“This is the big one Mateos.” Jaree hopped next to him as he reviewed the data spec. “We pull this off and Malorn will definitely promote us.”

“Keep hopping around like that and he’s gonna make you clean the recyke intake valves again.”

At once Jaree stilled, a sensitive enough chemical detector — like the one embedded in Malorn’s hand — could pick up the neurotransmitter shift and hormone spike from Jaree once they’d turned on their emotional dampeners. Should just keep them on all the time. “I am calm, I am chill. And I am still dying for your opinion on this cherry little gig.”

Nothing cherry about it. Mateos shunted half the reading off to his coproc and slid onto the data highway. Dull perspective take: this was a sneak and burn, simple corporate sabotage. Keen take: there was too much money on this. Target was a virtual unknown L-Corp out of Kylar’s Loop named Etiolon Inc. Job was to sneak into the place and destroy one whole lot of their inventory. Their team was encouraged to take whatever they wanted in addition to the fee.

“Someone has a big hate on for Aytilon inc.” Jaree did this, talked while Mateos worked. They thought they were helping.

“Etiolon, I think it’s a reference to the word, “etiology,” though that’s a guess.” Mateos switched his coproc over to search mode, it had digested the whole file and his AI was prepping an abstract. “And the fact I have to guess means there’s more going on here than it seems.”

Mal’s Warriors — informally the “Mal-wares” — were a high end “mercenary company” out of Rosalind Loop. Malorn commanded a small pirate fleet, with a flagship the envy of some Loop-gov navies. All those resources meant they could be choosy about their jobs and their clients would be discreet.

No way to find out who sent them this job exactly. And Mateos’s coproc had already turned up a whole fat bunch of nulls. “This is a rotten job. Nothing fresh or cherry about it.”

Those had been his exact words a month ago. When Jaree brought the job to Malorn, he let Fate decide. Which meant Mateos and a bunch of second-string tech rats were void coasting blind right into Etiolon Inc Station OmegaZed.

What Mateos had learned about the corporation they were about to sabotage had not instilled him with confidence. Loop corporations behaved more like organisms than legal or contractual entities. Most performed a myriad of functions, with another dozen-dozen smaller companies feeding off of them, and another thousand off of them and so forth. Sol was a massive petrie dish of interconnected parasitic capital-drive dragons.

Etiolon Inc defied that. They had a platinum contract with one of the scariest security firms in Sol.

Platinum.

Mateos knew why Malorn let the job go to them in the first place. Maybe a dozen techsmiths spinning around Sol could crack into Nautilus Security and out again without 80% losses. Malorn had three of those working for him. And Mateos was one of them.

It should have given my opinion more weight.

It wasn’t just the platinum contract with Nautilus. That was unusual enough. But the weirder part was the lack of a transaction record between them. People had died to get the mere financials for Etiolon Inc. There were no payouts for that platinum contract. There were Loop chains with over ten billion citizens who couldn’t afford to pay Nautilus’s rates.

Malorn had ignored that.

Then there was the weirder stuff. What should have been a homogeneous culture of healthy companies swimming about Etiolon’s cash stream was more like a small group of highly specialized single-celled organisms engineered to serve Etiolon’s needs. They didn’t even go through the usual parties for their catering. Dozens of little companies, with records and histories just as mysterious as Etiolon’s, provided trillions in annual trading to one company or sometimes each other. And that was it. Outsiders need not apply. Mateos could almost imagine some shadow corp hanging around and eating any companies who tried to insinuate themselves in this… frankencorp.

Their unknown client had offered Malorn far, far too much money for this job. It was what had sparked Mateos’s initial caution. And it was what drove the pirate admiral to accept.

