Chapter Text
Crowley was, for the lack of any words to better describe his current state, f*cked.
In the scale from one to ten, he was about googol f*cked. And being aware of that did not make it any better.
Actually, he wasn’t sure why he was repeating that to himself at all, but for the dozen or so brief seconds he still had before his inevitable death, that’s what he repeated to himself. He was f*cked and it was his own fault, no one else’s. Everybody’s going to think it, of course nobody’s going to say it because it’s not appropriate to talk about dead people like that, but they’re bound to think it.
He might even get a nice epigram on the memorial wall before they blow it up to obliterate the evidence of his existence. And Pritchard will name a particularly annoying feline straggler after him, whom he will feed surreptitiously in a dark alley and complain to it about what an idiot of a pupil he once had and how tragically that pupil ended his life, beaten up near a rubbish bin in a pretty similar alley.
The sirens were not yet howling. They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves. Logical. Not everyone here had swapped their brains for an extra pair of hands or a sophisticated sense of humour. He could have made fun all he wanted, but the Baron’s soldiers really didn’t lack sense. And weapons.
And here was his main problem.
He got rid of his weapon in advance as soon as it occurred to him that he had walked straight into an ambush. They didn’t see him clearly for more than a blink of an eye, but they fired at him anyway. They had permission to shot a random passer-by, just to catch someone who might have even the tiniest clue about the Ranger Corps survivors in hiding. They walked straight into him so unexpectedly that he assumed at first it was a complete coincidence.
And then he realised they had cut him off from the main road and turned-on sonar to suppress communications. They knew. They were hunting a Ranger, and they knew that a Ranger would call for HoR-se help at the moment of danger. They cut him off, in the process turning off the electricity in the entire district. And somehow no one was worried about it. A couple of screams rang out from the dark streets as he ran between the buildings, seeking shelter, glass rattled somewhere, a deafening bang hissed from somewhere. But no one called the gendarmes, no one panicked.
A night like any other. As long as they weren’t being chased, everyone didn’t give a damn that someone was being chased at all.
Also no one saw anyone running away. Crowley had his escape route out of the district cut off, but he wasn’t going to run down the middle of the street like a bird with its head chopped off. Some bird, he couldn’t remember what kind, but Pritchard used to call out to recruits that this was what they looked like. Crowley took his word for it, and whatever it looked like, it couldn’t have been a pretty sight or a viable tactic for running away from a squad of armed soldiers. He hid first on the low roof of one of the buildings that was falling apart from old age.
Another had barbed wire at the edge. Fortunately, he spotted it in time. He scolded the occupants of this house in his mind, although in truth he was absolutely not surprised by their precautions. He ran further to the edge of the building. Most of the houses in this area still had gutters. LED displays were scarce, the dark, slippery metal suited him to running like a Ranger suits to ballet, but he had no other choice.
At least he was surrounded by darkness. He would hide in it and sit there safely, waiting for the chase to get bored and tired, or for them to be chased away by one of the gangs, for whom the sudden darkening of the district was a real Christmas present.
He found a great place to hide by an old, clogged chimney. He checked the transmitter, making sure he could neither send nor receive any signal. Crap. He was left to believe that no one would find Cropper in the meantime, and even if they did, the smart machine – sometimes smarter than him, probably – would make good use of its security systems. And then it’d probably taunt him with the interface, but somehow that didn’t worry him.
Just to wait out the search. Since he’d gotten rid of the gun, unmarked, specifically with no biometric enhancements, they wouldn’t find him, even if they did find the gun. And they wouldn’t find it, he was almost certain of that. He was equally certain that they wouldn’t find him either.
And then the Baron’s motherf*ckers pulled a helicopter down on his neck.
He heard it and only therefore had enough time to escape in time, saving himself by jumping off the roof. He lacked maybe a few centimetres to reach the trough. He banged his shoulder against the windowsill, making quite a noise, hooked the trough sideways, bruising his ribs painfully, and dived with great grace into an open dumpster.
