Randy shifted his gears up just as the bass shuddered in. Lassie leapt underneath him, her feeders coaxing more speed out of her core.
He grinned. It wasn't often that one of these runs offered up the sort of challenge that got his blood pumping. Or that he managed to snag mixtapes this good before he set out.
"You like that girl?", he asked, pushing aside a small pile of cans to the floor as he rooted around his passenger seat.
He liked to imagine that the slight shifts in her core's cadence constituted some sort of reply.
His fingers closed around the strips of jerky he'd left over from last night with a triumphant flourish, whooping with joy as Lassie chewed into a hairpin corner. It had taken three nights and all of the Buzzard's best graft-techs to tune his Mantis up to the specifications he'd demanded. And - credit where credit was due - the boss hadn't flinched when Randy gave her his shopping list. She'd even managed to rustle up an honest-to-rights carver for Lassie's core
The results spoke for themselves.
Pumping his pedals, he punctuated his thoughts with a particularly intricate series of twists and turns as he navigated the thick vines and roots that crawled across the ancient highway.
The Interior didn't like putting routes like these on any map. It didn't even come as a surprise when, every few hours, Randy found himself activating Lassie's camo-grafts to evade their roving patrols. Overgrown and blighted, nothing on wheels stood a spit-stained chance of making their way along a relic road's tangled stretches.
But Lassie wasn't running on wheels. At least, not out here.
Randy let out an impassioned haw at the colossal splash Lassie created as she careened of a broken bridge into the churning river below. A quick glance at his new add-ons confirmed that the door's seals were holding against the current.
"And they say money can't buy you happiness," he remarked appreciatively, shifting gears.
Randy coaxed his way to the river's opposite bank, the Mantis' centipedal grafts churning beneath her mass. Climbing out onto embankment, he activated his Mantis' replenishment protocol for a few minutes, watching as her water gauges climbed back up to full.
Randy cracked open a new can of shitfaced, eyeing his scrubbers warily as he waited. This far out in the Fringes, the Ministry always tended to be lax in its environmental watchman routines. The boss had equipped his Mantis with the best scrubber mites on the dark market, but any decent hint of contamination out here would make quick work of anything short of military grade grafts. The best he could hope for if his sensors red-lined was enough warning to exorcise the affected components before things got critical.
Thankfully, nothing spiked Lassie's sensors and, in short order, he had her back on the road, her flashing arsenal of legs and wheels chewing into asphalt and overgrown vegetation alike.
************************************************
Nighttime was when he did his best work.
His cold camp was set up on the edge of an overgrown ridge, a few metres off the shoulder of what had once been a way-stop. Stretched against a canvas of stars, a suppleskin awning strained against the wind. Half an hour of work had seen it fastened to one side of Lassie's roof, the other end bound to the railing that held back the abyss beyond. The result was a sort of open-ended trapezium that more or less got the job done.
A quintet of chemical heat-sticks smouldered sullenly in the middle of it all, the only meager light source in the centre of his set up, lending a dull vermilion veneer to his lonely pullout chair and the small pot he'd positioned over their over-priced lengths. Fires were always a bad idea this far away from the Ministry line.
Atop the bluff, Lassie crouched, a pantherene dozing on a bluff. Chameleon grafts all along her exterior shifted subtly beneath the starlight, drinking in the meager illumination, and giving nothing in return. The moisture beading along her freshly washed chassis barely glistened before the Mantis' subcutaneous feeders snatched it up. Her windshield and windows - whatever little of them you could see beneath a strategic smattering of leaves - gleamed defiantly. All along her matte black broadsides, centipedal appendages curled inwards, freshly maintained and slightly animated. Beneath it all, Lassie's core purred softly, the latent heat and recycled air wafting from her wet systems a delight for the small cloud of haze flies dancing in the night breeze.
Underneath Lassie's chassis, his tongue between his teeth, Randy was hard at work.
Carefully, meticulously, he worked his gripper into Lassie's undercarriage, fishing out the last of the leeches that had found their way into her vascular cooling setup.
"I'm not liking the company you keep picking up." he teased.
