Chapter Thirty-Six

The call with Bowdoin was anti-climactic in just about all possible ways. He accepted the file, laughed his arse off for a solid minute, then sent me the locational data for Richie and Sync.

I asked him what was so funny and he laughed harder. The bastard.

“Fine, whatever,” I growled at him. “Look, I need another job doing.”

“Sounds interesting.” He shrugged. “What do you need?”

“You know how the APS are registered? When we’re free of the army I mean, any suit that’s in the city has a registered locational tag, as well as a hardwired explosive in the suit that the government can detonate if we act up, or you know, go corpo hunting?”

“Vaguely, yeah?” he agreed, nodding and seemingly playing with something else, not really paying a great deal of attention.

“Well, I need that.”

“What?”

“The registration, just hack it or whatever.”

“Yeah look, when we talked about that before, well I’ve looked into it a bit. You want me to hack into a secure server, something that’s designed to keep the most lethal machines in the city under surveillance and from running amok, and you just want me to ‘hack it or whatever’.”

“So, let me guess. This is where you tell me that nobody else could do it, and that you’re a genius, and triple whatever cost it was going to be?” I asked him sarcastically.

“No, seriously man, this is where I tell you it can’t be fucking done.”

“It can,” I assured him.

“It can’t,” he replied just as seriously. “You don’t know what you’re asking, this is a system that’s maintained by AI’s, a system that searches the city constantly, every single goddamn camera that’s connected to the city systems, all traffic cams, surveillance, security cams, weather trackers, hell the fucking rodent and research systems, ALL of them are linked to this! There’s no way a suit can move in the city without being instantly picked up on one of those and then cross referenced! As soon as that’s done? They’d know, and there’s no way to spoof it.”

“Wait, no you don’t understand—”

“No, Kabutt, you fucking dinosaur, you don’t understand! There’s no way to get the system not to report you! I’d have to hack all three AI, watch them around the clock, maybe code more AI to watch them, they’re that fast and then…”

“Bowdoin, it’s been done before!” I said firmly.

“No it’s-”

“That walking turd Major Marcial has an entire black ops team that get by without, and M-Corp had one as well, so…?”

“Yeah but… wait, no that doesn’t work.” Bowdoin said after a few seconds of thought. “That can’t work.”

“Just because you don’t know how they’re doing it, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Figure it out!” I suggested, and he totally ignored me, staring off into space.

“It’s not possible,” he said. “Genuinely, I mean, it can’t be, right?”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Nobody’s that stupid.” Bowdoin mumbled after a few seconds of staring into the distance, before sitting up and smiling at me, making me both confident he’d figured out a way to do it, and fear for my wallet.

Then he spoke up again. "So, here's the deal. I have an idea of how things may work. However, since you are a fucking suicide risk for me , and this is so damn far beyond my paygrade I should be presented the keys to the fucking Living Earth tower any day now...I'm going to turn you down."

"Bowdoin. You're not fucking—"

“Except... because I am that nice, and because you'll be paying me a lovely finder's fee, I'll be presenting you to a friend of mine, who is almost as crazy as you and almost as talented as me. And I will tell him which hunch I just had."

“Fuck, no look, I don’t need ‘nearly as talented’, I need…”

“Tough!”

That was it, that fucking hacker dickhead Bowdoin said he’d get back to me with the other guy’s details and soon, as well as that as soon as I knew when I needed it all in place, I was to call him, giving him as much notice as possible.

He and I knew damn well that the way my life was I’d give him as much notice as was possible , which meant most likely I’d call him and demand it be done ‘now bitch now’.

That being done, and unable to resist it, I’d powered the suit fully, then sat there for a few minutes, my eyes closed, feeling the hum of the power cells and the comforting presence of the suit all around me.

All my personal stuff had been stripped out, the stored memory files by Richie, to keep them safe, and the actual personal physical bits, like the stupid things like the stickers and the stink bomb that Fergie had stuck into one boot—it’d driven me mad for a fortnight—were all gone from the rebuild.