A few screams rang out somewhere above his head as, frozen by the impact, he lay motionless for a moment, afraid to even lift a finger.
He had seen quite a few movies where the hero saving themselves in this way miraculously survived the fall, softly landing in the rubbish. Quite a few times he had heard or made a remark himself about how improbable this was and how many metal, glass and sharp objects land in the rubbish, making such a jump most likely to end in the death of the daredevil. According to this theory, he expected pain, excruciating and piercing, from the broken tubes piercing his body, broken bottles, tin cans, and other traps for helpless people falling from rooftops.
The flash of light that slid across the roof and fell into the alley snapped him out of his daze. Since it didn’t hurt, he decided to be of good cheer. He broke off further into a run, leaping from the dumpster. Straight at the just-walking-by gentlemen with stun guns attached to metal batons.
How unlucky must one be…?
Crowley was saved by the speed with which he knew how to get the f*ck out of somewhere. And probably also by the bewilderment of his appearance in the path of the gangsters. He threw himself into flight, pursued by the round light from the helicopter and the screams.
He was almost certain that for one blink of an eye they could see clearly as a lone figure ran into an alley sunk in complete darkness.
The screams ran after him. He heard the clatter of many pairs of shod shoes and the hiss of electricity. Since someone was running away, they must have had a reason and something valuable to take from them. Even if, in Crowley’s case, this something could at most be his life, a few hundred people in the country might also have had a desire for taking it.
The alley was empty, delineated between the high, dark walls of the windowless buildings on this side. For a moment Crowley hesitated, running, whether it would not be better to hide somewhere in the shadows, against a wall, and wait for the random volunteers in pursuit to run on.
Then again, a bloody helicopter.
He wasn’t taking any chances.
He ran until he reached the block where he could hide behind the tall containers where rubbish from all over the district was stored. He pressed his back into the icy metal and made sure he had the edge of the roof over his head so they wouldn’t spot him from above.
Only when the four men pursuing him, for lack of a better occupation, ran on, passing his hiding place, did Crowley carefully take more air into his lungs. He ran his hand over his ribs, sides, neck and legs. He found no wounds. The field suit should protect him from injury, of course, but he honestly had lower expectations for it. He found only one broken seam on his shoulder. No blood, his own or anyone else’s after falling into a dumpster.
Well, okay, then maybe he wasn’t so f*cked. He wasn’t injured. At least not yet.
He was unarmed, hunted down and cut off from command on a mission that no one was overseeing because… well this is where the real crux of his currently hopeless situation began.
It wasn’t that Crowley didn’t know how to follow orders. Sometimes he acted rashly, all right. Sometimes he stuck his neck out a little too much and was a little too nervous, a little poor at dealing with anger and enduring injustice in the world. Sure. Pritchard explained this by his young age, his familiarity with the realities they lived in and the colour of his hair. Crowley didn’t understand what the latter had to do with it, but he respected his mentor’s opinion.
He really was able to listen to commanders. The problem was that they currently had a vacancy for this position. Scattered around the kingdom, away from the larger cities, the expelled Rangers from the Corps mostly sat quietly, not asking for more trouble. Baron Morgarath’s regime, introduced gradually but undeniably, was trouble enough. Since the Rangers had been targeted by spontaneous hunts by his men over the past months, they should have sat quietly, hid and waited out the worst of it. Normally they would have fought, of course. If only it was for whom, and on whose orders.
Currently, Crowley could only fight on his own behalf. That was enough for him to get himself into trouble during a routine reconnaissance mission in one of the westernmost towns of Gorlan province. Before he disappeared, Pritchard had given him clear orders, and although he currently commanded only one Ranger, Crowley was not going to take it any less seriously than he would have taken orders from the King.
The exception was if someone just happened to need help enough for Crowley to forget that, in the final analysis, he was the potential target here far more than the harassed barmaid or the beleaguered passer-by.
“The errant knights are already long asleep,” Pritchard once told him. “If you’re so looking for a trouble, you’ll join them soon, boy.”
