Trace stood up as he heard Monroe stop firing his cannon of a rifle up on the roof. Hitting the lever, he sent the platform the few feet back up to the main floor. At the top, he spotted Monroe coming back down the ladder. The barrel of his rifle was smoking as it hung from his back.

“Everything go alright up there?” Trace called out.

The large man nodded and pointed to the warehouse doors as he jumped the last few feet of the ladder to land with a heavy thump on the concrete floor. “I wasn’t able to leave any alive. I tried, but they tried calling for help each time.”

Trace nodded. That was something he hadn’t even thought of when he had made the initial request. “Alright, let’s bring everything inside the warehouse and down into the basement. Hopefully, a few feet of concrete will cut out any trackers they might have.” He’d worry about what to tell anyone that came looking for them later.

There would be someone as well, after all, even if they weren’t being tracked, which was unlikely, they were still known to have come to his warehouse. Someone would show up with questions, and he’d need to have a story for them when that happened.

Working as quickly as they could, they dragged the bodies into the warehouse and onto the elevator. Each one had a fist-sized hole punched through their body in some location. For a couple, it was where their armor had clearly failed. Then there were the ones with annihilated pelvises, destroyed shoulders, or the two that were missing their entire heads.

It was a grizzly, messy business.

After the bodies, they gathered up all the equipment, and then finally drove the vehicle they had arrived in inside the warehouse. It was some sort of personnel carrier, with six wheels and armor plating. It had powerful motors and was roomy inside, but otherwise pretty basic. They parked it on the elevator platform with the bodies and then each grabbed a hose connected to the pumps in the basement.

Together, they washed the blood away from the front of the warehouse, removing any lingering evidence that might have existed. Just for good measure, they washed down every surface they could see with the heavy flow of water.

Riding the elevator down into the dark basement, Monroe had the good sense to turn the lights on the personnel carrier on. It had two different light bars attached to it, one on the bumper and one on the roof, in addition to the normal bright headlights, that gave off an enormous amount of illumination.

Trace had never been this far down in the basement before, as it had previously been underwater. This was his first real glimpse of the space, and what he was seeing was absolutely disgusting.

The water, which should have been mostly rainwater, had taken on a distinctly acidic quality. The concrete was rife with pitting, along with all the other dirt and grime that had made its way down over the years.

With the help of the bright light, they could clearly see everywhere the bear had stepped, as part of the concrete had crumbled away beneath its paws. The pitting had weakened and destroyed the top layer, but the layer beneath that seemed to be fine. He would still need to level the floor and get rid of all the old, ruined concrete though.

“I can’t believe we used to drink that stuff,” Monroe muttered.

“I tried some water a while back,” Trace told him as he stopped the elevator a few feet above the floor. “It was absolutely foul tasting, gag-inducing stuff, and film it left on my tongue.” He shivered at the memory. “I can only hope it used to be different. Even filters don’t seem to make a difference from what I hear.”

“Not the filters we have access to, anyway,” Monroe said darkly. He kicked one of the bodies next to their feet. “When you get a chance, take a look at the tech these guys are packing. It makes even the highest-end stuff on the market look a few generations old.”

“Why does it not surprise me that the corporations are hoarding all of the really good stuff to themselves? Though, if I’m being honest, I already kind of had a clue that might be the case when I saw the bear. It was healing itself mid-battle,” Trace lowered the platform to the point where they were just barely above the water and hopped off. “Granted, it seemed to be cannibalizing itself to do it, but still, I’ve never heard of them having that sort of tech before I saw it.”

The water had gone down to where it was now just barely above his calves. In maybe another ten minutes or so, the rest of the water would be gone.

He let the water pull him toward the hole in the wall, feeling the brittle concrete crunch under every step he took. It was an odd sensation, but also strangely pleasurable in a way he couldn’t quite describe.

At the opening, he had Monroe lower him down into the sewer pipe. He gathered everyone visible and passed them up one at a time, along with all their equipment. He left the bear for last, while he went farther down the pipe to look for anything or anyone that had gotten washed away.

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The entire process took over an hour by the time he was ready to attempt passing the bear up to Monroe. He still couldn’t be sure he had gotten everyone or everything, but he certainly thought he had. The bear might have lost a significant amount of fat during its fight there at the end. However, it was still a behemoth of an animal. That was discounting the mass of cyberware they had grafted onto the beast as well.

Trace would be impressed with himself if he even managed to so much as lift its paw.

It was at that point that Monroe jumped down and joined him in the sewer pipe.

The water had mostly finished draining from the basement by that point, with only a trickle of the liquid still coming out.

“I turned off the pumps you were using. I assume you didn’t want to burn them out.” Monroe told him as they each grabbed a wet, stinky bear arm.

