The drive back to New Denver had been… interesting. The route they had been forced to take led to them running into multiple groups of raiders. Working together, using Monroe’s powerful assault rifle and Trace’s revolver, they were able to scare them off each time.

  The guns were damaging to the raiders, but unlike before, these groups were smart enough to turn and run before becoming incapacitated.

  They arrived late, and Monroe slept in the RV portion of the semi while it was parked in the warehouse.

  The next morning, Ko came over with Sevorah at Trace’s request.

  Working together, they were able to find some planks that could be used to unload Black Betty. With the van out of the way, the crates and their labels were revealed to Sevorah and Ko at last.

  The trained medic had them pull out the crates of medical supplies and pharmaceutical drugs. She ignored the supplies for the moment, and looked at the crates with the drugs, her brows drawing close in anger.

  “Take off the lids from those two crates, please?”

  Ko looked closer at the names printed on the crate in confusion, not recognizing them.

  Using his new arm, Trace ripped the lid off the crate without a second thought. Next to him, Monroe did the same with the other crate.

  “What sort of pharmaceutical drugs are these?” Trace asked, opening a white box, and pulling out a glass bottle with a thick, viscous liquid inside.

  Sevorah retrieved her own bottle with a different liquid and label from the crate Monroe had opened. “These aren’t medicinal pharmaceutical drugs,” She told them angrily.

  “Huh? What do you mean?” Trace didn’t understand.

  “You don’t mean?” Ko rubbed her metallic throat and Sevorah nodded.

  “That’s right, these are the sort of drugs that the corporations like to play around with.”

  Trace dropped the bottle like it had scalded his cyberware hand. “Are any of these useful, or are all of them, you know, bad?”

  Sevorah rolled her eyes. “The only way to know for sure is to go through them all. I imagine at least half are good, but don’t forget all poisons can also be a medicine.”

  Ko reached down and ripped the manifest off the lid of the crate closest to her. She handed it to her mentor, who began slowly reviewing the names.

  “I… don’t recognize most of these names,” She admitted after a few moments. “I’ll need to look up what they are back at the clinic. Is there a manifest on the second crate?”

  There was, and a moment later, both of them were stored in her pocket for later.

  Working together, they carried the two crates out from the back of the trailer and put them in an empty corner of the warehouse. With those out of the way for the moment, they moved on to the remaining crates.

  Sevorah and Ko were obviously most interested in the crates of medical supplies.

  They grabbed the crate manifests right off the top, this time around instead of having them rip the lids off.

  Monroe muscled the crates with those items closer to the opening of the trailer, while Trace gleefully headed to the crates with the tech hardware. He had been waiting days to crack these things open, and he couldn’t wait to see what was inside them. Sure, logically, he knew that whatever they contained would not only be out of date but also already on the open market. Knowing that did little to stifle the excitement he felt at opening what amounted to giant boxed presents.

  Any company that was worth anything already had its own couriers who transported their private stock. The only items being sent through people like the previous owner were goods going to shops and places that wished to remain mostly anonymous.

  Which meant that everything in these crates was likely something he had already seen on shelves in the past. However, that didn’t mean that he had been able to afford them simply because he had seen them.

  Unlike the others, he ignored the manifest sheet on the lids and directly pried the top off. He was eager to see what was inside. He could go through the list later to see what it called everything.

  At least, that was the plan.

  It went out the window almost right away. The first of the tech hardware crates had been purposely mislabeled.

  “Hey, Monroe,” He called out, staring down into the crate. “You know how you said I could have whatever was in the tech crates?”

  The big man grunted in acknowledgment as he shoved one of the medical crates down the length of the trailer.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  “In the future, you might not want to make such promises without first seeing what’s actually in the crates.”

  “Huh, why? What did you find?” He cracked his back and came over to join him. “Holy frack,” Monroe whispered, the softly uttered words somehow still producing a bass-filled rumble. “There must be dozens of rebreather masks in this crate and extra filters for all of them.”

  These were much smaller, personalized rebreather units than the ones that had been fitted to the suits they had been wearing. This style of mask was the sort that people who actually lived in the badlands or other areas with poor air quality favored. Compared to the cost of his cyberware arm, the units were cheap. Most people did not make the sort of money that an edger stumbled their way into. As a result, a black market had developed around the things.

  Even modules were expensive, but the prices for most of those were relatively reasonable because everyone used them.

  “What should we do with them?” Trace asked as he pulled one of the masks out.

  Monroe shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t have much experience in dealing with the black market.”

  Trace placed the mask back in the crate and grabbed the lid, putting it back on top. “Do you at least know where it is?”

  Monroe nodded.

  “Alright, then we’ll put these to the side for now. In a couple of days, we’ll go visit the black market and check out the place for ourselves and see what we can learn. Maybe we can figure out how to sell them then.”