Sometimes Crowley took his words as if they were the purest revealed truth. Other times he landed in a dumpster, hiding from the helicopter and the soldiers running after him around town.
Such was life, once on a HoR-se, once in the gutter, he repeated to himself back in the days of the Corps. The Ranger’s job required a lot of sacrifice and had already thrown him into various places. This time it threw him into the middle of a neighbourhood where he wouldn’t want to walk unarmed, in the middle of the night, during the darkening and with a chase set after him. Well, tough luck.
He waited until the helicopter flew off towards the outskirts of the district, illuminating the streets and rooftops. The crew numbered at least four, with rifles of the latest models. Laser sights, biometrics, maybe even plates embedded in their temporal lobes. Crowley had already seen many strange things, which some called improvements and others called playing gods, for which humanity would surely be punished. Whatever the moral or philosophical approach to biomechanical modifications of the body and fusing it with weapons, the consequences for the enemies of such soldiers were usually dire. The Baron’s men could afford the expense of well-executed treatments, keeping away from the nightmares of the underground enhancement trade. Baron Morgarath had both the means and the reasons to ensure his people had access to the best weapons. Many good people had died thanks to the accuracy afforded by modern military technology. Crowley privately knew a few of them.
And now he was the one being hunted.
He had to consider what would now be the wisest move. The problematic thing was that this was the course of action expected of him by the soldiers looking for him in the area. He should get out of the area as quickly as possible, over the wall to the other town. There he would be out of range of sonar effects and could contact Pritchard, call Cropper and get the hell out of there. This was what they expected him to do. So they waited for him at all the gates in the wall. They were outnumbered, had plenty of ammunition and moved faster than he did, running across rooftops and alleyways. Tough luck indeed.
What was left was to wait. Only, waiting here was asking for a knife under the ribs or a stun gun beam in the occipital. Also a poor prospect. He had to find a better place to hide.
The transmitter was still not working, and with it the automatically updated maps. He had his eyes and legs and that was all he had left to save himself at the moment. Well, okay, he still had a brain and a pretty good one at that, if the feedback from the Corps, in whose ranks he had already spent a nice couple of years, was to be believed. He still had at least five hours until dawn. A bit long to hide somewhere against a wall and pray that some gang didn’t beat him to death after a failed theft attempt. They didn’t even have much to steal from him.
Crowley decided not to head for the walls where they were waiting for him. He waited a long moment after the disappearance of the helicopter from the immediate vicinity and, with an unhurried but sure step, moved ahead into the centre of the district. The darkness of the empty alleys enveloped him and tucked him in. With his heart in his mouth and two knives under his jacket, Crowley walked deeper and deeper into a neighbourhood he was never supposed to be in.
Pritchard would strangle him if he found out.
Virtually invisible in the wealthier towns, the war had left an indisputable mark on the poorer districts, at the provincial borders and in the places where battles were fought. South of Gorlan, whole towns were turned to ruins, roads impassable and forests barren, contaminated by the fires that broke out after the battles. The surroundings of the former capital were completely deserted. The once beautiful, rich towns ceased to exist with Baron Morgarath taking over. It did not look like they would ever return to the maps. The young Prince Duncan, if he was lucky enough to be alive, was hiding far away, too far for the Rangers, cut off from each other, to find him. Formally, power was still in the hands of his father. An informal interregnum had prevailed for almost two years. Chaos was fuelled by the actions of the Baron, trying more and more overtly to seize not only power over the army, but also the title and the throne.
Somehow, everything had gone haywire in this strange world of theirs.
Walking through the streets of the town, Crowley couldn’t snap out of the impression that it must once have been a cosy and crowded place, full of neighbourly disagreements, with children playing in the streets and coloured lights in the windows. Today, it was barely the skeleton of the old houses, bristling with the iron teeth of the bars in the gates and the bent sheets of the roofs from which the lights had disappeared. The streets were almost empty at this hour, especially with the blackout. He passed maybe five people for a quarter of an hour of fast walking towards the centre.
