Chapter 73: Unease
After a day of investigating, they had precisely nothing to show for it. Not surprisingly, squatters living in an abandoned mine that had been in legal dispute for over fifty years, with two Matrix crashes wiping out over ninety percent of the records for the area were not exactly the easiest people to research online. We could have asked around, but after what had happened to Berzerker’s contact, we decided that keeping our remaining contacts out of this was the smart play. We’d go to them if we had to, but no one appreciated it when their contacts put them in harms way, and that kind of attitude went both ways.
That meant our options were unfortunately limited, and we were going in with far less information than any of us would like. That, sadly, was the name of the game sometimes. You couldn’t always have near-perfect scenarios like our first couple runs. Usually, you had to make the best of a bad situation.
That wasn’t just because this game tried to replicate life to some degree, and life didn’t treat you like you were the main character of the story all the time. This setting was a dystopia, and you didn’t have ‘happily ever after’ in a dystopian setting, you had ‘they made it out and got paid’. Sometimes, you had ‘a few of them made it out alive’. And a lot of times the story had the Bad End.
That was just how things went. However, those of us who had been in the Beta quickly realized that those utter disasters and half-victories made the true wins (even the ‘just for the moment’ wins) all the sweeter. It was a big difference from older MMOs, where winning, saving the day, and generally being the big swinging dick of the game universe taking down dragons and elemental lords every single time made all the victories blend together, and feel the same. It was like watching an old action movie for the tenth time in a week. Yes, the explosions and visuals were still amazing to watch, but there was no real tension, because you knew that you, the heroes, would win in the end, even if you had to wipe on a raid boss a few times to learn the mechanics. Sure, sometimes it was great to be the overpowered badass destroying everything in your way, but sometimes having to work for things made everything sweeter.
But that bit of game design and worldbuilding philosophy wasn’t really pertinent to the matter at hand. Babydoll’s drones were circling the area, running regular patterns over the area. Part of it was so that it wasn’t obvious we were staking out the mine. We weren’t going to do the same mistake as MissMe and her crew did, and send up obvious red flags to our quarry.
The other reason was because we obviously did not know enough about the area around the mine. Beyond just spying on our target, there was a chance that we would find someone watching them, waiting for us. Finding them first would solve a whole lot of our problems. Or at least make them easier to shoot when they reared their heads.
Still, that bit of paranoia had not paid off, this time. Either no one was watching to spring a trap on us, or they knew us well enough to know some of our tactics. Given that they were able to get to us through one of our contacts and then eliminate said contact before we could ask? Better to assume they knew us, and what we could do. Sure, there was always the possibility that the bookie’s death was actually random gang violence, but it was safer to assume it wasn’t. If we were wrong, well, extra prep was never a bad thing.
So, we were driving out to the ass end of the Barrens, hoping to talk to some drugged up, deadbeat squatters and either run them off or convince them to sign on to the new mining concern, assuming that was even real. None of us expected that the squatters would actually be drugged up deadbeats, of course. My money was on a settler collective. The girls had their own ideas about what we’d see.
The mine was not like what you see in some old movies, a shaft going into the side of a mountain, wooden beams holding up the walls. There were mines like that in reality, of course, but they were relics of prior centuries. Especially for coal.
There was an entrance to the mine, of course, since a strip mine would have been easy for Babydoll’s drones to observe. However, the mine was, according to the records, known as a slope mine. Instead of a long vertical shaft with an elevator, the mine had a metal building the size of a warehouse covering the entrance. When the mine had been running, trucks would carry workers down the slope to the underground layer where tunneling machines carved out stone, leaving only large pillars of solid stone to support the ceiling. Rail cars would have hauled coal up from the mine, and then dumped them in the back of waiting trucks to take the product away.
The building was still there, though it was in obvious disrepair. The only things about it that looked reasonably well-maintained were the solar panels on the roof. All different makes and sizes. Scavenger work, signaling that there were definitely people here. Probably used the power to circulate the air. I could hear the sound of an industrial air handler bringing air into the mine. I expected that, inside the building, there would be battery backups, for night, if nothing else. Not being able to breathe was a bad thing for long-term habitation, after all. And this was not some fly-by-night settlement.
The vans pulled to a stop roughly thirty meters from the building. We could see that a ‘garage door’ made of welded scrap metal hung where the original had been. Rusted hinges meant it would swing out, rather than roll up. Probably had enough mechanical knowhow to work up a door and hinges that’d work with the weight, but couldn’t jury-rig rollers, if the tracks even still worked.
