D'khara, Oliver, and Roger ran across the dark lawn, away from the growing conflagration at the mansion. Roaring billows of flame already obscured half the place, and the few remaining guards were focused less on the escapees, and more on escaping the fire themselves.
The Riotfish caught sight of the white Battle Wagon, red now in the glow of the massive fire, and redoubled their efforts to reach it as fast as possible. In the pell-mell dash D'khara's foot fetched up against something, and he sprawled full-length on the ground.
Rolling over, he saw that he'd tripped over a body. Well, most of a body.
"Mrs. Meade, are you okay?" Oliver asked.
She sat behind the wheel of the Battle Wagon, grim-faced and seething.
"There were young men that were very rude to me," she hissed. "They were bad boys!"
D'khara stood and looked at what he'd tripped over. It was missing most of its head. Paying more attention now, he found another body splayed out face down, with a huge hole in its back.
D'khara made a face. Of course he would trip over the messy one.
"Is there anything we can do to assist you?" Oliver asked gently.
"Oh, no," Mrs. Meade replied, her tears welling up again. "I'm sorry, Mr. Oliver. I'm not mad at you. I just don't understand this day and age, when three grown men would attack a helpless old lady."
"Helpless, right," muttered D'khara, dragging his boot along the grass to get some of the mess off.
"Manypops!" added Roger.
Oliver squeezed into the passenger seat as D'khara and Roger loaded up in the back of the wagon.
"Mrs. Meade, did you say there were three?" Oliver asked as she started the Battle Wagon. "I ask because there were only two b--URK!" He cut off as the Battle Wagon jerked violently forward and stopped.
With a stone face, Mrs. Meade slammed it into reverse, and the Battle Wagon jerked and stopped again. Forward, jerk, stop. Backward, jerk, stop.
"There must be something jammed in the wheel well," she gritted.
A few more jerking starts, and whatever was jammed in the wheel well fell loose. The Battle Wagon lifted noticeably as it rolled over it.
"I had to chastise them most severely," she said.
"Yes," Oliver said. "I imagine, um, they are, um, that is to say, extremely chastised."
"Wait," said D'khara, "Where's Little Timmy? He didn't come out with us."
They turned as one to consider the mansion, now full aflame.
"You don't think..."
"BWAAAAAH!!!" screamed Little Timmy, slamming his hands on the passenger window. He had crept up in the dark and decided that what everybody needed after a botched mission and a couple unexpected dead bodies was a good scare.
This is the kind of decision maker Little Timmy was.
He rolled laughing on the ground. Oliver stepped out and threw him into the Battle Wagon hard enough to bounce him off the back doors before he hit the floor, likely saving him from the opportunity to personally jam up another wheel well.
The Battle Wagon quietly trundled off into the night.
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Several miles away, with the Battle Wagon parked, the Riotfish sat in the back, contemplating the glow on the horizon that represented their incandescent failure.
"So." Oliver said. "David is expecting a situation report any minute now."
They all avoided each others' gazes.
"I don't suppose the file we retrieved was the one we were looking for?"
More awkward scuffing of feet and minute investigation of shoes.
"It's just some old transaction records," D'khara admitted, handing over the few crumpled pages he'd clung to.
"Any real intel at all?"
The interior corners of the Battle Wagon became fascinating.
Oliver pulled out a datapad.
"One of us has to contact him." He set the datapad on the floor in their midst. "Rock paper scissors?"
The first few rounds ended quickly, as Roger had unnatural luck, and D'khara had spent most of his formative years with only two games to play in the mines: "Rock Paper Scissors" and "Let's Hit Eldred Until He Cries".
Oliver and Little Timmy faced each other over the datapad, fists clenched in their palms. Oliver sounded off the cadence slowly.
"Rock... paper... scissors... shoot!"
Oliver's fist planted firmly in his palm, and Little Timmy's fist briefly showed scissors before switching to paper.
"Little Timmy, that's cheating!" Oliver bellowed. "You can't change what you threw! You lost, now you have to make the call!"
Little Timmy gave a sickly grin, shrugged, and shrank back a little. His face contorted, tensed, then relaxed.
"Timmy don't you dare!" howled Oliver, grabbing him by the shoulders. "You can't leave now!"
