THE GUARDSMAN: Book 1: Honor of the Fallen – Chapters 5-7
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The Guardsman, Book 1: Honor of the Fallen:
Chapter 5)
John sat comfortably tucked away in the corner of a little eatery he had discovered.
It served simple fare, served in bulk, and served military dining production line style. The customer entered, received a plate near the door, moved down the food line, picked up the various parts of the meal, and then paid at the end of the line. The restaurant was a really bare-bones place. It was so bare bones he could not find them listed in advertisements.
He had been in this section of the building, on assignment one day at lunchtime, and had literally followed the crowd, until he bumped into the place.
He had the chicken, rice, and beans plus a side of fresh greens. John had even gone crazy and bought cheese for the top. Beans were starting to drive him crazy.
Humanity still could not divorce itself from the requirement for specific amino acids in foods. Rice and beans created one of the few perfectly balanced combinations of amino acids, both were easily portable and were immensely affordable. Hearty versions of both plants populated whole worlds in massive agrarian farming efforts. They were both also easy to ship and store so remained inexpensive and portable to all corners of the galaxy.
It always made him chuckle thinking about all the billions of unsuspecting people out there flushing their toilets. They thought they would never see their byproducts again like they just magically disappeared. Instead, their byproducts went to processing centers at the bottom of every building. That was part of the reason for the stench at lower levels. From building processing centers, they were dried, collected, and sent to a freighter in the form of ‘topsoil’. The topsoil was exported to a farming world. The farming world covered their fields with humanity’s byproducts. The farmers then shipped the crops and produce back to industrial and city worlds where the unsuspecting populations found their own wastes returned to them at mealtime. What had once been waste, after traveling billions of kilometers round trip was returned hot, steaming, and delicious in the form of the customer’s favorite fruit, vegetable, or meat product. Meat products added a few more steps, but the end result was the same, a hot meal waiting for consumption.
The perpetual human recycling machine. The ironic efficiency always made for a fun morbid joke.
People were such simple creatures. People lacked comprehension and were full of prejudices and hang-ups at the same time.
John’s reflection on food humor was the best he could to disguise a growing irritation at having accepted this assignment without looking at who was in the folder first.
He absently shook more hot sauce onto the mash of brown that had once been neat piles of separated foods. The green salad he would save for last. He saved it for last since it would help to get the taste of the beans out of his mouth.
John hated beans.
He never liked them growing up, in the creche, because they stuck to his teeth, well the skins did, and they always tasted so bland, like eating paste. After years in school and the service, he could consume anything. However, there was a difference between consuming required nutrients and ‘eating’, or even better ‘dining’.
While skimming the folder that he had brought to lunch, John thought, “This character is a piece of work: murder, robbery, extortion, and racketeering. He has to have his fingers in a bit of everything.”
The next page gave him pause to shovel several more spoonfuls of the spicy mash into his mouth, so he could chew and read.
John flipped back to the beginning, bookmarking the page with his finger, while he choked down the beans. John started counting known associates and accomplices, and he did not like the numbers as they continued to climb. “The guy has a personal army…”
He shoveled more food into his mouth while thinking to himself, ‘He has lots of associates, he fell off the grid, and the agency’s ’employer’ was looking for leads, unable to locate the subject, on their own. This guy is a big enough fish that he does not need to run too far. And someone like that would have a profile to maintain. They won’t stay below people’s visibility too long. If he went missing for too long, he would lose control of his crew. They would start stealing from him and before long making plans to replace him. But I need to find him, or they will think I’m dawdling, trying to run up the bill.’
