Chapter Forty-Three

It was sunrise the next morning as the helo transport landed, the rest of the team standing by to watch me leave as I boarded it, in all my APS glory, the storage pack on my back packed with everything I thought I might need, dozens of large medikits, power cells I knew I could drain into an APS unit, clothing, food, anything and everything.

It was time to recover my friends, and as much as I’d love the help from Reign and the others, the simple truth was that the Fingers weren’t a place for any living creature out of full armor, and the storm that was raging there was predicted to last the next three days.

That was both a boon and a nightmare.

A boon because the electrical storm was fully preventing any kind of observation missions there, meaning that nobody that saw us going in, could tell what the fuck we were doing.

The nightmare side, was that there were horrific winds going in all directions, and while I had a plot to the location of Richie and Sync, if the helo was trashed by a crosswind, we were all fucked, and it seriously decreased the time on station we had.

We had thirty-six hours before the guild was going to be fucked up though, and that gave us two choices. First, we could go to the nest today, all of us, including me in my APS, and we could clear it—if I was on foot, the odds of success dropped significantly but it was possible, we’d just lose most of the teams doing it—that dealt with the immediate problem, but left Trees out there, playing silly games.

It would also most likely start the fight off that we couldn’t afford yet, with the major and his people, especially when they saw me vanish into the nest, considering it was in the undercity.

They’d send the ghost team in, and probably pay Trees as well, and I’d get absolutely pounded, with my team being caught in the crossfire as the major took me down.

On the other side though? We’d carefully disabled any cams anywhere near the warehouse for my takeoff, and while I and my companions were marked as boarded on the manifest of the helo, there were thousands of such vessels in action around the city at any one time.

If the major was looking for me? He’d already know where I was, and chances were that if he knew my suit was working? He’d have attacked already.

Instead the three of us—myself and Richie and Sync—were boarded under our pseudonyms, the handles we’d inevitably used when gaming, and that was our best chance.

“LDS aboard,” I confirmed to the pilot who flashed the ‘ready’ and ‘take off’ lights twice, clearly giving me all the warning I was getting.

The helo lifted, shifting under the additional weight as I forced myself into the sections set aside for me. It was an old transport helo, heavily reinforced, and the usual deployment pods I would have been in weren’t in this model, meaning I was reduced to holding tight to the seats, kneeling between them as it pitched and rolled, taking the gaps between the skyscrapers and arcologies at a rate that was frankly terrifying.

I kept hearing everything from collision warnings from drones as we blurred past, to air cabs and more screaming around us. I gritted my teeth, holding on tight and praying that the pilot didn’t fucking pancake us into the side of a building, as a sudden comm request came through.

It was an unknown ID, I almost denied it, then in a fit of contrariness, I accepted it instead, pulling it up and connecting, grateful for the distraction.

The connection was grainy, deliberately so, and the figure that spoke was as broken a figure as Stinger was originally, deliberately using tech to hide who and what they were.

I almost killed the connection then, expecting to be sold some shitty sob story or wild ass attempt at hacking, when they spoke.

“We. Know.” That was it. A shitty threat, if ever there was one, but before I could tell them to fuck off? A vid started to play. It was crappy quality, but it was clear who and what it was. It was Borrolet, filming me draining the nanites out of the specters and harvesting the remains. “You will pay us one hundred thousand credits a month, and quit the Vigilant Heart immediately.”

I stared at the figure before me, we were, in the simulation, sat across a table from each other, the chair under me small and uncomfortable, the table slightly bigger than it would be really, and the figure on the far side looming over me in a shitty attempt at intimidation.

They were an outline only, black as pitch and filled with a thousand swirling stars designed to make identifying them impossible.

“And if I don’t?” I asked, feeling a surprising wave of relief running through me as the blackmailer I’d been expecting finally showed themselves… more or less.

“Then we release the recording. You will have the technology claimed by the city, losing everything, and be executed when the truth that you were attempting to infect innocents with contaminated specter parts comes out.”

“Whatever.” I snorted. “I’m a little busy right now. Want to give me some details?”

“Details…?” he asked sounding confused.

“To pay you for fuck’s sake,” I lied, biting down on a rising need to vomit as the flyboy fucker in charge of the helo took another corner at a ridiculous speed.

“You have twenty-four hours, before…” they started, the ID showing up as Finn Tekk, which I assumed was bullshit, unless they were tremendously stupid and had actually shared their real name. But hey! I cut him off and made a call to Dondo, who answered surprisingly quickly.

“You miss me more than Reign, eh?” The half orc grinned at me, and I glared at him, swallowing my bile again.

“Fuck right off,” I said. “You know our deal for me to supply your boss with nanites?”

“Yeah?” he asked warily. “You better not be trying to back out of that shit, Kabutt, Oshbob doesn’t like—”

“He doesn’t like me , never mind people that try to fuck him with deals, I get it don’t worry. Some dickhead knows about it though and is trying to blackmail me…” I paused for a split second then went on, lying through my teeth. “…and he knows your boss is using the nanites, he’s planning on spreading the word and put him out of business.”

“You got any details on him?” he growled.