Eventually, I couldn’t put it off any longer, and rather than physically keying anything, I did the final test. I closed my eyes, and I ‘felt’ the system through my nerve ports.

It was the last fear, and it was justified. As soon as I closed my eyes, it all changed.

Until now I’d been commanding the system through my implants partially, running tests with them, and through the various ‘normal’ system processes. Moving my arms, or thinking to, and the padding mimicking the feeling of the outside world so that it matched.

Now though, I stopped all of that and did a full mental linkup.

There were issues.

I’d expected that there would be, and sod’s law, I was ‘out’ of the system now, which meant that I couldn’t get a patch that would just fix things.

My RI began cataloging the various issues, and I winced as the list hit over a thousand sectors. In IT and system issues that was nothing, not for the billions of lines of code that made the APS usable. Hell there were sections that were designed to only kick in if the code had issues, or if limbs were removed.

I pulled up the code in my mind, suddenly standing alone on a beach, water lapping nearby in my mental construct as screens surrounded me, code streaming as I focused and parsed the meaning out.

There were sections that were written to account for seismic shifts in the ground, in specific latitudes, in specific depths of water, ranging from a puddle to deep water ops.

A thousand lines of errors? That was practically the gold standard!

The problem was, I didn’t know if these errors were the usual fuckups, if they were a new patch that had been applied and rushed, and now my legs worked backwards or whatever—I’d not be getting a replacement patch after all—or if these were specific to my situation.

My new spinal tap system was rigged for four inputs. The suit had done one main insert, the weapons systems would be run through the secondary line normally, and until the system registered that there were weapons attached that wouldn’t be inserted.

So that might account for the errors as well, but maybe…

A knock sounded on the exterior of the suit, and I blinked my eyes open, the massive walls of code that I’d been scouring through vanishing as I focused on the ‘real’ world again.

I also focused on Reign.

She was standing right before the suit, in a fucking tiny little red outfit, one that did nothing to hide and everything to enhance.

The escape bolts slid free and the suit began to open to my unstated command, as Reign stepped back, smiling when she saw the look on my face.

“We’ve got about an hour before the girls get back here, and we have to put up with Dondo and the pair of them trying to fuck the walls down,” she said. “I thought you might like to make the most of some private time with me?”

“Oh my gods, yes.” I breathed, disconnecting and ordering the transport container to seal itself up before I was even out fully. I barely made it out of the harness and down to ground level before the handholds had retracted, the corners drawing in and sealing the container shut.

Reign walked up the stairs to the apartment area, and I almost fell over myself hurrying after, admiring that elven ass as she cleared the top of the stairs ahead of me.

I hit the door without slowing, almost taking it off the hinges, and swept her up in my arms, tearing a burst of laughter from her, then kissed her soundly.

She put her arms around my neck and returned the kiss, then somehow she twisted and was wrapped around me fully, hands undoing my buttons and tugging me free, before whispering a question into my ear, and making me groan with need.

The next hour passed in a blur, the backblast of the aircar outside taking off as Dondo presumably took it to get the girls—although it could have been stolen for all I cared right there and then—and then the blast seemingly far too soon again, as it returned, warning us to shift rooms, the main room bench having been the perfect height, and the table? Well.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

It was both sturdy and had just a little give that meant it rocked in the most delightful of ways at times.

We barely made it into the bedroom before Luna and Gessh entered, and the laughter that followed us when they found some of the clothes we’d missed out there?

There were various catcalls and shouts of recommendations, before they went quiet, presumably having had enough fun and decided to move onto ‘making their own entertainment’.

We fell asleep in each other’s arms eventually, the pair of us exhausted, sweaty and both determined we’d get up and get a shower in just a minute…

…then we were out, fast asleep.

…

When I woke the next morning, it was to the sensation of Reign slipping from my bed, a gentle kiss placed on my forehead as I laid there drifting, not quite awake, and not quite asleep, and then she was gone.

I sank back into a lighter sleep for a little while, then forced myself to get up, having a long shower, dressing slowly, still feeling relaxed.