There weren’t any windows on the building. Once, there were, but patches of scrap metal covered them. Made the place more defensible, for sure. Which told me that there were people here who thought they would need to defend themselves.
But if they were defending this place, why were there no more visible defenses? Or even a guard? On a job where we were likely walking into a trap? There weren’t even any gang tags, despite this mine being deep in Headbreaker territory. Something was up.
A glance at the Astral told me what was missing. There was an eyeball floating just above the door that was likely a watcher spirit. The fact that it was still sitting there, instead of running off to tell its master about us, meant that we probably hadn’t set off the ‘alarm’ yet. Of course, there was no way we were getting through this without getting noticed. Watchers were stupid to a fault, but disrupting it would alert the summoner, and ignoring it would let it run home, possibly alerting guards along the way.
I sighed, and said, “We have a watcher spirit. Means there’s at least one mage in there. Gear up. Twilight and Babydoll stay in the vans. Babydoll, I want drones to secure the perimeter. Going into the mine will probably cut comms due to the sheer mass of earth between us, so I want you out here, in case someone decides to add themselves to the guest list. Twilight, I doubt there will be much to hack down in the mine, so you’re up here. Anyone comes calling, I want you to make sure that they have no electronic support, period.”
“Got it, Boss,” Babydoll nodded.
“I’ll start searching, Master,” Twilight promised.
Berzerker grinned at me. “So, what does this do to the bet, Master?”
I chuckled. “Well, I’m out of the running, since this is definitely no simple settler collective. But as for the rest? No clue. We’ll have to make our way in and see. There’s a chance that this can still be resolved without fighting, but that depends on who this group is, and what they want. These aren’t mere settlers, with a mage on their side, but they are trying to keep a low profile for some reason, with no obvious gang tags marking territory or guards keeping watch. Things don’t add up, and I’m not liking that.”
“Why not go in guns blazing, then?” Sexkitten asked. The question was less moral or ethical, and more wanting clarification, to ensure they were on the same page. It wasn’t even that odd a question, since we’d won a lot of fights through overwhelming firepower.
“Because we could be busting down the door of an orphanage, for all we know, and shooting up orphanages is bad for our rep,” Babydoll said.
I felt a bit of pride at how the girls had really started understanding the nuances of what being a professional criminal in this game entailed. Yes, sometimes you were shooting people in the face for money. All right, a lot of times you were doing that. But there were plenty of times when you had to decide whether or not you wanted to be a complete monster. Catching someone who skipped out on a bill with the Yakuza and returning them so they could be killed, or put in a bunraku parlor was different from killing a businessman’s four-year-old kid to prove a point, just as one example.
One or two monstrous things wasn’t terrible, especially when you were doing it for a decent reason. However, if you did too many monstrous things, then people started seeing you as a monster. And one of the big rules in most any story was that the truly terrible monsters usually got put down, sooner or later. And I was allergic to dying.
“As she said,” I nodded. “Same as when we asked questions about the movie studio job, ensuring that there wasn’t anything that would get us labeled as kid-killers. There are certain lines you shouldn’t cross, even as professional criminals and killers. People who cross those lines too often get removed from the equation, or are marked ‘expendable’.”
I took a breath, and continued, “We go in armed, but fingers off the triggers. There’s about a kilometer to the road, three kilometers to the nearest building. No real tree coverage. Not much chance of someone sneaking up on us, but I’m not convinced there isn’t trouble waiting to happen. We haven’t seen any sign of the Headbreakers, despite this being their territory. Gang’s don’t just… not mark their territory, unless there is good reason for it.”
Sexkitten nodded. “Which means there’s something they want to hide. Something that they can’t afford drawing attention to with gang signs and armed guards, but also something they are willing to have mages put watchers up as an alarm to protect. But what could that be?”
“No clue,” I admitted. “But we’ll find out. Berzerker, leave the assault cannon and the missile launcher. We don’t want to freak them out too much. Lead with nonlethal. We can clean up after, if necessary.”
“Got it, Master,” she nods, and begins loading up with her light machine gun, with a submachine gun, heavy pistol, a sword and a couple knives, and several nonlethal grenades as backups.
Not that I could complain too much. I was carrying enough blades to make an edgelord nervous. None of us walked around with just a single backup weapon. Redundancy was extra insurance that you weren’t going to end up high and dry, especially when there was no point in sneaking around. The van doors shut behind us as we went to see who we were really dealing with.