FSE

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For all appearances, Tristan was looking at a housing building. It even looked in good enough condition that the occasional person entering it might be one of the tenants, until someone spent a few hours watching it and noticed the very few people stayed in it for longer than five minutes. They entered, purchased their drug and left.

"How many people are we dealing with?"

"No more than you and Vic found."

"So the guy in charge, two muscle and a coercionist, not much of a gang."

"It was enough to steal the fabricator."

"So we kill them, then? Are we using it to draw in Baran?"

"We don't kill them until after you've confirmed those idiots haven't released the virus."

"If they have?"

"Then the old man better be healed by the time we get there because he's going to have to make me a cure."

"I don't think that Lady Dalia is going to be happy with you if you barge in."

"I don't care. She wants to die, that's her decision. I'm not going with her. What do the surroundings look like?"

Alex checked his tablet. "Still clear. They don't have any hidden security in the area."

Tristan had confirmed that in his initial walk around the area, but things could have changed in the two hours he'd been gone. He headed for the door, and Alex fell in step behind him.

The door opened at the press of a button and then he was standing in what someone might consider a cozy lobby with a man half asleep in one of the seats.

He was good, he hardly tensed as they entered, his hand didn't even reach for the gun in the holster under his arm. He did look up when Tristan walked past him to head to the lift.

"Can I help you?" the voice was hard, meant to mean, 'stop right there.'

"No."

The man made to stand, then grunted and collapsed to the ground. Alex had moved faster than the man expected, punched him in the face, and punched him again.

"Bring him."

Tristan took out a knife and slammed it between the two sliding doors. He worked it up until it caught on the latch that unlocked it. Behind them, instead of the lift cage, was a passage.

Alex had found the plans for the building, as well as the city ordinance condemning it. It had been buried deep enough no casual search would find it, but not so deep the automated system wouldn't and then order an inspection.

He'd also found material purchases, discreet removal of a broken lift. Everything needed to make sure the building was sound and that the ground floor was converted. All of that right after the fabricator was stolen.

The people who'd taken over the building had realized the kind of money it could bring and had invested what was needed to make sure they could work in peace. To bad for them, they weren't the only ones interested in it. They had no idea what was about to hit them.

The corridor was only long enough for a room on each side, then it opened to a large space with the fabricator on one side, tables in the middle and coolers on the other side.

A woman got out of a chair leaning against the wall as Tristan passed her, he punched her across the face and she went down.

"Bring her too."

The noise attracted the attention of the three others in the room.

"You missed one," Tristan said, then looked the three over. "Unless it's missed your notice, you're in trouble. If one of you pulls a weapon, he or she is dead. You work with me, you get to live through this."

"Hey, you got no business getting in here and roughing up my employees." The speaker stood and headed for Tristan. He was well dressed, the light brown suit fitted him perfectly. His black hair was trimmed short, almost military short. He was their leader, although he thought himself more of a corporate representative, than a drug manufacturing front man.

"I haven't roughed up anyone, yet." Tristan smiled, showing teeth. "Until limbs get broken, or ripped out, you can consider my actions to be gentle. Now, unless you want me to start getting rough you're going to tell your employees to go sit down on the floor in front of the coolers." He motioned to Alex to drop his two packages there.

"I want some assurance that you're not going to hurt anyone. Whoever your boss is, I haven't done anything to piss them off. I've paid the agreed amount to Dorvic. If this is a takeover, you really should be taking that up with him."

"You haven't told your people to go sit down. If you want to keep negotiating, I'm going to start ripping limbs out, and you're the closest one to me."

The man who'd been sitting at the computer was already on his way to the cooler. The woman by the table seemed confused by what was happening.

The man in the suit tried to glare Tristan down, but he just looked back at him and broadened his smile. More teeth showed, and it had the same effect it always had with humans. The man flinched and looked away.

"Marry, join Etienne, don't make a fuss. I'm sure we can come to some sort of arrangement without anyone losing limbs."

"You join them."

This time the man didn't bother protesting or trying to assert his dominance. He joined the four others.

