The cargo doors led into a loading area several stories tall and wide open. The ceiling vanished in the distance overhead. The concrete-and-brutalist theme from the exterior carried into the interior. Worn yellow tape marked out zones on the floor. Pallets, disassembled parts of shelving and other equipment were lined tidily against the walls. Bare steel walkways lined the walls on either side, thirty feet up from the floor. A pair of swinging doors adorned the far wall, leading further into the facility.

The Riotfish were on high alert, scanning for danger, mostly because of all the dead bodies lying scattered on the floor.

Thick, dark blood pooled around the bodies. They were all dressed in the unimaginative, dull uniforms of Ready/Impact. Nobody else was around.

The bodies were clustered together in groups near the sparse cover: steel shelving, a stack of crates, and a loose pile of steel plating had attracted a number of soldiers. They were clearly laying where they'd been shot down. Nobody had moved them at all.

"Okay, what happened to all these cheeseballs?" squeaked Little Timmy. "Who killed them?"

"Look at the wounds," Oliver said. "They were shot from overhead." As one, the Riotfish' guns swung up to the walkways above, but nothing up there stirred.

"Little Timmy," Fleer breathed, "can Dr. Navarre take a look at these guys?"

"Yeah no," Little Timmy said. "Navarre is not even coming out in this."

D'khara was trying not to look too closely at the bodies. He'd seen bodies before, but this was a new scale for him. He felt sick as he realized that all the work he'd done sabotaging the rifles had not protected the Riotfish, but had rendered the Ready/Impact soldiers completely incapable of defending themselves from whatever had happened here.

In a desperate bid to think about literally anything else, he fixed his gaze high, on his surroundings, away from his guilt bleeding all over the floor. It slowly dawned on him that there was something off about the facility itself.

"This place looks abandoned," D'khara said. "Those chain barriers have been up for ages; they're almost rusted through. And those dock plates haven't been used in years, there are rust holes. And where are the forklifts? And the shelves? What kind of loading dock is this?"

Oliver was bending down, examining one of the soldiers.

"He's missing his identitag." Oliver moved to another body. "This one, too. I think they're all missing."

"No," Fleer whispered. "No. No no no no no!" He dashed to the doors at the back of the loading area.

"David, wait!" Oliver called. But Fleer did not wait. He slammed through the doors and ran into the facility.

----------------------------------------

Oliver bolted after Fleer, with the rest of the Riotfish trying to keep up. They didn't go too far before they found him, his rifle hanging loosely from one hand, standing in a cavernous room. The room had many floor-to-ceiling cages, each cage filled with empty shelves. Broken pallets were stacked in odd piles around the cages.

The Riotfish piled in behind Oliver as Fleer took fumbling steps deeper into the room.

"There's... nothing," he said.

His rifle clattered to the ground and he sank down to his knees with his back to his crew, staring at all the empty shelves. Oliver approached him cautiously.

"David? What's wrong?"

Fleer barked a crazy laugh and gestured at the empty shelves.

"Our gold!" he cried. "Look at it all! Our solvency! Our salvation!" he hiccuped a sound halfway between laughter and weeping.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean nothing! There's no gold! Look at this! These things haven't been opened in years. Years!"

The thick layer of dust on the shelves and the generally poor condition of the cages affirmed Fleer's assessment.

"I don't understand."

"There is no loading equipment! There are no cargo trucks! There is no gold! There's nothing!"

"But how? Did they move it? And who killed all those soldiers? And where is everybody?"

Fleer sank in on himself.

"I don't know. I don't know anything. All I know is that I screwed it all up and we're done for."

"Now David, that kind of negative talk is not helping anything. I know it's a disappointment, but it's not nearly the disaster you're making it out to be. We'll finish up this contract and you can get us other work to--"

"He can't," D'khara said. Fleer, with his back to his crew, managed to shrink even more, as though he knew what was coming.

"What do you mean, he can't?" Oliver's voice rose a register. "Of course he can. He's gotten us all kinds of work."

"I overheard him talking with Pearce. We're still on the hook for the Crediture loan. They're on track to shut us down in a couple weeks." Seventeen days, to be precise. Nicely coinciding with the 90-day evaluation that he'd never have now.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Oliver was quiet for a long moment. His breathing sounded loud in his ears, filling the cavernous room. Focusing on his breathing helped keep his rising panic damped down.

"David, is this true?" Oliver asked.

Fleer simply sat there staring at the floor, an answer as clear as a shout.

"I'm sorry," he muttered finally. "I thought I'd fixed this."

"Typical," Little Timmy snorted. "Once a corper, always a corper."

"Why have you been lying to us?" Oliver said in the careful tones of one who was balanced on the vanishingly narrow peak between terror and rage.

"We couldn't--" Fleer struggled quietly. "After the Adler acquisition, Pearce wouldn't back off, wouldn't cut us any slack. Our finances, the jobs we could get, there was no way we could pull it off. It just wasn't possible. But with the gold! We could have saved the Riotfish and so much more!" He lifted his head to stare into the distance. "With the gold we could have done everything we ever wanted. But it never existed. It was a fool's hope. There was never any chance for the Riotfish. And now Pearce is going to come back and look down his nose at us and say 'I told you so' and he'll be right. He'll be right."

Fleer's head dropped again.

