Someone once said that knowledge is power. Maybe so... but one thing Marvin Du'Rouge knew with certainly was that
incomplete knowledge was more like a hit of caffeine: a brief rush of alertness and adrenaline followed by a long, slow descent into lingering headaches. He vigorously massaged the sides of his head, willing this particular headache to fade away, but no relief was coming. With a resigned, weary sigh he closed the glowing holo-screen in front of him, stood from his desk, and decided to take a long walk.
As Chairman of the Atlas Minister of Defense's Advisory Board, Du'Rouge was both blessed and cursed. He was blessed in the sense that he had a plush government-issued paycheck, secretaries and soldiers at his beck and call, an impressive sounding title and certain perks of the job, such as access to the spacious six floor luxury diplomatic airship whose sterling, carpeted halls he now meandered down directionlessly. By contrast, the curse of his job was that in actual reality he was barely regarded higher than a minor beaurocrat in the grand scheme of things, had a comparatively
small staff overall (last quarter his superiors had even stripped away half his already meager security detail and replaced them with
robots, and older models at that!), and was functionally little more than the person to whom the Minister of Defense delegated whichever administrative or record-keeping problems were the messiest and most uncomfortable. True, Du'Rouge could normally delegate to the other board members, and they to their underlings -- shit flows downhill, as the old wisdom goes -- but sometimes...
sometimes...
Du'Rouge gazed idly out one of the starboard windows, seeing the coastline of Anima begin to creep closer and wondering why he'd ever thought this was a good idea. It had all begun with some reporting discrepancies: unaccounted for funds here, irreconcilable resource distribution there, the kind of thing that should have been settled within a few months. Instead, the more his people looked the more they dug up. None of it made any sense, really -- he'd gone over the reports himself and was
still scratching his head. Assets weren't just being wasted or misplaced... somehow they were disappearing, and
that was the kind of thing that normally cost people their jobs. One does not steal from the Atlas Military and get away scott free, or at least such was his determination. Slush funds and pork barrel projects he could cope with, as political and military matters were almost impossible to keep separate, but somehow this seemed a different beast. It didn't help that his best clerk, whom Du'Rouge had vetted personally, had abruptly been brought up on investment fraud and perjury charges and forced to resign... or when, a week later, his second-best clerk had to take leave due to a death in the family and then simply never came back to work. All progress in the investigation had come to a standstill, and the chairman wasn't sure he fully trusted his newly appointed replacements, no matter how temporary they were. The whole affair had the unpleasant whiff of cover up to it -- what
specifically, he honestly hadn't a clue, but it was clear enough that someone with connections was skimming, then concealing their tracks. His advice to the minister wouldn't mean a damn if he couldn't keep accounts in order, and he wouldn't keep his job very much longer if he didn't start turning up results.
And so... Mistral. It was a long shot, but if you wanted to learn something that you weren't meant to know there was no better source that the city's seedy underbelly. It was, of course, distasteful to turn to information brokers and illegitimate avenues of inquiry, but of official channels were going to get results they would have by now. Thus, after starting for several long minutes at the approaching coastline, Du'Rouge shook his head and continued walking...
... completely unaware of what was going on beneath his feet.
It was not the first time Cordell had boarded a fancy-pants airship with illegal intent... it
was, however, the first time she'd boarded one
as cargo. The supply crate she'd stuffed herself into when the chairman's ship had stopped to refuel on the eastern coast of Sanus wasn't luxury seating by any stretch of the imagination. Given it had been carrying spare robot parts before she'd emptied it out, the smell of machine oil was completely understandable, familiar even -- it was how damnably
itchy the packing materials were that drove her nuts! To sit idle, scrunched up in a tight knot of limbs and frustration, waiting for just the right moment was very nearly intolerable. Only one thought kept her going: this was her chance, maybe her
only chance, to pin an Atlas military official to the wall and get some thrice-damned answers about 'Project Thunderbolt'. If luck was on her side... if the stars aligned... maybe... just
maybe...
She closed her eyes -- needless as that was in this cramped, pitch-dark space -- and flexed the muscles of both her hand and her mind together, pulsing her Semblance invisibly outward for what had to be the fiftieth time since getting into this damned box. No, there was
still someone in the cargo hold, even after all this time! She scowled in agitation. Same spot,
same exact spot, for
how long now??! It was a person, she was sure of it, but they were almost unmoving like an android. Not dead -- you don't detect Aura from corpses, after all. Her mind raced, debating between risking capture and staying a single second longer in the intolerable scruff of the box.
"... Aw, keelhaul it!" She muttered to herself, reaching for the crowbar she'd smuggled in. With a little effort the lid popped loose, and as fresh air flooded into the coffin-like box, she heard it.
Snoring.
Loud snoring. Her left eye twitched at the realization that the person she'd presumed to be standing sentry over the cargo bay was actually
asleep at their post, and possibly had been for hours now. All that wasted time...
Deep breath. It was okay... it was fine. She wasn't mad at herself. She had a mission, and right now that took priority over self-recriminations. Silently easing out of the wooden box -- and being sharply reminded of how much she
hated this sneaking about business -- Cordell quietly looked around until she found another similar box, this one containing a Zephyr Cutlass and three of her most trustworthy Gears. The little robots chittered happily as she released them, immediately doing it at lower volumes when she hushed them and pointed to a narrow maintenance shaft on the opposite side of the cargo bay. They had their mission: install a sneaky trojan into the airship's computers for later eavesdropping, disable all internal alarms and comm equipment, then seal the emergency bulkheads for most of the ship as soon as she got her hands on Du'Rouge. That middle-management bastard was going to sing like an opera star if Cordell had her way, and she wasn't about to let anyone interrupt their little
chat.
Mentally pulling up her dad's best guess as to the ship's layout, Cordell tip toed past the sleeping guard and out into the ship proper. Her Semblance would keep her two steps ahead of detection until she found the blasted bureaucrat... if luck held, it would be smooth sailing from here.