[color=9e0b0f]"What a dump. Who would trade the citadel for this trash heap?"[/color]

[color=0072bc]"This may come as a great surprise to you, Knight, but often wanted fugitives are limited in their choices."[/color]

[color=9e0b0f]"You can cut the attitude HAL 9000. I'm out here aren't I?"[/color]

[color=0072bc]"Reassuring to know you are at least doing the bare minimum that your job requires you."[/color]

[color=9e0b0f]"Tough to get much else done when you're done when you're bitching in my ear."[/color]

A figure stepped up onto the brow of the hill that overlooked the ruined settlement, and anyone with a bit of sense would take one look at the chess piece insignia embroidered onto her chest and realise that they had a problem. 

You didn't tend to see a knight of Erubesco walking around in the wastes unless someone was in a lot of trouble. 

And someone, or rather two people, definitely were. 

Knight Kora Norrevinter had been awoken a few hours before first light by a deployment notice that she was going to be playing fetch. A researcher and one of her subjects had taken off somewhere into the wasteland. Rumour was they were planning to sell state secrets to Liberty. Or ashland factions. Or something. 

They were bad guys, that was the long and the short of it, and she was to return them to the citadel. In how many pieces they returned was mostly down to them. 

--

Many miles away, in a control room somewhere in the depth of the citadel, ORIN sat across a high-backed office chair, her legs hooked over the arm and a cup of coffee resting in her gloves hands. Several cables trailed up from her shoulders up to gaps in the room's ceiling, leading into the citadel's grid.  

Whilst she was a long way removed from the female knight out in the wastes, ORIN saw exactly what was going on. She also saw the names and faces of the fugitives that command had sent a retrieval order for. Orion Lazos and Leila Ingram. 

Ingram. 

ORIN would be lying if she said that she didn't take some satisfaction from this particular.

[color=0072bc]"Proceed into the ruins, Knight. Sweep and identify."[/color]