“Thirty fucking thousand…” I hissed as I ended the call, staring ahead, sitting on the second from bottom stair of an old concrete loading bay. “I’ll kill him!”

“Who?” Luna asked, and I flinched, having totally forgotten about her and her sister.

“It…it doesn’t matter,” I snapped, straightening up and looking around the shitty area we were in.

We were never called to fucking nice areas, of course—oh no, not to hunt fucking specters. This was the “pleasure beach” that Luna had wanted to visit, but it wasn’t a fucking “beach” area, not anymore.

The specters had been sighted around there, and then had wandered off, apparently leading the locals to believe they were forming a nest in the sewage pipes, and had headed into an abandoned reclamation plant, one that specialized in metal.

That meant that although the outside looked much like any other industrial building on the edge of the zone—tall stone walls, shitty, filthy windows that hadn’t been opened or cleaned by anything bar the rain in at least fifty years, and blocked and covered fire exits—it was also topped by great chimneys that belched soot-laden particulate matter into the sky.

“You sure?” Luna asked carefully. “Look, boss, you gave us a chance, all right? If we can help, we will, okay?”

“You’ve no idea what you’d be getting into,” I said grimly. “Seriously, you don’t want any part of this.”

“You don’t know what we’ve done over the years,” Luna said softly. “Look, boss, I’m not offering to go out and do murders for you, nor suck your dick, despite the joking around, but we’re mercs at the end of the day. You need us? We’re there. And if there’s some creds to cover the incidentals and maybe something more? Great.”

“Luna, I…” I nodded. “Thank you.” I left it at that, unable to do more at the minute, and desperately in need of getting things moving.

I needed time to plan, I needed to figure this shit out, and I damn well needed to earn an absolute fuckload of credits, because that little shit Bowdoin was charging me thirty fucking thousand creds for his part in hitting Tyrannus!

Plus he’d tried to claim half of whatever we recovered!

I’d told him to go fuck himself if he thought he was getting anything from my suit, that it was personal, and not to take the piss, and he’d accepted that after a few grisly threats.

I had a rough location in a corpo “pleasure estate” for Tyrannus as he “recovered,” and Bowdoin was going to narrow it down, find the little shit and find out what security was involved. It’d cost me my last three thousand creds, as a deposit, but I’d made it clear to the little turd that, if he didn’t do the job? I’d be visiting him personally to beat my credits’ worth out of him.

The armor was already on the move, though, and Tyrannus was my only contact to it. If it got into a corpo hub? I was never getting it back. That meant I had no goddamn time to fuck about. I needed to get to him tonight, and before I could do that? Well.

I needed thirty thousand credits.

Twenty-seven thousand really, after the deposit was taken off, but I’d no doubt need more goddamn ammo as well, so fuck it.

Just thinking about that made my fists shake again, and I had to clench them tight to stop from holding my rifle grip.

“Okay!” Reign called, jogging over, and I shot to my feet, ready. “So, there’s three specters been seen here. They think there’s more, but they’re not sure, and—”

“Three,” I growled. “Fucking three?”

“They apparently claimed there were more because they didn’t want to wait for a team to get around to them.” She forced a smile, clearly not happy either.

“Where are they?” I asked grimly.

“The specters are—”

“Not them. The lying fucking shitbags!”

“The manager is in there.” She pointed to a door with sections of grey showing through the peeling paint. “Kabutt!” She grabbed me as I started past her. “This is a client. No fucking him up,” she warned me. “Julius will boot you from the guild, and us as well.”

“I’ll just have a little word,” I promised, before walking up to the door.

The manager evidently saw me coming, probably on the camera above the door, as a hand reached out and grabbed the edge of the door, dragging it closed. As I reached it, the heavy clunk of locking bars slid into place.

“Reign, grazer,” I ordered, and she winced, but handed it over. “Thank you.” I spoke with forced politeness, before turning to look at the door.

“I have reason to believe there’s a specter inside that room,” I called out loudly. “If there’s any living being inside, open the door now. If not? On three, I fire this grazer, full beam, full power, and drain the battery. One. Two…”

“Don’t fire!” a panicked scream rang out. The door was unlocked and the duty manager, a scruffy bearded little bastard in striped pink and white, held his hands up, shaking his head. “Don’t shoot! There’s no specters here!”

