The rest of the team arrived a few minutes after Trace sent the message to Monroe. Unfortunately, no one had any clue on what to do about the basement area. All they could do was hide the bodies and hope for the best.

  A short while later, the bodies had been disposed of and each person had hopped inside of a truck. There were a couple of large semis with attached trailers, but the majority of the vehicles were large box trucks.

  “Should we place any explosives here?” Mel-Gear asked before they drove away.

  “I’d like to,” Trace replied, as he tried to scratch his neck, but only got the back of his helmet. “But we only have enough for the warehouses.”

  She clicked her tongue, but nodded. “It’s a shame, but I understand.”

  Trace was driving one of the semis to the warehouse when he received a call from Monroe. “Let’s hit the first warehouse for now and grab as much as we can. Then we can use the bulk of the explosives on the second warehouse.”

  “That works for me. Just let Kenshin know. He and I can work together to eliminate everyone inside the place as quietly as possible.”

  They parked a block away from the first warehouse. Trace and Kenshin left the others behind and quickly approached the warehouse. During the time they had taken to hide the bodies, Trace had taken the opportunity to loot their ammo and refill all the magazines he was carrying. It was a good thing that the ten-millimeter caliber was so common.

  “Do you want to go in together, or do the same as before with one of us handling the front and the other the back or side?” Trace asked the more experienced edger.

  Kenshin grinned. “Let’s do the same thing as before. Except this time, I’ll take the front, and you go in through the back.”

  Trace switched his suit from night camouflage mode to active stealth and took off at a jog. He couldn’t go too fast, as the paint on the suit wouldn’t be able to keep up with his movements. Even the jog was pushing it and only worked because the area was mostly dark. In a properly lit area at his current speed, he would have been fully visible.

  A minute later, he was at the rear entrance of the warehouse, not having spotted any cameras on his way there.

  He sent a message to Kenshin, letting him know he was in position, and cracked open the door. Seeing no one nearby, he slipped through the opening and immediately scanned the area. There were two people wandering around the perimeter, one on each side of the warehouse, both inside. Five more people were sitting in the middle section, playing a game of some sort.

  These gangsters really didn’t seem to be all that worried about getting attacked in the middle of the night.

  Kenshin handled one of the people on the perimeter, while Trace took care of the other one. After that, they worked together and removed the five in the middle.

  With everyone eliminated, the first of the box trucks was brought into the warehouse. There were a couple of loaders that they used to transfer the items from the warehouse into the truck.

  In a little over an hour and a half, they had filled each of the trucks and the three trailers.

  All told, they had emptied a little under half of the warehouse. More than they had originally hoped to get by quite a bit. However, now that the warehouse was emptier than expected, they could get away with using fewer explosives. In this case, they would still plant four of them, and then the extra two would be placed back in the old logistics building.

  At the second warehouse, Trace carefully snuck in and placed each of the explosives without ever needing to take anyone out.

  Sunlight was just beginning to appear on the distance horizon when Trace rejoined the rest of the group. The trucks had all been parked several streets away, but Monroe and the others were waiting for him on a nearby rooftop. They wanted to be near enough to see the fireworks when all the explosives went off.

  “Are you ready for this?” Trace asked, pulling his helmet off with a relieved sigh. His hair was soaked with sweat, and though they couldn’t see it, so was the rest of his body. He really needed to add some sort of ventilation or cooling system to the suit. It would help extend how long he could keep the active stealth system going, but more importantly, doing so would keep him from overheating.

  The paint had sealed the suit almost completely, and it almost didn’t breathe at all.

  Pulling out three detonators, he handed one to Monroe and the other to RapidStrike, who was standing on the other side of him. The three shared a glance and then pressed their respective buttons.

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  The two warehouses went up in flames, creating craters where they had once stood. Farther away, the building with the parking lot exploded as well, collapsing everything onto the basement below.

  “Well, that went well,” Trace said after they had been standing there for a couple of minutes. “Monroe, I have a recording for you to add to the file. Take a look at it and edit the video as needed, then send everything off to Revlock as we discussed earlier.”

  Everyone grinned maliciously, as the plan was all coming together. The last part was sending everything they gathered on the gang to Revlock. The job broker would then disseminate the information to everyone else, edgers, gangs, corpos, and the worthless police. By that time tomorrow, everyone who even remotely mattered would know that the blood-dogs had worked with the scavs.

  A short time later, they had each of the box trucks and semis parked inside Trace’s warehouse. The place was cramped, and he would have liked to take a few of them down below, except he couldn’t. The Vinna-Kwoi personnel carrier and all the freezers were right out in the open. Those were items that they needed to keep hidden from everyone, not in their closed circle.

