Chapter Twenty-Three

Reign and I climbed into the air-cab about fifteen minutes later, one of those annoying situations where there were none available and then like six all at once had shown up, but that was life.

Luna and Gessh were on their way as well. Reign had called Todds who’d agreed to meet them in an hour, as he was still out with his kids—and their babysitter, who apparently had made it clear just how impressed she was that he wasn’t just a nameless merc after all.

When he was named as one of the ‘heroes’ who’d ‘saved the city’ from a specter outbreak—that was how the media were spinning this for some reason, no doubt some credits had changed hands somewhere—he’d gotten back home to find his kids worshipping him.

He'd had some time with them, packed them off to bed, and then the babysitter had apparently nearly broken him demonstrating just how impressed she was.

He was single from necessity, not choice apparently, and had been barely surviving on the money he was pulling in. Now he was laughing, and I’d gotten a message from him confirming that he’d be ready for the next job whenever we needed him.

I watched the city flashing past the windows of the cab, then smiled, unable to help myself, as I felt Reign’s fingers entwined with my own.

Turning to her, she smiled at me, tired, clearly exhausted in fact, judging from the rings around her beautiful eyes, and yeah, still with blood and cleaning solution matting her hair from the op.

She was still stunning though, and she leant in bumping me with a shoulder, before kissing me.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “This wasn’t what I was expecting when I joined you for that evaluation mission.”

“Me neither,” I admitted. “I’d not change it though, not for the world.”

“Nope.” She smiled and kissed me again. “So… when we get back…” She trailed off, quirking one eyebrow. “You think it’ll take you long to sort the harvester out?”

“Most of the day,” I said, “As much as I’d like to rush it off, we can’t.”

“I know.” She laughed, then shook her head. “You know, it’s stupid. I know we can’t, and I know we shouldn’t. But now that the only thing that’s stopping us actually screwing each other’s brains out is time? It’s really hard not to just straddle you right now.”

“That and we’ve got like ten minutes before we land, if that.”

“Good catch.” She nodded seriously. “So, we could go what, three times?”

“Cheeky bugger!” I laughed, before pulling her close for another kiss. This one went on for a lot longer, and was definitely getting more serious, when Reign eventually pushed back, breaking the kiss, and free of both our roaming hands.

“Okay,” she said, her voice husky. “I’m going to sit on the other side of the cab, because one more kiss like that, and I’m riding you here and now, I’ll pay the delay charge on the cab if it has to sit idle while we finish!”

“And the fouling charge?” I joked, getting a grin as she licked her lips.

“No risk there.” She sighed, before moving to sit across from me, straightening her clothing, as I adjusted my own. “Right, let’s think of something else… these electronics.”

“What about them?” I asked.

“You’re sure you can do this?”

“Yes and no. Inventing something like this from scratch? Fuck no.” I shook my head. “As it is though, scanning the parts? Downloading the schematics and programming that were already done? Patching across what I was taught and using the versions that we had in the APS to replace any missing parts? Yeah, I can create a monster that’ll probably do the trick.”

“What about the missing or damaged parts?”

“Easy to replace most of them,” I assured her. “It’s literally a case of scan in the damaged bits, find a match, and send a drone order for them. I’ll get a handful so I can test them, and then boom. The missing parts? That’s going to be the awkward part, but that’s life.”

“How bad do you think?”

I shrugged. “Honestly, hopefully not too bad. It looked to all be there, besides the actual impact and storage sections. The real issue is the separation and cleaning process, and that’s what we’ve got. If need be? I can use that hand that we salvaged earlier, build the system around it and…”

I broke off, my mind whirling as I considered things, then I grinned. “Oh yeah,” I muttered. “Okay, give me some time, I need to work on this…” I told her absently, the desperate need to jump on her vanishing as my mind raced off down a new track.

“Men.” She sighed, shaking her head fondly at me. “Such simple creatures.”

“Hmmm,” I agreed, not really listening. I was already miles away, linking back to Lion’s shop, and scanning through the arms he had in stock.

None of them were right, but after a few seconds when I pinged him a notification, and he jumped in. Then we were deep in the data in seconds.

Turned out the girls had both chickened out, something about one looking for a sensitivity booster for sex, and the other looking for an audio enhancement, neither of which he had in stock, and certainly not for the handful of credits they had.

They’d been sent away to reconsider things, and Lion had been bored.

Now, I was sharing sections of my design with him, and he, being an actual cybernetic genius and carver, was racing ahead in leaps and bounds.

The original design had been on an extendable ‘arm’ more like a crappy post. Then there’d been medikits slotted into the arm to drain the clean nanites into.

That was great, I liked that section of it, but the arm? I’d either have to have a special unit built to wear an extra arm—and all the attendant problems that’d bring, from attention, to confusion and more—or I’d have to build it into a weapon, something at least the size of the rifles that Reign was always lugging about.

That meant limiting my offensive capability until I could get it built onto my APS, at the very least. I’d thought about my arm, attaching it there, but the fact it was a mid to low level one, and that I’d need so much work doing to another? It’d just seemed like something to look into later.

Fix the kit, then work out how it could be used.

Now though? Now I had limited time with the original, and I’d seen the missing parts?

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

My mind was leaping ahead again, even left in the dust by Lion.

