When I awoke, it was with a pounding headache, a taste like a cat had shit in my mouth, and a steady beeping as the suit pulsed audio and visual cues to wake me up.
I focused groggily, the flashing lights of the HUD tamping down to normal, as I saw the stealthy movements below.
It took a few seconds to make sense of them. Snow was still falling, and we were high enough in the mountains that we got as much low clouds passing over the ground as we did them passing above.
After a minute, though, it resolved.
Footprints appeared. Whoever was making them moved, pausing and waiting for the footprint to fill in, before making the next.
It was slow going, but they were in full stealth. The only person I could see being up here, in full stealth, and moving that carefully?
I locked a tight beam onto the figure and whispered as I “knocked” on her suit for the connection.
“Sync?”
“Fuck’s sake,” came the response. As the request was approved, Sync’s image appeared in my HUD. “You owe me what it’s going to cost to have my armor cleaned.”
“Shit yourself again, huh?” I replied, unable to help myself.
“We’re in a suit that’s so cutting-edge that we don’t know half the shit it can do yet. Most of the really high-end tech is locked down and restricted until it’s been approved for the battlefield, and yet we still get a fucking tube rammed up our asses without so much as a drink bought first, and it’s held in place with tape. Tape I’m allergic to,” she snarled.
“Thanks for that mental image.” I sighed. “Where’s Richie?”
“Hidden in a cave. Barnes?”
“Toast.” I shook my head. “I left him in the wreckage to rest and climbed up high. He got his commlink working and connected to a satellite. Next thing I know, a shark is Hellfiring him into the next life.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. My antenna was trashed, or I’d have been hit as well.”
“Mine’s offline. Richie locked it down.”
“He okay?”
“Broken pelvis. Swears it’s from all the action he had last leave.”
“Lying bastard.” I grunted. “He gets less action than Fergie, and Fergie’s both ginger and dead.”
“Fuck’s sake, boss. He’s only been gone a few hours!” Sync snapped, and I bit back on my response, hanging my head in shame. “Be realistic—if there’s another life after this one, Fergie’s already knee-deep somewhere.”
I snorted, knowing she was trying.
“Fine, let’s get to Richie, then we can plot a fucking murder.”
“You don’t think it’s accidental then?” she quipped.
“Yeah, in the same way that Kevski’s marriage broke up because he tripped and his dick ‘fell’ into his wife’s sister. Total accident.”
“I remember the mimed demonstration of him trying to ‘help her up.’” Sync sighed. “And Tyrannus walked in, first day in charge, only to see that.”
“Wonder if that’s where it all went wrong?” I muttered, pushing up and out of the snow, shaking it off my back, then moving to start the climb down.
For a second, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. I couldn’t afford to use the active camo, nor could I climb down without turning my back to Sync.
I trusted her—she’d been one of us for years—but…someone had arranged all of this, and for a second, I doubted her. Then I remembered all the times she could have killed me, and I shook it off. Paranoia was a useful tool, it kept you sharp, but there was a limit, a point where it fucked you up.
I’d need to watch that.
By the time I reached Sync, she’d deactivated her camo, and to my relief, she was both armed and ready. We hugged briefly. The incongruity of two of the feared APS operators, massive machines of death, hugging it out made us laugh, before she led me back down the mountain.
Forty minutes later, and we were with Richie in a sheltered cave, taking turns to exit our suits, stretch, wash with handfuls of compacted snow—a refreshing and yet terrible experience—and then reentering, locking the suit up tight and shivering as we recovered.
“What’s the plan, boss?” Richie asked after we’d eaten some emergency rations, and I shook my head.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” I admitted. “How’d you both survive, anyway?”
“Something hit Scott’s bay,” Richie said. “It detonated. Next thing I know, I’m falling, smashed through a tree, then landed on a rocky outcropping. A spike, you know? I think it’s done permanent damage to my sex life.”
“Your right hand will forgive you, I’m sure.” Sync snorted. “I landed a little farther off, hit a snowdrift, and when I dug myself out, I found him.”
“Dragged me into the drift, then laid on me.” He forced a grin. “Told you I was irresistible, even broken.”
“I have active camo and a secondary battery designed to use it,” she grumbled. “Unlike you idiots, I can use it properly. It made sense.”
“Irresistible,” Richie said again, then sighed. “It’s a curse that’s followed me all my life.”