Alex headed for the fabricator.

Tristan went to his prisoners and crouched down. They were already dead, but that was information they didn't need to have until they stopped breathing. Hope was a powerful weapon, in his hands it was a deadly one.

"Here are how things will go. When those two wake up, you are going to control them. If I need to put them down, they are not waking up again."

The man in the suit nodded.

"I'm going to ask a question. You answer it. If I believe you, we move on to the next one. If I don't believe you, I start hurting someone until I get an answer I do. So, how much pain each one of you suffers is entirely under your control. I'm only here for answers. I'm not part of a takeover. I don't work for some other faction. The person who hired me doesn't know you exist, and she doesn't care, so when it comes to what happens to you it's entirely up to me, and you. Are we clear."

They nodded.

The guard Alex punched groaned and began stirring. Immediately the man in the suit was talking to him. Tristan remained silent until he was done, the guard was awake and glared death at Tristan, but otherwise not moving.

"Good work. So first question. How did you become aware of the fabricator?"

"That's what you're after?" the man in the suit looked over Tristan's shoulder. "Hey, what are you doing!"

Tristan sighed. "You're going to want to focus, unless you want to lose a limb. You don't want that to happen, trust me. I've seen it happen before, it isn't pleasant."

The man looked at Tristan and pulled his legs to him.

"What I'm after shouldn't matter to you, unless I decide it's your limbs, then it's going to matter a great deal."

"I got a tip," the coercionist said.

"Etienne!"

"Hey, I don't know about you, but I believe him when he says he's going to rip our limbs out. I want to keep mine." He had a slight accent, marking him as someone who wasn't a local.

"Someone informed you the fabricator was there?"

"No, just that the management program the warehouses have been using for decades developed a glitch where some of the identity tags for what they were holding became corrupted and vanished from the system. I confirmed it and contacted Zack." He nodded to the man in the suit. "I figured that he knew people and we could sneak in, see if there was anything we could make a profit on."

"And you found the fabricator."

"That's not a fabricator, it's THE fabricator. That's a custom job like I've never seen. It can only deal with organics, but it can assemble anything you give it the raw material for in no time, and it came preloaded with some exotic stuff. But it's big, so we needed a place to store it."

"Before that we had to find out if it could do anything." The man in the suit added, sounding like keeping his limbs depended on him contributing. "We found some portable power and got it running. Etienne made it through the security, but he doesn't know anything about biochemistry. But he was pretty sure it worked. I figured it was worth the gamble and got in touch with money--"

"We have a problem," Alex called.

Tristan turned so he could see him while keeping the five in his peripheral vision. "They printed it?"

"No, the formula isn't in there anymore."

"Erased?"

"Extracted."

Alex looked them over, and Tristan saw the woman flinch when Alex's gaze met hers. She was the one neither Vic nor Alex had known would be here.

Alex went to her and crouched. "Marry, right?" She nodded. "How'd you get mixed into this?"

She flinched again when Alex touched her head and she looked at Tristan.

"You should answer me, my partner isn't the most patient person you'll meet."

"I--I've known Zack for a while. Not as part of this, we went to university together. I'm a biochemist, he called me so I could look at what was in the fabricator's memory, the formula wasn't something they could use, but then he asked me to help them design others. They could have gotten any recipe from the net, but he thought that if I made them something truly unique it would help them stand apart."

Alex nodded, his finger prodding through her long dark red hair. "Why did you remove the formula that was already there?"

"It-" she looked at Tristan. "We needed the space for our own recipe."

Alex's finger's stopped. He parted her hair and revealed a rectangular patch where it was missing.

"It's a processing enhancer," she said.

"Does it help?"

She gave a small smile. "A lot. I had to go into debt to get it, but it was so worth it. I would have passed my classes with it, if not--"

"How much memory came with it?"

"Oh, a lot, I was able to get all the material for both the classes in without any--" What she'd admitted to him registered and her eyes became fearful.

Alex tapped the patch of skin. "It's in there, isn't it?"

She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything the light's went out.

Then explosions lit the room.