Ekke

Ekke took a sip of her coffee as she watched the news feeds. It was good to be Operations Lead, she thought. Field work was fun, but she was all about that analyst life. Watching the action happen from afar was so much better than being shot at on a regular basis. All that noise and mess was for the birds. She could get her hands just as dirty as a desk jockey as she could a wet worker. Plus the new dental plan was a major upgrade.

A faint flicker in the corner of her eye drew her attention from the wall of screens. It was only the subtlest shift in the light reflecting off the walls behind her, but that was all the announcement of a certain someone’s presence most would get. Ekke swivelled her chair around, mug of coffee raised mid sip. Sure enough, there he was, all four hundred kilos of wetwork incarnate. Jjavìk, Dire Wolf Third Class, First Marine Corps Elites Division, her assay from six different departments for this operation. He was a hulking mass of man and machine and yet somehow could enter a room quietly enough to sneak up on a ninja.

“Don’t think I’ll ever understand how you guys manage to sneak around better than Eyyosk himself,” Ekke commented.

“Interpretive dance,” Jjavìk said, flatly.

“Whatever you say, boss,” Ekke responded, turning back to her screens. “Ballet, butt sex, or billiards, I don’t give a shit. I’m just thrilled your plan is working out as well as it is.”

Jjavìk grunted in response.

“She’s falling apart,” Ekke continued. “City Council has scheduled a confidence vote for next Europasday. Apparently she was always a little kooky for conspiracy theories, but since you started fucking with her, she’s really gone off the deep end.”

“Uh-huh,” Jjavìk said, grabbing one of Ekke’s protein bars.

“Guessing CC isn’t too happy about all that racist shit she was saying on Kon Ai-Rouam’s podcast the other day,” Ekke added, “it always goes back to the Herbalists doesn’t it? What’s up with that anyhow? Why’s everyone got such a hate boner for them anyhow?”

“Ignorance and stupidity,” Jjavìk answered, shoving the protein bar into his mouth whole.

“Sinno’s Balls, Jjavìk, don’t choke on that, alright?” Ekke commented. “Not sure I could hit you hard enough in the plexus to dislodge it if you did.”

Jjavìk stopped chewing and shot her an annoyed glare.

“Copy that, boss,” she responded, “Whispers from our contacts with the Kitsune are saying the vote is all but confirmed. CC is under a lot of pressure from the public to put an end to the public embarrassment. Ranting about the Herbalists conspiring with the National Monitoring Assay and the Politbellum at the behest of a Lexenon paedo ring to murder the police and kidnap her son because reasons, well..that did not help her case. Another week or two and she’ll be just another conspiracy crank raving on the El. Bonus is looking juicy on this one. Mighty pleased with the work. You?”

“Thrilled,” Jjavìk sighed, heavily.

“You don’t sound like it,” Ekke replied.

Jjavìk’s expression was typically disappointed. Beyond that, she couldn’t parse what he was trying to tell her. She rarely could. Jjavìk was as incomprehensible as arcane gibberish pulled out of some compacted ruins buried in the bedrock of old Terra. A perfect conundrum. Utterly indecipherable.

“Is all this bad thing?” Ekke questioned.

“It is what it is,” Jjavìk said, taking a seat next to her.

Typical non-answer.

Why she kept asking him anything was perhaps the better conundrum. Much as Jjavìk was the biggest beefcake bodybuilding billy badass Ekke had ever seen, he was surprisingly thoughtful. The longer she worked with him, the more it seemed like the First Marine Corps was about as far from a bunch of unsophisticated, cyberjacked gorillas with guns as Rill was from the rest of civilisation.

Sharing his thoughts, on the other hand, seemed to be a severely underdeveloped skillset for Jjavìk. It was all riddles and ambiguity with him. Everything had to be interpreted like she was interrogating data for obscure connections and hidden patterns.

Sumbitch…

If it wasn’t the answer to her own bloody conundrum.

“You sound...dismayed,” Ekke observed.

Unholstering his massive sidearm, Javíc set it on the desk between them. Ekke felt a chill go down her spine. In all the times they’d worked together she had never seen him do this. If memory served, she’d never seen any First Marine let their precious pistols leave their immediate control. Firsties never said it, but everyone who’d worked with one figured out that these sidearms were a kind of sacred emblem, oriflamme, or symbol to them. They had a lot of identity wrapped up in those guns.

If Jjavìk was setting twenty-five kilos of iron more precious than life itself on her desk, there was something he was trying to say.

Had management decided to liquidate her?

When he leaned back in the office chair—specially-designed to accommodate his size and mass—Ekke didn’t know what to make of the situation. She had somewhat expected he would give some kind of final soliloquy before shooting her in the face, a sort of pointless object lesson delivered with all the smugness of someone who just liked to hear themselves talk.

He didn’t do that.

Talking was not his favourite thing, so she supposed her expectations there might have been a little unrealistic. It wasn’t that he didn’t have all the considered principles of the usual villain types Ekke interrogated on a regular basis, Jjavìk was just the exception to the standard mean. Belabouring someone with his point of view must have been a waste of breath to him.

