“Motherfucking, ass-fingering, goat-blowing sons of a turd sandwich!” I roared, staring at the APS before me in disbelief.

“He seems annoyed,” Oshbob commented to Luna.

“He gets that way when people play with his toys,” she said. “It came in like this?”

“It did,” the Orc—Oshbob, boss of the orc crime syndicate, smuggler, thug, merchant, and general lord of the underworld—assured her. “I had it opened as I’m not handling something that heavy and with those warnings on the crate, when I don’t know what it is. Beyond opening the transport crate, it’s as it was when it arrived.

“It can’t be!” I snarled, spinning and glaring at him. “The major…he…Tyrannus!” I screamed the name to the overhead girders, sending goblins and fuck knew what else scattering as I fought to control myself.

“What you see is what I’ve got, human. Now, you want it, you pay for it, or I sell it for scrap.”

“Pay!” I snarled.

“The hacker…Bowdoin? He arranged for me to hold it, that’s all. You want to remove it? You pay the storage fee.” Oshbob grunted, folding his arms.

I glared at him, seeing the heavy muscles, the cybernetic and the shift in the background as his people moved, getting ready.

“How much?” I spat at him.

“For you?” He pretended to consider it. “Fifty thousand a week, for storage.”

“You…” I hissed, hands coming up as I fought to restrain myself from going for the fucker’s throat.

“We can make it seventy-five,” he growled back.

I fought down to urge to fucking punch him. Then I saw the way his eyes moved to my hip.

I looked down, seeing the plasma sword’s hilt in my hands. I’d not even realized I’d drawn it, and it was a hell of an effort to put it back in the loop on my belt.

“Boss…” Luna warned, and I felt Reign’s hand on my shoulder, squeezing gently, even as in the darkness behind the fucking orc something moved, paused, then vanished.

I turned, tracking it, trying to find them again, glimpsing massive eyes, and maybe grey skin? All I knew was that I caught a glimpse, and then they were gone. And if they could vanish that easily?

Showing themselves had been a warning.

“So,” I forced out. “You wanted me to come meet you. What was that all about?”

“I heard about Lucky,” Oshbob said.

“And?” I waited for the whole “he was like a son to me…” bullshit I was sure was coming.

“Never liked him much,” he said, making me blink in surprise. “But he had one thing going for him.”

“What’s that?”

“He was…lucky.” Oshbob’s lip curled in amusement as I tried to decide whether the massive fucking orc had made a pun.

“He wasn’t that lucky.”

“Oh, he was. I never said if it was good or bad luck…”

“So…he was still alive at that point, right?” I asked, trying to figure the big bastard’s angle.

“He brought me mods that weren’t as shitty as the normal ones I’m offered, so I wanted to see where they came from, and make you an offer.”

“And that is?”

“Work for me. Find me those mods, and more. Luna tells me you’re going into bounty hunting? Great. Strip those you kill, bring me the mods, and I’ll pay a fair price, or…”

“Or?” I asked, ready to tell him to go fuck himself, angry at the world.

“Or, I’ll reach out to some contacts I’ve got, and I’ll arrange replacement parts for this,” he suggested, crossing his arms and watching my face as I struggled with the deal.

“You—” I swallowed hard against the surge of hope. “You think you can find parts for this?”

The APS, my APS—the suit I’d goddamn worn for ten years, a suit I’d rebuilt a hundred times a hundred different ways, making modifications to, adding in everything from extra padding to a better storage for the memory core for movies and shit—sat before me, suspended in its transport harness.

The suit, when ready to go, was just over three meters tall. The transport container was four, by the time you included the support structure, the cushioning, and the general security sealed around it.

As it was, the suit sat comfortably in the harness, the support posts holding it under the chest and along each limb. Or they would…if the rest of the goddamn suit was there.

It’d been repaired, and had apparently been in the process of rebuilding when Tyrannus had diverted it and got it out. So, currently, the main frame was intact, the arms and legs were there…but they were skeletal, literally the internals and the connections.

But the main parts?

The weapons? The sensor pods, the short-range jump-jets, the exterior armoring, and the interior shielding? All of it was missing.

I had a skeleton of my fucking suit—it was even missing the goddamn power cell—a fusion storage cell, for fuck’s sake! Where the hell I’d…

“You can get them?” I asked him slowly, barely daring to let myself hope. “You can get the parts?”

“Do arseholes stink?”

“How much?” The costs would be in the millions, if this was legit.

“Not sure…Maybe a few hundred thousand credits per unit…” He shrugged. “I’d have to have them stolen. Nobody’s going to sell parts for these on the open markets, probably not even the smugglers’ markets, not after that fight.”

