[u][b]Caberra, Commonwealth Constituent World City of Talusia [/b][/u] Javelin let the warm water run over her hands, turning it red with blood. Not hers of course; it belonged to the three corpses in the next room, each of them freshly adorned with a slit throat. She’d cleaned up all evidence of her own presence, and every trace of their involvement with the human insurgency, which she now knew was called Talon. Javelin considered retrieving the building’s security footage, but ultimately decided against it; simpler to change her face once she left. This first few insurrectionists had been surprisingly easy to find. Javelin had started with Lydell’s tearful wife, who had pointed her to Lydell’s poker buddies. She’d left the wife alive, a quick probe of the distraught woman’s mind revealing she had no knowledge of her husband’s treason before it came up on the news. Javelin had not honestly expected the ‘poker buddies’ to be co-conspirators, but they were worth investigating. She’d arrived at their apartment door dressed to impress, and implied to the man answering the door that she was looking for a rather special kind of party. She’d soothed his suspicions with a deft touch, been shown to the den, and incapacitated all three men before they could get a word out. Oresteia taught that physical torture was almost useless for extracting information. Sleep deprivation and mental stress was moderately effective, but a trained psintegrat was best of all. Javelin, happily enough, was a trained psintegrat, and pulling information from the men’s minds had been fairly simple. After that, well, the Queen’s exact words had been “kill them all”, and Javelin was of nothing if not a patriot. Sufficiently washed up, Javelin made one more sweep of the apartment, making sure there were no clues left behind. She wanted any investigation into the incident to end with unanswered questions. Satisfied with her work, Javelin let herself out the door, down the elevator, and out into the night. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Javelin spent the next few hours slowly letting her face rearrange itself into something new. The Yanissan geneticists who created operatives for Oresteia boasted that their wares were ‘shapeshifters’, but that was overselling it. She was capable of changing her skin and visage in limited ways, but couldn’t do anything to fundamentally alter her skeleton. Still, it was a useful enough feature. The three poker players had given her a useful amount of intelligence. Some she would act on personally, the rest she’d send back to her superiors. Each of the men knew eachother and one other member of another Talon cell. The orders for the Dubrovnik strike had come through a man called Artemis Lochte, a store owner here in Talusia. Arriving at Lochte’s store in downtown Talusia, Javelin was somewhat surprised to see it was a high end furniture store selling hand made, genuine wood pieces. She wouldn’t have guessed that Talusia, or even Caberra as a whole, was quite wealthy enough to support such a niche business. There was a young couple inside, well dressed and admiring mahogany bookshelves. Lochte was hovering nearby, keen to make a sale. Javelin needed some privacy, so she gently picked through the couple’s thoughts. Both had doubts about the expense of genuine wood, so Javelin massaged those doubts, gently coaxing them to the surface until the couple decided that they’d better go check synthetic wood options, just to be sure. Once they left, Javelin preoccupied herself pretending to admire a teak bureau until Lochte sidled over. “Beautiful, isn’t it ma-” Javelin knocked him unconscious with a swift blow to the temple. Locking the shop’s door, she then dragged Lochte into the work space at the back, securely tied him to a chair, and applied a stimpatch to his arm, letting the chemicals slowly revive him. Trying to sift through the thoughts of an unconscious person was an exercise in futility. Lochte slowly came around, his head rolling forwards. Javelin preempted any confusion or obfuscation by reaching out and firmly grasping Lochte’s head by the jaw, forcing his eyes level with her own. “You, Artemis Lochte, are a member of the Talon insurgency. You played a direct role in an attack on Dubrovnik station over Praetoria. Tell me where the orders for Dubrovnik came from.” The words were not specifically necessary, but they would focus Lochte’s thoughts and make them easier for her to read. The insurgent didn’t say anything, but his jaw tensed up and he glared daggers back at Javelin. His thoughts scattered to a thousand different places, drowning Javelin out with white noise. Lochte had been trained to resist psionics. Ah well, even the best training could only do so much. “Dubrovnik,” she said calmly. “Tell me about Dubrovnik.” As she spoke, she began to apply pressure to his mind, no longer skimming through superficial thoughts but actively pushing into his consciousness. Lochte began to sweat, a good sign by all means. He spoke for the first time since being roused. “Rot in hell, bitch,” was his stubborn response. Javelin was unphased, and pushed harder into his mind, using her words to reinforce her efforts. “Dubrovnik. Tell me about Dubrovnik.” All at once, Lochte’s defences failed, and Javelin dove into his mind. There was no pain, contrary to what many thought, but there was a profound sense of intrusion and wrongness. “Tell me about Dubrovnik,” she repeated, and his thoughts coalesced around that word as Javelin sampled them. She pulled out names and places, sampling them all and filing them away, letting Lochte’s own mental processes push towards what was important. Lochte had been tasked with finding a ship to transport the strike team, and had recruited Captain Lydell. He didn’t know where the strike team members had come from or been trained, but he knew where the power armour had come from...James Gallagher...Duranin. Javelin sighed in satisfaction. Lochte’s other leads could be pursued by other operatives, but she was going to Duranin. Lochte himself seemed to sense she’d prevailed. “You’ll never stop all of us,” he said, still defiant. Javelin didn’t say anything. She simply drew a knife and slit his throat.