With the two corpo agents mostly out of commission for the moment, he felt a little more comfortable with taking the time to loot people. He wasn’t going to take a lot of time doing it, but a few extra minutes was fine.

It did end up with him snagging the keys to several personal vehicles. Which is exactly what he needed to get back to Denver at the moment. Finding each of them so he could decide on which one to pick though, took another few minutes.

Most of them were aged, rusted-through pieces of junk that looked as though they were one good pothole away from crumpling in on themselves.

There was one, and he had no idea who he had gotten the key from, but the person had clearly been an enthusiast. Everything from the wheels to the engine was custom, not necessarily good custom work. But what could you expect from people who lived in the backend of nowhere?

The truck was sitting on a three-inch lift kit with large, oversized wheels that gave it another two in height. The body panels were all thick stainless steel, while the windows had been entirely replaced with screens. During his quick inspection, he was able to find three different air filters for the interior of the cabin.

With a little more work, and if you removed the lift kit, this truck was almost ready to go through the badlands. Well, that was maybe a slight exaggeration. It would need a fair bit more work to survive the badlands of Wyoming. The high-speed winds were always at a constant sixty miles per hour or higher, with regular gusts of up to a hundred and forty. At those speeds, the sandy winds could strip the flesh from a person’s bones if they weren’t careful.

Forget about paint on a car or anything else. Every minor crack needed to be sealed before you even attempted to cross that place. Then there was also the always present danger of being flipped over.

Most simply went around whenever possible.

Regardless, he had no designs on ever going through that place, so this truck fit his needs perfectly. It would be a little out-of-place inside the city, but that was a problem for later.

He loaded up both his bags and a few extra items he had found, and then left the scarpo town behind.

As he was speeding down the road, dodging potholes, he put together a message for Stick-Point along with all the photos he had taken. Strictly speaking, the job was only half-finished, at the same time, it was clear that the posting had been less than honest in pretty much everything.

It was to the point where if he had to pay a fine to be clear of the job or take a hit on his reputation, then he would. That was how ridiculous this job was.

At least for the moment, he had a truck of his own. Proving that it was his if he was stopped would be an issue, however, it wasn’t as though the original owner was going to fight him for it. That said, it was still a worry. One of the few things the Denver PD did do was pull people over and constantly hand out tickets. They were a form of tax on the people who had vehicles, and repossessing those same vehicles for unpaid tickets was a favorite pastime of theirs.

If he got stopped and they discovered the truck wasn’t his… He would be lucky if the only thing that happened was it getting impounded.

There was still an hour or two left before he had to worry about that.

A mere speck of time that passed by more quickly than he thought it would. It turns out that driving the entire way made the trip go a lot faster than if one tried walking most of the distance. Who would have guessed?

Trace pulled the truck over and stopped as soon as the city came into sight. He couldn’t put this problem off any longer.

Slipping the system breaching module into his neck, he connected to the truck and began running through the options. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing he could do with the module. Not that he had truly been expecting anything else. Car companies had long since hardened their systems against such common breaching modules. He would need something more high-end if he wanted to gain access to this system.

It was a little funny to him that car manufacturers had better security than apartment buildings and a lot of lock companies. For whatever reason, even after those places were breached and had their secrets spread, they rarely released patches for their old systems. That wasn’t the case for car companies who kept updating even their older models.

He was sure it had something to do with money. It always did. All he knew was that at the moment, it was causing him problems.

Leaving the system breaching module installed in his neck, and the cable plugged into the truck, he pulled up the G.H.O.S.T. System menu. He had been through it hundreds of times by that point, and yet he still couldn’t stop himself from hoping there was something inside that would help.

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The NetConnection option had been his best hope, but even after scrolling through multiple pages, he still hadn’t seen anything new. There were plenty of items that had the potential to help at some point in the distant future, but that was it.

Going back to the main menu, he selected 'Nanite’ and began opening and closing each option. It was on the third option that he found what he was looking for. It was a sub-option, and the name alone was enough to make him stop. ‘Upgrade Temporary Module’, just as the name implied, it upgraded any temporary module he had installed at the moment. By which it meant modules that were only meant to run programs instead of installing something.

There was a drawback to the option. Namely, while it made whatever module it was used on far more capable, it also then existed on a deadline. Two minutes to be exact, after which it would crumble to dust as it was ejected from the ports in his NetConnect.