“Thank you, Reign,” I said through gritted teeth, chucking the grazer to her and nearly knocking her off her feet, before striding forward. “Now, you fucking streak of piss, why the FUCK am I here?” I screamed into his face at half an inch’s distance.

“Sp…sp…specters…?” he stuttered.

“A NEST!” I roared into his face. “We clear out infections of specters at nest levels!”

He closed his eyes, panicking as he tried to get a breath.

I held onto the collar of his shirt, shaking him like a mastiff shakes a kitten.

“We’re here, wasting our fucking time with three specters when people are being eaten, they’re being dragged into the depths and torn apart, and you lied to us?!”

He promptly pissed himself, and I dropped him on the floor, disgusted.

“We’ll be back in an hour,” I told him coldly. “The site will be billed for a full fucking nest, and you’ll approve it, or so fucking help me. I swear by the gods of blood and chrome, I’ll drag you down into the deepest part of the city and I’ll nail you to the fucking wall for the specters to come for real.”

With that, I spun on my heel and marched out of the room. “Reign!” I barked.

“Yes, Sarge!” she responded, stiffening automatically.

“Lead the way. I need to fucking kill something!”

“This way…” She set off running; Luna and Gessh fell in behind me as we ran for the nearest grate. She sent it a code, unlocking it, then jammed a crowbar into the gap at the edge as the bolts retracted with a heavy clunk, levering it open.

The ladder inside, old rungs literally welded to the wall, was just visible with the heavy cloud cover overhead and the rain that hammered down. I started in without pause, my helmet illuminating the darkness below me after only a brief flicker.

I climbed down. The rusted rungs took my weight without so much as a groan, and at the bottom, I dropped the last few feet, landing lightly and bringing my rifle up, ready.

I swept left and right, checking out the tunnels that ran in either direction. Faint light filtered down from above here and there, as well as dripping water.

Beyond that, there was fuck all signs of life.

The rain was heavy enough and the openings frequent enough that the bottom of the tunnel—a literal overflow drainage pipe that was three meters high and circular—was a few inches deep with running water.

I splashed through it, heading to the left at Reign’s recommendation. Despite knowing how fucking stupid it was, I didn’t wait for the others, either.

I was too angry, I was too furious, both with that asshole above us, figuring that why should he wait, why should he have to put up with anything, when he wanted it dealt with straightaway, and with Tyrannus.

He, like that dick above, said only what he wanted, not what it’d cost anyone else, and I was incensed by the fucking arrogance.

Tyrannus was trying to profit by stealing ten fucking years of my hard work. He was fucking me over, and in the process, making it so that I couldn’t even make the death reels for my friends, just because it was convenient for him.

I reached the end of the tunnel, taking a left at the T junction, but finding nothing at the end of that line. Then I took a right, striding on as the others exchanged worried glances with one another behind me.

Reaching the far end of this passage, I found a sealed grate, heavily slotted to permit water egress, but to prevent anyone else. Reign slipped around me, punching in the code, and then stepped back.

I entered, taking point, and quickly found the source of the sightings.

A single specter.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I hissed, staring at the specter before us, hanging suspended over the storm drain.

It was tightly bound, shaking and trying to get free, while all around it, draukka roamed.

We’d found a fucking nest all right, but it was a spider nest, one that, although it might cause serious issues for the locals and end up requiring a visit from an exterminator, was absolutely fuck all use to us!

The single specter was being examined by a dozen draukka, long-legged spiders with thick bodies. They’d mutated back in the uncontrolled nanite expansions, their life cycle massively expanded from that of a “normal” spider. They now bit and injected their young into their victims, using a nanite charge—how the fuck it worked, I didn’t know, but it did—to force massive cellular replication in a short time. The spider’s eggs were incubated and brought from microscopic size in the mother’s bite to almost the size of my pinky nail in the victim in about four hours.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The area around the bite was totally numb as they spread, feeding on their host, and it wasn’t until they broke through the walls of their tiny little replication prison that the host would truly feel them.

They’d damn well feel it for a short time, though, as they burrowed through and out of the victim’s flesh, eating and growing all the while.

A single spider could become twenty full-size adults inside of a day, and from there? Their spread was exponential. They should have been ruling the city, killing and eating everything in sight, except for the fact that they were only one of the fuckers down here, and everything else, especially fucking goblins, loved the taste of spider meat.