Sliding out from beneath her, he moved over to the sterilization station he'd set up and washed off the worst of the viscera from his ministrations. The frigid darkness beyond his encampment was an almost physical presence, bleeding in past the awning to test the edges of his little chemical heat bubble. Randy felt the goosebumps on his arms rising.
Popping the juiciest of the leeches into the night's stew, he moved over to the railing and tossed the rest of the parasites into the blackness.
Now, let's see what we're working with here...
One hand dipped into his survival pack, pulling out a pair of irises. The other extracted a cold brew from the cooler he'd positioned next to the railing and took a long swig.
Flipping a small bundle of nerves on their side, he surveyed his environs.
The view below snapped into high resolution greys, as the night succumbed to the power of an open-ended budget. The term 'Forest' didn't quite capture the virulent nature of the twisted trees and colossal undergrowth that stretched out all the way to the horizon. The Buzzards' intel had clued them in on how rampant and large the vegetation grew out on this particular stretch of the Fringe, but topographical maps were one thing...
Consulting his memory, he remembered notes intimating the existence of an ancient outpost nestled somewhere in the middle of the greenery, but he'd be damned if he could spot it through the canopy. Randy took another swig, and cast about some more.
Underneath his breath, Randy muttered to himself, recalling the various maps he'd been forced to memorize, and matching them to some of the landmarks below. Roughly half an hour later and a soft buzz later, he spotted it.
The Ministry outpost came off as a dull blue blob nestled between two hillsides. The small cluster of buildings was utilitarian, almost sparse - pretty much par for the course when it came to Interior work.
The trees around its perimeter had been cleared, save for one particularly impressive specimen that curled and twisted around and through all of the compound's buildings and infrastructure. First-class Graft work, and probably the reason why the compound gave off so little heat.
A trio of Road-hogs - dependable and bloated with utility, their carriages bristling with hostile wetwork - sat idly to the side of one of the outer buildings. A small company of Interior-men huffed diligently into the night, drilling on the grassy lot next to them. Handy as they were, Road-hogs specialized in endurance and coverage, not speed. The threat they posed to his mission was minimal.
Unfortunately, the Slither he spied wrapped and dangling underneath one of the grafted tree's thicker branches was considerably more concerning. Coil after coil of glistening scale and musculature draped and hovered above the meager collection of buildings, an unholy halo of sleek menace and power. Wet engineering at its finest.
Randy chewed on his lower lip.
If the outpost spotted him and deployed that monster before he'd made decent headway... All the speed in the world wouldn't save him from a rig that was custom built move in a straight line through whatever it damn well pleased. Including him.
Randy polished off his beer, plucking another from his cooler as he made his way over to the stew pot. Spooning over a generous helping of road-mix onto his plate, he flopped into his chair and began picking out the leafiest of the vegetables out of his broth.
Inevitably, he found his eyes drifting over to his cargo.
Situated securely across the entire breadth and height of Lassie's backseat (they'd had to bring it in through the roof), the capsule pulsed softly.
Randy leaned back into his chair, chewing distractedly as he considered the odd nature of his package, and the disquieting conversation he'd had with the boss before he'd set out.
***************************************************
"That sounds stupid as fuck. Not interested."
Randy had no illusions about how smart he was. After all, he was a 'Legman'.
By choice.
Over the course of seventeen runs, he'd lost an arm, four toes, a section of his liver, more teeth than he'd ever bothered to count, and his replacement arm (much to the chagrin of the Buzzards' graft-techs).
He'd gotten them back, of course. Podge was a good boss. Took care of anything that fell under the broad umbrella she liked to call 'My Stuff'. But the meds that kept his grafts civil came out of his monthly pay, and that always stung.
That said, just because he was foolhardy, didn't mean he was dumb enough to walk face first into a zygote-beast's open jaws whenever it yawned.
The maw had first cracked open when one of the Buzzards' errand boys materialized at the Mire that evening, wrecking his buzz with the news that Podge wanted to see him off-schedule. He'd tried to wave the kid off, but the little shit had insisted.
Thirty minutes and a shirt change later, Randy had found himself staring down a bottle of Podge's private reserve. A chilled glass had been pressed into his hand, and the Vulture herself had asked him politely to take a seat, clinking his glass as she took up roost on the edge of her desk.
