“What do we know?” Marc asked harshly as the two Warreth females entered his personal chambers.
He generally didn’t like dragging everyone into the throne room, except for special occasions. That kept the mystique going. This was business.
“Got a lead, but we’ve got a problem, Maximus,” Maiair replied.
They were sisters, Maiair and Yooyar. Primarily crimson in their feathers, with black and white highlights. Maiair was taller, but only slightly, and a year older.
Yooyar was probably the more dangerous of the two, however, the older sister was the cannier opponent.
“What happened?” Marc asked, moving across the outer chamber to grab a bottle of wine.
It wasn’t worth making a scene with these two. They were loyal, and could be lethal if he needed to point them at someone needing to be disciplined. He grabbed a glass and poured some wine into it while he listened.
“Morty and Xiomber indeed found themselves a human,” Maiair said. “The description fits.”
“Where?” Marc looked up as the glass was full. He didn’t bother offering any to the sisters. They wouldn’t be here long enough to drink any, and this wasn’t a social call.
“Orgoth Vortai,” the older sister replied. “Witness puts them in Punarvasu a couple of days ago, but they’ve gone dark.”
“They’re on the run,” Marc said. “They can’t get far.”
“Somebody made the human,” Yooyar interjected. “The Constabulary got a tip. We’ve spotted a pair of cops in the place where Morty and Xiomber were confirmed.”
Marc swirled the glass and sniffed the bouquet as he thought. Suddenly becoming a genius was incredibly useful if he needed to solve a math or physics problem, but not in the messy, complicated tides that represented the street. Still, he could use this to his advantage.
“Follow the cops,” he decided. “Keep an eye out for the two traitors and the human, but let the cops do the leg work. If we get lucky, they’ll flush the trio for us and we can swoop in. If not, they’ll all end up in a cell somewhere and we can take care of them.”
“Second problem, boss,” Maiair said. “We’ve been down in the lab. Morty cooked everything good. Sabotaged the controllers to fry all the panels when they completed the jump. Plus, about half the generators overloaded and functionally melted.”
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“Fixable,” she replied. “But it will take time to build a whole new, completely-illegal, wormhole generator. Plus, if the authorities are jumpy about humans being around, someone is going to be looking at all the parts vendors, wondering who brought him here. If we suddenly buy a lot of gear, it’s likely to show up on someone’s radar.”
“Understood,” he said. “If the cops do catch them, one of those two shits are likely to offer us up as a way to either cut their sentence, or make sure that we end up in the same cell with them.”
“So what do we do?” Maiair asked.
“Let’s get ahead of the curve,” he replied, taking a drink as he cycled down all the branches of the new decision tree faster than anyone he had ever met could match. “Keep together the hard core of the organization. Just the twenty or so we’ll need for action. Have everyone else go to ground as fast as you can shut this facility down. Assume a police raid in five minutes and wipe everything. Put the A-team on the transport and get us jumped over to Orgoth Vortai as a tour group.”
“Why there?” Yooyar asked.
Warreth didn’t have a mouth that could be used to communicate emotions, like humans did. They used the feathered headcrest instead. The younger sister was confused, but that was inexperience. She had only joined the organization barely long enough ago to meet Cinnra, before Marc supplanted the old boss. She and her sister had understood which way the winds were blowing.
She was trying to figure out which way he was moving, so she didn’t put a foot wrong, rather than challenging his authority. Learning, which was good. There were still a few of Cinnra’s people he would need to ease out.
Or arrange lethal accidents for.
“There is no place better than anyplace else,” he explained. “But they’re likely to run, so we need to be in a position to give chase. Either them or the cops. This is about being close enough to force their decision curve the way we want it.”
“Oh,” she said, nodding firmly.
She didn’t understand, but Marc expected her sister to fill in the details once they left.
He nodded them out and drank more wine.
Having Sky Patrol here changed things. The cops just might listen, if they knew what Dankworth really represented, and Sky Patrol wouldn’t give up on their prey.
He should know. Packed carefully away, he still had his old uniform.