I locked the door behind me and kicked my boots off into the shared pile of various footwear to one side of the narrow hallway that led into our apartment. I could hear the TV from the main room, gunfire and explosions. Tevin was sitting on the couch, angled forward on the edge of his seat, his knees against the makeshift metal plate we used as a coffee table. He leaned from side to side in concentration as he gripped a console controller. A handspan taller than myself with a shaved head and scribbled with various scars and tattoos from the neck down, Tev made me look like a kid fresh out of basic-education by comparison.
The big man growled at the screen, his words spaced out and timed with pulls of the trigger on his controller. “Quit… Spam.. Jumping. Around!” Each word increased in volume as he sent rocket after rocket at another player on the screen, who leapt across the screen and bounced from wall to wall.
I’d known Tevin since we were kids, we grew up on the same street and ran around together with a bunch of other neighborhood kids. He’d moved away to go to college after getting a sportsball scholarship for one of the major Guilds. When the Links came down a few years ago we had reconnected after he spotted me in one of the lines and pulled me to the side.
Absolutely scared the crap out of me at the time. He just walked up, towering over me in his full armor on guard duty and pulled me out of line, dragging me to the side before he thought to tell me who he was. He liked to tell the story and joke about it when we had a big group together, and now that it had been a few years, I even laughed along sometimes.
I tossed the canvas bag with the bundle of food inside at him, he ignored it bouncing off his shoulder and onto the couch next to him as he continued to try to blast the other player.
“Think fast, supply drop! Looked like a veggie brick and lily-flour this week. I bought, so you're cooking.” I joked as I quick-stepped between him and the TV towards the hallway and shared bathroom, wanting a shower before anything else.
“Hey! I can’t- Ah damnit,” the other player finally closed the distance and backstabbed his avatar. “You made me die man!” he looked over at the bag I had thrown at him, then back to me, “Did you say lily-flour? They didn't have anything better?”
“It’s the Lels, you know, the little beaver-bear guys?” I reminded him, again, of the source of my cheap food. They had a longer name I couldn’t remember, but no one really used it anyways. “Anything else is like 10 times the price in the Capital, even worse in the Hub. You'll figure out some way to make it taste good, I believe in you!”
I didn’t give him the chance to reply and continued into the hallway, passing by Rin’s closed door as I made my way towards the shower.
I cast a quick glance at the glowing screen of the water-ration meter as I stripped down and stepped into the stall. Rin had posted a ration breakdown chart next to it, in an effort to stop Tev from using all of the water. I’d used the chart, but he didn’t even notice it until Rin had dragged him in there and lectured him on it for a half an hour. A mini cold war was waged for a number of months as Rin and I tried method after method to get him to limit himself to his water ration. In the end, it took more stick than carrot, but Rin had managed to gently coerce the big man into following the rule. We had settled on using an old alarm-clock he had tinkered with and somehow made it calculate equal shower-ration times. If you went over your time, it would start making terrible headache-inducing noises after a series of warning blasts.
After some daily grooming and making some faces at myself in the mirror, playing around with my blunt features and checking on my teeth at the same time. I quickly showered and changed into my second set of clothes, reinforced work pants and a breathable T-shirt. I tossed my dirty outfit from today into the other compartment of the fresher, before running a hand through my short-ish dark hair. Thinking to myself that I was nearing time for a hair cut, I hated it when it got long enough to start getting into my eyes.
When I came out a little while later, the whole place smelled of cooking food and spices. Tev was actually a great cook and did most of the cooking of our communal meals. I did most of the buying through my hookup with Rosso, and Rin hardly ate anything. I didn't mind that he only rarely chipped in for food and never cooked. He fixed stuff when it broke, and occasionally ordered specialty things in, like some of the spices I was smelling and the fresher that did all of our laundry.
I walked back into the main room, an open room with the couch and TV setup closer to the front door, and a tiny corner-kitchen and small round table on the far end of the room. Tev was standing in front of the stove with his back to me, juggling between multiple pans and pots as he bobbed his head along to music that played into the earwig he always wore. Rin had decided to leave his room and was sitting down on the table, absorbed with a tablet full of dense text and charts.
Tevin had introduced me to Rin after we had reconnected, they had met in guild training and ended up being assigned to the same division. He was a bit of a mystery still, and had yet to tell me his real name or what he did for a living. Which was not too out of the norm, lots of people keep their government names a secret, myself included, especially if you had a contract.
Rin was of average height and built of wire and bone, with dirty-blond shaggy hair and constant dark bags under his eyes. He was pale from a life mostly lived indoors, and was easily one of the smartest people I knew, way smarter than me. I suspected he worked some secret intel government job, but had never tried to push the issue.
I glanced over Tev's shoulder at what he was cooking while I walked by, then took a seat next to Rin at the little round table.
“Anything interesting today, I mean, other than the bombing?” I asked. Rin replied without looking up from his tablet.
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“Quartz crashed, the Sequence pulled in a huge asteroid half made of it, silver and platinum took a hit too. Low gold levels though, so it is unaffected. Borealia secured a mass-labor contract with the Centaurs, the asshole ones, and our negotiations ceased earlier this afternoon. Can not be good.”
“The Grays?” I questioned, and Rin nodded in reply. “You’re right, that’s what… three countries connected to them now? And we’re the last nation on the continent without strong ties.” he nodded again.