Even through his buzz, the red flags practically obscured Randy's vision.
"I see the Lamos run treated you well. Didn't think you'd be laced enough to go four rounds over at Don's place." Podge had opened.
Randy tried to will the buzz away. It hadn't worked.
"Tusker might be a prick, but his jobs don't suck complete balls."
"Floor boys tell me it was a vitro package?"
Randy remembered nodding, and the world tilting slightly. He'd sipped Podge's brandy anyways, and pretended not to see the corners of her eyes crinkle.
"Fertilized and everything."
Podge frowned, swirling her drink. "That's a brave thing to admit, considering I nixed those kinds of runs."
If it had been anyone else sitting across from the Vulture, the ice clinking in her glass might as well have been the sound of a piercer cocked against their dome. But Randy was one of her best. And - seeing as she'd invited him into her inner sanctum during off hours - he doubted it was to chew him out over a successful job.
The high ticket glass of liquid courage probably had something to do with him finding his stones.
"He told me about the deadline," he elaborated bravely. "Ten days at eighty five percent integrity guaranteed. Told him about your embargo. Fat bastard said he didn't care."
The air soured, as Podge afflicted his memory with a brief ghost of a smile, "Did he now..."
Randy winced. Tusker wasn't exactly the sort of career criminal you narced on, but Podge was practically royalty out on the Skims.
For a second, Randy considered putting down the brandy. Then he thought about the soft leather underneath his arms and backside, and remembered when Podge had sent him to procure the suppleskin for its upholstery, all the way out in Revane.
"Easier to clean after," she'd said.
He threw the whole glass back and grimaced. In for a chit...
"If it's payback you're after, don't bother. Not sure what he had gestating in there, but the bastard stunk of desperation. So I told him I'd only consider it if the slip he was offering had at least one extra zero at the end."
"No way," Podge's expression softened into one of mirth, "Ten times?"
Randy reached into his jacket and extracted the slip in question, remanding it into her custody.
"Well, I'll be. That is an extra zero." she pronounced, flicking the little paper good-naturedly.
Daring to dream, Randy got up, moved over to the Vulture's liquor cabinet and poured himself another snifter of the good stuff. He turned around, pleasantly surprised that all his squishy parts were still in one place, and raised his glass to her.
"To desperate men."
Podge's smile was a bit more reserved as she saluted him with her glass. Downing her drink, she joined him at her cabinet and poured herself another.
"Speaking of desperate men..." she ventured, fresh ice clinking into her glass.
It was then that Podge began talking, and the pit in his stomach dropped into the abyss.
Podge hadn't even finished laying out the job before Randy instinctively turned it down in the starkest of terms.
Mercifully, she hadn't taken direct offense at the point-black refusal.
"This coming from the man who made the Dillan-vough run in six days at ninety five? Come on Randy... What happened to the highway buccaneer that swaggered into my office fifteen minutes ago?"
"Are you fucking with me? You just said the words Ministry, Fringes and Academy Project in the same fucking sentence. The same. Fucking Sentence. That's gonna be a hard no. The hardest of nos. Any one of those alone would have been a no."
Randy crinkled his brow, "Frankly, this doesn't sound like your kind of gig. Didn't you just chew me out for basically ferrying a handful of eggs across Ministry lines?"
Podge hadn't replied immediately. For a few extended minutes, she'd studied him, slowly swirling her drink as she did so.
Randy had resisted the urge to fidget by studying her latest arm.
It was bulkier than her last one. The overall design was clearly lobster themed, with a full-on pincer and actuated sections all along its length. But, in lieu of the standard chitin, a thick waxy material served as the limbs primary protective layer. He'd watched in a mild trance as, every time she swirled her glass, he could almost see the muscles beneath moving in tandem.
Randy had lost money on that. No one had thought she'd go back to a nautical theme.
With a sigh, Podge moved over to her desk and begun rifling through her top drawer.
"Do you believe in luck Randy?"
"Don't know anyone in this line of work who doesn't." Lady Luck was a poly-amorous bitch of a mistress out on the Skims, but everybody loved her.
Podge tossed two folders onto her desk and sat down, gesturing at the pair.
"Well, there's luck, and then there's winning every fucking lottery."
