"31E, report."
"No movement on target. Just like the last six times you checked in."
"Stuff the backtalk. You're in enemy territory and it's my-"
Kauko sighed and cut the channel before pulling back up the scope view of her rifle. Her target, a pine martin, and a few others were visible through a window pane, almost a hundred floors up atop one of the higher buildings in the district. They've been in a business meeting for almost two hours, and not knowing when it was going to be over has been driving the cheetah to boredom. She's just about to put the scope down again when there's a strange flicker of light in the back of the room, moving past the hallway windows.
She cycles through the scope's views - optical, thermal, radio. Nothing, but it's hard to see any better from over four kilometers away. Instead she replaces the scope's view with a planted surveillance beacon and.. something signal masked is moving through the hallway behind the meeting room.
"There's someone else here! Going in before we lose it!"
Kauko is already kicking down the door to the dark supply closet she's been holed up in before she catches the "do not" over the connection, but by then she's switching to high reactivity mode and leaving a blur of spots to any bystanders that happen to be watching. The artificial feline hauls her frame from the opposite end of the floor to where the meeting was taking place, catching up to find the door already opened.
Reaching for her weapon with one paw, she pushes into the room. A wolf and a lynx have surrounded the martin, while the others in the meeting were scrabbling to the opposite end of the table. Scouting the situation, Kauko increases her time dilation from double, to twenty. At this point, as fast as her precision built synthetic frame is, she still has to wait for it to catch up. Everything gets darker, and her sensor suite has to work to provide data fast enough.
She's built for this, though. She keeps an eye on the predicted motion of the other two, and focuses her body to tackle the wolf with her mass, while at the same time while her paw is moving to aim her stunner at the lynx. The cat spends a full minute in subjective time playing out something that only takes five seconds in reality - the would-be kidnappers are caught off guard, the wolf going down as she rams into him, and the lynx is already convulsing and dropping to the ground.
Before she's even to the ground, however, her spatial motion pings movement from closer to the others in the room. What she missed in her rush was that the other group in the room hadn't gone of their own accord - there was another lynx that had stayed signal-masked, only dropping it once the cat and wolf were both on the ground - and the lynx was already starting to raise a pistol to point at her.
With such a strong time dilation, Kauko couldn't move her body to respond fast enough as she watched the predictions for the lynx's weapon lock in on her. Panicking, she did the only thing she thought she could do in this situation: she pulled the trigger.
From four kilos away, a remote sniper with a fairly oversized scope was automatically triggered before the second lynx could finish aiming. And in less than seven seconds after entering the room, the feline's weapon splattered the contents of the lynx's head across the meeting table, barely missing the executives in attendance.
She practically doesn't remember what came next. Stunner to the wolf. Up off the ground. Stunner to the in-shock martin. Fireman's carry on the incapacitated martin. An immediate exit, barreling into the stairwell, and then a 450 meter drop over the railing and down to the basement garage floor, where a gravity catch had already been set up and waiting.
It wasn't until Kauko was back in the field office, six floors underground beneath the front business set up in the city, that they had really processed what had even happened.
"I. Gave. You. An. Order."
"I didn't-" the cheetah starts to say, before finding the fox's hand wrapping around her throat, squeezing down tightly enough to crush an organic's windpipe.
"Didn't what? Keep the channel open? Consider all the risks?? Listen to your handler's instructions?!?" She can feel the fox squeezing harder.
Kauko gasped, arching up in her chair, but was unable to get any words out. Synth frames don't need to breathe, necessarily, but a certain amount of emulation still exists.
Aarii sighed and shook her head, before letting go. Kauko slumps down into her seat, paws raising up to her throat. Not that even the fox's gloved paws could produce enough force to really damage it.
"You. Listen to me. You do not backtalk, you do not drop comms, you do not rush in. You do what I tell you to, and only what I tell you to."