I hissed at the sight of the spiders, then backed up, lifting my rifle. My single round took the weakly struggling specter in the head, ending it all.

It collapsed backward onto the web, and the spiders hissed and scattered, darting for hiding places.

Luna grunted, looking in and shaking her head.

“What a waste,” she said sadly. “A few hours’ work, and it’d be spider kabobs for us all weekend.”

I ignored her, stalking back and looking left and right, mentally reconstructing the route, trying to make sure there was nowhere we could have missed anything.

“Kabutt.” Reign stepped up to my shoulder and waited.

“What?” I snapped a few seconds later, as I mentally came up empty.

“Calm down. Look, these things happen, all right? Some missions are just a waste of time. Our run through the bio-farm should have been for like three or four, that’s it. That’s the normal.”

“No,” I snapped. “No, it can’t be! I need a fucking nest!”

“A nest? Kabutt, we barely survived yesterday. We were hunted by something that has to be higher up the food chain than the ghouls, and we were lucky. We got away. Some days it’s like that. Some days, it’s all bullets and blood, and the next, you’re sitting, sewing up the rips in your armor—”

“Fuck’s sake, Reign!” I snarled, turning to face her. “I’ve not got time for this shit!”

“You think I have?” Her voice dropped. “You know what I’m living with, what my debt’s like! You think I’m happy about this? I hate fucking around down here. You think I want to spend my life in the sewers!”

“You don’t?”

“Of fucking course I don’t!” she shouted, waving her arms around as if to say, Look at this place. “I’m here because there’s always more missions! You know how many normal merc missions a single, female half-elf gets that don’t involve me somehow ending up in my underwear, or being railed by the entire team? The decent merc outfits won’t take me with my past—the shitty ones? I’ll be stripped, used, abused, and disposed of!”

“It’s true,” Luna said; Gessh nodded. “We tried other merc bands before, and it’s not just that we’d be used as bait, just like she would be. She’d be sent into places to get attention, unarmed, half naked, then the ‘real’ mercs storm the place, and she’d be getting a little cut of the profits. That’s why we don’t want to work with the shitty guilds.”

“The shitty guilds…” I growled, shaking my head as I remembered how bad the shitty guilds were. The way I’d been jumped and dumped, my gun stolen, and…

“You want to make some money?” I spoke before I could think better of it. “Fuck it, I’ve not got the time to be careful, not now, so fine!”

I turned to face them all, noting that Gessh was sealing the door back up and that it was locked before she turned to me.

“I need thirty thousand credits by tonight,” I said, noting the winces and the way the others looked at one another. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you for donations.” I snorted.

“Glad to hear it.” Reign shrugged. “Because being offered a credit if you’ll do a dance often offends…”

“You hate the shitty guilds?” I asked, getting nods. “Any of you ever dealt with a guild called Errant Mergers?”

“Once,” Gessh growled. “Never again.”

“I’ve not dealt with them, but I’ve heard shit,” Reign admitted, and Luna just grunted, making it clear that her sister and she had been in whatever issue they’d had with the guild together.

“Well, last chance to back out,” I offered. “Because they fucked with me, and I need money, so I’m going to pay them a visit.”

“A visit?” Reign asked slowly. “What kind of a visit?”

“The kind where I burn their guild house down around their ears, and we fucking loot them,” I said. “You do this with me, you do my jobs?” I looked from one to the other of them. “Then we’re in this together. I’m offering you a chance here, as part of my team.”

“What’s that worth?” Reign quirked an eyebrow. “No offense, boss, but the bounties? That’s one reason I’m in on the jobs you have. Most likely, if that bitch had a bounty, the others will too. The merc guild, though? If they had a bounty on their heads, their guild would be broken up. You’re asking us to help settle personal scores, to make you money to do something that you’re not sharing. If we’re in, we’re in all the way, or I’m out.”

“You two feel the same way?” I asked, and Luna and Gessh glanced at each other before answering.

“More or less,” Gessh said with a groan, scratching the underside of her chin as she spoke. “Look. I hate those Errant Merger assholes, so yeah, I’m up for pissing on their parade, but you’re talking about assaulting a guild. There’s four of us.”

“It’s a pissing contest where they’ve got a machine gun, and you’ve just got your dick,” Reign said subtly. “It’s not a good idea.”

“You’re out then?”

“I didn’t say that,” Reign said with a sudden quirk of her lips. “I just asked what’s in it for us, considering the risks.”

