Outer Olympus

Outer Olympus: Chapter 14

Forty-eight hours ago, Kase Coppercoat would have said being put in charge of a task force specifically dedicated to apprehending the kids that had repeatedly humiliated him would be a dream come true. In practice, however, it turned out coordinating a hundred man search of a city of five million people was exhausting, especially when the two groups involved hated each other. Despite Specialist-Major Vestal appointing him as liaison between the forces, her VISOR agents still looked down on him for being just a lowly Enforcer, and now the other Enforcers had a bone to pick with him, seeing him as failure promoted past his station due to outside interference. He had expected that once the Enforcers doing his grunt work realized how hard it was to deal with the kids they'd no longer think it was so embarrassing that they had foiled him before, but somehow it ended up once again being his fault for not leading the search more effectively.

Maintenance Six was very large; it was a city with five million inhabitants, and only about twenty thousand Enforcers to police them. Within that, Kase had been able to get around two hundred engaged in this search. The city was primarily divided into three segments called "stripes," separated by the equally sized glass sections that allowed in sunlight. At one end of the stripes were the docks, where ships arrived, unloaded, and were repaired, and on the other side were the reactors and other key pieces of technological infrastructure, with businesses and housing occupying the stripes between. Outpost Raven, where Kase had operated his whole career out of, was near the docks on Stripe 2, which is the area where he centered the search, as all recorded encounters with the kids had been in that area. He also knew the kids were in good standing with the Dockworkers, which made things harder; the Dockworkers Syndicate had no shortage of means to move people and supplies under the Enforcer's noses. He also wasn't sure the kids hadn't been operating on other stripes, it was more than possible that they moved between them using the docks and simply only had been noticed on Stripe 2. He had some of the Enforcers under his command looking into small crimes on the other stripes to see if this was the Kase.

There was also always the chance the kids, presumably having heard of the bounty on them by this point, had fled towards the reactor; this would be an audacious, bold, and foolish plan, which meant he didn't put it past them at all. He wasn't going to reward them for that sort of thinking by spending no effort to investigate the possibility, so he had eight Enforcers looking into it, all of whom considered the assignment a punishment. Still, the kids would be out of their element on that side of the city, which hopefully meant that they wouldn't be able to hide long under any sort of scrutiny, so it was worth it just to rule the chance out.

There were thousands of security cameras on the station, and just collecting all the footage from the local businesses that ran them was already impractical, let alone manually combing through tens of thousands of hours of recordings to find maybe a brief glimpse of a trio of children who didn't look particularly distinct from any other group of punks their age. This meant instead of going through everything, Kase was receiving reports of possible sightings, retrieving footage from the area and combing through it to authenticate the reports. This process was, in a word, exhausting. Kase had expected thirty, maybe forty sightings a day. But he was beginning to realize, as he discarded another clip that was just two random children, that there were a few flaws in his strategy he hadn't foreseen.

The massive bounty VISOR had been willing to place on the children at his suggestion had accomplished one key thing; the kids now couldn't trust the people around them. Kase very much doubted many of the dockworkers, zealous haters of the Enforcers, would consider snitching on a bunch of kids, but that wasn't necessary for the scheme to be effective; the greatest strength of the Dockworkers, who lacked the resources, equipment, and training of the Enforcers, was their solidarity. Working together, they could be quite a thorn in the Enforcers' side, but with two hundred thousand credits on the line, the kids couldn't be fully sure they could trust anyone, hence, they would be without their allies. Kase had every reason to believe this part of the plan had worked.