The pursuit must have lost his trail, for he had not heard or seen them since leaving his hiding place. Dressed in a dark outfit that could be either the suit of an ordinary pilot or a mercenary, with his head tucked into a hood, Crowley blended in with his surroundings even when he came upon larger human concentrations. He reached the centre of the district, where he expected to find an opportunity to hide.
Maybe some kind of bar or casino, possibly even a bloody workshop, anything, they had to have something here. Somewhere all these people were going, after all. He followed them, picking out from among the few strangers he encountered a group of three people who were clearly going to a party.
Young people, younger even than him. Two were already drunk, one at least did not give that impression. Some people were clearly not moved by the blackout and the patrols on the streets. Crowley understood this, people were used to the new grim everyday life and tried to steal from it at least brief moments of forgetting how dirty, brutal and pointless the world was.
Pritchard would have laughed at such talk, Crowley stated in thought. He would have laughed that listening to Crowley’s self-pity at least made him feel younger because he had a more positive attitude than his former apprentice did.
The three partygoers led him to a less rundown part of the neighbourhood, where in a few houses people could afford interior lighting. Because of this, he had to concentrate on avoiding the patches of coloured lights that came down the alley more and more densely. The silence was finally disturbed by the sounds of life. Somewhere, old music was playing, played from the now antique reproducers for which there was no need for central electricity.
More and more people were hanging around. He assumed that according to the old rule of the street-smartness, there were at least ten guns for every eight people gathered at night, so he avoided interacting with them. Ranger training worked reliably, Crowley hid first in the gloom and then in the crowd that was beginning to approach a few buildings.
A bar, a brothel, another bar, a casino, a workshop. Real pick and mix.
He hesitated, taking advantage of the fact that quite a few people were stopping in the area, not going anywhere inside, immersed in conversations.
A familiar low rumble echoed behind the block of flats in front of which people crowded into the concrete courtyard. Crowley smiled a bit. Illegal HoR-se races, most of them stolen from junkyards and garages, repaired desperately until there was nothing original left in them except the engine. The famous engine, strong and literally impossible to break down in the popular opinion. Given what he and Cropper have been through it was quite likely that this one marketing slogan did not lie.
HoR-se had lost in official use and gained in illegal one somehow two decades ago if he remembered correctly. The government did this to itself by withdrawing them from military equipment in favour of faster, more manoeuvrable chasers. They had one major disadvantage compared to the HoR-se, derived in a straight line from motorbikes. They had weaker engines, so operated more efficiently but for less time. Irrelevant for chases, but quite important in the scenario of the army cutting off access to new equipment. Only hell knew why but they were still called in the same ridiculous way, as Single Person Combat Flying Craft in Confined Space (the shortcut ‘SPCFCics’ in Crowley’s opinion, was particularly idiotic).
The Ranger Corps was the only military unit at the time to oppose the reform and, after much discussion about it, eventually kept its HoR-se. The Corps used them until its end, training more Rangers to use heavy, impossible to destroy machines with intelligent interfaces and very difficult to defeat security systems. Crowley was part of the last generation trained fully before the Baron destroyed the unit. He had learnt to ride HoR-se even earlier, as a child sneaking into the kind of illegal racing he now heard nearby.
For a moment he was tempted to just wait there until morning, watching the lunatics on the dilapidated machines spinning pirouettes over the heads of the spectators, crashing through the metal ramps and jumping flips off the machines before they landed. The heavy, familiar smell of cheap petrol that had started to be distributed through the black market, the roar of engines and a crowd he could hide in. Perfect. What stopped him was the realisation that the makeshift racetracks were usually frequented by ‘delegations’ of at least the larger gangs from the area. He really had enough trouble for that one night.
He had given up on going to see the races. Assessing critically what was safest, he looked around the area, remaining hidden himself. People paid no attention to him, busy talking, drunk, partying or arguing. He could even stand here like this and just wait.
That also turned out to be a poor plan.
