All active projecting Agents were called in to Headquarters for an emergency briefing. A nervous and distracted Tad Eccles informed the assembled teams what had happened: last night, Orpheus Group's computer systems had been breached. It was a directed attack with a specific target. One highly classified file had been downloaded. The Board of Directors was assuming that the perpetrator stole the information in order to sell it, and thus would refrain from making copies in order to let scarcity drive up the price. All available resources were to be dedicated to recovering the file before the information in it was further compromised.
Eccles would not describe the contents of the file, except to say that it contained the locations of several caches of extremely sensitive "equipment" belonging to Orpheus Group. The Agents were to split into teams and travel to each of these locations, to protect them until a removal team could get there and move the cache to a secure location. Agents Markham, Morrisson, and MacMillian formed one of these teams. Agents Watts, McGee, and Herschler were sent to investigate the possible source of the hack.
Markham, Morrisson, and MacMillian were sent to the train yards near Dockside. Morrisson and MacMillian both projected, while Markham elected to remain in-body. At the train yards they located a specific warehouse containing nothing but an old, padlocked freight car.
Inside the freight car they found several cryogenic suspension creches, much like those discovered by Agents Herschler and MacMillian in a self-storage unit several months earlier. As MacMillian and Morrisson explored the interior of the car, wondering what to make of this, Agent Markham, who was standing outside, heard a noise at the warehouse door.
There stood Donald Sanderson, manifested visibly, with his spinal barbs fully extended and his hands twisted into multi-jointed talons. He stared blankly at Agent Markham and said: "They are coming."
Agents Watts, Herschler, and McGee located their target: a cheap two-story apartment building on the edge of the Gardens. Orpheus' network security specialists had traced the hacker's signal to here.
Agent McGee, who had elected to remain in-body, opened the door with a police-issue lockpick gun and kicked it in. The Agents found an empty apartment, bare except for some shelf-frames, spare cables, and bits of plastic packaging from store-bought computer components. An interview with the apartment manager revealed that a woman "with brown hair and a tattoo on her arm" had paid him a month's rent on the apartment (in cash) but only lived in it for three days. He had seen men helping her move a number of cardboard boxes in and out of the place, and they had driven away in a black, unmarked van.
While the other two Agents searched the place, McGee noticed a suspicious-looking man watching them from across the street. Herschler immediately puppeteered him, subdued him, and scanned his thoughts. The man had been sent to watch for anyone investigating the apartment. He knew nothing about the previous tenants or about the hacking of Orpheus' computers. But he did know the name of his employer: Stephen Vacek.
Back at the train yard, the Agents approached Sanderson very carefully. He was clearly unstable, and his appearance flickered back and forth, the spinal barbs and claws vanishing and reappearing as he struggled for self-control. He spoke in cryptic fragments. "She's not here," he said. "I've looked everywhere. You have to be careful. They're coming. They won't let me away from them. It isn't just Eurydice. Something terrible has happened. You have to find out what they did. They're coming. All of them."
Suddenly several spectres converged on the warehouse and attacked. They were shaped like severed human torsos, balancing on their hands, but they bayed like hounds and had rusty muzzles bolted to their faces. Long chains trailed from their collars, stretching back out of sight, beyond the warehouse walls.
Agent Morrisson unleashed a dirge attack, while Agent MacMillian grew wings and shaped her forearms into razor-sharp blades. One of the torso-hounds leaped onto Sanderson, who instantly reverted to his monstrous form and began struggling with it. MacMillian snapped the creature's chain with her arm-blades. Agent Markham, who could not see the spectres himself, ran for the van, calling back to Headquarters for backup.
McGee, Watts, and Herschler quickly returned to Headquarters to report what they'd found. Eccles ordered them to immediately reconnoiter Vacek's location and wait for backup. The three Agents projected and made their way to a small office building downtown.
Herschler attempted to haunt the building, but was pulled into one of the machines in Vacek's office and trapped there. The Agents outside saw only a brief flicker of the building's lights, then lost contact.
Watts flickered himself and McGee into the middle of the office, where they saw several technicians struggling to keep Herschler contained, while Stephen Vacek screamed at them to get the situation under control. McGee puppeteered one of the technicians while Watts began enshrouding random pieces of electronic equipment. One goggle-wearing technician fired impulsively at McGee just as he entered his target, and the ghost-shot bullet passed through McGee and his host body, grievously wounding both.
At that moment, a familiar voice called out "Stand down! Stand down and no one needs to get hurt!" A woman stepped out of an alcove, her hands raised in a conciliatory gesture. It was former NextWorld operative Cheryl Banning.
"Wait a minute, what do you mean, 'stand down?'" yelled Vacek. "That isn't what we planned!"
"You're right," said Banning, and shot Vacek in the chest four times.
Agent Markham drove the van through the warehouse loading bay doors and crashed into the boxcar, dislodging several of the spectre-hounds from its roof. By this time, one of the hounds was grappling Agent Morrisson, and Sanderson had two clawing at his back.
Agents Doug Sands and Steve Keller arrived at that moment, in response to Markham's backup request. Sands went to help Morrisson while Keller ran towards Donald Sanderson. He body-checked Sanderson into the path of two more of the hounds, who instantly latched on. Their leashes tightened, then pulled, and Sanderson was lifted up through the roof of the warehouse and disappeared.
Agent Morrisson dispatched the last remaining hound by dirging point-blank directly into its skull, shredding its corpus and dissipating the thing.
Keller explained that the spectres were fetch-spirits, sent to reclaim one of their own that had escaped the spectre hive-mind. The suspended animation creches had never been in any danger; however, the only way to make the spectres go away was to give them Sanderson. Although disturbed by Keller's tactics, the other Agents were forced to accept his logic.
"Believe it or not, this was never about you," said Cheryl Banning. She held up a CD-ROM. "Here is the file we stole. You can have it back. We already knew what was on it, we've no intention of acting on it, and we certainly don't want to sell it to anyone else."
Herschler indicated Vacek. "What about him?"
"You were Vacek's pet project. He used us to get to you. But we were using him to get something else."
"What's that?"
But Banning would not elaborate. Eventually the Agents agreed to take the CD-ROM and leave peacefully, on the condition that Banning would provide them with a supply of ghost-shot bullets.
Before they left, Banning made a cryptic remark: "Tell Emma MacMillian she was right. This is a terrible thing we're doing. Our two sides are no longer at war... but maybe they should be."
Back at Headquarters, Herschler, Watts, and McGee gave Eccles a heavily edited version of their encounter with Vacek, leaving out any mention of Cheryl Banning or NextWorld Enterprises. Removal teams successfully transported the cryogenic creches to a new, secure location. Eccles removed the Agents from probationary status, in recognition of their service.
News stories that evening reported that construction of Graceful Repose Residential Towers had finally completed, and the first tenants would be moved in within a month. The completion of this long-awaited urban renewal project had been made possible in part by generous funding from noted philanthropist, Stephen Vacek.