by Ros Per
- Hahaha ... He’s demanding that my fighters ... Hahaha ... throw us out of the office ... Hahaha ... and arrest us, because: "These plebeians do not realize who they’ve messed with," - someone knocked on the door and we stopped laughing, and stared at entrance together.
- Please enter! - Carefire shouted, after someone knocked again. A man of about 40, wearing the same kind of suit Survaker had worn, looked into the room.
- Good afternoon! I'm looking for the Commander ... Yeah, I guess I’ve found him. May I come in? - After Carefire’s nod, he entered the office and introduced himself. - Investigator Stepanenko. I understand that you are the commander of outpost No. 5-17-23, Alexander Carefire? - a nod in the direction of the commander followed his words. - And Volper, a participant in the project to restore the fifth level, who we need to talk to, or, as people might call him, the replicant, which is strange, because we all go through replication process, but the name, for some reason, was given to the participants of the project. But that doesn’t matter. As far as I know, you’ve already met my partner. -
My and Carefire’s nodding confirmed it for him. This investigator was strikingly different from the first man’s. He had a pleasant voice, choosing his words carefully, trying to avoid upsetting us or saying anything that might be perceived in the wrong way.
- “I apologize for my colleague,” Stepanenko continued. “Unfortunately, he’s the son of one of the shareholders of the pharmaceutical corporation and has decided to work in our service to raise a few levels, to show off his status later. While he’s running around like mad and writing angry letters to his daddy, demanding the rude individuals be dealt with, you, in this instance, we can calmly resolve our issues.”
This guy was far from simple. He’d managed to get rid of a pain in the ass by using us. He’d most likely managed to plan it out based solely on our profiles. True, my psychological profile is only a couple of pages, but I suspect analysts in his department do their work well. And now he was emphasizing the fact that he was supposedly the skilled one, not his partner. I get the feeling he’d accept any concessions with a smile and offers of eternal friendship, while angling to stab you in the back.
- “Please, go on,” I responded. - What do you want to know? -
- Don’t worry, Volper, just some trifling questions. Our service received a report on your joint operation with Alexander Carefire, during the destruction of the gang that had been led by a certain Alckor, and we just need to clear up a few things, regarding that. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?
- “Please do, I have nothing to hide,” I said. Of course, there was something I was hiding, but I wouldn’t admit it, obviously.
- To start with, tell me how it all happened, starting from the moment you learned about the location of the base, - he took out some kind of rectangular device and put it on the table. – And I will record our conversation to help with my reports, if you don’t mind.
- “Not a problem, please feel free to record! So, it all started when I returned to the technical tunnels and cleared everything up...”
Then I briefly told him about what happened, from the moment I discovered the place, to the moment the reinforcements came in with Carefire. Only I didn’t mention Ellie and Krill.
- It turned out that, when you went down to the eighth floor, the security robot had already been destroyed? -
- “Yes, when I passed through the 8th level, going further down, the robot was lying in a pile of debris.”
- You mentioned that all the cells in the room were empty. -
- “Yes, there was only one security guard for the entire lab.”
- Try to remember more details... -
He tortured me like that for another thirty minutes: asking questions, periodically returning to different points and formulating the question in a new way. If I hadn’t been expecting such a thing, I’d most likely have already let something slip a few times by then; there were some tricky questions. I formulated my words so that they sounded true. Never giving a definite answer, I always answered in detail, implying one answer, but in a way that it allowed it to be taken as an answer to another question.
- Last question. Have you ever seen this person? - Stepanenko opened his right palm, and Krill's hologram appeared above it.
- “Let me think,” I began to drag things out, trying to quickly put together an answer. “Most likely not, but I won’t exclude such a possibility. I wasn’t paying particular attention to the people who were there. I was trying to survive and make my way out of the jammer’s range.”
- Hmm ... Well, then I won’t keep you any longer, I still need to find my partner, lest he end up doing something with unpleasant consequences. Goodbye, gentlemen.
And then he left the office. I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but for the time being, I was free of the investigator. If I end up working with the mutants again, it’ll be necessary to make up more details for the story I’ll tell anyone who asks about it.
- That’s strange! - drawled Carefire.
- “What’s strange, exactly?” I turned to him.
- I’ve heard about this Stepanenko. In general, he deals with quite complicated matters, so I don’t understand what he’s doing here, dealing with such an ordinary case.
If you take Krill’s level into account, then I’m not at all surprised that a proper investigator was sent. I felt like something else was off, too. If he’s such a good investigator, then why did he leave so easily? Okay, so far, I’ve dealt with this problem, although it may come up again in the future. I’ll focus on more personal plans for the future, for now.
- Alex, fuck him. Instead, tell me, how do you feel about the notion of working with me?
