Tales from the Deep - A Question of Trust

March 2067. After having relocated to Hampton Brooks, the Fishface Syndicate has a problem with traitors and members gone rogue. Blade Aural is sent to investigate the whereabouts of one such fish mutant, one that might or might have not involved in Elena's disappearance, mere months before.

(Proofread and edited by Kaleb O'Halloran)

Blade looked at his gun, weighed it in his hand, his finger dangerously dancing on the border between the trigger and the handle. He sighed. He didn’t like it in the slightest. Firearms were not his forte. Brawling was not his forte either. His mind was his most prized possession, the one working part of his body that he would always trust. Yet, this time, he didn’t have the luxury of relying solely on his intelligence.

He slid the chamber out of the handle, loading the projectiles in one by one. Hollow point, high caliber, extremely deadly. The weapon was a Sachson 52, an anti-armor revolver, originally designed to fire piercing explosive rounds. Using it against a biological being meant turning them into a screaming mess of blood and entrails that would have made a horror movie director shriek. But that was precisely what was going to happen. Hollow point rounds would have made it at least a little bit less gory, but certainly not pleasant.

Blade stared at his reflection on the polished metal, took a good look at his own face. His shark-like features, his yellow skin, his green eyes, his apparent lack of mouth.

Well, it’s do or die, I guess.

He holstered the weapon under his purple jacket, lifted his sunglasses. Then he knocked on the door in front of him, a door tucked away in the deep end of the slums of Shard’s hinterland. The sound of rusted metal shaken by his fist echoed around him, bouncing off the dusty concrete, off the half-washed graffiti. The pale afternoon light seemed to shake too, for a long instant. Blade took a mental note of it, sharpening his senses, focusing on the outside to perceive any little change in his surroundings. It could have been self-suggestion, but he felt as if he were violating something sacred, and that the walls, the paintings around him were judging him for that.

No answer.

Blade knocked again on the door, this time stronger. The sound propagated through the metal, boomed inside the cramped hallway.

No answer.

He looked around, thinking about what to do. He had a feeling, the feeling of being watched. This place was bad for his health, not unlike the cigarette he had just finished smoking. That was bad for his health too, but probably not as much as the ones he used to have back in Brooks. Finding real cigarettes in the US – not low quality, poisonous, black-market replacements – was a real challenge. Every single one of the fifty-three states had jumped hard on the “smoking kills” bandwagon some twenty years ago, after a prominent presidential death due to lung cancer. Before that, yeah, everybody knew smoking killed, but as long as it didn’t affect the chief of state, the government seemed content with just taxing it or adding warning stickers everywhere, with some graphic imagery for added effect. Then, the big wig dies during his second term, of a lung cancer that not even the best medical machinery could cure in time, and suddenly it becomes a question of national security to outright ban tobacco. But there, on the other side of the Atlantic, he could still enjoy the simple pleasure of drawing a puff of a real cig. The UK weren’t on such a puritan level of prohibition yet, but that wasn’t going to last forever. Sooner or later, he’d have to quit for good.

A clanking noise, footsteps, curses in some language he couldn’t fully understand. Blade’s attention went back to the door. He stared at it intensely, waiting for a sign. And the sign came.

“Who’s there?”

A peculiar voice, a little bit high pitched but not unpleasant. A voice Blade hadn’t heard in almost two years. He replied calmly, without any hurry.

“The golden boy’s back from his errands.”

Frigid silence from the other side, for a long second. Then a frustrated grunt, inhumanly deep, accompanied by the sounds of clattering metal.

“You have the wrong address.”

“I’m not stupid, Jorma.”

Another bout of silence. Then, the door started opening, little by little, letting more and more of the outside light filter in. Blade stared down, stared at the figure standing in the shadows, sheltered by walls of sheet metal and rust. Said figure was smaller than him, ten, maybe twenty centimeters in total. And he looked like a gray shark, with a scrawny humanoid frame.

“Not stupid, definitely not. But you are a frying liar.”

The diminutive creature called Jorma shook his artificial fist, staring at the unexpected visitor with a barely contained, unyielding rage. Despite being a sharkman, much like Blade or their mutual ex-associate Shaz, Jorma tragically shared none of the latter’s physical prowess, nor the former’s analytical skills or intelligence. By any metric, Jorma Vekkala was just an average fishface specimen. He lacked Go’s acumen, Delfina’s cold blood – heck, even Feliz could have been considered more of an evolutionary success than him. Yet, Jorma Vekkala had done something many of his better-equipped peers hadn’t managed: surviving as long as he had after defecting from the syndicate.