‘What was this character’s name?’ John thought as he absently flipped back to the front of the packet, “Qudir Dardan Kimikon Dardanos.” John shook his head and rolled his eyes before gulping down more chow. He detected four different ethnic origins in those names. Every one of them meant something strong or powerful. Even ‘Dardanos’ for example meant ‘to devour’, in the ancient Greek language from ancient Earth. “He must think highly of himself. No way he can keep his head down out of the public eye for long. And he’s probably educated too. Either that or more likely he just wants everyone he might meet to think he is educated. Interesting, this will be something, does this critter actually have a poison bite or is he just noise and warning…”
In a breach of manners, he shifted his utensil to his left hand and started to shovel while compiling a list of supplies he would require for the mission, with his right hand, using pen and paper. This one would require some gear; he had not bothered acquiring it yet. “And a map, a big frickin’ map, because I cannot plot all this out in my head. I seem to be doing that a lot lately. Either I am losing my memory, or these things are getting more complicated. Then again if I keep talking to myself, I will know I’m nuts. And so, will everyone else around me… “
John finished the warm meal and sat back with his salad to cleanse the taste of the ‘brown’ mash out of his mouth.
Chapter 6)
John was glad that his paper notebook contained a column for ‘mission prep time’. Otherwise, he never would have been able to account for the hours he had spent wandering the commercial market buildings. He kept finding himself ever deeper in the twisted, ever tighter, ever dirtier corridors, layered with the stench of over-packed humanity that had settled permanently into place. If he had to be there he really wanted to get paid for the time. The press of patrons had become lighter but more disreputable the deeper he went into the depths of the building; their stench did not improve either.
A person could live their whole life in a building like one of these, and never see the light of day. A resident might not need to ride a tram or air car, from this building to the next. The massive, incorporated structure served its purpose as a warehouse and maintenance bay for people. There were plenty of jobs and facilities to make each building into its own autonomous town in earlier centuries.
The enormous buildings typically contained banks of apartments, in luxury, mid-level, and tenement quality, based on the physical level within the building and its proximity to the city center. The deeper you went, the cheaper they were and the dirtier the building and people became. In between were hospitals, food markets, clothing distributors, entertainment centers, private building police and civil order patrol stations, and even vehicular distributors but the vehicles were sold only at the uppermost levels. The buildings did not discriminate against anyone. They did not enforce any barriers or set patrols to track down the wandering vagrant.
The buildings did however ‘charge for services’.
Instead, they used a soft cap to segregate the building levels.
There was a charge for everything, and those services became more and more expensive the higher you traveled in the building. There was nothing as sinister as a coin-operated elevator but there were ‘card swipes’ to reach higher levels for ‘security purposes’. Tenants paid extra for those security features in their rental agreements. They got their cards, and it kept the riff-raff out, limiting access, but not stopping it all together.
No one elevator traveled the two thousand meters from the grubby, mist-shrouded ground level to crystalline pinnacles boasting luxury apartments, with views of sunrise and sunset. The graceful arch of the structures climbed from utilitarian, hundreds of square meter bases, to artfully curved windows and pristinely polished exterior at the top, justifying its costs as ‘maintenance expenses’. Simply put, building management rationalized that the cost of maintaining an elevator at fifteen hundred meters was much more ‘expensive’ than maintaining a similar elevator at five hundred meters. Never mind that both were enclosed in the same exact maintenance and service corridors and facilities and employed the same technicians.
The people at the lowest levels got to gripe about the pricey requirements for ‘elevator level security cards’ to even call elevators at that level. Conversely, the people at the top got to gripe about being fleeced for everything they were worth by coin-pinching building owners, who charged extra for everything from pumping water to their lofty abodes, to additional security patrols, to the elevators, to personal skimmer docks, and window cleaning service. Everyone from top to bottom was equally unhappy and equally capable of articulating their gripes.
All were equally capable of leaving after paying to break their lease, paying freight elevator surcharges to remove their personal effects ‘early’, and equally capable of looking for some other equally uncomfortable people warehouse, possibly owned by the same mega-corporation they were trying to leave or if not, they would arrive at one exactly like it.