- “What is the plan?” He asked, trying to get more details about my request. “Do you need a reinforcement group again?”
- No, this time, I need the opposite. Let me describe my idea better, and we will sit down and think about how to implement it. -
- “Well, let’s discuss it, then.”
- I want to start doing raids on places far from here, but I just can’t stand carrying out other people's orders, and I would like to be self-employed, so to speak! -
- “So register your own clan...”
- Wait, – I interrupted him. – Look. As I said, I want to work alone, but not because I need a big income or something like that, I just want to be independent, not reporting to anyone. A clan, of course, can help me with this, but there’s another issue: I don’t want to manage any people; I already told you that I’m tired of it. But without any support, I cannot fight properly. I need a material and technical base, equipment, doctors, etc. Hell, I even need a skilled warehouse manager! My plans won’t work out if I don’t have all of that. So I suggest you provide me with a base, all the necessary personnel for its maintenance, plus a trophy unit, under the guise of a battle group, to carry the loot for me. On my part, I’ll give you half of the loot, and I’ll just reserve the right to have first pick of the trophies, with you being able to take all the excess from me at the estimated cost of the system. What do you think about my proposal? -
- “And why don’t you want to serve in one of my military units? I’ll form a new squad, consisting only of you, and assign you the appropriate logistics and facilities.”
- Alex, you told me that the property and trophies are distributed according to the hierarchy. That is, as far as I understand it, if I enter your service, most of the loot will then simply be assigned to the outpost. I suggest we sign some kind of agreement or whatever; I admit I’m not that informed about the system when it comes to these matters. The agreement will include the following: the outpost will provide me with all the necessities I require to do my part. Like rooms, workers, and equipment, maintenance, etc. In return, I’ll pay a certain amount of money for your services, or provide you with half of the looted trophies, if the estimated value of that half exceeds the required payment amount. Plus, you’ll have the exclusive right
to buy the remaining trophies from me first. Or something like that. -
And in response, there was only silence. The poor man was thinking it over hard; he was used to doing everything through direct orders and protocol, as it happens with the bulk of paramilitary formations. But my commercial approach to this issue has caused a mental block. I can practically hear his brain creaking, processing the information it received. His forehead was wrinkled. It wasn’t because he was slow or stupid; I know from experience that it’s hard to think like a civilian, after getting used to a military way of thinking.
- “Ok, wait,” the deep thinker woke up. – “In a nutshell: you continue to clear the territory yourself. The outpost provides you with repair, maintenance, and treatment services, and warehouses for all the looted treasures, and you give us half the trophies for it?”
- Yes. -
- “I still don’t understand… what do you get out of this? You can rent a warehouse and get everything else at the research center by just paying for their services. There are doctors and engineers there. And everything will be much cheaper.”
- I don’t agree. My contract with you ensures I have a base where I can always return to rest a bit and where everything is looked after by specially trained people. Also, I have the support of a rather serious, at this level, organization, in the form of your outpost, which is very interested in providing me with all the services I need, and the highest level of services, at that. I no longer need to dig through trophies to sort them out, and I don’t need to look for a place where I can get rid of my excess loot, somewhere I can get repairs or medical care. I don’t need to haggle about the price of the services or worry about their quality. That is only a small list of upsides for me, especially when you consider the support, the teams that will carry everything for me... My benefit is saving myself a lot of time and effort that I can invest into searching for new targets, or on individual private orders.
- “Well, yes, you’re right. For me, as the commander, such an offer is profitable as well.
And then we started to hash out the contract, discussing various force majeure situations and the rest of the red tape questions, which took us a lot of time, until evening, in fact. I’d wanted to sort out some trophies from the bandit base so much, in order to pick up some new equipment and weapons. Alas, it seemed like I’d have to wait until tomorrow.
CHAPTER XVIII: Beyond the walls of the outpost… Again
After I signed the contract with Carefire, he allocated some space within the outpost, where his guys began to build a two-story building for me. As I’d understood from our conversation, the first floor would be reserved for the warehouse and a large garage, together with a repair shop. On the second, most of the space will be occupied by the rest of the service departments and a small room, which will be only for me. In return, I will pay rent. From a legal point of view, the entire building will belong to the outpost and be part of a specially formed technical unit, where, apart from me, all the other military groups that serve beyond the outpost’s walls will also get various services.
Well, those are only being formed now. And in fact, these units are also being created because of me and will consist of a fire support group and a trophy team. Although the commander had long been planning to do something similar, he either hadn’t had any time to do this earlier, or he’d lacked the resources. I couldn’t understand where he would find people for all these posts that had appeared after the formation of the new divisions, but after I asked Carefire about it, everything became clear. He’d simply invited his former colleagues or those who had served under his command. Some of them were persuaded to return to the service, others were invited and offered contracts; he even invited a couple of fighters from the prison.
