Chapter Thirty-One

The next morning dawned clear and cold, a bite in the air that wasn’t expected, and to feel the cold in the city like this? With all of the fusion plants, the factories and more, all surrounded by the wall?

That meant it was fucking freezing out on the plains of the wasteland.

That made little difference to us though, beyond that the coffee was more in demand, and the site we were booked for was surrounded by swirling clouds of steam, the vents along the edge of the building bleeding off excess heat in maddening patterns.

Visibility might be shit, but we were heavily armed, and that had a habit of evening things out in my experience.

The office block we’d been called to was long abandoned, supposedly, but of late it’d been overrun by homeless. That in itself wasn’t a problem, hell everyone needed somewhere to get their head down, and I certainly didn’t begrudge them that, no the issue was that the group that owned the site, had come looking to move them on, and they’d been attacked by a specter.

The description was that it was big, black with massive bulky shoulders, red eyes, and it was heavily armed.

When Julius had put it on the board as one of the early jobs that needed doing—the owners wanted it dealt with before the reno team arrived—he’d been surprised when Reign had claimed it.

“You sure?” he’d asked. “It’s a single specter, I was going to send one of the inexperienced squads out and…”

“We’ll take it, its next to uh… this one!” she’d said quickly, picking up another, a much bigger job in the building at the edge of a block a few further down the road from the first one. Julius had been overjoyed apparently, and had confirmed the job with the clients, who insisted on a photo op at the beginning of the job.

That the developers insisted on the same thing? It was a pain in the arse, to say the least, but at least it was done quickly. Reign and I were in full face helmets, Gessh, Luna and Todds weren’t, and apparently that was enough. I refused to take my helmet off, knowing that while I’d almost certainly been identified by the major on the cooling tower job, I didn’t need to make it any fucking easier for him.

The job was a letdown.

First and foremost, we’d thought it was the banshee. That for some reason it was dealing with these people, and that was why it’d attacked the developers.

It wasn’t. Hell, it wasn’t even a fucking specter. It was a heavily modded homeless guy who’d apparently traded his face plate for some angel dust to some gangers, and now he was literally ‘faceless’.

His eyes were glowing red optics, and apart from his lower jaw and his temple? His face was down to the supporting structures. Add on that he’d once been a particularly large guy, and had worked as a bouncer in a load of places before getting thrown on the street?

He was just wearing a damn big coat, and carrying two—empty—guns. He’d scared the shit outta the developers, and nearly got shot for it, but a quick discussion with him and the other homeless, and the developers paid them a few credits each to move on.

It wasn’t worth our time, not in terms of the cost, but we’d saved some innocents from what could have been a nasty situation, and we all felt a little better about that.

The second job? That was a lot trickier.

The client site was ‘Future Enterprises Inc’ and advertised that they provided ‘a capsule to carry you into the next life’.

That was more or less true, as well, if you were a fucking idiot. The company had floor after floor of the building converted to hold anti-entropy pods and cryo-chambers. They were two of the latest fads to come around again, and were sold to those who wanted an escape, but didn’t want to take the final option of eating a bullet.

Instead, there were the two options—cryogenics and anti-entropy. Cryogenics was exactly what it sounded like, they froze your ass—and the rest of you—and kept you on ice, until the destination date you’d selected came round. For example, three hundred years from today.

Then—again in theory—the company would unfreeze you, and using the more advanced technology of that time, return you to a pristine new body.

Hooray, all the old rich farts that couldn’t afford to actually rejuvenate their bodies, would get to palm it off for a while in the vague hope of ‘new tech’ down the line. All the while their trust funds and more would be ‘maintained’ by the company, to cover the costs of housing them.

Swap out maintained, and add in raided, and the advert was suddenly a lot more accurate.

The other option was anti-entropy.

This was a LOT more expensive, and it involved the entire body being preserved in a null-field. This was actually new tech, and when the field was switched on, you simply ceased to register for reality as we knew it. Turn it off a week, a month or a millennium later? For you it’d been the blink of an eye, and that was it.

The big advantage of this was that your body was intact, so rather than possibly being told that as a brain in a jar—with frostbite—there was nothing the company could do for you, you could actually walk around and deal with things as you wanted.

Maybe you go again, maybe you don’t.

You’d have the choice though. The issue with it was the cost, the entropy pods were horrifically expensive to maintain, but it’d been discovered that there were advantages to it.

If the field wasn’t turned off, but instead was lessened, you could activate lower functioning areas of the brain, crucially without bringing the client to full consciousness.

That gave you access to a full neural loadout that was essentially doing nothing.

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Considering that the best way to train an AI was to interact with it and let it read living, active brains? Well. The company suddenly had an extremely lucrative sideline.

The once struggling ‘Future Enterprises Inc’ was suddenly looking for more investors, as they needed to buy extra space for all the space-cadet clients. They even dropped the prices of the anti-entropy pods to below that of their competitors, and were busy as hell, with a waiting list of over three years.

