Fuck. My head. Everything's fuzzy. Maybe that was all a fucked nightmare, and I'm back in my apartment with a bad hangover. I'll open my eyes, and do the same thing I do every morning. Look for my smokes, and remember how fucked my life is.
I open my eyes.
Still in that gaudy as fuck lobby, though I now can feel something heavy on my back. And I can't move my arms. The floor is doing a nauseating dance with me as my vision utterly fails to focus.
“Stop moving,” a voice booms from above me, heavily modulated, but with a hint of an accent cutting through what should be a voice masker. “Donehal Security.”
Fuck me, if the train that hit me a few seconds ago was their security, why were they paying us to be on detail? Sure, they could be up-armored mall cops for all I know, but if Officer Friendly had the time to spare to hit me in the face, they could have spared some time for one of their apparent upper-level management personnel.
“Yeah, nice. Officer Chambers. Black Wolf Security. Got a name I can call you?” I sputter out onto the marble tiled floor, doing my best to remain still. It's kind of hard to not squirm when the air is being pushed out of your lungs by a figurative truck kneeling on your spine. I shouldn't be reflecting on the amount of times that I've yelled at someone for moving around now that I've experienced being on the receiving end.
“Shut the fuck up.”
Twisting around slightly, I can see the rest of the team being led out of the former client's room in cuffs. Notably, I can tell that Saba's got a bloodied nose, but one of the guys dragging her along has an even bloodier nose and seems to be walking with a slight limp. She's got a shit-eating grin on, and I can only assume what happened there.
The voice above me booms again. “So. Here's how this is going to play out. We are going to take you down to the temporary detention cells. You will be held there until our forensics team can determine what happened. Your employer will be notified that you are being detained for the time being. Understood? Good.”
I quietly groan. I know I'm going to get punched in the back of the head if I say anything. It's been too many fucking hours without a smoke. Best I can do is keep my mouth shut and hope that this all blows over quick enough.
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Another three hours wasted sitting in this plain, drab, and gray cell. The entire place smells nauseatingly sterile, like we're the first ones to ever sit in here since they built it. They were nice enough to seat us all together in the same block.
Probably hoping of one of us will say something dumb enough to be incriminating. I mentally pause at that. They legitimately think we did it. In what actual universe would they think—
It all hits me like a fucking flying brick. If they do as corpos do, they're going to do the barest of work on anything regarding their internal affairs and throw the book at us. And if that guy was as high up as I think, we're getting a pretty large book thrown at us. Corpo incompetence at it's finest. Do the bare minimum, all while raking in record profits year after year.
More time passes. It's almost the same as us waiting in the lobby, except this time the smattering of small talk is nearly non-existent. And Khez is staring at the ceiling instead of his communicator.
Yeah, that's how I feel without my smokes.
Sully pops his lips. Pop. Pop. Pop. It derails my train of thought like a giganbovine just stepped onto the rails. He just keeps doing it, maybe in lieu of doing other things to be annoying.
I rub the slowly forming bruise on my forehead. As slowly forming as this headache is growing. “Sully.”
He gives me a thumbs up and… promptly returns to popping his lips. I hope the corpos get around to shooting me soon. It'll be better than having to put up with this.
“What're ya reckonin' they're gonna try ta hit us with, lads?”
Who the f—I pivot around at a breakneck pace to figure out who said that, assuming it was just Sully putting on some kind of voice. It was Khez. He speaks up again.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“I'm figurin' they won't be able ta pin th' shootin' on us. Security footage'd show us bein' outside of the room when it happened, aye?” he mumbles rhetorically up to the ceiling. I'm starting to see why he doesn't talk much. Probably gets a crapton of flak for his mountain accent.
“Not to mention that we're using caseless rounds. Whoever shot the poor bastard was using brass,” I speak up. I have no idea why the hell we're trying to piece together what just happened. It's out of our hands now. Maybe we're both just hoping that someone sensible will overhear us talking and let us walk.
“Hah. Feck. Poor.” The dwarf chuckles, his grin barely concealed by his beard. “Wha's feckin' got me, is that th' communications outage happen'd after we breached th' room. It wasn't up 'afore the gunshots, otherwise I woul'n be catchin' me feckin' footie while they was makin' us wait.”