It was a system. It was a system that worked. It was the same system that had developed over the millions by many millions and millions more cubic parsecs of human-controlled space. The hundreds of thousands of populated worlds all worked on more or less the same system. It was those independent corporations that built and supported the apartment blocks, others that operated the foundries, and then the factory corporations, and the utility corporations, that all merged together into massive interconnected corporate conglomerates. Those interconnected corporate conglomerates and mega-corporations then owed fealty to the corporate entity that controlled whatever world they happened to call home. Every one of those star-spanning mega corporations was built on the toil of billions of small businesses housed in the much larger corporate structures. The billions more people the corporations employ, and the resources they developed, along with the products and improvements they all created allowed humanity to live, trade, and establish the foundations of interstellar commerce.
John did not care about any of that just now. He was becoming more and more frustrated that the very specific items he needed to acquire were not only ‘restricted purchase’ but additionally restricted from ‘his’ purchase. No one would sell a ‘John Smith’ what he needed.
The chartered law of the land was the law after all.
Well, they were not really laws exactly. They were more uniform building rules.
Still, the fines for violations were steep. The fines for violations resulting from those carrying dishonor were even steeper. The devastating combined results of both would crush a small business owner.
Therefore no one was stupid enough to sell a ‘John Smith’, the name of ultimate dishonor, a name that only the most despicable of cowards, deviants, and traitors carried, the tools he required for this current mission. Everyone realized that to do so was to dishonor him or herself, dishonor their children, and most likely earn them a family re-designation name of dishonor. They would carry that stain until some family member did something so great as to allow that individual to compensate the Central Personal Records Registry Corporation to erase the taint of his or her ancestors and regain honor in society, as an individual. A name was everything in the human worlds. A name would follow you for a long time.
All citizens needed a name of honor to be among the ranks of professionals and true ‘citizens’. They needed a name to even apply for a job that would eventually authorize the purchase of what he needed. They needed the certificates of training and requisite background checks associated with that job to turn it into a career. Then they needed the time in service in that career to build a good service record before the restrictions were lifted, but the purchase was still monitored.
The man who was now ‘John Smith’ did not have any name to even begin that process. Nor did he have the time or patience to accomplish any of the required life and name-changing feats before this assignment expired.
He had the money squirreled away. He just did not have the time. He also had too much honor to shirk his punishment.
Instead, he wandered lower and lower into the truly seedy commercial sections at the depth and bowels of the massive apartment and commercial structure looking for an alternative to the rightly registered sources for what he needed.
He was truly lucky to have a job as a mere junior private investigator. He worked for a crooked retch of a man. His boss, John knew, was illegally skimming from his wages. John was actually paid the Earth-set legal minimum wage rate. However, his boss reduced that to a ‘probationary rate’ and held his earnings in ‘escrow’ until John proved he was capable of behaving himself. John was the little man in the agency, not because of his ability, but because of who and what he was.
That contractual withholding placed his wages into the indentured servitude range, specifically prohibited by Earth-based Terraforming Commission contracts subletting worlds to the governing mega-corps. The mega-corps then passed those down to their resident corps to enforce.
Earth courts looked very poorly upon slavery allegations, and metered harsh punishments to slavers; if they were ever caught and the expense paid exporting the accused all the way back to Earth. The vast majority of the time the governing mega-corps just metered that justice on a sublet basis and the multitudes of human worlds kept spinning without notice.
Sometimes it happened. Sometimes it did not.
Escrow was all right, within reason. It was wrong, but the owner/boss could justify it as a hedge for his charity for taking a risk hiring a poor, desperate John Smith. The boss could probably weasel out of trouble with a little waterworks and some mumbled ‘I’m sorry’.
John suspected that escrowed back pay would disappear into the owner’s pocket when one of these progressively more insane assignments eventually got him killed. He would never make it to medical care in time to save his brain and there would be no one to rebuild his body. No one could believe that a ‘John Smith’ would have the funds to pay for a complete hospital or body repair shop bill anyway.
Sales of some weapons were highly restricted; there was little reason for a fully licensed, but still low-level private investigator like the boss, let alone someone like John, to have a Gauss pistol. John found himself descending countless stairs and ill-lit concourses until he felt the temperature changing to cold and damp, from cool and pleasant, while his ears popped their displeasure at the atmospheric pressure changes.