“Thanks. As long as they’re still in working condition, I might be able to sell them to someone,” Trace grunted as they slid the uncooperative slab of annoying musk across the ground a few inches at a time. “I don’t suppose you’re strong enough to just toss this thing through the hole it created, are you?”

The dark man laughed. “Even if I was, I doubt the joint could handle that sort of abuse. There would also be the need to worry about how to properly set my body to throw something so much heavier than myself.”

“Well, I have some rope we can use to haul it up. I doubt if they’re rated for extra-double-O-fat though.”

“We’re barely inching this thing across the ground; you honestly think we can lift it into the air?” Monroe asked in disbelief.

“Nah, I have another idea for that, but we’ll need something long and rated to carry this chonker of a heavyweight here. Do you have anything in Black Betty that might be useful?”

Monroe let go of the arm with a grimace, the wet oily musk already starting to seep into him. “You know what? I actually just might. I keep some chains and steel braided rope in the back for different projects. We could use that.”

“Good, let’s lower the platform down the rest of the way, and take everything off it. Then we’ll go up and get those.”

By the time they had hooked up the chains and steel cable to the platform and then wound it around the bear, they were both getting tired. It was nighttime, and they had been going for hours, ever since the bear decided the basement needed a new entrance earlier.

Climbing back up through the hole, Trace tiredly trudged over to the platform and sent it ascending to the main floor above. The chains and cable tightened, and then, with a grinding noise as it dug into the concrete, it began to drag the aberration’s body back into the basement.

He let it go until Monroe called out to him, and then slowly lowered the elevator back down. Monroe needed the reduced speed to gather up the chain and cable and keep it from bunching up underneath the platform.

Finally, it hit the ground with a thud, and Trace felt his legs give out as he just let himself stare up at the roof far above him.

“I am so tired right now,” He complained weakly. “I’ve been getting better recently since I started eating better and building more muscle, but shizz, I have no endurance.”

“Nah, you did fine,” Monroe said as he sat down next to him with a relieved groan. “I’m pretty wiped as well, and I like to think I have pretty decent endurance.”

Trace rolled over a minute later to look at all the bodies on the floor in despair. The basement was cold, but he didn’t think it was cold enough to keep all the cyberware connections from going bad. There was a reason scavs froze everything they took out of a person. The cold was the easiest way to prevent the cybernetic connections from degrading, which tended to be a permanent problem or at least a very costly issue to fix.

It took someone who was actually trained in working on cyberware like Sevorah, or possibly Ko, to properly extract them without needing to do that. Even then, they still stored them properly.

“You said they had good tech in them?” He muttered tiredly.

“Their weapons, yeah, and the arms I saw were beyond impressive.” Monroe followed his eyesight. “You aren’t thinking of doing a little scavenging, are you?”

Trace scowled at the term. “They attacked us first! It’s not the same thing in the slightest. Besides, they’re already dead. It’s not like they need it anymore.”

“Fine, whatever, no need to convince me on this one. They’re corpo scum, frack them, and the corporation that sent them. How are you going to manage it though? I don’t exactly see a ton of freezers around here.”

“Hopefully, it won’t be me that does the work, but a professional.” He sat up and yawned. “I’m going to get my truck and bring it down here. Can you get started on stripping these guys down to their underwear? I don’t want to risk bringing a tracker not in their cyberware to wherever we get sent.”

Monroe heaved himself up with a nod. “See if you can dig up something that’ll wake us up. If you don’t have anything, I think I have a couple of Max-Energies left in the front of the van. You might want to check for visitors while you are up there as well. Someone should have come by to check on one of these teams by now. Corpo hit squads don’t typically vanish without someone coming to check out why. Even if it’s just a drone, I would have expected something to have made an appearance by now.”

“I’ll check it out,” He agreed, sending the platform up to the main floor of the warehouse.

Trace cycled through the various modes of his eyes, looking for any heat signatures, radio waves, or network connections that shouldn’t be there. There was nothing. That didn’t mean there hadn’t been anything there watching them though, only that there wasn’t anything there at the moment.

He went to the regular door of the warehouse and then repeated the process. Out there he found a drone a drone floating around. It was switching between the area where the personnel carrier had been parked and the road.

Judging by how lost it was acting, Trace was hopeful that whoever was in control of it hadn’t thought to fly it through one of the holes in the roof after all.

He put a message together with all the details he could think of and then sent it off to Ko.

After that, he grabbed the cans of Max-Energy from Monroe’s van, along with a tarp he spotted in the back. They needed something to hide the bodies from view.

Ko replied just as he was moving the truck onto the platform.

‘Sevorah says she’ll help. We’ll do the work there though. Bring your truck here, so we can load up some equipment into the back of it. She wants to see what they did for herself.’

Trace could feel the unmentioned threat at the end of the message. If he had been lying in any way, his access to Sevorah, and likely Ko, would be cut off.