They keep going until they run out of highway at the coast, and Kandi suggests that they can break up their trail a little more by calling in a favour from a guy she knows, for once; and that's how they wind up hopping up the coast on a tramp steamer with seemingly no set or sensical itinerary, a shitty rustbucket converted trawler. The captain's a friend of a friend, demobbed after four tours of combat trauma and progressive military augmentation, deep in bugfuck prepper paranoia.
He spends some nights having screaming arguments with dead squadmates, unknown nameless opfor casualties, possibly the Ghost of Christmas Fucking Past for all Kandi knows or cares.
They're technically not allowed in the hold, and Kandi stealthily checked it out to make sure they weren't sitting on a cache of nerve gas or trafficked teenage girls or — well, anything they wouldn't want to be sitting on. What's down there is a scarily up-to-date milspec drone swarm launcher and electronic warfare suite. Pirate, maybe.
If he's not a pirate, he's got a hankering to take down actual warships. She prefers to think he sometimes knocks over cargo freighters, frankly; militaries tend to hold a different class of grudge, and they're in enough of a firing line of their own.
Not that they know any more about that than they did before.
A couple of weeks of slow, queasy chugging between coastal ports, it's Kandi's turn to make a preplanned internet run. Corporate chain coffee shop wifi, VPN, some carefully-chosen and pre-screened-by-Whisper web searches and emergency backup email account checking.
And there's a message. Says it's from Eigen. Kandi reads it a couple of times, sucking her teeth at the debug display of just how many embedded web links her software is refusing to call out to, each one of them, if it had, a blazing "I OPENED THE THING, COME GET ME" signal.
There's a contract out on Whisper, the rest of us just got swept up collateral. I've rolled over and told them the fuck-all I know cuz I don't owe her copping a faceful of lead. Any time you want to shed the heat, your intel gets you in on a share of a six mil bounty pool.
-Eig
She digs out a week-old straight-to-e-waste shitphone that's never been out of airplane mode, takes a photo of the email onscreen, tells the mail account to mark it unread, logs out of everything, and heads back down to the docks to listen to Cap'n Brainfried scream drunken slurs and murder threats at the ghosts in his head.