How they ended up there remains a puzzle to me, but I realized one thing: the commander was inviting only the people he trusted to his outpost. I supported him and wished him well. Not even because he cares about his soldiers (although this is also an important factor), but also because Carefire was now practically building a new organization, taking advantage of the unique opportunity that had been presented to him after the appearance of this outpost. If this went on like this, then perhaps this outpost would eventually grow into a larger structure that could compete with many other corporations.
I devoted the following three days to sorting out the trophies. It is, of course, good that I’ve made a list of items, but the names didn’t tell me anything. Therefore, I had to go from one object to another and read its attributes, which formed a huge list, where under each model I also entered the attributes issued by the system, while at the same time adding my own notes, so as not to get lost in this pile of various equipment mixed with weapons.
It turned out that there were a lot of items that I couldn’t use due to restrictions imposed by the Server. All those items were immediately marked with a note to send them to the long-term storage warehouse, to which they would be moved later. As for myself, I’d picked up five identical sets for now, just in case. I could now handle respawning several times in a row. But everything that didn’t suit me, or I simply didn’t want to use it, was mercilessly noted as items for sale - all sorts of machine guns, heavy combat armor, security droid complexes and other stuff, which I wasn’t ever going to use.
The entire list was later sent to Carefire, who promised he would appoint a person to the position of storekeeper in a couple of days. At the same time, I immediately looked at what I needed from the items on this list before sending the trophies to the trading corporation, which now controlled the local store. Having dealt with the current issues, after walking around the construction site that would be my future cover for a bit, I decided that it was time for me to go searching for new adventures again. After carefully examining the cleared area around the outpost on my tablet, I decided to go in the opposite direction of the bandit’s former HQ.
The players were now hurrying to shoot everything that moved, to clear up the area between the post and the main base, and even Carefire had begun to give the task of clearing mobs in this zone to almost everyone. So I don’t have much to do there, but in the opposite direction, where the dark spots of the unexplored territory were closest, there were very few players, and if I wanted to find good places for hunting, I figured I had to go there. Having equipped myself with a kit collected from the trophies, I threw in a three-day supply of food and water. After a bit of thought, I added, just in case, a portable analyzer, which could be used to test water or food for safety of consumption. Strangely enough, there had been no such analyzers in the trophies; even Carefire didn’t have one in stock. I had to go to the store to get it, and even there they barely managed to find it somewhere in the depths of the store.
And so, I was standing on a branching road and pondering where to turn: left or right, and then I suddenly heard an explosion from the left side. Judging by the sound, it wasn’t that far. Moving a little to the side, I hid behind the fragment of a building, which was lying on the road, like an improvised barricade. I pulled a monocular out of my pouch and started looking through it at the street that went to the left. Although my monocular was quite large, I had only 12x magnification, but it had a very useful function, and that’s why I’d chosen it. The laser range finder, which was built into the monocular, measured distances from 30 to 1800 meters, with a margin of error that was only ten centimeters.
Of course, it had one drawback: it consumed as much energy as a full-fledged aiming military complex. It was only because of the rangefinder function that I’d taken such a thing with me, and it now showed me that after 1070 meters, the street would turn sharply to the right. The flash that ran through the wall, to which I was now measuring the distance, showed that there was a battle around the corner; in about three seconds, the sound of an explosion was heard. I definitely won’t go there: they seem to already be having a load of fun. So I decided to turn right. Moving the monocular away from my face, I began to pack it back into the pouch, w
hen I noticed some movement at the end of the street.
Since I hadn’t had the time to pack up the monocular, I placed my eye against the device again, observing the people who’d shown up around the corner through it. The first three of them were very close to each other. Although no: two people were carrying the third, supporting him on both sides. Damn it, the magnifying function isn’t letting me see everything in detail. But if I'm not mistaken, the fighter in the middle is missing a leg: up to his thigh. A couple of fighters appeared, who, covering each other, alternately moved from cover to cover, firing somewhere around the turn, at an enemy that was invisible to me.
Putting away the monocular, I became thoughtful. On the one hand, it’s not my business; on the other hand, these guys are in really dire straits. These five players probably ran into someone or something. Now they have a fighter that’s basically dead weight, with two of them too busy carrying him. The remaining two are simply trying to distract the enemy, giving their comrades the opportunity to deliver the wounded to a safer place. From the human being’s point of view, of course, they’re doing everything right, but from a tactical standpoint, their actions are stupid: they should’ve sent the injured guy to respawn and continued to fight back. Then again, if the wounded man is dragged to the outpost, he won’t lose any skill development. Okay, why not help these miserable sods, and then I can go back to my own business. Throwing off my backpack, I put it to my right leg and took out the case.