“Anyway, what’s the play here, boss?” Sync gnawed on a bit of dehydrated schmeat. “Gods, I hate these shitty rations…”
“As I said, I don’t know. Some fucker has it out for us. They sent a shark to take down the helo—that’s a serious cred loss for the corps, even without all of us—then Hellfires to make sure that we were down. Someone seriously doesn’t want us reporting shit, but not sure who.”
“Tyrannus. Has to be,” Richie said flatly. “He lost his bonus, and got slapped down hard from above. Probably fucked any chance of him getting any juicy corpo job when he gets out without serious creds changing hands. He’d do it.”
“He would,” I agreed. “He’s enough of an asshole he would, I’ve no doubt. The point is, though, could he do it? I’m not so sure. Hell, I don’t think the major could either. Too many moving parts, and too many chances to go wrong, with too short notice to seal it up tight.”
“Maybe he saw the chance and ran with it?” Sync suggested. “What about the corpo scumbag?”
“Could do it. Again, the question is why?”
“Hide the AROC,” Richie suggested.
“Then why send us there when they weren’t ready? If it was M-Corp fucking us over, trying to get our suits or make the corps expand or whatever, they’d have been ready. Think about how it could have gone. We walk in and they’re ready for us? Just send the teams in separate, space out the helos? We land, spread out to search and get hit with the AROC; we’re dead and the suits are theirs. They wait for Blue to arrive, do the same again—take the helos down, bug out with whatever escape plan they had in place.”
“They’d have had both teams easy enough.” Sync nodded. “Hell, the mech wasn’t even ready.”
“If that’d been ready, hidden and loaded? It could have taken us out like it did Fergie, cut us all in half if they weren’t after the APS. Can’t have been the corpos that did it…or at least not M-Corp.”
“I still hate those shifty fucks,” Sync muttered, and I nodded.
“Everyone does.”
“Their credits spend well though.” Richie sighed. “Look, we can figure out who and why later. What do we do right now?”
“SARS will be on their way, and there’s no chance that they’ll leave the area before they know what’s happened,” I pointed out. “Search and Rescue Squad are like fucking dogs with a bone. They’ll tear the mountain apart looking for us, and they’ll be running full record all the way. Nobody can make us vanish then. We wait for them to arrive, walk out, and boom.”
“It’ll be boom, all right,” Sync snapped. “They took out the helo, they sent a shark with Hellfires—you think they’ll just shrug and say ‘Ah well, maybe next time’?”
“Nope, but whatever they do with SARS there will be recorded. Nobody gets to hide shit when there’s that many people involved. It’ll come out, because some turd will want to make their name by sharing it with the world.”
“So, not for the sake of truth and righteousness?” Richie snorted. “Nah, don’t answer that. It’s always some hack who ‘wants the world to just be safe and fair’ and all that crap. The next thing you know, they’re doing tooth-gel adverts and starring in pornos with brand-new horse cocks grafted on.”
“You’ve got real issues, Richie, you know that?” Sync sighed.
“Exactly, and yeah, he does,” I agreed with her. “So we wait for SARS or whoever comes. I walk out first…we see if I get hit with an orbital or whatever. You fuckers stay hidden. Maybe we bury the entrance here…fuck my armor up a bit, make it look like I crashed outside. Draw them in nice and close. Then, if something happens, I’ve got you fuckers backing me up.”
“I don’t like it,” the others said, almost as one.
“You think I do?” I countered. “I get to stand out there and wave my dick around, see if anyone shoots it.”
“Maybe we’re all being paranoid,” Sync said after a few seconds, and we both glared at her.
“You hit your head or something?” Richie asked her, and I snorted.
“No. Some fucker is out to get us, that’s sure as shit. I mean we’re thinking that SARS might be in on it. For that to happen, SARS as a whole would be compromised. Who’d bother? Just pay an armorer to fuck our kit up on the way out, put a virus in the latest updates, shut our suits down when we walk in. That’d take a single guy, maybe two or three to do the code, that’s it. A whole SARS team, as well as the headquarters’ operators watching over it? The captain and the major? For what?”
“You got a point?” I asked.
“I think it’s an opportunist. Like the scavs…what if they hit a depot and it got hushed up? They grabbed the AROC and then they sent the shark as well; some gang funded them and they got all pissy? Look, hitting us in a snowstorm when some dickhead pilot’s playing with the Fingers? That’s easily hidden. As far as anyone’s concerned, we crashed and the Hellfires went off. Maybe they pay off someone high up to read the SARS report and close it, no fuss…that’s doable.
