I blinked, working my jaw as I tried to make the world resolve fully, then reached up and pulled off my helmet. Everything went dark, then brightened again as my internal visual augments took over from the helmet’s fractured ones.

Luna leaned in close, frowning at me before peeling back an eyelid and nodding as she shone a light in.

I cursed as the world whited out. Safety cutouts came online to prevent damage from the sudden unexpected white glare.

“Sorry, boss!” She winced before she grinned. “You’ll be all right. Looks like a concussion.”

“Here.” Reign leaned in and showed me a small medikit. “Use it.”

I nodded my thanks, trying to ignore the way the tunnel spun and my stomach tried to demonstrate my breakfast to everyone from that simple movement.

“Thanks…” I mumbled, pressing the injector to my neck and grimacing as it hissed. The needle punched into my vein and poured icy-cold nanites directly in.

There were a few seconds of throbbing pressure as they swarmed my brain, then blessed relief as they broke down, spending themselves in an orgy of rebuilding and repair.

I sagged back, feeling the cold of stone under me, sharp and pointed fractured rocks and the seeping wetness of a puddle, but I was alive.

The seconds passed and everything seemed to change gradually, until, all at once, I was no longer watching uncaringly through my own eyes, like I was watching a vid-drama, and I was back in the world.

“What happened?” I gasped, sitting up and wiping away the water that ran down the side of my face.

“Fuck!” Luna grunted in surprise, her blade in her hand already, before she let out her breath in one long sigh, shaking her head. “Boss, don’t do that! I nearly fucking stabbed you!”

“Luna?” I winced, wiping more water away and looking round. “Where are we? Where are the others?”

“Looking for a way out.” Luna shrugged. “They told me to stay and watch over you.”

“Where are we?”

“Still in the tunnels. Reign used your grenades and her own, tied them all together and set them off at once. Gessh tried for a bank shot, but they barely made it around the corner before they went off. Two flash-bangs, three incendiary, and three frags. Took the tunnel down and a load more besides. We barely made it out.”

“And now?”

“We’re in some old underground station,” she said. “Most of the direction we came from collapsed, three tunnels currently, with a fuckload of rubble from higher up. Not sure if there was any damage on the surface or if it’s all down here, but…”

“But we need to get the fuck outta here if we want to survive, and not be taken down by angry people, never mind the specters.” I groaned as I twisted my neck and popped a joint.

“Yeah, basically.” She grinned. “I managed to hold onto your loot, but it’s a bit fucked.” She offered a bag to me.

I took it, glancing inside and seeing a load of technical crap, as well as the more general stuff I’d been looting as I went. I nodded my thanks, putting it all away, and gathered up my weapons, settling everything back into place as I got myself ready.

“Which way did they go?” I asked Luna after a minute.

“That way.” She pointed to a narrow stairway behind a grate that had been pulled out. “Both because it goes up and, if that fucker survived, it can’t come after us.”

“What the hell was it?” I glanced back toward the rubble. “I mean, I’ve heard of higher-grade specters before, but I thought things like that were urban myths?”

“Me too,” Luna admitted, gathering her gear and pulling a handful of bullets out, pressing them one at a time into a magazine as she led the way to the stairs and I slipped my helmet back on. “You think I’d have come down here without a plasma cannon if I’d known they were real?”

“Heh, same.” I grunted, shaking my head. “That would have gone massively different if I was in my suit.”

“Why don’t more APS do that then? I mean, you get out, you get your suit, and you get registered, and boom. You could make a fortune strolling around down here, hunting those fuckers.”

“Because they get paid a lot more to sit on their asses in a pretty office,” Reign called down from farther up the stairwell. “I was coming back for you. Come on, we’re not far from a ladder up to the next level.”

“Imagine it, though,” Luna said after a few seconds as we climbed higher, moving out into a narrow corridor, then into a tunnel that appeared to have been for maintenance at some point. “You could have killed all of them, probably without needing ammo. Take down what, two hundred a day, on your own? Twenty thousand credits a day.” She let out a long whistle and shook her head. “What I couldn’t do with that kinda creds…”

“Same,” I muttered, before sighing and nodding to Reign as we caught up to her. “Realistically, though? Most of the smaller tunnels I wouldn’t be able to get into, not in my suit. And the bigger ones? I could march along them for days and see nothing, or I could have a ceiling collapse and be trapped forever. I might not see a single specter, or I might draw them like flies, in their thousands, and be torn apart. Who fucking knows.”

