Chapter 504 The Ups and Downs of Working With Honeypots
?Timothy heard the hatch to the cargo hold hiss open and almost fumbled the atomic printer he was still holding in his hand. He paled and gingerly set it down, then turned around and saw his “wife” coming into the hold behind him.
“Holy fuck, you startled me!” he exclaimed.
Catherine was taken aback for a moment, thinking, ‘Aren’t reapers supposed to be hardcore badasses? Psh, a little door scared such a big man.’ Then, a mischievous grin crossed her face and she got a truly wicked idea.
“Honey, I have a headache,” she said, slumping down to sit on the floor next to him. She leaned over and rested her head in his lap and practically purred at him. “Rub me?” she asked, blinking innocently and conveniently ignoring the fact that she was still wearing nothing but a sports bra and compression booty shorts.
Timothy awkwardly fidgeted in place and didn’t know where to put his hands. There were so very, very many options, and not many of them were good. He poked her forehead and growled, “Focus, ‘Siobhan’. You’re supposed to be a good girl, remember?”
Siobhan stood up with a sigh, murmuring something about blockheads and no fun, then headed to the locker on the other side of the cargo bay and began inventorying her own goodie bags for the mission ahead of them.
At least it was a convenient excuse, anyway. Siobhan was one of the most accomplished honeypots in all of the NIA, and Timothy suspected he would truly enjoy the downtime on his current mission, unlike most of the missions reaper teams were sent on. There was definitely a distinct difference between being cooped up in small rooms with nine other sweaty, unshowered men and being paired with a nyxian honeypot, an unforeseen perk he was only just now coming to realize.
He cleared his throat and changed the subject in an attempt to remain professional before they made landfall. “I wonder how many other teams they sent out on this mission. Have you heard anything through your grapevine?”
“Nothing specific. The response is just ‘a lot’ whenever I ask. Those cultist bastards are likely to be embedded in plain sight where they can lose themselves in the crowd. I hate it, but it’s a damn smart move—whoever their strategists are are bloody good at their jobs,” she coquettishly complained.
“Well, so are we,” he confidently claimed, puffing out his chest.
[Beginning landing sequence in three minutes,] AI 228 announced over the main channel and through the implants of the nyxian and reaper.
Siobhan cleaned up the kit she had just inspected, much like Timothy had done with his, then the pair strapped themselves in for groundfall and made small talk as the stealth shuttle fell screaming to earth like a shooting star, hidden against the backdrop of the sun in the sky.
Not that anyone on the ground would have seen it anyway, given the general cloud cover over the part of Washington that was west of the Cascade Mountain Range. Because, while Eastern Washington was a cold desert and, like most deserts, was mostly sunny and arid, Western Washington was either a marine coastal environment or a temperate rainforest. People from around the Puget Sound, in particular, would experience more than three hundred days of cloud cover per year, on average, and more than two hundred days of measurable rainfall.
They even had a term for the typical weather there: “liquid sunshine”, they called it.