“As it is, though, we survived. We go back to the base? They’ll come after us again. We’re the only witnesses. They can’t afford to let us live.”
“So what do we do?” I rubbed my chin in thought. The confines of the suit made even that movement awkward, let alone eating and drinking.
“We go rogue,” Sync said softly. “Come on, guys, don’t tell me you’ve not considered it. Just walking the fuck out, heading back to Artem, vanishing into the mess? Richie, you can hack anything—you could sort us new identities easily enough. We hit a gang, wipe them out…that’s disposable income. We use their IDs, start again.”
“The trackers?” Rich asked, his voice making it clear he was considering it.
“In the suits?” she asked. “Kill it.”
“Wait, that’s a point. Our suit trackers—why didn’t they use them to find us?”
“Storm around the Fingers will block it. There’s a shitload of electrical and magnetic debris here. Once the storm is over? Sure, they’ll activate them, and boom. But I can kill them, I think,” Richie said.
“Do it, and wipe these conversations,” I ordered him. “I don’t need a fucking missile interrupting us.”
“Sir,” he responded automatically, reaching out with both arms. Filaments extended from recesses to jack into our suits physically. His role as the team’s tech granted him access to shit we didn’t see or need. “Working on it, but thanks to the codes from the major, I’ve erased the recordings now, and taken the system offline. We can talk freely.”
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“Right.” I sighed. “So, they think we’re dead, and we what? Walk away? You think nobody’s going to notice three unregistered APS suits rocking up to the West Gate?”
“No way they’d let us in,” Rich said firmly. “The suits would be reported miles out. We’d have helos inbound in minutes if we’re not on the list of merc operators.”
“So what do we do?” Sync snarled. “We just go back to the base? Wait and see when someone’s going to wipe us out? It’s not happening! You’re all right…” She looked at me. “You’ve got what? Ten months left?”
“Nine,” I corrected.
“Nine months…you play up you don’t know what happened, maybe no memory of the whole mission, and they might leave you alone, not worth the risk. No way all three of us can pull that off. No, we try that shit, and we’re dead.” She shook her head. “We’ve got four years in the corps yet. That’s a hundred missions easy. A hundred chances to fuck with us, if a knife in the dark doesn’t do it for us.”
“So what, we run off and live in the wilds?” I shook my head. “They’ll soon hear about a set of suits roaming around. Not to mention batteries. Where the hell we gonna get recharges? Food, water, ammo?”
“The scavs manage it.”
“They’re scavs. They’ve got entire communities out there. We’re city, and worse, we’re judgment. They’ll hunt us for fun without the suits, and with them? Hell, we’ll have the other cities hunting us in a few days!”
“What if we sleep?” Richie asked suddenly.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“What if we sleep?” he repeated. “Seriously, think about it. Sync and I, we trigger the emergency cryo function. I trick it into thinking we’re injured. All the failsafes go online, and it locks us into a coma, drops our body temps into cryosleep. You come back for us, get us registered with a merc company. You can get our suit details easily enough.”
“And what, I just leave you here?” I asked, aghast. “Frozen in a fucking cave? Ready for some scav to find and strip?”
“Yeah, basically,” he replied, grinning as he thought about it more. “Look, Sync was right—one of us, a sole survivor, injured, confused? It looks like the pilots crashed and you were thrown clear. You claim no memory of the mission, they tell you whatever bullshit they like—you know they will. You just agree, keep your head down, stay off the grid, make no fucking waves, nothing. Then you leave.”
“And you two just sleep it all away?” I asked, disbelieving what I was hearing.
“Shit, yes. Look, you find out that it’s a genuine fuckup, and there’s no threat? Great, you come back for us, wake us up. We all get bollocked, maybe a year or two added on, but that’s it. We live. If they cover it up and sell you a bullshit story? You know they’d have killed us, and you know who to fucking hunt. You get out? Follow the original plan.”
“Join a merc company,” I said softly, nodding slowly. “Get my suit registered, get all the shit we need, then get a hacker to get us a mission up here, just me on the way out, pick you up, bring you back.”
“New identities, suits licensed…we’re out of here in, what? A year? Year and a half tops. Give you six months in a normal merc outfit and you’ll be running it, especially in a suit.”
“We’ll need to replace the mil-spec mods. They take them back.”
