#scene 1

Think of it like a reward, his boss had told him, because he was an asshole. You’re my best agent, so you get the best assignment. In agency parlance, that meant: ‘you pissed me off somehow, but since you consistently bring in results, I’m not allowed to punish you. So I’m going to send you somewhere very scenic, for a mission that will be either mind-numbingly boring if you’re lucky, or extremely fucked up if you’re not.’ And since Tristan was an experienced agent, and he had a sense about these things, he could already tell that the second option was the most likely, even though he’d hadn’t even set foot on the godforsaken boat yet. He’d only needed one look at the mission brief to be able to tell.

According to the files he’d been given, half of the passengers of the cruise were set to board today, and another half at the next destination. Given the speed that the tickets had been sold, the lack of publicity for the cruise, and previously gathered data on some of the passengers, there was a high possibility that most if not all of the people about to board already knew each other, and may be involved in some manner of scheme. Unfortunately, what manner of scheme remained unclear, and it was one of the things that Tristan was here to uncover. With his luck, it might turn out to be anything from a terrorist plot to a weird sex cult.

Tristan scrunched his eyes shut and shuddered at that last thought. In the back of his mind he prayed to whatever deity oversaw spies (like all good spies, the god of them probably knew better than to let anyone know its identity, so he never put a name on his prayers and trusted that they reached the right godly department anyway) to not let him walk into a sex cult. Or at least not while partnered with Reed.

Once again, he didn’t have anything against the guy! And it’s not like Tristan was a prude or anything. He just… not with colleagues. Or other agents, even if they weren’t colleagues. Never again. That was a hard limit that he had set for himself years ago and he was going to hang on to it. It made his whole life so much less complicated.

Speaking of Reed, he sure was taking his sweet time. Tristan checked his watch. It was very fancy and very obviously a knock-off of an expensive brand, and would likely break down on him halfway through this mission. You’d think that would be annoying, but he knew that it was a feature, not a bug. Nobody thought that you were an undercover spy with military-grade equipment if your phone screen was cracked and your watch was a piece of shit. (That wasn’t the reason why he had been given it, though. The reason was that the hacks who worked down in Equipment hated him. It wasn’t his fault if they got offended when he returned his gear with obvious improvements in the softwares and hardwares. He wasn’t trying to insult them, he just needed shit to fiddle with on long boring stakeouts. He was a technomancer, of course he was going to mance the tech! What else did they expect?)

At T-minus-30 minutes to departure time, Reed still hadn’t shown up and Tristan was fidgeting with his undercover identity’s cellphone. He wasn’t actually supposed to turn it on until he’d boarded the ship, to reduce the risk that his movements before embarking could be retroactively tracked. But his partner was way beyond late now, and Tristan needed to know what the fuck was going on. Reed had been delayed, obviously, but Tristan didn’t think it was a catastrophic — or permanent — delay, or he would have received some signal to abandon mission and gtfo. So, what, was Reed just stuck in traffic? Did he slip on a banana peel and twist his ankle? Had he misread the briefing packet and was waiting in a completely different coffee shop? Tristan’s thumb hovered over the phone’s home button. He was just going to text him real quick using the café’s wifi, and then hack into the router to erase his tracks. With his skills, he was reasonably sure that no one but his partner would ever see that message.