John reflected that his disgraced name alone meant he must have been a shadow of a subhuman coward, traitor, miscreant, or all of the above and, therefore was unworthy of even contempt let alone charity. That John was ‘charitably’ allowed to work for reduced wages while the owner risked disgrace himself for placing John on the payroll was a modest blessing. The unspoken agreement between John and the boss was enough to keep John’s mouth shut about the stolen wages.
John was starting to fume, but not about his wages.
He felt like he had walked kilometers because he had. His path was not straight but through a twisting warren of tunnels and hallways that ran this way, and that. Everyone interspersed and jumbled confusion designed to trap, confound, or delay a customer, with money of course, from leaving. The maze was a state-of-the-art commercial ‘mouse trap’, which had decayed under the weight of its own compost. The automated guides were no help, half the time no one bothered updating them. When they did, just because a shop advertised, that they had some product or service, it did not mean they stayed in that particular business or even if they were still in business anymore at all. The other half of the time the guide itself was broken beyond function and was just an impediment on the concourse walkways. All the confounding guides were good for was indicating where you were in the maze, not where he ‘wanted to go’ in the maze.
John felt like his sanity was beginning to slip just from the hours of tedious searching. He became desperate to break the dissatisfying and grossly aggravating repetition of the task; John made the mistake and did the math again to take his aggravation down a notch. ‘If this structure is eighteen hundred and sixty-six meters high and if each floor was approximately three meters tall. How many total floors were housed in the building that could possibly hide the type of shop I am looking for?’
While thinking about the math that still confronted him, John checked a few corners and stores only to find they were useless to him. All the shops he was finding catered to teens and young adults who didn’t want to deal with the reality that they needed to get a job someday and would regret capturing images of their dress when their parents, ‘someday to be grandparents’, pulled them out to embarrass the middle generation. The gaudy fashions just looked that stupid, half the time.
John continued his math, ‘That made approximately six hundred twenty-two floors. Approximate dimensions at this level are five hundred by five hundred meters, which makes an even two hundred fifty thousand square meters. Minus about twenty percent for hallways and utilities, shaves off about fifty thousand making just under two hundred thousand square meters of space on this level alone. I need to search to find someplace that sells the pistol I need.’
John asked himself while he wandered the corridors “Why the hell was I good at math?”
Talking to yourself was still one of those habits that got a human looked at sideways, when done in public, he thought as he passed a staring vagrant. The additional elbow room given to him by the infrequent passerby was pleasant, but the awkward space was a little much, so he decided to keep his inner monologue to himself.
Then he decided. ‘If you want something disreputable, go as far down and deep as you can into the darkest slimiest cracks. I need to go someplace where no light shines on misdeeds.’
That mantra had served him well in his months as a ‘junior’ private investigator.
John checked his comm’s timer and groaned at the passing hours.
John resigned himself to a late dinner.
The tools he needed were still un-acquired. He had a long way to go before he could return to his apartment and begin his real mission preparation…
A working automated map caught his eye. He slipped unnoticed through the sparse crowd, totally disinterested in the commercial offerings of this level. He was looking for something as low as he could go. Since he was on the thirty-second story, that meant levels one through five were the best choices. He randomly picked the middle, chose level three, and boarded a nearby elevator.
The ‘elevator’ could hardly be called that. It was more a system of pulleys held together by luck, and just enough inactivity, to have not fallen completely to pieces sitting in its shaft. John got out after descending a single level and decided to ‘walk’ the rest of the way.
The door to the stairwell, which ran parallel to the elevator shaft, popped open under the force of his frustrated palm and foot. He started down.
John fell back into his day’s irritating math rut. ‘I’m on the thirty-second story, I need to go down to level three which means twenty-nine floors, at three meters per floor,’ as he passed the first switchback in the stairs, ‘that means it is eighty-seven meters down to the third level. I hate math. I am never doing math again.’
