Created G.H.O.S.T. System - A Cyberpunk Story

Stick-Point was silent for several seconds. “I’ve been looking into this job more, ever since you raised the warning flag on it. I had to dig deep, but eventually, details began appearing that I didn’t like the look of. Also, the client isn’t particularly happy at the moment. For some reason, they expected things to turn out differently even with their wildly inaccurate job details.”

“Okayyy…” Trace was more than a little confused. “So, what does that mean for me? Is my rep taking a hit? Do I need to pay a fine? What?”

“Still trying to figure that out, honestly. The client is creating plenty of noise, but the information you provided makes for a very good case on the job being a tier two, possibly even a tier three edger job. I’ve presented everything to the other top job brokers, and we’ll talk about it at our meeting tonight. I’ll let you know in the morning what everyone decides. However, I don’t see this going sideways unless the client really starts flashing some credits.”

Trace growled. “I know I shouldn’t ask this, but who is the client, and why are they so set on having a tier-one edger doing this job?”

“You’re right, you shouldn’t ask that. It’s rule number one of being an edger. Never ask who the client is! Of course, do you know what the second rule is?”

“Never piss off the job-broker!” Trace told him with a snort.

“Exactly. So, while I’m still not going to tell you who the client is. I will say that they aren’t anything like our normal brand of tier-one clients. That alone should have raised some flags when this request was first investigated and processed. This is the sort of client that would normally have been hiring a specialist.”

Trace shivered as that sank in. Stick-Point wouldn’t, maybe even couldn’t, tell him who the actual client for the job had been. What he had done was, in a way, almost as good. It told him the class of person behind the request, which in this case was related to the ability to hire specialists in a normal fashion. Unless he missed his guess, Stick-Point had also alluded to their being more than one of them.

The sort of people on that type of list were rather small in his uneducated opinion, CEOs, and the like. People with more credits than they knew what to do with. The type with enough wealth that if they ever actually spent any of it, they would crash the economy.

Those were the sort of people who could afford to hire specialist edgers on a regular basis. At least in his mind.

They spoke for a few more minutes, with Stick-Point giving him the location for the module seller before mutually hanging up.

Trace groaned and rubbed his eyes as he leaned back into the couch and just tried to relax.

The bags were on the small table in front of him, just waiting for him to go through.

He cracked his neck and sat up, pulling the courier bag closer to him. Carefully, he removed the revolver and all the ammo for it, placing them to the side before he began removing everything else. First up was the ink-sheet he had recovered from the desk the android had been sitting at. He wished he had taken more time to search that desk, just in case there had been other items. It was too late now though.

After that, he spread out all the data prisms he had collected from the room he had escaped into. At the time, he wasn’t really looking at what he was grabbing. He had ensured that he was grabbing all the data prisms, but little else beyond that. It came as a surprise to him when a grenade, several suppressors, and a handful of gun components all rolled out of the bag.

He knew he had just been shoving random crap into the bag at the time, but he didn’t realize it had been quite to that extent.

Regardless, he pushed all the extra items to a different side of the table so he could go through it all later. Right now, he was more interested in going through the items he had put in the duffle bag. After that, he would go through the ink-sheet, then the data prisms, and finally then take a look at all his new guns.

He might not have gotten quite as much as he had been hoping for from this job in regard to overall loot. However, all things considered, he hadn’t come away too bad. The truck alone almost made it worth it for him. Perhaps not in creditory value, but in sheer usefulness, it would be hard to beat.

Always renting a van or taking a cab to and from jobs was an excellent way to create and leave a trail for people to follow.

Being an edger was dangerous work, and you tended to collect enemies with every job.

His disastrous job with the scavs was an excellent example of that. Of course, having the truck would simply give them an item to track constantly. That was the risks you took, and simply something he would need to deal with.

The duffel bag landed on the table with a clunk. Pulling back the zipper, he grinned. Oh, yeah, now this is what he was talking about. Those goons he had taken out with the EMP might not have been the smartest of fellows, but they had certainly been equipped!

He had been able to swipe a fair amount of credits from their then-disabled crypto-vaults. Being a gangster might pay well for the average scrub, but taking them out in bulk was where the real money was out.

Nearly all of them had been sporting modules of some kind, a few of which had been completely fried. There had also been a few with data prisms in their pockets that he had been able to grab.

The true prize though, was the nearly excessive number of guns he had stuffed in the bag. The bag bulged with their various pistols, two additional scout rifles, and an smg he had grabbed for fun.

At the rate he was acquiring guns, his own armory would soon outpace the original owner of this apartment. It would take a little longer though, as he was determined to only keep a couple of each model. He wasn’t going to have a near-endless pile of guns shoved in a corner.

They were tools meant to be used, not simply collected. No matter how awesome that sounded in his head.