“So, two years. Tell me you’ve not been saving to replace them anyway.”
“You know I have,” I muttered.
“So six months as a standard merc, shit detail, pay off the carvers to upgrade you, then you get into the leadership once you’re back in your suit. I know a hacker—he can sort this shit for us. Once you’re plugged in, he’ll sort trackers and authorizations. As far as the local police know? We’ve finished our service. We’re all legit.”
“You trust him?” I asked skeptically.
“Hell, no.” Richie scoffed. “But he loves credits, and if he has the chance to earn real scratch? He’ll take it, and he’ll not dare fuck us over. Armored Personnel Suit operators, remember? A hacker pisses us off, he ends up as a smear on the floor.”
“How, though?” I muttered a minute later, actually thinking about it. “How do we convince them I wasn’t just hiding and…”
“That’s the bit you’re not gonna like, boss,” Richie said apologetically. “You want to do this?”
“No, but it’s the best chance we’ve got, and this storm isn’t going to last much longer. They’ll send drones in soon. Hell, they might be outside already…” I shook my head. “It’s not like I’ve got a better plan.”
“Then you need to be fucked up, and badly, and we need to time this so it looks like you’ve been laid there in the snow, fucked up for a while…”
Silence fell, and I cursed, seeing exactly what he was getting at.
“We need to bury the entrance as well,” I pointed out. “If you’re outside…”
Grim nods were shared, and Richie disconnected from our suits, straightening up.
“Last chance to change your mind, boss. We’ve got no time, so either come up with something fast or…”
“I…” I sighed. “Fuck. I’ve got nothing,” I admitted. “You sure you’re going to be okay in here for a year or more?”
“Be safer than you’ll be out there,” he assured me. “I’ll do you a datapacket, one that I’ll hide, like seriously hide, better than those pornos you watch and we all pretend aren’t obvious in the team tacnet.”
“I…How?” I asked, choosing not to respond to that.
“Data log. I’ll encode it, lock it right down. You take it to my man, he’ll know how to unlock it. Nobody outside of a high-tier AI will be able to besides him.”
“I’ll bury us,” Sync said softly, shaking her head. “I don’t like this, but you’re right. It’s our best chance. You sort the logs, I’ll get the cave entrance ready, then fuck him up. He covers us over, and then…”
“Then we get to have a nap.” Richie grinned. “Hey, look on the upside. We no longer have to put up with those dickhead officers.”
“Yeah, if we live and don’t end up in a military jail.”
“Or stripped by scavs when you’re asleep, and I’m shot in the head when I open my door,” I pointed out, getting grim chuckles.
“Well, what will be, will be,” Richie quoted, reaching out and laying a hand on my armored shoulder. “You’ve got this, boss.”
“I do, but do you?” I asked. We all knew the cryosleep was an emergency deal. It’d freeze them, all right, but if their batteries gave out before I got back for them? It’d not be pretty.
“I’ll make it work,” he assured me, before grinning. “You remember, boss, this data? It’ll be the only way to find us. You can’t have the location on anything else. And the Fingers give off weird signals at the best of times—radioactive as fuck, so that’ll block any scanners. You lose this, we’re stuck here till the batteries die, and we rot.”
“How do I find it?” I swallowed hard, not liking the way this was going.
“You get in your suit, and you ask for it. Simple. The suit tracks everything that you are, remember? If someone’s forcing you to ask, it’ll never give it up. It’ll detect duress, so you ask only when you’re really ready.”
“And if I lose my suit?”
“Yeah, don’t do that,” Richie said quickly, shaking his head. “Like, seriously, don’t lose your suit.”
“Nine months.” I sighed, clapping him on the shoulder. “Nine months till discharge. Six months on the merc list, doing shitty jobs, build my rep. Then, as soon as I can afford the rest of my mods, I’ll be back for you, and I’ll bring the hacker.”
“And a medic,” Richie recommended, glancing toward the mouth of the cave where Sync was already stacking rocks. “Seriously, if you’re much more than a year? We’ll need one, regardless. More than a year in cryo without the proper prep, and we’re gonna be fucked up. But a little medical magic and some nanites? We’ll recover.”
“A year,” I promised. “I’ll be back within a year. Somehow, I’ll make it happen.”
“That’d be good, boss,” Richie said on a private link. “Seriously, the longer we’re down? The more risk of memory loss. The nanites will rebuild the cells fine. As long as we’re alive? They can bring us back given enough time, but cell damage in the brain? It’s the memories and more that’ll be lost, and those are what make us, us.”
