Wars ended when they became unprofitable.
That's why the Fuel Purge wasn't raging across the Baltics anymore, why the peace papers were signed and the losing corporations crumbled. But hell, it's also why Voss-Oil kicked their soldiers out, why their implants went limp. Peace didn't need cybernetically enhanced soldiers. It needed industry-men, laborers. And Mick never did get the papers to be one.
'Course, some man in a luxury suit found him drinking by a Washington skit before he could do something stupid. Said Syntech was looking for men like him; offered Mick a job on the spot. Mick agreed. He didn't mind leaning on engineers who dug up restricted data, or cleaning up the aftermath of a department bullet cleanse—because, at the time, he needed the credits for another drink.
And now? Shit, he still didn't mind.
If Mick didn't do the corp's dirty work, somebody else would. At least this way he was the one getting paid… even if the jobs were rather grey.
What was today's contract? Well, if the story logged in the company's system was right, an agri-cell was under hack-attack by a still unidentified rival. An attack that's disrupted communications for over nine days now. But shit, there wasn't a single antagonistic company dumb enough to drop data-bombs on a facility unimportant to wider operations. Which meant something else knocked out comms', and that had Internal Affairs itching for something drastic. Not that they needed to be, mind.
This was probably something simple like a raid from a Scrapper Band.
Lord knows industrial farms were preem targets if you knew what to gut. Special-grade chemicals, agri-tech, the worker's organs and implants; all of it moved for a pretty penny in skitter-markets. But if it wasn't that? Well, it'd be exactly what the company system said it was: politically motivated sabotage. 'Cept, instead of data-bombs, it'd be a little more old school. With gun-grunts sent to cripple crop production and butcher the skeleton crew that kept the place operating instead.
And while one was easier to clean up, Mick knew HQ wouldn't wanna see either option on a report. Not if it meant sending out security-forces to hunt untraceable Scavs, or sparking a war over some dead slop scrapers. They'd much prefer he just cover up the facility-wide genocide, find a nearby Nomad clan to blame, and keep some high rollers ignorant to anything beyond a profit dip.
Easy.
The only issue would be any hostiles still remaining at the complex. But Mick wasn't about to pull up and check for himself. God no. That's what drones were for. And he'd let one scout ahead while he waited from the comfort of his company issued sedan.
Well, comfort might've been a stretch.
As the self-driving car lurched into park and its windshields fizzed into a blank film of static, the obsidian skinned man scooted up its hardened seat. The saggy upholstery clung to the braids of his hair like a clingy lover. Loosely. Stickily. Just like his plasticky trench coat. Yet, the lazed cloth wasn't what snagged on his mind. It was the glitching windows that did that. Or more precisely, the fact a Tech swore they were fixed.
Bastard must've used faulty parts again, thought Mick, watching as the windows dulled the interior to a liquid black.
This was the problem with unregistered vehicles.
Be it surveillance vans or cruisers, if the company didn't want them on record, they got patched together with whatever chopped stock the depot-boys had in storage. Easier to deny or hide something's existence if it was jerry-rigged from a dozen different makes. Mick knew that. He was built the same way; a mish-mash of different lab-grown organs and synthetic muscles so that when his body hit the morgue, the fuckers digging through his corpse wouldn't be able to pinpoint what company he worked for.
But shit, that didn't mean he appreciated it.
With a hiss, the engine fell silent, and the cabin lights hummed awake—soaking the raven hued interior in strokes of emerald green. Dim as they were, they still shimmered across his inky skin, tracing the edges of his stoney cheekbones and jaw like static on rock. God, he groaned, rolling his shoulders. The low lights, the stale air; it resembled the airtankas they stuffed troops into for transport.
And while he could fix the lighting, nothing could be done about the O-2.
Tucking his chin-length dreads up and behind his ears, the windows pulsed a faint grey. Finally. Tapping a button near the horn, the smart glass sang in response, and the distortion rippled away. A part of him almost wished it hadn't, though.
As greeting his eyes, scrunched from the change in light, were ash-colored clouds. Thick. Heavy. Their bulging forms sagging so low to ground the horizon blanched into a dark mass.
Remnants, Mick thought, his face easing to a frown. The last Corp-War left a lot of that—that debris some thousand nukes kicked up.
