Chapter 80: Chapter 76

I nodded, and Lee left. As I let myself out of the front gate, truck full of unpaid groceries humming onto the road, I thought about what he had said.

The Sleem, Dearth, the damned yarsps, the miserable Arms Keepers militia, the delves in my basement, even Mr. Sada. We were surrounded by existential threats on all sides, and I still hadn’t managed to wrap my head around it.

But that didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter. Lee said it best, I was responsible for all of their lives now. Being the manager of a Nu-Earth affiliate was a far different beast than being the manager of a run-down campground in the middle of nowhere.

If Lee had been listening to us, I had to assume that Dearth had been too. Maybe even the militia, though I rather seriously doubted those fellas valued operational intelligence, just based on the way they had operated so far. Still, every single one of our enemies knew we were weak. 

Exposed and vulnerable with weak leadership, and so much petty internal drama clogging up our survival instincts that we had made ourselves a giant target.

That ended, or we did. We’d been lucky to date, me in particular. I had a suit that let me survive my fuck-ups, and those were still plentiful. But I had my violence back. The one thing I was good at naturally, the one thing that came easy to me.

Violence never solves any problems, they told me. They lied. Violence does solve problems. It’s just a really bad tool to rely on for the task, as it has this unfortunate habit of making more problems than it solves. What they should say is that violence compounds problems, but most of us are too stupid to understand what ‘compounds’ even means, so they lie to us instead.

Still, it solved that vein-scorpion problem pretty easily. Once I started smashing, that first problem went away fast, just like the tank. Ignoring the fact that violence against a pod had caused that problem in the first place was easy, if I only chose to focus on the problem that got solved after the fact. The first mistake I shouldn’t have survived.

As I drove, I thought hard. I focused on our problems and started thinking of solutions to them. I spun through each of them. Dearth had sent a tank, and I had smashed it. Knowing that I could smash their tanks and survive being shot with explosive shrapnel while doing it, helped empower me toward a solution. I would just go smash Dearth, before they could come smash us.

The Sleem I felt I had handled. For the moment, anyway. Hopefully, Axle would have power up and running by now, and the farm would be producing. We needed sales, to get us more refrigeration units, to get us more sales. The more equipment and tools I could afford, the safer everyone would become.

That led my mind to the militia. I had known these morons before BuyMort. They were regulars, and came out to the campground for weekend trips. Brought in brothers from all over the state to drink shitty beer, shoot hand built targets in the desert south of the campground, and race ATVs all over the place until somebody ended up in the emergency room.

Yeah, the more I thought about them, the less of a problem I had with killing these guys.

Taking the contents of their armory would equip my people quickly, and without expending any morties. I just hoped I could do it without spending any of my own people’s lives as well. I smiled as I thought of a distraction that Phyllis and I could make entirely impossible to ignore. She used to get a special gleam in her eyes when the militia came to camp.

The yarsps I would have to deal with soon, but the instant I did it meant Dearth was free to use the main highway and roll more armor down on top of us. The vibrations in the ground must be what attracts the yarsps, which was why the hover tank had been used, and had been alone. I wanted to try and control the moment Dearth came for us, and now that Lee and his people were moving in behind our more secure walls, yarsps were something I expected we could just hold off easily. Also, being edible was a silver lining, I hesitated to cut off our only ready meat supply just because it was scheduled to attack us every morning.

I thought about the faction of delves in our basement as I drove through the desert. Based on the way Rayna reacted to them, and their own interactions with my people and myself, I knew there was only one way they would leave us in peace. Taytrinn’s reaction to Quadrum taking her over by force in order to speak had me thinking she was now suspicious of us. Of what was about to occur.

My final subject for contemplation was Mr. Sada. He had become a massive threat, obviously. The conversation with him about the drill bit, and the workers he would have condemned to Storage was hard to get out of my mind. He even mocked me for trying to remind him of our partnership.

I thought about what came next. About what would have to happen. Dearth would offer him another buyout. This time it would be significant. They had paid an eleven million mortie ransom at the drop of a hat and hadn’t hesitated to buy back their own scrap for another five million. I had meant it as an insult, but it taught me something important about my enemy. This affiliate could throw around their wealth, and I had no doubt that Mr. Sada would not be able to resist it.

There was only one answer to the problem. The ship was unrealistic, we could never have fixed it up in time to prevent him from doing something else that hurt us. And now that I had sold it, we didn’t even have a place to start from with that plan.

There were axes hanging over my head, several of them. The one I felt the most pressure from, was Mr. Sada, without doubt. With a shaking breath, the realization that I would have to kill him sunk into me.