“When did I ever lie to you?”

“Tell me where Delfina is and I’ll leave you alone forever. That was a year and a half ago, Blade, right after I survived a very close encounter with her and a bunch of scalpels. Cost me one kidney and one hand, you remember?”

His rusted metallic fingers danced against his palm, just to reaffirm the concept.

“Yet, despite that, you’re here again. Why? Did everyone else leave and force Go to send his yapping catfish around doing menial chores? Or do you want my left kidney too?”

Blade stared him dead in the eyes, crossing his arms. If his mouth were easily visible, his expression could have only been defined as grave.

“You are on Go’s hit list, Jorma. He’ll send someone for you soon.”

At that notion, Jorma went pale, his mouth agape. Blade placed a hand on his shoulder, without breaking eye contact.

“Now, may I come in?”

**

Blade didn’t know what to expect when Go summoned him to his office without any further details. Since the day they moved to the other side of the Atlantic, he couldn’t remember a single time that had happened. Whenever Go wanted to have a talk with someone, he always spilled the beans up-front, in a very direct, matter-of-fact way, never leaving the other person hanging. He usually cut the chase even when conveying groundbreaking news, such as the fact that chasing Shaz was not a priority anymore, due to the involvement of that scaly old alien bastard and that furry abomination Delta Team has for a commander. Not once in Blade’s recent memory was he given an assignment where he didn’t have at least a little bit of info going in. There was a first time for everything, true, but that didn’t make him feel any less uneasy about it.

The doors to the office opened, letting him into the magnificent room almost completely made of steel glass, surrounded by windows and aquariums on all sides. Several tropical species of fish were swimming placidly in their warm water, under the indifferent gaze of a man in a business suit with a squid-shaped head.

The mutant known as Go Ottari, boss of the fishface crime syndicate.

“It’s good to see you haven’t lost your punctuality, Blade,” he said without turning away from the aquarium, “Every day I spend in this cesspool of a country, I feel like I’m getting lazier and lazier. I hate America.”

Then why did you bring us here? Blade would have liked to ask, but he knew the answer already. After the Second Black Lightning, rumors about the syndicate’s presence in Italy had started to go wild. Rumors that – by themselves – wouldn’t have even left a scratch on Go’s reputation, but put together with the testimony of a certain scaly old alien bastard, could have caused some serious troubles. Troubles Go didn’t want anything to do with. So he had taken the most logical course of action – leverage his contacts in the US to find an appropriate business plan that would require his immediate and full attention there. It worked better and faster than expected, with the core fishface members and their direct adjuncts all moving from New Langdon to Hampton Brooks, Virginia, in the short span of just two weeks.

Hampton Brooks wasn’t even a city. It was just a settlement near Richmond, chosen almost randomly among the few American towns where the syndicate had a fixed presence or a small legal base of operations – absolutely nothing compared to the bustling urban life of New Langdon or the magnificent opulence of Euterpe. Go still resented the scaly old alien bastard for forcing his hand like that, but – in a way – felt relieved to not have anything to do with him anymore. Paying for his silence had been expensive, but that old fart knew too much thanks to his acquaintances, like the man with no face and that secret service woman. Killing the old geezer would have caused too much buzz, after which it would have been impossible to retain the facade of a legitimate business. And Go couldn’t afford that. He, the Go Ottari had fought against racism for his entire adult life. Every human supremacist saw him as a symbol of societal decay – they were disgusted that one of the richest men in the UK was a squid. Obviously, everyone thought, he had to be a criminal. Thus, he became the criminal that everyone took him for, and nobody – nobody alive, at least – had evidence of his illegal operations. The few who had caught wind of them either joined him, were paid off to keep quiet, or ended up visiting the bottom of the English Channel with concrete shoes – none of which were mutually exclusive to each other.

Now, Blade stood there, a mere three meters away from the squid man, under the vigilant eye of his trusted bodyguard – that single-brain-celled, shark-shaped colossus named Joe Buracci. A brute with arms as thick as a baobab’s log, and as dumb as an entire building, let alone a single brick. He was a simpleton who could bend metal bars as easily as one would break chocolate. Blade decided not to stir the pot, and to instead just get straight down to business.

“What can I do for you, Go?”

“Have you heard that the lobster has been hired by the AWA? Pretty unexpected, if I may say so myself. Happy for him, but I wonder if maybe we should have kept him under our leash. He was loyal, after all. Very loyal.”

