I still wanted to keep a low profile after recent jobs where we were a little too public. One option was to get work out of town. Spark contacted a colleague, Kresk, to find more information on Maxim. Where could we find him? We needed some answers. She pitched him on a revenge plot and though he wasn't interested he did help us. "You had a run in with old Maxim? How did he look?" Spark said, "Cool as a cucumber and doing better than I'd like. Which is to say: breathing." Kresk said Maxim is operating close to the old lab and school in the Ukraine. Seems he and others are working for a branch of the Red Army in Cherkasy along the River Dnieper.
Spark proposed selling any recovered research to finance the mission. She was going to work on how to put cyber tech in Awakened soldiers, so any information she could steal would accelerate the process.
Interesting. The academy where Blitz was enrolled is active again.
I talked to Oskar before leaving home to see if there were any contacts known to International Spotlight where we were headed. He said he'd look into it. He also noted that where we were going, they put on a veneer of being OK but the place was simmering. One point of interest is the Temple White Lotus, a modern Buddhist temple where the lab had obtained Physical Adepts for test subjects.
I rented a vehicle for the trip and planned a route through Poland and about three-quarters of the way across Ukraine. The 20-hour drive was uneventful but no 20-hour drive is enjoyable. We arrived along the river. The forest landscape showed more maintenance the closer we got. There was a ferry ride across the river to the city proper. The city was surprisingly nice, almost disarmingly so. We settled on a motel near the airport to keep a low profile. Of note: there wasn't a big metahuman population, so two Orks and an Elf might stick out a bit. Spark got a room and we Orks share another one. Boots on the ground to do some recon and look around. First stop: the temple, which is on the waterfront. We walked around the garden for a while until Spark got the attention of one of the residents, a monk by the look of him. She chatted with him, trying to get an opportunity to find out if they could be an ally. If the Russians were still taking Physical Adepts maybe we could rescue them? Hard to tell how it was going from our vantage. Eventually the priest moves with Spark to a more secluded spot, where they spoke quietly. He was looking around nervously. "Our next tour is at 3:30! Thanks for visiting!" he said overly loudly as he walked Spark back to us, trying to avoid suspicion. He then hurried off.
Spark confirmed that the monk told her it was still happening, the kidnapping. It happened as recently as six months ago.
We headed out to catch the ferry across the river with our vehicle. It's autumn so our cover story was leaf site seeing. The main road eventually branched off into smaller roads as we got closer to the school. Spark was riding shotgun with a cover story for the school of being an architecture magazine writer doing an article about the campus.
As we arrived on campus we crossed paths with a delivery van. There was a gate with an attendant. I stopped so Spark could talk to the middle aged man with a rather informal windbreaker who approached the vehicle. In Ukrainian, he said, "Can I see your parking pass?" Spark: "I'm Maria Skovo, a reporter with Eastern Architecture Weekly." And blah, blah, blah. "Oh, OK. That's nice. We do have a nice campus." He ducked into the booth and came back out with a day pass. He pointed us to an administration building, showing us on a map. I recorded the campus layout with the camera in my cyber eyes and saved it. The buildings were an old style and austere, just as Blitz remembered them. A distinct difference was the lack of usage in certain places, formerly busy buildings now vacant, wilder growth of vines in places. The other two in the crew got out at the admin building so Spark could get access or get a tour. Blitz was intent on finding evidence of his mom's old department or leads on her former co-workers. I found a visitor parking lot, parked and tried to keep a low profile until Spark and Blitz got back.
Here's what happened to Blitz and Spark inside the Tulyakbay Academy:
Spark came out with the hard sell, attracting attention with her over-the-top art house flamboyance. It seemed to draw a little too much attention.
Blitz got into the computers and found his mother still listed on the staff with a dead link to her faculty profile. He noted the others with dead links and then, after attracting the attention of an employee for accessing what was supposed to be off-limits to students, he got out of there.
There was a black golf cart with the school insignia coming my way while I waited. Another security guard was at the wheel. He stopped and was eyeballing me and making notes. Then he drove closer, looking for a parking pass, which I had displayed. He headed back out along a narrow path, too narrow for a full-sized vehicle, I noted.
Meanwhile Spark got a pair of students on the quad to tell her about an incident a few months back when there were vans on site working from "that building over there," they said, pointing to one of the seemingly unused older buildings. The people in the vans were speaking Russian, they recalled.
We got back on the road soon after, as it was evening at that point, and we needed to get to the ferry. It was a quiet ride to the ferry. We used the noise of the boat to cover our chat to catch each other up on the day's results and what our next steps should be. I saw a man on the level above us lock eyes then take off toward the stairs. We decided to follow him. I split off to go to the vehicle, to make sure the guy doesn't frag with it by putting a tracking device on it, damage it or otherwise tamper with it. I shouldn't have let my ride out of my sight in the first place, I chided myself as I moved. Spark tagged along then split off to follow the stranger. I got to the vehicle and went over it looking for signs of tampering, but found none. I looked around for another parking spot where I could move the vehicle to throw off pursuit. Soon after I had moved it, Spark showed up and looked around, confused that the vehicle was not where we left it. I flagged her down but was distracted because when I relocated the vehicle it was making a grating noise for which I could not discover the cause. A quick review had shown me nothing, so maybe I was just being paranoid, I thought. Then the ferry's horn went off and people started heading toward their vehicles.
Blitz apparently encountered someone trying to obstruct us. Spark used the comm to tell him to knock the dude out and take the van he'd been using. We could steal it and meet up later to see if it held any useful clues. Blitz hit the driver with a spell and the guy went slack, dropping a camera and comm. Spark hopped in the guy's van on the passenger side as Blitz took the wheel.
Spark pulled the guy into the back of the van as Blitz waited for the green light on the ferry that would allow us to take the vehicles out onto dry land. The all-clear was given and we headed out.
