Trace had his Kenyobi 10mm pistol in his hands as they crept into the crumbling warehouse. It didn’t have a suppressor, as the extended barrel lacked the threading needed to support the extension. What it did have was the scope that allowed him to peek discreetly around corners while keeping the rest of his body behind cover.
It was a function that he had taken to using more and more often lately. He didn’t fire the gun very often due to how loud it was, but it was just so useful outside of that one function.
Using the image he received from the scope, they crept through the opening they had found in the side of the building. Something that wasn’t exactly hard, given its current state. Many of the other holes they had seen only went to tiny rooms that had been blocked off, leading nowhere. This was the first one they had found that connected to a hallway.
There were old footprints in the loose dirt at their chosen entrance.
Monroe had his massive revolver strapped to his thigh, forgoing his more standard Lexoya pistol for the moment. Meanwhile, the shotgun he had taken from the corpo agents was in his hands. He had welded a suppressor to the front of the barrel. The spread of the shot would be lower than before, due to the longer length of the barrel. The decrease in how loud it was, combined with making it more deadly, had made the big man very happy.
He had needed to be careful with how he did it, ensure everything was straight, and that it never grew too hot. Still, it had turned out wonderful, according to him. It still wasn’t as quiet as something like Trace’s CD-10, but it was much better than before.
Trace kept one eye on what he was seeing through his pistol’s scope, and another on the old footprints in the dirt. Whoever had come this way had been checking the rooms, likely looking for anything valuable. Up ahead of them, there was an intersection, and the footprint traces grew muddled. This was an area that was more frequented.
He slowed down, his other hand going to the CD-10, still in its holster. A flick of his fingers had the quiet snaps holding it in place undone. Now he could pull it out quickly if needed.
Crouching down, he slunk closer to the intersection and slowly edged the barrel of the K-10 around the closest corner, all the while looking in the other direction. As soon as he registered that there was no one there, he flipped the gun around and pointed it the opposite way.
It was just in time to catch a man with an ill-fitting cyberware arm exiting a room. Before the gun could be seen, Trace pulled it back and hurried to the proper side of the corridor. Monroe followed after him a beat later, his heavy steps muffled by the years of gathered dirt.
‘I only see one person. Let’s see if we can take him alive and get a location for the drug operation out of him.’ Trace messaged his partner silently, already having his gun back in place and watching the other man as he stretched out his back.
He was unwashed, but outside of his awkward arm, he looked mostly normal. There was nothing about him that screamed douchebag gangster, or drug skeeter. If he hadn’t been alone, Trace might have even thought the man was a normal scavenger, due to their relatively close proximity to the scarpo town of Parker.
However, there were only two kinds of people that entered the ruins alone. The first was edgers, who got bored while out on a mission to the wastelands, and the second was gangsters of some sort. Scavengers and everyone else knew better.
The ruins were dangerous places to enter alone, and not just because they were all on the verge of crumbling. There was a reason people had never moved back into all of these homes and buildings after the wars. Countless urban battles and small-scale conflicts had left traps and other unknown items all over the place.
There weren’t even records of all those battles. None may have happened in one location, while the neighborhood a mile away had become a warzone.
Everyone knew to treat the ruins with caution as a result, unless they wanted to die or were simply reckless.
Thankfully, by following the footsteps in the dirt, it was easy to see where others had already gone through this place. In that regard, the man was lucky. In Trace’s case, the different sensor scans his eyes could perform would keep them safe. Not that he could use those that often at the moment.
As soon as the man was looking the wrong way, Trace leaned around the corner with his CD-10 in hand. Taking careful aim, he shot out the back of the man’s leg. With a pained cry, he began to reach for his gun. A second shot that hit him in his normal fleshware shoulder convinced him that was a bad idea.
Trace waited a few seconds, just letting the man curse at him, to see if anyone would show up to help him.
Monroe walked quickly past him, lifted the man up by his neck, and inserted a device into his NetConnect. “There now, isn’t that better?” He asked the man politely, who stared back at him fearfully.
“What did you just do?”
“I put in a jammer. This way, you won’t be able to call or message any of your friends and let them know that we are here.”
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“But… those are illegal!” He complained with a whine.
“And making drugs isn’t?” Trace asked, coming up beside them. Leaning closer to Monroe, “Do you think you might be able to hook me up with one of those? I’ll pay, of course?” He asked.
The giant of a man placed the injured idiot back on the ground as he began to laugh. “I’ll have to ask. It was made by a friend.”
Trace blinked and nodded, his eyes flicking down to the revolver on the man’s thigh. He hadn’t forgotten about what sort of people he knew already; however, he hadn’t described them as friends.
“I can’t wait.” He shifted his attention back to their prisoner. “Now, tell us which of the ruins the drug operation is based out of.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just a scavenger.” He told them, continuing to whine annoyingly. “I have nothing to do with those people.”
Trace and Monroe shared a few quick messages back and forth as they came up with a plan.
“Very well then, Flash-Fry, if you would do the honors. Crush his arm, start with the cyberware one first, and let him see how easy it is for you to do. I want to see how quickly he begins to talk after that.” Trace used Monroe’s edger name since they were in the middle of a job.