It was true as well. The knowledge that there were APS black ops roaming in the city, and that a corpo had managed to get a full squad?

M-Corp had denied all liability, needless to say, pointing to their publicly owned suits and their contractors and that there was just no need for the hidden group.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Some lower-leveled dickhead had been marched out; he’d confessed to trying to impress his superiors, and running the whole thing without their knowledge. Fines had been offered—and no doubt bribes—and a criminal trial was in progress.

He’d be found guilty and probably told he was a very naughty boy and serve a month in a luxury corpo prison, if he wasn’t just put under house arrest for the damn weekend.

No doubt he’d serve his time in a more junior role in the corpo, being visibly “punished”…then he’d be promoted a few ranks higher as soon as everyone forgot his name.

Everything would go back to normal, and nobody gave a shit about the poor bastards who died.

“It’d need its weapons as well,” I pointed out.

He nodded.

“And three plasma swords.”

“Three?”

“They’re the only effective counter to an APS, and my team will be damn well trained to use them,” I told him. “Once we start using my suit, word will get out. There’s no way it can’t. The black ops team will be sent after me, and we’ll take them down.”

“Then what?” Luna asked.

I looked down at the stripped suit, for the first time seeing it without rage at the condition it was in. I paused, my mind whirring.

“Then, we get more parts, and we repair the suits.”

“What’s the point?” Oshbob asked. “Nobody can use them.”

“Let me worry about that.” I smiled, turning back to Oshbob. “So, you want me to bring you harvested mods…and you’ll repair this? Okay. You take half the value of the mods we bring you off the debt for this, and you pay us the rest.”

“I’ll pay you what the mods are worth to me, that’s it,” he warned. “You take the offer or you leave it, and I’ll be damn well charging your ass for the storage.”

“No,” I countered, smiling. “No, you won’t. Tell me, Oshbob…what if I could bring you pure nanites? Containers full of them.”

“Pure?” The orc blinked, clearly surprised. “How?”

“You don’t need to know. I’m APS. We have our ways,” I assured him. “You buy the parts, and I’ll bring you the nanites as well. Those you get a sample of, to make sure they’re good. Test them however you want, but after that? You pay for them, twenty percent under market value.”

“I’ll pay twenty percent of market value,” the orc snapped, and I snorted.

“The most valuable resource in the world, one that’s tightly controlled by those corpo fuckheads and the government, and I’m offering you a separate, private pipeline…”

“Thirty-five percent,” he muttered grudgingly.

“Let’s cut the crap. I don’t fucking haggle well,” I said. “I’ll say thirty-five under market, you’ll go forty of the market; I go forty under it; we meet in the middle at fifty percent. Let’s save ourselves the fucking effort, all right? Fifty percent, and I sell them to you direct.”

“You sell them to me or mine only. I tell you to deliver it to a chop shop? You do it.”

“I deliver to a chop shop, I get discounts on the mods they have.”

“Ten percent,” he grunted.

“Fifty.”

“Don’t push it, Kabutt. I don’t like you already.”

“Boo-fucking hoo. I’ll survive.”

“No, you won’t,” Oshbob snapped, unfolding his arms. “Fine. Twenty percent discount at any of my chop shops, you deliver the nanites where I say, and I pay fifty percent of market on them. Mods will be individually valued, and you can take the offer or you can fuck off.”

“This warehouse…you got many like it?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“A few.”

“Got any with rooms?”

“They’ve all got rooms. What fucking use is a warehouse without space to store shit?”

“I mean living areas,” I snapped. “Running water, toilets, beds, fucking walls and windows, doors that lock, all that shit.”

“Maybe.” He grunted. “I’ve got one, but I don’t need you fuckers sleeping in the corners and shitting on my stuff.”

“How big is it?”

“Smaller than this.”

I looked around at the massive warehouse, the crisscrossing girders that held the weight of the building overhead and the thick walls that kept everything from specters to thieving gobbos out, and I nodded.

This place was far bigger than we needed, but the place we were all staying currently? It was two rooms. That was it. The shower was built into the bigger of the two, meaning that we’d need to all be traipsing back and forth, and there wasn’t going to be much in the way of privacy either.

“Is it secure?”

“More or less.”

“How much?”

“For the four of you?”

“Aye, and power, water, and all that shit…no whacking that on top,” Luna interjected, and the big orc grinned at her.

“To you, girl? A thousand credits a month.”

“And to me?” I muttered.

“To you, you human cockroach? Ten thousand.”