The road was quiet, and I needed to think about literally anything else, so I pulled up my statistics app to watch my racist ad and get my numbers back. I knew I should just replace the terrible thing, but I also wanted to know how bad the racism was before just deleting it. 

A morbid curiosity about what Molls experienced. 

Plus, I had a scrambling feeling in my chest that I needed to check the number of remaining humans on Nu-Earth.

The ad sprang up on a small screen in my vision, which I was able to swipe to the bottom right of my peripheral vision. It was worse than I had expected. A lot of full nudity, which was a surprise. Both male and female, all Nah’gh, of course. More than one of them had Molls’ condition, where they were oversized, with extra-long tails, and pearlescent white scales.

Surprisingly, when males had this condition, it regularly resulted in dual penises. They were called Conda Retrogrades by the ad’s ‘doctor,’ and Conda was a commonly used abbreviation.

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Most of the ad was an oversexualized mess, but two points stood out to me due to repetition. The ad called the Nah’gh dangerous, and it debased them through sexual representation. Two clear signs the information was untrustworthy. The only point the ad seemed to be trying to make was that because of their sex slave origins, and the genetic manipulation done to their ancestors, all Nah’gh were inherently untrustworthy. 

Criminal by birth, it called them.

I shook my head and happily swiped the video closed as it ended, a clash of music and flags revealing a human faction standing side by side with an elven faction. Both shook hands over a slumped Nah’gh on the ground between them, blood seeping from the snake-persons lips and nostrils.

The ad faded and my app started working again, revealing that the remaining population of natural Nu-Earthers was down to only nine-hundred million and change. I cringed and swiped the app away, sending it to my deletion area, a small garbage can in the corner. I could find something else, something that didn’t aid a hyper racist group like whoever those humans and elves were.

It was a bummer, I thought as I waited for the campground’s gate to open and let me in. Here I was finding elves finally, and they were all a bunch of dickheads so far. Except for Specter, he seemed okay.

I sighed and went to find my hobbs. I needed to warn everyone of what was about to happen.

Rayna was with Tollya in the dwelling they shared with two other family units. They had wisely taken the hut nearest the parking lot. It was very central to the entire campground.

Before I had even left the truck’s proximity, several hobbs and a couple of nearby humans walked over to help unload. A trail of them soon led to the storage barn.

“Make space in the cold storage, pack this stuff in. Make sure nothing that doesn’t need cold storage gets into cold storage. There’s more coming,” I told them. Each of them nodded, and I approached Rayna’s hut.

I knocked lightly on the door, standing with my hands behind my back until it swung open. Tollya stood in the doorway, a pair of boxer shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt covering her form. She yawned and turned aside, gesturing for me to come in.

“Hi, I’m sorry. I probably woke you all,” I said with a small cringe.

Rayna exited one of the side rooms, brushing aside a privacy curtain. It looked like it was made from thick sheets of plastic, but each was colorful and covered with eye-pleasing designs.

“Is okay. Hobbs can get by on very little sleep. You should get some when you can though, you look tired,” Rayna finished by lifting her chin at me. She was wearing an outfit similar to Tollya’s, and I assumed they had found some bargain on sleeping clothes from Nu-Earth raiders like we had done with our furniture.

“Well, I need some well-rested hobbs.” I slipped into a chair at the center of the hut, part of a circle of seating surrounding the main fireplace. It had been built fire pit-style in the center of the hut, to warm the entire structure as needed. “We need to talk about multiple missions.”

“More missions?” She asked, sitting down opposite me. Her long legs crossed, and she stretched back in the chair with a yawn. “BlueCleave always ready.”

I believed her too, in spite of the yawn. “Okay good, cause I think you might like this one. We’re going to go kill all the delves in the residential wing before they can cause our affiliate any harm.”

Tollya had been rattling around behind the privacy curtain, and when she came out I saw that she held three steaming mugs in her large hands. Her ears perked when she heard me say delves and kill in the same sentence, and she hurriedly set down the mugs in front of each of us before plopping into the seat beside Rayna.

“What about beholder?” she asked.

Rayna merely stared at me.

“The beholder asked me personally to free him from his delves. I don’t know what else that could mean, and it sounded like he’s just desperate to be left alone,” I started. “The thing is even helpful to have around, and it seems like all we have to do is hide him here. The radiation he emits is not harmful to us, and is beneficial to the Sleem, as well as providing us cheap power through Cube. Plus, I think he killed a bunch of listening devices when he arrived.”

I finished with a shrug. “As far as I can tell, the only problem with the beholder so far is the delves that came with him.”

“And now that he’s expressly asked us to free him from them, I think a purge is in order.”

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