Chapter Forty-Two

An hour later and I was sitting smiling to myself as I played with the armor, each and every part I needed spread out around me like a childhood connection toy.

All in all the morning was going well, all things considered.

I’d had coffee, some great sex, nobody had shot at me, and I had a ‘little’ building project to keep me busy for a few days.

Also, Reign and the girls were planning on doing as many assassination and bounty missions as they could over the next few days, so it meant we had credits coming in, they got more ‘real world’ experience and I got peace and quiet.

“That looks complicated.” The voice from behind me almost made me drop the crystal matrix in shock, I’d been so absorbed in it as he moved in I’d not noticed the bugger’s approach.

“It is,” I assured Dondo, looking over at him and frowning. “No offence, Dondo, but usually the only time I see you, you’re swinging that chair leg you pretend is a knob around, and dragging the girls off, or you’re here to ruin my day with Oshbob wanting something, so which is it?”

“Neither,” he said, a little smile on his face as he took a sip of his coffee. “I’m not busy, usually Oshbob has jobs for me, today he doesn’t, so I’m relaxing, thought I’d come and have a look at this.”

“Well, just don’t touch anything,” I ordered. “No offence, but unless you know what you’re doing…”

“It’s an expensive mistake waiting to happen—like that ANN, if it’s not kept cool, it’ll degrade,” he pointed out.

I frowned, looking around, searching for the… fuck.

“Shit…” I started to get up, and he waved me back, already striding over to reconnect the loose power connection to the ANN. As soon as it was plugged back in, he flicked a few of the connections, then picked up a sensor and connected it to the output, checking the readings before nodding.

“Solid green,” he assured me. “No degradation, yet.”

“I’ll need a new connector putting on that then.”

“Looks like a factory fault.” He rubbed at it with a calloused thumb. “You can see the way it flexes, cheap crystal.”

“You know your stuff,” I agreed grudgingly.

“Oshbob likes us to learn the basics.”

“The basics?” I said, a little surprised. “You recognized an ANN and knew it needed the connector checked. That’s not ‘basic’.”

“Depends on your point of view.” He grunted, amused. “I deal with a lot of things for Oshbob. I get an Artificial Neural Network out and I break it? I’ll be looking in the gutter for my teeth, so yeah, keeping a unit like that fit for use is a basic thing.”

“Interesting,” I said slowly. “So, if you know what an ANN is, you’d know how to integrate units to each other?”

“Some, not sure about this, I heard it’s a lot of crystal integration, that’s why I wanted a look at it,” he said, leaning against the wall and sipping his coffee again.

“Still, you can run a link and set up turrets?” I asked, and he nodded as if that was nothing. “Well, we’ve got six.” I nodded to the turrets in boxes on the far side of the room. “I need them setting up with overlapping fields of fire.”

“Where?” he asked, moving over to the boxes and glancing in. “And these the ones we got you?”

“Yeah.” I swallowed my desire to snarl at the fact that it was always fucking Oshbob at the bottom of any dodgy dealing. “And they need setting up in here and outside. We need…”

I explained the locations I’d picked out, and the reasons; four outside, each with at least one overlapping field of fire, and sensors that were rigged and hardened, a central basic node to run everything off and a simple RI to manage it. The remaining two turrets were to be set up inside the warehouse, both in strategic locations, hidden from casual observation.

He agreed to help with the installation of them all, provided he got a few nice little details in exchange.

He’d apparently had his eyes on a plasma sword for a long time, as well as wanting the training to use it properly. He’d seen the monomolecular blades that the various nutters about the city wielded—as did Gessh and Luna for that matter—but he wanted the god fucking standard.

I hesitated, then shrugged at his price. The blades weren’t cheap, but if he could actually get them? It was worth agreeing to teach him a little of fighting with it, in exchange for making sure the fucker actually chased Oshbob up to get us the ones we needed.

I was also fairly sure that nothing that was going on here was without that bastards approval, so he wanted Dondo to know the inside of the suits, and how to use a plasma sword. Probably in case I ever went after Oshbob.

Some might think that having a potentially untrustworthy ally like Dondo set up my turrets was a mistake, and they’d be right, if not for the fact that I still had, stored away in my RI, the settings I was going to be using for the control RI.

It’d be linked to me, personally, and my RI as the primary owner. Dondo could insert whatever shitty little hacks he wanted, and when my RI installed that? He’d have wasted his time.

It might be that I was a little paranoid, but that was life.