Blade noticed an inflection in Go’s voice, a subtle emphasis on the word loyal. For a second, he felt the unpleasant sensation of being watched by every living thing in the room, including the fish swimming in the aquarium – no, especially the fish swimming in the aquarium. He squinted his eyes, shook his head. It was just self-suggestion, it had to be. Go continued.

“But enough with the pleasantries. I brought you here because I need you for a cleanup operation... back on the other side of the Atlantic.”

Cold shivers ran down Blade’s spine. The other side of the Atlantic. That could only mean one thing. He raised his hand, interrupted his boss before he could continue.

“Hold on a second, boss. I thought Shaz was off our hit list.”

Go chuckled, still without turning.

“Who cares about that drunken bum? He’s already spent all our money, wasted it on alcohol and dicks. Even if I had him skewered, sliced, steamed and served on a silver plate, as he deserves, what good would that bring us? It would only attract more unwanted attention. No, this has nothing to do with your ex-boyfriend. It’s about the other fugitive – Delfina.”

Go finally turned around to look Blade dead in the eyes before continuing.

“I had indeed lost interest in our former star assassin – now, smutty cartoon nut, practically obsessed with cosplay…”

The squidhead strode forward, stopping just centimeters away from Blade’s face.

“...That was, until I got wind of the incident in Aubépine. You know about it, don’t you?”

Blade nodded. It had been the talking point for days, in the corridors of the fishface base. There wasn’t a single member of the group that hadn’t followed the macabre details of that accident. Blade kept his eyes firmly on his boss, never daring to look away or back down.

“Sure. What’s the deal with it?”

“Once Delfina got back to the UK, we lost her... which shouldn’t have been possible, with all the goddamn information channels we control. Thus, I’m convinced that someone helped her erase her tracks. Someone who knows exactly what my methods and resources are.”

Go grabbed Blade’s fin, pulled his head down to talk directly into his ear.

“Find him, Blade. Find that traitorous bastard and bring me back his dorsal fin. Don’t come back until you do.”

**

Jorma looked at Blade with eyes wide open, sitting at a cramped, metallic table, rhythmically tapping his fingers on the dirty surface. Blade was sitting in front of him, his back bent forward, his legs shaking a bit. Jorma grunted as he forced open a bottle of soda with his teeth, haphazardly spitting the cap onto the floor.

“So, the old squidface believes I helped Delfina escape? Seriously?!”

He pushed the bottle into his mouth, took a couple sips. Blade shrugged.

“He seemed pretty confident too, said it couldn’t be anyone else. He was keeping tabs on you, you know.”

Jorma blinked twice, his mechanical hand continuously tapping the table in a broken rhythm, his finger movement syncing up with the constant humming of the large ceiling fan.

“...But I thought...”

“Yes, you thought you were safe, but Go is more intelligent than we give him credit for. He must have realized your corpse was missing – well, except for your right hand. Delfina is a skilled killer, yes, but she definitely isn’t capable of nuking a sharkman from existence and reducing his body to atoms. If I managed to track you down, what makes you think Go couldn’t have done the same?”

Jorma took another sip of soda, his biological hand trembling, in contrast to his prosthetic one. Blade took note of the scrawny sharkman’s outfit: a white tanktop with more than one hole, and a pair of dark jeans. The great golden could tell something was stuffed under the tanktop, as it had a prominent thickness at the abdomen level that wasn’t well-matched by Jorma’s body shape. His gray skin also complemented the poor state of his flat in an excellent manner, almost making it seem like he and that omnipresent layer of rust were made to live together. On the contrary, Blade himself sported a bright purple jacket, a pink shirt, and long green pants – all freshly ironed and impeccable in their cleanliness. Jorma looked at that suit scornfully. He had never seen Blade as anything more than a nuisance, but somehow, that nuisance had already been able to track him twice after his alleged death.

“Go ain’t smart. If he were, he wouldn’t have sent us to Encorp to retrieve Delfina during her deep genetic reprofiling operation. Thought she was harmless in that half-human, half-fish state, right? But no, as soon as we got in, she seized all those scalpels ‘n’ knives and sliced us up worse than sushi, pufferfish!”

Jorma grabbed his artificial wrist, moved his mechanical hand left and right.

“Have you ever watched a part of your body be completely severed from your bones, Bladder? Have you ever felt as if you still had a hand, even though it’s not there anymore? The phantom sensations? The feeling of being able to see it even after it’s gone? Have you, Bladder?”