By the fifth switchback in the stairs, very few other people were passing going the opposite direction, but they were definitely not the type that you would run into in the light of day if they could avoid it. The lack of security cameras was not for lack of mounts or wiring, initially at least. There were clearly places at every switch back and door where the cameras ‘had’ been positioned, to catch people coming and going. Rust, dust, and grim collected in the structural scars, they had been absent for a long time.
The monitoring devices probably had served one type or another house of ill repute for years before they burned out and replacements had to be stolen from elsewhere.
Maintenance had probably gotten tired of replacing those fixtures decades prior.
John pulled his sweatshirt hood out from under his overcoat collar and up over his head, as much from the growing damp cold, as a desire to retreat into its shadowed interior.
The closer he got to his destination, the more John wondered at the world where he had lived his whole life with law and honor only to find that it was built on such a rotting lawless mess for a foundation. What was the point of law and regulation if it was all ignored?
His second thought was that the same lawlessness would probably provide the place to purchase the very tools he needed. So, this was truly a case of ‘do I really care? Or am I more interested in getting what I need so I can survive the next several days of this assignment’?
John opted for the latter and, to try not to die in a spreading pool of his own blood over some petty criminal’s location, as he trudged along to some unknown destination at the bottom of the tower.
Chapter 7)
The wizened elder, rasped his lower-level tower slum accent in reply, “Ga-da ‘ell! I ain’ sellin’ no these wurgun pissol ta zum stranger ain’ ga no permi’ er no ID…”
He pushed back the hood. He was in a crappy little nook of a resale shop, way down in a back corner of level two. He had finally found what he wanted. It was not even arm’s length from his grasp, and the old cockroach would not sell it to him.
With a sigh, John slowly pulled out his comm and checked the timer. His free right hand ran through his short hair. He had long since lost patience on levels three and four.
John snapped, “Look, I’m tired, I’m hungry, it’s late, and I need that gauss pistol for work. Look here is my inspector ID,” John flipped the little chit with his company’s name and his picture on it in the man’s face, for the third time.
The crooked elder retorted, “I ain’ sellin’ no these wurgun pissol ta zum stranger ain’ ga no permi’ er no ID…”
John retorted again, “Yes, you said that before. I know I’m a stranger, you have seen my ID.” Then it clicked, the old cockroach had said he could not ‘sell no working pistol to some stranger’.
By now John’s patience with the dirty world he lived in now was giving way to a degree of expedience that his prior law-abiding lifestyle had never afforded before. John was however starting to catch on to their own coded language and the honor system of this gray society.
John also remembered something another vendor had said hours before, ‘money talks bullshit walks’ before the man had sent him ‘walking’. Where anyone first came up with such a crude expression was beyond him, but it seemed to be a rule of life down here. John pulled out a wad of neatly folded bills, from his right pocket.
His comm had disappeared into his left pocket sometime during the aggravating moral debate he held with himself. He looked over as the last customer other than himself, drifted out the door with a sharp lack of interest. The proprietor shot daggers from his eyes at John for costing him the sale.
John took a breath and the hint, rethinking his approach, and admitted, “Okay Sir. You are right. I know the law. I have a really important and dangerous case coming up and I forgot myself. Please excuse me.”
The proprietor’s complete lack of interest in the amateur con line was more cutting than any words he could have spoken.
John pressed on, “Do you have any junk?”
The offended old man snapped irritably, “Ain’ no ‘JUNGE’ ‘ere! Allz-I-gots de good ztuff! Loo’-roun’ ya! Allz good stuff!”
John apologized again, trying to retrace his steps, because he was starting to smell the whiff of opportunity, “No, no! I’m sorry, that came out wrong. That’s not what I meant! What about pieces of equipment you cannot fix? Maybe someone brought something similar but broken in to sell for the metal and you bought it cheap and now you cannot move it? What about old stuff that no one is interested in? I am only interested in pieces, parts, and such.” John surreptitiously zipped his thumb over the wad of bills he had folded in the palm of his right hand while the greedy old bastard watched, every bill flicked, and the proprietor’s eyes caught every move.
