Climbing the stairs back to the bar, Jack repeats to himself the advice the old man had given him.

“Go slow, Jack. Ya gotta hold off on sayin’ whatcha really think. Focus on the deal. Negotiations are all about gettin’ them to do what you want while thinkin’ it’s their idea. These days, ever’thing’s negotiable. Just gotta figure the right terms.”

Of course, the first thing he’s got to do is make sure Peanut or one of his crew is alive. It’s kind of tough to strike a deal with a corpse, especially a merc corpse. They’re usually booby-trapped.

According to Slim, Bule’s resident tech, mercs are sold on the booby traps as being a last attack measure, but it’s primarily a means of thwarting would-be looters. To hear Slim say it, any self-respecting techsmith would take the necessary steps to prevent their gear—especially biosync weapons—from getting lifted off a body and resold in the secondaries. Not doing so is an indictment of one’s professionalism and, more importantly, a potential lost sale.

Jack thinks about all the off-hours he spent in Slim’s lab, chatting his ear off about gear and ideas for new kinds of kit to make. What he wouldn’t give to be doing that right now. At least Slim doesn’t have a pack of drunken mercs try to wreck his place of business every other week.

He reaches the top of the stairs and notices a flicker from the ceiling trusswork. Good, Zeke is still in one piece. The little monkey peeks his head out from behind one of the ceiling beams and looks down in Jack’s direction. It’s a bit dark up there, but there’s still enough mid-afternoon light filtering in to make out the look of concern on Zeke’s face. Jack reaches up and touches a short, red kneak among those clustered behind his left ear to record a whispered message.

“I’m alright. You stay put. Keep hidden.”

When he releases the kneak, the recorded message is packaged and broadcast at an ultrasonic frequency Zeke can hear, but most people can’t.

Jack remembers how he’d laughed in Slim’s face when he got the kneak—it came for free as part of a bundle deal when he got the subsonic paralyzers. He smirks a bit when he remembers what he’d said. “What a lo-fi piece of crap! Anyone with a freq-extender is gonna hear that plain as day. Why would I ever put that in my ’trix?”

Of course, the port matrix behind his ear had plenty of space and Jack thinks kneaks just look damn cool, so it wasn’t much of an argument. Even still, Slim had offered to install a matrix on Zeke so messages could be encrypted and transmitted digitally, but Zeke was … resistant to the idea. It took Jack a week to convince the monkey to come back within arm’s length of him. In any case, low-end tech or blinky decoration, none of that matters when you want to send a message across the room to a monkey. Jack makes a mental note that if he gets through this, he’ll have to apologize to Slim for this one time when the damn thing actually came in handy.

Keeping low, he edges up the last few steps to take a quick survey of the damage by peeking around the banister at the top of the stairwell. Well, he attempts a quick survey. There’s a lot of damage. With the view blocked from jutting floorboards and splintered tables, it’s difficult to tell which body parts are still attached to people. On the far side of the crater in the floor, charred timber still glows a dark red near the meaty splat that used to be Hot Mess. Jack winces. Name was more accurate than I thought it’d be.

The pungent scent of burned hair and melting sinew doesn’t help, either. The odor clots the air, choking the breathable chunks into tolerable pockets where it just smells like someone has lit a meat smoker without first checking if there’s a cat sleeping in there. Everywhere else in the bar, the smell is more like you’ve set your own upper lip on fire using gasoline and dog shit.

It’s not quite the worst that the bar has ever seen, but it’s close. And if Jack doesn’t sort out some kind of arrangement with these mercs, it could get worse. His stomach tightens just thinking about the time and bartering it’s going to take to rebuild. And Harris is for-sure going to use this as an excuse to try and take the bar away from him again.

Jack’s mind starts to spin with what-ifs. What if he can’t pay for repairs? What if he can? Who’s he going to owe? What if he does lose the bar? Where would he live? Would he have to go back into service? He’d gotten lucky—really, dodged-a-bullet lucky—when the old man picked him. Can’t count on that again. His mouth fills with the sick, watery bubble of spit that forecasts a fifty percent chance of vomit. He takes a seat a few steps from the top and lays Plan B across his lap. Gotta let the sick wear off.

Face buried between his own knees, he takes a deep breath. That shit smell sure ain’t helpin’ anything. He exhales slowly, trying to will the bile in his stomach to stay in its rightful place.

Jack’s “please don’t throw up” meditation is interrupted by the sound of mechanical scraping and whispered orders. He turns to look back up to the roof support and touches his Zeke-kneak. “How many?”

He can’t see Zeke’s face anymore, but the little monkey’s paw sticks out from the main beam. Two fingers extend and wave in Jack’s general direction. Jack faces forward and looks at Plan B. Hopefully at least one of the two is on Peanut’s crew. It’s not Hot Mess, that’s for sure. There’s a chance it’s one of the customers from before all this started, but not likely. Doesn’t matter. Without ammo, Plan B is going to be pretty useless, whatever the case may be.

He hears the hiss of more whispered orders and that scraping sound again. It sounds like one of them might be trapped. That’s promising.

Jack slides Plan B off his lap and carefully props it against the stairwell wall. He pats the surface of his vest, feeling the shape of the contents in each pocket. He might have more he can barter with than just that girl. Hell, these are well-financed mercs. Maybe he can turn them into customers of his other business.

Of course, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have some kind of defense. Rolling to his stomach, he crawls up the stairwell and peeks around the top banister again. This time he’s looking for something much more specific. He needs a gun, one that works. Just a plain, cheap ass gun. Nothing with anything special on it, nothing that would warrant a biometric lock or a booby trap of any sort. Should be pretty easy. Most of the mercs that come through Bule aren’t in the same high-priced class as Peanut and his team.

It takes him a second, but he spots exactly what he’s looking for. There’s a semi-automatic rifle nestled under part of an arm. It’s not more than two meters away. There’s not much cover there, though.

Alright. Different tack. Give some, get some.