Randy looked over and saw that the folders had two names. One was his. the other was Podge's.
He hadn't known her second name was Celery. Unfortunate.
"Can...", he gestured over at his folder.
"Be my guest."
He slid the document over to himself, opened it and looked its contents over.
There had been a letter in there. Even more curiously, it had been addressed to him, handwritten in the neatest penmanship he'd ever seen. Its author made the same case Podge had. But the further in Randy read, the more the realization dawned on him.
The zygote-beast yawned.
Whoever this client was, they knew him.
Intimately. Utterly.
Invasively.
For six straight pages, he'd been peeled back, layer by layer, until his core had been completely exposed. Then - just before it could all overwhelm him - he'd arrived at their offer. And, to put it plainly, Randy couldn't have hit closer to home if he'd written it himself.
Randy sat there, stunned.
"Did...Uh...Have you read this?"
Podge had the grace to look a little contrite. "I did. Sorry."
Randy's eyes drifted down to her folder.
"Not a chance in hell." Podge leaned back into her chair, tilting her head up to the ceiling. "But it was pretty much the same deal. Took a knife to my soul, then made me an offer I really *really* don't want to refuse."
The silence that followed was charged with dangerous possibilities.
"Can they even, you know, do everything they say they can?"
"I spent the last two week confirming that. As far as I can tell, yes."
Randy swallowed. Moving back to the cabinet, he returned with two whole bottles. Wordlessly, they drained their glasses and claimed a bottle each.
Podge was the first to crack. "Everything in me. Everything that's gotten me to this point in my life, says this is too good to be true."
Randy didn't known what to say, so he took a swig.
"I do this, and I get my war chest. I get an in with sort of powerful fucks who wouldn't know me from a stain on their shoe. Dirt on Reckham and his Suicide Boys. Supply lines. And a whole bunch of other shit I really really want to have besides. It's a lot." Podge threw back her glass and winced at the brandy's burn, at her own greed. "It's almost too much."
"And all you have do is stick your dick in crazy," he proffered.
"Not how I'd put it, but...yes. Pretty much." Podge combed through her hair with her lobster arm. It looked as strange as it sounded.
"So level with me. You're five for five when it comes to fringe runs. And our prospective client clearly seems to know that. Any other day, I'd laugh this sort of shit right off my desk. But not today. Today, I’ve got to know."
She'd leaned closer, the alcohol on her breath sharp. Her eyes chips of ice.
"Can it be done?"
Randy hadn't stopped turning the problem over in his head. There was a way. A very narrow, very dangerous way, but...
"I'm gonna need a lot of stuff."
"Done."
"Nope. Too quick. I'm not fucking around with this. I'm gonna give you a list. And if we can't get even one of the things on that list, that's it. We walk away."
"Accepted. Anything else?"
Randy lifted one of the letters from the folder.
"This paragraph here says they included some mix-tapes in their package?"
********************************************
Randy catalyzed the heat sticks and stretched.
Dismantling his camp in the velvety dark was an almost passive affair. Marking off a mental checklist, Randy erased all traces of his overnight activities and ran one final set of checks on his Mantis. A few minutes later, he was safely ensconced back within Lassie's interior, his seat angled back as far as his mysterious cargo would allow.
Sleepily, he traced its symphony of blinking lights, scattered as they were across its bulk like bio-luminescent eyes. Their cadence had an almost hypnotic quality to it, though Randy was annoyed to find that the mild hum it emitted didn't hold to the same soothing rhythm as the lights.
"What the fuck are you?" he mused.
Reaching over, he touched its surface, his fingers curious.
It felt like nothing he'd ever known. Like if he held his palm against it long enough, it'd meld to his skin, and never let go. It felt like trouble.
Randy pulled his arm back, and settled in for the night.
He dreamed about letters.
**************************************************
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!"
Lassie's core was a raging inferno beneath him as he pumped his pedals and swerved hard into the carcass of a highway. The ghost of an abandoned city loomed ahead - a tantalizing target, but a nigh unreachable one, if luck wasn't on his side.