Little Timmy's head rocked back and forth as Oliver shook him. His face smoothed and became kindly, the sharp edges softening, the pupils becoming a more human size, with the crinkles around his eyes hinting at old mirth.
He blinked rapidly and looked up.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Oliver? What's going on?"
D'khara covered his face with one hand. What a time for Dr. Navarre to finally show up.
"I-- you-- Oliver visibly took a moment to compose himself. "Hello, Dr. Navarre. I apologize for my roughness. Little Timmy switched out at a bad time."
"I'm terribly sorry," Dr. Navarre replied. Even his voice sounded different from Little Timmy's. Gentler and calmer. "Is everybody okay? Any injuries?"
"No one is in imminent danger," Oliver groused. "There are some contusions and minor burns. Now I need to make a call." So saying, he snatched up the pad and stomped out of the Battle Wagon, which rocked heavily and lifted noticeably on its wheels as he stormed out.
Dr. Navarre set about patching up the few injuries Roger and D'khara had sustained.
"I'm sorry," he said as he gently spread soothing ointment on D'khara's burns. "I know it's difficult having Little Timmy and I share a body. Share a mind." A troubled look crossed his face. "I hope someday he and I can re-integrate. As our personalities become more similar, we come closer and closer to becoming a single person again." He carefully rolled a bandage around Roger's arm. "Tell me, did he seem calmer this time? Closer to me?"
D'khara gave a sickly grin and noncommittally rocked his hand back and forth.
"It's a fire!" Roger said gleefully.
Dr. Navarre continued his ministrations in silence. Oliver's voice could be heard drifting in from outside.
"Ah, yes sir. No casualties on our side. Um, Battle Wagon's fine. No sir. No, not as such. No, not a complete success. No. No, I don't think so. Um. No, we couldn't... well, there were some unforeseen circumstances. Yes. Yes sir. No, no file." Oliver pulled the datapad away from his ear as the volume on the other end spiked sharply. He continued speaking with his ear away from the datapad.
"Well, there was, I mean we found... I don't think so, no. We, uh, may have burned it down a little." He jerked his ear away from the pad again and poked his head into the Battle Wagon.
"I think he'd rather talk to you, D'khara," Oliver whispered, holding out the datapad.
Pinch-lipped and wide-eyed, D'khara shook his head and said nothing.
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The Battle Wagon rolled up to the tired old warehouse the Riotfish called home. The neighborhood was in a run-down, mostly abandoned industrial district, which meant there were no neighbors at night, which was usually nice, especially when Roger was having one of his episodes. But tonight it just felt lonely. The single functioning streetlight at the end of the block flickered as the Battle Wagon stopped in front of the giant steel shutter built into the side of the building.
Mrs. Meade punched in the code on her dash that would unlock the garage. The shutter shuddered, clanging upward. She pulled in and everyone disembarked.
It was a defeated crew that schluffed in from the garage, reeking of smoke. Dr. Navarre went into his room and closed the door, D'khara dropped his shotgun on the floor and sank into the recliner in the sitting area, and Oliver flumped full-length onto the sofa, straining its structural integrity to its absolute limits.
Even Roger was uncharacteristically muted.
With Fleer out of town, they didn't even have the catharsis of his disappointed glares or snarky comments to contend with.
D'khara leaned back and stared at the ceiling.
He had to succeed here. He'd failed at every single thing he'd ever worked at since the accident. That had to stop.
Ninety-nine years of bad luck. He just needed a break. This one break. Please.
Dakarva D'khara.
He replayed the mission in his mind. Where had it all gone wrong?
The file room, obviously. Roger had gotten bored and it all unraveled from there. And he'd gotten bored because D'khara took too long. And he took too long because he was too short to reach all the shelves quickly.
He cringed as he remembered climbing the shelves. What he must have looked like.
He came to a decision. He threw himself to his feet and stormed back to his workshop.
Fine, he was a dwarf. And the standout feature of dwarves was that they were short.
He slammed a rod of steel stock onto his workbench.
Well. He wouldn't be short any more.
----------------------------------------
Later, Fleer sat at his desk in his dim office, hunched over, staring blearily at the screen and scrolling through the finance spreadsheets without really seeing them-- they rolled by in a smeary scattershot of unreadable red numbers.