“He gave me an account to pay into, that’s all, not sure if the name is real.”

“Good enough, gimmie.” He nodded, and I sent the details over, trying not to smile as Dondo ended the call with a curt ‘we’ll deal with it’.

I couldn’t help but grin, knowing someone was in for a world of hurt now.

Clinging to the seats in the back of the old transport, I cursed, shifting my grip and moving as far towards the middle of the helo as possible.

I’d broken one of the seats accidentally, two rows ran up the middle of the helo, seats facing into the middle, with a space between them, and a row on either side, back to back, facing outwards, with the sides of the helo able to be cranked back to a huge degree.

Clearly it’d been designed to drop the maximum number of troops in one go, unloading from both sides at once, but as it was? With me in the middle in full armor I was being rocked from side to side constantly, then up and dipping down as the mad bastard pilot played at flying.

I’d never liked those goddamn flyboys, but fuck me, right now I was wishing for the arrogant fuck stains of the army helo divisions.

My fingers had left dented, crushed metal behind as I gingerly lifted them free, wincing at the damage done to the old craft, before shaking my head.

There wasn’t so much as an integrated anchor point back here, just small metal eye-links to run cables through, strapping or clipping your gear down.

They were obviously designed for infantry packs and so on, not multi-ton mecha, and fuck me it showed. I started to slide to the right, the scraping sound of my armor against the floor of the helo loud even to my ears inside my armor, as the squeal of tortured metal rang out.

I tried grabbing a link, managed to get a finger through it, and snapped it off.

This was going to be a long goddamn flight.

After twenty minutes I couldn’t take any more, and comm’d the flight deck, asking for a status update, then cursed roundly as I found we’d only just crossed the outer wall.

That was it.

After all that time we’d literally just crossed the wall of Artem, and were out into the wilderness.

The ETA to the Fingers? Five hours. Five fucking hours. The maximum range for the helo? Twelve hours, or so the pilot thought.

He thought .

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I gave in to my mounting rage and called Julius before we were too far out. Needless to say the helo didn’t have a dedicated comm node available.

“Kabutt?” Julius asked, looking harassed. “What the hell man, you there already? Give me good news!”

“There?” I growled. “Fuck’s sake, Julius, I’m not even properly out of the bastard city yet! There’s five more hours of flight time, six hours almost each way…”

“Long flight I guess, but that’s life…” he started and I cut him off.

“The pilot thinks the helo can manage a maximum range of twelve hours, Julius,” I snarled. “What’s six hours each way? He’s saying he’ll land on site if the weather isn’t too bad and I run off and collect, then come back to him? You think my people are going to be able to climb a mountain after being in cryo? They’ll barely be able to walk!”

“Tw- oh.” He winced. “Look, Kabutt, seriously, it was the best I could do, I’m sorry. Heavy lift helos outside of the army? They’re just not needed, there’s less than fifty in the city that I could find, and most of them? They’re corpo owned. You want a corpo drone watching as you retrieve your friends?”

“There must have been better options than this, come on man.” I sighed, bouncing and shaking from side to side as we hit some turbulence. Seriously, it feels like I’m going to fall out of the fucker at any minute.”

“There’s seven options for non-corpo affiliated heavy lift helos in the city,” Julius said bluntly. “Seven. Of those? Two were undergoing maintenance and are out of action for the next three or four days, so count them out. One is rated for a fifty ton lift, and is a three rotor ‘Battlefield support’ model, wide storage and so on, heavily armed…”

“Perfect…” I started and he nodded.

“For the trip out there and back? Seven hundred thousand credits. That’s the fuel cell usage more than anything else, but it also requires a flight plan be filed with the city, an independent observer from the city be aboard, and a background check on anyone that hires it. It’s heavily armed Kabutt. I know you’re a walking fucking weapon, but add in the ability to fly? That fucker could take down an arcology if it wanted to, they don’t let that shit fly without a damn good reason.”

“Okay, fair enough, but—”

“Of the remaining four, two are already booked, that puts us down to two options, one of the pilots swore blind his bird was perfect for our needs.”

“Okay…”

“He was also off his face on angel dust and naked when he took the call, not to mention painted blue, and kept telling me to call him ‘His Royal Majesty Paulus Hazelnuts, Patron Saint of Ribs, and Lord of the Banana hammock’. I decided that even considering the stable nature of most pilots, it was probably best to take the last option.”

“Fuck.” I groaned, shaking my head inside my armor. “Pilots man, why the hell are they all either mad or assholes?”

“Why pick one?” He snorted. “Half of them are ex racers and lunatics that escape the army for crashing their birds, you know what they say. If you can walk away from a landing it’s a good one, if you can use the bird again?”

“It’s a great landing.” I finished for him, nodding and cursing. “Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with my life.”

“Is that a serious question?” He snorted. “Look Kabutt, you’re in the latest and greatest death machine the army can build, you’re armed to the teeth, and if the worst comes to the worst? Get him to fly close to the ground and when he runs out of fuel, jump out. You’ll be fine, he’ll crash and die, and I’ll save half the flight fee. Now, no offence, but I’ve got a load of shit going on here, and I’m with a team of newbies, hunting specters. I kinda need to focus on how many of them I brought down with me, or I’ll take less out than I should.”

