“Lucky,” I greeted the half-orc as my call and remote VR invite went through. My avatar appeared, as did his, as if we were both actually in a bar, as I’d mentally selected. Just for shits and giggles.
He appeared on the far side of a table from me, digital, and unfortunately non-refreshing beers sat on the table between us, adding to the ambiance, and I desperately wished they were fucking real right now.
“Kabutt,” he replied grimly, looking around, clearly not recognizing the bar—it was a forces-only one from near the base, and somewhere I’d spent a lot of time. “So. Where the fuck are you, and why is Lilith still breathing my fucking air!”
“Who’s Lilith?” I grunted and nodded as Luna crouched next to me in the real world—invisible to Lucky, of course—and whispered in my ear that the cab was two minutes out.
“The fucking shitbird I told you to kill!” he snarled, furious. “Listen, you arrogant little fuck, when I say kill, you kill and—”
“Shut the fuck up,” I said flatly. “Lucky, I’m only going to say this once, so listen, because if this is how things are going to be? We can move straight along to where you try to kill me, and I get annoyed and slaughter you and your fucking gang.”
“You think…” he growled, leaning forward. His massive knuckles rested on the table between us as he stood.
“I know,” I said flatly. “Now shut the fuck up. You asked where I was? I was doing a specter hunt, deep under-fucking-ground with a merc company, proving myself to them, so I can go on recons where we know there’s likely specter activity and actually kill some to loot, rather than wandering the undercity fucking blindly, all right?”
“You get anything?” His demeanor changed instantly as he no doubt matched up the details he clearly had from the tracker he’d had implanted in me.
“Nope. First gig. I’m being assessed, and the guild have scavengers that sell it all for scrap.”
“Bullshit,” he growled.
“Lucky, I don’t give two shits about you beyond your usefulness to me, so believe this—I don’t view you as important enough to lie to,” I said grimly. “Now, I’m on my way back to the guild. I’ve had a shitty day and I’m not really in the mood for this, so, send me an update in an hour or two as to this Lilith. If they’re not out of my way on the way back, I might take care of it. Or, you know? Maybe I fucking won’t. I’ll see how I feel. This, though?”
I gestured to him and me, flicking a finger back and forth.
“This is a partnership. That was the deal. Now that might not matter to you—you might think I’m an employee—but believe me, try giving me shit like this again? I’ll be dissolving the partnership, and you can try to get your creds from me.”
“I’ll rip the fucking mods out by hand,” he growled. “You talk to me like this? I’ll skull-fuck your head and use it as a fucking goblet! I’ll—”
“You’d spill your drink,” I said, and he glared at me, chest heaving as he clearly tried to restrain himself. “You take my skull for a goblet—okay, you can try, but let’s say you succeed? First, you’re saying you’re gonna skull-fuck me. I’m guessing unless you’re going for my nose, there’s gonna be some damage. You crack it, your drink leaks out. I mean, yeah, you could repair it after, or fill bits in, but then nobody’s going to recognize me, surely, and that’s the point of this, I’m guessing.”
“You’ll regret this, Kabutt,” he growled.
“No, Lucky, I fucking won’t. You know why? Because it’s been a long-ass day, and I’m still considering helping you out, despite you being a dick. So, what’s going to happen is this. You’re gonna seethe a bit, then calm the fuck down, because we both know you only get a real return on investment if you put your big-boy pants on and carry on. Secondly, I’m doing exactly as I fucking told you I’d be doing—getting my mods done and hunting. I’m working. And because you couldn’t figure out where I was? You’re throwing a fit right now. When you calm down? You’ll see that the only one with an issue here is you, so fucking get over it.”
He stood there, glaring at me, and I smiled.
“Or, you wait until I get back tonight, and we sort this out between us. I win, and you’re no longer a problem. You win, and I won’t give a shit anymore. But you’ll have to go to Oshbob and explain that you lost the new supplier of primo mods you’d gotten. I’d imagine that won’t go down well.”
My boot was kicked, and I forced myself to my feet. The image before me separated as I willed normal vision to return in my left eye only.
“Now, I’m heading to a taxi. Do you want me to divert and head to you right now? We can kill each other, and there’s a chance I don’t need to spend the time cleaning my gear, so, you know, be honest here.”
“The partnership stands…” he growled. “But you’ll be hitting Lilith today, and her partner tomorrow, or I’ll—”
“Yeah, okay, we’ll see.” I nodded. “Good talk.” I cut the line and climbed into the transport with the girls, sighing as, unsurprisingly, as soon as my ass hit the seat, I got a warning for “fouling” the taxi, as well as a notification that the charge had been added to the bill.
