The remains of two thirds of the kill squad around her feet, the remaining member redoubled his grip on his two force pistols.
“Get on your knees, Agency bitch!” he hissed. Victrix Lament raised her hands above her head and spoke in a calming voice:
“Alright, nobody wants to get hurt. Do what you have to.” She walked around the desk and stood in front of the last man standing.
He was quite young. Spit sprayed from his mouth as he declared “Your Agency tricks don’t work on me! I’ve got a trick of my own!” He tapped the padded white cap that sat snugly on his head. “Psychic damper! You can play your mind games all day and this little thing will protect me!”
“Very impressive. And very rare. Where did that come from?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” said the man. It seemed to be a favourite taunt of his.
“I would,” Lament said. Then she ducked below the field of his twin pistols and drove a swift heel into his ribcage. The guy made a noise like hurk and staggered. Two punches to his wrists and the force pistols clattered to the floor like loose change. Her hand around his throat, Lament said “Should have killed me at a safe distance. Where did you get the damper?”
He was suddenly very cooperative, for some reason. The psychic damping coif, as it was officially known, had been sold to him for twice it’s original value by a group called the Miner’s Brotherhood. A little more pressure got him to reveal that Myle Omar paid protection money to that same gang, who had sent him and his squad ostensibly to collect. But when they got there, Omar was nowhere to be found.
This was bad. Somewhere between the Consulate and here the Imperial surveillance machine had sprung a leak. Only a handful of people might have known where she was going, and any one of them being a mole, unwitting or otherwise, had severe implications.
“… Excuse me? Can I go?” said the young man. Almost surprised to remember he was there, Lament released her grip on him, in the same movement snatching the damper cap off his shaven head. “Hey!”
“This is stolen property,” said Lament. “I’m confiscating it. And being very lenient, too. You have a chance not to be found at the scene of the crime. Take it.” Then the guy got the hint and ran. Some of these tough guys were too stupid to see a good deal looking them in the face if it made them feel like someone was getting one over on them.
She looked around the office quickly. There was no hint of where Omar had gone. He had known they were coming, and gotten the hell out of there while there was still time. The kill squad had thought they were being sent here for Omar, but really they were being sent here for her. It all came back to the Brotherhood. They probably had Tariz’s shipment too.
Ducking out of the office she was struck by the lack of interest from the gamblers. One old man, who had been standing near to the stairs, glanced in her direction.
“You alright? Quite a ruckus,” he said, and then whooped as a tooth came flying straight towards the camera. “That looks like a canine!” he said to the broad-shouldered man beside him. “Pay up!”
It was an ugly sight. Rakhell seemed to deal exclusively in ugly sights. Their primary export.

Outside the club a stranger walking past caught her arm like a fish-hook. She would have broken his arm then and there, but the stranger flashed a deputy’s badge and said “Come with me.” Lament decided to withold judgement and break his arm later if the need arose.
The stranger led her around in a circuitous route through the steel marketplace of 437, waving away curious shopkeepers and beggars alike with the ease of a lifelong resident.
“Sorry about this, but you know how it is,” he said.
After a long silence which Lament didn’t feel like breaking, the deputy cleared his throat and carried on in a low voice: “We’ve been watching the place for the last week and you just walk in!” Lament didn’t care to answer.
The deputy stopped in front of an unassuming alleyway. “This way,” he said, motioning towards a staircase that led up the side of one of the ramshackle buildings that filled the block. Lament went first. At the top was a door made of plastic sheeting with a small peephole cut into it. The cover was slid off the peephole and a grey eye appeared at it.
“We don’t want any!” said a husky voice from inside. The deputy stepped forward and rapped on the door sharply. “I told you-” said the voice as the peephole opened again. “Oh. You’re back.”
“I’ve got our POI here, if you’d like to speak with her,” said the deputy.

She was sat down in an uncomfortable chair. The room was dark, with only tiny slivers of window space streaming light in – observation points. This little light diffused around the room, letting Lament’s sharp eyes pick up the weary expressions on the faces of the law officers lounging in various positions.
“You’ve made quite a ruckus,” said the only standing member of the little cohort, who Lament identified as the leader. She was older than the others, with streaks of grey prematurely entering her military-cropped hair. “You think ’cause you’re in yellow you can walk all over our investigation?”
“Apparently,” Lament said disinterestedly. The sergeant scoffed.
“Agency types! All the same. Put a little bit of juice in your brain, flash your little insignia, all of a sudden you don’t need to listen to us!”
She went on ranting for a while, until Lament elected to interrupt. “I’m here on a case. Shipment rated X clearance has lost a crate somewhere. Trail goes cold with your Mining Brotherhood.”
“They aren’t my Mining Brotherhood,” said the sergeant pettily.
“They seem to be operating right under your nose.”
The sergeant scowled. “Not all of us have carte blanche to operate outside the law, missy.”
Lament nodded. “I can understand that. You spend a lot of time chasing up drunks?” she asked.
“The drunks are funding the gangs. Cut off their demand-” Then something seemed to occur to her. A sly smile passed across her face. “But if you’re looking for the Brotherhood, I think we can help each other.”
The smile didn’t instil confidence in Lament. Of course if she wanted to she could just walk out of here and siphon the memories out of the sergeant’s head on her way. She did her best to look innocent and said “Anything I can do to help our loyal law enforcement.”

The stinking air blasted past her face as the airbike swooped lower and lower, circling the enormous tower like a helter-skelter. Not for the first time, Lament was glad of her filter mask.
“The p-platform should be right here,” said the deputy in her ear. He was strapped into the bike just like she was, but still his arms were wrapped tightly around her waist.
“Nervous flyer?” Lament asked.
“More so the falling,” he said. “There it is!” he released one hand, pointing out straight ahead. Looming through the smog, a colossal structure: an abandoned mining platform, the sergeant had said. When the company downsized, unable to keep pace with the rapidly shrinking crust of the planet and hoping to refocus into mining laterally into the unspoiled Green Half, it had left those of its workforce who were unable to pay their transport fees behind. This was the birth of the Mining Brotherhood.
“Your sergeant said we should approach from below,” said Lament. “Hold on tight.”

When the deputy had calmed down, Lament pulled the airbike up beside a catwalk on the underside of the platform and hooked its tethers to the handrail.
The door was old fashioned, the kind with a big wheel in the middle. Locked of course. While Lament focussed her energies on wrenching the handle aside, the deputy watched in awe.
“I don’t agree with the sergeant,” he said. “I think it’s – well – sort of romantic. In a classical sense.”
“Just what I need, an educated cop,” Lament grunted, pulling the door open.

They were in the shadow of a massive digging vehicle in the platform’s hangar bay when they first caught sight of any sign of human occupation.
Two men, carrying a heavy drill between them, mutually grumbling about the boss. Could have been a scene from before the platform was abandoned, thought Lament.
A moment later, a spotlight from a gantry above dazzled Lament. After her eyes had adjusted for a moment, she saw him. Flanked by two bulky figures, a gnarled old man. In the metal claw that served as his right hand was clamped the orange glow of a cigar. “Do mine eyes deceive me?” said the gnarled man. “Is this the little Agent as we were promised?”