Leaving my room I closed the door softly, seeing that the sun was barely risen, and smiling to myself as I smelt the coffee in the machine.

Reign was sitting at the table, sipping at her own cup, and smiling at me over the rim as I moved in.

“Morning,” she whispered, and I stole a quick kiss, her lips tasting like the juice of the gods, before I got my own mug. Sitting with her I couldn’t help but smile at the way she slid a hand almost hesitantly across the table, half way to me, and I reached out and took it, holding it in mine.

We were so similar, and so different in many ways, but the feeling of her slender, small hand in my mine made me smile so easily. For a few minutes we simply sat there, not saying anything, just enjoying each other’s presence as we watched the sun coming up over the distant chimneys and buildings, the long shadows being cast by the wall meaning that ‘sunrise’ was a misnomer in the city, but still.

It was the company that mattered.

Twenty minutes later the first sounds of stirring from the others filtered through to us, and I finished my second cup, before standing. “Are you ready?” I asked Reign, and she nodded.

“What’s the first job?” she asked, setting her cup aside and squaring her shoulders, pushing our romantic morning and fun night aside, making room for the paid professional killers we were.

“Reload, check the gear we’ve got, then load up. We need to make the most of this. We’re going deep today, and we won’t be coming back until we’re out of ammo, we’re out of specters, or we physically can’t loot anymore.”

“Sounds fun,” she said, smiling at me, before nodding towards the steps down to the warehouse floor. “You get started, I’ll organize some food to arrive soon and check on the others, get everyone moving.”

Another hour had passed before the last of us—Todds—arrived, and by then? We were mainly ready.

We’d taken the lessons learned from the cooling tower mission, and applied them here. Not only did we have spares for most things—and I had a spare fuckin’ helmet, because they always get trashed—but we also had enough food for three meals each, a container of water, four small and two medium medikits each. A length of lightweight chain, because it was a fuck load easier to climb than rope, and strong as shit, a welding torch—a small one that had an integrated battery and filament dispenser—and lastly our standard loadout.

All the things like a ‘normal’ medikit, a blanket, a change of clothes, a spare knife, a windup torch, just in case of EMP’s, and most importantly?

An utter fuckload of ammo and razorwire.

We literally had a buttload of ammo for everything, so much I hadn’t even counted it, there was enough to fill every mag we had, then an ammo case, a heavy duty case filled to the brim with ammo, probably enough to reload everything from scratch at least once over, as well as directional mines, grenades, collapsible bags, and last of all?

A pair of big bags that were filled to the brim with spent medikits, ready to be refilled.

If we managed to fill all of them? Individual small medikits were a thousand each, and we had more than two hundred. If we just filled all these fuckers up, not counting the damn kills, not counting the looted mods?

That was going to be a hundred thousand or more, considering that Oshbob had agreed to pay half the market value for them.

Loading it all into our aircar took all the space it had, and we had to get a second cab for ourselves, but hey, that was life, nothing was ever fucking easy after all.

Clambering out of the cab at the other end, loading each other up, we got some seriously weird looks from the locals, considering where we were?

There was nothing dodgy going on, specter-wise here, besides us anyway.

“You sure this is the place, boss?” Luna asked as we set off walking, the sections we needed to pass through to get to the nearest entrance to the undercity were too narrow for the cabs.

“I am.” I told her, using the tac-net.

“Good, because you know we’re fucking surrounded already, right?” Gessh added in, and I nodded. “Just, you know. This is a bit of a bad area, that’s all…”

“I know,” I said, smiling as we passed a symbol etched into one wall, glowing with a mixture of imprinted metallic hues and photoluminescent paint making it gleam in the dim alley.

Where we were was one of the most congested, dodgy and dangerous areas I possibly could have found. The buildings here were ancient, old housing slums that had started out as blocks of flats and individual houses, but over hundreds of years they’d grown into each other.

The building code for the larger blocks and the arcologies was very specific, the insane weight of such structures meaning that they had to be spread out, and certainly not in any area that was as structurally unsound underground as this was.