  “Sounds good to me.” The large man agreed readily. “What’s in the other tech hardware crates?”

  They pushed the first crate to the side and moved too quickly to open the remaining three crates. The second one also contained smuggled goods inside. There were weapon mods, pellets of packed gunpowder, bullets, casings, and reloader units.

  The last two crates, on the other hand, contained actual legitimate goods with items that he could use in some form. There were even a few pieces that he spotted which would help him revamp the railgun, and possibly make the recently destroyed heat-sink even better.

  Eventually, all the crates save the two ingredient crates had been removed from the trailer.

  Ko studied the manifest papers with a critical eye, before handing them to Trace and Monroe, who were examining the inside of the crate. “I suppose you can sell them to a store or a restaurant?”

  The contents of those two crates were legit, in other words.

  “What about the medical supplies? Anything useful in those crates?” Trace asked her.

  She nodded. “No equipment, obviously. However, they were absolutely packed with PlugDocs, Blood-gels, different stims, some material to grow synth skin.” She hesitated and began to grin. “And most importantly, there were several boxes of general healing stimulants.” She laughed and clapped her hands giddily.

  Generally, healing stims had to be specifically modified or created for a person. This process ensured that the stimulant would be at its most effective, with little of the stimulant going to waste. The initial testing process was expensive, but after that, creating the specific healing stims only cost around a thousand credits apiece.

  General healing stimulants, on the other hand, were designed to work with anyone. As a result, there was always going to be some of the healing stimulants going to waste. That meant it would never be as effective as the tailor-made version. That was one of the most obvious downsides to using them.

  The other was the cost. Designing a healing stimulant that would be even somewhat effective for the general populace was incredibly expensive.

  It was much cheaper to build it around a single person. That way, they didn’t need to include all the pointless extra items needed to make the stimulant effect for everyone else. When dealing with healing stims, random gene mutations, and body disorders, all needed to be taken into consideration.

  That meant the general healing stims had a price tag of between eight and ten thousand credits.

  Trace blinked in dumbfounded amazement, his brain taking several seconds to catch up. “Um, uh, I think I’m going to need some of those for my first aid kits.” He muttered weakly.

  She had said several boxes of general healing stims. If he assumed that on the very conservative side, there were only six stims to a box. It would still be enough to pay back everything he owed Sevorah and leave her in his debt. Something told him that the boxes weren’t single-stack affairs either.

  Sevorah ginned at their stupefied expressions. “I think we’ll be able to come to a nice agreement over the materials in those crates.”

  ***

  Trace opened the warehouse doors and waved everyone goodbye. They had spent the better part of the morning going through and moving the crates. He would begin moving items over to the clinic later, using his truck.

  Right then, Monroe was taking the semi out to get looked at and fully repaired. He would come back later to pick up Black Betty. The trailer would stay in the warehouse for the time being.

  As the warehouse door was closing, he spotted the single drone that was still around lift off a nearby roof and fly away. Glancing down at the short-sleeved shirt he was wearing and the obvious onyx-black cyberware arm attached to his shoulder, he barely held back a curse.

  He had forgotten about the drone during the time they were gone and hadn’t even been thinking about the need to cover the arm that morning.

  Rushing inside the apartment, he threw himself onto the computer chair. He scooted over to the pile of materials beside the 3D printer and quickly squished them into marbles. Using a cold soda as lubricant, he downed one after another until his stomach felt unpleasantly heavy.

  “What’s wrong? You seem to be panicking for some reason?” Deckard asked, his avatar spinning around on his own computer chair.

  “I think the drone Vinna-Kwoi left outside the warehouse just spotted my arm,” He explained hurriedly. “I need to do the ‘Overload’ upgrade quickly and hope it changes the look of my arm some. All I can do is hope their drone didn’t get a truly great look at my arm.”

  They continued to talk, while Trace waited for the material in his stomach to get absorbed by the nanites. Once ten minutes had passed, he pulled up the G.H.O.S.T. System menu and navigated to the option he wanted.

  Selecting ‘Overload’ and then his arm, he waited for one of the inevitable messages to appear. He wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘Overload and its functions are related to experimental technology developed by Koarden Enterprises. Atomites are intensely volatile in nature, and not only does their creation, but working with them involves an extreme amount of energy. Due to this, all wireless energy receivers located within the user’s body will be temporarily reallocated to this task.

  Time to completion Estimated 2 Hrs. 30 Mins

  1 Atomite Unit, 2 Special Nanite Units, and -1 Normal Nanite Units will be consumed during this process.

  The user’s consciousness will now enter a slumber state as the Overload upgrade is performed.’

  Trace had only just finished reading the message when his eyes slammed shut, and he fell limply from his computer chair.

  https://www.amazon.com/author/joshuakern

  

  https://joshuakernbooks.com/