Chapter Twenty-One

I sat in a small, shitty chair that was clearly designed to make the person sitting in it as uncomfortable as possible, while I shifted my weight, and pretended to work on the report of the tower mission.

I’d written hundreds of AAR’s in my time, literally. Hell, I usually wrote them on autopilot, more than half of it coming from the RI and me just polishing the details as we watched the recording. It parsed relevant details out and locked them down.

Why the hell, when they had an AI go over the recording of the fucking fight, they had any need for an after action report, but they still did, apparently.

The waiting room I was sitting in, along with Luna and Gessh—Todds was taking his kids somewhere nice today apparently, treating them after the scare of them almost losing him live on a vid-cast—was that particular blend of rich and poor that only medical facilities and lawyers offices could manage.

The building was alright, well maintained, and the waiting area was clean. There were seats, and even a toilet. That was about it though. On the other side of the desk that the receptionist sat behind though? The quality was markedly different.

One glimpse through the door there when someone passed through revealed expensive seats and what looked like a full-on buffet bar for lunch being delivered.

On our side? A vending machine. A particularly shitty vending machine, that was both at least double the price I’d ever seen one before, and somehow managed to be out of stock of everything that wasn’t apparently designed to be vomit inducing.

“This is taking the piss right boss?” Luna groaned, shifting on a chair that she barely fit on, and groaning in discomfort as she did. “I’ve never been so battered by a bit of furniture,” she lamented.

“That’s a new name for it,” I said.

“Hey, I was fine before I sat on this. It’s the chair’s fault, not Dondo…”

“You were walking like you’d ridden across the wasteland on a bike with no suspension,” I pointed out dryly.

“Hey, he knows what he’s doing,” Gessh interjected with a smile and a slight coloring of her cheeks.

“So I heard,” I growled, shaking my head. “Can we change the subject?”

Luna sighed. “Touchy this morning aren’t you?”

“Only because she didn’t let him touch her,” Gessh added, and I glared from one to the other, before resolutely looking back across the room at the door Reign had gone through.

When we’d shown up here this morning—four fucking hours ago—It’d been with the expectation that she’d be in and out inside of an hour. Hell, yes it was a brain mod, but a decent carver had that shit sorted in no time these days. She might have been a bit woozy, but I’d been planning on a nice aircar ride back, and I wasn’t even going to try anything on the way.

Massage seats.

Maybe some music or something.

Definitely not going to try anything until she was a hundred and ten percent ready.

Probably.

But after three hours, when Gessh and Luna had messaged and asked where I was, I’d given in and told them, and they’d been steadily complaining about the seats, the décor, then lack of food and the horrible smell of the place for twenty minutes, and I wasn’t sure if it was the grim-faced receptionist, who glared at us the entire time we were there, or the sisters that I wanted to shoot more.

That it’d taken four hours so far, and that according to a brief message from Reign an hour ago, nothing beyond a review of ‘her circumstances and finances’ had been done yet?

I was rapidly losing my limited fucking patience.

I’d just started to fantasize about shooting the receptionist in the face—she was genuinely glaring at me as if I was there to rob them of her children’s inheritance or something—when the doors banged open and Reign stalked out, looking furious.

“Kabutt, I… Luna? Gessh? Brilliant. Get in here,” she snapped, before about turning and marching back through the door.

We were up and moving before the squawk of protest could properly form in the receptionists mouth, and by the time we reached the doors—with her frantically hammering the ‘door close’ button and ordering us to back away, that we weren’t allowed in there—it was too late.

Gessh grabbed one door and practically ripped it off the wall, while Luna drew her shotgun and smiled winningly at the security guard that came running out of the small office on one side.

He took one look at them, at me, and then at Reign walking away? Then shook his head, dumped his pass on the floor and headed for the door.

“Fuck this shit, ya’ll don’t pay me enough anyway!” he called over his shoulder as he left.

I followed Reign into a very nicely appointed office, to find a weaselly little man, presumably at least half goblin, sat behind the desk. He started sweating as soon as we entered, and that only increased as Reign took her guns back. She’d been forced to leave them with me as she went to discuss the matter with a ‘counsellor’ and hadn’t been happy about it.

“What’s the problem?” I asked. Standing behind Reign as she sat back down, both Luna and Gessh stepping up on either side and drawing guns.

An automated turret deployed from one wall, locking onto Luna, then switching to Gessh, then me, then Reign, clearly struggling to pick the most overt threat as it waited for an order to fire.