Losing one of the two system-breaching modules he had inherited with the apartment was a fairly hefty price to pay. Especially if this didn’t work. Truth be told, he could have bought a vehicle for the price of one of those modules if he sold them. Not one as nice as this truck, but it would have been completely legal.

Before he could change his mind, he selected the option.

He could feel a decent portion of the special and regular nanites surge through his body in a wave as they all made for the module. The regular nanites were serving as a bridge for the expendable special nanites that would do all of the work inside the module.

The system breaching module began to heat up, as the displayed options from it began to flicker in and out before eventually disappearing entirely. The entire process took around a minute, and as soon as it had finished, the two-minute countdown began in the corner of his vision.

It didn’t even matter if he was using the module or not; the timer was already running out on it.

The menu inside the system breaching module was far more advanced this time around when he opened it. There were options for changing everything from the displayed make and model to the odometer settings.

He took a quick moment to change the owner and then locked that particular setting. No one else, except perhaps the manufacturer, would be able to change it now. Once that was done, he started to poke around at the other options. There was one for the electric motors that drew his eye. Unfortunately, the timer ran out a second later and the module disintegrated, destroying the menu.

From the brief look he had gotten, it seemed as though it might have been possible to tweak the power output of the motors. There had been several more options as well, so even more might have been possible that he just hadn’t seen.

Either way, getting an upgraded system breaching module had just become a higher priority item for him.

With the matter of the truck’s ownership now taken care of, he was free to continue driving into the city.

For the moment, he would park it at the apartment building. He really didn’t want to keep it there for more than a few days though.

With any luck, Sevorah would come through with that warehouse or other site he could use. It had become a little less of an immediate major concern with how little he had managed to loot on this job. However, now that he had the truck, future jobs would hopefully see an uptick in looted items.

At the city walls, he was stopped, and the ownership of the truck was inspected by a couple of seedy-looking Denver PD pig pushers. The fact that they were inordinately displeased when it came back as registered to him, told him all he needed to know about them. These two had been looking to get a free ride.

Trace took a few snapshots of their faces and nametags before driving away. He wouldn’t do anything to them now, but if he was ever on a job, and saw them in a dark alley. Well… no one could blame him if his finger slipped a couple of times.

As he was parking the truck underneath the apartment building, he was already making a list of items that needed to be changed on the truck. At the top of the list was the lift kit. He liked the height, but at the very least, it needed to be something modular that could be changed on command. The roof of the truck had scraped against the height bar as he pulled into the underground parking area. The light bar that had been on the roof of the truck had been torn completely off at one point and was now in the truck bed.

That had been a thoroughly unpleasant experience, listening to the tearing of metal.

It made his teeth hurt just thinking about it.

Dragging his bags and new equipment into the elevator, he hit the button for the eighth floor and felt a part of himself relax. Over the last few weeks, he had grown increasingly comfortable with the thought of this apartment as his own.

He still wasn’t ready to completely give himself over to the idea, but it was hard to deny the comfort.

Inside the apartment, he placed the scout rifle on the desk so he could work on it later. The other guns he had collected, he placed on the floor for later inspection.

Everything else followed him into the front room, where he could start sorting through it. It was time to see what he had actually managed to snag, and if any of it was anything good.

It was doubtful, but one could hope.

Stick-Point chose that moment to call, leaving him to separate everything from the bags in a semi-distracted manner while talking to the man.

“Where are you now, Trace?” The job broker asked worriedly. “Did you get away from that bloody scarpo town alright? I’ll send someone to pick you up. Just tell me where you are.”

Trace chuckled at the old man’s slipup. This was supposed to be a work call, and yet he had used his real name.

“I’m fine, Stick-Point. I just got back to my place a couple of minutes ago, in fact. Snagged myself a set of wheels and drove myself home.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t get pulled over.”

“Heh, yeah, I’m going to need a more advanced module at some point. The basic ones just don’t cut it for that sort of work.”

Stick-Point snorted. “An advanced module for anything would make your debt to Sevorah seem small in comparison. Even more so for one of those. You should look at the elementary or complex modules first. You might get lucky.”

There were four levels of modules: basic, elementary, complex, and advanced. With each one growing in price and ability.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Trace capitulated for the moment. “I still need a location to get them though. Now, what’s the word on this job?”