in from an encounter out front by the bikes, where a Troll in the gang decided to turn his youthful interest in the bikes into a stressful test drive of the nine-footer's massive motorcycle. The test drive under duress lasted all of seven seconds, but Blitz managed to not crash and make a graceful exit to the roaring laughter of the assembled onlookers. My how far out of our comfort zones we'll go when a person who scraps the ceiling looms over you.
Long story short we got the IDs and got gone. We had plenty of preparations to do before the flight out.
Most of the time I stay in a mid-level apartment with a garage connected to it. The place sits on the outskirts of Hamburg, the kind of place I can leave in a dune buggy and not draw too many strange looks.
I packed for the trip, filling a rucksack with a medical kit and replacement supplies, some tranq patches, my GPS unit, survival kit and spare rations and wire clippers. Survival knife on my belt and Ares Predator III in a shoulder holster under my armored jacket. There's spare ammo and a silencer for the gun too. Made sure my Rating 2 ID purchased the other night is in my pocket and headed for the public transit then on to the meet-up to get to the helipad.
"Don't be flashy about it," Braun said about our pay load and gear. It's a short flight, during which I pointed out a few of the places I and other smugglers cross from Germany into Poland. Most of them are running contraband, some of us are bringing people in or out.
Szczecin is a mixture of bombed out neighborhoods and places that look barely touched, as if the residents can, on a good day, pretend none of this even happened. We took a bus from the landing site to the city via the main road and hit a check point about a half mile from the city gates.
The Elf breezed through. I wasn't even close enough to her to hear the cover story. I was too busy preparing to give the local Polish soldiers the story of why two Orks are coming to this hell hole on their own accord. We stepped up, offered our IDs, and got the once over from one guard in fatigues who checks the paperwork. "We're here to party," I told the other soldier, hinting that my German cousin is with me for an adventure. The soldier wished us well while cheekily musing on the worthlessness of German beer compared to the Polish options. I promised to drink my 'cousin' under the table with a healthy dose of the local stuff.
Braun got through the check point with no issues. He's quiet, introspective. "This place has changed a lot. We'll have to do our best," he mused to none of us in particular.
Braun found us a place to set up, a coffin hotel in a district where he says his unit was once stationed. He had obvious jitters. "That used to be a factory," he said grimly of a place that's been leveled and is now a sad, gray park.
Who are our local allies? Who knows and is sympathetic to the cause? I found a small sub corp of Saeder Krupp, where an overseer on site is sympathetic to the Domestic Army (the AK). Word is he eats his lunches at a nearby cafe. I took the description - gray haired and dressed in business casual clothing - to the place and tried to find him. It's a small place and he was not hiding so I found a stool next to him at the counter where he was already eating.
I threw out some intentionally clumsy banter about the weather and the war and the boys who will never get to fight again. He took the bait, engaging with me after I had to push a little to elicit a response. "Seems quite the coincidence you'd make such statements to me, a stranger, no?" he said, and I copped to being on the lookout for those who agree with what the Black Star fought for. He told me that there's a place called The Outpost that sometimes veterans of the war go to. Sounds like a social club of some kind, and so I thanked him, and told him that if he has more to say he can leave messages here for me. I paid both bills and tipped the waitress well, noting that there might be people asking about me and if she takes their info I'd be appreciative. "The coffin hotel I am at does not offer messaging services."
Spark found a news document that details a commemoration of the Black Star in the neighborhood where we are staying. Some locals set up a memorial for the unit recently. We decided to check it out, though Braun said he has another lead he wants to follow up on himself. So I headed out, stopping at a vendor to buy a bouquet of flowers that come from the region I grew up in, one far from here. The other two shadowed me at distance, looking out for any interest I attract, good or bad.
Up ahead I saw the site, an alley where two buildings that still stand were hit by some type of explosion and the rubble of each building's corner piled up to make a sort of sheltered hollow of brick. It was papered over with photos and posters of people who have gone missing. There were candles and crucifixes and all types of tokens and memorials. One photo drew my eye, a group that has been here and took a picture of themselves at the shrine posted it here among the items. Among the people in the photo is Powzu. I had been recording the entire trip with the Opti-cam installed in my right cyber eye. I zoomed in on the photo, hoping a good image will be useful to Braun later. "Hey, try to get an image of the over there," I heard from Blitz through the ear plug unit of my phone. He was across the street from the memorial with Spark, and was pointing to the place I should be looking for. "I detected an Astral presence that had a sinister and satisfied reaction to you arriving at the shrine," my fellow Ork said, taking a moment to dodge a few construction workers who are bustling around that sidewalk. I got some more video and then kept walking in the opposite direction of the hotel, making sure to take a long, meandering path back to the hotel to make tailing me as hard as possible.
The other two were already at the hostel awaiting my return. We talked over the situation, comparing notes while we waited for Braun to get back from his part of the mission. "Whatever it was wasn't good, boys," said Blitz of the presence he detected.
"I did get a lead on some supplies and crates that got hijacked but it's too early to tell," said Braun when he got back. We shared our tale.
When I showed him the photo, he was shaken. "That's him, that's Powzu! Frag, he's alive!" But Braun did not recognize anyone else in the photo. Invigorated by the breakthrough he agreed to come with us to The Outpost. It was about 4 p.m. so we decided to make our way there, figuring that if it is a social club of sorts then it would be late enough in the day that people might be there. I finally holster up my pistol, having eschewed it so far since entering the city. The rest are armed as well.
I noticed that Braun had to psyche himself up to go. I told him that I've talked to others in similar situations while en route out of their compromised location, those who have suffered. "I feel like I'm going to see a ghost," he admitted. I squeezed my thumbs, a Polish tradition to foster good luck. He smiled, making the grip with one hand while clapping me on the back with his other hand. "Let's go brothers - and sister," he said.
We walked and talked, trying to let this be a moment of normalcy, never knowing just when things might get crazy. The Poles pass in the street, so many just living their lives and trying to cope with the conditions.
A Dwarf pedestrian
On the way, Spark spied a presence duck out of sight farther down the street as we approached. Blitz reached out with a spell to ascertain if it is a friend or foe ahead of us. My supposition: foe.
I jogged out toward the person, asking if we should pursue. Blitz came up with me, to take advantage of some type of scrying or the like. The other two hung back a bit, guarding our six.
I drew my pistol from inside my jacket, keeping the Predator in my off hand because it conceals it between me and anyone who might notice a firearm. I snuck up around the corner, spotted a human male crouching in the alley. "There's your guy," I whisper to Blitz, and he seemed to switch modes from spying to attack mode. He went deeper into concentration, staring at the target then releasing the hand he holds to his temple and splays his fingers out toward the man. The target's legs went out from under him as if he was hit by a car. I ran up on the man with the heavy pistol extended; he gave up immediately, putting his hands above his head in surrender.
Behind me out in the main street where two of my companions stand, I heard the crackle of energy like a frayed power cable in a storm.