“The Council has to be pissed, I wonder what they offered them,” I mused aloud, he just shrugged.
Tev moved around in the background, I heard the slap of flatbread being flipped in a pan. Feeling awkward in the silence, I spoke up again, “I got pinged for Payment tomorrow, so I won't be back till the next day. It’s 6 days early, I hope I’m not getting sick or something”
Rin actually looked up at me this time, shooting me a glare. His response was quick and angry, “6 days? Bah, it was 4 for me last time. I ended up…”, he stopped himself from saying something, before looking back to his tablet before he continued, “...almost missing a deadline. You should check the valleys around your mountain for clay”.
I blinked at him, not following his shift in subject, “Clay? Rosso doesn't stock that as standard. I’d have to wait awhile for it to sell, or buy it from him myself and then try to sell it… Why?”
“Rent a scanner and search for heavy metals, with his region, climate, and geological makeup, there are bound to be deposits. Even if he is not advertising bounties for them, he will take the chance if you present it.” He replied flatly.
I nodded, considering his line of reasoning. I could rent a cheap scanner pretty easily, and I had seen a number of clay banks in the tiny streams that ran down the mountain in some places.
A more comfortable silence took over as I thought the idea over for a few minutes, before Tev sat down at the third chair and said, “foods done”, around a mouthful of flatbread. He had already filled his big bowl of broth, noodles, various vegetables, and set a plate with a pile of toasted flatbread in the middle of the table.
“Smells good” I said as I stood to fill my own bowl, I glanced over my shoulder and saw Rin had remained seated, so I grabbed the big mug he used for everything and filled it as well before sitting back down and sliding it over to him.
“You spend all day gaming big-man?” I asked Tev as I grabbed a piece of flatbread for myself, dipping it into the broth and taking a bite.
“Mrphmhmm” Tev nodded in reply, chewing for a moment before swallowing. “Yeah, Sindree got called in”. He filled his mouth with food again.
Sindree was his latest girlfriend, if you could call her that, and recent enough that I had only actually met her a couple of times in passing. Since we all had moved in together, I’d watched him casually hop from relationship to relationship, and it never seemed to concern him too much.
I nodded and tucked into my own food, the silence now held at bay by sounds of Tevin's loud chewing and the occasional clatter of spoon against bowl, mingling with the main-menu music of his game still paused on the big TV across the room. We ate in silence for a while, Rin eventually picking up his mug and sipping on it, his eyes still glued to his tablet.
As we neared the end of the meal, I told Tev about my latest encounter with payment-day bullshit, and we all lamented and complained about it together. It was one of the few topics that I’d found that would pull Rins’ full attention into a conversation. After another hour or so of bullshitting, mostly between Tev and myself with an occasional comment or insight from Rin, we scattered in separate directions and I crawled into bed.
The next morning, the door to Tev’s room was wide open and he was already bolting on his armor inside when I emerged from my mine. We grunted at each other, and finished our morning routines before heading out the door together.
He had been transferred out of guard duty, which is what instigated us all moving in together. He was moved out of the barracks, assigned this apartment, and was somehow able to choose us as his roommates. All I knew about his new post was that he got more credits, days off, and his own personal set of powered armor, but he came back with injuries more often.
I don’t think he paid too much attention to anything beyond the realities of combat, to tell the truth. He had rolled the idea of being a “grunt” into his identity, and had a tattoo across his chest that proclaimed as much.
He fought, trained, and studied the methodology of warfare and killing, but refused to learn or care about who or why. He said it kept things simpler for him.
We walked the direct route back to the Link, and this time I didn’t worry about taking so many precautions in the daylight with Tev walking ahead of me, towering and bulky even before he strapped on the powered matte-gray and angular armor and his various weaponry. Neither of us seemed to be in the mood for talking, and not a single word was spoken between us until we parted ways at the Travellers station. I saw him walk off in the direction of the rail platforms, before I ducked into one of the many side entryways to the contractor's entrance.
I put my street-clothes back into my backpack, before donning some sunglasses and my mask again before I ran the gauntlet of screaming hate from the crowd of protestors. Today was more mild compared to most days, with only a single megaphone-wielding preacher reciting their twisted views on religion and trying to whip the crowd into a violent frenzy. The Shepherds always swept a bunch of the protestors, whatever their reason for protesting, into detention after a bombing.
After stashing my street clothes in the locker, I finished off my meal-shake from the day before, then approached the body-rig. Grimacing at losing the day's work and frustrated that the Coreworlds could just jerk us around like this and there was absolutely nothing I could think to do about it.
The Link ship’s body-rig was a segmented mechanical arm that swung down from the center of the ceiling against the back wall of the booth. On the end of it was a small saddle, similar to a bicycle seat, with a form fitting brace that ran up the length of your spine, and a helmet that would come down over your entire head. The whole thing was made from a yellowish metal, duller than gold or brass, and dark gray rubber-like polymer that hid all of the many segmented joints.
I sat down on the saddle and felt it form itself to my back and grip around my hips and shoulders, locking onto me solidly and taking most of my weight, leaving me feeling sort of like I was underwater. I pulled the sleek and shiny yellowish-metal helmet down over my still sour face and waited the half-a-second before the Link whisked my consciousness away. In that slice of a moment, I thought to myself, maybe I’d file a complaint about this bullshit when I was done.