The trip to the merc guild didn’t take long, just under an hour of marching through the streets, watching the world. I could have gotten a cab, or hell, paid for the mag-train full-day ticket again, but I wanted to walk, to get a feel for the city, and to understand what had changed since I lived here.
The army barracks, like the rest of the military, were self-contained towns, or maybe tiny cities, considering that there were at least a hundred thousand living there, between the various squads, platoons, companies, and all the attendant hangers-on.
There were hookers, gear suppliers, bars and places to eat, entertainment and training, places to take a few days’ leave, and places to run, to train, and to damn well live.
There were also the less useful hangers-on as well: thieves, rip-off merchants, and officers, not to mention the corpo types who lived in the middle ground.
Too important to associate with the likes of us, and too unimportant to live in the corpo wonderland that was the heart of the city.
It’d been ten years since I’d bothered with the rest of the city, and considering the army’s rules about merc squads? Going to visit and scope the place out was likely to get serious punishment detail.
Nobody knew why, considering that most of us went to work there when we left the service anyway, if we survived, but that was just the way shit went.
I’d spent some time doing some rough background checks, knowing, goddamn knowing something about this guild was familiar. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was. I’d dug deeper, finding they’d gained a reputation for being more of a “no questions asked” outfit, and a lot of their higher earners were in the guild’s management.
That meant that either they were rewarding the best of them, or they were taking all the juicy contracts for themselves.
That would be a problem, long-term, but for now? A no-questions-asked guild was definitely the way to go.
The merc guild Errant Mergers was at the end of a row of weapons and chop shops, clearly knowing their regular customers. There was also a massive whorehouse and a pair of bars, one of which was already rocking, considering the pair of women who staggered out into the street as I walked past.
Cheers and screams rose from behind me, and I turned, before finding a comfortable place to lean against the wall, watching the fight as it continued.
One was stripped to the waist—full upper body dermal armoring, so nothing “fun” to see—and the other was a full cyborg remodel, glossy black metal and plastic in place of skin, but the pair of them were beating the absolute shit outta each other.
The subdermal armor-wearing one was massive: boosted musculature, fists that looked like she could crush steel, and her head was a full chrome-dome. The skin was replaced with armoring, glowing red optics.
I winced as the glossy one slid past her punch, before driving a fist into her armpit.
There was a grunt from the bigger one, and I grinned, silently acknowledging that her opponent knew her stuff.
If that’d been armored properly, she could have lost her hand. But, the speed that the bigger one moved, and the mobility, suggested the armoring was incomplete.
A blow to the back of the knee, the back of the neck, the front of the throat, and another to the back of the opposite knee, and the giant went down. Two fast blows to the shoulders, numbing the arms, and a foot that flashed up high, then slammed down hard on her opponent’s crown, and the fight was over.
I shook my head. The pair were heavily modded, literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds. And had the giantess managed to land a blow? It would have been all over. But as it was?
The glossy, much faster of the pair won on skill alone. I was impressed despite myself, and I smiled before heading off again. I rolled my neck as I tried to remember why the hell this merc guild stood out among all the other bottom feeders when I’d gone looking for the nearest with my RI.
Something to do with Richie, I was sure, but it just wouldn’t come right now. I shrugged it off. Once I had a decent mod again, I’d be able to recall it perfectly. It wasn’t important, though. Most of those who worked in the army had either dealt with or moonlighted with the guilds at one time or another.
I was an exception. As an army brat, I’d not done much, and those I’d dealt with obliquely with friends? They’d mostly changed hands or been renamed, bought out, or taken over in—very—hostile takeovers.
It meant I needed somewhere fresh, somewhere that didn’t know me, and somewhere that, when I fucked off, it didn’t matter. No long-term contracts, no background checks…I needed a shitty, dodgy guild, that was all, and these assholes ticked all those boxes.
The building was squat and wide, the front door bracketed on either side by a pair of orcs, glaring at anyone and everyone who came past.
“Ident,” one snapped at me when I strode up, and I extended it, knocking on the reader he extended. His brow furrowed as he tried to read it.
Glancing at the other, and clearly smarter of the two, I quirked an eyebrow in question.
“You a member?” he asked, and I shook my head. “What you want?”
“To join.” I waited as they looked me over, and the first one continued trying to read the screen.