  The box trucks and semis were nice, but none of them had been customized to the same level as Monroe’s was. These were all meant for short trips around the city and didn’t even have sleeper cabs. Whereas Monroe’s semi had been modified for extended trips.

  The money would be divided between them all once everything was sold. Something that they would all be responsible for helping with due to the large amount that they had managed to get away with. Monroe and Trace would be working with Sevorah and their contacts from the black market as much as possible.

  However, there were three semi-trailers full of equipment and five box trucks. That was a lot for a couple of people to purchase, even if they were only the middlemen. Everything needed to be unloaded and cataloged as well, so they actually knew what they had gotten. At the time, they had simply loaded everything in sight, paying no attention to what it was.

  That said, doing all of that could wait until later. It was time for all of them to get some sleep.

  Monroe slipped into the back of his semi and onto the bed there. Meanwhile, Trace went into his apartment and stripped out of the stealth with a sigh of relief. His body was soaked in sweat, and he left the suit open to dry out while he toweled off and then fell onto his bed, asleep before his head even hit the pillow.

  ***

  Trace yawned as he stumbled out of his apartment and into the noisy area outside. It was only noon, but already everyone was back and hard at work unloading the trucks. A line of equipment had been carefully placed against one wall of the warehouse. Monroe and GreaseStain were working together to lift the heavier items out of the current box truck when Trace found them.

  “Haven’t you people ever heard of sleep?” Since moving into his own place and off the streets, Trace had discovered that it was something he was rather fond of. “It’s only noon, and we got back here at what, six, six-thirty?”

  “Around there, yeah.” Monroe agreed. “We need to get everything cataloged though, one of the guys we talked to at the black market before already got back to me with a list of what they’re willing to buy and what they’re willing to pay.”

  His eyes snapped open, all sense of tiredness fading in an instant. “Wait, you’re saying that they already have buyers lined up?”

  The large man nodded.

  “What are you waiting for? Get back to work, you lazy bums!” Trace yelled good-naturedly, jumping into the back of the box truck to find something he could carry out.

  They really should have grabbed one of the loaders as well.

  While the team was busy working inside the warehouse and staying out of sight, Revlock was doing his best to set a portion of the city on fire. The leader of the blood-dogs had known what he was getting himself into when he decided to work with the scavs, and yet he had still done it. No one liked scavs, no matter how far gone mentally the members of a gang were, or their specific ideologies that always held true. The blood-dogs had broken the code, and now everyone was coming against them.

  The territory they had claimed and all their holdings would be burned to the ground. Then, once they were done, the remains of the gang would be scattered in the wind, and they would be forgotten.

  It was one of the few times that someone would ever see an edger working alongside a corpo who was working beside a gangster that was then standing next to another rival gang member. Some things transcended all rivalries or other allegiances, and this was one of them.

  Scavs were a plague. You did not work with them, and if you bought something from them you fracking better well hide it.

  Regardless, the team who had originally set everything in motion missed all of the excitement. They were busy working through the day and into the night, unloading everything.

  By the time they came up for air and had finished, it was ten o’clock at night and they had already missed everything. Revlock sent a recording to both Trace and Monroe, who then forwarded it on to the rest of the team. Together, they watched the gang get decimated in solemn silence.

  “It’s probably best that we weren’t there,” SpitFire said somewhat distantly after the video had finished. “We might have brought attention to ourselves somehow if we had gone, and I don’t know about you, but I can do without that.”

  RapidStrike, who had been cataloguing everything, nodded. “We got our revenge on them last night, anyway. This event was for everyone else.” With that, he sent the completed file to everyone, a solid half of which had already been marked for sale to the black-market contacts.

  Trace whistled in appreciation. “That is a big list. Both what we have, and what they are buying. We should see if they want anything else.” He bent over backward, cracking his back with a sigh of relief. “That can be done tomorrow though. Right now, I just want to crawl back into my bed and finish getting that sleep I didn’t finish getting because you all woke me up earlier with your racket.”

  Mel-Gear tossed a sandwich wrapper at him with a grin, and they all began to leave. They had done some good, and more importantly, this quick job had scored them a lot of credits. Far more than they originally thought it would.

  Inside his apartment, Trace placed the stealth suit on his worktable and quickly cleaned it out. Tomorrow he would begin working on some improvements to the suit. It desperately needed a cooling solution. If he had tried wearing it during the day, he would have passed out from heat stroke. There was also the matter of extra ammunition. He had more that he wanted to add, but that was all he would likely be able to manage with this first iteration of the suit. Everything else would need to go in the second version.

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