Chapter One

I arched my back and groaned. I was aching from head to toe, and unlike the way I’d like to be, this had absolutely nothing to do with a great sex session.

First of all, my sort-of girlfriend, Reign—we still weren’t exactly sure what was happening between us yet—was unable to have sex, or even orgasm currently.

That wasn’t down to my shitty abilities either, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was, that I’d been on my hands and knees for ten minutes trying to get this job done, and still I had more work ahead of me.

“You gonna give up and admit you can’t do it?” Luna called through to me from where she relaxed, leaning against the doorframe.

“Fuck,” I said clearly. “Right. Off.”

“There’s no shame, you know.” She laughed. “Most people can’t do it.”

“I can and I goddamn will!” I turned back to the object of my ire. Three more attempts were made, several minutes of it as I struggled back and forth, before scowling as I bundled the fitted sheet up, rolling it into a tight ball and shoving it into the drawer under the bed. “Fine! Fuck it!”

“I’m telling you, the ability to fold a fitted sheet is proof of witchcraft.” Luna pointed a frozen treat at me, fresh from the freezer.

“Oh fuck off with that. I used to be able to do it, must be the wrong sheet or something…”

“Sure, sure… he still complaining about the sheets?” Reign asked, walking in from outside and dumping her bag on the table with a clank of metal and a groan of relief as she shook her arm out. “Fuck that’s heavy.”

“Yeah. Keeps going back and trying again every few minutes. So, what’s that?” Luna stood and crossed the short distance from the seat she’d been lounging in to the fridge freezer, pulling the bottom half open and ripping free two more treats.

She tossed one to me, and the other to Reign, who snatched it out of the air, grinning as she read the label.

“Oh man, Strigoberry?” she crowed. “I’ve not had these since I was a kid!”

“Melun?” I grunted, reading mine before tearing the label off and balling it up. I tossed the rubbish back to Luna who caught it and Reign’s, before dropping them in the bin and returning to her seat.

I tasted the iced treat and sighed, tugging the door to my bedroom shut behind me as I walked out, taking a seat at the table and sighing as I sat back, sucking grimly as I tried to ignore the lure of the sheet.

“So what’s in there?” Luna asked again.

Reign shrugged. “Bit of all sorts. Some of my gear, a couple of gun kits I had laying around in my locker at the guild, and a set of step-up chargers for the grazer, expensive, but worth it.”

“How expensive?” I asked, curious.

“Twenty thousand.” She winced. “They came in from a job last night, and Julius knocked me. Said they’d be going on sale to the general guild later today, and then the net if they didn’t sell, but considering they’re almost a hundred grand for these normally? I had to get them.”

“Had to?” I asked with a sad smile.

“Had to,” she insisted. “I’ve got a third of a battery left on the grazer, one, out of three.”

“Mine’s dead,” Gessh said, sitting up from where she’d been laid flat, relaxing on some packing crates, stretching her back out. “Will it work on mine as well?”

“Should do.” Reign smiled. “That’s why Julius suggested them to me, twenty thou is a hell of a price, I know, but…”

“But considering a recharge for mine is five hundred?” Gessh shook her head. “I’ve one goddamn battery and its five hundred a recharge, with that?”

“We can plug it in, and it’ll recharge the power cells as part of our rental here.” Reign nodded. “Mine are three hundred a go to recharge, and three of them? That’s nine hundred a mission if I use them a lot, or twenty grand and it’s done.”

“I’ll pay half,” Gessh offered. “As long as I can use it too, obviously?”

Reign grinned. “That’s why I bought it.”

“Transferring.” Gessh transferred the money over, and Reign winced again as the credit transfer came in, and the ‘wellness clinic’ took their forty percent from her.

She was up to seventy odd grand saved when we spoke about things this morning, and she’d sworn she was saving to get the implant out as her first priority.

It was her choice, I mean, they were taking forty percent of everything she earned until that money was paid off, and she owed just under two hundred grand, meaning that she needed to earn at least three hundred grand more, by my admittedly rough and ready calculations, to be free.

I liked Reign, and yeah, we’d fooled around a bit, and she was important to me both as my right hand—heh—in the squad, and as my friend, not to mention that she was a fucking terror with a sniper rifle.

We’d not gone further in our relationship yet, not just meaning the physical side, which she at least had intimate knowledge of me from, but also emotionally.

We liked each other, genuinely, I thought.

What had happened though, had been right after a fuck load of fighting, daft flirting and the pair of us nearly dying. That meant that for now, I was taking things slow.