Crowley’s watchful eyes caught the approaching silhouettes of gendarmes on pursuers in the darkness. He cursed in his mind. Eight soldiers with guns, f*cking marvellous.
He didn’t immediately throw himself into flight, knowing full well that it would draw the attention of both the gendarmes and the people in the area. He waited a while, contemplating the range of choices before him. One of the bars had a quirky, metal-free vibe that caught his attention for a while longer. Styled in the old days, it was smaller and less crowded.
There he directed his steps, unhurriedly, hesitantly, glancing still at the other. He let what pair was in front of him pass by another kissing not far from the wall.
He glanced at a signboard formed of old-fashioned, single led lights, some of which were already burnt out. He did not, however, read the inscription above the door.
“Citizens, we are looking for a fugitive suspected of terrorism,” rumbled the interface voice of one of the pursuing gendarmes behind him. “This person is alone, dangerous and most likely injured. Please remain calm and do not impede proceedings.”
He entered the bar, trying desperately to keep his cool. People started looking around at each other, searching for the intruder whose presence had drawn the damned gendarmes to the area.
Most people were here in groups, at least in twos, for their own safety. Besides, they were all from the same neighbourhood and knew each other well.
‘f*ck,’ Crowley muttered in thought, sinking into the darkness of the antechamber to the bar.
He heard the automated message being passed on to the security of the buildings in the area. The same message went through the crowd outside, but also inside.
Swirling laser lights, attempting to pretend to be the former so-called incandescent lightbulbs, cast a faint light on the crowd inside. A dance floor, a counter with a bar, a dozen or so tables, doors to the bathrooms and the back room. Fifty people tops. Few, not enough to hide here safely.
The checkout interface at the bar repeated the message. The overhead lights came on and the music was turned off.
While wanting more and more to throw himself into flight, Crowley commanded himself to stand still. He stood, stunned like the rest of the guests, glancing sideways. They were looking for the intruder, annoyed, and he was desperately looking for a way out of the situation he found himself in.
Dancing couples, threes, fours, even larger groups. Nowhere for anyone to sit alone, not a single lonely person whom he could entertain with conversation, pretend for at least a moment that they were here together. There was still the option of hiding in the bathrooms, but he suspected that there the gendarmes would check first.
‘Fuuuck,’ Crowley repeated weakly.
He looked around once more.
And then his eyes met a gaze so similar to his own that, against reason, he hesitated and looked on it for longer.
‘f*cking sh*t,’ his own eyes were probably saying.
‘sh*t’s f*cked,’ said the stranger’s gaze, angry and nervous at the same time, but with just the right amount of panic to make Crowley understand in a flash what was causing it.
The stranger stood against the wall opposite him. Alone. And they looked around, searching for a way out of the situation they found themself in.
Their gazes focused on each other a blink of an eye before one of the gendarmes entered the bar. Crowley assessed the stranger instantly, as critically as he could. They were afraid, definitively they didn’t want to be stopped by the gendarmes either. They were alone. About Crowley’s age, dressed in ordinary dark work clothes, only the jacket was a little more decent, as if military.
But they weren’t military, no way. This was a person in as much need as he was.
‘Please, just please,’ Crowley whispered in his spirit, himself not sure who he was asking for mercy. ‘Just this one time today, may I succeed in one damn thing…’
There was another second of hesitation as the stranger watched, assessing him with their gaze now. Crowley smiled weakly at them, forcing himself into a friendly expression despite his nervousness. The stranger looked at him intently, perhaps a little uncertainly. And they had pretty eyes.
Crowley made up his mind when he saw that the stranger did not back away, at the sight of his smile. It was he who took the first step towards them, then another. At the third, he saw the stranger head through the crowd towards him, also not taking their eyes off him.
‘Please, please, tell me, you know the Common Language,’ Crowley thought belatedly, but there was not enough time for anything else.
Amidst the general confusion, he managed to get close enough to the stranger that they could see each other clearly and hear each other.
