Chapter Four - Back to Cat

“- This quarter’s going to be the first where our profits aren’t increasing.

- You mean we’re losing money?

- No, I meant that our profit margin isn’t going to be bigger this quarter than it was in the last one. We’re still in the black.

- That’s unacceptable. How am I going to explain to the shareholders that we’re making less profit?

- We’re still making billions.

- Yes, but we’re making less billions than we were before, and that’s not going to fly. Figure something out.”

Private anonymised discussion on the Nimbletainment C-Suite Chat, 2057

***

“Is this how it usually goes down?” I asked Rac as the two of us followed her... I suppose they were work friends.

The crew didn’t waste much time once Garter had laid out the mission. We all just got up and got going. I wasn’t sure where we were going, exactly, but the others seemed to know. We pushed through a door at the back of the Barber Shop and into a service corridor lined with cubicles and stacks of boxes. It was a lot less glamorous than the main section of the bar, but the music still carried in here.

“Yeah,” Rac replied. “Most of the time the jobs are pretty cut-and-dry. Go somewhere, scare someone. Steal something from a corp. Stand around and look scary. Sometimes we escort stuff.” She shrugged. “It’s alright work. Mostly it’s good because it’s fast. Half a day, a few hours.”

That made some sense, I supposed. Rac was often back home, so whatever work she was doing here had to be quick.

“Raccoon hasn’t come on any real dangerous jobs,” Coco said as she glanced back at me. The woman was a good half-foot taller than I was, and a whole lot broader at the shoulders. “But we don’t usually take on jobs that are that bad.”

“Mostly because no one wants to take the risk,” Garter complained. “Even if that’s where all the good money’s at.”

Jerusalem’s hand twitched, then he looked my way and tilted his head to the side.

Jerusalem has sent you a link to a limited party chat. It seems like it’s what the team uses to communicate. Specifically with Jerusalem himself.

So he’d text into the team chat? Yeah, that made some sense. “Gimme a sec,” I told him. “If this chat’s safe, I’ll join it.”

Nothing will get past me.

I opened the chat, shifted it to the corner of my vision so that it wouldn’t be too annoying, then adjusted its opacity until it was only barely visible. “Got it,” I said.

Jerusalem gave me a thumb’s up, then a line of text appeared in the chat.

Spider: The good money is in the bigger jobs.

Spider: The bigger jobs take a long time. Or they’re dangerous.

Spider: I like danger. But not right now.

“What’s wrong with danger right now?” I asked.

That earned me a look from Garter which practically shouted ‘are you a dimwit.’ “Didn’t you notice the incursion? The big walls they’re building on the edge of the city? The conscription? The club was half empty. A month ago the place would have been booming at this time of day.”

“Lots of good folk got themselves zeroed,” Coco said. “You didn’t notice.”

“Oh,” I said. “I noticed, yeah, just... guess I didn’t think about how that would impact the... whatever you’d call this kind of job.”

“Merc-work is fantastic right now,” Garter said. “That is, if you’re willing to sit on the front line for an hourly rate and pop aliens. A lot of low-risk work right now. So a ton of us have signed on with different merc companies and PMCs to go stand on the walls and blow up aliens and immigrants.”

“Immigrants?” I asked.

“People from outside the city,” Coco said. “Every damned shelter’s packed to overcap, there are more hobos on the streets than ever, the undercity’s crawling with them. Every hotel, motel, flophouse and shithole apartment’s taken. It’s all those damned rural people trying to squeeze into our city and taking our shit.”

I decided not to comment on her opinion there. Although, on the surface it made sense. New Montreal was surrounded by smaller cities and hundreds of little towns. All those people had to go somewhere. They couldn’t stay out in the country when there was such a massive incursion going on, so they came here, to the big city, where the walls would keep them safe and where the locals were oh so welcoming.

I kinda got where Coco was coming from too. New Montreal was a crowded shithole at the best of times. Packing it full with a few million extra souls wasn’t going to improve anything.

Spider: Water’s down across most of the city.

Spider: Lots of corps are laying people off too.

Spider: Things aren’t good right now.

Spider: Things are only going to get worse.

“Alright, enough whining,” Garter said. “We’ve got a job, people. It’ll put credit in our accounts and food in our bellies. We can’t complain too hard, can we?”

Garter pushed through a door at the end of the corridor, and I was hit with a wonderful bouquet of rotten eggs and unrefrigerated meat. I placed a hand over my nose and blinked a few times as my eyes watered.

The looks I got from the others, the sly little smiles and the motion of Jerusalem’s shoulders, suggested that they knew what we were walking into. And that was some enclosed back alley. We were closer to the centre of the megabuilding, and there was a large shaft running from the top to the bottom of the building. A vertical tunnel filled with hundreds of AC units and balconies on every level where trash was dumped into large containers.

There was a hovering truck above, currently grabbing onto one of those containers with a pair of heavy-looking forks. A few chunks of trash fell off the edge and I followed them down with my gaze as they dropped down and down and down into the abyss below the building. There weren’t enough lights down there for me to guess at where it all went.

Probably just under the city. I imagined there had to be a pile of lost trash down there tall enough to be a mountain by now.

Maybe someone tossed something flammable down every so often, to burn some of it down.

“There’s my baby,” Coco said as she moved over to an old minivan parked halfway off the edge of the balcony. It looked like it was just barely hanging on there. Coco’s eyes flashed and the hovercar rumbled to life, the sliding door on its side screeching open even as she popped the driver side door open and climbed into an extra-wide seat.

“Get in,” Garter said as he hopped in himself. The back of the van had a couch along one side, and a couple of fold-out seats near the back. There were also some suspicious looking crates and the back of the passenger side seat had a gun rack welded to it.

Jerusalem slipped to the front, sitting next to Coco with his knees folded up to his chest, and I found a place on the couch next to Rac while Garter slammed one of the unfolding seats down and then kicked the door closed.

“Right, job’s on sub-two, under Nimbletainment Six,” Garter said.

“Is that the corp we’re hitting?” I asked.

“Nah. NB’s big, this is some numbers-company. Not that I’d look too deeply into it,” he said.

I, however, have looked into it. The job was given to Millenium Animal from a self-proclaimed gangster. The warehouse in question is being rented by a corporation whose name is a series of numbers. It’s owned by another numbers corporation, which is in turn owned by a conglomerate. But digging deeper, the line of ownership ends at a Nimbletainment subsidiary. It seems like it’s mostly a corporation set up to provide deniable resources to undisclosed projects.

“So, what are we going after?” I asked.

“We don’t want to know,” Garter said.

Experimental smart ammunition.

Coco lifted us off, and instead of climbing like I expected, we dropped. The van had some lights on the front which flicked on and illuminated the interior of the tunnel as we descended.

“Job’s about as simple as it gets,” Garter said. “We rock up to the warehouse, Jerusalem disables their security, Coco breaks the door, and then we let our local pals rob the place blind.”

“What about corpo security?” I asked.

“Barely any out and about right now,” Garter said. “Most of them were moved to keep corpo assets safe from the aliens. It’s the only advantage we have right now in all of this incursion shit.”

“Good thing too,” Coco said. “Cost of ammo tripled. Fuel costs have skyrocketed too. It’s getting hard to be an indie merc right now.”

Garter shrugged in an easy ‘what can you do’ kind of way. “At least with so many mercs working for corps right now, it’s easier than ever to get your rep up. Once everything cools down we’ll be the top of the top, you know?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

This wasn’t the experience I was expecting it to be, but it was interesting all the same, and I was already along for the ride.

***