Well… Maybe if the place Sevorah found for him had enough room, he could keep and collect a few of his favorites.

Speaking of which, that reminded him he needed to send her a message.

Eight pistols, two scout rifles, one smg, three knives of differing styles and lengths, plus all the various data prisms and modules he had collected.

He hadn’t had a chance to use the kukri he had borrowed from the armory in the office. He liked the style though, and was more than a little sad that none of the three blades mimicked it. They were run-of-the-mill knives, in his opinion. There was the ever-popular tanto dagger, a quick-open stiletto -he’d keep that one and stick it in his pocket- and the last was a badly weighted throwing knife.

Without a doubt, he was selling the first and the third one. The blade of the stiletto wasn’t the greatest. That wasn’t a problem with what he had in mind for it. The knife was meant to be a backup ace to get him out of emergencies, not something he used on a regular basis.

He dropped both knives back into the duffel bag. All the data prisms he had grabbed from them went into one of the large pockets in his new courier bag. While the data prisms he had found in the room went into a separate pocket. It likely didn’t matter, as the information contained in them would be the deciding factor anyway. Regardless, for the moment, he wanted to keep them separate from each other.

The pistols he spread out across the table, taking his time to review each one.

Unlike the ones he had taken from the scavs, these weren’t covered in layers of blood and gore. For the most part, they looked as though they had been properly taken care of. There were a few places where they could stand to have a little extra care, but that was fairly normal, in his opinion.

He had shot a couple of them in the teaching module, and they were decent, in his opinion. No better or worse than the CD-10 he had already started growing accustomed to. He felt alright with putting those in the duffel bag to sell, though if Ko stopped by later, he would probably offer them to her first.

That left five pistols. These were a little tougher for him.

Trace hadn’t used them in the teaching module, and while he recognized the names of their manufacturers, that was it. He didn’t know if these specific models were worth the metal they had been created from. Not everything could be a winner. Even reputable companies inevitably had bad products they were forced to sell on the cheap.

The next hour was occupied with Trace researching each of the guns in turn. Digging up all he could about the models in question, and whether they were worth anything. The answer was no to three of them. The remaining two, however, were actually really good guns.

One was a Kenyobi with an optical scope and an extended barrel. It wasn’t by much, but it would improve accuracy over longer than normal distances. The scope integrated with his eyes and instead of the normal reticle, provided him with a secondary adjustable zoomed-in view of what he was aiming at.

Trace wasn’t a huge proponent of fighting with two guns, especially since he had just barely started to get his aim under control. That said, he might have just found a gun worth wearing on his other hip. The fact that it also fired 10-millimeter ammunition like his CD-10 helped as well.

The less he needed to worry about different types of ammunition, the better.

The second gun was from a local manufacturer that had started up within the last forty years. He hesitated to call them a corporation just yet, but they were well on their way to becoming a weapons-based one, for sure.

It was a Maritech X5, with twin offset stacked barrels that were each fed ammo through different methods. The main barrel used the traditional magazine in 10-millimeter ammo. The second barrel, however, was fitted to use clips that came in from the side. There was a switch on the trigger that controlled which barrel you were firing from at any given time. The main draw of the second barrel was the particular ammo they had chosen for the clips.

It wasn’t powerful rifle ammo, or some sort of huge wrist-breaking buster ammo, like his revolver used. Instead, it actually held shotgun shells, three to a clip, ready to be blasted out from a short pistol barrel.

Well, he certainly wasn’t getting rid of that pistol either. It just sounded too awesome and useful to let go of. It would go in his armory for the jobs he thought he would need, the extra versatility, or whenever he went up against some scavs. Yeah, that would become his scav hunting gun.

The smg was nothing special, but being able to fire that quickly would definitely be useful. He would keep it until he found something better.

Last but not least were the two scout rifles.

He had been looking forward to these two the most. He liked the scout rifle he had, but he would also be the first to admit that it had its issues. The mods on it were nice, but the scavs he had taken it from originally had not been kind to the poor rifle at all. Even after all the work he had put into it after cleaning it up, there had still been problems with the gun.

It seemed as though scavs were of the opinion that when a gun started to fail, there were two options, replace it, or modify the shizz out of it.

On the one hand, he was absolutely fine with getting all the sweet mods. On the other, he would have just preferred they had taken care of it in the first place. Of course, since they didn’t take care of their weapons, it led to a greater-than-normal number of jams, misfires, explosions, and other problems. So, he really wasn’t going to complain.

Both of the scout rifles looked like they were in overall better condition than his current one. Not that it was hard with the massive dent someone’s fat metal arm had put in the receiver. They had fewer mods, but he should be able to transfer a couple of them over, so that wasn’t a big deal either.

Trace was just starting to look up the information on the first one when someone banged on the door in a slow, tired manner.