“Don’t use that nickname.”

“Why not, Bladder? Weren’t you always pissing your pants in fear of being bullied, until your bro Shaz came to protect you?”

Blade clenched his fist, but relaxed almost instantly. Getting worked up over a name would have served no purpose, except wasting energy – energy better spent analyzing the situation at hand. He took a look around the small flat. Photos of Jorma, of a human woman, and a kid. A small library with novels and children books. A ball, some toys. A beaten-up TV. All bathed in the dim light of the fading afternoon. Blade squinted his eyes. He suddenly felt the impression that the air around him was vibrating, probably because of all the specks of dust floating around. But that was all it was – an impression, something he didn’t need to care about. He turned to stare at Jorma, his green eyes reflecting off the other sharkman’s irises.

“I see you’ve gotten a bit too... close to land-dwellers, Jorma. Am I wrong?”

“What if I did?”

Blade shrugged.

“I don’t know, you tell me. Getting too attached can be dangerous. Accidents happen. People disappear. It’s a sad world, isn’t it?”

Jorma gritted his teeth, jumped out of his chair, raised his artificial fist.

“Don’t you dare–”

But Blade punched him in the stomach before he could do anything. Jorma lost his breath, fell to his knees. Blade grabbed him by the chin, lifted up his head.

“Three weeks ago, Delfina was in Aubépine with her boyfriend, a finless named Renzo Rubecca. They were visiting a local comic book convention. And guess what? They got ambushed. A coordinated attack carried out by no less than nine people, which ended with two of them dead, four gravely injured, and three incapacitated. All of them had a score to settle with her.”

Jorma pushed Blade’s hand away, stood up on his own feet, only for Blade to force him down again.

“Delfina survived almost unscathed and escaped without leaving a trace. Once she got to Shard, we lost her trail completely. And, tell me, who in this world has contacts in the Shard underworld, has a long-standing feud with Go, and knows all about how our information channels work? Who else but our former field scout Jorma Vekkala?”

Jorma finally freed himself from Blade’s grasp, stepping away as he breathed heavily.

“Come on, are you for real? After what Delfina did to me, why would I have helped her? Pufferfish, I wish the killers murdered her cold!”

“I don’t care about motivations, I’m not here to play shrink with you. Let’s stick to the facts.”

Blade’s hand reached inside his jacket, gripped something, quickly emerged again. Wielding a gun. Jorma gulped. It was a silenced Sachson 52, a high-caliber weapon meant for assassins and robot-hunters. Piercing, detonating rounds that could make someone’s head explode. He looked at the barrel, looked back at Blade.

“Blade...?”

“There’s a traitor here. Someone has to die today. And Go sent me to take care of it.”

Jorma crawled back towards the library, shaking his head in constant denial, his eyes wide open in terror.

“Wait! There’s a misunderstanding! I haven’t done anything, I swear!”

Blade stepped forward, keeping his aim firmly trained as he cocked his weapon. Jorma’s body jolted at the metallic sound of the bullet being loaded into the chamber. Blade towered above him, the frame of the great golden completely overshadowing that of the scrawny gray shark before him.

“As I said, there’s a traitor here. I see him very clearly, right now. And in our line of work, betrayal is what gets you buried at sea.”

Blade placed his finger on the trigger, not a hint of sympathy in his emotionless visage. Just plain, cold calculation. Jorma’s eyes were filled with tears. He shut them tight, gritted his teeth, sobbed profusely, waiting for the bang.

“That’s enough, Blade. Good job.”

A metallic voice filled the air, coming from somewhere in the room Blade couldn’t immediately identify. Still, he kept his finger on the trigger, unfazed. That was the voice of someone he knew very well. The voice of Go Ottari. Suddenly, a blink in the corner of the room, the optical camouflage disabled. A floating camera drone, quietly hovering near the wall. Blade still didn’t avert his focus, keeping his gun at the ready, Jorma now on the verge of passing out. The voice continued.

“We don’t need to spill another fishkin’s blood, not today. So leave that spineless wreck alone. You passed the test.”

Blade remained still for a long second.

Then, he pulled the trigger.

A muffled bang echoed inside the small flat, followed by a gasp of pain, a scream that pierced Blade’s ears. Jorma slumped onto the floor, with a hole below his chest, his eyes still open, his breathing broken, gasping for air. The camera drone simply hovered in place. Silence fell again among those walls made of sheet metal, interrupted only by the constant humming of the fan. The drone buzzed, the artificial voice coming out of its tiny speakers again.