He'd skipped the last two days of his conference, forfeiting the prepaid hotel, caught another red-eye flight back to HQ, paying the outrageous cancellation fee, and dashed back to-- do nothing much. He'd spent the trip haggling with Datatura over the details of the contract, and whether Riotfish's burning the mansion down constituted "gross negligence" or just "combat exigencies".
Fleer had tried to argue that Datatura's goal with the data-- obscuring the ownership of the land grant-- had been accomplished by burning down the mansion and all the records with it. The Datatura contact countered that, since they didn't have the records in hand, there was no guarantee that they hadn't survived somehow, and wouldn't crop up later as an issue in arbitration.
Fleer had seen pictures of the mansion on the newsfeeds, and was quite comfortable that no records had survived. But the Datatura contact would not be moved on that point.
At the end of everything Datatura allowed that Riotfish could keep the 10% up-front fee, and they wouldn't drag the whole matter into arbitration. Fleer had been angling for more, but the non-arbitration concession was a huge relief to him, so he didn't push too hard.
He felt comfortable that "combat exigencies" was the correct answer to the question of what went wrong, and it was an easy argument for a mercenary outfit to make, but without having been there he wasn't sure he wanted to try to argue that in front of a mediator. Not with as little working capital as Riotfish, Inc. had.
After the stressful flight was done, he'd realized there was really no need for him here at HQ, except to wrap up the paperwork for the failed contract and line up another job.
All that rush and scuffle, to no good purpose. He sighed forcefully and scrubbed his face. They'd needed that money from the Byrd mansion job! The up-front fee kept the thing from being a net-negative venture, but they had to add money to the bottom line, not just tread water.
His desktop bleeped at him. Wearily, he swiped to answer it. Maybe it was work. Maybe it was--
Fleer was shocked and unsettled by seeing both founders of Vermiforme pop up on his screen. Red-eyed and drained, he did his best to put on a good face.
"Ah, Mr. Yanni and Mr. Sonam! How wonderful to speak with you both together!"
Sonam turned to Yanni.
"Is this him? This that Riotfisher guy?"
"Yes"! Fleer said. "We've been discussing a sponsorship to bring our business into the Mercenary's Guild. This would allow both our businesses to grow and thrive--"
"Yeah, we saw your handiwork on the newsfeeds." He flicked a subvideo onto Fleer's screen. It showed drone footage of the Byrd mansion, fully engulfed and billowing angry flames.
Fleer tried to grin through the nausea that suddenly crept over him.
"Uh, our recent job had some exigencies---"
"David," Yanni piped in, "David, you're my guy, you know that, right? But this kind of thing, it looks bad. It's bad, right? I mean, we don't want to seem like we're condoning that kind of thing. Look, you guys get yourselves squared away, let this thing die down and maybe in like six months or whatever, come talk to us again."
"Yes, well, I thank you for your time and consid--"
But Sonam leaned forward and disconnected the call.
Fleer laid his head on his desk and tried not to throw up.
After allowing himself a long minute of deep self-pity, Fleer forced himself up. He swept the spreadsheets away. He was in no shape to work on the finances. Maybe clearing out his messages would help.
As soon as he popped them up, the message from Crediture caught his eye again. It still looked like spam, but he got a nasty premonition.
He opened it.
Dear DAVID FLEER, This letter is to inform you that one of your creditors, LESSY HOLDINGS, has been acquired by Crediture, a finance and loan company. As part of the acquisition, we are reviewing our position on the riskier debts held by LESSY HOLDINGS. Your company, RIOTFISH INC., has come to our attention as an account of concern. We will be sending an auditor to your facility to review your financial records and operations to better understand the risk profile you present. Please be prepared with all records, organizing documents, and relevant paperwork. The dates and information of the audit are outlined below: Location: RIOTFISH, INC. HEADQUARTERS Auditor: STEWART PEARCE, SR. AUDITOR Date: AUG 14, 2443 Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
Fleer's panic rose the further he read, and by the time he hit the date, he was sitting bolt upright.
"The fourteenth? That's tomorrow!"
He dashed out of his office to get everyone else as panicked as he was.