“Sulphur. Sulphur, wake up.”
Ded wouldn’t exactly call the garage lively, but it was certainly a whole different beast from the picked-clean skeleton that was the Bunker. Engineers and mechanics – not Mechanicals, though those distinctions were starting to break down on the edges as good cyber became less restricted – bustled around between vehicles, repairing and reinforcing what they could, and tearing what they couldn’t down for scrap.
Unlike the tents the garage was an actual structure, made of proper stone bricks, and had some official numeral designation to set it apart from the other maintenance areas – there were a few other ones scattered around the Pit, though this one was the largest. Only the deskworkers actually gave a shit about that, though. Everyone else just said ‘the garage.’
“Sulphur, this is important.” Sulphur made a noise and rolled over, out of sight.
Ded sighed. The correct thing to do right at this point would be to give the man a kick, but in order to do that he would either have to double in height, or climb the ladder leading up to Sulphur’s little nook on top of the cabinets.
And I’m not climbing that ladder if I don’t have to – I can see the bits where he stapled it together. A shake of his head. I can’t understand how he manages to sleep up there. The room was noisy, and smelly, and all-around an affront to the senses, and he couldn’t imagine that being perched up on a thin ledge of cold metal made any part of it more pleasant.
Grumbling, he jostled the scrap ladder against the cabinet. The metal-on-metal screech made a few engineers shoot him annoyed looks, but it also got Sulphur to poke his head over the edge. “Ded?” He yawned, a dull glow visible from down the back of his throat. “What’s up?”
“Get down here. I have a lead on Cobo, maybe.” Sulphur’s eyes widened. “But not here. Wait for me outside, I’ll explain after I grab the bike.”
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Ded felt a tiny spike of fear when he got back to the supply tent and found it empty. Don’t panic. Lu could turn invisible, there's no reason to thing this guy can't. “[You still there? It’s me.]”
A head of spiky black hair poked up from behind a crate, and some of the tension in his jaw lessened. The foreigner’s eyes narrowed suspiciously at Sulphur, before he stepped fully into view with his arms crossed. “[Steal the iron right off a man’s eyes, ya did.]”
“That the guy? He doesn’t look like Lu at all.” Sulphur adjusted his ‘goggles,’ the overbuilt contraption more like a welding mask than anything. He claimed it let him see electrical fields, but Ded thought that it was probably just a placebo; the result of the man’s Comprehension finally getting itself in order, rather than an actual functioning machine. “But he’s definitely not speaking any language I’ve ever heard, so there’s that.”
“Look at the face, not the body. If you take away the scars, lengthen the hair…”
Sulphur leaned forward. “Hmm… Eh, I guess. I’ll take your word for it.” He shrugged, and took a step forward. “So, you [know what happened with Cobo and the kid, yeah?]”
“Sulphur, he’s not gonna just-“
“[I understand.]” The man uncrossed his arms. “[What’re you in for, fresh meat?]” Why are you here? Something like that, anyway.
Sulphur’s face scrunched up. “[Fresh meat? Hah! Ded, you didn’t tell me he was a flatterer! Kid, there ain’t any part of me that’s fresh, I’m older than spit. I’ve formed a crust.]”
“[I told you, his telepathy is hot shit. It’s just nonsense that-]“
Again, the man cut him off. “[You think you’re some kinda wise guy, huh? You think yer funny?]” For once, his expression fit the tone of his words; sarcastic cheer. “[You and me, we’re gonna go places.]”
Ancestors, this is going to be painful. While Sulphur and the scarred man traded playful barbs – hopefully playful – Ded took the opportunity to wheel his own bike into the tent. Unlike Hock’s hyper-efficient longleg model, his was a larger, sleeker machine built for pure speed. “[Hey. Drag the other one over here, we only have so much time before Hock wakes up.]” He might have put him in bed and pumped him full of painkillers, but that didn't guarantee he would stay down.
With a minimum amount of confusion, they managed to get the bikes set beside each other. Ded fished the two pairs of keys out of his pocket, and tossed the smaller one to the guy. I’ve got to get a name out of him at some point, this is getting annoying. “[Okay, so to turn it on you put the key in this little slot here…]”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
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E-Four wasn’t quite sure what he had done to get put on permanent border duty, but like most things in life, the solution was to stop giving a shit. It was real easy; he had a little button in the back of his head specifically for that purpose. He used to have to put a lot of effort into not caring, but with the button it was reduced to a single thought. Bored? Press the button, problem solved. Cyber sending false pain signals all down your face? Button, solved. The existential terror of knowing that up here on the surface, the Sun could show up and melt you at any time? Button. Button, button, button.
So he would say his life was going pretty alright. It wasn’t like the work was hard; it was almost always a thick soup of nothing, where he could just zone out and watch the sparks dance up above.
And when it wasn’t that it was at least interesting. Like now. “Hey D-E-D, hey Sulphur. You going out?”
