Chapter Two

“You lied to me.” Luna growled, staring up at the massive transport crate that had taken five orcs to manhandle into position yesterday. “You said I’d love it. This is about as far from what I’d love to be doing right now, as fucking possible.”

“True, but it’s for a good cause.” I panted, stepping back. “Fuck’s sake I wish we had a crane…”

“We’ll need one,” Reign said. “I’m not doing that ever again!”

“Yeah, well.” I shrugged, collapsing atop an abandoned section of packing crate and looking up at the protective housing for my armor, and smiling despite everything.

As an APS operative, I was fanatical about my armor, about making goddamn sure it was just right, loaded and polished, maintained and fucking ready at any minute to unleash hell and damnation.

As it was right now? It was stripped down to the skeleton, missing the majority of the parts that it needed for just about anything—including the goddamn power supply—and it hung suspended from the frame with loads of space around it.

It was mine though.

It no longer belonged to the army, and because of the way I’d gotten it back? It wasn’t even registered. No tracker, no hardwired explosives ready to turn me to paste if I misbehaved, none of it. It, and I, were both free.

“Why would we need a crane?” Gessh asked, staring up at it, reaching out to touch the fingers of one robotic hand, shaking her head at it. “Damn, they’re beautiful.”

“It’s a work of art,” I agreed. “Honestly though? The transport container is designed to house all the parts needed, and when the suit is in the field and can’t be returned to base for work? It doubles as a repair and work housing.

“That means that we have a repair and upgrade cradle that can hold the suit at least, and while it’s not great, it’ll work for any APS unit.”

“You thinking of stealing the recovered parts from the ones we fought?” Luna asked. “Because no offence, boss, but they’re gonna be under serious security… they weren’t supposed to be possible to steal in the first place, remember?”

“No, we leave those,” I agreed. “What we do, is repair my suit . Then once it’s up and running and we’ve got the system in place? That’s when we get my suit registered, but with Bowdoin’s help. We make damn sure I can use the suit in public, and we start clearing out specter nests the easy way. The four of us, taking down two or three nests a day? I see us getting real money, real fast.”

“I’ll not say no,” Reign said. “But isn’t that asshole major going to come after us?”

“We can only hope,” I said. “The suits he sent were from his own black squad, or ghost squad or whatever he’s calling it. He’s gonna have to hide them if they come after us again.”

“So hit us when we’re underground?” Reign asked. “Doing a specter nest or…”

“Or here.” I nodded. “We’ll need to sort this place out, get some serious defensive shit in place, both for APS and for normal scavenging scumbags. The advantage is? They come after us underground? We win and we can take a fucking suit hopefully… steal it away and hide it, then we retrieve it later for one of you.”

“Would it work?” Gessh asked. “I thought nobody could use them besides the original operator?”

“That’s true, mainly.” I grinned. “The advantage though, is that it’s nanites that make that happen. As well as the physical joining of man and machine through the spinal tap? There’s also a fuck load of nanites that are needed throughout the armor. Believe me, first time you join with it? It’s like you’re bathing in a vat of them. They’re needed to literally bind the armor to you. I could probably move it, even now, without my spinal tap, but it’d be hard and slow.

“With enough nanites though? I could reconfigure a suit to accept you. Get a spinal mod, train you up, do the full nanite rebonding? We could do it. The reason the suits are scrapped is that it’s actually cheaper, the sheer fucking number of systems that’ll need to be replaced, and the number of nanites that we’ll need to do this? They’re insane.

“We’ll need more nanites, per suit, than a chop-shop goes through in probably a year , hence why it’s ridiculous normally. If we can get that system up and running though?” I nodded over to the Stripper parts spread out on a table nearby. “That’s something we could do, like really do. We might have to swap out specter hunting for monsters, I’ve no idea what specters are like for pure nanites, but we can try.”

“Okay.” Gessh sighed. “So we’ve got this housing into place, and hooked up, its drawing power, now what?”

“Now we clean this room to within an inch of its life. We can’t use it, not filthy as it is.”

“Why not?” Luna growled. “Fuck’s sake, Kabutt, yeah you’re the boss and all, but seriously? We left the army to get away from all that ‘polishing the shitter with your toothbrush’ crap. The room is fine, sure it’s a bit…”

She broke off looking around the room and we all did the same.

It was a rectangular room, longer than it was wide, with half the upper floor taken out for living quarters, and the other half left as part of the warehouse, presumably for particularly tall units or whatever.

The state the room was in though?

One wall was all old shelving units, most of which were either collapsed or broken, or covered in piled crap. Whatever the previous owners had used it for officially, it’d clearly been a chop-shop of the non-organic kind at one point, with a winch system and pulleys—in totally the wrong area for us to have used them, sod’s law—and a drop down section to allow mechanics to work under a vehicle if need be.

There were containers that held used motor oils, chemicals that were marked for ‘disposal by official means only’ which presumably meant that they were regulated, hence why they’d been left here.

Bins held collections of screws, nuts, rubber bungs and fuck knew what else, all of them coated in a thick layer of grease and grime, then finally topped off with a wonderful collection of spider webs and vermin droppings.

Stolen novel; please report.

All in all the room was fucking filthy, and that didn’t even include the broken boxes, the damaged tires stacked in the corner, nor the vast collection of papers, packing crates and so on that Oshbob had left.

