Kind of help you can’t buy
During his meteoric rise, meteoric in the sense that it ended with a big fucking crash, Luke had amassed a pretty decent chunk of change. His bonus for the kills, paid out reluctantly per contract by AT, and his higher team-lead wage had been more than he could spend on his mem, and since it was such a fucking hassle to find a mem dealer with any Hardworld mem worth buying, his savings grew, despite his best efforts, and when he dropped into the Bliss den after his talk with Rory, he had enough mem to run at that light for weeks.
Which is exactly what he did. Turns out, the void inhabited by that floating fleeing light, whatever it was, was just as cut off from everything as his personal realm, so AT was completely unable to contact him until he ran out of funds, maxed out his credit, and was spit out, miserably, in the high-roller’s suite of the bliss den.
“Where the fuck have you been?”
Down there Luke, up there Luke, and the extractor all had a feeling of déjà vu at hearing Car-Crash say those magical words for the unknowneth time. Only down there Luke had anything to say about it.
“Bliss den.” He said the words like delivering a death sentence to himself. Car-Crash groaned.
“Jesus! Well, I hope you weren’t too attached to your little coup. Whole things gone tits up.”
His coconspirators, if you could call them that, had gotten spooked by his unreachability, and assumed the higher ups at Constellation had solved their problem in a direct fashion by locking Luke in a shadow cell somewhere, maybe even had him shipped off to Nightmare. AT management had done nothing to dissuade this belief, quite the opposite, and after summoning all available parties back to the negotiating table, had come to an agreement. Luke would be ignored. The hits would be left to Constellation’s chosen, and as a consolation to the rebels, the top guns at A.T. would be guaranteed a B.S. slot on the boards whenever possible.
Hands shook, smiles were forced, asses were kissed, and that was it. A week and a half later, Luke rolled into the office and felt the change in atmosphere. His team had been reassigned to a new lead, and he was back to square one. There was still a slot on the team under the new Lead, if he was interested, but if not, good luck getting any work with anyone else.
But he was. He smiled at everyone, even Tenpound, like he was too stupid to know what “final-verbal” meant, and skipped off to the box.
The crash team swung by his apartment, and he was nowhere to be found. His empty bedroom was blackout-curtained and lit only by the menu screen of a flight simulator. Manuals and print outs of pirated PDFs and unframed flight hours certificates covered the three desks arranged around the frameless mattress and box spring. Dispatch called in a shaky voice on every line they had for him, trying to sternly warn him not to do what they were pretty sure he was about to.
Sure enough, half an hour later, Luke was sailing the skies in a hijacked police helicopter with a box of frag grenades in the copilot seat, and the city was breaking apart at the seams.
His suspicions that they would immediately put him on the lowest scale job they had were confirmed when he got a call on his personal cell.
“Hello?”
“Hey bro. This is Hamstar. Can you pick me up? I know who the target is.”
Luke had landed on top of a parking garage as sirens and cruisers swirled below like a liquid rave and Hamstar climbed in. They had about an hour of fuel left as they rose into the sky.
The target was in a caravan of seven cars, every member of the defense, heading out of the city. They didn’t know what to make of the attacker’s unusual strategy, but they had a safe house out in the sticks with belt feds and drones and 50 cal rifles. Luke’s only hope was to catch them before they got to it.
And he did. With Hamstar leaning out the side, grenades in hand, Luke came down for a pass at the caravan.
They made it on the boards all right, but not the main rung. Below the names of the five teams involved in the op, the killbox read “Null – negotiated”, meaning the target plead out of his bounty, but below that, the sizzle slot said:
Hamstar: Fell out of a downed helicopter with a live grenade in each hand. Killed two. Disabled one vehicle.
When Luke had been coming in for the kill, the defense had opened up with every gun they had, and Luke learned, or was reminded in the case of his Self, that police helicopters are not armored.
When he got back, Tenpound called him into an office, one in the back corner that Luke had never seen and which Tenpound seemed uncomfortable with, trying to decide whether he should sit in one of the chairs rung around the big desk, or stand off to the side of it. Finally, he decided on leaning against a file cabinet that extended, strangely, from the floor to ceiling like a pipe.
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“Hey, good morning. I’m Johnny Aceflush,” said the guy sitting behind the desk. He had a mask of polished chrome in the shape of a skull, with two red ruby spades glowing on his black marble eyeballs.
“Say, what if I told you that your days of running around in the Hardworlds were over, cause I got a management position with your name on it?”
“I’d tell you to go fuck yourself, sir.”
Johnny Aceflush laughed, and told everyone else, Tenpound and a few reps, to get out. Then he laid it out.
“Mr. MOA,” (he pronounced it mo-ah) “That’s just what I wanted to hear. Now, I know you wanna run with the big guns, and since this is off the record, we both know that closing deals is a no-go here at Ace Tactical. Strictly a blue balls outfit.”
The skull's teethy grin seemed to widen.
“And we both also know that you got a bad habit and a ton of debt. But, you’ve also got a lot of talent. A lot of promise. And though I run AT right now, that doesn’t mean I don’t have use for real killers in my other ventures. Here’s the deal.”
