Kat knocked on the metal-reinforced door, smiling at a security camera as it paused its normal sweep of the hallway to swivel and observe her. A second later the door clicked as its lock released itself. She pushed it open, having to strain for a second against its ancient hinges and heavy weight.

“Close the door behind you,” Whippoorwill called out from the other room. “I’m in the living room, plugged in.”

Kat rolled her eyes, slipping off her shoes as she pushed the door shut with her shoulder before walking into Whip’s apartment. She made her way past the kitchen, stocked with gleaming, unused, stainless steel appliances en route to the living room.

Whippoorwill lay on the couch, clad in disheveled pajamas with her twitching eyes closed. From the hallway, Kat could make out the grey snake of her friend’s cranial implant as it curled around behind her furniture and plugged into some unseen socket in the wall.

Snorting, Kat walked past the smartpanel, ignoring the rapid movements and bright flashing lights of a Chibi Princess Cats rerun. A sweep of her foot cleared the coffee table next to Whipoorwill’s couch of the empty soda cans and food cartons that covered it.

Whip jumped, eyes opening in bewilderment at the rattle of aluminum cans hitting the hardwood floor.

“You need to hire a maid or something,” Kat said with a chuckle. She plopped a plastic bag down onto the newly cleared table before reaching inside and taking out one of the two styrofoam containers. “Anyway, I got us kebabs from that new place down on 17th Street. I made sure to avoid any of the ‘chef’s special’ options so you should have a mix of lamb and chicken.”

Whippoorwill sat up eagerly, pressing a release on the back of her head that unplugged her cord and began coiling it. She leaned forward, grabbing the remaining styrofoam container while Kat looked for a chair that wasn’t covered in trash to sit on.

“Thanks, Kat,” Whip choked out through a mouthful of skewered meat. “God, I didn’t realize how hungry I was until I smelled the kebabs. I guess I just lost track of time while going over the data from Copper Spook.”

“Looks like you’ve been getting distracted a lot.” Kat grunted, brushing a handful of burger wrappers off of a recliner before sitting down.

“Sorry about that,” Whip replied apologetically, setting her first empty kebab skewer onto the coffee table. “I was looking into ads from NyanNyanMaid and they’re a little pricey, but they advertise ‘full maid services at any time of the night.’ I’m a bit of a night owl, so I figured a late night cleaner would be perfect.”

“You do realize that NyanNyanMaid, LLC is a registered brothel right?” Kat asked, glaring at Whipporwill’s empty skewer. She hadn’t been in the girl’s apartment for ten minutes, and already clutter was beginning to accumulate in the spot Kat had cleared off of the coffee table. “The late ‘full maid services’ they’re talking about don’t actually involve all that much cleaning.”

“Oh.” Whippoorwill blushed, averting her eyes. “Oh.”

“I hesitate to ask what sort of pages you were visiting that you were getting advertisements for NyanNyanMaid,” Kat continued, smiling impishly. “You do know that the ‘sexy singles in your area’ aren’t all that interested in helping clean either, right?”

“ANYWAY,” Whip responded hurriedly, her cheeks scarlet. “I managed to decrypt everything we pulled from Copper Spook’s archives, and there’s a lot we need to talk about.”

“Is that where you found out about NyanNyanMaid?” Kat leaned back in her chair, still grinning at Whippoorwill. “He certainly seemed like the type.”

“Millenium’s remnants have been very active in the Chiwaukee area.” The other woman wouldn’t meet Kat’s eyes, instead electing to studiously ignore her jibes. “Spook handled any number of information gathering jobs for them, but there is more than a little evidence that he was actively helping higher ups with blackmail and extortion.”

“It sure looks like part of the reason that GroCorp hasn’t been able to eliminate Millenium is that a lot of their security and intelligence chiefs have been compromised,” Whip continued. “Honestly? Even if we manage to acquire irrefutable evidence, I half expect that some of these people would rather have us eliminated than risk some of these secrets coming out.”

“Good news and bad news,” Kat replied unhappily. “The good news is that someone new has been assigned to ferreting out Millenium’s involvement in the area. Now try and guess the bad news.”

“Belle?” Whip asked, making a face.

Kat just nodded, sighing as she sunk into her chair.