He’d pulled up a tier three ‘Aramid Armaments’ model, a seriously nice one that was a hundred and seventeen thousand.

That was its price on OFFER, and I winced as I looked at it. Lion took the technical specs though, and put them into a program he ‘just happened to have lying around’.

I grunted at Reign as she directed me out of the cab, stumbling along, barely paying attention as I was led into the warehouse and abandoned with a grumble.

The next thing I knew the arm was blown up before me, sections coming apart as layers were removed, wiring was rearranged and…

And the fucker removed the plasma launcher.

It was a one shot, emergency scattergun design, and it literally stored enough power for a single blast, but it was amazing, and I desperately wanted it to stay.

Lion scrapped it ‘out of hand’… literally.

“Here,” he said, twisting the hand that I’d tentatively shown him, and ripping out the claws and poison delivery system. “We reverse this. Sink the claws into the target, install exhaust ports in the heel of the hand, and you replace the pressurized pump for the poison, into a high power suction model.”

“Specters aren’t going to have blood that we can syphon,” I pointed out. “Not most of them.”

“No,” he agreed. “But they’ll have the ‘nites, and that’s what this magnetic separator is for, don’t you see?”

He pulled the rough design apart before my eyes, bent it, folded it, and then fucking mutilated the design I’d had, replacing it with something that was both terrible and wondrous.

The nanites that we all loved that were deployed from medikits were basically kept in tubes, pressurized injection ports that forced the nanites out.

That was it. they were cheap as all hell to produce, and easily refilled.

This new system? It had sections on the arm to plug in empty medikits, sure, but it also had a section that was covered in ports, ports where the tubes the nanites came in could be pushed in.

The entire arm looked lethal anyway, it was all ridged steel and titanium muscles, hydraulic presses and more. Then on top of that, the internals required to produce a fucking scattershot plasma burst were ripped out, and replaced with a seriously high tech, botched together design to steal nanites.

I loved it.

Especially as to form the magnetic field, there would need to be rings of differing sizes implanted up and down the arm.

Between the copper coloring of the magnetic rings and the black of the arm?

The damn thing looked like it should be modelled by someone called Hugo on a catwalk.

“Can you do this?” I asked him after a few seconds.

“That?” He gestured to the tech side that I was providing. “Not a chance in hell. Can I put that into here though? Alter and butcher this into the device you want? Yeah, that I can do,” he said. “You’d need a secondary power supply for this though, the arm wouldn’t be able to power it normally.”

“I can do that.”

“You want me to do the work on that arm?” he asked, and I nodded fervently.

“Yeah, do it.” I shunted the credits to him without being asked.

“If you can get this working…”

“Yeah?”

“We need to register the design.”

“What? Fuck no,” I snapped. “We’ve got the only shit that can do this, why the hell would we…”

“You’re thinking short term,” he interrupted. “You sell this design, and that tech? We’ll earn a hundred times what the nanites are worth, that you can personally extract.”

“And we’ll be cut out of the deal in seconds, we’d be lucky to get paid at all, before the corpos have us stamped and branded, the device locked down and more. Fuck that.”

“Seriously Kabutt,” Lion growled. “Think about it, as soon as the wrong person sees you with this? Word will start to spread. Give it a week? You’ll be dodging corpo head hunters, rather than selling it for a massive pile of credits.”

“I…” I growled, then nodded. “I’ll think about it, alright?”

“Deal,” he said, before grinning at me. “I get half.”

“You’ll get an even split with the rest of the team,” I corrected. “If there’s six of us, we all get what, fifteen percent?”

“You all get fifteen percent,” he tried. “I’ll make do with whatever’s left over and…”

“You’ll be getting a flat fee at this rate you cheeky fuck.” I growled. “I’m providing the arm, the body the damn thing will be mounted on for testing AND the tech. You’re what? Plugging the fucker in?”

“I’m rebuilding the entire arm, and…” He argued, before breaking off and sighing, then nodding. “Alright, point taken, you’ll all be on the shitty end of the testing, and you brought this to me. I’ll drop any fees for installation, and I’ll help with the work. What do you need?”

“You any good with electronics?” I asked, and got a flat stare in response. “Fine, get your arse to this address.” I shot the warehouse address over to him. “Oh and Lion? If you, I don’t know, ‘forgot’ and accidentally sold the location details to someone else? They better kill me, because I’ll come for you if they don’t.”

“Anyone ever tell you, you’ve got real trust issues?” Lion asked me, grinning.

“Yeah, my last major,” I grumbled. “And my old captain.”

“What happened to them?” He joked.

“I tortured the captain, then dropped a building on him, and the major I’m still hunting. He’s running a black ops APS unit.”

“I…” he broke off, then nodded. “Alright. Point taken. I’m on my way, Kabutt, and yeah, don’t worry. I know this is a hell of an opportunity. I won’t fuck it up.”

“Good man.”

I cut the link, blinking at being in the now spotless warehouse, the sterilization drone making a slow pass on the far side, and the distant sound of Reign in the shower overhead.

I paused, seriously wondering if she’d have locked the door, and if she’d object to me joining her, just for a little bit… then shook my head.

“Work first, Kabutt, then kill people, then the sexy-time!” I promised myself.

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