“Go in. Second on right. Red desk.” The other glanced at his companion and sighed.
I nodded my thanks and moved in, noting that the first guard still hadn’t noticed I was moving. The mere thought of letting an orc do a mod on me? It was insane.
Some of them were smart, sure, but of all the races that made up the city, orcs were invariably the dumbest, most violent, and the ones most likely to be taken down by the enforcers if anything was happening.
Having a pair of them out front as guards?
It sent a message, all right—one that suggested the guild didn’t have a fucking clue what it was doing.
The only people likely to attack a merc guild were other guilds, so the orcs would be taken down from a distance before they ever saw their opponents.
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What the orcs would do, though, at the slightest provocation, was beat the shit out of people. So although having them on the door would intimidate regular citizens, it made anyone with a clue think twice about these amateurs.
That made the guild perfect for me.
Marching straight up to the red desk, and the bored-looking elf who sat behind it, polishing her nails, I offered my ident chip, this time unlocked to show my military service and status as an elite operator.
She went from uninterested, to confused, to wide-eyed in a handful of seconds, before glancing at me and then away, clearly searching for something to do to look busy as she sent messages.
“I need to register,” I said after a few seconds of her frantically sorting through things on her screen.
She bobbed her head, forcing a quick smile.
“I’m…just looking for something, sir!” she assured me hurriedly, as others at the desks around the room got up, shuffling out of the room.
More and more vanished, including the handful of people who had been looking at the jobs boards at one end, or arguing over missions.
“You’ve got some fucking nerve!” a voice called out, and the elf behind the desk darted away as I turned and looked at the figures marching out of a pair of double doors at the other end of the hall.
“What?” I asked, confused and staring at the five men and a woman who marched out of the back rooms, guns at the ready.
“APS, eh?” their leader snarled, marching right up to me and shoving me, hard. “You think we’d forget? That we’d just forgive and move on, not fucking judge you?”
“What the fuck are you…?” I snapped back, staggering. Then I hesitated, as finally, finally the traitorous memory surfaced.
Richie, drunk, laughing his ass off as he talked about a job he’d done right before joining the APS. He was literally days away from a solid year in training, so he had gone off the rails, and he’d taken a load of “credits only, no questions” jobs.
One of them had been for a gang—some hacker had been pissed at another gang or something; I’d never paid that much attention—and they’d hired Richie to do a little “distracting.” In pure Richie style, he’d blown half the apartment block up, and had shot the shit out of anyone who tried to get at him, killing a handful of their people.
So he’d claimed, anyway. The exact number changed regularly, from one or two, to fifteen, depending on the audience. He’d then hung around, taking potshots while holed up behind cover, having a great time.
He’d even released a canister of TRX-42 into their atmo, literally dosing a bunch of them on nasty psychedelics, making them see fuck knew what.
Worst of all, he’d done it all while off his head on some very good angel dust. After about a year and a half, when he’d been forced to actually come down and go clean by the APS Corps, not to mention going all in on his tech skills and joining my team, he’d finally seen the “minor details” he’d missed when taking the job.
It was a gang versus gang job, yeah, but he’d been identified by the gang, and he showed them how effective mercs could be. They reformed their gang as a merc company, after that, and got access to heavy weaponry. They also marked a vendetta against him. And yeah, that was why their logo was familiar.
We’d all been shown it and warned to stay the fuck away from anyone wearing that logo if we were alone and unarmed.
Then we’d been told that if we were ever alone, unarmed, or stupid enough to let them get the drop on an APS operator? We deserved what we’d get.
It was also probably why the guards were outside, I assumed. So no lunatics could rock up and toss in a gas grenade, then seal the doors and laugh their ass off.
“Well, shit!” I growled, before dodging to the side as he lunged at me with an electric shock baton extended. “Whoa! Stop it, you stupid fuck!”
“You’re a dead man!” he screamed, practically frothing at the mouth. He swung for me again; the others spread out, guns leveled.
“It wasn’t me, you stupid fucker!” I shouted, jumping back again. “I came to join up!”
“Bullshit!” He lunged again, this time flicking a knife around and trying to stab me with it.
I blocked, a backhand swipe, left to right with my right hand, grabbed the shock baton with my left—which was a mistake; that fucking stung despite it being a robotic hand—and I kicked him full force in the balls, dropping him with a wheeze, tossing the baton aside before freezing as the others pointed their guns at my head.