There was at least a good day’s work in it for a professional cleaning company, if we’d been able to get one to come to such a godforsaken shithole part of the city.

I wasn’t looking forward to what was coming.

“Okay, so maybe it’s a bit dirty,” Luna finished lamely, clearly knowing damn well that her ‘it’s fine’ attempt was falling on deaf ears. “But seriously? Beyond this section of the building for your suit, what more do we need to clean?”

“All of it,” I said. “Not even looking at the suit and how much anything like all the floating crap in here would fuck with the internals, but that?” I nodded to the collection of cables and insanely high tech on the other table.

“You think you can get it to work?” Gessh asked and I nodded.

“I’ve used them before, the design? Its fucking brilliant, shrunken down to a fraction of the size the kit normally is, and the way its laid out? It should work, but, and I’m being clear here, it should work. I was trained, all the APS operators are, to repair our gear. This looks like I can make it work, but we’ll need some very good gear to fix it.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Luna asked, stepping over and lifting one end of the mass of connective wires, plates and projectors.

“It’s broken,” I said simply. “It was torn free of whoever, or whatever, was using it, and I do mean torn, there’s multiple places that look like stress fractures and breaks. There’s a missing section that looks to be the holding area for the nanites, that’s fine, I’ve got some ideas for that, and frankly that’s the least technical part of the system. The main issue, is that a fucking goblin was hiding it in a potty on its head.”

The others all winced at that.

“Exactly. The entire thing is covered in grease, sweat and filth, and before I can even consider fixing it up and testing it? It needs to be clean. I’m not spending days working on the fucker, to dump it on the table there and have some rat piss on it or chew the wires. We need to clean this place, seal it from anything getting in, and then we need to damn well set up an area we can work on sensitive electronics in.”

“A clean room?” Reign asked. “I’ve seen them in vids, and if that’s what we need…?”

“No, we don’t need to go to that level, and if we did, hell it’d break as soon as we took it into the undercity. We just need to get it working and sealed up again. Some of the sections I need to work on can be sealed inside rubberized or plastic containment, and we can get kit to do that, it’s cheap enough. What we need though?”

I looked around, making sure they were all on board.

“We need this place fucking spotless, as clean as we can make it, and a decent electronics station to work at, then we need to make it as secure as possible. For now, nobody knows we’ve got anything, beyond Oshbob, and he wants us to fix it all up, that gives us some time to get things sorted. Then if he, or anyone else tries to rob us once we’ve got it all working? They get fucked up.”

“Tell me we can hire someone…” Luna whispered, and Gessh hit her across the back of the head good naturedly.

“You always want to avoid the work for a few credits.” She sighed. “Seriously, sis, for what it’d cost, not to mention the risk we’d run? It’s not worth it. A day, maybe two of hard work and we’re laughing. It’ll cost hundreds of creds to pay someone else to do it, and how often did we wish we could get a job that paid that in a day? Better to save the money and just work.”

“I know…” Luna growled, shaking her head. “I just fucking hate cleaning.”

“Me too,” I said, then snorted at the incredulous look on Luna’s face. “Seriously? You think I want to clean it? I want to ignore all of this until my suit is ready, then slaughter some fucks and move us all into a pleasure garden to chill. If I could not do this? Believe me I would, but we need to fix our gear, so come on.”

“Quicker it’s done, quicker we can relax,” Reign grumbled, picking up some rubbish from one of the benches and looking around aimlessly. “Fuck’s sake, where do we start?”

“At one corner,” Gessh said, pointing. “Those roller doors open out into the fenced-in area, we get them open, and we drag anything and everything we don’t want out there. Fuck it all, there’re companies that take crap away, even if they don’t clean, they’ll send someone to pick through it and see if they can smelt shit down.”

“What about the tires and so on?” I asked.

“Get it all outside and believe me, there’ll be a company somewhere that makes money from it all, even if we have to pay them to take it, it’d be worth it.”

“Can you sort it?” I asked and she frowned then nodded.

“I think Oshbob said something about a company that did that kinda shit, I’ll ask Dondo about it. He’s one of the guys there.”

“A guy?” Reign grinned, “We were there for like half an hour, and we spent all of it talking to Oshbob, how’d you find the time to…?”

“Oh believe me, she has her ways.” Luna snorted. “Half our conquests were me going to the loo or the bar and coming back to find her dragging some guy around by his dick.”

“As long as everyone’s having fun I don’t see the issue!” Gessh laughed. “Right, you fuckers, start cleaning, I’ll go find Dondo.”

“No fucking him while we work!” Luna growled. “Seriously, you pull something like that and I’ll…”

“Sorry, can’t hear you!” her sister called back, already running for the door, laughing.

“I mean it!” Luna bellowed, starting off after her.

“Fuck’s sake, I feel like we’re child-minding at times,” I growled at Reign.

“You love it really, now come on, the sooner we get this clean, the sooner we’re back out and earning. The sooner we earn more creds? The sooner we both get laid.” Reign snorted and balled up a filthy rag, before throwing it at me, before bending over at the waist to pick something up from the floor.

She paused, and grinned, seeing me admiring her ass. “Unless of course, you don’t want to get laid any more…?”

I was moving before she finished speaking.

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