Chapter Four – Back to Cat

Chapter Four – Back to Cat

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

– 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.