The deal was that Luke sit back, shut the fuck up, and not make any god damned waves for six months, and most importantly, respond to every call promptly, no excuses (Johnny had assured him he didn’t care what his vices were, as long as they didn’t interfere with the bottom line) then when his yearly review came up, Johnny could confidently move him to another Constellation venture, of which he was a partner, where Luke could intern with an actual team, prove his drive, and most importantly, his willingness to listen and take orders, and then he would be on his way to a “beautiful career”.
“But you gotta be a team player. You gotta show that you can put your ego behind you and put the job first. Its arguably a more important skill than just getting the bullets where you want them. Got me?”
Luke had him the moment he opened his mouth, but he just nodded, and assured, and falsely apologized, and then that was it.
Oh, and then the bombshell.
“For the near future, you’re gonna be driving only. You drop off your guys, you come back, you don’t shoot a damn thing. Show me you got restraint.”
Luke nodded and assured and all that, and stepped out of the office into the same hall he had dropped out of his dreamworlds into minutes before, and knew with that whispering knowledge that he wouldn’t be able to find the office again if he tried.
He was floating in the black, trying to decide between his Realm and the Bliss den, stuck between the pull of two worlds, when Car-Crash called him.
“Where are you?”
“Just floating.”
“Bliss?”
“Not yet.”
There was a silence. In that moment, up there Luke realized, everything after hung in the balance, just kinda sitting there in Car-Crash’s hands, something fragile and wobbling.
In the end, he had closed his metaphorical gloved hands around it, and offered it up to Luke, putting him forever in his debt.
“Well, I’m not sure I should be telling you this then. But before your little bender, I was talking to someone about you. He saw you on the boards and started asking.”
“Asking what?”
“About your employment situation, you know. About your professional mobility.”
“Oh gee let me guess. He wants to hire me.” Luke said, all the suspicion and contempt of his current employers coming out in the words.
“Mother fucker, if you knew who this guy was you’d already be in my face.”
“So, who is he?”
“He’s my mentor, you could say. I knew him before I gave up trying to be a trigger man.”
“Ok, but who is he?” Luke was wondering why the fuck he hadn’t heard of Car-Crash’s “mentor” till now, and why he seemed so uncomfortable talking about him, like he might say too much.
Car-Crash scoffed.
“What, you want a name? Goes by Outlaw Eleven now. I could tell you his old name, but I know that wouldn’t mean anything to you. I could tell you some of the teams he was on, but those wouldn’t mean anything to you either, even if I wasn’t sworn to secrecy.”
“Ok, so he’s a big shot. And he wants to hire me. Is that it?” Luke was feeling about as bitter as he ever had about this place, and the idea that Car-Crash had some upper-crust patron ready to save his ass at the most opportune time sounded like dreamworld bullshit.
Unfortunately, no matter how hard he tried to crush it, there was a little part of him that knew Car-Crash was a friend, and that he was trying to help him out. This little guy, however, had not made his existence known in Luke’s words.
“Yeah, that’s it, you fucking asshole! Hey, you know how much I’ve had to risk my ass nurturing your rising fucking star?”
“Didn’t ask you to do that. I’m sure you saw a ticket to a higher paycheck through me, right? This big-shot guy isn’t trying to hire you, is he?”
There was a painful, silent pause.
“You know what, I’ve been nothing but honest with you. I told you I’m not a shooter. I told you the plan was to tag along when you moved on to bigger and better things. And you were a-ok with it then. Let me guess, you saw some fucking flower or some shit that made you think of that bitch, and now you’re acting like one? You think you’re the first asshole to get stomped by a succubus in this place? But whatever, fuck me, Poor you, everyone’s out to get you! But you know what? Fuck it! I’m not gonna be an asshole just cause you’re a little baby brat bitch! He wants to meet you at the Space Station, and I’m gonna tell him you’re good for six o’ clock! If you can hold out on dropping into Bliss for that long, you’ll have the meeting of a lifetime, courtesy of me, and then you better be kissing my ass, and if not, then fuck off to your crack den and your boo-hoo broken hearted bullshit!”
Car-Crash’s shouting cut off suddenly, like he had figured out how to slam the phone on a telepathic call.
Luke tried very hard to keep his anger up, to take every one of Car-Crash’s harsh words and rub them in his still open wounds, to kick up a pain that would drive him straight into the bliss den.
But the anger dissolved in the radiation of something else, a knot of pure guilt, a deep childish sadness, and it took him a moment to realize it was a response to the hurt in Car-Crash’s voice.
His introspection reversed, and he saw in his mind’s eye all the times he had spent with the guy, all the things he had done, and tried to see himself from Car Crash’s point of view. A sad bliss addict. A thorn in the side of A.T.. A rising star. But he couldn’t see a friend. God that hurt. Luke had really taken the son of a bitch for granted. For all the help and hand holding and neck sticking out that the guy had done for him, he’d never been more than not an asshole to him, at best, and at worst…
Luke checked his watch, a little glowing set of digital numbers that appeared on his wrist at will, and saw it was 4 AWT. He pointed his face at the horizon and took off for the space station, his tears falling in a twinkling trail behind him.