Roger was not back at base camp when they arrived. Fleer set everyone to striking camp while he sat in his camp chair, spinning through the contract information on his datapad. He wasn't really seeing. He knew he needed to get over to Daugereaux to let him know the contract was done, but he was wrung out. He was utterly drained.

"Oooh, nippy-snippy sads, like a gelding."

Fleer lifted his head to see Roger sauntering back into camp.

"Oh hey, Roger. Glad to see you made it back. You doing okay?"

"As tasty rain!" he chirped. "Happy lending a hand!" So saying, he held a strip of raw flesh out to Fleer.

Fleer recoiled.

"Roger, why do you have that?"

"It's handy!" So saying, he carefully laid the flesh on Fleer's knee.

"Ugh." Fleer gingerly picked up the flayed flesh and tossed it away.

Roger cocked his head. He loped off, retrieved the strip of skin and brought it back.

"I, won it hands down!" he said, laying the flesh back on Fleer's knee.

"Roger, stop it. You're not funny, and I'm not in the mood." He brushed the flesh off his leg onto the grass.

Roger carefully picked up the flesh, and stared at Fleer, who was avoiding his gaze.

"Antigifting?"

"Roger, that's not a gift. It's just something gross you cut off of one of those dead guys."

"Hahaha! What's dead guys?"

"The dead guys in the Cryocorp facility."

Roger looked confused.

"Nope. All under trees and gruntbuggly. No messes in the woods!"

Fleer looked up at him.

"You didn't go into the Cryocorp facility?" Roger shook his head. "Did you take this from the dead man at the ambush site?" Roger shook his head again. "Roger, where did you get this?"

"Oooh, all scary dark and poke-pokey! Excitement! And necklaces!" So saying, Roger pulled a handful of dozens of identitags out of his pocket.

Fleer sat bolt upright.

"Where did you get these?"

Roger shrugged.

"It was in their pocketses!"

Fleer took the strip of skin from Roger and carefully unrolled it. It was the flesh from the palm and fingers of a man's hand. He considered it for a moment, then pulled out his datapad. He connected it to the hardline shunt and proceeded to perform the nastiest hand scan of his entire life.

His datapad beeped as it processed the scan. It worked sluggishly as it struggled to pull a signal through the patchwork of cabling Oliver had cobbled together.

Fleer dropped the skin and tried to wipe off the datapad as best he could while it churned through the data.

"Roger, the man you got those from, was he dressed all in black?"

"Yep!"

"Hmm."

The datapad beeped. Fleer looked at the data streaming by. He scowled, poked through some data. Scowled some more, poked some more. He lowered his datapad and stared off into the distance.

"Well? Who was it?" Oliver asked.

"Huh? Oh. Rayvan Cross. He worked for Tapstrike Ltd. as a mercenary. Nothing at all to do with Ready/Impact."

"Holy cow, how many mercenaries are there in this swamp?"

Fleer stared off into space, still concentrating, when an ugly suspicion occurred to him.

"Roger. The man that this came from... he's dead, yes?"

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"...yyyyyyyes?" Roger said, without much conviction.

"Was there anybody else with him?"

"One! And one more! And a half! All ketchup pops!"

"Four? So there was more than one guy out there. Let me look into this Tapstrike a little more."

Fleer hunted through the data while everybody stood around pretending to be patient.

"What in the-- Tapstrike Ltd. is not just any mercenary outfit. They're high-end black bag specialists. 'For when you need things quiet' according to their tagline." He flipped through some more data. "Very discreet. Great ratings." Fleer paused, whistling through his teeth. "They're not cheap, either. Whoever hired them was not afraid to spend some money on their men. Unlike our friends at Cryocorp."

"But why? What's to keep quiet out here?"

"All those soldiers apparently. And-- oh no. We need to get back to Daugereaux now. Grab your guns and let's move!"

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

Fleer was sitting in Daugereaux' cabin, banging his head on the kitchen table while the Riotfish stood around looking at each other uncomfortably. Daugereaux had a grim expression as Ma Daugereaux stirred something in the background that smelled of old boots and peppers.

Fleer's datapad lay on the table, scrolling a feed of data by, unheeded.

"How could I have been so stupid?" Fleer moaned.

"Yeah, well, par for the course is all I'm saying," Little Timmy muttered.

"What did you figure out?" Oliver asked.

Fleer lifted his head and stared balefully at Oliver.

