The Rose of Flames: Rising Tides

Chapter 3

August 6th, 2047

7 A.M.

Rialto, Italy

"WE'VE BEEN ROBBED!"

Ray jolted awake in surprise, the yell ringing in his ears. Robbed? What? He wondered as he scrambled to get up and get dressed, currently just in a random gray t-shirt and shorts. He threw on his Thorn gear, grabbed his rifle, and tore out of his room, which just had a simple bed, desk, and some other stuff he'd put in, like shelves and whatnot.

Sprinting into the halls of the base, he looked around, barely jumping out of the way of other soldiers who were heading down the hall, going toward a room he knew all too well. Uh oh. Did someone steal plans?

As he turned to follow the soldiers, Ray spotted Jea and Wash heading toward him, Jea looking furious and Wash puzzled. "Jea? Wash? You know what's going on?" Ray asked them.

Wash shrugged, but Jea answered. "It must've been that little prick from last night!" she exclaimed loudly, drawing the attention of other soldiers and, to Ray's dismay, one of their only hackers, who called herself Hora. "I knew she must've been here for more than just a snack!"

"Wait, what?" Ray heard Hora ask from behind Jea, who turned to look at her. "What prick are you going on about? Are you saying you three met the thief?"

Ray sighed. "We were in Lorenzo's, last night. He had a customer that didn't give up her name. When Jea tried to get her to talk, she just embarrassed her," he explained. Hora burst out laughing.

"She got shown up by some random tourist? That's great!" she laughed. Jea looked furious but said nothing. "Did you guys see what she looked like?"

Wash spoke up. "She wasn't wearing anything special; just some torn up pants, hoodie, and gloves-"

Ray blinked. "She was wearing gloves?" he asked, bewildered. "Why would a tourist be wearing gloves in summer?"

"That's what I was wondering, but I just assumed that maybe it was just what she wanted to wear," Wash told him, Hora and Jea listening intently, "but then I considered the possibility that she was hiding something, maybe some scars."

The four continued to discuss the lady from last night while heading toward the file room. "My question is who would have the gall to break in here," Hora said after a while. She was also wearing Thorn gear but didn't have quite as much. She could take her hacking skills into the field, often a bit overeager to get into the action. "I wouldn't think some tourist would do it. Overshadow, maybe?"

Ray sighed. Overshadow was an organization who often fought to protect their world, and regularly got in Thorn's way. "Who knows, but I doubt they'd be able to get in here like that; they don't have any decent means of getting here, in general, let alone undetected," he pointed out.

"It had to have been that shady foreigner from last night!" Jea exclaimed as they got to the door. To their surprise, Wash was looking at the closet, where the two guards that were usually stationed in front of the file room were both there, confused and unsteady. Wash helped the two out of their tight, makeshift prison.

"Maverick? David? You two okay?" Wash asked them while Hora opened the door. "What happened?"

David, who was usually posted on the right of the door, shook his head. "I barely remember," he said quietly; he was a newer recruit and was still rather young. "We were standing guard when the lights suddenly cut out. Mav and I couldn't see a thing, when all of a sudden, I heard Mav get knocked out. I couldn't see who did it," he added when Jea opened her mouth to presumably ask who it was, "because I got knocked out shortly after. When we woke up in that closet, my keycard was gone."

The four exchanged a glance before entering the file room, where soldiers were looking around. Hora instantly went to the terminal, examining the activity. "Strange," she muttered, Ray, Jea, and Wash joining her. "Recent activity has been wiped, but there are missing USBs that had nothing on them."

Ray looked over her shoulder and saw that none of the files were missing. "Nothing is missing, though," he muttered. "Do you think we're just overreacting?"

"No," Hora told him, typing away at the terminal. "I just recovered the deleted data, thank God for backups, and saw that everything had been copied and put onto the missing USBs."

Ray looked stunned. "And no alarms were tripped? How did the thief even get in here?"

"A window was open down the hall, but the cameras were knocked out by the time the lights got cut," Wash told him. "It didn't catch who did it."

Hora was instantly clacking away on a holographic keyboard she'd just brought up. "Around 3:30 this morning was when it happened," she told them. "It seems the cameras and lights got hacked because it wasn't done in the surveillance room."

"And no one at Overshadow has any sort of hacking ability," Ray pointed out again, realizing that Jea was probably right. "And we don't know of anyone who may have a reason to steal info from us other than...."

"That prick in Lorenzo's, last night," Jea finished, smiling triumphantly, glancing at Ray. "I...."

"If you say 'I told you so,'" Ray grumbled, "Then you're not getting a pick up from me on the next four missions."

Defeated, Jea didn't finish her sentence. Ray sighed. "Wash was probably right. The gloves were a dead giveaway that something was wrong. She was too calm to be a normal tourist."

"Then what were her motives?" Wash wondered aloud.

Hora sighed, and the three looked at her. "She's probably a hacker if your suspicions are correct," she told them. Jea seemed stunned. "And hackers do things either for money or...."

"Or what?" Jea pressed irritably.

She looked Jea dead in the face. "Or out of spite, or curiosity. Hackers love to gather info on people, or, in our case, groups."