It also meant that while I’d agreed I’d help her pay off her debt, I wasn’t cleaning out my credit account to do it. We had to be sensible, and if it took a week, or a month, we’d get her paid off.

Normally earning that kind of money in such a short timescale was insane, most merc contracts paid far, far less after all.

We had a few advantages though.

First and foremost, we were a team, one that already had each other’s back and that had been forged in some serious fights together. That meant we could take on contracts that others couldn’t or shouldn’t.

Secondly, we were registered as Specter hunters, and business was good. The various companies paid a small fortune to have their premises secured against the specters, and each kill got us paid.

Lucky might be dead, but THE orc as everyone called his boss—Oshbob—wasn’t, and he was more than willing to use ex specter parts in his chop-shops.

That meant that we could be paid for killing the specters, loot their weapons and mods, sell them as well, and get more experience working and fighting together as a unit.

Luna and Gessh were sisters, half-orc women who were happy with rifles and as trained soldiers, holding the line, but when it got close in and dirty?

That’s when they excelled. They had a pair of vibro-swords, the metal honed to a ridiculous edge, and set to vibrate at a high frequency, enabling them to cut through steel with only a little effort.

Between them as ranged and then close in fighters, and Reign as ranged and sniping, we had a good set up. I was an experienced Sergeant from the APS squads, used to commanding a team of armored suits that were rightly feared on the battlefield.

We’d been betrayed and backstabbed on the last mission we went on before I was kicked out of the army, with all but two of the team lost, and those two were currently hidden in cryosleep in the Fingers.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

The massive and yet horrifically mauled mountains had been the site of some of the worst wars of the old world, the mountains shredded and gouged by some form of weaponry that nobody could identify, but what was known was that it was orbital, and that the armies that had been battling it out there were all lost.

The mountains themselves were reduced to ‘fingers’ curled and gnarled, with massive holes bored through in all directions.

The end result was a place of terrible beauty, where boulders floated, carried by electromagnetic charges, and storms were the norm. Scanners were useless, as the insane levels of electromagnetism and the left-over scrap and fragments of the armies that died made all but the best equipment useless.

Pilots, both of fixed wing fighters, drones and helos, being the arrogant shit stains that they were, liked to fly through them, rather than over or around, and so when our transport had done that, we’d crashed there. We’d suspected we were being hunted; Richie and Sync from my old team, the only other survivors besides myself, had buried themselves in a cave and gone into cryosleep.

Now, I was finally making inroads into the real mission, which was to get my suit up and running, to get to them using the locational data they locked into my suit, and then to get them back here and living life again.

I’d added in that I wanted that bastard Major Marcial’s head on a pike as well, as it’d come out that he was responsible for fucking us over on the last mission, not my actual captain, Tyrannus, as I’d thought.

I’d started torturing Tyrannus, and it’d all come out.

Not that I objected to torturing Tyrannus. The little bastard had tried to steal my suit, and now it was in the warehouse below us, in goddamn pieces.

Half the fucker was missing, and it was going to take weeks if not months to earn enough to have it repaired.

The only consolation?

I’d looted something that might just turn it all around.

A specter incursion had been started by goblins on my first trial mission with the guild, hundreds, literally, or specters hunting goblins, which was weird in itself. Yes, the specters typically wanted to slaughter anything, and yes, goblins were fucking annoying, but specters were usually only after mods.

The goblins typically didn’t have any of them, or active nanites beyond the low-level background number everything on the planet had these days, and so the specters tended to kill goblins if they found them, but had no interest in actually hunting them.

The device the goblins had been hiding though?

It was a crude, but massively scaled down version of a bit of classified kit that the APS carried on special missions. It was known officially by some stupid acronym, but we all referred to it as the stripper.

It literally stripped the ‘pure’ nanites from the bodies of those you used it on, and pure nanites were the basis of everything.

Any mod you chipped, you needed pure nanites to run and integrate, or you’d end up a specter. You wanted to stay young and healthy? Nanites. You’ve been stabbed, shot, burnt? Nanites. Hell, there were classes of weapon that required nanites to form the projectile, because only pure nanites could form the perfect fractal patterns that would do the job.

Nanites could make anything from anything, and the only reason we weren’t all living in the lap of luxury, was because there were never enough of the little fuckers.

Every hospital, every chop-shop and every high-tech bit of kit required them, and the gulf between the amount of nanites that were produced, and the number needed only grew every day.