As such? Investments were focused elsewhere.

Areas declined gradually, as more and more buildings were converted without any consideration for the rules, and when a city as corrupt as Artem thought that an area was bad?

It was really bad.

Hundreds of meters of streets, parks, shopping areas and more had been gradually cut off from the sky as people extended their apartments out and up.

Soon the parks were lost to gangs, then the shops were replaced with more slums, and before long you had a level of living quarters in an area that approached that of the worst arcologies, but without the common sense approach to building and spacing.

The result was this.

An area that corpos ignored, that ACE patrols avoided and actively turned around, giving up on chases inside of, and that the only real way to deal with, besides ceding it to the gangs as they had, was with a flamethrower and wrecking balls.

“You’re way too cheerful for this boss,” Todds said, trying to watch in all areas at once. “We’re walking into a trap, you know that?”

“Nope,” I said. “If we were trying to pass through here? Sure. They’d be setting up an ambush ahead, but we’re taking the next left, then we should find a covered entry, that’s our path.”

“To the undercity?”

“Yup.”

“Why the hell did we come into this section to do it?” he asked nervously. “Seriously boss, we’re carrying more disposable wealth in one of these bags than this entire area is worth, and there’s five of us. This is not a good place to be, alright?”

“We’re going to need a nice safe exit…”

Luna snorted. “Boss, I know we see some shit slightly differently, but this is fucking Reaper territory, this is NOT a safe area.”

“True, but if you cheerful fuckers will let me finish?” I said, as we took the planned left, then all stopped dead for a second. I sighed as we started pulling free the piles of dumped rubbish and boxes I should have been expecting, before gathering around the sealed entrance. “Todds, get the door, be ready to seal it after us.”

“Yes, boss.” He pulled out the plasma cutter and welding torch, then starting to check the entrance out.

It was old, clearly dating back to when this was a respectable area and people worked, instead of thieved for a living. The old entrance to the undercity was arched, once wide and more or less inviting, and no doubt tiled inside as those areas we’d seen elsewhere had been.

This was wide enough that I had to guess there’d be a mass transit hub nearby as well, not far from the surface, but it’s clearly been given up on as too dangerous when the rest was abandoned.

The wide entrance was filled with solid metal doors, with a massive locking bolt and cover. There were also laminated overlapping warnings that the inside was dangerous, subject to collapse without warning and infested, and were in turn covered with centuries of graffiti.

Now it was all reduced to the point that all that you could say for sure was that Sharon wasn’t going to be happy about what had been written here about her, and that Donald was likely to be long dead.

“Right, we need a safe place to exit with our loot, okay? Anywhere we enter this section is either too close to the gang territory, or too far away to be lugging all this gear in. If people see us enter with all this, and then a few hours later leaving again by the same entrance, we’ll be hit. As it is? Likely they’ll come after us regardless. That’s why we brought directional mines, and the MADD grenades as a last resort.

“Instead we enter by one of the more dangerous routes, we mine the area behind us, set up a nice little secure position, and we get ready for any fuckers that try to hunt us, namely the gangs. You all with me so far?”

“Yeah?” Luna said. “Won’t this draw the specters though?”

“I certainly fucking hope so. And just in case it doesn’t?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s what the gang is for,” I finished, and waited.

“Why… oh, you evil bastard,” Reign said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “You’re not leading us in here unaware of the gang, you’re killing two birds with one stone.”

“What?” Todds asked, crouching down by the grate, checking the seal on it. “Sorry, I’m missing something, but you all need to be aware this was sealed and then opened again, this has a recent lock applied, it’ll cut easily enough with this, but someone’s going to be pissed.”

“That’s fine, like I say, seal it again after us, we don’t want it to be too easy, but also not impossible.”

“And the reason you want a fucking gang chasing us?” he asked.

“Nice and simple,” I said watching the street behind us, gun ready, and making note of the number of eyes watching us from the crossing streets, as well as the small drones that flitted overhead.

“We need specter bait.”

‎