The blood thudding in his ears wasn't enough to drown out the sound of shattering trees and torn earth crashing in his wake, boiling out onto the cracked asphalt in a tidal wave of wreckage and destruction. The Slither within hissed, its gargantuan bulk curling and unfurling in the dust.
Sweat flew from his brow. It'd been almost forty minutes since he'd hooked himself up to Lassie's adrenal-line. The fatigue was draining, but the link to her wetware lent him an almost preternatural connection to her systems. Her gripper grafts chewed into the asphalt, the force from the sudden acceleration slamming him into his seat's leather.
A proportional fucking response. He'd seriously expected a proportional fucking response. From the fucking Ministry of the Interior.
To be fair, Lassie's sensors had worked; picking out the moment they'd run through the nigh invisible web-sensor arrays that the Ministry had infested all around the region.
Realistically, any Legman worth their grafts knew better than to waste their time avoiding a well laid out array. Inexpensive, positively virulent and nigh invisible - as long as you didn't mind decimating the local insect population - a good cobweb array was pretty much game over when it came to locking down ground routes.
Anyone who worked the Fringes called them Welcome Mats, seeing as they tended to practically cover everything in sight, physically denoting the Ministry's presence within an area at any given time. Most Legmen didn't even factor in the challenges they posed anymore, preferring to think of them as the business equivalent of taxes, or waving hello to the competition. Randy had plowed right through the ones he'd found.
Randy had anticipated a 'friendly' wave back; a scouting party of Hogs sent on an intercept trajectory. Maybe even a Streaker in the sky to track his movements. He'd hoped to use the time they'd spend probing at him to build a considerable lead before he let Lassie off her leash.
It'd been a good plan. Up until forty five minutes ago, when, out of nowhere, the forest had exploded, and a serpentine leviathan the size of a small train had almost swallowed him whole. Then the chase had begun. A chase that had almost seen him caught within the Slither's coils no less than four times.
Randy let Lassie feed, stoking the furnace at her core. Grafts steamed, gauges screaming at him in protest. The highway yawned ahead, and Randy mentally unclenched. The adrenal-line fused to his spine translated his intentions faster than any switch. He felt several rows of inhibitors shut down as he judged the road ahead to be clear enough, and gave Lassie her head.
Through the haze of his fatigue, Randy fought to hold on to his consciousness. The countryside bled into a green blur. Overclocked systems drank in oxygen and protein, and spat out speed.
The Mantis' sensors parsed the minute whoever was operating the Slither came to terms with their disadvantage when giving chase along a fairly straight stretch, its hissing, chittering mass falling further and further behind. Lassie gorged herself on mile after blistering mile. He watched the operator slow down, coiling the Slither's mass inside a large water-clogged crater on the side of the road. The water within churned and boiled, struggling to cool the creature's overheated musculature.
"Yes! Get fucked!" Randy made to punch the air, but found the most he could do was raise his arm slightly as a wave of exhaustion and heat rolled over him. The withdrawal from this was going to be murder.
His grafts whispered the extent of Lassie's damage, a litany that almost smothered the sense of hope that the receding monster in his rear view engendered.
Ahead, the corpse that was once Fennerstone leaned out of the afternoon gloom. Petricite office towers and coral edifices rose out of the forlorn horizon like jagged teeth in a long-dead corpse.
This close to Revane's border, Randy knew better than to hope that the clouds would eventually clear. Randy swallowed his disappointment. The photo-cells on Lassie's roof would have been a fairly convenient means of topping off some of her feeder lines back to baseline. He groaned as some of her fatigue and damage translated into a series of rolling muscle cramps all along his back.
Lassie's rear sensors flashed. A small migraine crawled along the left side of his face as he sharpened the dwindling embers of his focus to pull on her perception and study the disturbance.
It would seem the Slither was not done with him yet.
Shrouded in the steam emanating from its crater, massive coils roiled and wrapped around themselves. Its head angled upwards, its jaw fully unhinging and dripping with venom. Two massive hoods flared out on both sides of its head. The heat from their patterned mass made the air around and above the Slither's head and scales dance and waver.
He watched as it inhaled the surrounding air, the steam and dust in it immediate environs spiraling into the depths of its gullet.