Closer to the coasts, atmos-scrubbers kept the worst of it at bay; but out here, near the Central Union, the air sat bloated and stagnant. For good reason. The Population Collectives couldn't afford purification tech, and the corps didn't need clear skies to turn a profit.
Good reason indeed.
Mick dragged his gaze from the curtain of fog that bleached the horizon, turning it towards the fields that bled through its haze instead. Reed-like. Brown. Why a pharma-corp dedicated an entire facility to growing this shit, Mick didn't much care. But, he figured it was the same reason weapon manufacturers ran their slum hung hospitals. Yep, Syntech must've seen cash in growing the bioengineered wheat that every damn vehicle ran on. Other corps certainly did since, hell, nearly every single one had a facility like this somewhere. They were that good for creds'. Ugly, but good.
Though, call him crazy, he couldn't help but think this place looked uglier than it should've.
Squinting, Mick took in the rolling plains of copper hued crops. Short yet wiry, they pooled across the horizon like a stormy sea of rust. But, as the fog thinned, his brow twitched. Well, ain't that a bitch.
The wheat was dry—no, worse. That leafy ocean barely whipped in the wind, its stems too swollen and stiff, still as posts.
Were the irrigation systems taken offline? Mick pondered, though, he soon grunted at the thought. These crops were engineered for longevity, for droughts. No, they were rotting because of something else. But what exactly? Radiation,guessed Mick. That shit didn't give a damn about engineering. It unspooled cells strand by strand, helix by helix, until life forgot how to do anything but rot. And these crops just happened to have been planted in an irradiated wasteland. 'Course, Syntech wasn't stupid. There were plenty of ways to make this land farmable. They had the tech. They had the means. So what the hell happened to them? Those means, that is.
Turning to the flat, sandless desert outside his driver-side window, Mick's eyes took on an unreadable glint.
The still uncultivated earth stretched out in patches, crater-pocked and scarred. But nestled between those half-filled divots, still raw from the dirty bombs dropped here decades back, were head-sized lumps of dirt stained steel. Well, that'd be what went wrong, he hummed.
Those lumps weren't debris. They were agri-bots—the things that should've been keeping these fields alive, bathing them in stimulants and gene treatments. Yet, here they sat unpowered instead, decaying from a lack of wax baths. Yep, the environment was already starting to chew through their chassises, which meant they must've been taken offline when HQ lost contact with the facility. Not by Scrappers, though. Scrappers wouldn't want them scattered like this. They'd have uploaded a back-alley code-spike that called the bots back to roost. Leaving them out to rot wasn't their M-O.
Which, shit, wasn't something that mattered. His job didn't include building a case on the bastards who did this. He needed to stop doing extra work and just focus on covering it all up.
So, with lips pursed in boredom, his mind moved along. Exhaling sharply through his nose, Mick glanced at the computer embedded in the center of the car's dash. Encased in a black, boxy frame, it hummed as pixels pulsed and stretched across its screen. With a sigh, he smacked the top of its case and the box flickered to life. A gray, top-down silhouette of a rectangular car materialized onto that grainy display, hovering over a green flickering grid. But it wasn't the grid or the crude rendering that caught his eye—it was the blinking notification in the top-left corner.
The drone finally done? Flicking a switch just below the cubed interface, he opened the message, the screen flashing its contents with a light that pooled across the lacquer of his coat. Syntech's logo flickered in the corner, a pixelated rose circled by a stethoscope. It was the drone's report.
He paused, eyes sweeping over the blurbs of diagnostic jargon and environmental scans as the screen auto-scrolled.
Most of it was bullshit, of course.
Like, why were three undocumented trenches important? What did it matter if they were big? Fuck. Even the company system thought it was bullshit. "Likely unlogged Sumo-Class quarries, no escalation required" it read.
Seeing that, Mick hummed, agreeing with the system's assessment. Dig sites that big were loud, messy—any half-functional agri-bot would've pinged them weeks back if they weren't supposed to be there. So someone must've forgotten to file the paperwork it seems. Not surprising. Most people weren't even literate enough to file shit in the first place.
Swiping across the screen, he scrolled down to the section about hostiles. None detected, it read.
Good, thought Mick, his calloused hand already gripping a dial behind the steering wheel. A lack of raiders meant this job would be over quicker.
Well, hopefully.
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