Chapter 152: Chapter 146

I found Axle in his office, the room directly at the bottom of my favorite library tower. He was hunched over his personal library console, a more advanced version of the myriad consoles below. The Knowle was editing the church newsreel I had just participated in, cutting the advertisements, and getting it ready for a physical copy on a crystalline disk. Physical storage took up a great deal of the library.

Nothing in physical storage was available to take from the library, but anyone with access was able to browse and request copies of any item in the public sections. As long as Axle had funding for console slurry, he happily handed copies out.

“That was a disaster,” he said as I entered, not bothering to look up.

“Agreed, she played me like a fiddle,” I sighed back.

“Kraken Corp is not exactly new, but this aggressive style of business from them is,” Axle said, finally looking up at me. “I’m glad you kept the helmet on, that’s a wise course. Still,” he said, pointing at the screen. “You tensed when that Dearth delf kicked an ad your way. You’ll want to mind that.”

I nodded, and said, “thank you Axle, I promise to suck at public relations less someday.”

My friend and partner chuckled. “Honestly, it wasn’t all bad. You got us some good, up-close shots of that tentacle, better than what’s available on the open market. It’s also good to know the church is staying hands off until our paperwork fiasco is resolved.”

Axle licked his nose, took a deep breath, and swiveled his chair to face me. “We have more immediate problems than Kraken Corp,” he said.

“Is Dearth fighting us on the leases?” I asked.

We had sent the Dearth Conglomerate Nu-Earth board a series of leases to continue using their own cargo ships. All we required was three percent.

“No, it’s not that,” Axle said. He licked his nose again and cocked his head. “Well, it is that too, but not the biggest thing I need to talk to you about.”

“Bigger than losing the Dearth morties? What the hell are we going to do with those ships now?” I muttered.

“There has been a killing in Prescott,” Axle said carefully, watching my expression.

I scowled. “Okay, anyone we know?”

He shook his head. “No, nothing like that, but this is . . . different. Beyond the scope of our local enforcers. Tollya has asked you to take a look personally.”

“Tollya? Who was murdered?” I finally asked.

“Killed. And it was one of our newest starfish troopers,” Axle said. “They were in the barracks at the time, so we’ve secured the area. There is video,” he offered the last quietly.

I stared at my friend, ice running through my chest at his words. “Someone managed to kill one of our starfish troopers? The hobbs who wear these, right?” I thumped my own more advanced suit.

He nodded, slowly. “Something did, yes.”

“Well, you were right, that’s more important than the ship leases,” I muttered. “Hey, what happened with those, anyway?”

Axle shrugged. “Nothing. Dearth said no interest and condemned the theft. I expected an attack shortly after, but all scans are steady. The Sol Board is staying hands off, and the Nu-Earth board is still licking their wounds. I keep intercepting messages for equipment and troops, but only long form response denials come back on any channels we can monitor.”

“So they’re up to something,” I said.

Axle stood and stretched, nodding. “Almost certainly, but nothing overt. If Dearth begins evacuating their remaining forces in the North America market, we should watch for asteroid strikes. The Sol Board has a large force in the belt.”

I shook my head. “That’s not like them, they protect profits at any cost, they’d never just shell the planet without trying to take it back. Most of their ships are full of lithium, gold, silver, industrial quality diamonds, and fish, for some odd reason. They’re still trying to run business as usual by all external signs.”

“I hate these brainstorming sessions,” Axle admitted, squeezing the bridge of his nose. “Guessing our enemy’s moves at scale gives me a headache.”

I nodded. “Yeah, me too brother. Let’s go watch one of our troopers get killed instead, I guess.”

Axle nodded, and we walked down through the library. The building was simple, but warm. He’d used classic Nu-Earth construction materials for most of it, once funding had become available. Concrete and steel formed the foundation and walls, with simple glass windows dotting the exterior. Mud-crete walls filled the interior, to create separate areas for different information storage and access rooms.

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The good stuff was hidden in the basement, under heavy lock and key. Mostly it was just our illicit records, Shela’s silk sales and the like. But if the Dark Elf high houses discovered our smuggling, they would discover our refugee from the House of None. Through Dro’erja, they would know we had wiped out the House of Shireen.

Trouble I didn’t need but prepared for. The dark elf great houses were reported to be wealthy, connected within the church, and vengeful.