“You… you can’t just…” the little bastard tried to say, when Reign cut him off.

“You’ve given me six different reasons why I can’t be free of the mod since I arrived, and each one is shittier than the last,” she growled. “So let’s be clear on this. The reason you don’t want to remove the mod isn’t because you’re afraid I’ll relapse, or that I’m being used, that I’m trafficked for sex—my ass is great, but nobody will pay that for a go of it—and more. The real reason, is that I’m making decent creds, and you’re taking forty percent of them, and you want to keep that going. Once I’m paid up? You’re legally required to remove the claim on my account. So, we all know what’s going on here, and considering that you’re the fucking cockroach that fitted it, I don’t believe for a minute that you can’t remove it!”

“It’s not that simple, we need to book in for the procedure, and—”

I lifted my plasma sword and triggered it.

The sight of the arm long bar of contained plasma, flickering and burning bright enough it hurt to look at cut him off quickly, and Reign started to speak again.

“Someone is getting operated on in a few minutes, Director Hughes, the choice is yours,” she said almost patiently. “It can be me, paying my debt off, and you removing the implant, or it can be Kabutt here, a sergeant of the APS Corps, operating on you, with his plasma sword.”

“Just to make it clear,” Gessh said laconically, “we’re all heavily modded. Your turret opens fire? It might kill one of us, most likely it’ll just hurt. Then the rest of us will destroy it, and we’ll force you to remove the implant without payment.”

“Then we torture you until you transfer everything you own to us, and we kill the miserable bitch on the front desk, then we’ll go have lunch.”

“I could go for a burrito,” Reign admitted, before smiling at the little bastard. “So. Last chance before I save a lot of money…”

“You…” he whispered, wincing before sagging, then waving a hand as the turret slid back into the wall, and he evidently made a call to the front desk.

“Prep theatre one… yes, yes, I know! Just do it, Dalla!”

A few seconds later and he’d clearly disconnected, as he glared at us. “Just so you know, the procedure is dangerous—”

“Very dangerous,” Luna agreed. “If Reign isn’t completely satisfied, then I foresee a ‘complication’ coming your way.”

“One that involves a plasma sword being pressed against your asshole and triggered,” I finished for her, cutting the power to the blade and holding the projector up, making it very clear where the blade would appear and go.

“No, I… I’m serious!” he tried.

“Oh believe me, so am I.”

Reign smiled at him. “You fuck up and lobotomize me, ‘doc’…” She shook her head. “…they’ll kill you and everyone you’ve ever so much as looked at in passing. Do you understand this? You know that tower they broadcast the fight from? The team that went in and killed literally thousands of specters, that captured a banshee, that fought through insane traps and beat the old deathmatch?”

“Y… yes?”

“Want to make a comparison against the image of the ones that captured the banshee, and us?” she suggested.

A second later his face went even paler, and his ears started to shake as he forced a smile onto his face.

“You don’t understand… I’ve always been motivated by what’s best for my clients,” he tried, to snorts around the room.

“Don’t make me fucking laugh,” Reign snapped, rising to her feet and glaring at the little fucker. “Let’s get this done, and you’ll get the transfer after I recover.”

“We can’t…” He started and she took the safety off the massive grazer rifle, letting the room fill with the ominous hum of the weapon going ‘live’.

“If I die on the table, or get lobotomized, you’ll die in there too,” she said. “If not? You’ll get your pay, like I came here to do in the first place. Now let’s get to work.”

“Uh…” He started and we all glared at him, watching him wither under the combined distrust and hatred. “Um, I’ve never removed one,” he admitted in a small voice. “But…”

“BUT?” Reign snarled.

“Never?” Luna growled, shaking her head.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“If I remove it, there’s going to be a gap in your cerebral cortex,” he said. “It’s that gap and space for infection that I’ve heard causes the majority of the port-removal terminations.”

“So we put a new mod in?” Reign suggested as we all looked at each other in question.

“I don’t have any, or any experience in…”

“Fuck it,” I snarled. “Guess what you little bastard, today’s your lucky day!”

“It is?” he asked, blinking.

“Oh, it really is,” I assured him. “You get to learn a lot, and for such a reasonable price too…” I gestured to Luna. “Grab him, we’re going to see Lion, he can watch over this little turd and make sure the job’s done right.”

