The big Syndicate ogre glumphed over to the corner of the warehouse with me, confused and depressed, head hanging and knuckles practically dragging on the floor. I made sure to get out of earshot, and also to keep the wall to my back, in case any of these strange gang members got the right idea.

“Whaddaya mean, punch you?” he asked, bewildered.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Kiba,” he said.

“Kiba, huh? Does that mean ‘big fella’ or something?”

“Means tusk.”

He did have two big ass teeth starting to protrude from his underbite. Made sense.

“Kiba, why don’t you take over this shindig?” I asked him. “You’re big enough to boss any of these other yokels around.”

“Don’t talk about my friends like that,” he said, but made no move to actually stop me. He didn’t even stop pouting like a four year old who’s been denied a lollipop. I could tell he’d been crying.

“Pff, it’s not like you’re going to do anything about it, ya big marshmallow. You gonna hit me like I asked?”

He pouted even more and slouched further. “Nah.”

“Because The Godfather has your back, or you’re too much of a coward to do anything by yourself?”

“Show some respect! We lost good people!” he growled.

“All of them, apparently. There any left?” A notification pinged, showing I’d just gained a point in my Taunt skill.

“You… you…”

“What? Dick? Bully? Come on, snowflake, show me some of that big thick ogre backbone. Straighten up that jello shot you call a spine and show me you guys have something worth taking over if I come and proclaim myself Grand Poombah over this whole operation.”

“You wouldn’t–“

“My ninety year old grandmother could knock this place over with her hands blindfolded and two eyes tied behind her back.” I punctuated this by shoving him, and hard. Even enhanced the way my Strength was, I still really had to lean into it to get him on the back foot, but I was successful. “Now either fight back, or I’m taking this place over. I won’t be nice about it either. I’ll find your room, get up on your bed, and take a big old crap in it. Then I’ll find whoever you’ve got a secret crush on–” His eyes flickered over toward the woman who’d lead us in here.

I snorted laughter, and kept right on with the tirade of words I didn’t really mean. I just needed him to believe me. So far it was working, but not fast enough.

“Yeah, that jank piece of filth. I’ll make her my footstool…”

There it was: a light activated somewhere in that thick skull of his. He went from feeling sorry for himself one second to seeing red the next second.

He belted me a good one across the face. It was enough, or he had buffs on, to spin me around and crash me against the nearest wall. I tripped over a pallet and would’ve gone down except that Cybernetic enhancement did the moving for me, and instead, I cartwheeled away.

He roared in anger and came after me. Meanwhile, I readied my nano-healing injection, activated Aggressive Negotiations, and took another hard right cross to the cheek.

This time I rolled into the punch, and staggered away into the middle of the warehouse to get a bit of breathing room.

I couldn’t help but laugh while spitting blood. The words came out muffled from my split lip and mushy nose. “Vere he ish! Atta boy!”

This time when I turned, I had plenty of time to duck under his punch, get into his space, and put the hammer down into his solar plexus. The wind rushed out of him a moment before I blasted him on the inside of the knee.

Stolen novel; please report.

I followed this with a lightning fast nano-healing injection. If it worked as advertised–

Yep, he screamed out in agony, fell on his back, and started jerking in pain. Nanobots at a certain level of craftsmanship were horrific to have inside you.

I leaned in real close. “When you get up, you have two options. One, you give Dirk Stone a call and you give up being Syndication; the Looney Toons take you over. Two, you grow a pair, walk up to that girl you have a crush on, tell her how you feel, then you lead this gang before someone worse than me sees what a bunch of noobs you have here. Scream in pain if you understand me.”

He did.

I hopped up away from him and approached the crates while the others around debated whether they wanted to try attacking the guy who’d just put their number one enforcer on his ass.

The crates themselves were large: four feet cubed, made of smooth and shiny black metal, with electronic locks and a clear warning: !!!WARNING!!! Tampering with the lock on this crate will cause it to explode! !!!WARNING!!!

They wouldn’t fit in my inventory, which I figured they wouldn’t, but it didn’t hurt to try.

I turned back to Kiba, who was getting to his feet and glaring at me. I gave him a quick hand signal against my chest: one on my left hand, two on my right. Kiba gave me the peace sign subtly against his leg.

