Monroe turned off the lights on the personnel carrier and gulped down his energy drink as they rode the elevator back up. “So, we’re bringing some of her equipment here?”

Trace nodded as he drove the truck over to the van and stopped. “That’s what Ko told me, yeah.”

“Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

“Me neither,” Trace agreed.

“You realize you no longer have enough metal, right?” The welder asked him as they quickly packed the chain and cable back into his van. “You’re going to need a whole heap more if I’m going to put any kind of door or seal over that opening down there.”

Trace groaned as they jumped back into the truck and hit the button for the warehouse doors. “I’ve been getting my metal from the junkyard. I can’t go back there for a few weeks. All the street-meats have taken over the place at the moment.”

“There are other junkyards…”

“But none that I’m familiar with or that are quite as close. That’s the one I’ve always gone to, ever since I was a kid.” He looked out at the glowing city as the warehouse doors closed behind them. The drone was nowhere in sight. “I’ll figure something out. No matter what, we need to get that hole plugged.”

***

Sevorah was glaring at Trace the entire time they loaded equipment into the back of his truck. All of it was older items that she kept as backups in case any of her newer equipment failed at the wrong time. There was also a deep chest freezer that they had to strap on to the tailgate to ensure it fully fit.

“Did you kill her pet or something?” Monroe asked once they were on their way back to the warehouse. “I mean, I hate scavs as much as the next person, but even I’m willing to do this.”

“Who can say with her? Sometimes it seems like she is alright with me, and others it’s like she hates my guts.” Trace slowed to turn onto the road that would take them to his warehouse. “She’s protective of Ko, and I understand that, but I also think she jumps to conclusions far too easily.”

Sevorah stayed close behind them as they neared the warehouse. Her small car barely took up any room on the road.

Trace flicked through a few of his eye’s sensor modes as they waited for the warehouse doors to open. There was still no sign of the drone from earlier. It looked as though it had left the area.

He parked the truck right on the lift and as soon as Ko and Sevorah were in position; he began lowering it down. After it touched the bottom, he drove the truck off the platform and sent the elevator back up. Just in case that drone was still around, he wasn’t going to leave any sort of opening in the floor that it could easily fly through.

Monroe jogged over to the personnel carrier and turned on all the lights. The extra light revealed the basement in all its glory to the two newcomers.

The sight of all the extra light jogged Trace’s memory loose, and he tapped the button to turn on the light bar on the roof of the truck. Even more light lit up the basement, leaving almost no shadows left for anything to hide in.

He rather wished there more shadows honestly. There was so much grime and other nastiness everywhere that the mere thought of cleaning the place was enough to give him nightmares.

Sevorah and Ko had promptly chosen different targets to inspect as soon as the lights came on.

The trained mender had gone for the reason why they had been called there and was inspecting the agents.

Ko, on the other hand, was more interested in the bear.

Both of them were finding items they found interesting, just in different ways. The agents were indeed packing some seriously advanced cyberware. The insides of the bear were an absolute mess. The tech that had been shoved inside it was pretty advanced. What really drew her attention though, was how everything had been grafted to the poor beast.

It was obvious that the bear had been an experiment right from the start. The way the arms had been grafted on was done with far more care and precision than the extra muscle and tubes that had been jammed into its legs. The connections there were little more than amateur hack jobs in comparison.

The real discovery though, had her frantically waving Trace over. She had just cut open the bear’s chest and found something beyond unexpected. Pooled around its various bullet wounds were several, now inert, very recognizable silver metallic puddles.

“I knew something was going on with it when I saw it healing, but how is this possible? Meredith banned all research into nanites years ago. We only have ours because we got them from Deckard and her.” He hissed softly enough that Monroe and Sevorah had no chance of overhearing.

“You said it was an experimental corpo aberration.” She bit the inside of her cheek and hesitated. “Maybe it was just a regular aberration first, before becoming some corporation’s experiment.”

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“You think the nanites are what created the aberrations?” Trace asked pointedly. It was in line with the thoughts that he had already been having regarding the nature of the irradiated zones. There was something else going on there.

Ko nodded. “They would need to be different from the ones we have, more powerful in some ways, and limited in others. It’s the only way the corporations would be allowed to get their hands on them and do experiments with nanites. Even then, I expect the steel goddess has put endless restrictions on them.”

“If they are allowed to run experiments on beings with nanites inside them. Imagine what they would do if they ever discovered the two of us existed, or Deckard, for that matter.”

She swallowed and slowly nodded. “I shouldn’t waste any more time here. The connections on these parts won’t keep for much longer if we want to try and save them.”

Ko hurried over to the truck and grabbed some more tools.

Trace helped Monroe unload the freezer and placed it by the door that hid the stairs leading up into the apartment.