With inertial dampeners on their boarding missiles, Mateos hardly noticed a jolt when they hit the side of the station and locked in. A few seconds later a door-shaped nano-charge seared through the outer hull of the station and provided a safe corridor for them to enter. Steam and byproducts outgassed from the process, but Mateos had already shut off his external breathing systems and set his lungs to automatic. He had the sensation of breath, but his implants were handling oxygenation duties. He opened a series of hatches in his calves and forearms as he waited for his turn to enter the station proper. A low band swarm hovered out of the hatches and began to perform their preprogrammed dances.

Jaree led the way, loaded into their warchassis. They looked like a bad-holovid show for kids, featuring teens with boxes on their shoulders, hands, and elbows to simulate robots. Jaree was human and a cyborg, but every single circuit and bioengineered cell in their body came out of MilCas black spec factory. Right now those metal bits were painted neon red and blue, with digital ink occasionally changing the whole scheme to something new.

They tooted at him over comms and charged into the hallway. Because the company who built the Etiolon Station OmegaZed went defunct and lost their data in a purge, there were no schematics for the station. Part of the month-long delay in starting their job had been due to the need to wait for Malorn’s EM engineering team to come up with a way to get a high quality scan of their facility.

Now Mateos, Jaree and the others knew where to go. Implants and training kicked into full combat mode, Mateos hummed over the steel plated floors like a ghost. The chem analysis system informed him the air was breathable and free of chemicals, but Mateos had many good reasons not to trust it. He could imagine Jaree taking a deep breath just to be contrary.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Nothing had gone against the plan so far. Mateos had started to believe his earlier paranoia unwarranted when Jaree stopped before him, turned and shoved Mateos backward and into the others behind him. A black figure in fuzzy metallic armor burst from the thin metal wall and into Jaree, swinging through the air where Mateos had been standing. The blow only slid off of Jaree, not making any noise as it did, but almost severed their arm. Almost was a bad place with Jaree.

Not a decade back, Mateos would have squeezed his eyes shut over what happened next. Nanites reconnected Jaree’s tissues and simultaneously extended spikes from various parts of their exposed armor. Pink and purple glowing spikes smashed through the enemy’s armored carapace and out the other side, pinning them to the wall. They twitched for a moment as blood and other fluids leaked out of them, down through the metal grating of the floors.

Jaree chuckled as they patted their arm. “That stung. They almost got me.” Metallic wrenching punctuated their sentence and a long black spike tore through Jaree’s head. They twitched for a moment and laughed. “No brain there, sorry!”

Spinning in place with an almost dainty series of moves — for a three ton behemoth — Jaree slammed their attacker into the metal wall, stunned as they reoriented themselves. Too slow for their own good. A boxy hand pistoned out with enough force to leave an impression of the flattened bits of flesh and metal they’d made of the black-armored cyborgs on the opposite wall.

“You’re brain’s right there though. Ha ha!” Jaree’s face emitted sparks as they tried to extract the spike from their jaw, banging it into the walls and generally causing more of a ruckus. The others watched their backs while Mateos grabbed the spike and pulled it out of the back of Jaree’s head. They laughed as they swayed, turned back toward Mateos with their blocky metallic hole already fusing together and gave a stage whisper. “My brain’s in my ass.” They winked and continued to lead the way through the facility.

The entry missile had carried them through several meters of outer shell and other potential problems. But the security system knew where they were now. Mateos got his turn to shine. The small-scale digital swarm he’d released into the station with him had already started their job.

A series of scanners, active sensors, and other security systems opened themselves to Mateos. He thought of himself as ironically old school. When he stepped into a building, ship, or station, he began to infect it right away. No need for ECM with a system like this.

Those scanners showed Mateos and his team run off, toward the administration section. Now that he could use the station’s senses, Mateos felt around for the missing bits Jaree had destroyed. A security cyborg. Cute. Mateos sent a general stand down order to those and hid their presence from the Nautilus systems.

A platinum package meant there was an active response team on premises, including a data sec expert like Mateos. So far he hadn’t met them. Good thing. Mateos couldn’t handle the other team’s version of Jaree. Which was one of the many reasons Malorn never hit MilCas or their suppliers. No sane person did.