“I know. I’ll make it. I’ve got most of what I need for the mods as it is. A few jobs—hell, a few decent bonuses between now and then? I’ll be done.”
“Yeah, well, give it a few months before you come for us after you get out, okay? Just in case.”
“Don’t come too soon, don’t come too late, eh?”
“Not the first time you’ve been told that, is it.” He grinned. “Okay, boss. Go help Sync. I’ll get this ready.”
I clapped him on the shoulder again and moved to the entrance to the cave, grabbing a large rock and heaving it into place.
“So…snow’s still pretty heavy,” I commented.
“Yeah.”
“So…might be awhile before the storm blows itself out,” I tried again.
“Yeah.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“Sync…”
She stopped, spinning to face me. “Just don’t, okay?” she begged. “I’ve lost two of us today, and now you’re going. We’re going to fucking sleep, and we might never wake up…”
“This wasn’t my idea—”
“My idea was to run!” she snapped.
“We’d die. Even if we could hide the suits, the scavs left us alone, and the monsters and shit didn’t find us, we’d die of starvation and fucking dehydration, not to mention radiation.”
“We’d die together,” she muttered. “Not slipping away in my fucking sleep.”
“I’d rather go in my sleep,” I admitted.
“Not me. Just the thought…Why’d you think I don’t sleep well?”
“Because you’re a paranoid psycho?”
“Well, yeah, all right, but besides that,” she offered with a forced chuckle.
“It’ll be all right, Sync, you know it will,” I assured her. Both of us knew I was lying.
The next fifteen minutes were spent in hard labor, digging massive boulders out and piling them over the entrance to the cave, then burying it in snow, until it was almost all hidden.
“Time to get inside,” I told her, and she nodded.
“You know you need to look really fucked up for this to work, right?” she said, and I nodded. “And to make sure they don’t look here too closely.”
“Just not my face or my dick, all right? I need a reason to live.”
“It’d be a service to women everywhere,” she joked softly, before shaking her head. “But no. Best way?”
“Yeah?”
“If I shoot you or cut you, they might analyze it. Better it’s impact, and weather.”
“So…” I groaned, knowing what was coming. “The cliff?”
“Yeah, boss. Sorry, and…we need the power. So, as you’re not gonna need it, if we could siphon your batteries?”
“Get in there,” I growled, nodding to the cave before sighing, and stopping her with a hand on her shoulder. The wind screamed around us; snow whipping back and forth made it impossible to see much beyond a few feet. “You’re right, and I’ll miss you, okay? Look after that idiot?”
“I always do.” She nodded.
She moved in, and we worked to bury the entrance, her on the inside and me on the outer, dragging a sheet of old steel from fuck knows what or when, across part of the entrance, and laying it over and under more stones and fractured shale.
When there was only a small space left, I reached my left hand in awkwardly, and I felt the connections locking in. I approved the battery drain, watching as it fell, siphoned off to Sync’s suit.
Twenty minutes later, the connection retracted and was replaced by Richie, as a datapacket was fed through to my suit, vanishing without a trace as quickly as it appeared.
“I’m going to set a general system wipe for fifteen minutes on your suit,” he told me. “It’s top level only, personal stuff. It’s all backed up, like Fergie’s and Scott’s stuff, and ours, now that I think about it. But it’ll read like the system was damaged and did a reboot. Your main bond and synergy will be fine. It’s just so nobody finds us doing this in the system memory and comes looking.”
“Fifteen minutes.” I nodded that I understood.
“When it happens, the suit will power down, like full offline mode, then reboot. Be ready to hit the lock. You don’t want it opening automatically and not being able to close it again…”
“I’ll make sure I’m in place,” I said, not looking forward to it.
“How will you do it?” he asked, and I snorted.
“There’s a cliff to the left, three hundred meters. Provided I survive the fall, I’ll be believably far enough away from the crash, and you both.”
“You’ll survive. Impact resistant, remember? Just make sure you don’t tense. Stay loose, relaxed, and yeah, be ready—it’s gonna suck.”
“I know.”
“Hey, SARS is good, though, right? They’ll find you?”
“I damn well hope so,” I muttered, gripping his hand once in farewell, then moving back, trying—and failing—to not feel like I was abandoning my friends.
