MIGHT OF THE EMPIRE

The next major planned venture was intercepting the military's food supplies and sabotaging them, but the poison was not scheduled to arrive for a few days yet. In the meantime the three members of the team split off once more to pursue their own angles. Beaver was watching the river to better understand how supplies were delivered and how they might be intercepted. Pigeon was studying the operation of the mail service for similar reasons, and Firefly was disseminating a different kind of poison: slander.

Under the guise of Carol, she cajoled the crowd and made all sorts of insinuations throughout SoCC meetings, trying to turn public opinion against Daguerrochev. The general's private and secretive nature lended itself well to such things. After a few days of circulation, rumours began to take hold.

Pigeon's spying served mainly to confirm what she already suspected. Training her spyglass on the post office from a distance attracted the attention of a suspicious guard who then had to be deflected with excuses of testing a new lens, and revealed no new information. Stepping inside the post office wasn't much better. It was sufficiently well-organised to have no obvious vectors of attack, as the mail was transferred almost directly from mounted couriers in a stable at the back to post office staff. If Pigeon was going to get a glimpse of what was in those coded messages, it wasn't going to happen here.

After exhausting her options at the post office, Pigeon then contacted Goncharov. He corroborated everything everyone else had had to say about the recently arrived general, and volunteered a salient new piece of information: Tanya Daguerrochev was deeply religious.

Beaver's dockside sleuthing proved productive. Supplies were transported on barges from warehouses at one end of the city to the military district at the other. Once there, the captain of the barge crew exchanged documentation with military personnel, and the barges were unloaded. After that, the barges were usually poled back up the river.

After a few days of investigation, the poison arrived. It was delivered by barge in a disguised crate, which Beaver unloaded along with the rest of the cargo at first, then later retrieved under the cover of darkness.

It was at this point an alternative plan was conceived - that of poisoning the army's food further up the supply chain rather than hijacking a delivery barge. Pigeon and Beaver began scouting the warehouses and factories for possible opportunities for ingress, while Firefly stayed out of the way keeping up appearances as a performer. The warehouse and factory staff operated using staggered shifts, and packaged food was almost never left completely unattended. This was not due to a fear of tampering or theft, but simply because there were so many people working there.

Once they had singled out a warehouse and gotten a good read on the schedule of those working there, Pigeon and Beaver began their nocturnal infiltration. Beaver took the lead, accompanied by Perceval in the event that a distraction was needed, while Pigeon hung back. A lone warehouse worker was lingering by the entrance, and Beaver patiently waited to choose his moment to slip past.

The worker's back was turned as Beaver stepped out, but in the split second it took for him to clear the distance to cover, the worker snapped back around, catching Beaver right in the open. As soon as he spotted him, the warehouse worker lunged for the alarm bell. Beaver dashed forward and bludgeoned him unconscious mid-ring. He then snatched Perceval from the air and tossed him before scarpering, leaving the bird flapping noisily around the bell. Pigeon meanwhile had already long fled.

While Beaver and Pigeon had been preparing this escapade, Firefly had been pursuing a completely different angle. She had assembled a new disguise as a noble to infiltrate the church in the inner city, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tanya Daguerrochev in the flesh. The church had seven factions, with each one devoted to one of the seven Scribes, not counting Soliam Murr, the patron saint of the emperor himself. Those of one faction had little interaction with those of any other while there and attended separate services.

Without any direct evidence as to which Scribe Tanya followed, Firefly made a guess at which one was most likely based on their ethos, and followed that group. The sermons were of an encouraging and conciliatory nature, urging people to stick together in these troubled times. As for finding Tanya, in spite of the vagueness of the description there was still no one there who could plausibly match it. Either Tanya was in a different church faction, or she didn't attend that church at all.

Once they had finished with their respective enterprises for the time being, the team reunited and planned out the attack on the barge. Beaver had studied the schedule of the barges well, so it didn't take much time treading water before a suitable target passed by.