Control over security meant their course was clear, so Jaree wouldn’t have to fight anything else until they reached their target. Hopefully not even then.

All five of the team moved into the room with their target in it like the experts they were. Mateos kept his coproc on security, but used his main brain to confirm this was their target and look around.

Blue creches filled with feet and an unknown liquid lined the walls like books in a library. All four sides of this large room held dozens upon dozens of creches. They were specifically told to blow up the Foxtrot bank in this room. According to the room schematics, which Mateos had access to now, the whole forewall was Foxtrot. Which meant the aftwall was theirs.

“Oh. Huh.” Cyborg bodies. “Oh… wow.” Not just cyborg bodies. These were top of the line military, no… black ops specification bodies. These were so illegal… Mateos actually chuckled to himself and called up the file on the occupants. None of them had a name, just numerical designations. He scanned them and picked the one at random: H-2791. It was close to the floor and near at hand. Jaree had finished placing the demolition charges. “Come over here and smash this thing, J. Don’t hurt what’s inside, that’s our bonus.”

Parted out, this one body would sell for millions. Maybe tens of millions. Jaree smashed two creches — the one Mateos and indicated and a second — and grabbed both of the bodies from within, a nude male and female. According to the spec, they should last weeks out of the creche without maintenance, but would need to be activated before then. He’d gotten all of the information he could out of the system.

This place was insane. MilCase would erase this station and every little secondary company attached to Etiolon the moment they learned about this. Better to proceed with Malorn’s plan B.

“Goin’ full burn folks.” He gave the command to blow the station out of the void. Mateos twitched at his own words. They were close to the missile and the extract-pod. Something had flickered across his view of the station’s security system. “Something’s…”

Jaree roared and bashed her fist through a skull which had appeared at her ankle level. It had cut her leg right off. She needed to get it or she’d… His own systems began screaming alerts into his field of view.

Arcane runes blazed to life around Mateos as nascent protections from his ship’s magi kicked in. Too late, unfortunately. He felt the possession take hold right as Mateos’s ability to control his body or mind faded.

Bad news for me, bad news for them.

Wizards never appreciated the stark raving paranoia of a magic-phobe like Mateos. Possession, soul binding, soul rend, all of it kept him awake and paralyzed at night. Even the few displays of magic by the other members of his crew were reduced to “fancy technical tricks” in his head. One trick, an entirely mundane one, was to hypnotically instill a systematic habitual behavior into one’s fingers. Mateos never thought about it anymore, he just tended to fiddle with them a certain way. All of the time.

Because if he stopped for more than thirty seconds, he had another twelve to enter an abort command before the charges spread throughout his body slagged him.

Mateos had grown beyond the urge to be sick when affected by magic now. Now he just gloated at the wizard who’d displaced his soul shouldered Mateos’s body and his drone swarm and tried to distract Jaree from murdering his fellow security personnel.

It was long forty-two seconds before the wizard died with Mateos.

He woke exactly six hours later with a gap in his memories. “Oh shit I died on mission.”

Malorn looked over Mateos. “But you succeeded. And you got a bonus.” The pirate admiral motioned his head toward Mateos and presented a steel-grey cyborg body, hanging from a hook like a suit. On her head was stamped the words: “OmegaZed” her chest bore another imprint: H-2791” There was no other identifying mark. “Could part her out…” Malorn twisted up the side of his head. “But I think that’d be a waste. There’s no ghost in there, we already checked. Gotta be a CC chick. Might find her useful.”

Mateos shrugged. He’d known he was successful before he woke up. If he’d died and failed Malorn… Mateos would still be asleep. As to his bonus, Mateos had no idea how he’d earned it, no idea what the cyborg hanging there was, or what it could do. “Um?”

“Here’s what we know.” Malorn sent the technician a data stream and his coprocessor summarized it for him.

“I’ll keep her.”

Malorn chuckled. “Good man, she’ll be useful on mission.”