Chelen City: Chapter Twenty-Five, Part Two

 Notes: And we're going, we're going, we're--wait, we stopped, FULL STOP, what the what, plot? What are you thinking? ARE YOU EVEN THINKING!?

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Twenty-Five, Part Two

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Chapter Twenty-Five, Part Two

 

When Elanus stepped into Moreno’s cell and immediately found himself on the business end of a guard’s modified stun gun, he was grateful that he’d taken the time to plan for Contingencies F-I, because he was going to need them. It wasn’t that he didn’t have tabs on Moreno, that he wasn’t tracking which of his guards were sympathetic to his cause and which ones he was blackmailing, but he honestly didn’t think the man had the guts for this more dynamic course of action.

Shit. Kieron had to be losing his mind, seeing this with the girls. He hoped they were doing a decent job of calming him down.

“So, I guess you didn’t ask me here to talk,” Elanus said in as uninterested a tone as he could muster in the moment.

“Not in the slightest,” Moreno replied, a smile splitting his too-wide, sweat-damp face. “You must think you’re so clever, you shit. So damn clever, all the trouble you made for me ever since you got back here. No, before that—I had deals in place with Moritz that would have made me wealthy beyond even your wildest dreams, and you scuppered it all when you got rid of him.”

“I’m not at all sorry for that.”

Moreno nodded. “I’d respect you less if you were, not that I respect you very much to begin with. You’re not much of a politician, but even you have to realize that there’s no way to change a ruling society as deeply entrenched as ours. Nothing you or Caria do is going to make a difference in the end. Everyone, and I mean everyone above a certain threshold in society, wants to see you fail. The only way you could get around that is killing a lot more of them, and I don’t think you’ve got it in you.”

“I only threaten to kill, I almost never follow through,” Elanus said. “Just like everyone else ‘above a certain threshold.’”

“That’s going to change after this,” Moreno said, his voice thick with satisfaction. “I’ve got people whipped into a righteous frenzy—not even the ones I give a shit about, either, but the second they know that something has gone wrong with me, they’re gonna come down on you and everyone you care for like a supernova. You think you know chaos? You haven’t seen anything yet.”

Elanus nodded slowly. “And you plan to be far away by then, I take it.”

“You’re damn right I do. I’d like to stay,” he added with a bit of regret, “but this planet’s too hot for me now. I always knew I might need to get out of here in a hurry, and I’ve got plans in place to make that happen.”

Ah. He’s actually counting on his wife. Not too surprising, since he had her parents and their son guarded by people who were loyal to him and prepared to kill them all, but the ruthlessness was almost stunning. Almost. “What’s my role in this going to be, then?”

“What do you think, smart guy?” Moreno waved the stun gun theatrically toward the door. “You’re going to get us out of here. I’ve got a skimmer waiting for me underground, and you’re going to lead the way. I don’t want a single door to give us more than a second’s pause, or I’ll strike you dead one limb at a time. And to show you I’m serious—” He raised the gun and shot Elanus in the left shoulder.

Fuck! The energy beam hit him in the joint, numbing the nerve cluster and deadening his entire arm—and across his chest and partially up his neck as well. It became harder to breathe, and he felt his heart stutter and skip a few times before it settled back into its regular rhythm.

“How,” Elanus asked through gritted teeth, “am I supposed to get us out of a secure government building with half of my dexterity taken away?”

Moreno smirked. “Please, you think I believe that you need your hands to do anything? If you can’t open doors with your implant and the angels on your shoulder at this point, then you’re not half the man I thought you were.” He puffed his chest out a bit. “Too bad I’m ten times the man you thought I was, aren’t I? Now move.”

Kieron is definitely freaking out now. But that was something to be handled later. Moreno had to be handled now. Elanus nodded, then turned back toward the door he’d come through. “I suppose you can handle this one,” he said over his shoulder to Moreno. “Since it’s your guard who lent you that stunner, after all.”

“Sure, but I want to see the whiz kid in action.”

“All right.” [Catie, activate blue zone, path eighteen. We’re going down.]

[Initiating. Daddeeeeeee, are you okaaaay?]

[I’ll be fine, sweetheart. Just don’t let Kieron come after me.]

[Don’t worry, Daddeeeee, Lizzie is with hiiiim. Door opening in point-two—]

It opened, and Moreno chuckled. “God damn, where were you when I needed you, kid? We could have ruled this entire planet together.”

“Nah,” Elanus said because he was a bit of an idiot. “I prefer to work with smart people.” He stiffened as the stunner poked him in the middle of the back. “You won’t,” he said quickly. “You need me to get to the basement.”

“Don’t tempt me otherwise. Move.”

Elanus, with Catie’s help, managed to not only open every door he needed to go over a hundred floors down without interruption, he also wasn’t seen by anyone—physically, at least. He didn’t bother to stop the video footage from being recorded, but he was careful not to let it be registered and seen by the building’s AI or its human security officers yet. After all, he didn’t need Moreno to have more useless charges heaped on him. What was Caria going to do, after all—put him back in the cell? Put him in a darker one? His followers would wreak havoc.

That was a place where they’d been outplayed, and Moreno had been right about one thing—Caria’s ideals had run into Elanus’s practicality there and left them where they were now. Not that he was entirely comfortable with the idea of simply killing the man and putting an AI fake in his place for all video appearances, but it would have made things considerably easier.

They got to the basement, Moreno’s gun still firmly fixed on the center of Elanus’s back. “Two more doors and we meet my friends,” Moreno said confidently. “From there it’s to a private spaceport, and you’re coming with me for that as well, because I don’t trust you as far as I could throw you. Once we break orbit, then I’ll put you in the ship’s lifepod and set you loose.”

Well, that was almost certainly a lie. Elanus thought about it as he opened the first door, which led to a set of actual stairs—stairs, no lift or moving walkway, how quaint—down two more levels to another door. Obviously he wasn’t going to let things get that far, and it would be child’s play to run interference with both the ship and whatever transport they were using now, but he had to do so in a way that wouldn’t put him in danger. That meant—

The moment the second door was open, Elanus felt a harsh blow impact his ankles. He fell to the dirty floor, winded, and felt the energy beam Moreno had reflexively squeezed off fire above him. It hit—nothing, because whoever had taken him down was already moving, grabbing Moreno by the front of his jumper and pulling him forward until he tripped, rather painfully, over Elanus himself.

Oh, shit.

“Wait!” he croaked, but a second later he felt a warm splash against the side of his face and neck. A second after that, Moreno’s head had been forcibly severed from the rest of him.

Elanus slowly turned to look up at Kieron, who scowled fiercely from where he was crouched beside Moreno’s body, garotte in hand, and snapped, “You fucking idiot!”