Chapter 144: A Stone

/Nikki’s First Person POV/

"That’s two holes."

"It’s one hole, Nia. It went in one side and out the other. That’s one bullet, so it’s one hole."

"It’s two holes, big guy, because I can put two fingers through two separate sides, and if the System charges you per hole, and it will, then you’re paying for two, so stop arguing with me."

I was kneeling in the snow at the Ascender’s empty hinges with the old door lying flat beside me and a Crafting panel hanging in the air where nobody else could see it, and Nia was sitting on the roof of the truck above me eating crackers out of the dry-goods trailer, and she was right, and I bought the door.

-Ding!

{

Centralized Resource Exchange and Distribution Interface Terminal (C.R.E.D.I.T.)

Vehicle Repair, Armor Modification & Expedition Fortress Conversion Invoice

Platform: North 27 Ascender Luxury Expedition Vehicle

Designation: Ascender

Platform Status: Operational

System Integration: Not Installed

System Integration Token: Not Detected

...

Current Vehicle Condition

Structural Condition: Repair Required

Ballistic Protection: Standard Factory Configuration

Exterior Damage: Extensive

Ballistic Glazing: Damaged

Suspension: Operational / Upgrade Required

Tires: Operational / Winter Upgrade Required

Habitation Systems: Operational / Interior Restoration Required

...

Requested Modifications

Ascender Structural Restoration

Includes:

Ballistic Damage Repair

Body Panel Replacement

Structural Reinforcement

Interior Wall and Cabinet Restoration

Electrical and Utility Repair

Luxury Upholstery Restoration

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 126,000 Credits

Labor Cost: 67,500 Credits

...

Ballistic Armor Package

Configuration:

7.62×51 NATO Resistant Protection

Passenger Compartment Coverage

Door and Pillar Reinforcement

Underbody Protection

Engine Bay Protection

Radiator Protection

Protected Fuel Lines

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 330,000 Credits

Labor Cost: 90,000 Credits

...

Ballistic Glazing Package

Includes:

Windshield Replacement

Side Window Replacement

Rear Window Replacement

Multi-Layer Ballistic Construction

Anti-Spall Interior Layer

Reinforced Window Frames

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 180,000 Credits

Labor Cost: 36,000 Credits

...

Heavy-Duty Mobility Package

Includes:

Reinforced Suspension

Heavy-Duty Axles and Hubs

Upgraded Steering Components

High-Capacity Braking System

Increased Ground Clearance

Winterized Suspension Components

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 96,000 Credits

Labor Cost: 31,500 Credits

...

Heavy-Duty Winter Tire Package

Configuration:

Oversized All-Terrain Tires

Reinforced Sidewalls

Run-Flat Construction

Snow and Mud Tread

Central Tire Inflation System

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 72,000 Credits

Labor Cost: 18,000 Credits

...

A-Frame Obstacle Ram Assembly

Configuration:

Chassis-Mounted Reinforced A-Frame

Vehicle Deflection Geometry

Obstacle-Clearing Structure

Sideward Infected Deflection Geometry

Front-End Mechanical Protection

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 54,000 Credits

Labor Cost: 18,000 Credits

...

Roof-Mounted M3M Turret System

Configuration:

M3M Heavy Machine Gun

Manual Turret Traverse

Internal Gunner Control Station

Joystick Control

Dedicated Weapon Display

Daylight Optical Sight

Thermal Sight

Manual Stabilization

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 148,500 Credits

Labor Cost: 36,000 Credits

...

360° Surveillance & Blackout Navigation Package

Includes:

External Camera Network

Thermal Imaging

Low-Light Cameras

Infrared Navigation

Blackout Lighting Configuration

Internal Camera Display

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 67,500 Credits

Labor Cost: 18,000 Credits

...

System Exclusive Power Package

Includes:

High-Density System Exclusive Power Panels

Charging Hardware

Power Regulation System

Cold-Weather Power Management

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 90,000 Credits

Labor Cost: 13,500 Credits

...

Vehicle Recovery & Protection Package

Includes:

Heavy Recovery Winch

Front Recovery Points

Rear Recovery Points

Reinforced Skid Protection

Protected Drivetrain Components

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 30,000 Credits

Labor Cost: 9,000 Credits

...

Fire Suppression & Sealed Cabin Package

Includes:

Automatic Fire Suppression

Engine Compartment Suppression

Battery Compartment Suppression

Kitchen Suppression

Sealed Cabin Filtration

Positive-Pressure Cabin Mode

C.R.E.D.I.T. Cost: 39,000 Credits

Labor Cost: 12,000 Credits

...

Vehicle Integration & Calibration

Includes:

Armor Load Verification

Suspension Calibration

Steering Calibration

Brake Calibration

Turret Alignment

Weapon Mount Verification

Camera Alignment

Power System Verification

Vehicle Weight Distribution Verification

Integration Labor: 45,000 Credits

...

Vehicle Inspection & Certification

Includes:

Structural Certification

Ballistic Protection Certification

Ballistic Glazing Certification

Suspension and Brake Certification

Turret Mount Certification

Fire Suppression Certification

Sealed Cabin Certification

Winter Operational Certification

Final Roadworthiness Certification

Certification Cost: 72,000 Credits

...

