The Hawaiian Special Forces

Chapter 34

Aoloa handed one of the rabbits he'd caught to Hokulani. She was still sitting next to a house, busily negotiating for a good meeting place. SherpaDerpa planning to send a buddy of his for the meet, but obviously needed to be careful. Hokulani was making things more difficult by refusing to meet in a public location.

Aoloa hooked into the conversation.

::Sub-Tor? Nice!::

::Thanks. Now let me concentrate.::

SherpaDerpa: Meeting at the edge of town? At night? I'm sorry, but that's completely unacceptable. The risks are much too high. It's a perfect chance for cops to make an illegal arrest.

UPSOutsider98: And as I've told you, getting into a town is not possible. Look, we've gone in circles on this. Insider just got back. Can we do a video chat? I think it will clarify a few things, as well as conveying our sincerity.

SherpaDerpa: You realize this is a horribly bad idea, right?

UPSOutsider98: I'm acutely aware of the risks involved, but we seem to have reached a stalemate, and this is the only method I can think of to address the issue.

There was a pause from the other end. ::Do you think he's going to go for it?::

::I don't know, but if he sees me, he'll understand the problem. Then it'll be up to him to convince his contact to meet us. The layers of indirection here are mind-boggling,:: she replied.

Finally, a video chat request came through. Hokulani accepted it and routed Aoloa's visual/auditory feed of her as her video stream. On their HUDs, a young man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask appeared. "Hello, Outsider..... What the hell?" His voice was digitally distorted, but the surprise still came through.

"Hello Sherpa," Hokulani replied. "I'm sorry my speech isn't very good, but as you can see, my jaws aren't really meant for speaking, anyway."

"What? Is this for real? And there's my image on the HUD, who's recording your video?"

"That's Insider. We don't have access to standard cameras, so we work with what we have. Do you see why we cannot meet in a public space?"

"I...," There was a pause as Sherpa recollected himself. "Yes, I see the problem. Even with clothing, you'd quickly be spotted as unnatural."

Hokulani nodded. "We can travel more or less anywhere in Switzerland to meet you, but we cannot afford the risk of discovery. For us, meeting in person is already a nearly unacceptable risk, yet it's the only way to get verifiable proof needed to establish our authenticity. Our goal is to reveal to the world, conclusively, what's going on."

"Okay, I understand the issue, now. I'm not sure I'll be able to convince my contact to go along with this, though. I'll see what I can arrange. We'll talk tomorrow." With that, his video feed cut out.

::You realize he recorded all of that, right?::

She nodded. ::I'm counting on that. If he hadn't, he'd be too stupid to work with, and he'd have no chance at convincing his contact to agree. He was probably hoping we were stupid enough to show our faces so he could justify a flat refusal, then doing a ton of research on us.::

::It was a pretty risky thing to do.::

::Necessary, though. In this community, they only care about what you can prove. Spouting nonsense is easy. Anyone can claim anything and come up with a cool video to back it up. We just proved we either have some seriously impressive AV hardware, or are telling the simple truth. It should be enough for the next level of investigation.::

::I almost wish we were negotiating with a government again. They're usually easier to work with.::

::Yeah, like the Germans?:: she asked sarcastically. ::'Cause that worked out SO well for you.::

::Yeah, yeah, I know. I just didn't work on my terms carefully enough.::

::That's all these guys do. You're great in a fight, Aoloa, but you suck at this stuff.::