The morning morphed into the afternoon quicker than I expected, and Dondo proved to be better company than I thought, the rough jokes, and surprising insights as we worked, as well as having someone to bounce a technical question off now and then was a relief.

Most of the time he didn’t have a clue, this was APS tech after all, and it was head and shoulders above the levels of most engineers and mechanics. I only knew what I was doing through rigorous training, but there was something about explaining the technical steps to someone else that helped you to see the issue yourself.

An old training sarge had called it ‘rubber ducking’ after a supposedly ancient custom of explaining your system to a literal rubber duck, as saying it out loud helped you to find the issues.

Being a training sarge, he had an actual rubber duck with an eyepatch that when you explained your mistakes to it, was programmed to give you constructive abuse for an hour solid.

‘Constructive’ being things like pointing out you were too dumb to breed and so on. Still, by the time the girls finally returned, I’d managed to get the skeleton of the suit fully operational again, the legs were fully enclosed and the jump-jets attached, although the power still needed routing for them, and the arms were attached fully again, both undergoing integration tests.

Dondo had pretty much earned his place in the sword training that I was planning on giving, and the turrets were in place, even if not fully active yet.

Reign, Luna, Gessh and Todds had carried out two minor hits, literally only a few hundred credits each, but they’d also had three quarters of the day in specialist training with the Stinger collective.

That wasn’t cheap either, notably, but it was seriously effective.

There’d been some attempts years ago to ‘upload’ skills to people’s brains directly, to take someone fresh into bootcamp and to make a lethal soldier out of them, an all-rounder that could be a sniper specialist, a hacker extraordinaire and more. The first stages had apparently been so promising that the tech vanished and so did the class they were training.

Someone had apparently thought they could make perfect spies and so on like that, and had gone all out.

Unfortunately the imprinting was short term and seriously damaging, the entire batch of trainees ended up brain-burned and wiped out, forgetting skills in combat, forgetting the combat itself and just flopping down to play in the mud and more.

The entire project had been shelved.

It was something that was brought up every fifty years or so, tried and failed, then dismissed over and over.

Instead they’d all spent most of the day in Aug-World, with their sensory input linked up to full.

They’d been in flat, featureless rooms with unloaded weapons, but to them, they’d crept around massive military complexes, they’d carried out assassinations that required them to climb to the top of buildings, and they’d fought hundreds of enemies in waves, dancing from form to form, one hand tied behind their back.

It was one of the few things I agreed that Aug-world was useful for, even more so than a ‘normal’ training building, because you could tailor make it.

If you had the technical specs for a building? If you could get access to it and do a walk around? Maybe hack the cameras? You could build an exact replica in a different building, an abandoned one, and run a thousand dry runs.

If you had the time.

The only issue with that kind of training?

Consequences.

Specifically, the lack of them. You get used to doing a mission over and over without any long term consequences if you fuck up? You grow complacent, even when you know you shouldn’t.

That was why we were given highly limited access to Aug-World for training in the army, and we had our pain receptors turned up to maximum, so any simulated bullet wound?

It felt worse than the real thing.

That apparently was how the Stinger collective liked to run it as well, against members of the collective playing the part of guards and countering teams, and they’d had a great time kicking the shit out of my team.

Luna and Gessh especially were a mass of bruises from a day spent in martial arts training.

Fortunately we had a nice supply of medikits, and could afford the luxury of using some up on this.

Reign had spent the day with the massive bastard that had insisted on Anthos Black’s death as the price of us ‘killing’ Stinger and claiming the bounty.

He’d not offered a name, beyond ‘Stinger’, but he was apparently a heavy-weapons enthusiast, and when Reign had come to him with her desire to learn to use a ‘real’ railgun, he’d taken her off to one side and shown her his collection.

She’d come back with a new respect for ultra-heavy weaponry, and a love of the possible levels of destruction she’d be able to unleash with an APS Heavy Railgun. Todds on the other hand, was absolutely knackered, and while the others were mainly happy about the idea, he was ready to go home to his kids.

And apparently his nice warm baby-sitter, as the girls had spent all day ribbing him about a message he’d gotten when they were having lunch.

The baby-sitter was expecting to stay at his tonight, again, and while they couldn’t hear the message, the bright red cheeks and the awkward adjusting of his pants as he got up suggested it was a good one.

He’d really wanted to go home sooner, rather than later, and me stopping that wasn’t popular.

Especially not to discuss sword forms, and certainly not ones that were so different to the ones they were taught today with Stinger. They’d had a joint hour long training session with the sword, as I’d asked earlier, and now I was teaching them something so totally different it was almost a dance.