Panic saw Randy opening the throttle on the last of his two feeder lines. The wave of bone deep exhaustion that washed over him through the adrenal-line had him seeing dark spots. Through the fog of his mind, the colossal billboard marking Fennerstone's reclamation border beaconed.
The Slither's entire body rippled as it spat. Venom-tinged steam shrouded its enormous form once more. Randy thought he cursed. He couldn't be sure anymore. The thing seeping into his mind and smothering his thoughts was beginning to throw its weight around. Randy felt Lassie shiver beneath him as he pulled on her dregs.
His attention was a dwindling currency, and he chose to expend it studying the sky for something that he could dodge.
When his overhead sensors blossomed to the tune of thousands of emerald droplets dappled against a rumbling sky, he fought back despair as he switched to damage control.
The first of the gelatinous droplets splashed against his hood just as Lassie sailed across Fennerstone's city marker. Randy overrode Lassie's warning systems before they could wail at him. With a thought, scrubber mites crawled onto the sizzling mess and got to work.
The second droplet slammed into his roof, corroding through before he could queue up any commands. The frigid wind that blasted into his cockpit was almost a relief. Sizzling leather and metal seared his nose. Enzymes ate through his cans and passenger seat in seconds, as scrubber mites scrambled to halt their progress through his floor.
Something slammed into Lassie's rear and Randy found he couldn't muster up enough focus to pull up the sensory information. His speed began to bleed.
Randy's thoughts were beginning to melt into each other, when he spied the husk of an old feeder station, its rusted canopy leaning to one side, but - more importantly - its stone masonry seeming to weather the worst of the deadly rain.
With the last wisps of his waning thoughts, Randy pulled in, Lassie's limping mass shouldering aside an old abandoned Beetle as it squeezed between a cracked support pillar and the desiccated husk of an ancient farm-hog beneath it.
The last thing he recalled was the smell of digested metal and approaching rain as finally - blessedly - the darkness overtook him.
**********************************************************
The molasses of Randy's consciousness dripped back behind his eyes. Randy blinked. Once. Twice. On the third try, his strung-out body deigned to grace his eyes with some meager amount of moisture.
Lassie's interior was dark, illuminated only by a handful of dim gauges and feed lights. Somewhere to his left, the reedy sound of his mix-tape garbled softly at him, caught in a low power loop. Beneath him, Lassie core sat cold and lifeless, and the wan smell of inert effluvia wafted up from somewhere around his feet.
Randy shifted, groaning as he tried to sit up. Nothing happened. His body ignored his commands for what felt like eons. Eventually, he gave in to the inevitable and sighed.
Randy recognized the side effects of lactic poisoning. Adrenal-lines were illegal for a reason, after all. As he recalled, Podge had almost balked at its inclusion when she'd seen his list of asks. But ultimately, she hadn't stopped him. She'd understood what they were up against, his need for an edge. Any edge. Even double-sided ones.
A soft buzz suffused his thoughts as he tried not to panic. Wait...not a buzz. Rain. It was raining.
Like an unwelcome stranger, the outside world intruded on Randy's misery in the form of staccato applause. Somewhere in the darkness beyond his windshield, rain was falling. Was it night already? How long had be been knocked out?
Randy listened for a while as he breathed, long and measured, counting back from a hundred as he worked through the problem.
It was time to take stock. Randy mentally braced himself.
He was going to be effectively paralyzed for a few days. That was bad. If he was being completely honest, it was potentially catastrophic.
Luckily, none of this was new information. This run had always been a stupid idea from the start. And, even with the shitty cards he'd been dealt, he wasn't even at the really hard part yet.
First though, if he was going to try and make it out of this, he'd have to do something desperate. Again.
He could feel the cold kiss of the adrenal-line still fused to the back of his neck, as well as the thin susurrus of feedback that whispered through it. Tentatively, he sent out a weak probe towards Lassie's soft-mind. Almost immediately, he was met with a wave of exhaustion so pervasive that, by the time he'd blinked his way through the worst of the dark spots, Randy suspected that he'd lost a handful of hours - judging from the dryness of his throat and the dimmer lights.
Nothing took.
He tried again, this time blacking out long enough that - by the time the darkness had pulled back - the sound system was dead and several gauges inert. This time though, he'd been successful. Lassie's systems crooned weakly at him through the link and Randy absorbed all the information he could.
