After sending off his report to Ellis regarding the apparent abduction of Elden Shaw, Marcus was ordered to hold his position and await backup. Presumably the team that he was waiting for would have forensics experts and checking out the scene might compromise the evidence. He'd already had drones in there providing preliminary footage, and even he knew not to send in the Lynx - not that it had any instruments that would be helpful. But he took the order at face value - stay out of the ruins of Elden's hideaway.
But sitting idle was not something Magnus was good at. So he re-tasked the Fly-Spys to perform a wide search pattern around ground zero, hoping to find something of interest. And, just to keep an eye on the building of interest, he sent his Kanmushi off to find a nice dark crevasse to hide in to make sure no one else disturbed the scene. For good measure, he attached a micro-sensor microphone to the little drone since the basic sensors it came with did not provide an audio feed.
As the insect like drone got near the house, he took more direct control, not leaving such a sensitive task to the simple dog brain of the drone. Reaching out across the Matrix with his mind, he touched the drones primitive mind and entered it, feeling his senses merge with the digital sensors of the drone. The world became huge, a tiny pebble becoming a boulder large enough to cause navigational issues. But he was able to move across the dirt and blacktop with amazing speed, mechanical legs moving faster than any natural bug could manage.
As he moved up the driveway, scanning the house for a good spot to sit undetected, he noticed deep furrows in the dirt. Regular patterns marked the furrows as tracks, and from the size and wide set of the tires and deepness of the impression, he guessed that they were from an Ares Roadmaster, or at least something similar. He made a mental note of the tracks and moved the Kanmushi into a spot under the eave near the front door where it was virtually impossible to spot, but had good coverage of any approaching vehicles. From that vantage he also noted the front door, bashed in so hard it was only barely still on its hinges. Dead center there was a very troll sized boot print. The dust on the porch and the dirt around it showed a plethora of recent prints from various shoes, at least 4 different people in all.
From the outside, he was a man, sitting quietly in a chair in a nondescript house in the middle of the Redmond Barrens. Next to him sat a large drone, all armor and wheeled legs and menacing weapons. The Lynx sported a massive machine gun on an equally massive mount. Two smaller side mounts provided a grenade launcher and a flamethrower. The drone was not the type to be intimidated by concepts such as "superior numbers" or "heavily armored". It filled rooms with death quickly and completely. Occasionally, it had even collapsed buildings with the sheer amount of ordinance it delivered. It watched all the exits at once, flooding the room with motion sensing radar. The man in the chair was not expecting company, so the drone had orders to fire on anything that entered.
Outside in the driveway sat an Ares Roadmaster - not the one that left the tracks at the Elden squat. It was tasked to watch for any movement near the house and it contained another drone, a Roto-Drone armed with a single high caliber rifle. It could launch quickly, needing only to have the van's rear door open to let it out, and it could "subdue" a target over a kilometer away, or hiding behind a wall. Of course, the dog brain was unlikely to make such shots, but it rarely had to.
The man in the chair didn't look like he was doing much, but in the Matrix he moved with speed and grace. With the small bug drone situated, he began the task of following the tracks. He opened a virtual window and began forming complex shapes within it, a cryptic code that eventually formed an automaton made of pure Resonance - a Sprite. The sprite took the form of a small robot, a machine not unlike the drones he commanded in the meat world. And indeed, this sprite had an affinity for such devices. He picked one of the three Fly-Spys and re-tasked it to the house, having the sprite merge with the device's icon in the Matrix, working its magic to improve the flying drone's capabilities.
Marcus jumped in to this drone, again merging his consciousness with its brain, reveling in the freedom of flying through the open sky. The senses and responsiveness of the drone were beyond what the drone could normally manage, helped as much by the sprite as by the mind link he had with the airborne device. The world was laid bare before him in all its squalor.
He followed the tracks until they reached the northbound lane of the 202 and are lost. He jumped out of the dragonfly shaped drone and flitted along the 202 in the Matrix, looking for cameras that might have captured the getaway vehicle. It takes a while, but eventually he finds three cameras. He is ready to deftly pry their secrets from them when he notices that they are owned by Knights Errant. He stops short and leaves the Matrix, marking them with an ARO first. The footage could wait for proper channels - he would not hack Ares property without a clear and present need.
But it was still valuable intel, and he was in the middle of sending an update to Ellis when he received a message from whom he assumed was Jordan Steiber.
>>Incoming call
>>From: REDACTED
>>"Ground support, this is Black Sky, do you read, over? Slowing to approach speed and coming in to land. ETA 10 minutes. Rendezvous at landing point 6."
He finished sending the update to Ellis, then replied to the anonymous message using the same channel.
>> "OMW. Who am I babysitting today?"
He leftthe Lynx to guard the house and headed out to the van, got in, and commanded it to drive to the pre-arranged coordinates for landing point 6. He retasked the Fly-Spys, keeping one watching the burned out husk of the crime scene, one providing areal coverage for the safe house, and the last, still harboring the machine sprite, to scout ahead of the van as it makes its way to the rendezvous.
