On Solaris, it was all too often the case that the outcome of a match would be decided before the fight. I’m not talking ludicrously one-sided matches where it’s obvious that one side doesn’t have a chance (see the infamous Carl “Bossmonster” Kaled versus Herbert Wilks match, for example) but those where someone had a vested interest in seeing one side or the other lose and was going to do everything he could in order to make it happen. Usually that somebody is a criminal, and usually they’re very unsubtle when they decide to lean on their target to make it happen.
Eckhart Stein may not have been a criminal (may) but he certainly was on the slimy side of things. His offer to me seemed innocuous enough, but his second one definitely was the sort of “gentle persuasion” one associates with Solaris Mobsters, even if the threat wasn’t immediate. So when we found out that the Royals were hiding out in some resort town, I was actually hoping that he’d be there with them, if only so I could give him a little bit of a ‘talking to’ about things.
Unfortunately, it seems that I was out of luck. Stein had been in town, yes, but he’d gotten out of there before we arrived. On the surface, this seemed to make sense to me, but when I dug a little deeper, things got a little bit strange.
While they were in town, the Royals engaged in a non-stop looting spree, aiming to load up on and run off with anything that was even remotely valuable. (Bunch of charmers, huh?). They ended up dumping almost all of their loot before they ran off (though the Hunchback we captured had the spare space in its cockpit packed out with valuables, and I suspect the other ‘Mechs did too). Stein, however, didn’t.
What he did do was apparently spend most of his time in a hotel room (the nicest one in town, I have no doubt!) and order lots of room service (Not paid for. This guy is a world-class bum). However, from what I heard from the staff there, he spent most of his time on the communicators as well as the Kamenz InterWeb. When his room service arrived, he was almost allways talking to somebody; on the few times he left his room, he would go outside to talk to somebody. He probably had his communicator in the shower.
Now on one side, this reminds me a lot of your average Solaris agent or manager when there’s something big going on. God alone knows Pete Vogel spent a lot of time glued to his communicator, and probably had it surgically attached after I quit the team. From what I gathered, that’s kind of an appropriate comparison. Stein seemed to be the actual brains behind the Royals, while Lucas Royale himself was their face but not the sharpest tool in the shed.
But then factor in what he tried to pull with me and we get back to the back-room scumbag, the sort who’s trying to make sure that regardless of who wins the fight, he’s the one who comes out on top. Now if you ask me, that’s what was going on here. Maybe he’d seen this whole deal with backstabbing us go south and he was trying to find a way out or the like.
What’s really interesting, however, is the timeline. It seems like he quit town at some point early in the morning two days before we arrived. That also means that he was out of there before the Incinerators and their hair-brained rescue mission. Did he have no faith in his people or them? Or was this all one big set-up? I mean, if you wanted to be stupidly paranoid about it, he could have called for help from the Incinerators knowing that they’d give away the Royals location and all.
Thinking too hard? Probably.
One thing’s for certain. He wasn’t the one who shot Lucas Royale. One question answered, many more raised
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