“Hey!” Crowley called out, smiling broadly and cheerfully, as if at someone he was very fond of seeing. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere, and you’re what, propping up the wall so it doesn’t fall down?”
A shadow of hesitation ran across the stranger’s face, their eyebrows twitched as if in reflex, but they mastered themselves instantly. They snorted at him almost rudely, shaking their head with resignation.
“Everywhere but where I said I’d be…” Crowley heard the reply in Common Language, enunciated in a deep, calm voice with a hint of irritation at the bottom of it.
Crowley smiled charmingly, as brightly as he could. With that smile he had just greeted them, meeting the stranger as they passed a trio of people in colourful outfits with sequins on the legs.
“But I did find you eventually!” he proclaimed happily.
“Impressive,” the stranger snorted, raising one eyebrow.
It even looked funny, and if they had been given more time, Crowley would surely have said something about it. Just then, the gendarme stepped into the crowd, telling people to move away. He headed straight for the bathrooms, passing the bar.
People escorted him away with worried and annoyed glances.
Crowley encountered a reflection of his own feelings, tension and concern, in the stranger’s eyes as they looked at each other again. No one else was paying much attention to them, but he didn’t want to risk at the moment even a small talk that might seem suspicious.
So he said the first thing that came to mind.
“What we’re having, sunshine, a drink maybe, or shall we eat something first?”
The stranger had dark, probably even black hair (Crowley wasn’t sure in the poor light), a grim expression on their face and a sharp, almost unpleasant look in equally dark eyes. Part of their face was hidden by a dark beard, adding to the impression that was so at odds with being a ‘ray of sunshine’.
Crowley could only hope he wouldn’t get headbutted in the nose. They were already standing close enough to each other that a tad shorter than him, the stranger could easily have done so.
They still weren’t smiling, but at least they hadn’t sent him to hell. Sincere hesitation was reflected in their dark eyes and Crowley took advantage of the moment to wave his arm lightly around. Some of the people, not hearing any gunshots or shouts from the bathrooms, and not seeing any commotion around them, began to lose interest in the gendarmerie’s search.
“Your place against the wall seems better,” he chuckled casually. Guessing his intention, the stranger was the first to move back against the wall.
They moved away from the centre of the confluence just enough to make looking at each other no longer awkward, on the verge of risking being exposed. Crowley hesitated but made his decision quickly. When they found a vacant seat, he leaned slightly towards the stranger.
He immediately caught out that they tensed up, ready for a fight.
“My name is Crowley,” he whispered carefully, with a smile, as if he had just told a secret to a person close and dear to him. “He, him.”
The stranger nodded as a sign that they had already comprehended why Crowley had approached him.
“Halt,” they replied in a whisper. They must have caught the question in his gaze because he immediately found out as well. “He as well.”
Crowley nodded to Halt briefly and smiled broadly at him, glad of the outcome of the conversation and how ordinary it must have looked to the rest of those gathered.
“Dinner first, then!”
The gendarme stayed in the bathroom for another long moment. Long enough for them to reach one of the vacant tables. Crowley wanted to take a seat against the wall, but the stranger – Halt – pre-empted him, sitting down in a chair with his back to the wall and his face to the room. Reluctantly, but with a smile, Crowley took the seat disliked by all suspicious people. He was left to trust that Halt would warn him in case the gendarme returned and there was some risk.
For the time being silence fell between them again, they exchanged glances and hesitated. Crowley got the strange impression that if he did not start the conversation himself, they would wait for a while.
“I’m so glad we’re finally able to meet without all that rush,” he prompted, keeping an eye on the scenario he had set for himself.
Reflexively, looking for familiar patterns, he thought back to the exercises he’d had hundreds of hours of during his training. Training scenario, field game, role play and undercover work all in one. He quickly pieced together the basics.
‘This is Halt, he’s your partner, he’s sullen and mischievous, but he’s got pretty eyes and a pleasant voice. You also probably like him for other things, you just don’t know what they are yet because you’ve only known him for two minutes. Deal with it.’