Ekke often wondered if he hated the sound of her voice more than his own. It was a toss-up, really.

The grizzled old war dog interlinked his fingers behind his head, propped his feet up on the desk, and watched the newscasts with an inscrutable, but borderline sad look on his face.

Silence, Ekke soon realised, was so much worse than villainous monologuing. Reading Jjavìk’s intentions was nigh impossible in the best of circumstances, and this situation was shaping up to be the opposite of those.

“Look, she’s not dead,” Ekke argued, nervously, when the tension of his silence became unbearable, “so why the long face?”

Jjavìk said nothing, just continued staring at the screens. Ekke’s eyes danced between the two of them, feeling even more tense than she did before. Maybe he would kill her after all.

“You’re religious, aren’t you?” Jjavìk asked, after another, uncomfortably long silence.

“Yeah. What’s that got to do with anything?”

He’d never asked her about that before. Wait a minute… She knew that question. He was here to liquidate her.

Bastard!

Another long silence.

Say something dammit!

Jjavìk shifted in his seat, leaning forward slightly.

“When you’re nothing but worm food and molars decaying in the dirt,” he elaborated, “the best of you go off to dance in the inner heart of the maiden. That right?”

Rubbing salt in it now? Little shit!

“Close enough.”

The First Marine nodded, silently.

Don’t you dare, Jjavìk! Don’t you fucking dare!

“Singing and dancing in eternal spring,” he continued, his voice soft and unreadable, “a bunch of naked tree huggers in a paradise garden partying and fucking for the rest of forever. Glorious isn’t it? A real slice of heaven.”

Ekke bristled at the blasphemy.

“What are you getting at?” the words said through gritted teeth.

“Go ask a Devotee of Synthon what hell is,” Jjavìk replied, “and they’ll describe your heaven.”

Ekke huffed angrily. Cybrosians didn’t know a damned thing. Cultists and extremists to the core, the whole bloody group. Obsessed with blood rituals and self-mutilation for their machine god. Heretics and blasphemers the lot of them.

“You see,” Jjavìk said, the words more statement than rhetoric, “The ArQive didn’t hire you to think about what it is that you do. Do too much of that, you’re liable to become ineffective. Ineffective is another word for defective. Defective parts get replaced. The machine must continue running, after all.”

The pivot took Ekke by complete surprise. This was not where she was expecting this conversation to go.

“Are you high?” Ekke asked, growing increasingly impatient.

This wasn’t like Jjavìk at all. That one monologue, if she could even call it that, was probably the longest he’d spoken for in the entirety of the time they’d worked together. And this was his pivot. It had to be. He was going somewhere. But what was he waiting for? And why? If he was going to kill her, why all the lead-up?

She’d seen him decomm defects before. There wasn’t any talking, any camaraderie, anything. They were nothing to him. He just pulled iron and blew them off payroll.

“What if the dead are actually the lucky ones?” Jjavìk asked, standing up.

A cold pit formed in Ekke’s stomach.

“Can you even get high?” she quipped.

Her heart wasn’t in it. He knew. She knew he knew. And he knew that too.

Picking up his piece, Jjavìk returned it to its holster.

“Your mistake was assuming I didn’t kill the Mayor,” Jjavìk said, patting Ekke on the shoulder.

“What?” Ekke reacted, bewildered.

“Two and two, Ekke,” Jjavìk said, opening the door behind her.

What was he on about? What was this conversation?

“Don’t think about it,” Jjavìk said darkly, before exiting the room.

The door slid shut behind him, and Ekke sighed with relief. That big gun of his could still blow her into raspberry jam through the wall between them, but she’d never seen him decomm a defect like that before. He wasn’t a coward like that. If Jjavìk was going to blow someone off payroll, he at least did them the honours of looking them in the eyes when he did it.

A real stickler for things like that, Jjavìk was. Still, Ekke had seen him do things completely out of character in service of a mission. Predicting what that hulking hairless bastard might or might not do at any given moment was practically impossible. If he had orders and mission parameters, anything was possible.

Ekke waited for Jjavìk to come back, to shoot her through the wall, to say something more, to give her any kind of clue what he was planning, but he didn’t. As the minutes dragged on, and nothing happened, Ekke felt the tension slowly begin to unwind, but not completely. Muscles she didn’t even know she’d tightened unclenched. Knuckles, reflexively gripping the arms of her chair, relaxed. It seemed she wasn’t being decommed after all.

“What the fuck,” she exhaled.

Chuckling nervously to herself she turned back toward the screens mounted all over the wall. Newscasts blasted over a collection in one corner, but one in the middle caught Ekke’s attention.

A bug in the Mayoral Mansion’s master bedroom showed Asakto Rei sitting in the chair where Ekke had planted Jjavìk’s decoy projector. The mayor looked up, without even knowing there was a microscopic camera there, and gazed directly into the lens. Ekke looked into Rei’s eyes, her own reflection just visible from the glare on the screen.

Then it hit her.

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