“Agreed. It’s like they’re just everyday civilians who happen to have a gun and a badge and think that makes them hardcore enough for this kind of stuff,” grumbled Holland as the skiff reached the last section of the dock that was useable as a mooring. “They’re good at pushing around working stiffs, but these downspire gangers are out of their league.”
“Cor-sec is bringing up reinforcements to fortify this area so they can prep it as a salvage hub,” Patrick observed as he and Holland helped Samuel stagger off of the skiff and across the dock towards the beachhead.
“So, we’ll be moving on down the line, eh?” mumbled Samuel as his comrades lay him down on a stretcher next to Ben, who sat upright against a bullet-riddled flak board with his left arm in a pressure sleeve.
“Yeah, we’re getting rotated to that FOB we built in the metro hub two levels up for a few days of R & R while command decides which pit of hell they want us to clean out next,” laughed Ben as he looked over Samuel’s various wounds, “But I’m thinking you’re probably going to sleep through most of that.”
Samuel didn’t answer, the painkillers finally wrapping him in their warm embrace and ferrying him into a blank numbness, far from any tentacles or foul lakes.
5. FOB SPECTER
District 12 was one of the many uniform hab-blocks that circled the outer ring of the Vorhold spire city, which provided housing for commuters who worked at the various industrial complexes that comprised the inner circle of the spire.
Vorhold, like most other spire cities, was constructed like a giant teardrop, frozen upon impact with solid ground. The base of it was circular, made up of four concentric urban circles, with the buildings of each circle rising higher and higher towards the center. At the exact apex of the city was a gigantic spire, hence the name of the urban planning style across mapped space, where management and the elites worked and played. Most spire cities in mapped space were exceptionally old, and generally considered an archaic way of designing cities, as it created a physical and ever-present reminder for anyone in the city as to who held the power and who did not.
Spire cities were relics of a more brutal age, when the mega-corporations were still struggling to dominate their citizenry in a somewhat overt manner.
The general idea was that by witnessing the lavish lifestyles of the elites and living in the looming shadow of their mighty spires, the common citizenry would keep their heads down, keep their mouths shut, and work harder to achieve that distant dream.
While there were plenty of corporate worlds that contained spire cities, most of them, like Vorhold, were shadows of what they once were. They had been allowed to slowly degrade as more and more elites simply moved off world to distant resort planets or paradise ships, allowing their spires to be bought up by what passed for the middle class in their respective corporate cultures.
Most corporations in the modern age had realized that flaunting the wealth and power of the elites generated more resentment and dissent than it inspired compliance and increased productivity. The elites lived a life generally removed from the common citizenry, who now labored towards simpler goals.
Vorhold had been one of the last true spire cities. The elites of Vorhold Ventures had gambled the majority of their vast fortunes on a number of faulty investments and speculations, rapidly finding themselves with tremendous debts. Vorhold corporate culture was no different, in one respect, from the rest of the mega-corps. Common citizens were prevented by regulation and taxation from owning much in the way of private property. Their homes, vehicles, devices, services, and medical devices were all leased from their feudal corporate masters. Everything, even the grimy depths of downspire and the abyss of deepspire, were owned, according to the documentation, by Vorhold Ventures.
When the Vorhold elites began to fall behind on their debt repayments, many of the creditor corporations formed an alliance and waged a devastating economic war against Vorhold Ventures. Battle fleets created pickets to police the shipping lanes and enforce severe trade embargoes while they covertly encouraged and perhaps, even bribed Red List pirate ships to prey upon the handful of relief ships and smugglers who attempted to use the alternate routes.
It did not take long for Vorhold Ventures to accept defeat and begin selling off assets to cover the debts. The grim truth behind corporate culture was revealed as the elites bailed themselves out at the expense of the common citizens upon whose shoulders they had risen in the first place.
Grotto Corporation’s voracious appetite for raw materials was notorious throughout mapped space and they seized the opportunity Vorhold presented with savage intensity. Grotto Corporation was not a company that thrived on innovation, or speculation, but upon hard assets. This meant that Grotto rarely had the kind of liquid assets that many of the other mega- corporations held, though it was by far one of the most robust companies in existence.
Payment by Grotto to the elites of Vorhold was in the form of money, ships, and properties off world. The elites then turned and liquidated all of those hard assets in a matter of months, which allowed them to pay off their debts and leave Vorhold to its new master, Grotto Corporation.
With little more than a few boardroom meetings and some signatures, the entire future of the spire city and its entire population was sold off. The elites abandoned the city to take early retirement elsewhere while the common people and even the militant cor-sec awaited their fate.
Grotto Corporation now owned everything in the spire city, from the tallest building to the lowest sewage tunnel, and it meant to get a return on its investment. The entire city was to be depopulated, demolished, and what did not get re-used elsewhere in the Grotto empire would be sold as scrap.
The forward operations base was by no means comfortable, though when compared to the rotten shadows of the downspire sprawl that surrounded it, most of the soldiers stationed there had come to consider it rather pleasant. In the ledgers of Reaper Command, which led the joint action between the former cor-sec troops and the salvage marines, the FOB was logged as FOB D12/2. However, for the locals to whom this was now a home away from home, it was Specter.
Once the joint forces cleared the metro hub beneath District 12 they had found themselves inundated with refugees from downspire. All but the most ferocious and stubborn of the gangers and clansmen had been making their way upwards since news of the city’s takeover. Though cor-sec had warned Reaper Command that the population of downspire was unknown, no one was ready for just how many thousands had come streaming up from the depths all over the spire city.
They were the shadow population of the spire. Castaways from the corporate society that had, one way or the other, left them so desperate that they sought the underworld. To the Reapers, the refugees had seemed like ghosts, mere hollowed out shells of who they had once been. Life in downspire was hard, violent, and usually short.
Perhaps, thought Samuel, as he looked up from his drink to take in the crowded squalor of the base, this was why the slang name for the base had come so naturally. To walk the streets of District 12 one would never notice that just a few clicks downwards there was another world rotting beneath one’s feet.
Samuel sat alone, as had been his custom for the last two weeks, sipping his one drink before retiring to his bunk for the evening sleep cycle. With no natural light present, the Reapers had to rely on their devices to give them any sense of time. The first week of R & R had been scheduled, and that had passed Samuel by in a blurred cycle of fever and medication as his body fought against the myriad of infections he’d picked up while fighting in the murky soup of the lake.