Axle and I exited the library and turned toward my former home, now a parking lot. It had been my call to pave it over for use as Axle’s hovercraft parking lot, but Molls had been sad to see it go. I had more bad memories there than good, but our new place was a giant upgrade anyway, sitting atop Dearth’s former tower in front of the space elevator.

We walked to Axle’s personal hovercraft, squatting on the tarmac with its wings extending overhead. He kept it clean inside, in case he needed to pick up a shipment of books or whatever else our teams found. Once in the air, it was a quick trip over the mountain to Prescott.

The city had taken on a new sense of life since I opened it up for humanity. People from all over the world who had been displaced or driven out of their lands had come to find a way to make it as part of the greater Silken Sands community.

The walls surrounding the city were intact and manned by hobbs who had joined BlueCleave in order to join Silken Sands. We had multiple apartment complexes, which housed a mixed population.

Rayna suggested I place the newer hobbs and their families in housing with the rest of our people, and she was right. Neighboring with the security forces led to a primarily peaceful city, filled with people living lives as normal as BuyMort would allow them to. The hobbs were all eager to prove themselves worthy of the BlueCleave name, with its storied history.

Honestly, having the standard troops living with the civilians had been life saving on multiple occasions, just defending against dream storms, let alone everything else that came with BuyMort.

BuyMort could and would happily transport away anything you wanted to sell through it, for a percentage-based fee. If you wanted to maximize profits on large scale sales or extractions, you ran your own shipping network, using BuyMort as little as possible. And Dearth had set one up for us to take advantage of.

We had a thriving ecosystem of alien trade coming through Prescott. Everyone wanted to avoid the transport fees required to get off-world, or save on fuel entering or exiting the atmosphere, and the elevator was the ticket for each and every one of them.

The morties rolled in, and our people were primarily happy and safe. Any trouble too large for our regular forces brought out the starfish troopers, which Tollya herself trained and led.

We hovered over the great blocks of black plastic and newer mud-crete additions, coming in for a landing near Tower’s warehouse, a BuyMort fruition center. The primary military compound, where the bulk of our vehicles, arms, and explosives were stored, surrounded Tower's warehouse.

It was the biggest target in Prescott, since any successful suicide attack would summon BuyMort bugs to wreak havoc, and Dearth had already proven they were not above such tactics. Dearth had begun the fortifications themselves, back when Prescott was theirs.

All we’d done was improve upon everything they so graciously left us.

All the pods for the local area flew in and out of it, but they used predictable flight paths, so we rarely had any issues with near collisions.

Which was a good thing because the last thing we needed was the automatic defensive portaling in of extraplanar monsters to wreck us, all because the dumbass algorithm thought its pods were under attack.

Annoying, but easily avoided with good logistics.

Tollya awaited us on the tarmac, holding a large rifle in her arms and wearing one of their new war picks on her back. Her starfish suit was bulky, and obvious, sticking out from the jacket she wore. She nodded at me through the windshield as the hovercraft settled into place. The war picks were capped with hardened titanium tips, and each came equipped with a momentum-aid internal ballast system for extra hard strikes.

Looking over them activated an ad in my brain, and I stifled a smile reading through the proud yet broken English of the Nu-Earth hobbs.

NOW BUY SKULL-CRACKER FROM BLUECLEAVE. MANY STRONG! YOU BE HERO OF TRIBE. WINNER POWER RELEASE! NU-EARTH CROM-HARDENED TITANIUM TIPS. THIS WAR PICK YOU WAR PICK. 5000 MORTIES, 3.9 STARS.

A young hobb wearing BlueCleave fatigues rushed over, holding onto his cap as he brought a charging cable to plug into the hovercraft. Axle thanked him while I approached Tollya.

She stiffly saluted me, and then grinned. “You good boss. Tell that Kraken bitch BlueCleave not to be fuck with,” she said. Tollya had been happily working on her Nu-Earth swear lexicon.

“It’s ‘fucked with,’ in that context, but thank you. I happen to believe what I said, by the way. Kraken Corp looks like it may be another threat we have to face, so I’m glad you don’t like them already.”

“Kraken corp destroy Victorian-Earth. Many hobbs worked there. Dug coal, worked factories. Living lives, like us. BlueCleave ready,” Tollya said.

Her eyes were hard as she spoke, and she liked buying shaped nuclear charges on sale just in case we needed them. I believed her.

“Good. Show me what we’re dealing with here,” I said. She motioned for me to follow her, and I fell in line behind the hobb, Axle following.

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