“Receipts must be retained for all operational expenditures, regardless of value. The discipline of accounting for the smallest sol prepares the executive to account for the largest one.”— Kallum Inc., Accounting Department Operations Manual (rescinded)
The Guild door creaked.
The tavern wrapped around me, familiar by now, as the fireplace was cozy and the wooden beams overhead still caught its dancing light. Sera was behind the bar, polishing a glass, possibly the same glass she had been polishing three times last week.
I crossed the floor.
An elf at the corner table raised a hand, and I nodded back. The two patrons from last time whose names I had never learned were at their usual booth, and the older of them lifted his tankard. The dwarf in the front corner, whose face I knew without remembering where from, said “Dash” without looking up from his bowl, and I said “Hi” without breaking stride.
Hoffman was on his stool. The tankard was at the third braid, which was probably foam by this point. “Dash! Welcome back!”
“Dr. Hoffman,” I said as I slid onto the stool one over from his, which had become mine by attrition, and let the coilgun’s strap come off my shoulder and the weight settle against the bar’s footrail.
Sera set the glass down. “You walked in as if you came from somewhere.”
“I’ve just leveled up, but that’s a long story. I—” I cleared my throat. “Yesterday I—I mean…”
“Hm. Wait with that.” She turned to the back shelf. “Then I have something for you.”
She pulled down a bottle I had never seen before. The label was pale yellow, with the same corporate-beige discipline as the last one. She set a tall glass on the bar, dropped two cubes of ice into it, and started pouring before I had assembled an objection.
The liquid came out of the warm orange of late-afternoon honey.
Jeup Premium Pour Series: Honey-Pear Variant.
I picked it up.
The smell was sweet, committed, two-handed sweetness that arrived at the nose and waited for permission to enter.
I took a sip.
The pear was first. The honey was second and slightly louder than the pear had any right to permit. Underneath both was a faint floral note I suspected of being engineered in a Jeup lab from a focus-group transcript.
“...okay,” I said. “Weak seven.” I took a second sip to confirm. The second sip was a six and a half. “It’s sweet. It’s good. It’s not—I’m not going to order a second one.”
Sera nodded as if this were the response she had been pricing in. “Honesty is fine. The contract with Jeup is that I tell them which variants the regular sells, and you are the regular, Dash. You drank the soda.”
I sighed.
[Paid: ¢9]
She accepted the transfer without comment and leaned an elbow on the bar.
“Naiche told me about Saturday.”
I had been waiting for it. I had also been hoping she would not be the one to deliver it, because Sera had a way of saying serious things without raising her voice that landed harder than the same words from anyone else would have.
“Right.”
“You didn’t get the job. And the client canceled the request, so it’s fine. Plus Natalya didn’t make a problem of it.”
Hoffman’s tankard came up halfway, paused, and went the rest of the way to his mouth, where the laugh that had wanted to escape him sprayed out the foam instead.
“Natalya,” Sera continued, “told Naiche the abort was correct.”
I exhaled. “It’s still... I know it was the right call. I just—”
“Yes,” I looked at her. “That’s normal, Dash. The job you didn’t do differs from the job you did wrong, but they hit the same. You’ll get used to which hits differently.” She shrugged.
I nodded.
The Jeup, on the third visit, was a seven again.
I drank some more of it.
Hoffman set his tankard down and looked at me. I lifted my glass an inch when he lifted his and Sera went back to polishing. “Naiche is upstairs,” she said. “He’s reviewing the scouting contract.”
“It came back?” I sat up. “And?”
“And Hellboop picked it up, despite it being bronze. She is one of our better silver scouts and turned the report in this morning.”
“That’s—that’s what?”
“She called it relaxing. She likes vertical farms. Says the security architecture rewards patience.” Sera turned a glass over and set it on the back shelf with the others. “She also wrote seventy pages.”
Hoffman set the tankard down without drinking and let the smile happen in the open. “Hellboop,” he said, and shook his head, the metal clasps in his beard chiming faintly against each other. “Once she is in, she is in.”
“Naiche is going through it,” Sera said. “He has been going through it since she came. He is currently hounding Hellboop down for a summary, because Naiche has the position that a scouting report should be readable in one sitting. An hour ago Hellboop was running away from him, and he was chasing her. She was also laughing and yelling that the truth requires the space that the truth requires. They are still arguing about it, I think. They also date, so I think she did it on purpose.”
Sera reached under the bar and placed a small, folded note on the wood between us.
The paper was guild-standard, the same warm cream as the contract parchment but plainer, with no embossing or watermark. When I opened it, there was a single string of figures inside, in Naiche’s neat, slightly old-fashioned hand. A holo-number.
“Naiche says you should call this. Your family. You should call about how much you may spend and what your pre-approved limit is.” She nodded at the folded note. “He also says the situation room is empty if you want privacy.”
I looked at the note.
