When I woke to the banging on my door sometime later, I pulled a pair of pants on, groaning as the bruises pulled, and was surprised to find it was Lucky himself waiting when I opened the door.
“So, you always make house calls?” I stood back, before making room for him to step in, turning my back and strolling to my meager closet, dressing quickly.
“I wanted to see what you have, and Oshbob…well, he’s a bit of a legend,” he admitted, glancing over at the kit.
I’d taken it in the shower with me before bed, taking a few minutes to hack away the flesh that I could now see more clearly, and to disconnect as much as I could.
It was still very clearly “used” with parts of its previous owner still attached, it seemed, but fuck it.
“Mil-spec?” Lucky asked, referring to my comments last night, and I nodded.
“Took it off a ghoul.” I figured it would be evident enough to anyone who dealt in such things—half the flesh that was still attached was rotting, after all.
“No shit?” he asked, eyebrows rising. “A real one?”
“Yeah, took a corner too fast and there were a handful of specters,” I said, before making my position clear. “Had to kill them all, but couldn’t carry everything. If there’s a market for it, though, and he can do some decent deals for me? I’ll bring him more.”
“What you got?” He gestured to the pile, and I shrugged.
“Couple of arms, internal mods, brain mods and optics, a hand…few things,” I repeated. “You speak to Oshbob for me?”
“He knows we’re coming.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t give a shit, though.”
“What?”
“He gets orcs bringing him stuff all the time to strike deals, and he barely tolerates them. Hates you humans.”
“Well, what the fuck’s the point of going to him then?” I asked, exasperated, my anger sparking to life.
“I owe him a favor, and you owe me one.” He smiled toothily. “He might do you a deal, or maybe—depending on what this is—I’ll do you a deal.”
I saw the readiness in his eyes. He’d clearly like to have me working with him by choice, especially after I’d demonstrated my ability to bring back interesting things he could turn a profit from. But I could see the other side as well.
If I wasn’t going to “play nice”?
This little room would become a bloodbath.
“As long as I get my mods upgraded and replaced, and I get paid? I don’t give two fucks if it’s you or him who pays me. These mods?” I gestured to the pile. “Over three hundred thousand credits’ worth,” I bluffed, guessing all the way.
“At retail, maybe,” he agreed, glancing at the pile then back to me. “I’m not buying from a proper chop shop though, am I? And even if I was? They’re contaminated. They’ll need to be cleaned and…”
“They need cleaning,” I agreed. “But the ’nites? Already wiped.”
“You think I’ll just take your word?”
I snorted, before lifting my left arm. The servos whirred, but as soon as I let go, the arm swung back down, lifeless.
“EMP,” I said firmly. “All their gear was exposed. If mine’s fucked? Theirs is totally wiped.”
“What makes you different than them?” he asked, and I smiled.
“I wasn’t as close to the pulse, and I’m alive, beating heart and all that shit. The living flesh blocks the pulse. Rotting, dead flesh? Not so much.”
It was bullshit, but I didn’t care. I needed the credits and replacement parts, so although I’d not be taking parts from this Oshbob—he bought chopped-up specters, after all—I needed replacement nanites. Preferably I’d get a full rebuild.
“So, what is there?” he asked again, and I sighed.
Fully dressed, I finished putting my gear away, including the shotgun into the back sheath, and I moved across to the deck. Plugging it in and checking for model identification numbers on the first two mods I came to, I pulled up the specs on the separate spinal and the main chest armor with its attached sections.
Torso Integrated Armoring
Tier: Three
Orion Systems cybernetic subdermal Torso Integrated Armoring with integrated internal processing and [optional] hardened datadeck storage.
This model offers five integrated expansion slots to upgrade user internals, including Bio-Mesh™ internal upgrades to replace organic lungs, synth-flesh layering to protect and prevent hemorrhaging, and bionic organelles to replace basic digestive tract and organs.
[Optional] Hardened Datadeck storage is the standard for enhanced security delivery operatives.
Toughness: 15
Strength: 12
Durability: 86/100
Cost: 11
Spinal Reinforcement
Tier: Three
The Nexus 9700 Spinal Reinforcement mod is a significant upgrade over the original biological, physical spine, improving upon the organic in every way.
The 9700 can take significantly more damage than a biological variant, and stores three additional emergency injection ampoules, ready to give you that much-needed boost in an emergency, or when someone really needs to learn their place!
Warranty: [60 Months]
Toughness: 11
Durability: 86/100
Cost: 3
“Shit, a hardened datadeck!” I looked up from the specs I’d read off, seeing the way Lucky stiffened. “You got something to say?”
“I’m thinking data courier who got lost.” He looked the datadeck over. “A high-end one.”