Financial Summary

Structural Restoration: 193,500 Credits

Armor: 420,000 Credits

Ballistic Glazing: 216,000 Credits

Mobility Package: 127,500 Credits

Winter Tire Package: 90,000 Credits

A-Frame Ram: 72,000 Credits

M3M Turret: 184,500 Credits

Surveillance / Blackout Package: 85,500 Credits

System Exclusive Power Package: 103,500 Credits

Recovery Package: 39,000 Credits

Fire / Sealed Cabin Package: 51,000 Credits

Integration / Calibration: 45,000 Credits

Inspection / Certification: 72,000 Credits

...

TOTAL DUE:1,699,500 Credits

...

Advisory

Ascender has been restored and modified for extended winter expedition operation.

Ballistic protection has been installed throughout the primary passenger compartment.

Ballistic glazing has been upgraded to equivalent protection.

Suspension, braking, steering, axle, and tire systems have been recalibrated for increased vehicle mass.

Front A-frame ram assembly has been structurally integrated with the vehicle chassis.

M3M turret has been installed with human-operated internal controls.

Thermal and low-light navigation systems permit vehicle operation without visible headlights.

System Exclusive power panels have been installed.

Existing habitation systems have been retained and restored.

Existing fresh-water and greywater systems remain operational.

Expanded battery system remains operational.

All newly installed systems have passed diagnostic verification.

Structural testing passed.

Ballistic certification passed.

Winterization testing passed.

Final vehicle certification complete.

No warranty implied.

}

[This fucking thing costs more than most people spend on a house.] I felt my eyebrow twitch as I sent the Ascender into the inventory.

"Confirm," I sighed.

And that was when I heard it.

A voice that wasn’t one of ours, coming around the front of the house in pieces on the cold air, a man’s voice, pleasant, unhurried, saying the word "compensation," and then a moment later, clearer, saying "especially the women."

And the moment that voice reached my ears, every hair on my arms went up under the sleeves.

I instantly stood up and walked around the side of the house fast, which for a body like mine now is quicker than jogging used to be. Nia came off the roof of the truck without a sound and landed beside me with the SR-25 already at her shoulder, because she’d heard it too and needed less time than me to decide.

We came around the corner of the house together, and I saw the yard all at once.

Six men. Three trucks through the cattle gate. Ruth in front with her arms crossed and her face gone white as the snow. Thirty women in a loose line behind her with their hands moving toward the eleven guns they owned.

Bill at the gate, mouth open on a word. Leo on the porch with his hand off his ribs for the first time all day. Nora beside him, holding the controller, not moving at all.

And a man in a good wool overcoat standing on the top step in front of Kara with the red print of her hand already blooming on his cheek, raising his open palm to hit her back.

Everything in me went very quiet.

And my body had already started on it before my head had finished assembling itself.

There was a flowerbed along the side of the house with stones set around its edge, grey river stones about the size of an egg, and I bent and picked one up without breaking stride and threw it.

And that thing traveled forty meters. A stone leaving a hand that can now punch a chest into cardiac arrest, at a man’s head that was turning back toward a woman I have known for three years, and the stone crossed the yard so fast that the air made a sound behind it, a short flat whip-crack that turned Ruth’s head, and it hit him just above the left ear.

His head came apart.

It came apart, into the air, in a wet grey and red cloud that went out over the porch rail and painted the snow beside the steps, and what was left of him stood there for about half a second with its hand still raised before the knees understood and he dropped sideways off the steps into the yard with a dull thud.

And in that half second of silence, Nia fired-

-Tish-!-Tish-!-Tish-!-Thard-!

Five men in the yard, and the SR-25 was already on the first one before the stone had finished landing, and he went down with his rifle still on his shoulder, and she’d already fired the second before the first had hit the snow, and the second man went down, and the third had got his mouth open to shout and did not finish, and the fourth had actually started to raise his rifle at her, which was brave and pointless, and he too went down with it half-raised.

"Leave one," I said, while the fourth was still falling.

-Thard-!

The fifth man’s knee damn near exploded from under him in a spray of red, and he went down screaming into the snow.

"Which one did you want, big guy? I picked the one that looked easiest to break~" Nia lowered the rifle and looked at me.

Two seconds. Maybe three. Nobody else even got to fire a single shot.

Six men had driven up a road to buy women, and now five of them were dead, and one was screaming, and the whole thing had taken less time than it takes to say it.

Then the yard came back to life all at once, and it came back scared.

"Oh, God," Ruth said very quietly, and then said it again louder, and the women behind her were all talking at the same time, and the word I kept hearing in it was "forty,".

Vera had already dropped to a knee and was reloading a rifle she hadn’t fired because her hands needed a job, and Bill was standing at the gate looking at the stone lying in the snow at the foot of the steps, just the stone, as though it might do something else.

And I understood the fear completely. These women had spent eight days managing forty armed men by giving them nothing to push against, and I had just walked into the yard and pushed with both hands, and there was no version of the next three days where those men did not come up the road with everything they had.