Monroe grinned, acting as though he was just a big dumb brute as he grabbed the forearm area of the cyberware with his own cyberware limb and squeezed. His face didn’t show an ounce of strain as his fingers tightened and the metal began to bend and deform. With a crunch, something inside broke and the man’s hand fell limp amidst a shower of sparks.
He screamed at the sudden backlash the damage brought on the nerves controlling the hand. The arm hadn’t been covered in synth skin, so it wasn’t connected to nerves in that way. It was merely the feedback from having an active limb connection severed improperly.
The man tried to reach across and cradle his arm protectively. Except Trace had shot that arm in the shoulder and it wasn’t responding properly.
“Stop, please stop,” He cried, tears flowing down his face. “I’ll tell you what you want to know. Just stop, please.”
Monroe unclasped his hand around the man’s deformed metal cyberware arm, which now had an imprint of his hand around the forearm.
“That’s all we ever wanted,” Trace told him with a smile. “We even asked politely. You’re the one who made us do this to you. I hope you see that.”
He nodded emphatically. “I do, I do. It was my fault, I know that. I’ll tell you everything. Just follow this road in the direction you were going before. In about one and a half miles, you’ll come to an intersection. Turn left there and follow it for three miles. You’ll see another intersection. Go through it and immediately turn right. You’ll see a large building. That’s where we, they, I mean they, have holed up.”
“Good, thank you. I mean.” The man looked so glad that he had been able to help them that Trace almost felt guilty shooting him in the head. The roar of the K-10 echoed through the empty corridors around them. “I feel a little dirty now. I think you broke his mind with that small amount of pain.”
“Me? You’re the one who gaslit the poor bastard and told him it was all his fault.” Monroe argued as they searched him for anything good, making sure to retrieve his jamming module.
Nothing. His weapon would be worth a few credits, and he had a couple stashed in his crypto-vault, but that was it.
“Still, it wouldn’t have been that easy to do if his mind hadn’t already been broken by you.” Trace wiggled a finger into his ear and popped his jaw. “When we get back, do you think you might be able to weld a suppressor onto this pistol for me?”
Monroe took the K-10 from him, with his permission, and began looking it over. “It already has an extended barrel. If I make it too much longer, it could become unwieldy.” He held it against his side and acted through the motion of drawing it a few times as they walked back to their vehicles.
“I can do it, yeah. It’s not a problem, though I would suggest going for a shortened suppressor. It won’t be as quiet as your CD-10, but it’ll be worlds better than it currently is. The smaller amount being added on will keep the end result from being overly unwieldy as well.”
Trace took it back from him and compared the length of the extended barrel to his CD-10 with the suppressor attached. They were nearly the same length, with the K-10 only an inch shorter. He hadn’t realized how long the extended barrel actually was until that moment.
“That sounds like a good idea,” He said at last, putting them both away. “I hardly ever used it right now, outside of scouting because of how loud it is. I’m trying to become a wraith, so I need my equipment to be quiet.”
“Let’s do that then. When we get back, I’ll put a shortened suppressor on it. We’ll see if we can’t just have the threads added to the gun first. Sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t, and other times,” He hefted the shotgun. “It simply isn’t worth the effort.”
“Huh, I didn’t know they could do something like that,” Trace admitted.
“Well, I grew up closer to the life than I believe you did,” Monroe admitted with a wink. “There are a couple of different ways of doing it, and not all of them make long-term sense. I’ll go with you when you go to the shop to ask.”
A few minutes later, they reached the first intersection and turned left, just as the man had told them to. A few miles later, they reached the next described intersection and stopped in the middle of it.
To their right were the ruins of an old shopping center. The predominant building was an ancient multi-story grocery store with a sign that read ‘King Kroge’ dangling from some ropes near the roof. The outside of the ten-story building was covered in countless exits and entrances on each floor.
“It looks like this place was some sort of automated grocery store, back before the wars,” Monroe told him over the call he had initiated as soon as the intersection came into view. “I heard about these sorts of things from other edgers. They were entirely run by robots. People would call in with their food orders, and the bots would select it and then send it out for delivery onto another robot, one that could fly this time.”
“There wasn’t a human involved at any part in the process?” Trace wondered, trying to imagine it.
“Nope, apparently that was how they wanted it back then. The entire idea was to give people more free time to pursue whatever made them happy. Back then, there was plenty of food, real food for everyone.”
“Okay, now I know you’re joking,” Trace laughed, no longer taking him seriously. “There is no way the corporations would let any of that happen. There would be too little profit in it for them.”
“They didn’t,” Monroe agreed. “They attacked the steel goddess and caused all of this, after all.”
Trace felt the air get sucked out of him as he abruptly stopped laughing. That was right, so few people mentioned it, that it was easy to forget how everything had become the way that it was. At times it felt as though the cause would become forgotten history, but somehow the truth kept getting spread around and never being forgotten. No matter how much the corporations wanted it to be, the average person wouldn’t let the truth die without a fight.