"I-" the feline starts, only managing to get that much out before a glove comes across her face. Kauko tenses and reels, mostly in surprise, partially in the sudden impact but also at how badly those metallic-lined gloves the fox was wearing hurt. Hurt her. In a fully synthetic frame. The hell were those things?
"No, you be quiet. Listen. I am your field handler. I don't care why you're here, or how poorly you play with others. While you are in that body, on this assignment, you. listen. to. me." At the same time, the fox slipped her finger down from the cheetah's cheek to her chest, just above the curve of her breast, and pressed in. Only nudging like a playful bump. Except that Kauko's tail may as well may as well have found a path to mains - what felt like lightning shot forward from that point and rushed through her artificial form. She knew it had to be a synthetic effect, her body wasn't wired to feel something like that, but that made the realization of what was happening even worse.
The cat's body arches hard as she cries out in pain, and the fox just smirks and withdraws her hand. "Good, these work. If you don't want more of that, or worse, you will say yes handler. When I tell you to do something.. on the field. Do you understand?"
Kauko gets out a "yes, handler" while trying to process her situation. The king cheetah had volunteered her frame operational capability to do a little bit of field work for the Furthest Systems Department in exchange for maintenance. Aarii has field authority and is her handler while on this mission. At home they would both have reported to the same people, but the chain of command in a situation like this needs to be clear. They were also not the only ones operating on this planet, about five other operators and two more field authorities were off elsewhere. Clearly, not here, at the moment.
As for that glove, and the earlier simulated choking, she realizes that this frame must have been provisioned with specific "features" to reenforce the chain of command. The glove must be a controller, to allow for specific actions to be used that would otherwise be dangerous in the field. In the fox's case, apparently, she felt physical pain appropriate for punishment, as inflicting it otherwise was basically impossible.
The fox looks down at Kauko more seriously, now. "Good. I know you've only done this sort of work a few times before. This is my sixth deployment and my twenty-first mission (deployment|mission|operation) as a field handler. I intend to keep this mission as successful as the past twenty. So you will need to trust me when on operation. I will bring you home. Do you understand?"
Kauko nods, but instead of approval, she finds that glove landing a punch to her gut, hitting as hard as if she were biological. The cheetah doubles over in her seat, and coughs, instinctually trying to recover despite the lack of her body's need to. The fox is glaring, now.
"Do you. Understand."
The cat winces as she tries to dismiss the pain in her stomach, and bites at the corner of her lip as she realizes what the fox wants. She replies, quietly. "Yes. Handler."
Then, Aarii's expression changes to a smile. "Good! Hopefully we won't need to use this again after your fuck-up today, hmm? We both know what happened, but. A debriefing is a debriefing." The fox straightens herself up, starting to remove the gloves. "Operation report."
Kauko sighs again, and lets herself lean back up against the seat.
"Field operator unit 31E reporting.
"Target was Amories Vol Taber, Materis Corporation. Objective was to enter the Polaris Corporation Tower during a business meeting and detain Mr. Taber long enough to clone his encryption keys, using the location for timing and misdirection.
"Unit 31E infiltrated the ninety-third floor of the building and waited one hundred sixteen minutes before discovering another team using a signal mask had already advanced on the the meeting. Unit 31E then proceeded to the objective, shot one attacker using a long range monitoring station, and then escaped using the backup route with the target.
Recovery team picked unit 31E and the target up, unit successfully cloned their encryption keys, and the target was discarded at a nearby park.
End of operator report."
The fox picks up after the cheetah finishes.
"Field authority Aarii-7C99 reporting.
Operation was successful. One casualty, unknown group. No cleanup required, not part of operation scope. All equipment recovered.
Follow-up filed to discover identity of opposing team using recordings taken by unit 31E.
Next team can proceed as planned. End of report."
Now, the fox's eyes slide back down towards the feline, whose eyes are closed, head tilted up, and chest is rising and falling as if she were breathing. Aarii caresses her thumbs over the metal ridges of her gloves, running down the length of each finger.
"Now, you're not going to give me a reason to use these again, are you? Hmm?"