She laughed. “We’ll take it at a thousand.”

I hesitated, then nodded, reaching out a fist and wincing when his massive one slammed into mine, almost breaking my fucking wrist.

“Done.”

“You have bin.” The big orc chuckled. “A month upfront, and a deposit, then you get to lug that shit there.”

“We…fuck.” I groaned. “How much to…”

“A thousand.” He grinned. “Upfront. It’d need to be smuggled there.”

“How soon can you get it there?”

“Oh…not long,” he admitted. “You want it?”

“It’s got rooms?”

“Here.”

The file that Oshbob sent to me was devoid of locational tags, but beyond that, it was fairly well laid out. The structure was split over two levels: the lower floor and half of the upper as storage; the second half of the upper floor split into eight rooms, four of which had bathrooms. The others were set out as a kitchen, a main gathering room, and two empty areas, presumably for food or other storage.

“Yeah.” I sighed, looking at the others first for confirmation, and getting enthusiastic nods. “We’ll take it. Two thousand, yeah?”

“For the rent and deposit. Another thousand if you want this transported there. My people’ll remove our gear. What’s left, you dispose of. And you keep it clean—no trashing it. It’s an investment o’ mine,” he warned us with a growl.

I glared at him, before nodding and transferring the credits. The four of us were led out of the warehouse as some of his people—goblins…he was letting fucking goblins handle my suit—sealed the transport container up.

“You going there now?” he asked us, and I glanced at the others, gauging their reactions.

“Should we?”

“We’ll need to buy cleaning supplies and get our shit from our apartments,” Luna said, and I nodded.

“I’ll need to grab my stuff too,” I said, having not thought about the apartment before now, and accepting the data transfer, along with the keycode, and finally finding out the location of the warehouse. “Fuck’s sake!” I snapped. “A thousand credits, a fucking thousand credits you charged me?”

“It’s a big crate.” He grinned, before nodding toward the building directly across the street he’d just made me pay a thousand credits for his goblins to carry my shit to. “Remember, I expect to see it’s looked after…”

With that, the big bastard strolled off, chuckling to himself as I stared after him disbelievingly. I didn’t know whether I was impressed, or whether I was about to stab the fucker with the plasma sword that’d somehow made its way into my hand again.

“Kabutt?” Reign said softly, and I turned to her, seeing those beautiful eyes as she smiled at me, standing close to my shoulder. “Did you really just buy us all a home?”

I grinned back at her. “Rented, but yeah.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, her hand slipping into mine and squeezing tight.

“It’s gonna be a bomb site, you know that, right?” Gessh asked, laconically, and I nodded.

“Probably.” I led the way across the cracked and broken asphalt. “But you know, I’ve got a good feeling about this place…”

The building before us was squat and ugly. A chain-link fence encircled it, and a large garage door led into the warehouse. A small door in the side to let us in on foot, and a few little grimy windows, deliberately too small even for gobbos to get in, or at least, in and out with anything.

The walls were rusted and dented, occasional bullet damage showed here and there, and the far corner looked to have been set on fire at one point, the anti-rust paint having melted away and the entire section the red of dying metal now.

It was a mess. What looked like years of crap and general litter, abandoned rubbish and more was blown from side to side inside the perimeter fence. But inside?

Once we were in, the door closing with a solid clunk of a good lock behind us?

It wasn’t that bad.

The warehouse had a collection of tables on one side, clearly from something that had been made in here at one point, and the other side held the remains of storage cradles, presumably for loading goods for shipping.

That was fine. My suit would go in one of them, stored and safe, except when we were working on it, and there’d be room for more in the future.

There was space to build a proper armory, and there were rooms for each of us, water, warmth, and safety.

We could order food in for now. Hell, we needed to sit down and plan, sort all this shit out, not least the whole thing between me and Reign that was now out in the open.

My cheeks colored as she crouched, checking a low cupboard, and then looked up at me, the similarity to earlier, as she stared up into my eyes, literally drinking me down, coming strongly back to the fore.

She blushed a little too, then grinned, and I grinned back.

Luna was already heading for the rooms, with Gessh jogging to catch up, loudly commenting that as the biggest, she needed the biggest room.

It was like being surrounded by a squad again: the jokes, the horseplay. Well, the only difference with the sexual tension in the air was that it wasn’t Sync and Richie this time, but me and Reign…Also, to the best of my knowledge, unlike those two, Reign hadn’t just teased me and wandered off.

No, this was good, I decided. Here we could grow. Here we could get ready, prepare for the future, and get things back on the right path.

Finally, we had a home again.

The End