The clients had no clue they were being brain harvested, and essentially, if they wanted to complain about it? The first one that was due to be unloaded wasn’t for another century and a half, so fuck it. Someone else’s problem, that.

This was where we came in, just as the ledger was looking fantastic for the company, a member of staff had noticed a scratching noise in the basement, and had opened an old door.

The influx of long dormant specters was both merciless and lethal, and when they found the virtual smorgasbord of high tech equipment? Well.

The survivors of the massacre of the lower floors were traumatized to fuck, and that was just the staff. The actual clients hadn’t found out the truth about the incursion until the specters managed to turn the pods off, and by then they were both surrounded, and looking very tasty.

I was standing at the top of the steps glaring at the weaselly little man that was both trying to justify the situation, and its potential—he’d decided that as we had sold the banshee, word had gotten around about that after all, then we had disposable funds to invest in his business—and on the other side, he was trying to make damn sure we didn’t damage anything.

We were to clean out the specters—and dispose of any bodies—without damaging the pods, as they were highly sensitive and expensive equipment.

I’d asked if there were cameras on the floor, and had been told that there weren’t unfortunately. It’d been judged ‘best for privacy reasons’ by some utter idiot.

On the upside, when the door closed behind us, and all of us ‘accidentally’ forgot to activate our recording devices? Well. Any damage that was incurred at the site had definitely been done by the specters.

We didn’t, we were recording, just in case, but they didn’t need to know that.

We exited the small airlock style door at the foot of the stairs into the actual floor ‘proper’ and I shook my head in disgust. Clearly it’d been designed to appeal to people with more money than common sense, things like hangers by the pods for dressing robes and a comfy pair of slippers were sat neatly at the head of each pod.

That the previous occupants had put so much thought into their long term napping situation, and so little into the realities of life was obvious.

They were laid here and there like discarded cordwood. Mods ripped free, and the majority of the elderly had been cut apart to get at functioning systems inside them, such as organelles and bio-hearts.

Bloody handprints were slap-dashed across previously pristine pastel painted doors and polished floors. Meat and dripping, congealed blood covered the walls, and as soon as we walked in? the proverbial dinner bell rang out for the next course.

There weren’t many of them, not really, maybe thirty, and most of them came straight to us, drawn by our high levels of electromagnetism and the coded signals the nanites broadcasted.

For me, the experience was insane.

As soon as we stepped inside I could feel them, like a shimmering chime from a tuning fork, the song of the ‘pure’ nanites, but where that soared and lifted, underneath it, was the song of the dead. A crackling, warbling ‘wrongness’ that slunk along the bottom of the register.

I’d hesitated, stunned by the onslaught of wrongness, until Gessh had shouldered me aside and snap kicked a specter in the face.

She wore shoes, and trousers, not because she needed to hide her gleaming alloy legs, but because she hated cleaning all the crap out of them when we were on missions.

Despite that, the sheer impact of her foot was enough to tear the rotting skull free of the neck, and the body collapsed. She twisted, hopped to land in the foot as it came back down, and spun. Her head going low as she swung her center of gravity around, and her other foot blurred by high, taking another down to the floor with a crash.

In the two seconds it’d taken her to do that? I was back, the song was suppressed, as much as I could manage, and my rifle was up, barking over and over, single shots as we started down the corridor, Gessh and I in the lead, Luna and Todds checking the side rooms as we passed them, and Reign floating in the middle, ready to help out wherever she was needed.

Fifteen minutes it took, that was all, and we were at the door to the undercity, checking our weapons and readying, before slipping out.

The click of our optics flickering from full ‘standard’ to ‘dark-mode’ was always jarring, but the more you did it? The easier the change became.

Looking around the section that we emerged into, it was clear we’d found another of the old escape tunnels that were built into the underside of Artem long ago. The arced ceiling, the mosaic tiles where some long dead city planner thought that what was important was preserving some fucking advert for eternity, and the deep funk of the air made all of that damn clear.

The deeper we went down the slightly sloping tunnel, the danker the air became, until I was seriously glad for the full face helm and air purification system, while Luna, Gessh and Todds complained vociferously.

Todds ended up sealing his stealth suit helm and shimmering out of existence not long before we reached the bottom, and the reason for the funk was revealed.

The city, like most I guessed, had very strict rules on the kind of pets that were allowed inside the walls, and that should the citizens decide to get rid of said pets? Well this is how it needed to be done.

There were disposal services, both for the living pets and the dead bodies, and despite jokes to the contrary, I was fairly sure it wasn’t actually the same company with different colors on their vans.

Neither, again despite the urban legends, did they provide said pets remains to be turned into the ‘elephant legs’ that rotated on a spit in the late night food joints frequented only by the exceedingly drunk.

What this meant, was that there were ways to dispose of the animals, and that they were both simple and easily available. That was why when we reached the bottom on the decline and splashed out into the huge cavern before us, I was exceedingly pissed off to see a fight between two massive bull-gators.

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