“Great,” Whippoorwill grumbled. “That’s exactly what we need. Millenium is sniffing around, trying to put hits on us, and now Belle is back in the picture. I’m not sure how much better a life stuck as her lapdog would be than carbomb form a Millenium operations team.”

“Agreed,” Kat responded. “Unfortunately, Belle was looking into Copper Spook when you shot him. She knows we have something, and she’s going to keep pressing me until we sell that information to someone. I’ve put her off for now, but there’s only so long I can dodge her before she turns up the heat.”

“Will she be a problem if we sell to someone other than her?” Whip brushed her pink hair out of her frowning face. “This isn’t going turn into something where she tries to ‘take care of us’ if we don’t become her in-house spy team, is it?”

“As long as we deal fairly with her, we should be fine.” Kat shrugged listlessly. “She wants the information, no doubt about that, but if we worked only for Belle, she would lose all plausible deniability when employing us. She has her own teams to do basic spying. With us, if we get caught snooping somewhere we shouldn’t be or killing someone important, she can claim that we were acting on our own. We’re worth more to her as independent operators, so she won’t press us too hard.”

“That…” The other woman hesitated. “That isn’t anywhere near as reassuring as I thought it would be actually.”

“That’s the good part about attending corporate college I suppose.” Kat popped open the styrofoam container in her lap and pulled out one of the kebabs. “You learn how the other side thinks. It had never really made sense to me that the corporations would honor the samurai code, but once I took a couple of classes on ‘covert business transactions’ they spelled it all out.”

“The corporations know that senior employees are going to engage in cloak and dagger ‘side projects.’” She bit into the kebab, wincing as the combination of spices and hot juices sprayed the inside of her mouth. “So they made a system that lets them keep their ‘side projects’ separate from their everyday life. All of the complicated rules with names, the free market for hiring, it really only exists so that executives can deny the actions of the teams they hire. Apparently before the corporations decided to embrace ‘independent contractors’ like us, there were incidents where rivals started slinging fireballs at each other in boardrooms over operations gone wrong.”

“These days,” Kat continued, “there are a million unspoken rules and invisible lines that corporate employees can’t cross. If Belle’s personal intelligence teams got caught stealing the design for a new brand of fertilizer from a rival, she’d be fined and have a mark against her on her employment record. If we get caught? She can still attend the opera with the person that executes us and pretend like it had nothing to do with her.”

“Again,” Whip grumbled. “Hardly reassuring.”

“I don’t know,” Kat countered. “It’s not like I would actually believe the executives if they came out and said that they were allowing us our independence out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s actually strangely comforting to know exactly how our existence benefits them. It gives me a much better idea how far we can push things before we agitate the powers that be into crushing us.”

Whippoorwill just bit into another meat skewer, shaking her head.

“Fair enough.” Kat chuckled. “So, what have you managed to pull out of Copper Spook’s database? Anything juicy?”

Whip swallowed a mouthful of food before discarding the skewer. She shifted slightly on the couch as she gathered her thoughts.

“A lot of low level stuff.” Whip’s face scrunched slightly as she began reciting from memory. “A list of information sources, arms brokers, and fences that are willing to work with him. I also have logs of the samurai that he’s using for operations, but only one or two of them are named, and it looks like all of them were kept in the dark. A bit more promising is the banking information from when Millenium pays him, but I suspect that cracking into Swiss Federated Bank to track them down would be more trouble than it's worth.”

“I’ve walked by their local operations center.” Kat shook her head. “The place is practically a fortress. I’m sure we could break in if we really wanted to, but there’s no way I’d be able to pull that off without getting noticed and I’d prefer to not to piss off another major corporation for no reason.”

“Yeah.” Whippoorwill made a face. “Their security doesn’t play around either. The second I sent a ping their way to follow up on Spook’s files, I hit a buzzsaw of electronic defenses. I’d prefer to consider bothering Federated a last resort.”

Kat nodded fervently. The banking system wasn’t quite a megacorporation, their operations were too narrowly focused for that, but at the same time they couldn’t be underestimated. Every megacorporation used the escrow systems of the three big banks when trading outside their boundaries, and each of the banks had enough private security to ensure that their operations remained independent. Picking a fight with them was a good way to end up in a whole lot of trouble.

