Valentina

When we liberated the docks from the avenging skulls gang, we took a prisoner. Well, taken a prisoner is probably not the right way to describe it. We’d found a human, or someone we thought to be a human in a chair, unresponsive. On scanning them we found that they had some implants. They appeared to be to repair some old damage and to replace muscle groups and bones with synthetics. They also had a plug link with secondary and tertiary processors in their head. It looked like they had a history of combat wounds that had been cured professionally but there were other wounds that had clearly been left without intervention. .
 
Other than being stuck in a mental loop, there seemed to be no current injuries. I had to feel sorry for them. It had never happened to me, but from what I knew, when you were stuck in a mental loop, time passed exceedingly slowly. The other thing was, putting yourself in a loop was not something you would normally do. The chances were, someone had done this to them.
 
I found a terminal and typed out a message “We will be getting you out soon, don’t fight we don’t want to hurt you” I could see that the message had been read but no response. “Are you willing to talk?” same thing. Read but no response. There was nothing more we could do now other than hope they understood and wouldn’t try to fight us when we woke them up.
 
We got things ready, knowing the chances were they would need food and water when they woke up. We were hoping she wouldn’t fight but we made sure there were guns in the room just in case. I plugged in and released the loop and she woke up. She looked around at all of us suspiciously but took the bottle of water offered. She cracked it and sniffed but then took a sip. We explain who we are and that, for now, she is a captive but we have no intentions of hurting her. She looks at Max ‘Well, you’re military for one thing. You’re not who I thought you were, but you are all idiots. You won on the numbers game, no other reason.’ Max nods but corrects her, ‘Ex military. Private security now’ she just nods. I ask why a hacker was here in the first place. She gestures to her sleeve and I nod. She pulls up the sleeve to reveal her forearm covered in abrasions and burns and underneath it all, a CNG tattoo. She tells us she is Valentina and she was in the Logistics core, 2nd division. Responsible for Hacking, Surveillance and net watch. She got out due to a dislike of the brass and being given orders she didn’t like.
 
Once she got out she ended up with the Ascended Skulls. It wasn’t planned. One of those friend of a friend type things. She didn’t realise quite how averse to the current order they were. After 7 months of ‘re-education’ she joined their forces. When she said ‘re-education’ the look on her face said it all. She’d been tortured. She unzipped the front of her suit and showed us her ribs. Lets just say her rib cage did not look like it should. not set correctly, caved in and set that way, pieces of bone sticking out, skin healed around them. The group could have fixed this but didn’t.
 
The torture was almost symbolic. To show that they’ve taken their fair share of beatings and survived. She was coming across as professional, no emotion just a deadpan expression. She wasn’t trying to hurt us or herself but I suspected that she may have PTSD. There was a certain amount of fire and fight behind her eyes though She definitely didn’t seem like she had given up.
 
Ilyara offered to help her by curing her wounds, re-setting the bones and healing the skin over them. She nods. It’s hard to tell if she’s happy or just being practical about the whole thing.
 
Max asks her if she wants to get away from the Ascended Skulls. We can help her get away and give her a new identity. She looks like she is starting to form some kind of bond with Max, she seems to listen to him more and I’ve seen her eyes darting to him a few times.
 
We leave the room to discuss things out of her earshot but leave Igor in there with her keeping an eye on her. As we leave she starts eating the food we left for her and drinking the water. Once outside I suggest that Max be the primary point of contact with her. If she is starting to trust him then he has the best chance of getting through to her. I offer to go and get more food and drink. This would have a two-fold benefit. One would be that it removes an additional threat from the room, the other would be another small gesture to help her trust me. I suggested bacon butties which got a murmur of approval from everyone so I just headed to the kitchen to make a big batch.
 
I tapped into the base security so I could keep an eye on the camera feed and what was going on in the room. I was listening in as she was saying that there was a low likely hood of the Ascended Skulls trying to find her again. They were not that well organised but the organisation was divided into cells so information was compenmartalised. Not to mention they would probably now just assume that she was dead.
 
Max again offers her a way out of the Ascended Skulls and employment somewhere else. I knew he meant Chase. I heard her response “Well I can’t go back and I don’t know if I want to” She liked the sound of the offer but wants a little more time. I could understand that. She’d basically been mistreated from one organisation to the next. It couldn’t be easy to think about jumping in with a third.
 
He asked her if the Ascended Skulls were related to white skulls. It was a good question and made sense. She said they do have links but not in the way we think. There is something they have, that they practice, insidious, gets in your head, others more than the rest. Something unnatural. Artefacts with glyphs, probably Amaranthean. They do things to you if you let them in, odd powers, reinvigorate the dead. Tends to be people that are experimented on or experiments they have taken from white skull establishments. They tend to steal artefacts and creatures from the bases they clear. She hasn’t seen them but has seen the reports. As she was talking her words became disjointed, like she was thinking but not wanting to remember, or couldn’t remember properly.
 
Max asked if there was anyone she wanted to get out with her. She shook her head, no. Some of the group were tolerable but too many were happy to be in the group.
 
He asked about the data she was after. She had wanted to secure the manifest, they were being reinforced by another cell who were going to take certain containers then retreat. They’d just needed to know which containers to hit. She doesn’t know what was in the containers, she had reference numbers for shipments not inventories of what they contained.
 
Ilyara decided that she’d been questioned enough. She was looking tired and had been through a lot. She put a stop to the questioning and offered to start her rib procedures. I offered to help. I’d assisted a few times before and it was interesting to learn plus it meant I was more likely to be able to help Ilyara in an emergency situation if it was needed. It took us about two hours, Ilyara used nanites to help with the recovery process, help the skin and bones to heal. Once we were finished we left her to recover and went to check in with the others.
 
I did a quick search of the news and social media to see if there was anything about the raid at the docks but nothing had come up, so Ace must have been able to get things covered up pretty quickly.