“Whoa,” I repeated. “Look, I didn’t do shit to you, none of you, all right? I heard about it, and figured you’d know what we were capable of, that’s all.”
“Oh, we know.” The woman smiled coldly, her grazer rifle pointed unerringly at my face. “Drop the guns.”
“Fuck’s sake!” I shouted, exasperated. “It…”
“We know it wasn’t you.” Another of them stepped up to my left, and I looked at him, shocked and wondering why the hell they were like this then.
“Huh?” I asked, articulately.
“We just don’t care!” The one who I’d kicked in the balls grunted as he climbed to his feet, limping in closer, before punching me in the face.
I staggered against the wall, bounced off, and raised my arms, reaching for a gun and ready to sell my life dearly, if that was all I had left, when someone plowed into me from the side, lifting me and driving me back into the wall.
I gasped, the air knocked out of me, and half fell onto the orc who’d just hit me. I blocked a punch, then another, then cried out as I was hit with a taser round, hissing in pain as I collapsed to the floor, jerking and spasming.
Hands ripped my gun free; a voice lifted in pleasure at the revolver, even as someone stomped on my crotch, then punched me in the face.
There was a brief respite from the pain when the charge finally expired. Then the next kick landed, and the world around me spun.
Others came fast and hard: kicks, punches, the butts of rifles, another taser round…It all blurred as they kicked the absolute fuck out of me. The orcs grunted as they put serious effort in, making me cry out as even with my body armor, my additional armoring on my clothing, and all my attempts to curl up and weather the storm failed.
“Judge this, motherfucker!” someone screamed, and a booted foot smashed into the side of my head, filling the world with light and pain.
They emptied my pockets of ammo and the medikit—the bastards—and laughed about it, before spitting on me, and going back to kicking.
The first of my ribs broke under the blows, and then quickly so did a second and a third. I tried to get my blade out of my boot, only to have a boot slam into my face and stars explode all around me.
More came, and then, after what seemed like hours, mercifully, it stopped.
I laid there, wheezing in pain and shock, and shuddering. Tides of agony rolled through me, before words, meaningless in my haze of pain, were exchanged overhead.
I was dragged across the floor, coughing, blood running free from dozens of wounds, only to hear a sound that I knew instinctively was seriously bad for me.
Laughter.
There were beeps—a keypad, my brain distantly registered—and then clunks as a lock disengaged, before I was unceremoniously tipped down into an air lock.
I crashed into the bottom. The hatch below me was solid metal and rang out as I hit. I laid there for long seconds, barely clinging to consciousness.
“He asleep, you think?” I heard from above, then more laughter. “This’ll wake him up!”
Sudden wetness, warm and stinking, as someone overhead, to the amusement of their friends, pissed on me.
The last thing I heard from them, besides one of them commenting on how nice their “new gun” was, was a voice that called down to me.
“There’s no open hatches in the area, but if you head a half kilometer to the north? You might find a way into the canning factory. That’s your only chance.”
“Wha…?” I whispered. Rage, fear, pain and horror fought in me, with the overwhelming disbelief that this had happened.
“Yeah, good luck, you judgy bastard…” he called to laughter. “Consider us even, you fuck!”
I looked up at him, only able to focus one eye, the other swollen shut.
He reached out to a pedestal and started to input a code.
I saw it, and the location of the air lock, the hatch—all of it made terrible sense.
They had the guild house over an entrance to the undercity, one of the abandoned ones, and they’d sealed it off. Now they were going to use it to dump their trash.
Laughter rang out as one of them said something; the figure overhead paused, letting someone else move in to look down at me. He grinned before pulling out a shitty handgun and emptying the magazine, save for one round.
Then he threw that down, hitting me in the side with it, before holding up my goddamn handgun and waggling it from side to side and making sure I could see that he had it.
“Thanks for the new toy!” he called down. “I always wanted one of these!”
I glared at him and focused before cursing. The battery in the grip was dead. I’d totally forgotten to charge it after the Mr. Crispy incident.
“Bye!” he called. More laughter rang out, and the hatch under me gave a sudden, ominous clunk.
I shifted, frantically looking around and seeing the rungs of a ladder right behind me. I twisted, reaching…and saw them retract into the wall, before the hatch below me slid open, and I fell with a scream into the blackness of the undercity.