I couldn’t help but smile, I’d done these katas with my old squad, and alone, and it felt so strange to do them now, to be the one guiding as a group fumbled and cursed their way through the slow, graceful movements.

Mushin, as I’d experienced it only a few days ago in the depths of the water storage tanks, surrounded by hundreds of specters, and as it’d come to me again and again through the cooling towers?

It’d changed things for me.

I’d felt that exactly as Scott had described it, I had it, as much as I ever would.

Now I knew that I’d only scratched the surface. This was a pursuit of decades, of your entire life, I realized, but as I started to teach, sliding my mind back to those days in the dojo?

I felt a calm envelop me.

The simplest forms were all we did for now, standing and sweeping right and left, ignore the arms, focus on the legs, on the placement of the feet, glide, not step.

Feet stayed close to the ground, smooth arcs that flowed constantly, starting with feet shoulder-width apart, we then swept the left foot back, facing outwards at a forty-five degree angle from the forward facing foot, and sink slightly, dip the knees, and hold.

This was the resting stance, the most basic of them all, and learning to keep the weight on the balls of your feet was insanely important.

Teaching the ‘passing step’ got me a load of sighs and glares, shakes of the head and more, but I stuck to it, the basics were important for a goddamn reason.

The front foot stayed in place, shifting out to forty-five degrees, and the back foot slid forwards, planting to face directly ahead, or at roughly ninety degrees.

I made them copy this over and over, watching as they grew more and more frustrated, until finally I told them to stand however they felt was right.

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Then I told them to keep their feet still, locked in place, and I moved from one to another and shoved them.

Each and every one of them, had shifted from the new stance, to stand ‘normally’ and each and every one of them fell over.

Then I stood—in the correct stance—and told them to take turns at me.

When they couldn’t push me over, they slowly started to see the damn point.

The next half an hour was literally shifting stances, dancing forwards then back on the balls of the feet, before I let them take the swords up and ‘play’.

Dividing the group would have probably been the best way to do it, especially as the sisters regularly fought with their blades, and had spent the afternoon getting their asses kicked by Stinger, and so had received some interesting new training.

That wasn’t my style though.

All six of us faced off in a rough circle, wooden training swords ready, with Luna and Gessh on opposite sides so they couldn’t team up straight away.

“Go!” I barked, and I stepped back, falling into stance and waiting.

Reign was the first to see it, and I’d half expected that, with her ease of taking the second position in the team I knew she had good instincts.

We both waited as Dondo launched an attack on Todds, who in turn attacked Gessh. Luna paused, switching from her first target of Reign, and instead striking at Todds’ back, as he was distracted taking him out, when Reign struck at the back of Dondo’s knee.

Then I and Reign attacked at once, standing on opposite sides of the melee and striking at the most distracted, taking them down.

In seconds, Dondo and Todds were out, and Luna and Gessh were facing Reign and I respectively, the sisters moving to fight side by side as Reign and I did as well.

I smiled, watching Reign out of the corner of my eye, as I waited.

Luna stabbed forwards, risking it all when she dropped to one knee and stabbed across, ignoring her nearest opponent to try and take me, of all people, in the crotch.

It was uncalled for I felt, and I whacked her blade aside then smacked her in the temple, taking her down.

Gessh had struck at Reign, the pair of the sisters swapping targets in an unspoken attempt to confuse us. It partially worked, as Reign, swinging at Luna overbalanced and missed, then took Gessh’s blade to the stomach.

I rolled my wrist and brought my blade back up and across, taking Gessh in the underarms, and effectively disarming her.

It was close enough a fight though, that I felt there needed to be more of an example. With that in mind, I paired the others up, Dondo on his own against me first, then Reign and Luna, and Gessh and Todds.

I had them attack me, and I disarmed and beat them once each, hard.

Dondo was the simplest, thrusting at me as if to try and skewer me—had the fucker landed it would have damn well hurt, he put that much force behind it—so I returned the favor by parrying, slapping the blade aside then spinning and bringing my own across the back of his head.

As he went down in a crumpled heap, Reign and Luna attacked. They ran at me, blades swinging, one high, one low, and I stepped to the left, slapping Reign’s blade aside, then shoved her, hard, in the shoulder.

She tumbled into Luna, who tried to catch her, then thought better of it, dancing aside… only to have me step in and sweep her legs out from under her as well.

She hit the floor, rolled… and felt my blade smack off her ass, ending her fight.