The old man eyed him and warned, “Z-day ‘ere. En don’na be tuchin’ no’in!” The old man left the counter and crept into the back room.
Apparently, the only things more crooked than the old man physically were his business practices. John’s grip on sanity was either fading faster than he had hoped or he had actually made progress.
Then one eye framed by matted grayish-brownish, and partially yellowed hair poked cautiously out from behind the back-room’s door frame. The older man was cautiously peeking into the dimly lit cave and dim concealment of the store, probably checking to make sure no authorities had strolled past and entered his establishment. John had spent so many hours wandering the nether regions in this particular strip of hell that his eyes were used to the lack of light. This was a place where every third light actually worked, between flickers and dirt smears. It was almost impossible to see from the blinding twilight of the corridor outside into the near-black darkness of the store recessed into a corridor’s corner and wedged between two other larger shops.
The store, which could have been more accurately called a pawn shop, on ancient earth, was not regulated by any larger authority or pawn broker’s collective, other than the policing of the building and the Corporate Hegemony’s law services infrequent visits. He probably had not seen an enforcement agent in years, probably since there were at least ‘half’ of the lights outside flickering their death throes instead of the mere one in three that now twitched to the currents.
Justifying his skirting firearms regulations, the old thief shared, “Es ‘junk box’. Zees ‘ere?” Pointing to the ancient scribbles on the cracked plastic container he carried to the counter, “Es ver rezyglin’ bu’ zay ne’r pik-up.”
That was interesting. The old man had a whole system in place to justify his possession of contraband.
John asked with mild curiosity, “Can I take a closer look?” John’s fingers worked to the rectangular box, the old man’s eyes following the money, in John’s hand. The cracked container’s lid did not belong to that container. The color and make were wrong but it served its purpose, by mating two orphan parts into a relatively functional whole. It kept nothing out, it kept nothing in, it was a wasted exercise, and it was an impediment to John’s progress. John’s anxious fingers tried to work their way inside the container on their own to complete his quest.
Now that the box of parts was on the counter the whole pistols in the case were long forgotten. The three old models, mismatching, weapons safely locked away in the display case, might have been on another planet for all he was concerned. John wanted to know what was in the box.
Cash disappeared into his pocket and the older man grumbled silently.
The lid landed on the counter as the jumble of parts and pieces came into view, John was struck by one emotion, ‘disgust’. The mixed jumble of parts was not only, not sorted, but completely intertwined with no differentiation between crushed scrap, rusted and neglected service pieces, parts, and receivers to ‘capture pieces’. One capture piece had a bullet hole clean through the receiver, just behind the trigger assembly. The round that had passed through that weapon would have taken off the center of the user’s hand just behind the trigger finger, probably including the thumb. If it were holstered and in line with the user’s body when it was struck, the shattered weapon would have spilled electrochemical propellant and projectiles into the user’s flesh.
It would have been better to lose the hand only, from taking a clean side shot then have the weapon hit in a holster so the offending round passed into the body. The round that hit the weapon would have shattered power cells and pulled the magazine’s additional projectiles into the user. All of the debris would bounce around in the ‘former owner’s body’ and would raise some real medical havoc, not to mention excruciating pain.
John speculated aloud, “Wow, I would hate to have been the poor bastard that was using this one…”
The laugh that sounded like gravel shaking in a cardboard box drew him out of his introspection, to the vendor. “May’e es jun’g, a’ver awl,” the hissed, rattling, laughs followed him back to the front of his shop by his register, and terminal.
Any of the capture pieces would be a pain in the rear end, bottom line. They were ‘other empire’s weapons’, which meant there were no spare parts or ammunition available even if John could pull a functional weapon together from the mismatched parts. Nothing irritated a professional more than knowing that either the weapon had failed, or the operator had failed resulting in the weapon being left on some battlefield somewhere. Bad operators are one thing. But to take a risk on a bad ‘weapon’ that had already sold one operator down the ‘River Styx’… that was a risk even John Smith was unwilling to take.