“Fuck’s sake.” I sighed, pulling my helmet off and dumping it on my knee as I settled back. “Tell me the guild’s picking that up?” I blinked as the real world swam before me again and the bar vanished.
“They damn well are,” Reign agreed, sighing as the pseudo-leather of the seat adjusted, settling her in comfortably. “An advantage of being an assessor is I get access to some of the advantages of the team lead as well, when it’s not being used. This is one of the bonuses. Essentially, if you decide your team deserves a little treat after a nightmare of a mission? You have a discretionary slush fund to pay for things like this. This is coming out of your fund, by the way.”
“Nice…” Luna groaned. “I needed this.”
“What?” I asked, confused and looking around, noticing for the first time that while I was still in my armor, the rest of the team had shucked out of theirs while I was on the call.
“Johnny Air-Cab,” Reign pointed out, grinning. “I paid the extra to have the massage seats an’ shit.”
“Motherfucker.” I groaned. “I didn’t realize, and I can’t feel a damn thing through this!”
“That’ll teach you to take a call when we’re all recovering,” Luna said with a smile.
“Yeah, well, it was the ganger I’m dealing with. He wasn’t happy.”
“What you gonna do?” she asked. “I mean, you going to see him or…?”
“I’m going to clean my gear, reload and repair, as well as have a damn meal,” I said. “Then, and fucking only then, I’ll look at the details of the job he’s got for me. If it’s a simple one? Fair enough. No need to make things worse yet.”
“Yet?” Reign shot me a look, and I hesitated, before shrugging and going on.
“It’ll happen sooner or later. He’s setting me up for a large bounty as the last job in our deal. It’s blatantly a case of I do the hit, then he hits me and claims the bounty.”
“You sure?” Gessh asked. “I mean, he might be honest…”
I looked across at her, and she sighed and nodded her acceptance of how fucking likely that was.
The four of us sat facing one another in the back of the cab, the windows darkened to prevent outside observation, and I grinned, realizing that when Reign had picked this company—for the seats as she’d admitted—she’d also unthinkingly made things worse in some ways.
The light for “privacy and comfort” was lit overhead; a single red blinking dot that was there to make sure we all knew that. It was an additional touch to ensure we enjoyed the relaxation the cab offered. Essentially, unless we connected to the cab and deactivated it, we’d not be pestered with calls and so on as the cab had a blocker active.
That was fine; it’d gone live as soon as I’d finished my call presumably. But now? That tracker would be registering as gone again, and I had to think Lucky would be going apeshit about me vanishing again.
So, in conclusion, I was getting fucked by Reign twice over. First, she was using my discretionary fund as a team leader to pay for the upgrade from a standard cab to this cab with the massage and so on that I couldn’t enjoy because of my armor. Second? She’d just made it look to that half-orc prick that I knew about the tracker—I did, but that wasn’t the point—and that I was deliberately goading him.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I was getting fucked twice without getting fucked. Great. Story of my life.
“So, you said there’s a bounty?” Reign asked into the silence. Her eyes cracked only slightly, and I snorted when Luna groaned.
“Fuck’s sake, Reign! First we get him to formally invite us to the team, then we complain about how poor we all are, then we ask about the bounty!”
“Yeah, unless you’re actually giving up that elf ass for real, try some subtlety,” Gessh added, not even opening her eyes.
“Yeah.” I smiled, shaking my head as I realized how much I’d missed the solidarity that you got from fights like this. “Wait till you’re asked.” I winked.
“Well, just letting you know that if you need a sniper, I’m available.”
“And muscle, if we’re throwing all subtlety out the window,” Luna said, echoed by a grunt from Gessh.
“If I need backup, I’ll call,” I assured them. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s happening with it all yet, just that he has a line on a target. He agreed straightaway to me keeping the bounty, no argument. So, either he doesn’t believe I can do it, and that’s why it’s the last job on the list, or, as I say, he’s planning on hitting me once I take the target down. Then he gets the jobs done he wants, he strips my corpse, and sells my parts, and he claims the bounty. Win-win.”
“Well, he’ll be in for a hell of a surprise if he tries that shit and we’re there.” Reign snorted.
“Damn right,” I agreed.
Silence fell after that, the girls clearly curious but not wanting to push any harder, and preoccupied with their own lives as they did whatever they were doing.