“He was geared up with EMP grenades as well as standard, and a good bit of kit beyond it, including one of the arms…that one, I think, as well as optical and brain mod,” I muttered, gesturing at one of the arms.
Lucky picked it up and examined it, clearly accessing something, before nodding. “Tier three, mil-spec,” he agreed, before rubbing his chin and looking over the pile. “That one’s tier two.” He pointed to the other arm, before sorting through the rest.
“Tier three, tier one, tier one…” he muttered, and I glared at him.
“Fuck’s sake, Lucky!” I grumbled. “Why the hell’d you have me do that look-up manually if you could have scanned it all?”
“I don’t work for you, Kabutt,” he snapped back, before forcing a smile as he looked over the lot as one pile. “Okay, so yeah, maybe two to two-fifty in retail, but selling it to Oshbob? Like I said, he hates humans.”
“So?” I asked, sensing what was coming.
“So you need a partner, someone he doesn’t hate.”
“Or, you know, I could go to another chop shop.”
“Maybe. But you’re on my territory, and maybe there’s a tax for this kinda shit.”
“Maybe you try that shit, you’ll need to be dragged out and burned,” I warned him, and he nodded.
“Maybe,” he agreed. “Of course, maybe you’ve only got one working arm, and I’ve got people outside the door, ready.”
“You probably have.” I nodded, forcing a smile. “But let’s face it, you go down this route, it might be that I sell you it all for a great price, I go get myself fixed, then I pay you a private visit, you know, when you’re sleeping and alone…”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“I don’t sleep alone.” He grinned. “You’ve seen my girls.”
“Yeah, nice tits.” I opened my mouth, then nodded. “And they’re not just for fun, are they?” I said slowly. “They’re bodyguards.”
“Modded all the way up,” he agreed. “You try surprising them when they’re having fun? It’ll not end well.”
“You think fucking with an APS soldier will?” I suggested. “I get my armor back, and I could slaughter you all without raising a sweat.”
“You’ve not got your armor, though,” he pointed out. “You’re on your own, mods are broken, and you could do with a friend, I think. How about this? I’ll pay you for all of this, and I do you a good deal. Then you go get more?”
“I need a fucking rebuild,” I growled at him. “You think I could go hunting like this?”
“And I know a chop shop that’ll accept my view of you as an investment.” He grinned. “You do a little job or two for me, maybe go find me some more gear, pay off my investment and…”
“You think I’m going into debt with a gang?” I snorted. “Are you fucking mad? You know what I am.”
“Fine. You think you’ve got a choice?” he asked coldly, the “good buddy” veneer pouring off him like milk from a glass. “Listen, Kabutt, you’re in a shitty position to be pissing on my offers. We all need friends, and it’s not like I’d be asking for anything you’re not willing to do.”
“Oh, really?” I laughed sarcastically. “Fucking practically charity work, is it?”
“You’d be taking care of some business for the gang, that’s all. None of these fuckers are innocents,” he said flatly. “Look, let’s lay it out on the table. Oshbob is the only one who’ll buy this from you. Nobody else is gonna buy specter mods, and he’ll give you half of what he’ll give me.” Lucky moved past me, sitting down on the end of my bed and glancing around. The frame creaked under him as he sneered at the state of the room.
“So?” I asked.
“So I’ll pay you for this, here and now. Then I’ll cover you for say, twenty grand at a chop shop I know, on top of the creds for this. That gets you fixed up and back out. You bring me a hundred grand’s worth of parts, and you do six jobs for me? The slate’s wiped clean.”
I nearly refused him outright, opening my mouth to tell him to fuck right off, before closing it. A new thought occurred to me.
“How much?” I asked after a second’s thought.
“For this?” He looked it over, pretending to consider it. “Twenty thousand.”
“Try again.”
“Oshbob won’t give you that much…” Lucky started, and I shook my head, drawing the shotgun out and laying it across my knees, not pointed at him, but not exactly pointed away either.
“You want to lay it all on the table?” I asked him, and he nodded. “Well, that works for me too. Let’s dispense with all the fucking bullshit. We do a deal here and now, or only one of us, and possibly neither, leaves this room.” I said it calmly, but I also said it with my fingers around the grip to my shotgun.
“That’s a two-handed weapon,” he pointed out.
“Only to reload.” I smiled. “I won’t need a second shot.”
“You will when my people come in after me.”
“You’ll still be fucked.”
“So…let’s hear your offer.” He nodded.
“You want me to do six hits?”
“Three outright hits, three cleaning out of security,” he admitted. “Two are people encroaching on my territory. You kill them, gangbangers, so no innocents, then you go on and raid their labs, capture their chemists and bring me what you find.”