They tossed a rope over the prow of the barge, Beaver and Pigeon on one end and Firefly on the other, and began climbing up the side of the boat. Though the team had remained unseen while they waited in the water, the rope was spotted immediately. Firefly was the first to scale the barge, and the first to see the crew. Four men were visible - two polemen, a guard armed with a sword, and the captain.

With a dagger in each hand, Firefly flung both of them at the swordsman, then cast herself backwards into the water. One blade missed and the other inflicted only a glancing wound. Without a human target, the swordsman struck downwards with his sword, severing the rope and sending Beaver and Pigeon splashing back into the water Moments later he succumbed to one of Pigeon's sleep spells moments later, as did one of the polemen.

While Firefly scrabbled ineffectually on her side of the barge without the rope, Beaver scaled it with ease. Once at deck level he saw that the captain had taken out a revolver, and hit him with a thrown dagger of his own before receding back into the watery dark. Reeling and bleeding, the captain staggered over to the unconscious poleman and began shaking him awake.

While the polemen frantically poled the barge along, Firefly abandoned her attempt to climb back onto the barge and threw another dagger blindly upwards in an attempt to arc it onto the deck. Judging from the shouts from above, it hit the other poleman. Still treading water further back, Pigeon followed up these attacks with another sleep spell. There was the sound of several bodies slumping onto the deck, followed by silence as the barge slowly drifted to a halt.

The silence continued.

When it became clear that no one on the barge was still conscious, the three saboteurs climbed onto the deck and surveyed the wreckage. In addition to the two polemen, the swordsman and the wounded captain, there was a fifth crewman who had apparently been in the cabin at the beginning of the assault, only to be knocked out by Pigeon's second arcane volley once he stepped outside to act.

Once aboard, they slit the throats of the crew, taking care not to spatter the deck with blood. Next, Beaver slipped back into the water to retrieve the changes of clothes they had prepared earlier in tarred bags while the others disposed of the bodies. This was achieved by fashioning floatation devices from the dead men's own clothes, then floating the corpses downstream. In theory the bodies would float out of the city and would not be found any time soon.

After all this was dealt with, they could attend to the original purpose of this expedition: poisoning the food. The supplies were packaged in a combination of sacks and boxes nailed shut. The boxed food was in practical terms inaccessible and made up about half of the shipment, so once the food in sacks was appropriately seasoned there was a substantial amount of poison left over. This incriminating evidence was then tossed overboard.

As the barge floated downriver, the military district dock came into view. A cohort of guards were standing to attention, left to grow increasingly twitchy waiting for the delayed shipment. A man addressed Firefly as the captain and began assessing the documentation.

It took all of about five seconds for him to notice that the 'barge captain' was not the right one. Firefly retaliated with a textbook manoeuvre: blame someone else's incompentence. Of course the paperwork was wrong, of course the bean counters and pencil pushers had no idea what they were doing. It was a tale as old as time, or at least as old as history.

The guard realised that he was getting nowhere and told Firefly to wait while he went inside. Pigeon's telepathic eavesdropping revealed that employing a classic counter-manoeuvre: kick the problem up the chain of command. After a bit of back-and-forth between the guard and his superior officer, he eventually re-emerged and informed the group that he couldn't accept the goods without proper paperwork. The 'barge crew' would have to take the supplies back to the warehouse and come back tomorrow.

This wasn't going to work for obvious reasons, but they gave every impression of compliance and began poling the barge back up the river. Rather than return to the warehouse however they continued upstream out of city limits and sank the barge along with its tainted cargo. Its fate would be known only to them and the local aquatic life.

The following day each of the group returned to their ordinary routines, giving no clue to outsiders as to what had transpired. The missing barge didn't make much of an impact on the rumour mill, but there were two interesting developments. The first was the arrival of the third general, John Amhurst, known for his specialisation in night assaults. The second was an apparent pushback in Firefly's attempts to discredit Tanya in SoCC meetings. No one was explicitly contradicting her, but her complaints and concerns were all of a sudden getting much less traction…