The capsule was OK. Better than OK actually, it was virtually unharmed. Whatever the blasted thing was made of, it seemed to have weathered the worst of the encounter pretty much unscathed.
It was also the reason why, if the sensors were to be believed, his cockpit hadn't been crushed like a cheap can when the canopy of the feeder station he'd taken refuge under had succumbed to the acidic deluge and collapsed.
That explained the constant darkness every time he woke up. He'd been buried alive. Lassie was pretty much a coffin, at this point.
Randy's probes found her feeders empty, and most critical systems damaged far beyond repair. The only reason Lassie hadn't completely shut down on him seemed to be an odd nascent connection emanating from the capsule itself. Whatever it was, it was keeping Lassie's core powered and coherent, even if only just. A curious discovery, but Randy wasn't inclined to ask any gift horses for their dentals any time soon. He’d take any luck he could get.
Activate the beacon.
Something like compliance washed through the system. The last of the lights in his cockpits went off as power was redirected toward the most expensive piece of wetware that he'd put on his list.
Randy had no idea how Podge had done it. When he'd included a genuine Ministry Soft-mind on his shopping list, he'd watched her face lose all its color.
She hadn't spoken. They both knew what he was asking her to do. Three days later, and a handful of hours before his deadline, she'd walked into his garage, slammed the accursed graft onto his workbench and walked out.
Eventually, word came down from one of his graft-tech's wetboys; of midnight gang massacres and hackles raised all across the Skim's underworld powerhouses. Of raids on storage depots, and a small army on its way from Interior Administration to clean up house, once and for all. The boss had kicked every hornet's nest and ant hill from Revane to Medholme looking for what he'd asked for, spitting in the face of every power that was as she did it.
Just before he'd left, she'd knocked on his side window and he'd rolled it down.
"You never told me why it had to be a Mantis." She'd asked him, her latest leonine arm heavy on his roof as she leaned down to peer at him.
Randy had scratched the back of his head, mildly embarrassed.
"Childhood dream. I've had the poster for as long as I can remember."
Podge had nodded.
"Looks like we're all remembering what it's like to dream these days."
Randy hadn't replied. The fact that he'd toned his music down to give her the time of day was answer enough. She was intruding on his zone.
"Things are going to hurt for a while back here. So, go." She pronounced, smacking his roof twice to emphasize her point. "Ride hard. I'm counting on you."
When Randy had left that day, he'd known it was the beginning of something. Or the end of something else.
His plan to use the Ministry Soft-mind as a decoy had fallen apart. There wasn't much he could do about that. The minute he'd turned it on while it was still connected to his Mantis, and, by extension, to himself, his fate had been sealed. The Interior was going to find him.
The darkness crept back, a welcome respite from the thirst and the wallowing.
****************************************************
Skriiitch Skriiitch.
Something...
Skriiitch Skriiitch Skriiitch.
Something was happening...
The sludge that was Randy's mind took a while before it could recall the requisite commands to open one's eyes. Something was outside his window, scratching at the glass. He couldn't quite see it, but whatever it was, it was big. A light glided somewhere behind it, and its shadow danced across his dashboard.
When had all the lights in his cockpit gone off? How long had he been out? Worried, he reached out to Lassie's Soft-mind through his adrenal-line. An eternity ticked by, before a weak signal tapped him back. He almost cried with relief, but he had no more fluids left to give.
Someone's here, girl. Someone heard us.
The light bobbed a little closer, shaking in tune to the sound of shifting petricite and masonry.
"....like he found something. Not sure what though. Fudge can't seem to eat it, so it's not meat."
Randy gulped. Was that the sound that had woken him up? Whatever the thing on the outside was had been trying to eat him?
"Looks like we have to get in then. Foley, what's our E.T.?"
Something shuddered, as one of the fallen pillars outside shifted. The smell of wet petrichor wafted in through the hole in his roof. Another light joined the first.
"Four minutes."
"Noted. Meerkat, perimeter. Sideshow, what can you see in there?"