“If you stay with us?” Reign said softly, moving in closer as we walked and trying to edge Luna out. “We could team up. That way, you’d have people to watch your back and draw them to you, or rescue you if that kinda shit happened.”

“Yeah,” Luna agreed, utterly ignoring the annoyed look Reign gave her when she joined a conversation that she wasn’t wanted in. “How about it, boss? Are you going to stay with the guild after this? I know you said you were working to get your mods up to scratch to get your suit back online, but once you do that, are you staying or ditching us for a richer guild?”

“Fuck’s sake, Luna,” Gessh said from farther ahead where she leaned against the base of the ladder. “You’re supposed to be subtle with this shit, remember? Make sure he likes us first, flash him your tits or something, then you ask him to form a permanent team.”

“I can do that.” Luna shrugged and grinned at me unrepentantly. “Remind me when we get back to safety and I can get a shower, though, right? I’m filthy right now.”

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“I’m amazed it’s just you offering, Luna.” Reign sighed. “I mean, if you really want to catch his attention, surely it should be you both, right?”

“Fuck it. After we get out of here, and provided we get paid like I think it should be? He can join us both in that shower.” Gessh grunted. “But like I say, subtle, dammit!”

“Room for a third?” Reign asked casually, and I had to swallow my tongue to stop from blurting “fuck yes.”

First of all, I was fairly sure it was just a wind-up. Second, I was tired, and despite the nanites’ intervention, I still felt like shit. And third?

The most basic precept of all, in any squad, group, or friendship: Never shit on your own doorstep.

I was a serious believer in never fooling around with anyone I was too close to, as fighting and fucking, then going out and fighting properly? It never ended well.

I did, however, allow myself a moment or three of unsubtle reflection as we set off climbing the ladder, Reign’s hot half-elven ass only a few rungs above me.

The thoughts of her, Luna, and Gessh all in the shower with just me?

It was the thing dreams and fantasies were made of.

A handful of minutes later, and Gessh, at the top of the ladder, clambered out into the next level, calling down that it was all clear.

“Now what?” Reign asked me as I scrambled out and stood next to her, huffing with the exertion.

“Now, we find a fucking way out.” I looked at the hatch as Luna climbed out, then closed it behind her.

This level was a lot better. Hell, it looked as if it’d been maintained recently. And besides the lack of piled bodies, mold, various shattered sections of tunnel, and the general shit that was piled everywhere below? There was even a light in the distance.

We set off in that direction, hurrying along the tunnel, passing recessed sections every twenty meters or so, which looked vaguely familiar.

Ten seconds later, the noise that filtered back to us had us running like fuck back to the last recess. Gessh barely made it into the gap behind us in time, as an automated goods transfer train roared past.

A good thirty individual sections, like vertebrae in a snake, flowed along, dragged behind the mag-lev engines. We pressed ourselves deeper into the recess, staring wide-eyed at the containers passing before us.

A matter of seconds, and it was gone. The tunnel echoed with the sounds of its passage, and I practically collapsed.

“Uh, boss?” Gessh said after a few seconds.

“Yeah?” I muttered.

“I think I’m gonna pass on that group shower this time. I really need to get clean in private after that.”

There were a few seconds of silence, before we all started to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of that comment before I replied.

“Honestly, given the stress and sheer state of me right now? I doubt I could summon the energy anyway.”

“Next time, though, yeah?” Reign asked.

I glanced at her. The emotionless façade of her goggles watched me, and her lips were drawn together, either in disappointment or amusement. I wasn’t sure which.

“Next time…” I agreed, uncertainly, playing along. That uncertainty only grew when she nodded and smiled.

“Right then, ladies, time we got our tired boy toy back home. Otherwise, no shower fun for us in the future!”

“Whoo.” Luna yawned. “I can hardly contain my excitement.”

“Meh, he’s not much to look at,” agreed Gessh. “But you never know, maybe he tries hard?”

“He’s got a nice ass,” Reign pointed out.

I shook my head, listening and making sure there was nothing else coming, before stalking out of the recess and leading them down the tunnel toward the dubious safety of the light.

An hour passed, then two. In that time searching for a way out, forty-seven goods transports and a single black, heavily armed and armored transport passed by, each doing their damn best to make me shit myself or simply kill me.

By the time we found the exit, climbing up onto a low platform that led to an emergency exit, and from there directly out into the city, we were well and truly knackered.