“I… wait, what? No!” He shook his head. “There are trade secrets that…” He cut off as I lifted my sword projector and waggled it warningly.

“I’ll get the cab,” Reign said, as Luna grabbed the diminutive figure by the throat and lifted him with apparently little effort.

“Now there’re two ways we can do this,” Luna said with a smile. “One of them, you try to run and I get to kneecap you, the other you tell your bitch on the reception desk that this is your idea, and you make sure she believes it. Want to guess which one I’m hoping you choose?”

I smiled as Luna walked next to the director, and he led us all out of his office, passing the receptionist and speaking very quickly to her.

Whatever else was going on here, the receptionist was clearly either a shareholder, or thought she was, as she tried to complain that it wasn’t right the director going anywhere, and certainly not to remove anything.

By the time the aircar arrived—a four seater, but which fortunately had a large trunk—we were all thoroughly sick of the pair of them.

By the time we landed outside of the chop-shop, and Lion wandered up, still eating his lunch, the director had apparently still not recovered his attitude.

Lion on the other hand wasn’t as sanguine as we waved to him, then dragged the flustered and very well-dressed man out of the trunk of the aircar.

“What’s he doing here?” Lion asked, taking another bite of his lunch—a wrap of some kind—then pointing it at the little man. “I don’t do removals and strips, so if you kidnapped him…”

“Lion,” I said, shaking my head in mock sorrow. “You wound me man, you really do. Thinking I’d stoop to that.” I patted the smaller man we’d brought with us on the top of the head, almost driving him to his knees. “If I wanted a mod or two from him, you know me, I’d have torn it out myself, I’d never expect a friend to do something so bloody and violent.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, around a mouthful, before swallowing, then balling up what was left and tossing it into a nearby bin as he led us inside. “So, what’s the deal then?”

“You know that shitty brain mod that Reign has in?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“This is the fucker that installed it.”

There was a minute of silence as Lion turned and glared at the little figure, who seemed to wither even more under that look.

“Go on.” Lion invited after a few more seconds, clearly no longer worried about what was going to happen to our ‘guest’.

“Turns out they only have the roughest of ideas of how to remove it,” Reign said grimly. “And that if there’s a space left over it’ll cause issues, so we should apparently get a carver to add in a new brain mod.”

“And you thought of me?” he asked, getting various nods.

“We wanted someone we can trust to do the work, and to make sure he doesn’t fuck up. He’s going to show you how it all works and how to remove it…”

“I can’t! The guild will…”

“Your shitty little guild will never know you showed anyone, but the only two options you have here, are to remove it and hope we keep quiet, or to not remove it, in which case we kill you, and try and remove it ourselves. Now one of those outcomes is definitely fatal for you. Pick quickly.” To everyone’s surprise it was Lion that had spoken, and I nodded.

Clearly the carver that did special jobs for almost nothing to help his community disliked the vulture as much as the rest of us did.

That he had no ally in the carver apparently broke the director, who sagged, and nodded, before starting to speak.

The vast majority of the things he said were meaningless to the rest of us, only Lion seemingly understanding the words that fell from his lips.

For me it was like a someone had broken a language RI and it was spouting gibberish with extra vowels in, but fuck it. As long as Lion understood it, that was all that mattered to us.

Twenty minutes later and Reign was being ‘prepped for surgery’ which basically meant she gave me a single kiss, broken off before the rush of hope and pleasure hormones could make her sick, and she picked a new brain mod from the limited few that Lion recommended and could get there sharpish.

This one offered enhancements to all of her senses, supposedly enough to boost them all almost at will. It was a hundred and thirty grand, but I’d taken the little bastard to one side, and I’d explained to him that he was getting a class A education here for a cut price of only the exact amount that Reign owed on her debt. He was going to get to watch Lion do the operation, and then he’d know how to fix people in the future, wasn’t that wonderful!

He also removed the claim on Reign’s account, which she verified, and I explained the consequences of his actions, should he choose for example, to send an assassin after me for this.

Basically I made it clear that any attempt on any of our lives, would result in me coming after him. I didn’t need evidence, so hiding it behind getting others to hire them and so on was pointless.

Any attempt, and I’d come and kill him. that was it.

When he pointed out that I was a mercenary and an APS operator, and that people must try to kill me all the time, I nodded, and agreed.

It really didn’t appear to make him feel better for some reason.

Lion pulled out a tool called a nano-scalpel, and went over the details of it with the little bastard, while we all took up station a little off to the side.