The cab ride across the city wasn’t a short one. Where we’d come out, we were on the wrong side of the main freeways, and to get onto them, across to the guild and then back off, took forty minutes.
By the time we pulled out, the gentle rain of earlier had turned into a solid downpour. The drops hammered off the roof of the cab and sent up a steady haze of broken water.
The neon signs all around us reflected off the sidewalk, and I dragged my helmet back on, ignoring the cracks as I splashed through the puddles to the front door of the guild.
Reign had approved the cab fare—including the fouling charge. She and the others were getting soaked as they unloaded their gear from the trunk.
I’d clung onto mine, not being able to take it off in the confines of the cab, and I grinned upon hearing curses as they got soaked all over again.
The guild was much as I’d left it earlier, just a little darker and quieter, considering it was after midnight now.
A single counter was open. A bored-looking assistant sat behind the desk, eyes lit from within as he watched something. The few couches and random seats scattered around the room were filled by sleeping noobs, hoping for a rush, last-minute job.
I shook myself, water cascading off my gear as I strode deeper in. The assistant canceled whatever show he was watching, sitting up and scanning us quickly.
“Team-17,” he said in greeting. “Uh…Sergeant Kabutt, welcome back from your mission. Do you have any loot that you need assessing?”
“Wait one.” I turned and looked at the doors as the others crowded in. “Reign, you want to deal with this?”
“Not really,” she said, before grinning tiredly. “But, hey, I guess it’s part of the fun. Okay, guys, first mission is done, so this is how it works now…”
Reign walked us through the steps we needed to take, including tagging our personal feeds that had been recorded and uploading them to the guild AI for assessment. Our gear was gathered up, and the bags were turned out for the assistant to evaluate and log.
A handful of guns, credit-chips, some jewelry, and a load of random shit was assigned to the team’s account.
Notably, three things stood out. First of all, the grazer rifle and its batteries weren’t mentioned, and judging from the way Reign was clutching it, anyone who tried to take it had better be ready to pry it from her cold, dead hands.
Secondly, the datadeck that we’d found and that was in my bag was totally ignored, and I mentally tagged that as our bonus from Julius when he’d said that not everything needed to be reported this once.
The last thing was the mass of electronics and shit that I’d taken from the goblin’s hat. It was assessed as “random mod, damaged beyond recognition,” and assigned a value of five credits.
I tagged it and deducted the five credits for it from my pot, deciding I wanted to have a look at it. And if all else failed, I’d palm it off on Lucky for a laugh.
Once that was done, and things like the recovery and cleaning team had been confirmed as on sight and working, we were led out through the main public areas, and into the back.
I’d been taken into a ready room before, where I’d first met Reign, but here? This was the guild proper.
Away from the bits the uninitiated got to see, the building changed drastically. Everything was clean and well maintained, but military in design and Spartan.
No frills, no soft cushioned seats; instead, back here were workstations, locker rooms, and more. There were machines that were stocked with all the parts you could possibly need for standard weapon maintenance, from oils and tools to crystals and springs, all loaded into a vending machine that charged only a slight markup.
“It’s one of the best bonuses of the guild,” Reign said. “Everywhere I’ve worked besides here? You need a single crystal or a screw and you don’t have it? You need to buy a full maintenance kit. And you know how those work—you always end up with a dozen of one part you don’t fucking need, and never enough of the ones you do.”
“So where does it all come from?” I glanced over the catalog.
“Loot, mostly,” she admitted, shrugging. “The gear that we bring back, the guns that we don’t want, and that the guild has a load of, but that the price on the open market is crap? They’re broken down by the guild gunsmiths and stripped for parts. If it’s less than eighty-percent durability on assessment? The parts are sold on the net. Someone always needs something, after all. If it’s over eighty? It goes in here for cost plus ten percent.”
“Damn.” I approved, already thinking of my guns. “I like it. What about upgrades?”
“Physical or weapons mods?” she asked.
I hesitated. “You’ve got a carver?”
“Nah.” She shook her head. “We have some mods, though. Ones that are recovered from dead people—or looted uninstalled occasionally, uncontaminated and not claimed by the recovering team—are put into the catalog for us all, then you can take them to a carver yourself. Weapon mods are a bit more common.”
“Do we get a discount?” Luna asked, and Reign smiled, leading us down another corridor and into a small room.