I gave him a satisfied nod. “Okey doke, now I need to get these here crates somewhere else, and I sure hope you’ve got a vehicle to do that.”

They shared a significant look, and led me off down a hallway to where a garage had been sectioned off specifically for gang business. I could tell because it was tagged so much you could tell layers of spray paint had built up into a thick, bumpy layer on each of the walls.

They also had an auto shop here, with one of their people sparking up a welding torch off in the distance. I couldn’t tell what he was working on, and it didn’t matter: I couldn’t peel my eyes away from an absolute work of art.

“1961 Jaguar E-Type,” Kiba grumbled. “Boss called her Black Betty.”

“Holy hell,” I muttered, running a hand over the glossy curves. “Two hundred sixty-five horsepower v-6 engine. I’ve only ever seen it in pictures. Zero to sixty in like six seconds, right? Unreal.”

“Not exactly,” Kiba said, and reached his massive arm down to turn the key in the ignition. It was fake, of course, the whole thing was a replica. She rumbled to life, but rather than sit there and give me a bit of eye Jack, she floated up about four inches off the garage floor and hung there.

“What,” I said. “You’re kidding me… she flies?”

“Boss didn’t want her touching the filthy ground. She’s a hovercar; the wheels are just for show, they’re magnetic repulsors. They’ll get you up to twenty feet off the ground, max. See the steering wheel? It’s a yoke, you can pull in and push out for altitude.”

“Get outta here,” I breathed.

He reached in and switched Black Betty off. “She’ll go zero to sixty in three seconds. Anyway you can’t have her. She’s not for you.”

“She’s not for anybody,” I retorted. “Your boss is gone, and I don’t see anything else here I can use.”

Kiba chewed on this. The rest of the garage was half-built or half-destroyed slag. Whether they’d lost all their other vehicles in a recent battle or not, I didn’t know, but right now they had nothing I could drive.

“I’m coming with you,” Kiba said.

“And leave your people with no one who could possibly take the leadership role? I don’t think so. You can give me a couple of goons. I’ll return her as soon as I’m done…” I had under 20 minutes to make that happen. “Which has to be now. I have to roll… er, fly.”

Kiba tried to pack Black Betty with his entire gang, but we settled on three: one in the passenger seat, and two on these cool hoverboards I’d seen zipping around various places throughout the city. We tethered the crates to the back of the legendary hovercar with some similar maglev situation.

The three kids with me still had that haunted look of people processing a major shift in their lives. That refugee look that I’d hoped so fervently to never see again.

My phone rang, and I brought up the hologram. “Dirk Stone, grand Poombah of the Looney Toon faction, at your service.”

At the same time, I could feel the other Dirk’s sudden confusion over why his phone had been ringing, and why he couldn’t answer it. A spike of a headache settled over my right eye, and I tried to blink the pain away.

It was Hirataka. He was in the middle of yanking a bladed mecha suit arm out of another mecha suit’s cockpit bubble. It was dripping with blood, but he tossed it aside and picked a speck of lint off his suit.

“Dirk, I have been informed that the Brass Crosses has dispatched a team after you. Someone has informed them about the cargo you are sworn to protect. They are inbound from the west, where they have been attacking the Warblers.”

I scrunched up my face and was about to let loose a stream of swearing when Flicker Blue came on screen behind him. She actually leaned in, grinning, and waved. She was covered in blood.

“Is your puppy with you?” she bubbled.

My ninety pound German Shepherd, a puppy? Another flare of headache went through me, meaning Patches was with the other me. “I wish. He’s on a mission of his own.”

The glee melted out of her expression, though she continued smiling. “Well I’ll stop by and see him soon. If that’s okay.” She cocked her head, and put a little sparkle back into that smile.

“He’ll be thrilled to see you.”

“In the meantime,” Hirataka butted in, all business, “enemies are converging on your position as we speak. You will need to move, and quickly.”

I nodded. “Duly noted. I’ll contact you when I’m at the drop point.” And hung up.

The telltale sound of mecha suits, that whummmm sound of their booster rockets, was audible in the distance. Crap.

“Okay, boys and girls, we’re going to have to make this the fastest drag and drop you’ve ever seen.”

I put Black Betty in gear and promptly stalled her.