All the weapons and clothes they gathered together and stored in the back of the personnel carrier for the moment. There was no reason to leave it all sitting out in the nasty, damp, grime-filled basement.

At the last second, Trace snagged a rifle that had been broken by the bear and placed it in the truck’s cab to look at later. He had never seen one that was so filled with tech before. Even the ammo it fired was different from normal.

The two menders worked for hours, taking apart the agents that had been involved in the attack on the bear and the warehouse.

Sevorah prioritized getting several of each item inside the freezer, rather than going for complete disassembly. They had over twenty-two people spread across the floor of the basement. All of them had the same advanced model, NetConnect, which she made sure to grab a dozen of. There would need to be some experimentation involved before they could be fitted into anyone.

All of them had advanced cyberware eyes that she hadn’t seen on the market as well. They weren’t all the same model either, but five different versions, so they all had to be carefully extracted. Then there were the legs, arms, and various internal cyberware components. The latter could be saved for later, as she wouldn’t risk reusing any of them. While generic models did exist, that could fit anyone, that wasn’t what these were. These were completely custom units that wouldn’t fit or work for anyone else.

All they were good for was being studied and learned from, nothing more.

Even the legs and arms were a little bit of a crapshoot. No one wanted one arm or leg to be longer than the other, after all. Anyone who used these parts would have to accept the pair, and not just one. Which was a problem if they had only lost one arm. Asking her to remove the other one, simply so they could have a matching pair of cyberware arms, was just asking for more pressure to be put on their mind.

Of course, that didn’t stop her from grabbing what she could. They were simply of a lower priority as a result.

Everything that didn’t fit in the freezer went into the truck bed to be transported to the clinic. The connections would be dead by then, so they could never be installed in another person, but she had another use for them. Pieces for her research.

It was nearly three in the morning when they finished working. Each of their disposable aprons and gloves had long since become covered in blood and gore.

With no better option at the moment, each of the bodies was tossed down into the sewer pipe and then dragged a short distance away from the opening. With any luck, one of the many things that lived in the sewers would dispose of them for Trace.

The thought of those things getting inside his basement was exactly why he needed that hole blocked as quickly as possible.

Wearily, Trace hit the button on the wall that would call down the lift, only for his finger to go straight through it. He had used up everything the panel had left in it earlier, just sending the platform back up.

With a tired grunt, he trudged over to the door and opened it. Several inches of water splashed out onto his boots.

With each step up, his boots squelched, the sound tugging at his nerves. It was just one more thing in what had already proven to be an exceedingly frustrating, shizz-filled day. He was beyond tired, and all he really wanted to do at the moment was fall into bed.

He couldn’t do that though, not yet at least. There were still a few more things that needed to be done.

One of them was definitely getting himself clean underneath the sani-spray. If that was even possible. That could wait until the others had left though.

Right now, he had an idea of how to block the opening down below for a little while, at least. Then everyone could come up on the lift and leave.

When Trace had been initially setting up the area in front of his apartment, he had bought four large tables. However, the way he had set them up meant he was really only using three. The other had been placed on the side of the apartment structure, where it had been partially forgotten about.

He quickly cleared off the few miscellaneous items he had stacked on it during the last week or so and tiredly dragged it over to the elevator.

A few minutes later, with Monroe’s help, it was on its side in front of the hole with the personnel carrier’s bumper pressed right up against it. The hole was by no means fully blocked by the table, but it was enough that no one should be able to easily slide inside for the moment. Not without destroying the table, in any case.

With that task completed, everyone took the lift up to the main floor of the warehouse, alongside his truck, which Trace left parked there for now. Since the connections were already dead, he would bring everything over to the clinic in the morning after he got some sleep.

They took a minute to cover it all with the tarp he had found earlier and then headed straight for the sani-spray.

“We’ll talk when you drop those off in the morning. Take a few minutes to go through the modules and other items you found before coming over. I want to know more about why this little event of yours happened.” She poked him in the chest. “Make sure you find some satisfactory answers.”

Ko wearily waved goodbye as she climbed inside the mender’s small car and together, they drove off as soon as the warehouse doors were open wide enough.

“Thanks for sticking around,” Trace told Monroe as he climbed into Black Betty.

The big man cracked his neck and relaxed into the driver’s seat. “If this is what you meant by stripping a place of everything of value, I might have to rethink this deal.” He winked at Trace.

“Ha ha, you’re really funny. No, seriously though, if their stuff wasn’t so much better than ours, and we didn’t need to figure out what was going on, I wouldn’t have done this.”

Monroe yawned and nodded. “I know. Ko told me about the two scav dens you’ve already taken out on your own. Someone who does that, by themselves, doesn’t suddenly become one themselves. Anyway, night, I’ll see you in a few hours to get more done on the roof.”