Maybe he was just getting superstitious in his old age.
John dug deeper into the box and contented himself with sorting parts into piles while shifting and shuffling and steadily claiming more counter space while sorting mismatched parts.
Many of the Chroynos design concepts licensed from the military versions were replicated on the lower-power civilian versions. As a result, there were compatible parts between Chroynos Empire weapon types. That was not the case with captured weapons. That was why captured weapons were sorted away from the ‘decision mat’ in front of John and the ‘keeper bucket’ to his right.
Capture weapon casings and receivers were generally discarded. However, some of their internal components were close enough to be used or contained parts that could be converted or used directly. But that would require a lot of very delicate and complicated work.
John found parts for the civilian guard force weapons. These went in the next priority set of piles. He separated the receivers, coils, casings, barrels, guts; loose trigger parts, and magazines, into age, manufacturer, and model.
John was pleased to find many parts for his preferred weapons which were military-grade weapons. How it was that those parts ‘found their way’ into a civilian resale shop would have probably made some good campfire stories. They were most likely sold by brigands, deserters, or grifters. But the pieces and parts were there, and that pleased John infinitely, like finding an old friend after years of separation.
The nicest thing about the military-grade weapons parts John found in the tangle was that they were standardized. The last three Emperors of the Chroynos Dynasty had a thing about standardized parts for military weapons. Specific centrally controlled designs evolved slowly and with even more tightly regimented quality control between manufacturers, then their control over the design refinements. The result was that parts for weapons had remained relatively consistent for well over one hundred years, and while changes happened slowly, they improved efficiencies but remained relatively compatible.
The Chroynos Dynasty did a few things really well. They were really good at producing and distributing power utilities. And they were even better at designing, licensing, controlling, and hunting down infringers on their patented designs. The ‘Design Division’ was almost as ruthless in hunting down and destroying their enemies as the Military Corporation was itself at waging war. The meticulous and ruthless Thomys Prometheon saw to it that ‘Design Division’ was as efficient and uncompromising as he was himself.
The power utility distribution network and the Design Division Corporation were both imperial-wide ‘sole vendors’, in the case of Design Division no one was allowed to broach their properties. The power utility allowed small producers on fringe worlds but still owned the distribution infrastructure. Once the world became large enough to notice they moved in a fusion reactor system, with their distribution network and massive fuel-cheap capabilities quickly bought out or crushed the competition. Both corporations were wholly owned by the Chroynos Family. The Military Command Corporation was tightly held by the family too. The Ground Forces Corporation, Space Forces Corporation, Home Guard Corporation, and Ground Support Corporation were all owned in minority positions by the ‘Family’, but in majority by the Military Command Corporation. So there really was no difference. The meticulous order of ownership just established a Chain of Command. The system also ensured the ruling family’s ironclad control over the territories of the Empire.
Each corporation had a massive publicly held capitalization too, but the public’s massive capitalization still only amounted to forty percent. Since the public only controlled forty percent of the total and was twenty percent short of the Chroynos Family’s stake. No one could outvote them, nor could anyone countermand their decisions, concerning power generation, military decisions, or research and development.
At last, John shook the dirt and dead bugs out of the bottom of the plastic bin. The unexpected action drew the attention of the seated owner, who only shook his head and went back to whatever he was doing when John clapped the bin out on the edge of the counter. The countertop was now covered with neatly organized stacks and piles – all pieces and parts of similar weapons.
John methodically shuttled back and forth, up and down his assembly line picking the best conditioned and most recent components. While he moved, he was pulling pieces and parts here and there, and trying their fits. The owner would occasionally glance over to make sure John was not pocketing anything and was content seeing that junk was simply being rearranged with no harm so he returned to his business.
The first two hours passed quietly. But as the proprietor started finishing his project at his end of the counter, he began taking more and more interest in John’s project.