“We do and we don’t.” She moved across to a wall of lockers that were clearly attached to a storage area and laid a hand on the reader on the side and presumably sent a code from her ident, as the lockers sprang to life. “So first of all, these lockers.” She nodded to the wall; noises rang out from somewhere behind, as the storage area was accessed and things moved around internally.
“You have your own personal storage space here, if you want it. Anything in there is locked to you, and you alone. Nobody else can access it, unless the guild master, Julius, or the quartermaster, Bento, registers you as dead. Once you’re dead, and the system queries your ident, getting either a full offline signal, or confirmation of death from the central government, the locker is opened and the contents sold to the guild. Any profits are given to your registered next of kin, or go toward any guild debts you’ve run up.”
She pulled out a change of clothes, and grinned around as she held them up.
“Believe me, it’s well worth keeping a few changes of clothes in here. The guild has a cleaning service, and it’s not bad, but it’s not cheap either, if you need it straight back.”
“How much?” Luna glanced down at her gear.
“It’s generally a credit per small item of clothing, two to five per large, and depending on how bad? It can be an additional charge. You want it back in an hour? Triple it.”
“Triple!” Gessh growled, and I winced, already knowing I was going to be paying it.
“It’s because the kid who runs it needs to drag in more help.” She shrugged. “Honestly, I think it’s weird that Julius had street rats working on shit like this, but it works.”
“An hour you say?” I looked down at my gear, and she nodded.
“There’s a clothing dispenser out with the other machines. Last thing we all need is you walking around naked.”
“First you want me naked, then you don’t.” I sighed. “Story of my fucking life.”
“So, as I was saying,” Reign started up again, grinning at me. “Keep a change of clothing here. There’re shower stalls in the bathrooms on the next level up, and despite the jokes earlier, sorry to say there’s no way we’re all fitting in one—certainly not if you want to actually enjoy anything—so wipe your mind of that for now.”
I snorted, seeing amused smiles on the others’ faces.
“Julius is of the opinion that if we can get all our ‘work’ jobs done here, and for reasonable prices if we want to farm them out? Then we’ll spend more time here. Then not only does the guild become ‘home’ and covers its own upkeep, it also means that we’re likely to be here when the shit hits that fan, and he can send us out to take nests down. It’s a little cold and calculating, but it’s really not that bad.”
“That why you were here earlier?” Luna asked Reign, and she laughed.
“I’d fallen asleep after a job,” she said after a second’s hesitation. “Pinot, a friend of mine, was going home. I didn’t have any plans, and my apartment’s…it’s on the other side of the city, so I crashed here. I’ve got debts to pay as well, so, you know.”
“So the weapon mods…?” I asked after a few seconds.
“Right! Yes, that’s what we were talking about. Come on…”
She led the way out and down the corridor to another section, this one with several large tables set up, some seats in the middle of the room, overflowing trashcans, and more vending machines along the wall.
“So, you need mods? The machines hold them. Basically, just like the parts, they’re salvaged from the various guns and gear, repaired, and if they’re worth it, they’re stored here. The guild takes forty percent of the value on the sale. The rest goes to the team that took it down, split up by standard salvage rules.”
“Which are?” Luna asked quickly.
“Twenty to the team lead.” Reign nodded to me. “The rest split between surviving team members.”
“So he gets twenty, and we get, what? Thirteen?” Luna said, nodding as she confirmed her math. “Close enough, anyway. That’s fine.”
“I was expecting you to have a problem with the split,” Reign admitted, as I stayed silent.
“Nah, he’s all right, and he did pick us outta the mass. I suppose we owe him a little respect.” Luna shrugged, nudging me with a shoulder, and I nudged her back.
“Besides, you didn’t try to kill or fuck us,” Gessh, always subtle, added.
“There is that,” Luna agreed, grinning, and I smiled despite myself.
“So! Repairs and upgrades.” Reign went back to the tour. “Basically, you need gear? We strip what comes in, and we sell to our own first. If it doesn’t sell, it goes onto the net for sale by the guild. Any prices offered in here are generally cost plus ten percent. When the same shit is offered outside? It’s at least double that, so don’t be too surprised if someone isn’t happy when you buy a mod or whatever. They’ll get over it, though, because as much as we all like a payday, we also like to replace our fucked gear for cheap.”
She led us back out into the corridor, and to a set of stairs, leading up to the next floor, pausing before going up.
“If you want any clean clothes for after your shower, the vending machines are there.” She pointed back behind us, and Gessh, Luna, and I all headed back in that direction. The sound of Reign’s laughter followed us as we hurried to find clean clothing.