Luca was watching the situation unfold. While he was delivering orders, he'd forgotten a track of how much time had passed, and consequently, how much time was left on those bombs.
A lot tends to happen in two minutes and thirty six seconds. Going to, going from, coming, going, delivering, retrieving and more. At a glance, the statue that nestled the Phoenix crew and their bomb-lobbing activites could've been mistaken for any hub of industrious activities - albeit with six deadly high explosives attached to a timer that only had fourty four seconds left.
Three of the explosives had been respectively lobbed, carted or defenestrated into the bay. The little Ernie Droid should've thanked its lucky stars that it didn't have the ability to perspire, or it would've been able to do double duty as a garden sprinkler.
However, the little Droid's program did prove clever enough to realise that while all of the wires were the same colour, their connections were not. The program that Echelon had downloaded seemed to overlay an infograph in the Droid's eye, informing him which wires were good to cut, which ones weren't, and if they were in order - what to do.
As explosives got hurled into the bay and subsequently disconnected from the rest of the system, the Droid started to notice that the pattern would shift with every bomb thrown. It could've been a double-failsafe to prevent tampering, but the program was able to look through it as it read the impulses of the circuitry and the currents of the wires before it. How they changed before him.
With that in mind, Ernie had a few swift motions to perform his duty as the counter got closer and closer to zero... It was almost as though its hand was being guided by an outside force.
Click. Snikt. Click. Clack. Snip. Click.
The timer froze with seven point two seconds to spare.
"Oh. Yes. This calls for drinks, and flash-step." Came a voice on Ernie's speaker by proxy of Echelon. The Ernie would find that the hands that guided it were now the hands that were playing it like a marionette, "Untz, Untz, Untz. Who the Spacer? I'm the Spacer."
"Ech, y'know I'm listening to you," Luca dryly commented from his bedside space, "Not that I don't appreciate what you did - but why didn't you come down there in a suit?"
"I can't be in two places at once, but the Droid is a wonderful proxy. I had to attend to the matter at the Crimson Kestrel anyway. Untz."
"Way to steal the show. Ech... what about the barrels in the bay anyway?"
BLOOOOSH!!
Three columns of water surged up from the bay where the barrels had sunk to the bottom of bay exploded on their timers. When they were disconnected, their individual failsafe timers continued and ticking and consequently blew up. Fortunately, the three disarmed barrels that were still linked did not explode.
Echelon, and consequently the Ernie were visibly unsettled by the explosion, and she relinquished control of the Ernie to let her consciousness head home and return to her normal body.
"What?" Luca groaned from his bedside position as he watched Echelon's point of view return to the Kestrel, "An explosion or two a day keeps the mind sharp."
The sound of shuttles could be heard after the water, and when Zeta, Aerin and Smith looked out onto the ocean, they could see police shuttles heading to clean up what was left of the carnage and chaos.
The first shuttle touched down on the area beside the statue, and the first person out was Beau, flanked by several other heavily armed policemen who looked as though they' just emerged from another pitched firefight.
Beau looked a bit different, he wasn't wearing armour; Instead he was wearing a practical grey overcoat with a shirt and tie. The weather was too warm to warrant wearing a hat, making him recognisable. "Hey!" He yelled from below, "Sorry we're late. We had an uprising of our own to deal with in town. Would you care to fill me in on what happened? Where's the Captain?"
Luca blinked as he watched all this unfold from afar, and he had another mental blank as he tried to recant all the unlikely and improbable events that lead up to all of this, "There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, I assure you Beau."
Yep. A perfectly reasonable explanation for a dead clone, three barrels of high explosives, one of Origin's flagships looming above, an entire vice casino in ruins, a street turned into a flaming warzone, the intervention of an outside gang to secure the town, and about a hundred dead Zeroes gang bangers with hundreds more across the city - the surviving Zeroes were not much better without a proper leader, and they dropped their flags quickly.
Yessiree-bob. There was a perfect explanation for all of this.
-
((Not sure if remove this part. I know the Crimson Kestrel has a private room in it. (Uriel has a room to himself), but is this where he would go first to absolve himself of his sins?))
When Uriel got back to the Crimson Kestrel, he found that the hangar bay and cargo bay had been invaded by Zeroes, but repelled by the resident force. As alleged by Echelon, the blood stains and carnage were immutable. Sebastian was amongst the dragnet, sitting on a storage crate with a smouldering cigar in one hand and an assault rifle in the other. At his feet were some empty magazines and shell casings.
"You're back early," Sebastian acknowledged the Elysian and gave him a nod, "Anything to give a preliminary report on?" He sized up the Elysian for a moment and measured his palpable distaste and looked down for a moment and produced a foil packet with cigars and offered one to the Patrician. He had a frown on his face as he watched the Elysian's body language carefully, "Something troubling you? Has my son done something stupid again?" He was wrong on that count, but he did want to touch base with the Elysian.
-
Meanwhile, Enzo and his quarry escaped unmolested, he did have to pass by a few passing police shuttles, but otherwise the unscrupulous freelancer was free to turn in the bounty: 100,000 KS, The same as his boss' first bounty. There was no 'pidgin'-ing, or negotiation, half the price for a corpse, full price for alive and 'well'. Enzo still had 50,000 KS burning a hole in his pocket when he was escorted out of the premises.
