Chapter 130: Perishables

-Drrrrrrrrrrrr-

The drone of eight diesel generators rolled across the rooftop in one steady blanket of noise, while the first snow kept sifting down out of a flat grey sky and melted wherever it touched.

Eight temperature-controlled trailers stood in two rows across the roof with a fuel tanker parked at the end of the line, and I walked the hose back along them one last time, topping off the final generator until its note climbed half a step and settled.

[Alright... we’re going ninety liters, times eight, every two days... really need to settle down, get all this food rigged to solar panels...]

The cold had teeth this morning, but none of them were getting through the suit I was wearing.

It had gone on like a second skin at dawn, matte black from collar to boots, thin enough that I kept expecting to feel the wind through it and warm enough that my breath fogged while everything under the weave stayed comfortable, and the snow landing on my shoulders just beaded up and rolled off without leaving a mark.

Slim guards ran along my forearms and shins, low-profile and rigid, flexing at the joints when I hauled the hose and nowhere else; the weave itself was bite-resistant, which mattered more to me than anything else printed on its sheet.

Over the suit sat the chest rig, Level IV plates front and back, my Glock 20 riding center with the radio clipped beside it, while the Shorty 40 hung under my left arm, the karambit sat at my waist, and a new Viking-style bearded axe rode the back of my belt, heavier than anything I used to carry. After the enhancers, it all weighed about as much as a thick jacket used to.

The old ear pro was gone too, traded for a pair of buds with the comms built straight in.

And over everything went the same black jacket as always, half zipped, with Tikki’s shoulder pocket hanging empty because the chairman had taken one look at the weather and gone back to the sofa.

The jacket had point, though. A man in full kit reads as a threat, and the more tactical you look to some random guy with a hunting rifle a few tens of meters out, the more likely he pulls that trigger, and you will never even learn what killed you... So the Grey Man Strategy stays in effect, and the war gear stays under a scavenger’s jacket.

The whole set had cost a hundred thousand credits, boots and gloves included, straight off the System’s exclusive shelf, and there was a version of me a few weeks back that would have fainted over that number. Now it felt like chump change.

[Funny what melting one reactor does to a man’s relationship with money...]

I caught my outline in the brushed steel of the last trailer while I coiled the hose, a black shape with a rifle across its back and black-gold specs on the eyes, gold rims, squared lenses, a double bridge, custom ordered for reasons that were only half about looking good.

The other half being that nobody shoots the rich accountant first~

The M110A2 hung across my back on its sling through all of it, deep tan and scratched to hell, sixteen inches of 7.62 with the Enhanced Universal Suppressor out front, a scope up top with a canted red dot beside it, a folded bipod, a flashlight, and one small box on the rail that looked like just another IR laser except it wasn’t...

The trigger was new as well, faster than the old one, with a selector that now went one position past anything the factory intended, to full-auto.

The last generator topped off, so I killed the pump, walked the hose back to the tanker, and started the collection round, laying one gloved palm flat against each trailer in turn, and one by one, eight running reefers folded away into the grid and stacked themselves neatly into a single slot.

Every spatial pocket in every story I ever read paused time for whatever went inside it, and mine, naturally, does no such thing... Time flows in there exactly as it flows out here, which means the meat keeps aging, the vegetables keep wilting, the reefers keep running, and their generators keep drinking diesel inside my own inventory, on my schedule, forever.

I stopped in the middle of the emptying roof and gave it one more try anyway.

"System... has the price on that time-stasis upgrade moved... somehow?"

-Ding!

{

Inventory Temporal Stasis Module: 3 Billion Credits.

}

[...If you had a face, I would’ve spat on it.]

The panel hung there in the falling snow, clean and smug, until I sighed the whole thing away and got back to work, because arguing with a price tag has never once made me richer.

The plant beds waited in their own corner past where the trailers had stood, twenty of them in tidy rows, ten showing carrot greens and ten showing pale cabbage heads, all of them dusted with snow that still refused to stick.

They weren’t for survival, plain and simple, since the System sells all the food I’d ever need. They were for me. By year two of the last timeline, growing things was the only reliable way we ate, and the habit stuck somewhere deeper than reason ever reaches, so now a roof without something growing on it just feels wrong.

I walked the rows, touching each bed away into the grid, then pulled an empty box trailer out onto the roof, where it arrived with a thud I felt through my boots, and swung its doors wide.

Each bed came back out of the inventory at the trailer’s mouth, a few hundred kilos of wet soil apiece.

And the strange part, the part I still hadn’t stopped noticing, was how little of me the work used.

My body ran light and awake through all of it, the weight of things registering and then simply being handled, while my head kept a running count of beds and steps and generator hours without ever being asked, and the smells on the roof arrived in separate labeled layers now, diesel and soil and snow and the faint green of cabbage, where they used to be one grey smell called outside.

None of it felt like being somebody new, either. I was still me, still running the same thoughts I had always run... They just arrived finished now, faster than I could get worried about them, the same as my eyes pulled clean edges out of the grey skyline blocks further than they used to.

After pulling the last bed out of the inventory and settling it down, I stepped out, swung the doors shut, and touched the whole trailer away into the grid, leaving the roof empty, except for me and the snow.

"Nikki!" Nia’s voice floated up from the balcony below, pitched over the wind. "You done up there? We really need to get going."

"Yeah..." I called back, while my eyes went north on their own and narrowed.

Because an hour ago, two helicopters had crossed straight over this building, and I had watched them shrink toward the northern district until they stopped shrinking, hung over the towers for a long minute, and then sank out of sight, and the System had pinged me before they’d even finished descending.

They had gone down right where the Ghostbird was parked.

I keyed the question one more time as snow fell between us and the north.

"System... Status on the bird."

-Ding!

{

Ghostbird: Grounded. Secure. Access attempts: Ongoing.

Personnel on site: 14. Affiliation: Unknown.

}

Unknown was the honest answer, and it was also the useless one, because the System reads bodies and hardware, and patches and paperwork mean nothing to it.

What I knew without it was simple enough. The military camp holding the Ferrow region had eyes, and an NH90 had spent that whole day circling Halden, fifteen kilometers from their reactor, kiting a horde toward the plant right before the meltdown, and nobody with a radio and a working memory missed a detail like that.

So if these were the same people, they might recognize the airframe, and if they recognized the airframe, they would know the man who probably melted their region was somewhere in this city.

And even if they weren’t the same people, it changed very little, because a working helicopter is worth more than its weight in gold now, and fourteen armed men don’t descend on one to admire it.

The bird itself wasn’t the worry. The System holds every bolt of that machine, and nobody alive starts those engines without its permission, so they could camp on the rotors all winter for all the good it would do them.

The problem was everything else. I couldn’t call the bird here with company standing on it, couldn’t bolt on the upgrades, couldn’t fly us west without them following, and every hour they spent crawling over my helicopter was another hour gone from the twenty-three days we had left.

So they would have to be dealt with, one way or another, before anything else on today’s list. And underneath all that math, quiet and honest and a little ugly, sat the other thing.

I had a new body and a new brain, and I had been itching to find out what they could actually do. Their arrival felt no different than early Christmas.

Rolling my shoulders once under the rig, I walked to the edge of the roof and stepped off.

-Thmp-!

The balcony came up through four meters of falling snow, and my knees took the landing soft beside Nia while the flakes I had pulled down with me were still settling.