“What’s in it for you is that we slaughter the top nutters in the guild. Then we strip them, and we armor up from their armory.”

“They’ve got shit in the armory,” Gessh said. “Sorry, boss, but we were there a week ago. Lasted an afternoon before quitting and walking out. They claim fifty percent of everything you loot, and they get to pick the bits, they keep all the good shit, but where it goes, nobody knows.”

“They’ll be keeping it private, or selling it,” I said. “Either way, we hit them hard, and we fucking take it all.”

“And then?” Gessh frowned. “I mean, look, no offense, but you do this, and they’re going to pull all their guild in to kill us. Even if you take the fuckers down, getting away? It’s not gonna be easy.”

“It wouldn’t be,” I agreed. “Except for a minor detail.”

“Oh?”

“There’s an entrance to the undercity in their guild hall.” I smiled. “They tried to kill me and dumped me through it.”

“Okay…”

“I escaped and killed a few specters on the way out. That’s how I ended up EMP’d.”

“So there’s a way out, and I’m betting that there’s a way in that’s not too hard. I mean, they want people in off the street to join them, so we can march in through the front door and order every fucker out maybe?” Reign said musingly.

“But then what?” Luna said. “No offense, boss, you’re a nice guy and all, but we’re basically risking our lives to help you get even. Sure, we might get some creds out of this, but I doubt it’ll be that many, and even if we do? It’s an insane risk.”

“It is,” I agreed. “But the point here? Is that my suit is actively being stolen right now.”

“The APS?” Gessh asked. “I thought they couldn’t be stolen? That only their operator can use them?”

“Exactly,” I growled. “There’s a way around that, though, if you’re corpo scum, and they’ve taken it. They’re stealing my gear, and I need to find out where it is, then get it diverted somewhere safe. That’s the thirty thou I need, and why I need it tonight.”

“So…if you don’t get it tonight, it’s gone? Like in a corpo vault?” Reign asked, and I nodded. “Shit.”

“Exactly. So, here it is, I’ll lay it all out. You told me the truth, so I’ll do the same. You help me do this?” I looked at them one by one. “We hit the guild, yeah, we cover some personal debts there. Gessh and Luna, you like them about as much as I do, so we all get something out of burning the place down, regardless of the loot. But…”

“But?”

“But we also get gear. We kill the guild leadership. They’re assholes who were apparently a gang at first, then they went legit and started a guild, but they still have a gang mentality. They keep their shit in tight, and they fuck over anyone they think they can get away with. I’m betting they’ll have some good gear. We hit them fast and hard. Kill them, seal the place up, loot it to the fucking ground. Then we blow a hole through the sealed air lock underneath, and we escape through the undercity.

“ACE turns up, finds that we’re gone, and that because we can’t take everything, there’ll be plenty of loot left around?” I grinned.

“They won’t even chase us.” Reign grunted. “They’ll pocket what they can first, then call in for backup once they’ve got theirs…”

“Then we hit the jobs that Lucky has for me. All of them.”

“In a single day?” Luna asked. “All of them? Boss, it’s like, mid-afternoon!”

“Yeah, and we’re wasting time,” I growled. “We hit the targets, and we pay off my hacker. We get the job done? And I share the bounty with you all, all four of us, even split.”

“That bounty had better be—” Reign started to say, until I cut her off.

“It’s for Stinger, and it’s a quarter-mil bounty,” I finished. “Sixty-two thousand, five hundred credits each.”

“That’s…that’s a hell of a bounty,” Gessh gasped.

I nodded, turning to look at Reign directly, knowing that the sisters were almost certainly in, but that she was the one I really needed.

“It is, but, if you’ll help me with this? I’ll help you. All of you. You’ll be in my team for good, and that means real bounties, and real bonuses. You’re being fucked over, day by day, Reign, by that chip in your head and by the corpos. Well, I’ll help you pay that off. In an APS, the bounties we can get? Much higher, not to mention that I’ve got a way to draw the specters. We get it working and we can draw them to us, set up traps and slaughter them in their hundreds.”

“The tech you grabbed?” Reign guessed, and I nodded. “What is it?”

“It’s classified, but it’s not like I give a fuck about that anymore. It’s a way to strip nanites from a corpse.”

“Right?” Luna said, unimpressed.