“...Why did you do that?”

“You haven’t proved beyond doubt that you are the real Go. And I had orders to follow.”

Blade could hear a sound of hands clapping, coming from the speakers on the hovering device.

“Excellent. Above my expectations, even.”

A small flap opened on the drone’s black surface, revealing a projector. Go’s office in Brooks materialized on the wall of the shack, in an old-fashioned, two-dimensional way.

“I hope this suffices as evidence. Jorma has never been to our new HQ, right? You can’t train an AI or construct a program without having at least some pictures of the real thing. So, yes, I’m the actual Go. And, yes, I wanted you to prove your loyalty. Your loyalty to the syndicate. Your loyalty to me.”

Blade stared at the projection on the wall without saying a word.

“My apologies for doubting you. Your job is done. Feliz is waiting for you with our personal jet at the Shard International Airport. Don’t keep him waiting longer than needed.”

“What about the real traitor, then? Where are they?”

“We have no clue about their identity yet, so just let it go for now. We will have time for them later.”

Blade gazed back at Jorma, at his still-moving body, his eyes full of tears, his relentless sobs of pain.

“Go? I have only one request.”

“...That is?”

Blade cocked his gun again, this time aiming it at the drone with both his hands.

“Don’t question my loyalty ever again.”

One second later, Go’s voice and face were gone, replaced by another muffled bang. Where previously stood a drone, there was now only a shower of metal and plastic, falling to the ground in fragments after being pierced by a .52 hollow point round. Blade lowered his gun, holstered it back under his jacket. Jorma let out a long sigh, his hands both clasping his wounded chest… or, more accurately, clasping the pierced tanktop right above his navel, and the metallic mesh underneath it. Not a single drop of blood in sight. Blade squatted down, looked him in his terrified eyes.

“Good job with that bulletproof band on your abdomen.”

Jorma lowered his gaze, unable to stand that stare.

“...You noticed?”

“I did.”

“...Go threatened me, pufferfish! He would have killed Tara and her brat, if I didn’t agree to this charade. Finless people mean jackshit to that motherangling squidface... He planted evidence for you to find me, and... Blade, sorry, I...”

“It’s fine.”

Blade stood up, took a small notebook and a pen out of his jacket’s pocket, scribbled something on it. Then he tore the page out, handing it to Jorma.

“This is the number of a certain furry Delta Team commander’s secure phone. Contact him, if you or your finless other half ever need to expatriate. Tell him that Blade sent you.”

Jorma slowly got back on his feet, still breathing heavily, still crying.

“B... Blade… why are you doing this? I could... I could tell Go right away, you know!”

“Do it then, if that’s what you really want.”

Jorma fell onto his buttocks again, his legs squeezed between his crossed arms, curled up like a scared baby.

“I can’t... I don’t have any information to give you in exchange. I don’t know anything, nothing about Delfina, and I don’t want to know. Please, just leave me alone. Leave me alone...”

Blade nodded, then turned towards the door, left the iron shack without a single remark. He walked back under the vanishing sunlight of the late British afternoon, slowly making his way out of that slum. The painted eyes, the graffiti on the walls didn’t bother him anymore. They never bothered him in the first place.

That weird vibration in the air he felt earlier – he had recognized it immediately. A concealed surveillance drone, following his every step. That was the first hint that something was wrong. Well, the second, actually. The first was the trail leading to Jorma. Blade couldn’t believe even for a second that Jorma helped Delfina, not after what she did to him. But the evidence was seemingly ironclad, and doubting it in front of Go would have been a poor look for him. Besides, there was literally no way Jorma could have been the one erasing Delfina’s tracks.

Because Blade did it all himself.

He had guided her with his burner phone, deleting every trace of her passage, every possible chance to follow her, before literally burning that phone. Now, the deal was sealed, and nobody had any idea about it – well, except Delfina herself.

He smiled, with his seemingly expressionless face. He only spoke the truth, throughout the whole performance. Not a single lie on record. Not a single one.

Loyalty was a word Go liked to throw around repeatedly. But, to Blade, it was just a hollow concept. Loyalty without trust meant nothing, and Blade had lost his trust in Go a long time ago. He picked up his pace as he started walking towards the bus stop. He would have missed the soothing atmosphere of Shard, once he was back to Hampton Brooks.