Reign had stayed down, tired enough and knowing that if she moved it was over, and I tapped her lightly on the sternum, before picking up her sword.

Now armed with two blades, I stepped up parrying the combined attack from Todds and Gessh, before kicking his knee when he tried to plant it wrong, sending him staggering as I blocked Gessh again, then dropped to a knee myself and swept both blades across my chest in a downward ‘X’ as she tried to stab me.

Her blade slammed into the floor and I rose, keeping her sword trapped between mine as I twisted and rolled to the right, rolling my blades down hers.

She had the choice of have her hand ‘chopped off’ or release it, and she dropped the sword, leaping at me in a midriff tackle instead.

I took it, driven back two steps before I smacked her across the back and ‘killed’ her, then disarmed Todds easily.

The example made, that none of them had managed to land even a single hit on me, I spoke, giving them some constructive feedback, some criticism and sent them on their merry ways.

Todds was out the door almost before I was finished talking, while Dondo grinned at me and set off straight for the stairs up and after the sisters.

“That was cruel you know,” Reign said, coming over for a kiss. “We know that you’re better than us, you really should have…”

“Toned it down?” I asked, snorting as she paused.

“You did?” she asked, and I nodded.

“Sorry, Reign, but yeah, I did,” I admitted. “Give it a few weeks and we can start training properly, tonight was a tester, just to show the basics.”

“Now I feel even worse,” she muttered.

“And if I was to try and outshoot you?” I pointed out. “You’d kick my ass every time. It’s about training and experience, when you all have a little more under your belt then you’ll feel better, but until then, the plasma swords will be kept firmly out of reach.”

“Are they that different?” she asked and I nodded.

“You saw the two sword parry?” I asked “Where I blocked Gessh?”

“Yeah?”

“Totally pointless with a plasma sword, its plasma , it’d go straight through and disrupt the containment field. The blade would have taken me in the face, and mine would have carved her leg off. She’d have won that one, but she’d be down a leg, and you’d all be down a team lead. You need to learn the basics first, then you can learn which rules are fixed and which can be bent, or broken.”

“Without killing each other.”

“Without killing each other,” I agreed.

“So, now what?” she asked, as I picked the blades up and put them in a storage box, then kissed her again. “Too early for a shower?”

“It’s never too early for a shower,” I said firmly, it was rapidly becoming my favorite place after all.

“Or…” she suggested with a smile. “We could have a starter of pizza?”

“If you’re my main course, then I’m in,” I assured her, grinning.

That set the pattern for the next few days, the mornings were a little slower with coffee and unfortunately no more early morning ‘fun’, as when you’d recently had sex, you tended to be crap at fighting, the killer instinct missing, or it was in most men’s case at least.

Once we’d all had one form or another of breakfast, I started work on repairing my APS, Dondo got to work installing the turrets and syncing them up in between doing jobs for Oshbob, and the others went to see the Stingers.

Todds invested his earnings in a new grade of stealth-suit, something much more powerful, as well as more appropriately armored.

Reign fell in love all over again, her ‘one true love’ of the grazer sniper rifle almost neglected as she began training at the knee of the heavy weapons expert. She carried out several solo hits, the pair of them travelling the city to find their target, then ‘one shot, one kill’ was the order of the day, each from increasingly further distances.

Minor details like wind and rain weren’t really a concern for a railgun, but additional unintended casualties massively were.

The charge was adjusted on the fly, and she was trained with specialist goggles that could be tuned to identify materials and shielding. They spent hours on rooftops, discussing the material resistance and shield level that would need to be overcome to shoot through a wall, burst a shield and kill a target, and yet have the round stop there, rather than punch through the building, racking up collateral damage and deaths.

Luna and Gessh focused on melee and team fighting, working side by side, taking down incoming swarms of enemies, everything from beasts and monsters to corpo scumbags and drones.

There were set exercises to move through a projected building, trying to achieve different aims, rescuing someone, killing them, taking down a location, or protecting it.

Hour after hour they slogged at it, before being guided in hand to hand and martial arts by three of the stingers.

Todds was back on full stealth training, learning to use the equipment he had, moving through buildings and across various sites ranging from a shopping mall to a corporate headquarters.

He was tasked to get to ‘x’ floor without being seen, and if he was seen? He had to eliminate them.

By the time they made it back to train with me for the last two hours of the day, they were exhausted, and frequently pissy about the need to do so.

I stood firm though, knowing that sooner or later, the training with the plasma swords would have to be real.

