Chapter Forty-Three – Finders, Not Keepers

Chapter Forty-Three – Finders, Not Keepers

“Note to self: Don’t fuck with Rac’s weird catgirl friend.”

–Jerusalem “Spider” Smith, personal notes, 2057

***

I found Gomorrah chatting with not one, but three Family people. One of them was wielding a clipboard, the other two looked like they were a step ahead of the average PMC. Good gear, very sleek armour, slightly rounded and pitch black. It looked like they were custom fits too, or damned near to that. The kind of stuff that no real army would buy because they’d need a million different sizes to outfit a battalion.

Their helmeted heads turned my way as I came over, and I made a conscious effort not to be intimidated even a little.

Their gear looked pretty tight. There was definitely a samurai providing this shit, and I wasn’t sure where my own gear sat in terms of quality.

Then again, I had a large mech standing nearby, so fuck them and their little armoured suits. “Hey,” I said as I came up. “Good news, no news, news that’s not so good?”

Gomorrah let out a breath. “Something like that,” she said. “This is Officer Kennedy.” She gestured to the lightly-armoured guy with the clipboard.

“Ma’am,” he replied with a nod. “We were just going over the assessment with Samurai Gomorrah. Do you want us to start over?”

“Just give me the quick notes,” I said.

He nodded, then glanced at the tablet he held. “We’ve secured the area around the disassembly factory. No explosives found. No traps. The area within is still filled with unbreathable air, but that is an incidental matter and only a complication, not a method to prevent ingress.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Did you find a way to clear it out?”

“We’re opting not to,” he said. “We have a team coming in with PPE suitable for the task.”

Gomorrah nodded along. “The plan right now is to check what they have, catalogue everything.”

“And then what?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Leave it to the Family?”

I frowned. They couldn’t see it, but I think everyone caught on to the fact that I was hesitating.

This whole thing was a new sort of fucky. The gear in there was stolen, yeah, and now we’ve taken it out of the hands of the people who’d stolen it, but that didn’t mean it was returned to its owners.

If someone jacked something that belonged to me, and then I discovered that the cops had caught on to them, I’d be pretty pleased about it. But if I didn’t get my shit back, then I was basically no better off than if they hadn’t caught the thief.

“What are you guys going to do with all the stuff in there?” I asked.

“We’re going to move it to a more secure facility, for starters,” Kennedy said. “I don’t know what will happen to the materials past that.”

“Mhm,” I said. I raised a finger in a ‘one moment’ gesture, then popped open a text chat for Myalis. ‘What will they do with it?’

Historically, the Family has made most of its fortune from the selling of blueprints and Vanguard equipment onto the open and grey market.

Right, figured. “So, priority number one right now is figuring out which samurai all those things belong to,” I said. “Then we call them up.”

Kennedy froze for a moment. “Our orders are to move the items to a secure location first, for cataloguing and safety.”

I shook my head. “There’s got to be a record, right? Something that’ll let you know where everything is from?”

“There is a small server here. Its only connection is to a private network, the same one used to operate the machinery within the facility,” Kennedy said. He tapped his tablet a few times. “It has dates and times, item descriptions, but nothing on which samurai each item belongs to.”

“It can’t be that hard to back-track,” I said. “Myalis said that everything she makes has a sort of serial thing on it. Atyacus does the same?”