By the time the owner finally detached his bottom from the stool and rattled his bones down to visit where John was still standing, sorting, flipping, digging, assembling, and shuffling. He looked in his junk bin. His jaw dropped when he saw three complete if damaged gauss pistols in full form at the bottom of the bucket. “Tho’ I tol’ yu cain’ sell none worgin’!”
John realized his mistake. He immediately backpedaled and justified, “They do not work.” Pointing in turn into the bucket from one weapon to the next. “This one has a cracked barrel. This one has bad ignition coils. This one has no working trigger assembly and has a cracked magazine well. None of them work.”
The old man pointed at the partially assembled weapon in John’s hands and croaked, “Wud es ya-on nowh?”
John asked innocently, “This one?” Pulling the pieces and parts, he fell just shy of an outright lie, “This one is a mess; it looks like there are not all the pieces here for this one. It is short a few pieces of possible other parts from this and that, and these down and the end do not seem to have what is needed. The big problem is that the coils do not seem to fit this one good barrel. They fit all the broken ones. It is a shame really; it is almost in good shape otherwise.”
If the honor-bound and respectable man, whom he had been only seven months before had heard this ‘John Smith’ uttering such nonsense, he would have slapped himself silly. John felt the side of his mouth twitch in a smile that slipped out before he got it back under control.
The older man looked up with a raised eyebrow hardly believing what he was seeing, after all the years of collecting dust this junk not only took shape in this stranger’s hands but started to look lethal in a way John thought the owner had never imagined.
The old man was good at playing the fool.
John soothed, finally getting into the stupid games this required, “Don’t worry, none of these pistols I have assembled here will ever work again.” That was not technically a lie. None of them would work as they were ‘currently’ assembled. “They are all junk; they’re just scrap metal mostly. I could hand any one of these to a child and it would be perfectly safe. By the way, what time do you close?”
Surly at the late hour, the old man grumbled, in his raspy voice, “T’ree ‘ours ‘go…” still looking at the methodical piles and organization and back and forth to the bin and the old vendor knew there was no way they would ‘stay’ junk for long.
Thinking that this might go better if he played politics and soothingly offered, “Well in that case I need to make this worth your time. How many credits will you need for these four piles of junk?”
Scratching his dirty gray stubble, breathing past cracked teeth, with wide and age-faded but still canny eyes, “Vor ‘unred ab’ease.”
Feigning offense, John snapped, “Four Hundred!? That is sixteen hundred for four piles of metal! You know as well as I do that, I will work four months to make that kind of money!” John was starting to understand the concept of ‘haggling’, “None of them even work! I’ll give you eight!”
The wheezed laugh sounded more like a small dog being stepped on, “Es no jung ‘n you know i’d! D’welve.”
John rolled back on his heels and rocked a few times back and forth pretending to think. His purchases were going to be cheaper than he thought, but he did not want to let that insight slip. John brought twenty-four hundred credits, but he could not let the other guy in the negotiations know that.
His folded money had small bills on the outside, so there was no way the other could have known how deep the small bills ran.
John squinted his eyes and pretended to consider the purchase but thought about other items he would like since the price was already within his planned budget. “Add a maintenance kit, with extra cleaning oil, six standard Gauss pistol power supplies with two rechargers, a thousand rounds of Titanium plated Iridium standard armor piercing rounds, five hundred anti-personnel Iridium fragmentation rounds, a side adjustable hip holster with belt, and a right-hand draw under arm cross draw or preferably an ambidextrous shoulder holster, twenty standard fifty round magazines, a conceal container for the rounds, top end ‘scanless’ pouches for the twenty magazines, a case for the ‘junk’ I just bought, and you have a deal, in cash, right now, small bills.” John peeled off about half of the bills from the wad in his pocket with his right hand and counted them in his pocket.
The owner laughed. The price was music to his ears. He strolled into the back room to collect the advanced combat gear items he just ‘happened’ to have on hand.
John wondered how often the old buzzard had this exact same conversation during the course of a normal week. And how many other ‘boxes of junk’ parts he had hidden around the back storeroom.
John needed to remember the location of this shop for future resupply.
Thank You!
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