"All of it," Fleer said.

"I still don't understand what happened," D'khara asked. "Did Cryocorp call in Tapstrike to take over from Ready/Impact?"

"No," Fleer said. He idly spun the datapad on the table. "Because Ready/Impact didn't fail."

"But they all died," D'khara said quietly.

"Which was exactly what they were supposed to do."

"I don't understand," Oliver said.

"Think back through this. Bring yourself back a couple years. Cryocorp is cash-poor, right?" Oliver nodded at this. "But they have a giant pile of gold. What's the problem?"

Oliver considered this for a moment.

"I'm not sure. I suppose you couldn't buy your groceries with a gold bar. I don't mean to be insolent, but I don't quite perceive their problem."

"No, you put your finger right on it. They can't pay bills with bars of gold. They need cash. They can borrow with the gold as collateral, but that interest mounts up quick, and they need every credit to keep the business operating. They could just sell it, but dumping that much of a commodity on the market at once would depress it."

"So sad," Roger said.

"No, not sad, depressed. The price of a commodity, such as gold, will nosedive with such a sudden supply, and the Harrigans needed to maximize their capital. They even took the business public, remember? Just to boost the cash flow. They had to keep the shareholder's capital, keep the gold to borrow against, and still pay the bills. On top of that, in the last couple years, the Harrigan brothers have been buying all the stock back in order to take it private again. But where's all that money coming from? All of the family fortune was tied up in the business."

"Did they have some smart investments?"

"If they had those smart investments, they'd have used them instead of taking the company public."

Oliver nodded. "Point. Where would they acquire the kind of capital it would take to repurchase the company?"

"Here's my theory," Fleer said. "The Harrigan brothers were panicked, and wanted to take the company private again. They didn't have the funds for it, so they were selling the company's gold on the sly, slowly over time, and using the proceeds to buy back the company stock for themselves."

"But why buy back the company?"

"They can take the company private again if they own a majority of the voting shares. Buy out the majority, vote themselves into the positions they want and push some of that oversight back."

"So they were buying the company with the company's gold?"

"Illegal wumpkis!" Roger said.

"You're right about that. To say nothing of the shareholder lawsuits. They'd have lawyers lined up around the building just to serve papers."

Little Timmy finally took enough interest in the conversation to chime in.

"What does all that have to do with a warehouse full of dead guys?"

"Good question. So, they've basically stolen the company's gold, sold it, and have been buying back the company. What's their problem now?"

"At some point, somebody's going to want to see the gold," Oliver said. "An auditor."

"Exactly right. So they have a ticking time bomb in the form of an empty warehouse. How do they explain it?"

"The dog ate my homework!" Roger said.

"That's pretty close. The official story, I'm betting, is that 'we got robbed and they took all our gold.' It's a stunning maneuver."

"Wait, I don't get it. Who set up Ready/Impact?" Little Timmy asked.

"Cryocorp did."

"But then who hired Tapstrike?"

"Cryocorp did."

"What kind of stupid plan is that?" Little Timmy asked.

"Cryocorp created Ready/Impact to 'rob' their facility. That gives them their cover story for what happened to the gold. Then they hired Tapstrike to cover it up. So they've got a lot of bodies for dramatic effect, an empty warehouse, and a plausible narrative for the stakeholders."

Fleer gripped his head.

"Oh, and the insurance. Agh! They can file a loss claim on the whole amount of gold they had. They're effectively triple-dipping money out of the gold supply. Quadruple-dipping? I've lost count. In any case, it only works if nobody else knows anything about it, and Cryocorp can maintain full control of the narrative."

"They hired all those men just to kill them?" D'khara's features hardened into a grim frown.

"Dat ain't gon' stand," Daugereaux said. The Riotfish, focused on Fleer's narrative, hadn't been paying him any attention, but Daugereaux had been seething, getting redder and angrier while Fleer had been laying out Cryocorp's machinations. Now, his voice was raggedly quiet and dangerous.

"I ain't gonna have it. It ain't right. Dat ain't right, what dey done. Dey done it to my family in '92, and dey done it again today, and I ain't gonna have it!" He was roaring, slamming his fist down on the table in the midst of the Riotfish, who backed away from his raw fury.

"I understand you're upset," Oliver said, "But what do you mean? What's happening again?"

Daugereaux slowly straightened and stared off into the distance. Then he started to tell his story.