“Right.” I tucked it into the inner pocket of my hoodie, drained the Jeup down to the ice, and slid off the stool. “Thanks, Sera.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank Naiche when he comes to the situation room. He’s the one who decided you should not have to call from the bar.”
“I will.”
Hoffman, without lifting the tankard, said, “Good luck, lad.”
“Yeah.”
I crossed the floor and started up the stairs to the situation room.
Once I got there, I pulled Naiche’s note out of my inner pocket, unfolded it on the wood, smoothed the crease with my thumb, and keyed the holo-number into the band.
The connection picked up before the second tone.
“Kallum Inc. Accounting. You are calling the Director’s line. One moment, Mr. Kallum—I am connecting you.”
The woman’s voice was warm and corporate-pleasant, and she was gone before I had decided whether I was supposed to respond. Two seconds of soft, neutral hold tone. Then the holo bloomed off the band, and a figure resolved over the table.
Mid-forties in a dark blue suit, narrow lapels, with a tie the ugly neutral color I always hated. He was already half-turned, lifting from a desk chair as the projection caught up to him.
“I’m William,” he said. “Glad you called, Dash. Mind if I take it standing? I’ve been sitting since the morning.”
“Sure,” I said and shifted in my seat; the sword was still strapped to my side.
“Thank you.” He came around the desk to a window behind him. Through the glass, I could faintly see the moon.
I cleared my throat. “I’m... not entirely sure how this works.”
“That,” William said, turning back from the window, “is exactly what I was hoping you’d say.” He smiled and propped one hand on the windowsill, letting the other rest at his side.
“Let me get something out of the way before you start asking. The accounting office has a reputation, Dash, and you may have heard it from your uncle. So, short version. For most of a generation, this department fought your family over every sol. Every line item, every reimbursement, every fare in every cab. We were proud of it. We thought we were saving the corporation money.”
He paused and shook his head.
“We were not. Aggregate operational spending across executive officers, over that exact period, rose somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four percent, depending on which auditor you ask. Executive officers have discretionary budgets. They own the company and they work around obstacles. The harder we fought, the more creative they became. We saved sols on the lines we could see and lost ten times that on the lines we could not. The accounting office, of all departments, was producing the lowest net efficiency in the building. The board found this distasteful.”
He turned.
“They restructured. I was promoted to the directorship eleven months ago, specifically to turn the page. New page. New cover, ideally. And,” he tilted his head, “you are the first Kallum in operational standing I have had a chance to start fresh with. Everyone else has scars from the old system. You do not.”
I opened my mouth. “I should probably mention that technically I’m—”
William waved it off, a small, dismissive flick. “I have read the file. I am as confident as one can reasonably be that Director Dot will resolve your situation on his own timeline. As far as this department is concerned, Dash, you operate under sanction, you draw on Kallum funds, and you are both my problem and my opportunity.”
I shifted again; the sword biting into my thigh. “Okay.”
“Here is how the new system works.” He gestured with one hand, the moon over his shoulder. “For every Kallum-sanctioned operation you run, you have priority access to this department. Your requests jump the general pool. They come to me, or to my deputy, directly. The processing time you may expect—”
“Nine to fourteen hours.”
“Right. That is the general pool. Yours will be in minutes, not hours, on most lines. In exchange when you need funds, send a request with as much detail as you can give us. What are you buying? Why are you buying it? What do you expect to pay? We will respond with two numbers. The first is what our pricing model puts as the market average for the item or service in the area you are buying it. The second is the maximum the corporation is prepared to authorize. I would prefer, sincerely, that you stick to the average. The max exists because operations are messy and quotes change, and sometimes the average vendor is unavailable. Please, Dash, it’s not a target; I would prefer if you treated it as a ceiling.”
I blinked. That was quite simple math, and I liked that. “Average if I can, max if I have to.”
“That is the spirit of it. There is also one allowance. Once per mission, you may overshoot the max without explanation. No questions. The understanding is that operations occasionally produce expenses we could not have anticipated, and I respect that. The understanding also is that once per mission means once per mission. The second overshoot arrives with questions. Often, many questions.”
“Got it. Any of that negotiable?”
William laughed.
Short, slightly surprised. “I like you, Dash. Sadly, no. Chief Executive Officer Katherine signed the framework off some months back, when I drafted it. I have been waiting for the first opportunity to deploy it with someone higher up than our test agents. You are it.” His shrug was small. “I do hope you can work with it. I hope, more selfishly, that you do not give me an opportunity to refine the framework in the direction the previous generation of Kallums forced us to.”
That pinched me too much, so I pulled the sword from the scabbard and leaned it over the wall. Willian didn’t see it, or ignored me. “I’ll try not to,” I scrambled to say something.
“That is all I ask.”
I thought about the recon. “There’s one thing. I already paid five hundred sols out of pocket for a Guild scouting contract on the Bhavsar farm. Before this conversation. Is that going to be a problem to submit?”
William turned to a screen on his side of the call, off the frame, and his eyes moved laterally across whatever projection was showing him.