It took four more days in the end, before we finally got approval from Julius, and confirmation that we were good to return to the guild.

Liolet had apparently been offered a fuck load of credits to make sure we couldn’t return, as Trees tried to keep the guild tied up. It was all aimed at ruining the guild’s burgeoning reputation, Julius had told me when he’d turned up one night, swearing that he wasn’t there. He came to fill us in, to get us on board for the plan and to drink all my goddamn rum ‘before he died’, he was that soaked, having been caught in a sudden downpour as he exited the cab.

Liolet had gone to Julius when the deal was offered, not liking or trusting Trees, and the pair of them had hatched a plan.

Liolet took the money, things were dragged out, several jobs got redlined and there were fines being threatened… and then Liolet had voted to reinstate me and my team.

Trees had been furious, and had quit the guild, taking three of the more senior teams with him, and practically gutting the guild in what was obviously a well-planned and funded coup attempt.

Julius came begging, and we answered.

“Seriously, if we can’t take the nest down that’s developing in the Suburban Heights district? We’re fucked as a guild. We’ve got forty-eight hours, after that?” He shook his head. “We get a ten thousand credit fine, and the contract is ‘open’ again. I’ve got it on good authority Trees was promised it, and he and his three teams will be there, waiting and ready to storm straight in.”

“And?” I’d asked, still pissed.

“And then you don’t get your pass, and I don’t get to keep my guild together as the shit hits the fan, alright? We’re making good credits, but losing four of our main teams all in a day? We can’t hold our contracts, not all of them. Liolet is running around like a blue arsed fly, trying to make up for it, I’ve been out on specter hunts for fuck’s sake, and my skills are in administration and organization, not shooting!”

“Why’d you let it drag on so long?” Reign asked him.

“Because it made sure that any that were going to him, went. Those that stayed are loyal, and they didn’t give me that much of a choice, if Liolet hadn’t kept playing along with them, they’d have used the same tricks, but I’d not have been in control. As it was, when he switched sides? It caught them flatfooted.”

I’d hesitated, not liking that the guild was constantly running from disaster to disaster, but hey, I guessed this was the best chance we were ever going to get.

“I know what you’re going to ask for,” he said, glaring at me. “You want a position of power in the guild.”

“Shares, actually,” I said.

“That’s a position of power, considering that there’s only so many shares available to sell. I’d normally have to sell you my shares, but considering the bloodletting that’s going on?” He looked sick as he stared at the glass in his hand.

“After the cooling tower, we looked stable as an investment, and they came running. I sold forty-nine percent of my guild in shares, keeping control by a single percentage point.”

“And now?” I asked.

“Now those same investors are trying to sell their shares.”

“And what did you do with the money?”

“What money?”

“The money that they gave you for the shares,” I asked bluntly. “Fuck’s sake man, you didn’t spend it all on angel dust and hookers did you?”

“Ha!” He snorted, shaking his head. “No, I invested most of it in the guild, fixing some of the machines, upgrading equipment and more, the rest?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not enough to pay off the debts that’ll come if this goes fucking wrong,” he admitted. “I kept the rest of the money, just in case, and now I need your help, Kabutt. I’ll sell you shares, I’ll use my savings and buy them from the investors that are willing to sell, but I need a miracle from you.”

It was tempting to give him a totally different answer, given that he’d let us cool our heels so long, but the look on his face was priceless when we agreed to take a thirty percent stake in the guild, in exchange for the full earnings of the next nest job and saving their asses.

“Keep him up here till I give you the signal, then bring him down,” I told Reign when he went to the loo, and I jogged down the stairs, grinning to myself.

The suit was as finished as I could make it in the short term, with only a hundred rounds for the shoulder mounted railguns, ten cluster bombs in either dispenser, and three hundred rounds in the rifle.

It was however, fully operational, including the cold weather seals attached, and when Reign brought him down to the warehouse, unlike when he’d arrived, I’d opened the transport crate, and was in my APS.

He was chatting to her amiably about how much of a surprise Trees would get when we showed up to the nest, when the lights in the warehouse turned on fully, and he froze, staring up in a comical mixture of terror and wonder, at my APS.

“Holy fucking gods of chrome and blood…” he whispered, unable to keep from shaking his head in wonder. “…you did it?”

“We’re back in business,” I admitted, my voice coming through the speakers, the suit’s inbuilt systems adjusting the harmonics slightly to induce a subliminal level of near bed-wetting terror in those we faced. “How do you like your miracle?”

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