“Fair point.” I sighed. “Good luck with that, and shoot straight man.”

“You too.”

With that, he was gone, and I was back to rocking side to side, buffeted over and over by the wild winds out in the wastes.

I contemplated calling Reign, more out of a need for distraction than anything else, and quickly dismissed that as well. Instead I pulled up a story I’d started reading ages ago, and settled in, forcing myself to relax, focusing on that, as my RI read it aloud in my mind.

Hours passed in a sick feeling blur as I constantly moved from attempts at distraction, checking out everything from the schematics for the harvester, to the internal records for the arm, to watching out of the single tiny window.

I was quickly cursed and ordered to get back into the middle of the helo, as I was throwing the weight distribution off, and I did as I was told, having seen what I always did out there, a fat load of nothing.

Miles upon miles of scrubland flashed past under the belly of the helo, long dead and arid, blasted by everything from conventional munitions, to the sun, to radiation and chemical leaks.

There were entire sections of the wilds that while they were a wasteland, were full to overflowing with life, but there was nothing you’d want to go near.

Landing near to more than half of them would be a death sentence, even for me in my armor, and here and there flying creatures could be seen distantly tracking us.

I head the occasional click and whirr of the helos onboard guns, automated turrets that locked onto targets, waiting for a firing solution, and a command, but fortunately nothing closed the distance.

By the time we closed with the Fingers, finally, the sky had gone from leaden all the way to roiling, with thunder and lightning shaking the little craft from side to side and hailstones hitting the fusillade like constant machine-gun fire.

“I can’t get you too close!” The pilot finally deigned to speak to me, connecting as he battled the weather. “The winds… its crazy here!”

“It’s the Fingers!” I snapped. “It’s always crazy!”

“I don’t fly here,” he replied flatly, the air filled with flashing lights, warning beeps and more. “Nobody with any sense flies here, you know there was an army helo lost here only a few weeks back?”

“Yeah!” I snapped. “I was on the fucker!”

I pinged him the directional data again, checking our altitude and distance, and saw we were over two miles from it, when he shook his head.

“Can’t do it!” he declared. “Sorry and all, but this is costing us fuel like crazy, I keep this up? We’re not flying back.”

“What the fuck do you mean…” I started, only to have him speak over me, professionalism and experience coming clearly through as he spoke, even as he was clearly distracted.

“For every hundred meters we fly deeper into the storm, It’s costing us the equivalent of three hundred meters worth of fuel, I’ve got a reserve that should have given me an hour on site—”

“You said we didn’t have enough fuel before!”

“I was making sure you understood not to fuck around,” he snapped back. “Right, that hour on site? It’s now forty minutes. Sure that should be plenty, but at this rate? We’ll have less than ten minutes, and that’ll be if you can find me somewhere flat and stable to land. You want me to hold while you climb up, or keep station off a cliff in these winds? You’re down to a single flyby, you miss that? We’re not getting back. That’s on top of the risk we’re running of flying into the side of a fucking mountain, you know, because we’re literally blind here!”

“Electromagnetic…”

“The distortion is too strong! According to the sensors? We should be in a cliff right now, or splattered across it. No, you’ve got a choice, either we turn around right now, and we come back in a few days when the storm blows itself out?”

“Or?”

“Or I drop you off on a plateau somewhere here, and you use your Lidar as you go on foot. You map the section out, and I drop back, land and conserve fuel. That’s gonna cost me fuel to go out and come back, then go out again, so you’ll need to get whatever you’re getting, and bring it as far out as you can on foot. You’ll get one chance, a single pass, so you’ll need to be ready!”

“You’re fucking kidding me!” I snarled, my stomach dropping and my asshole trying to make neutronium at the thought of walking the fucking mountains again. “Seriously, there’s entire sections here that there’s no way up!”

“Or down,” he agreed. “And a couple of miles in this might be dozens more on foot, but the choice is I drop you here, and return for you in an hour, or I don’t, and I turn us around right now!”

“Fucking flyboys!” I snarled, shaking my head as I searched for a way out, a solution, anything that wasn’t such a goddamn fuckup of a plan.

I had nothing.

“Last chance!” he called. “Turning now!”

“Drop me!” I ordered, grimly, mentally swearing I’d never fly in a fucking helo again. “Drop me now!”

“Use the winch!” he called, as a section of the ceiling clattered back revealing a filthy old winch and chain setup, that I quickly locked into place on the connectors on my shoulders and back, glad of the arm articulation.

“Can it hold my weight?” I yelled over the sudden sound of the howling wind, the floor directly below the winch starting to split, snow and screaming gales filling the compartment as flashing lights went off, warning of cabin depressurization.

“We’re gonna find out!” The pilot laughed, an edge of madness in his voice as he tried to hold the helo steady, the floor cranking back wider and wider as the seats, clearly fixed to the front and back of the superstructure were left dangling.

“I fucking hate pilots,” I whispered to myself as I felt the connections start a slow spin, the world starting to rotate for me, as I slid lower, my legs dangling into the snow and storm tossed void.

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