Most nanites were produced by the government in a specialist site, beyond that, small numbers of pure nanites could be culled from monsters, but the tech needed?

It was insanely classified, and they didn’t lease our time out for cheap.

I’d heard that there were a few APS specialist monster hunters out there that had been licensed to carry the equipment, but that was almost certainly bullshit.

Or not, the way my week was going.

Regardless, if I could get the kit up and working—and I thought I could, I just needed some parts and a few extra bits—then we had a serious secondary income source.

I dismissed the thoughts about our current situation and focused in on the conversation with the others again, catching the end of Gessh’s words.

“… save a fortune.”

“What?” I asked, sitting up. “Sorry I was miles away, thinking of shit.”

“Thinking of her elf-ass you mean,” Luna joked, sitting down at the table next to me and shoving me with one heavily muscled shoulder.

I almost fell out of my seat, the sisters were much stronger than a plain old ‘vanilla’ human like me, but caught myself and bumped her back.

“I was thinking about ways to make money,” I corrected her, and she nodded.

“So you can get in her ass sooner. See, I told you all he was obsessed when we first shared that shower.”

“Fuck’s sake!” I groaned, playing it up a little. “We did NOT share a shower! If we did I’d have either a much bigger smile on my face, or I’d be a lot more depressed than I am. Now, can we move on? How are we saving a fortune?”

“The grazer charger.” Gessh smiled, taking pity on me before Luna could say anything else. “I was saying if we all switched to grazer or laser weapons we’d save a fortune on ammo costs.”

“No chance,” I said. “Seriously, it’s been tried again and again. They invented slug throwers what, a thousand years ago? Sure there’s been a few rises and falls of tech and society since then, but we’re still using them now for a reason.

“Reflective coatings, specter tissue, solid armor and shields? They’re far less useful against solid projectiles than they are energy weapons. Hell, plasma weaponry is massively more powerful, as well as not giving a shit about reflective surfaces or more, it just doesn’t work. They’re great as secondary weapons, no chance we can rely on them as primary, not long term.”

“Well, I love mine.” Reign shrugged, drawing her fingers down the length of the large grazer sniper rifle. “Sure, I’ll still carry ‘Old Faithful’, but when I can? Well worth using it.” She tapped her fingers on the barrel and smiled, and I found myself smiling back at her automatically.

“Okay then, so what’s the plan for the rest of the day?” Gessh asked. “Please tell me no more cleaning…”

We’d spent yesterday and most of today so far cleaning the warehouse to within an inch of its life, scrubbing out the main shared areas like the kitchen and storerooms, then spending more damn hours cleaning out our personal rooms.

I’d gone all out with mine, and as such I’d needed to replace the damn bed.

I’d stripped the sealed top sheet off and taken a single look at the mattress underneath, then I’d dragged it outside and put an incendiary grenade to work.

Whatever had used the room before me? I had to assume there was an incontinent tiger or something involved because the masses of hair, the strong smell of piss, and the sheer number of dried turds in the corners of the room?

It’d been a disgusting nightmare when I’d opened the door, coughing in the acrid stench that had washed out and over us all. Gessh, who’d been arguing as she was a half-hair taller than her sister, and therefore the ‘biggest’ of us all, and so needed the biggest room, had coughed, retched, and then walked away from it.

Reign had shaken her head and refused, the smell no great issue thanks to the patch we both had for our brain mods, but the little nuggets that were left everywhere? Too much.

It’d taken me six hours.

Six fucking hours to make that room almost clean, and burning the mattress had been the final straw.

I’d ordered a replacement—four hour delivery slot, thank the gods of chrome and blood—and I’d decided turnabout was fair play. Reign had teased the shit outta me enough times, so I had a shower and climbed into her bed with her.

I’d put pants on, and she had her underwear on, but it’d been a long ass night despite us both being exhausted. She’d cuddled in to me, said quite plainly that the blowjob she’d given me earlier was all I was getting and that I’d better not wake her up by prodding her with it in the hopes of a rerun, then we’d both tried to sleep.

“More cleaning,” I said sadly. “The communal areas are ready, here at least, and our rooms are livable now, if not great…”

“I got more cleaning supplies as well,” Reign said, and I smiled my thanks at her.

“Good! So, as I was saying our living areas are all good now, but next? We need to sort the damn warehouse, and get it ready for the next job.”

“Which is?” Luna groaned.

“Oh you’re going to love it,” I assured her, grinning.

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