“Pure nanites,” I said, louder and slower. “Not the corrupt shit, the actual good stuff. We can strip the nanites from the specters and anything else we kill. You know the harvesting teams? The specialist monster hunting guilds that take down the big shit? They don’t just bring back meat. When it’s a big one? They call in the APS Corps and we help out. Using that tech, we strip the corpse of nanites, and we all get a portion of the salvage.”

“Pure nanites,” Gessh said slowly. “Like really pure? The stuff that the government produces, that there’s never enough of?”

“Yeah,” I agreed with a grim smile. “We do this, and I get that working? We can strip the nanites from the specters, as well as the mods. I know Lucky will be planning on hitting me as soon as I take down Stinger, so when he tries? We take him and his gang down as well.”

“Then what?” Luna asked, her sister nodding that she was thinking the same thing.

“Then we go directly to an orc called Oshbob,” I said. “Apparently he hates humans, but he’s a crime lord, and we need one of those to move this level of shit. He’s also who we’re dealing with for it all already…ultimately, I mean.”

“He hates humans?” Reign asked, then she nodded. “Ah, he’s not going to work with you…” She turned to look at the sisters. “But he might with you?”

“We’ve heard of him,” Luna admitted, glancing at her sister for support.

“We have, but you know…dealing with him, once you do a deal with the Orc, you’re never free again. You know that, right?”

“He’s a ganger, just like any other,” I said firmly. “He fucks with APS operators, he ends up a smear on the floor.”

I saw the wince on the girls’ faces, and I shook my head. “Look, I’m doing this, with or without you. I’ve got friends who need me. Once this is over? I’ll explain it—you’ll have earned that. But for now? Either you’re in or out.”

I stood there, watching them, my heart sinking as they looked at one another, and I waited for the inevitable refusal.

“I’m in,” Reign said suddenly, and I jerked, looking at her.

“What?”

“I’m in.” She shrugged. “Look. You say you’ll help me get out of this? I can trust you, or I could not. Regardless, the one thing that’s changed for me from yesterday? Today, I’ve got a chance. That’s it. It might be a shitty chance, and it might be an insane plan, but you know? I’ve been waiting for the end anyway. I wake up every morning and wish I was dead, so fuck it. We do this? Either I wake up tomorrow with some hope, or I don’t wake up tomorrow. Either way, it’s better than I’ve had for a long time.”

“Luna? Gessh?” I looked at the sisters, seeing the way they stood. The pair of them subtly mirrored each other as they always did, their matching armor with the paint splash running down it. They’d added to their loadout with new shotguns each—a rifle was over each shoulder, a shotgun in their arms—and their swords standing out over their opposite shoulder, at the ready.

Their gear was simple, the swords easily the best of it, but it was all well maintained, black and grey, apart from their characteristic red and blue stripes to identify the identical twins.

They seemed to communicate silently, not with digital means, but that special way that siblings always did.

“We’re in,” Luna said after a few seconds, nodding to me.

“But…” Gessh drew the word out.

“Yeah?”

“We’re a team?”

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“Then there’s something we want,” she said quickly. “That we’ve wanted for ages.”

“Go on…”

“We want out of the arcology.”

“What?”

“Look, you’re APS—you fuckers live in the military zones. We live in an arcology surrounded by goddamn gobbos, and we want out. You think you can swing us a decent place? We’ll pay the rent, not asking you to do that, but you know? Maybe you know someone who might rent to us?”

I looked from the sisters to Reign, seeing the honest-to-God dream reflected in her eyes of not being a homeless vagabond, couch surfing and always at risk, of waiting to see who’s going to claim more than she was willing to give.

“I’m in a shitty apartment as well,” I admitted. “Reign’s seen it, but at the end of the month my lease is up. So how about this? We do this, and we get the armor? We pool our money and get somewhere decent, the four of us? Try it for a month, see how it works out?”

“I’m in,” Gessh said quickly.

“Me too,” Luna agreed.

“You guys know I’m up for it, but I’m losing half my money every time I’m paid,” Reign said slowly. “I want to, but I might not be able to pay it.”

“We’ll make it work,” I said firmly. “We might all be dead tomorrow, but if we’re not? We’ll be set up to earn a fuckload more than any of us ever have.”

“Then let’s do it,” Reign said with a genuine smile. “So…there a plan for the guild house?”

“Oh, you’ll like this…” I said with an evil smile.