"Excuse me for a moment," Oliver said in a strangled voice. He turned and stiffly walked out of the room. A minute later, from the far side of the loading dock, through all the walls, there arose a terrible growl that spiked into a petrifying roar, a sound that gripped the bottom of the spine and popped up every hair and goosebump all the way to the scalp. This was followed by a series of tremendous bangs and crashes. The walls rattled with each impact, and dust sifted down from the shock.

The rest of the Riotfish huddled closer together. For long, terrifying minutes the building swayed and shook with the shrieks of torn metal and the smashing of demolished walls. Then the noise died down.

Oliver walked back in, covered in concrete dust, with his hair and outfit askew.

"My apologies," he said. "I just needed a moment to vent."

D'khara stepped in quickly.

"I... I think this is my fault," he said. "I know I didn't say anything about it earlier, but I have this bad luck. I didn't mean to bring this on everyone, I just hoped it would--"

"This wasn't luck," Fleer said in a monotone. "This was a choice. My choice."

D'khara, his mouth stuck open halfway between words, didn't know what to say.

"Your choice, David," Oliver said, "that you did not share with us."

"I just didn't want everyone to worry. I-- no, I have to be honest. I just didn't want to have to tell you. I've supported you all for so long, it's just not right."

"You supported us, but you didn't believe in us. The Riotfish, we're more than just a company. Can't you feel it, David? We're family. And as a family we can forgive each other. But as a family we have to trust each other."

Fleer heaved a shuddering breath that was a hair's-breadth from being a sob.

"What am I supposed to do?" he cried. "There's nowhere for you all to go. Nothing to do. And once the company's defunct, the assassins will be out after me. I'll have to head into the Between to survive." He stared blankly at the floor. "Or not. I should just wait for them."

"Don't talk like that or I'll get angry again," Oliver said.

"Yeah," Little Timmy chimed in. "You gonna go full corper on us, check out and leave everybody else to deal with your problems?"

Fleer shook his head.

"I've always believed that if we can work, we can win. Well we can't work, and we can't win."

"But we can move forward." Oliver said. "Let's finish this job. Then we can figure out what's next."

Fleer nodded, his face exhausted and expressionless. With agonizing slowness, he dragged himself to his feet, picking up his rifle, with his back still to the Riotfish.

The Riotfish filed out of the storage room, leaving him alone for a moment.

Fleer took a long look at the rifle in his hand, but shook his head again. In the stillness he was alone. Truly alone for the first time in ages. The silence rang in his ears.

Family. They should be, they'd been through enough together. Which made his failure all the more galling.

Fat tears squeezed out and dropped onto the dead, dusty concrete floor. His face crumpled, but he never made a sound.

He couldn't even keep his family together.

He tried to sort out where everybody would end up. Little Timmy would probably land back in prison before long. Oliver could go to his clan in a pinch, though that wasn't ideal. D'khara had hinted that returning to the mines wasn't an option, but he was a hard worker, surely he could get a job somewhere. Mrs. Meade didn't have any family he was aware of-- there was no telling what would happen to her. Maybe she had some savings set aside to live on? And he and Roger... maybe he and Roger could head out of the city, find Roger's original home and hide out there.

But the city was to Fleer as water is to a fish. It wasn't something he loved or hated, but it was a part of him. A part of him he needed as deeply as he needed the Riotfish.

They'd been so close. But it had been foolish to think he could pull off a greater theft than a corporation. To think his crew could outwit the executive mindset. To think that he could fix things.

His crew just wasn’t capable enough. He sighed.

Then a thought occurred to him.

That was wrong, wasn't it? After all, during the Adler job, they'd locked down an entire corporate building, right in the middle of the Corporate District. They'd fought off waves of highly-trained, well-equipped soldiers with, well, with the equipment the Riotfish had. Even the Byrd mansion fiasco had its highlights: they hadn't nabbed the files, but they had fought their way into and out of a fortified mansion, in a direct shootout, despite being outrageously outnumbered.

It slowly dawned on him that his crew, while not what one might call traditionally competent, had their own way of getting things definitively done.

He had never given up on the Riotfish. He'd never given up on them because he'd never believed in them in the first place.

He rubbed his temples.

If only he'd realized earlier. He should have stopped thinking about running the Riotfish and started thinking about being a Riotfish. He should have been solving problems the Riotfish way instead of trying to suck back up to the corporate world.

What would the Riotfish do?

He grinned a little at the thought. Engage in breathtaking scope of collateral damage, probably.

It was here, in the depths of his most abject and complete failure, that he realized what he would miss most about the Riotfish.

Not Riotfish the company. That was a riddled mess of debt and bad decisions. Not his success as a mercenary executive. He recognized that he was mediocre, at best. Not even his childhood dreams, with the flash and excitement of the mercenary life, driven by foolish hero stories.

He'd miss Oliver's terrible cooking. And Mrs. Meade's knitting. Roger's unpredictable shenanigans. D'khara's grouching. Even Little Timmy's attitude. That's what he'd miss.

Oliver was right. Riotfish wasn't a company, they were a family. And family could screw up and stick together-- would stick together-- regardless of articles of incorporation.

He lifted his head. They might not be Riotfish for much longer, but he would find a way to keep his family together. The Riotfish way.

With firm determination, he wheeled and marched to the door.