“Hm. No. I am looking at your contract metadata Naiche sent now—scope, target, deliverable. The average for that description would have come in at six hundred. Max at eight. You posted at five,” he looked back. “Good job.”
“Thanks?” I said, really unsure if I deserved it. I just shot in the dark and hoped it landed, as always.
“We already have the data, so submit the receipt through the standard channel. It will be reimbursed in the next cycle. For next time, send the request to us before you post the contract. We will give you the numbers in advance, you can post directly from the band, and we will be much faster than you would otherwise be. And, Dash,” he nodded once, more to himself than to me, “welcome to the new era of the Kallum accounting department. I hope it is short and uneventful for both of us.”
I thought back to what Naiche said last time. This guy wasn’t that bad, so I gave him a grin. “That’s the goal.”
“It is the goal,” William agreed.
The holo cut, and the situation room was quiet again, the lantern’s circle steady on the wood. I shifted again and tried to get comfortable. These chairs weren’t NullSit, but they weren’t high class either. At least it was better without the sword in the way.
I leaned back and waited for Naiche.
The wait was short.
The door banged open. A woman walked in, tall, broad-shouldered, dark hair pulled into a braid, brown skin, a sharp grin already in place. She left the door open behind her. She crossed to the table, scraped a chair around from the wall, dropped into it, and propped both boots on the wood.
“Oh! Hi!” She looked at me over the toes of her boots. “I’m Regina, but go with my handle. Hellboop. I scouted the farm for you. It was fuuun—and I—”
Naiche followed her in, two leather-bound books under one arm. He pulled the door closed behind him and crossed to the table. “You turned in an unreasonable number of pages, Regina.”
She kept her eyes on me. The smirk held. “There was a lot going on.”
He set the books on the wood, lowered himself into the chair beside her, and, without breaking the motion, reached over and pushed her boots off the table. They landed on the stone with a boom that rang under the wood. Regina grinned.
“Also, Dash. Hello.” He turned to me. “And I apologize.”
“No need.” I waved it away and tried to keep my face professional. I lost the fight halfway through.
“Dash now knows so much about the op!” she beamed sideways at Naiche. “What do you apologize for?”
Naiche shot her a look.
She started laughing. As she laughed, she sat up straighter, hands settling at her sides, and glanced down at the books. She slid a single loose sheet out from under the top cover and pushed it across the table toward me. “Welp. Here you go. He forced me to do a summary. Please read it.”
“Regi,” Naiche turned to her as my hand closed on the paper. “This is not how we operate in—”
“Would you start differently?”
He paused. He looked at the ceiling, then back at the table. “No,” he said. “Go ahead, Dash. Read it.”
Regina folded her hands on her stomach and tipped her chair back slightly. “You asked me to scout one farm. I got all of them.”
I felt my cheeks warm. “I—”
“No worries, it was fuuun!” She bobbed her head. “Plus, I asked Nailyboop here for details about what you wanted. No extra pay needed.”
“That,” Naiche said, “is not my handle.”
“But it should be. Matching handles are so cute.” She said it straight-faced. I glanced between them, said nothing, and turned to the paper.
How could these two end up together?
The page was dense with the Guild seal in one corner, a header block in clean script, and a body of typeset prose that ran nearly margin to margin. Below the prose, a comparative table.
[Reconnaissance Summary: Tago Bhavsar Vertical-Cultivation Facilities]
Subject operates four vertical-cultivation facilities within Tago, designated internally as BVF-TG-01 through BVF-TG-04. All four operate under the standard Bhavsar two-stage model: subterranean automated germination floors feeding above-grade growing bays, with manual quality-control handoff in between. All four share a common orbital monitoring posture out of Bhavsar Orbital. Local physical security, staffing density, and production tier vary by site.
Comparative difficulty:
BVF-TG-01 (South Farming District) — ★★★★★ — Not recommended.
BVF-TG-02 (New Clearwater District) — ★★★★ — Conditionally viable.
BVF-TG-03 (Dämmergrund District) — ★★★ — Viable but elevated visibility.
BVF-TG-04 (West Farming District) — ★★ — Lightest profile of the four.
As I got to the line with monitoring posture, I blinked. “Wait, there is a netrunner watching over them?”
Naiche nodded. “Please tell me you at least tolerate Natalya.”
Author's note
Thank you for voting on the last chapter! The skill you picked is [Mark the Drift]. Before we make it canon, some of you raised that every of the skills is kind of redundant.
That was the point of F or E skills -- kinda underwhelming. Nice to have, especially in low-tech words, but not a foundational skill. If you have better ideas, please tell me and we can make another vote with yours suggestions!
[Mark the Drift] can also leave a trace in the air only for Dash eyes and he can adjust, but last night I spent way more time than I predicted reading about scopes (don't go that rabbit hole, especially YouTube videos!) and engineering scope to help with that could also be a fun chapter for Dash!
I'm open to your ideas, which is also the point of web-novels, right? ^^