Re: Team 1: Rictor & Shatterstar
It was a good thing that Star was angry. He had trained himself so that any strong emotion only made him focus all the more fiercely on his surroundings. It was survival 101 for a gladiator. If they didn't learn to use whatever emotions they might feel and instead were distracted by them, that was a very good way to get dead fast. Shatterstar danced away from Rictor's hands, using the motion of the shove to get moving himself. It took several beats for Ric's words to finally seep into Shatterstar's distracted brain. On the one hand, he was completely focused on the task at hand, but on the other, his subconscious was making erratic leaps of logic, as if his neural connections were somehow backfiring. Had Ric truly been speaking in Cadre when he spoke about their plans? Somehow he thought he might have been. Star had no reason not to trust his word, after all, something that seemed to have escaped his awareness in the last ten minutes or so. In any case, the mission was first. He could apologize to his friend afterwards.
While he chose not to answer his earlier accusations, he did grunt in response when Ric told him not to kill anyone. In fact, a distant part of him wondered why Ric would feel the need to tell him that, as if he hadn't just been about to slit a man's throat a minute ago. This was worse than even he realized, or would notice for a while yet. On the outside, he might merely look obsessively driven, which really wasn't that much different from what people already thought of him before.
Two more guards later, and they reached the archives on the first floor of the building. Since these guards were inside, Star took the time to search his belt pouches for strips of industrial strength duct tape to seal their mouths before going on. He even tossed Ric an aggressive glare as if to say, see? No killing. Happy?
He thought he had seen the glow of a computer terminal at the end of one aisle, but that was Ric's job. He began pulling drawers open and tossing everything onto the ground. They couldn't take the chance that the filing cabinets might be the fireproof kind.