“So that’s four of the six jobs.” I had no issue with eliminating scumbags.
“Yeah, and the salvage is mine. I’ll have my people standing by, ready to move in and secure it, so don’t fuck with me and try to sell it.”
“No to the salvage. You can have the drugs, though. The other two…?”
“One’s an outright kill. Old fucker who pissed me off. Armed to the teeth, though—he’ll be hard. Merc who hit a friend of mine on a contract, killed him when there was no need.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“The merc or my friend?”
“The merc,” I said flatly. “Did I even bother to learn any of your crew’s names?”
“Fair enough. His handle is Stinger. He’s known for the…”
“For the fléchettes he fires,” I finished for him, shaking my head disgustedly. “He fires a modified dart that’s custom made for him, from a fucking custom rifle. It’s designed to go through walls. He’s a legend of an assassin, not a merc, and you think I’ll just stroll up and kill him as part of this shitty deal? There’s a two hundred and fifty thousand cred bounty on him. Fuck knows where I’d even find him.”
I knew who he was, because yeah, I’d kept an eye on the bounty lists, and I’d been considering going bounty hunting once I was out of the APS Corps regardless. But that was with a fucking suit.
“Bounty would be yours,” he assured me.
“Fucking too right it would be. But you might as well name a corpo head and a fucking god while you’re at it, because—”
“I know where he is.”
“The fuck you do,” I said. “If you did? You’d have tried claiming the bounty.”
“I was going to sell the location. All I want is him dead and his gun.”
“Why the gun?”
“He killed my friend with it.”
“So?”
“So I want his fucking gun and his head!” Lucky snarled. “The last job—”
“You can fuck off with the rest of the jobs.” I snorted. “You want me to do a hit on a fucking master assassin, and then stroll over and do over some drug dealers on your patch?”
“You saying you can’t do it?” he asked. “That the APS Corps rep is bullshit?”
“Do you fucking see an APS suit here?” I asked, exasperated. “Seriously?”
“So, it’s about the suit, not the soldier then?” He grinned.
I glared at him. That old argument—about at which end of the arm the true weapon was—reared its head in me.
“It’s a suit,” I said. “It’s the operator who makes the difference.”
“Then the operator should be able to do this.” He spread his hands wide.
“This operator could. But I’d need a fuckload more than you’re offering.”
“You’d get the two hundred and fifty thousand bounty as well.”
“Yeah.” I snorted. “Provided I live long enough to claim it, and I actually survive going after him. He’ll have traps.”
“Drones too, and sentries,” he agreed, making me snarl in frustration.
“Are you kidding me?” I shook my head. “Look, the very least I’d need, not including the equipment, is a new arm, tier two as a minimum, a new brain mod, tier three, and a replacement spine…” I jerked my thumb toward my back. “Those alone are going to be close on a hundred grand. Then I’d need some decent kit, and a fucking hacker.”
“I know a hacker.”
“I don’t give a shit if you know the Santa Bunny and you’re personally ass-fucking her. It’d do me no good without the rest!” I glared at him. “Then add on decent weapons. I’d need an arsenal—decent sniper rifle at the very least, a new assault rifle, probably a Nutronics 6500, a bio-suit, and armoring.”
“So, a couple of hundred grand?”
I snorted. “Yeah, basically.”
“So how do we get them?”
“What?”
“We agreed to lay it all on the table,” Lucky said. “I’ve got forty-seven and a half thousand, and I could run up a tab with a chop shop I know for thirty thousand. That gives you seventy-seven thousand…”
“And a half,” I added absently, before grimacing at the grin that appeared on his face.
“And a half,” he agreed. “That’s enough to get you some serious mods, or equipment.”
“But not both,” I pointed out.
“Not both, but that’s life,” he suggested. “I’ll sell this to Oshbob, but I’ll not get that much back, so I’d need more, a lot more to square my debt with the carver, never mind anything else.”
“So?”
“So we’re back to the deal.” He shifted, rolling his shoulders and getting comfortable. “I give you those creds, you do the jobs for me…the hits. And when you’re not on the job? You’re in the undercity, hunting more of these fucks.” He nodded to the remains of the ghoul. “Find me five more? Kitted like this? That’s your hundred grand paid off. We’re back in business. Each mod you bring me, I’ll sell, and we split. We pay off our debt with the carver first, then it’s fifty-fifty.”
I pretended to consider it, really did for a few seconds. After all, he was right when it came to Oshbob. Few full-blooded orcs and humans got along that well; there were too many years of spilled blood between us. If I went to sell him gear? I’d be forced to accept a lowball offer. And even then, I might not walk out with my life. This dickhead, though?
