Cranson walked into the garage to find the others waiting. Good, that made this shit simpler. It looked like he'd gotten here before Cooper went off on a job - gonk was suited up in Lancer, if he'd been a minute later this would've been a shitfest.
He locked the door behind him, and walked over to Tumble, who was glaring at him. Eh, he'd figure it out later. He'd probably accidentally deleted a message to gather or something and was late, but other shit was more important and he'd barely slept last night.
"He's clean, boss," Ana said. Course he fucking was. He showered, he wasn't a gonkfuck idiot.
"Cranson," Tumble said calmly. "Let me guess. Got a job for us?"
Right. Yeah. That.
He took a deep breath. He barely even noticed the others tensing.
"Fuck Militech," he said calmly. "And most importantly, fuck the bitch who's my contact."
Tumble blinked. "Go on."
Right, okay, keep it together.
"You guys call me sellout, it's not completely wrong," he admitted. "Remember about three years back? That scrap with the Ironhide gang?"
Tumble's eyes narrowed. "The one where you smashed a couple city blocks and ended up on the evening news?"
"Yeah. They fucked up my baby pretty badly. I nearly didn't make it. And I didn't have the eds to fix her, the fixer stiffed me. But Militech…well. They approached. They wanted me to…keep an eye out. Nothing more, nothing beyond just…letting them know if the Table wanted to start a war with the corps 'again', whatever the fuck that meant. In exchange, they gave me the parts to fix up my baby, even to upgrade her a bit."
Tumble clicked her tongue. "The extra arms."
"Yeah. So I took jobs from them and kept an eye out, told them that the Round Table was too much of a bunch of pussies to pick a fight with a corps beyond being paid to do so, and kept doing jobs for them. A few months back, my contact fucked up and got some cement shoes. Her replacement was a bitch, and fuck her - now she wants me to drag you into hitting this Arasaka convoy."
"Yeah, I know."
He blinked. "How-"
"Winston."
Yeah that tracked.
"So you never told them anything beyond us being mercs?" Jacob asked, suit speakers tuned to a bassy growl.
Flynn shook his head. "Nah. They just wanted a heads-up if somehow we decided to go to war with a corp. That and to have me smash up stuff they wanted gone but didn't want their own boys to do." He folded his arms. "Like you said, I was a sellout. Well, fuck this. I'm done. This job's the last."
Troy cleared his throat from where he was leaning against an unoccupied station. All eyes fell on him, and the kid blinked. "Right. Uh…why, though? If you're so done. What exactly are they offering you that let you put up with it, and why are you talking to us at all? It can't be-"
"My sister."
Troy shut up. Ana's optics darkened. Jacob went very still, and Tumble leaned forwards. "Explain," she ordered.
"She died five years ago. She worked for Militech. I never found out why or how - she wasn't executive, but she was a hell of a lot smarter than me. Some kind of bigwig researcher in their robotics division - she wasn't allowed to talk about her work much, and I barely saw her. They never told me how she died." He let out a breath. "So that's the bait they put on this hook. A whole convoy of ACPA to smash, and if I'm a good dog and do what I'm told, they tell me how she died."
Silence reined for a few moments.
Then Ana sighed. "Fuck you, you inbred pyromaniac. Now I gotta bug Merlin for EMP bombs rigged for remote triggers."
Wait, what?
"Winston has his own little offer for us," Tumble explained. "He wants all of us to hit that convoy, and he told Merlin to give us whatever we need to make it happen." She glared at him. "We're coming with you. We've got two days, and I bet that Militech bitch loaded you with enough info to put together a plan. Also, Ana will be making sure they didn't sneak any shit onto your suit in the past few years. You know how corpos are."
Wait, what?
"You're…going along with it?" he asked.
Tumble shrugged. "Any objections to getting preem gear, stealing a hell of a lot of armor from Arasaka, and working together from here on out?"
The silence was deafening.
"That means yes, gonkbrain," Jacob rumbled. "Now let's start scheming."
In the depths of a long-neglected keep, a black knight dueled a bandit king.
The bandit's comrades littered the keep's floors, the dead innumerable - only the king remained.
The bandit's claws clashed against the knight's blade, again and again, to no avail - the knight was stronger, faster, more skilled than the criminal clad in rust-eaten plate could ever hope to be.
A swift motion, and the bandit lost the claws on his right hand. Another, and the murder-stroke smote the bandit's helm, sundering his plate.
Mordred wrenched the blade free, and let the scav ACPA crash to the ground, joining the last of its comrades.
The 'Rust Devils' had been in the higher echelon of loosely-organized scav-gangs. Only a few dozen in total, but they'd had their own scavenged ACPA - enough to make 'Mr. Hands' demand their elimination by the Round Table's hand, rather than resort to his usual contacts.
He sheathed his blade, already absorbing the damage reports from the three men-at-arms of his retinue. None had been even mildly harmed, their armor barely scratched. Good.
He opened a line to 'Mr. Hands'. The fixer's face remained in shadow that even his optics could not pierce. That was acceptable.
"It is done," he growled. "The Rust Devils no longer exist."