“That doesn't make any sense. If they were trying to stop him from calling for help—”
That figurative brick that hit me in the head? It comes spinning back at me at full speed, clonking me back in the skull. This wasn't a coincidence.
“Khez. Would someone have to be on-site to maintain that? I'm not what you'd call the best with technology.”
“Aye. Either ye'd need ta be damn good, at the controls, or a few floors away,” Khez gestures to the ceiling with each word, as if he was trying to map everything out to me. “I'm crossin' out damn good, puttin' a ‘maybe’ on few floors away, and figurin' it was someone at the controls.”
The more I hear, the more it sounds like this was a set-up. I figure the rest of the team has put it together too. Hire some clueless security team from outside of the corp, and put them in the vague area of a problematic upper-manager. Gun down the manager, blame the clueless outsiders. Oldest trick in the book. Though, it leaves a gap. Was it him that signed for us to detail for him, or was it someone else? If it was the prior, then maybe he knew it was coming and hoped we could stop it.
I lay down on the floor, pinching the bridge of my nose. You know, things could be worse. I don't know how, but it's completely possible that things could be worse.
The same black-clad tactical geared security officer from earlier strolls in, his boots thudding loudly against the pseudo-linoleum floors below with each step. Of course he's got to have his arms folded behind his back like he's about to scold a bunch of children.
“After reviewing all potential footage that we have had access to, we will be relocating you to a secondary holding site.” That accent still cuts through his voice warper's forced monotone.
I spoke too soon. Things are getting worse. The cell doors open and they throw a bag over my head.
Seriously. A bag over my head. A company that makes more creds in a second than I've made in my entire life, and they throw a cheap-ass bag over my head. At least I can tell from the length of time we've spent in the lift that we're probably going back to the ground floor.
The elevator dings, and the doors slide open. Yep. The once-empty main lobby seems to be crowded, judging from the murmurs and footsteps. Most likely guests of the banquet that our client never got to attend. The butt of a rifle hits me in the small of my back, even though I didn't slow down one bit. I grit my teeth. They're really making a show of our arrest.
The automatic front door chimes as we pass through it. A bit more walking. The signature clack of the back-hatch of an MT Vaultron. I step up without being guided. I can't even count how many times I've clambered into the back of one of these things. Straight to the bench.
By the way the vehicle teeters, I can tell they at least brought Saba with me. Well, that, and the loud ass CLUNK of her forehead hitting the top of the frame behind us. Whoever was escorting her didn't account for how tall the ork was, or didn't care. It was much likely the latter, given that I was dragged out more than escorted out.
The door clanks shut behind us, and the vehicle rumbles to life. I feel like I'm going to have a long time to reflect on things. Or at least, I thought I did. I immediately lurch to one side, with who I presume to be Saba falling atop of me and knocking the air out of my lungs. Whoever is driving this thing is driving like an absolute mad bastard. Every time they take a turn, we're thrown around in the back. They don't seem to be obeying traffic laws either, with the din of horns barely being muffled by the plasteel superstructure of the vehicle.
It was sitting in the back of my head the entire time I was in that cell. They're not even going to bother with the facade of a trial or a pretend investigation. They're driving us somewhere to dispose of us that isn't on corporate grounds. Sure, they could've shot us on the spot back in the suite, but I'm assuming they don't want to risk some low-level corpo digging into this and getting awarded a big fat promotion up the ladder when he gets all of his bosses fired. Do it on another corporation's property, and they'll investigate and have blackmail material to knock someone down a peg or two. Fuck me.
It's all playing out like I think it is, too. The vehicle loudly rumbling and shaking as it hits every single pothole on the way out to the middle of nowhere. The suspension on this thing isn't even enough to accommodate for how deep each dip is. The worst neighborhoods barely see any form of road maintenance. The unlucky ones simply have patches of gravel where road used to be in ages past, but ended up breaking down due to time and weathering.
It sounds like we've just gone from worst to unlucky as well, with the audible sound of rocks bouncing up against the undercarriage of the truck. A sudden stop. Are we getting punted out here? There's muffled voices and an urgent chiming from the outside. A security checkpoint. Fuck. There's only one place we could be going right now.