Once they were covered, I got moving. The external battery on my suit drained utterly, and my internal went on emergency backup. I grabbed a rock as I walked, smashing the external battery free, so that nobody could tell that the power had been siphoned away, and getting ready for what was coming.
The impacts would mess my suit up—and me—pretty badly, but as far as the fall was, I’d have a good chance of surviving it.
I kept telling myself that the suits were made with this kinda shit in mind, and that I needed to do it. But the truth was, when I finally made it to the cliff edge, across a narrow divide from where the now frozen wreckage of the helo was buried, I was fucking terrified.
Electrical bursts, bright blue and white, flared all around me, some blanketed by the flurries of storm and the clouds, others seemingly right before me as the centuries-long buried masses of metal attracted them.
I shuffled up to the edge, standing right on it, watching the wind and driven snow whipping around literally right before and under me. I took a deep breath.
The counter ticked down. 4…3…2…
I’d always felt that stupid urge when on a high ledge or wherever, to just step off, to let myself tumble free, and today? Right when that self-destructive impulse would be at its most useful?
Totally gone.
1…
The suit lights flickered and died, plunging me into darkness deeper than that of a corpo’s soul, and my suit powered down. I heard the various fans and more slowing. A steady, distant buffeting of the wind outside my suit was the only evidence that the outside world still existed.
For long seconds I stood there in silence, waiting for the wind to tip me out, as memories of my team came thick and fast.
I saw Fergie and Scott, Barnes and the others. I saw their smiles and heard their laughter, and my blood boiled. They were dead, or had their lives ruined, altered forever, by some corpo scumbag trying to make an extra few creds.
They’d never face justice, not for what they’d really done, and the destruction their greed had caused, and I knew it. No. What was worse was that looking back? I should have seen it coming. Yeah, fine, I couldn’t have foreseen all of it, but that Blue had been split off? That Richie was watching the base and that the stupid fucking pilots had taken us through the Fingers?
If I’d paid a little more attention, instead of being so trusting? I could have saved them. If I’d questioned the pilots on the way back, I’d have known more. I could have prepared. I could have looked up data on the target site, and maybe figured out what we were chasing.
All of it was there, and I could have done something about some of it at least.
The APS were supposed to judge the wasteland. We were supposed to bring the law to the lawless, to enforce the little civilization that we managed to cling to, onto the fucks out there. Now others, people who thought they were above the laws, had turned on us.
No. The guilty paid for their crimes. They had to, or what was the point?
We’d planned to go merc from the APS, sure, but we’d always be ready to dispense judgment. We’d protect the innocent, and we’d fucking bring judgment to the guilty.
We could be mercs and do that still; we’d just be picky fucking ones, that’s all. This couldn’t be allowed to stand. The guilty had to pay.
My heart grew colder and colder as I reforged myself in the fires of my own blame. I used the pain of the loss of my friends to drag up images, and to stare at them, to see them, and then to look at Richie and Sync, knowing that their lives were truly in my hands.
I couldn’t afford to be a trusting fool. Never again. Trust and mercy got me into this clusterfuck. No, I needed to be hard. Like so many others from the shittier areas of the city, I’d learned to be a bastard when I was crossed, to stab first and to ask questions never. But now?
The army had taught me right from wrong; it had taught me honor, and that until someone picked up a weapon, they were classed as innocent…But when they did touch a weapon, they weren’t innocent anymore. They became a threat, even if they weren’t yet guilty.
Now I was going to have to be even harder.
Tyrannus would be out soon as well. I had until then to get myself in check, start getting whatever kit I needed, and to get things in place.
I needed to be ready. Four months he’d be on the watch list for, like me and any other who was on release from the forces. If I waited until he was off the list? No doubt he’d be in some cushy corpo compound.
No, I needed to get things moving, and fast. Maybe hit him and question the fucker by taking a few days’ leave? I needed to be hard, I needed to be merciless, and I needed to get this right the first time. If I didn’t? Then I was failing the only family I’d ever known, and I wasn’t doing that.
They trained us to be questioners, as well as the rest. They taught us that once we left the base, we were the arbiters of justice. If we had to, we did whatever was needed.
Well—I’d do whatever needed to be done, and I’d make fucking sure that Richie and Sync were out of this and safe, even if I had to burn my soul to ash in the process.
I stood there for several long seconds, breathing coming faster and faster, nerving myself up to this…before rocking myself forward, the sensation of movement slow to come.
I fell outward, tumbling into the stormy night air.