Mr Hands chuckled. "Stellar work, Mordred. Good job tracking them down. They were a bit outside the weight class of the usual street-meat, y'know?"
"Indeed."
"Payment's wired to your account and split among your people, as agreed."
Mordred did not even bother to check his accounts. He simply signaled his retinue to follow and left the bloodstained apartment complex behind.
The truck was already waiting, Benson leaning against the cab. "Sir. Any trouble?"
"None," Mordred replied.
The driver nodded. "Alright. It'll be about twenty minutes until we get back to base. Any detours you want to make?"
Mordred looked at his retinue, each of them clad in their own ACPA. He did not repeat the question, merely waited for them to speak.
None of them said anything.
"No," Mordred answered.
Benson nodded, and lowered the ramp on the truck - a bulk model, large enough to carry four suits rather than the more usual two. It was only when they were all embarked and the armored ramp-door was locked and sealed that he began to take stock of everything else.
All four of them were caked in gore from the brief battle, the black of their war-plate nearly hidden beneath the crimson - when you hit unarmored gangers, they tended to splatter. The smell of it would be overpowering for anyone not them. But the base was equipped to handle that. It would not be a problem.
He'd expended twenty rounds from his main gun. He had no damage to his frame, despite the fight - his retinue had removed the other ACPA from the equation, and hence eliminated the only members of the gang who could have posed a threat while he cut down his foe.
Another successful mission, one that had made each of them at least five thousand eurodollars richer.
The others began clambering out of their suits. Mordred waited, and watched, reviewing both his performance and his own.
They were loyal, brave, and true - that he already knew, and that much was obvious. It was only their own skills that needed to be honed - complacency was death.
Fourteen years ago, he had seen the pinnacle.
They were still so far beneath it. But less far than they had been yesterday.
In that much, he would have to be content.
Mordred took a deep breath, and pulled himself inwards - ceasing to be present in his armored skin, becoming so much less. Interface plugs disconnected, the brief moment of vertigo ending as the connection between him and his greater body was cut.
Winston Arthur Scott, Jr, stepped out of his suit. His footsteps clanged against the metal floor of the truck, as they had for the past fourteen years, as the footsteps of all of his friends did.
He let out the breath he hadn't been truly aware he was holding, and smiled at his retinue. Three more metal faces smiled back at him. "Good work, people," he said lightly. "Drinks are on me when we get back and clean things up." He didn't have to warn any of them not to drink too much - one of the many benefits of fullborg conversion. "Just remember, we're meeting Maelstrom tomorrow. Trying to put fear into a bunch of cyberpsychos is pointless, but we should still try to make a point."
Jonas Clegane, snorted. "Cyberpsychos they might be, but they should know better than to fuck with us."
"The 'psycho' part is a bit heavier for some, dontcha know," Sally Ishtar replied from where she was leaning against her suit. "Still, they'll respect the metal."
"Only thing they know how to respect," Silas Greaves murmured. "They're the reason my cousin turned out the way he did." His optics flared red. "Can't say I'm too happy with your pops giving his killer all the applause, boss."
Arthur put a hand on the man's shoulder. "My father makes his own decisions, Silas," he said soothingly. "Even if he's trying to use that nomad washout as his champion…it doesn't matter. She'll slip up sooner or later - and the others are still fickle." He smiled. "Besides. If she decides to take a lance out on jobs…well, we look all the more attractive to those who want a lance of their own, don't we?"
"I know," Silas said. "And Flint…he was an asshole. But he was still family, you know?"
"I know." He patted the man's back. "We'll settle accounts one day. You have my word on it."
It was the simple fact of the matter.
His father's way had been…almost admirable, in a way. That he'd turned the disaster of the Night City Knightfall into a slow decline rather than a total fracturing of an organization, that he'd held the Round Table together at all…those were impressive feats.
But it was no longer time for trying to avoid disaster. It was the time for action.
The Round Table would have its place in the sun again, and if his father wasn't willing to seize it, broken by his mother's death…then he would have to.
Everything would be settled, one day soon.
And from there, there was only the climb to look forward to.
Until the day he stood across from the demon as an equal, his friends at his side, and had his blade pierce its heart.
Because all accounts would be settled - and Adam Smasher had a debt to pay.
The Wraiths were a clusterfuck masquerading as a unified bandit clan, and that was just the way Jill Basset liked it.
It made the job of 'leading' them a hell of a lot simpler. They didn't have to set up anywhere, maintain territory, or even keep an eye on the lesser groups. Raffen Shiv always came to her people, banding together - because once you'd lost a clan, you looked for the next best thing. All she had to do was point them at a target.
She tolerated the ones who got themselves killed and the idiots calling themselves her lieutenants, because the simple truth was that she was the meanest, toughest dog in this fight - and not a one of them had the spine to try her.
Even Flint, for all his bravado and taking over some of her boys, had bent the knee when her word had come down.
And now Flint, and all of the people he'd bullied into working for him, was dead.