"Ruth," I said, and she looked at me, and I saw her decide whether she was more afraid of them or of me, and land on them, which was the right answer. "I’ve got this... Let me handle it. Nobody in this house is going to be touched. I mean that."

"Forty of them, Nikki."

"Forty-three, luv," said the man on the ground with the knee, through his teeth, and Nia kicked him for the effort.

"Forty-three... Noted," I nodded. "Ruth, I’ve got this."

She looked at me for a long moment with her hands shaking on the shotgun, and then she nodded, once, and the nod cost her more than she would admit to.

The rest of them too, one at a time, because I looked.

Nora stood on the porch with the controller against her chest and her eyes enormous, and I could read her from the yard: she was both proud of me and terrified of me, and both were true at the same time. She just didn’t know which one to have first.

She had it worked out by the time I got to the steps. She picked proud. Her chin came up.

Leo had his hand back on his ribs and his jaw set, and he was looking at the man in the coat, at what was left of him, and there was nothing soft in his face at all, and I could tell Leo would have done it himself if he could have, and I think he knew that, and I think it frightened him more than I did.

Mr. Norton was already walking down the steps with his bag, past the bodies, toward the screaming man, because there was a wounded person in the yard and that was the whole of his philosophy, and as he passed me he said one thing, once.

"If you want him talking, I need him not bleeding."

"Yeah, we need him talking."

"Then move."

And Kara... she was standing exactly where she’d been standing, on the top step, with her right hand held slightly away from her body as if it belonged to somebody else, and there was blood on her jacket that wasn’t hers, and she was looking at me.

And I looked back.

Neither of us said anything, and I wasn’t going to pretend I knew what she was thinking, because I didn’t, but I knew what I was thinking, and it was that the last time she’d seen this version of me, she’d been on the third floor of a mafia building, and I’d told myself then that she would have to get used to this.

-Ding!

The sound was so out of place in that yard that I actually flinched.

{

QUEST AVAILABLE

Bounty: Dean Hallam

Target: Leader, Kessler Road truck stop group (43 members)

Objective: Eliminate the target.

Reward : Skill Token (1)

Enhanced Learning

Note: Skill Tokens are transferable and may be applied to any individual.

}

[...A quest.] I blinked. [It’s been a while since the System bothered to hand me one of these... And a Skill Token...]

I didn’t know that existed. I want that on the record. Two weeks of buying rifles and upgrades and injectors, and not once had the System mentioned that it could sell me a skill and let me hand it to somebody else, and now here it was, offered as a bounty on some random dude, for a job I had already decided to do.

[Fine. Fine... I was going to do it anyway. Now I’m getting paid.]

Nia dragged the man into the barn and did the interrogation, because Nia is better at it than I am and enjoys it more than a person should, while I stayed out of it and spent the time putting five bodies where thirty-one women wouldn’t have to look at them.

Twenty minutes and a whole lot of blood-curdling screams later, Nia walked out with the numbers.

Forty-three men at the Kessler Road truck stop, nine kilometers south. Two women, both of whom had chosen to be there, or said they had. Twenty-six rifles, mostly hunting, four of them semi-auto. Six shotguns. A dozen handguns. Something like nine hundred rounds total. Eleven working RV-converted rigs, thirty-odd trailers with actually useful stuff, four thousand liters of diesel in a tank, and food for six weeks if they were careful, which they weren’t.

Their leader, Hallam, ran it from an RV at the back of the lot with a generator and two men on the door at all times.

"And the layout?"

"He drew it for me." She showed me the back of a cracker box with a pencil map on it. "After the third tooth..."

[Damn... Good map, though.]

"Right." I looked south, down the state road, toward a truck stop I couldn’t see. "Here’s what happens... I’m building this place into something they can’t take, and it’ll take three days, and I can’t build and watch the road at the same time. So you’re going to watch the road."

Nia’s eyebrow went up.

"I’m talking extended recon... find somewhere with a view of that lot. And anybody who leaves it heading north, toward this house... just make them quietly disappear."

She didn’t say anything for a second.

Then she smiled, and it was the smile from the helicopter door, the one she’d worn while she waved at these women from behind a heavy machine gun, and I understood that I had just given her the one job she had been waiting three days for somebody to give, and that was to let loose and see what her enhanced body was truly capable of.

That was a little itch I had been wanting to scratch too. Those soldiers at the construction didn’t even feel like warm-ups.

"Finally~" she said.

She was gone inside ten minutes, with the rifle and food from the dry-goods trailer, and more than enough ammo to wipe that truck stop twice over.

And the last I saw of her was a shape going over the south fence into the trees without making a single sound in the snow.

The rest of that day I pretended to be an architect.

And that night, at a quarter past eleven, with the house asleep above me and Ruth and Kara at the kitchen table with the list we’d been making since noon, the radio on my chest crackled once.

-Kzzzt-!

"Nikki..."

"Here."

"Two are heading up the state road, on the flatbed, with a rifle each." A pause, and I could hear her smiling through it. "They’re not going back home~"