Yeah, he was half-human, but he was half-orc as well. He’d get a better deal, all right. Add in that I was essentially getting someone plugged into the underworld as a partner.
If I refused? Yeah, one of us was probably dead. Or I take the deal, and we’re back to consequences. First and foremost, I get fixed up, and I always had the option of judging and just slaughtering them if they crossed me later. Make him pay for it? Poetic justice, in my eyes.
The bounty, though—that changed a lot.
Two hundred and fifty thousand credits would cover all my rebuild to APS standard and beyond. Hell, I could get some tier four’s in there possibly, and a master assassin would have some shit-hot mods of his own. Rip them?
The gang would be waiting; I knew that straightaway. As soon as I hit the assassin, they’d hit me. They’d not let that payday get away from them, so I’d need to be ready, but…I could use Lucky to get an “in” with the underworld. Get ready, gear up, and when he came for me, maybe have drones in place? Take them all down? Maybe hire some mercs of my own for that hit?
Either way, this option got me back in the game, and with the way things were going…? Fuck it. I was done with playing nice.
The short-term solution was a good one. I get fixed up, I hit these gangs, treat him like any bounty fixer—he’s hiring me for the job, but I can’t trust him. Wipe out those who have been fucking with him…they’re gangs, after all—no innocents.
Hit them, wipe them out; he gets his gear. I do runs underground, clear out sections, see what I can find. Hell, with the right mods? I’ll be back in the game properly. I don’t have to fuck around with the low-level merc outfits, go straight to a medium one. Register and see if they’ve got any specter outbreak jobs, get paid for the same shit twice.
That made sense, yeah. There were always stories of merc guilds that made a living hunting and killing specters. If there’s any truth to that, then as long as I strip the corpses as well, I’d be winning.
I’d have to split my time between the gang and the merc outfit, but I could do that. It wasn’t as if I had a fucking girlfriend to fill my evenings.
“I’d need medikits,” I said into the silence. “Three of them. You’d need to get them—and nanite based.”
“Shit, you think I’m running a charity?” He grunted, sitting forward. “I’ll give you one, and it’s a small kit.”
“Nanite?”
“Yeah.”
“Gimme,” I demanded, holding my hand out.
“So, we have a deal?” He smiled widely.
“We have a deal,” I confirmed. “Seventy-seven and a half thousand credits, thirty-thou of them in credit at a genuine chop shop. No ripped mods. You get this shit, and I’ll do the five jobs…two outright gang hits. No innocents or the deal is off. Then two of their chemists—take the guards down, and you can move in. You get their stuff, unless there’s a decent gun or armor, as I’ll need those.”
“Then you go specter hunting, strip them as you go, bring me some good mil-spec shit for Oshbob. I split the creds with you, and you pay for your upgrades and gear. You survive long enough? I’ll give you Stinger’s address, and you kill him. That’s it, our debt is paid.” He smiled toothily as he said it.
“That’s it,” I agreed. “But we split whatever you find on that hardened datadeck.”
“Not a chance,” he replied, still smiling. “I’ll have to go into debt to even get that cracked, and that’s if the EMP didn’t wipe it.”
I paused for a few long seconds, before smiling. “Then you owe me four of your gangers to pick a fight.”
“You want them to kill someone?” he asked, confused.
“No, I want them to pick a fight with some guards, merc guards specifically, as a distraction. Then they can fuck off.”
“Will they live?”
“Maybe. Depends on them, really,” I admitted.
He considered it, scratching at his chin as he squinted at the door, clearly thinking about his people.
“They don’t have to be any in particular?” he asked. “I don’t want to risk useful ones.”
“Send your fucking stupidest. I don’t give two fucks. They just need to be loud and get attention.”
“It sounds like we’ve reached the point for this then…” Lucky frowned in concentration, before I grunted at the request that popped up for me.
Job
Kabutt will carry out five [5] contract hits for Lucky, including and limited to the following:
· 2 x Assassination hits
· 2 x Chemist lab raids
· 1 x Assassination and Bounty of [Stinger]
Supplemental:
· 1 x Recover 100,000 credits worth of Specter Mods
In exchange, Kabutt will receive:
· 47,500 x direct credit transfer
· 30,000 x store credit for Lion’s Chop Shop
· ? x Additional bounties
· 4 x gang members will be dispatched to Kabutt’s choice of location to act as a distraction.
Accept
Refuse
“Whatever,” I agreed, glancing over the details, uncaring. “Give me my goddamn credits and get out.”
“We have a deal.” He reached out one enormous fist, and I clenched my own, smacking his knuckles once, hard. “To show how generous and what a good friend I am, I’ll even get you some decent furniture,” he promised, looking around the room with a snort of disgust as he climbed to his feet.