Which should've been a hell of a task - while he'd been making waves, the Aldecaldos hadn't had the local strength to handle them in a straight fight, and Militech? Militech wouldn't move a finger without orders signed in triplicate, and she'd have known about it before they got anywhere near Flint's stomping grounds.
But still - it'd happened. When the fucker had stopped responding to calls, she'd had some scouts head on down, and they'd reported back that the compound he'd been holed up in had been stripped bare, the bodies burned with most of the chrome ripped out of them, and all the vehicles that weren't wrecks taken. Some of those, she knew, had turned up in Aldecaldo hands shortly after, and there'd been signs of a major fight - hell, a small-scale war, really - between Flint's band and the nomads.
But there'd also been other signs, and as she looked over what her scouts (actually pretty decent at their jobs, and not strung out chrome junkies like a lot of her fighters) had said, it became pretty damn clear what'd happened.
"So the Round Table's active in the Badlands again," she growled as she set the old-fashioned print-pics down onto her planning table.
"Again, boss?" one of her two flunkies - a duster-clad man named Preston - asked carefully.
She gave the man a nod. He might've worn a stupid hat with half the brim pinned up for no damn reason, but he was respectful and decent in a firefight. "Again. Before your time, pup - a bunch of Junkerknight gangers riding old war castoffs and making a ruckus. Heavy artillery for pretty much anyone to handle. They didn't go out into the Badlands much - but they were hell to fight." She grinned. "Imagine a hundred Flints, and you've got the right idea for how much trouble they were."
"That…seems like more firepower than anyone should've been able to have," the other flunky, Porter Gage, mused, singular cyberoptic gleaming as he tapped into the Net. "Corps tend to crack down on stuff like that, right?"
Jill shrugged. "Late fifties, early sixties - things were a lot different. Corps didn't have as tight a handle on things as they used to, Arasaka was still offshore, and Militech didn't quite have the reach it does now."
"So what happened?" Preston asked.
"Adam Smasher happened. Took out about half their number in one go. About half the survivors scattered, the others were small enough Arasaka didn't send him after them. Would be about…fourteen, fifteen years ago. Hell, pretty sure you can find the place the slaughter happened, there's a junkyard there now with heavy security on it." She shrugged. "They're still around - but they were mostly city types beforehand, and they're city types now. Night City's the only real place with the need for the kind of violence they supply, at least on this end of the continent."
"Still doesn't explain why they were out there to begin with, boss," Porter said. "Like you said - they're city folk. Would the Aldecaldos even know to reach out?"
She narrowed her eyes at him, then nodded. This was why she kept these pukes around. "Their leader's still Saul. He might have the contacts…but that one doesn't have the spine to pursue that kind of opportunity. Too much of a sellout to corps to consider hiring heavy metal to solve a problem for him. But he was working with them…"
She drew a knife, spinning it around her fingers as she thought out loud. "That Militech battalion that got flatlined five days ago. A whole scrapyard of guns and ammo, and the corps are slow to move. Round Table moves in, runs into Flint's bunch doing the same thing. Flint doesn't have the metal to fight them, pulls back to base - and the Aldecaldos take the advantage of the fight to join in. Saul doesn't have the spine to escalate, but he knows how to seize a good chance." She snorted. "So Flint gets his gonk ass flatlined and the Aldies and the Table strip his turf bare."
The knife thudded point-first into the table.
"What a fucking waste of time and guns," she snarled. "He had a hundred and fifty of our people under him, six 'strommers, another six of our people he'd borged to the gills, and he couldn't do shit."
Deep breaths, hound. Deep breaths.
"So what's the play, boss?" Porter asked. "If we've gotta look at the Aldecaldos knowing they can reach out to heavy metal like this."
Yeah, that was a problem she had to worry about now, Flint, you dead dogfucker. Thanks a lot.
The good times wouldn't keep rolling if her rolling circus of Raffen Shiv had to worry about getting massacred every time they went out on a job, or if they poked the bear a little too hard for those goody-two-shoes.
She pointed a calloused hand at Preston. "Where's that 'saka convoy that's supposed to be moving through?"
"The heavyweight one?" the dark-skinned man asked. "Shouldn't be more than a day or two out, coming down from NorCal."
Jill grinned. "Damn right we are. Gather up any of the boys who've used a linear frame and tell 'em to stand by. Then get every other gun we've got. That convoy's carrying heavy metal - and we're gonna take it for ourselves."
Her left and right hands looked poleaxed for a second, before they grinned back - proper wolven smiles, all teeth and no mercy.
Take care of your pack and they'd take care of you when the time came. She might not have given a fuck about most of the degenerates, but the ones with the brains to lead a proper pack were always useful - and she'd make damn sure they and their picked crews had the metal and might to keep the Wraiths together under her thumb.
Her predecessor, Dogkiller, hadn't thought that way - had been all-in on fear and killing her own. Well, she'd been an idiot, and died like one. Jill? They called her Greyback for a reason - she'd lived long enough to know what she was doing, and she intended to live longer still.
The good times would keep rolling, even if they had to stick a thumb in 'saka's eye to do it.
And once the boys were trained…it'd be time to roll over the Aldecaldos.