“Reign?” I looked around the alleyway we found ourselves in, and a handful of goblins peeked out from a pile of rubbish.

“Yeah, boss?”

“We’re in the guild now, right?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Fancy booking us a taxi and billing it to them?” I suggested, and she grinned.

“I think that the least we can do is bill the client for that,” she said. “Give me a few minutes.”

I nodded, kicking a pallet over, so that it fell from upright and braced against the wall—apparently sheltering a goblin I’d had no idea was there as it screeched at me and bolted for cover—and I laid down with my back on it, staring up at the sky above, letting the softly falling rain wash some of the funk of the tunnels away.

I closed my eyes, and relaxed, before marking myself as “safe.”

It was a stupid thing, a little thing, but something that a training sarge had drilled into us all years ago, when we graduated from being a “normal” soldier and into an elite APS operative.

RIs are wonderful machines, but unless you wanted to spend literally years and decades of your wages on buying a high-tier one, they were fairly simple systems.

That didn’t mean they were dumb—just that they wouldn’t do anything unless they were told to do it.

Soldiers and engineers being what we are, the forces started tinkering with the RIs as soon as the first ones were handed over, much to their creators’ chagrin.

One of the simple things that came out of it was the custom programs.

Tens of thousands were created, most basic as all hell, but when taken the right way? They could elevate a lowly RI to almost the same level as an AI in many ways.

I’d never bothered with a lot of the programs. Richie was always espousing the benefits of some new one, but for me, a few dozen made my RI much, much more useful.

One of them was given to us all by that first training sarge.

“Safe” and “On Mission” were two settings, fairly self-explanatory. But when you were on mission? The RI would filter things out. Social messages, calls, asshole officers who asked for status reports with pretty graphs that they could understand in their nice safe bunkers, while we were under fucking fire. Those little details were all culled and set aside, while the RI returned an “unable to connect” message or some such.

It saved careers, as well as lives.

Now, as I marked myself as “safe,” I got hit by three messages.

The first was a nice simple one from Lucky. A location for the first of the targets he wanted me to kill. Apparently she’d stuck her head up and was with a group of muscle, dealing drugs in an area that Lucky considered his.

The message was blunt, rude, and demanding, basically telling me to go kill the fucker right now.

I closed it and moved on.

The second was a video recording from Julius of the Vigilant Heart, who I guessed was apparently now my new guild leader and boss.

“Hey, Kabutt,” he said tiredly, rubbing at his cheek and forcing a smile. “Look, I know you’re gonna be pissed at me about this mission, but it was supposed to be a simple one. Perfect for a training run. Well, you and I both know no plan survives contact with the enemy, but this one? I swear we’re fucking cursed.

“So. It went badly, and I understand if you’re pissed. Do one thing for me, though, and come see me after you hand in the mission or first thing tomorrow. That’s all I ask.” He sat back, his eyes bloodshot as he rubbed at the bridge of his nose.

“Hobbs…he didn’t make it. I’m sorry. Last-minute complication with his biology, no clue how or why, but the nanites just didn’t work in him. They died off too quick, formed a clot, and then hit his brain, starving it of oxygen. By the time the doctors saw it? It was too late. He was gone.

“His medical form stated if he was unable to be revived after two attempts, he was to be let go. His family are heading to Sacred Soul in the 34th District. They’ll take care of him, and we, as ‘the bastards who let him die,’ aren’t welcome. Sorry, man, but I’d rather tell you myself than let you read it in a bulletin. I’ll send the others messages with the details as well. His body is being collected tonight at 2100 if you need to go, but honestly, we’re not welcome, so be warned.”

I glanced at the time, groaning aloud: 2317. Even if I’d wanted to pay my respects? I couldn’t have now.

It brought Fergie and the others crashing back, and I cursed, pausing the message and sending off another through “correct channels” to the army, demanding access to their records so that I could create their reels.

That done, I went back to the recording, starting it and snorting as the damn thing ended a second later.

I shrugged and opened the third in line. A second message from Lucky, clearly not fucking happy at getting an “unavailable” when he sent another message.

“Kabutt, you better not be fucking with me…” He glared at me from the recording. “If you’ve taken my credits and run? You’re in for a big surprise!”

That was it, and although I seriously wasn’t in the mood? Fuck it. Best not to take his money then end up at war with him in the same day.

That could wait till tomorrow.