Flora huffed and puffed and sucked her stomach in as much as she could. Scrabbling her fingers for purchase, she gasped in surprise when her hips popped through the window frame and Marita’s push sent her flying into the far wall with a crash.
“Nice...job!” Flora encouraged dizzily, stumbling to her feet and rubbing her head. She staggered to the booth’s door and opened it, giving Marita access to the deposit boxes. “There are two keyrings, let’s split up and see what we can find,” she urged, tossing Marita the set for the near wall and crossing to the further one.
The keys were marked, but not with the number of the deposit box, meaning that it was a slow and laborious testing process to find the key that opens each box. The first three were empty; the next contained someone’s will. Two empty boxes later, she gasped in surprise at the set of military medals in a fashionable case. “Okay, we’re leaving this one here...” she muttered, looking in alarm at the different colored ribbons. “Last thing I want is to make an enemy of somebody with this much military history.”
The next deposit box contained the first real score; a handful of glittering gold coins. The next had several rolls of foreign dollars Flora didn’t recognize. “I wonder why they didn’t store these in a bank...” she murmured, nevertheless retrieving and throwing them in a plastic bag with the coins. “Hey, wait, there’s something else here...” With the bills out of the way, she fished out a metal rectangular device with four rows of nine blinking lights. Each light had a name next to it, and a thin black button sat in the center guarded by a removable transpart cover. “What the hell is this?” She raised her eyebrows, opening the cover and experimentally pressing the button.
The device beeped loudly and Flora almost threw it back in the deposit box, fearing it could be a bomb, but then it stopped beeping and died down. <”Results forthcoming,”> a computerized voice informed.
Flora blinked. “Marita, you have any idea what this thing is?”
—————————-
Kojurro was still lying in a crumpled heap somewhere in Sartonic. He would have been perfectly content to keep doing so, but his tontine augment suddenly activated. Detecting his semi-conscious state, it sent a pulse to his brain asking if he was dying. When the brain didn’t respond, it flooded him with stimulants, causing him to gasp and roll over reflexively.
“Augh! Ugh...” Kojurro rubbed his forehead. “Where am I...?” He looked around. “Goddamn, the storm is still happening? I hoped to wake up in sickbay...drugged out on morphine...”
The tontine augment sent another signal to his brain, seeing if he was alive. This caused his fur to stand on end...every member of the tontine promised never to scan for a status update unless they knew another member had died. He’ll need to return to his deposit box and see which names remained; last he remembered only four of them were still alive after all this time. Tontine augment, he asked, which participant requested the update?
It reported his own name, and he gasped in surprise. Someone had access to his tontine status indicator? He quickly crossed to the nearest window, shattered it with a spinning kick, and fled into the torrential storm. If someone had broken into his deposit box, there was no time to waste.