Reign and I watched each other silently, as he injected her, and I swallowed hard, forcing a smile, as the woman I was slowly coming to care for most of all, sank into a drug induced slumber.

I watched those brilliant eyes flicker shut, and I sat there, knowing that she might never wake. That out of a desire to ride me, she was risking losing herself.

I felt terrible, suddenly wanting to stop it all. I didn’t need the sex, hell neither did she, but… but that wasn’t my call to make. It wasn’t about the sex, not really. Sure we both wanted it, and yeah, it was definitely something that could grow to be an issue between us eventually, as apart from the sex, she could never experience real happiness with the damn implant in.

She couldn’t enjoy food, drinks, real camaraderie, and yeah, sex. She couldn’t go to a comedy night, or watch a favorite vid. She couldn’t dance or sing or… or whatever she wanted, because she was trapped into a life of an emotionless automaton, all because of this little bastard taking advantage of her.

I hated him, and I forced myself to sit back, and stay quiet as Lion spoke about neural connectivity, and plasticity, and loads of words that just seemed weird to me.

I watched as the minutes became ten, then thirty.

After an hour, when Lion finally sighed and straightened from the job, I couldn’t help it, watching her half laid there in a chair, eyes closed and seemingly asleep while he literally tinkered with her brain from behind.

“Is that it?” I asked, coming to me feet. “Is it done?”

“The mod is out,” he confirmed, “The new one is ready to go in, so either sit down, or go for a walk, the less distraction the better here alright?”

I gritted my teeth and threw myself into the chair again, glaring as it nearly folded under me. After a few seconds, rather than laughing as they seemed to like to make people think they would do, both of the sisters moved as one.

A hand rested on either shoulder, and they both squeezed.

It was ridiculous, a show of sibling support that was meshed in who they were so deeply that they both reacted at exactly the same time, in the same way, and yet?

I reached up and laid my hand on theirs, squeezing back my thanks.

There was no need for words as we sat there, another hour coming and going, then a third, but eventually Lion stepped back and sighed, dunking his hands in a vat of some solution to one side, his tools sinking to the bottom as he lifted now clean hands free.

An injector was lowered on an arm, and positioned ready, as he gently smoothed the section of skull he’d cut free, back into place, and then did something with another tool, seeming to draw along to points of damage.

“I’m injecting a small portion of ‘nites on the incision line,” he explained, for the benefit of all of us, before he drew an elaborate pattern on the skull, then smoothed the scalp and her hair back into place, again, following the line.

“Did… did you just sign her skull?” Luna asked, and Lion snorted.

“No, I left a pattern of ‘nites atop of the bone, they‘ll be sealing the skull to the scalp, helps healing.” He shifted slightly, squinting and making a few last minute touches, then used the injector, and a medikit at the same time.

“The injector keeps her under for a few more minutes. The ‘nites will flush her of the knock-out, but the time it takes to do that they’ll be fixing more of her as well. I know it might seem like a waste, but without that, she’d have woken up with a splitting headache. As it is? Give her a few minutes and she’ll wake naturally.”

“That’s it?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“I’ve done all I can, the rest is up to her,” he admitted. “This is the worst part, memories are often lost in these kind of mods, and those memories? They might be nothing, playing with some childhood toy that you don’t even really remember, or your parents arguing… or they might be a core facet of your personality. You just don’t know.”

I understood it all, intellectually, at least.

Reign and I had talked about it, on the way over to the facility, and we’d made the mistake of looking up the recovery rates… as well as the side-effects.

All of it went through my mind as I moved over and knelt next to her, holding one hand in mine as Lion moved off.

Where Lion had the common sense to give us a little space, it took Luna marching over and grabbing the director by the ear and physically dragging him away to get us a little privacy.

I stayed there, as my knee went numb, as my back started to ache, and as my fear of what might be rose. We’d talked about the worst case scenario as well.

Not death, as horrible as that was, but that she might be… less, or different. That she might not be able to work with us any more, that she might not be herself.

She might decide she hated me for some reason, or that I was loved ‘like a brother’. She might not remember me, or she might be reduced to child-like in sensibility.

All of it ran through my mind, and my heart froze as her eyes finally flickered open.

We stared at each other seemingly for ages, before she tugged on my hand gently, and I moved in close to her, leaning in as she coughed, then wet her lips with a tongue and whispered to me.

“I’m going to rock your fucking world.”

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