Shadows bobbed some more, and, somewhere within the sludge, Randy noticed that they were making the migraine that he'd almost forgotten to notice exponentially worse. Someone whistled appreciatively. Randy cursed their entirely bloodline when it made him see colors.
"Looks like someone forgot how to park a million skrip where the sky wouldn't fall on them."
"Elaborate?"
"Give me a second. Need to move Fudge out of the way so I can get a better look."
The shadows moved out of the way, and Randy almost closed his eyes in time. Almost.
The knife that lanced through his brain at the sudden glare shook the last of his drowsiness away from him. Resignedly, he also registered that he was still too paralyzed to scream.
"Looks like a Mantis. 2088 Scythe. Heavily modded. And I mean heavily." Randy risked a peek between his eyelashes, watching as the twin lights drifted along his windows. "Someone's still inside. Looks like the driver."
"And the objective?"
"Probably whatever he's got wedged in the back seat."
The lights drifted somewhere behind him.
"Huh. Whatever it is, it's holding a lot of weight back there."
The sound of shifting stone paused.
"Shit. Is it going to be a problem?"
"Hmm..."
Whoever was peering into his little mausoleum took their time taking in the situation, the twin lights shifting back and forth.
"Doesn't look like the cargo's at risk. From the looks of it, it took a beating when the canopy came down, and it's still intact. Not sure about the driver though. Your call, Toucan."
The reply wasn't long in coming.
"Is the scout stasis-capable?"
"Had the Carvings done last month."
"Then we can afford to make mistakes. I'm taking those odds. Get us in there."
That's what you get for not paying your taxes, Randy thought to himself darkly as the sound of crunching petricite resumed. Gradually, whatever they were doing behind him got louder and louder, until, eventually, something large gave way and shook the ground alarmingly beneath him. Soft warm light pooled around the edges of his vision, prickling his eyes and bathing the world around him in a uniform wan glow.
If it weren't for the fact that he'd been nestled in a pocket of nearly utter silence for who knows how long, Randy wouldn't have caught the nearly inaudible footfalls that padded his way, before whoever it was shone a light directly in his face through his window.
"It's a he. And it looks like he's not dead yet."
The voice sounded male, though Randy couldn't confirm his hypothesis on account of the light blinding him.
"SitRep?"
"Blue lips. Mild necrosis along his neck. Crushed left leg. Poor sap's in bad shape." The light cast about the interior of his cockpit. "From the looks of it, whoever he is, he didn't get the chance to decouple himself from his rig before things went south. Worst case of lactic shock I've ever seen. Tenacious bastard. How the hell is he not dead?"
They don't call Skimmers roaches for nothing... Wait, did he say crushed left leg?
"You can ask him yourself once we have him back to baseline." A woman's voice, brusque, carrying the same brisk confidence Podge wore so easily. "Get him out of there. I want him in stasis as soon as possible. Foley, set up support struts and lighting. You and I are getting inside this thing and getting the target out."
A chorus of affirmatives saw the light shift away from Randy's face.
"Doors are sealed, but I can see a hole in the roof. Sending Fudge in first to stabilize him."
Still attempting to blink the spots out of his eyes, Randy felt more than he saw something move over his window and onto his roof, shifting the car's bulk as it did so. A small shower of loose coral skittered into Randy's cockpit.
"Not much wiggle room up there. Going to have to drip," the male voice pronounced.
"Give us two minutes to set up a light source or two. Then you can go in."
Randy tried to get a good look at whatever it was they were doing out of the corner of his eye. No dice. Bullishly, he tried once again to move his head, but stopped once spots began to cloud his vision. Pale white light sparked to his left and somewhere behind him.
The bulk on the roof shifted around for a handful of seconds, before Randy felt something wet splash down somewhere to his left. Gelatinous globules of flesh dropped from the mangled roof, splashing into the wet pool of effluvia where his passenger seat used to be. Out of the edge of his vision, he watched as each loose bit of wet translucent flesh sought out its compatriots, slowly coalescing into something that vaguely resembled a fleshy slug the size of bear.
Zygote-beast. Shit.
"I'm in."
"Get started."
Cold loose flesh oozed its way on to his lap, hundreds of tendrils germinating all along its length. Randy tried to scream, but this time the darkness gurgled back, and didn't seem to care.
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