“I think our best bet,” Whip continued, “are the e-mails sent back and forth with Spook’s handler. Everything was in code phrases or references, but after reading through a couple hundred of them, they spell out at least some of Millenium’s operations in Chiwaukee.”

“So we don’t know anyone’s name or capabilities.” Kat frowned as she tried to work through her friend’s reasoning. “All we know is that they’re active in the area and that Spook worked for them.”

“More or less,” Whippoorwill replied. “Most of the e-mails came from the wireless stations located around Homan Square and Spook’s contact made a couple of references to the ‘hideout’ or ‘the black site.’ I think it's safe to assume that the Millenium remnants are hidden somewhere in that area, but his handler was careful to never meet in person or give an address so I’m just guessing. If they didn’t trust Spook, it wouldn’t be that hard for them to spoof their location.”

“That’s not a lot to go on, Whip.” Kat pulled out her second kebab. “We don’t really have any way to smoke Millenium out, and the only hint we have is contingent on a group of battle-hardened mercenaries trusting a profoundly untrustworthy person. I don’t really care for those odds.”

“You didn’t let me finish,” the other woman pouted back with an over exaggerated frown. “Even though we don’t have a lot to go on regarding the Milenium base, Spook was involved with an ongoing operation. Apparently he was Milenium’s outside contact for an observation and monitoring program that used both Milenium and local assets.”

“We can’t find Milenium’s base,” Whippoorwill continued, a smile on her face. “But I can basically guarantee that some of their operatives are monitoring this ‘target alpha’ character. Even if we can’t nab one of their observers, making a move on their target will almost certainly get us a response. They’ve gone through a lot of money and effort to keep tabs on him, and I’m pretty sure they won’t appreciate us interfering.”

“Great,” Kat mumbled around a mouthful of meat. “Our current best plan is ‘kicking the hornet’s nest’ and seeing if something happens.”

“Hey,” Whip responded defensively. “This ‘target alpha’ guy has to have something on them if they’re going through all of this trouble to keep him under surveillance. Maybe we can just make contact with him and see if he has any insight into Millenium. This doesn’t have to be a violent operation. We could just go in, let him know he’s being watched and trade information about the people tailing him for whatever he knows on Milenium.”

“Uh-huh,” Kat replied, thoroughly unconvinced. “We don’t even know this guy’s name. How do we know he’s going to be receptive in the slightest to us showing up out of the blue and telling him that a powerful but defunct gang is keeping tabs on him and that his life is in danger?”

“I have his address and a short dossier.” Whippoorwill blushed, glancing away from Kat’s judgemental gaze. “Apparently he’s a samurai in possession of dangerous intelligence and Millenium wants him monitored while they gather the resources to eliminate him cleanly and quietly.”

“So this guy has been designated ‘target alpha’ by one of the most dangerous mercenary groups in the world, and even they are in the process of marshalling their forces to deal with him?” Kat asked skeptically. “This doesn’t sound like an accountant in over his head. He sounds like bad news, someone armed to the teeth and with the skill to be dangerous. Fuck, they’re probably a player.”

“Uhhhh,” Whip’s eyes glazed over as she checked the data stored on the computer planted in the back of her skull. “Yeah, it looks like they’ve noted that he’s a player but there isn’t much information on his class beyond that he ‘isn’t a spellcaster.’”

“Crap,” Whippoorwill winced. “Millenium warned Spook to keep his people discrete, but they made sure to tell him that there was a combat response team on hand just in case something happened.”

“Of course he’s a player and of course there will be armed goons ready to swarm us the minute we make contact,” Kat quipped back. “Still, if he’s our only lead, I suppose you should look into the address you pulled from Spook’s files. Maybe you can get us some more information about who ‘target alpha’ is and what he might want. Just be careful not to alert Millenium. They’re probably monitoring him electronically as well.”

Whippoorwill gave her a grateful smile. Kat could have given the girl more grief for her haphazard plan, but it really wouldn’t have improved anything. They didn’t have any great options and as half-baked as Whip’s idea was, Kat struggled to come up with a better plan.

“In the meantime,” She grinned at the pink-haired girl. “I’m not exactly going to unload my pistols. This doesn’t exactly sound like a low-key mission to me.”