Dog Eats Dog nodded almost imperceptibly. “Yeah. Vacation time.”
“Who’s the other guy?” E-Four didn’t recognise him at all, either by sight or by scent. In fact, he didn’t smell like much of anything at all. “Lonesome?”
“Yeah, found him out in the wastes. Think he’s from way up north, past the mountains.”
E-Four grunted. You think? Whatever, he can be as mysterious as he wants as long as he does his paperwork. Might even be true – who even knows what’s up there, anyway. “Nice scars. He in the system?” He flicked a mental switch, and his cyber started connecting to the dusty computer stashed just under his kiosk.
“Should be. We came in through north gate, Scabbiel did the paperwork.”
His cyber made a faint whir as it thought. “When was this?”
“Two days ago.”
Nothing was showing up. Even if Scab didn’t bother to file his shit properly, there should at least have been something – but no, no additions to the system at all in the last two days. “I’m not seeing anything. Name?”
“Dunno, he doesn’t talk right. Guy, say your name.” He nudged the man, whose bike was looking really familiar to his cyber’s photographic memory.
But the little seed of suspicion was derailed when the man opened his mouth, and bleated a few syllables in something that was like the bastard child of cloudspeak, and a very sad woodwind instrument. E-Four’s teeth on the meat side of his head itched, all the way down in the roots, and he winced.
“Ugh, yeah, I’m not writing that down. I don’t think there are letters for whatever that was.” Sulphur had also winced at the weird noise, but D-E-D had a better poker face than some of his bosses, and those guys were 90% metal. “But still, I’ve got to get him into the system; can’t have foreign warriors running around while most of us are off west fighting the big fight. So lemme just…”
He reached for the drawer where he kept the writing supplies, but Sulphur spoke up “Oh c’mon, man. Can’t you do this after we get back?” His hand paused.
“I really should do it now. Procedure and all that.”
“We’re going out, not in! Plus you totally don’t need me for this, so I don’t wanna sit around while this guy,” a nudge to D-E-D’s shoulder, “Plays translator. Look, here, I’ll bribe you!”
He fished around in his pack – the smaller cloth one around his front, not the big metal tank strapped to his back – and pulled out a small block of violently purple metal. E-Four’s eye widened, and his camera zoomed in.
“Iridon?! Oh no, I’m not messing around with that!” Whoever you snagged that from is going to want it back and some point, and when they do I’m not gonna be the one holding it. “Go on, get! I’ll- I’ll do the paperwork when you get back!”
Sulphur grinned, and gestured with the metal like he was going to set it down on E-Four’s desk – an action that threatened to destabilise D-E-D’s bike, since the small cube must have weighed nearly as much as the rest of what he was carrying combined. “You sure? This is premium stuff, and I’m just giving it away…”
“Sulphur, if you touch any part of my kiosk with that metal, I will shoot you.” He set the six barrels of his rota-rifle attachment spinning. “That is a live grenade, not a bribe.”
The old bastard’s grin just got wider. Luckily for everyone, at that point D-E-D slapped him on the head before the situation could escalate. “Sulphur, stop messing around and put that away. Where did you even get that?”
“Would you believe battle loot?”
D-E-D didn’t reply, but his expression conveyed his scepticism perfectly. He turned back to the kiosk. “We’ll be going now. Be back before sundown, hopefully.”
As he watched the three men pull away, their bikes roaring or purring depending on the size, E-Four could only shake his head and reflect on the perfectly stoic face that both D-E-D and the third guy had shown throughout the whole thing. Now those are two men who have not giving a shit down to an artform. Inspirational.
Then he dropped a few hints about a source of iridon to the higher Mechanicals through his wireless. He wasn’t willing to touch the stuff, but he’d gladly be the middleman between Sulphur and someone much braver.
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They rode out for an even hour, passing through deserts and increasingly jagged hills until they hit a big rock sticking defiantly out of the waste, like the raised fist of a buried giant. It was a pretty good landmark, isolated because of the relatively uneven and dangerous surroundings, and even better there was a little nook where you could get some reprieve from the overbearing brightness.
They parked the bikes in silence; even Sulphur was serious, at this point. They both wanted answers, and the man rising on shaky legs had better have them.
“[So, here we are.]” Ded leaned against the warm stone, a red-brown obelisk rising from a sea of dull yellow. The nook was hidden well enough, if you weren’t looking right at it; as far as he knew, he was the only one who came around these parts, precisely for the thing that other people avoided: the difficult terrain. “[We’ve settled our half of the bargain. You ready to pay up?]”
The man stretched, shaking weakness out of limbs that were obviously unfamiliar with the work of controlling a bike. “[I’m dealing you in, bitch. Set it all on the table.]”
Sulphur snorted. Damn broken telepathy. This is going to take ten times longer than it should. Good thing he had brought rations.