Chương 78: CDM 2, Chapter 14: Walkthrough

"Enforcer Gray, to what do I owe the pleasure?" Enforcer Grensmith sat behind his desk with dozens of columns of folders and binders stacked on the floor around him.

"I had questions about the new culling policy, and Enforcer Chapman said I should ask you."

"I can try. What's on your mind?"

"How long will this settler leveling program last?" Grensmith wobbled his head, thinking.

"Six months is the plan, but I wouldn't be surprised if it went for a year or more."

"How often will settlers be invited to culls?"

"One out of every five crawlers." Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What complete and utter bullshit. I left. I got out. When would it stop following me?

"Is something the matter?" Grensmith asked.

"No, sir. That was all I needed." Before I could turn away, he changed the subject.

"How are you liking being on the RAID project?"

"The tech is interesting," I answered.

"Troubleshooting the weird little problems we're finding along the way is kind of fun."

"What's your sense of the crawler and harvester reaction to the drones?"

"They absolutely despise it." Grensmith chuckled.

"That's what I'm seeing too. Anyone who does site inspections, really."

"Do you think RAID will become the norm after the pilot?" He nodded.

"The citation revenue will be hard for the brass to walk away from. If the hardware keeps getting cheaper like folks say, we'll probably see more of it instead of less."

"That makes sense. Well, that's all I needed. Thank you for your time."

"Don't be a stranger, Enforcer Gray. Appreciate you stopping by." My phone buzzed on my way back to the RAID room. Beth sent me a selfie of her and Leah posing with unreasonably large waffles.

"Thank you, Dor. <3" I needed that. Knowing Beth's life was a little bit better because of my efforts was fulfilling, but I felt the distance between us widening instead of closing. She was the only one who could really understand why Isaiah's arguing would upset me so much, but I couldn't talk to her. Life was hard enough for her already, and piling my problems on top of hers wouldn't help.

"Glad you're having fun! Love the pics." Nathan bent over to fiddle with the lockbox hanging on the door.

"Why are these things always the biggest pieces of shit?" he grumbled.

"There. Finally." He removed the key and unlocked the door, holding it open to let me enter first. When he followed, he flicked a light switch. The sun was still out, but only barely. Between the overcast sky and the shorter winter days, early evening got dark quickly.

"This whole floor is zoned commercial," Nathan explained.

"The last business in here was a thrift shop, but that was ten years or so ago, according to the realtor. She says rezoning is usually a pain. This spot is part of some revitalization zone, though, so there's less red tape if we do want to use this as a big common area. We'd need to figure out what to do with the big-ass windows in terms of privacy, but I have ideas."

"It looks even bigger in person."

"When a place is gutted like this, you end up with a lot less space when you're done than you'd think. We'll still have plenty, don't get me wrong, but it fills up quick when you start hanging drywall."

"Do we have to go back outside to go upstairs?" We saw an upstairs apartment access when we came in, presumably for tenants once upon time.

"Nope," he answered.

"There are stairs in the back too. I'll show you." The sound of our feet scuffing off of the dirty floor reminded me of creeping through ruins with Megan.

"This backroom they built is pretty janky," Nathan explained.

"None of this is load-bearing, so we can tear it out." I followed Nathan up a narrow set of stairs to the second floor.

"Divvying up daylight will be tricky," he said, gesturing at the windows at the far side of the room, facing the street.

"It's easier to cut the space up to have a front and a back, but then only the front dudes get decent windows. The back ones give you a view of jack shit."

"I'll take the back then." Nathan moved to the center of the room.

"The brewery you and Megs visited gave me an idea. I want to cut up through the ceiling to make an indoor balcony-type thing. We need the feng shui or whatever of opening up the space a bit more. If this is meant to be a proper guildhouse, then it should be easier to see or hear what's going on elsewhere. Otherwise, we're all just locked in our own apartments, you know?"

"Yeah."

"If we decide to keep the bottom floor for ourselves, I'd run that all the way down. Now, if we're cool with the loft vibe, we can leave most everything exposed and save ourselves a few bucks on drop ceilings. I dig the exposed brick look, but you feel how drafty this bitch is?"

"I do."

"That's no good. I want to get some legit insulation in here, make it cozy as hell." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"And the bones are good?" I asked.

"There's no major problems?"

"The roof is shit, so that needs fixed. All the other stuff that you'd worry about, like plumbing and electrical, is up to us to put in, so if it sucks, it's our fault." Nathan took me to the third floor next. It looked identical to the second, but he seemed to enjoy giving the tour, so I followed along. Nathan turned to me with his hands on his hips.

"We should buy this, right?"

"I know you're excited, and I agree it could become something cool, but I don't have the money, man."

"Don't worry about that."

"How do I not worry about that?"

"I've been saving up, and I've got some money my mom left me. You can pitch in on the mortgage payment each month, and we'd be square."

"Thank you, but I can't accept that. I'd pay you rent, but I don't deserve to own any part of this. With what you're describing, I don't know that I could afford the rent even."

"We've been over this, dude," Nathan said, "like hundreds of times now. Friendship isn't a balance sheet where everyone has to contribute the exact same amount in the exact same way." If such a balance sheet existed, Nathan's contributions would far outpace my own. I didn't want to think about how much he covered and paid for over the years, but in reality, I thought about it all the time. I was a charity case who took more than he ever gave, and that made me feel like a bad person. I forced a smile.

"You're right," I admitted.

"I didn't mean to bring the moment down. This place is really, really cool. Your plan for it sounds awesome too." Nathan smiled back.

"The realtor says we should expect closing to take sixty to ninety days, then I've got to do a bunch of hoop-jumping for permits and all that jazz. I'm stoked that we're doing this, man."

"I'm pumped too."

"We might have to fight Megan about the color palette," he added, turning to take in the room again.

"Well, you will have to fight her on it. I already know I'd crumble, so help me, Dorion, you're my only hope."

"If you put the whole costume on and ask, I'll do it."

"You're banking on me not having it anymore," Nathan replied.

"If you think for a second I threw those giant hair buns away, you're out of your mind."

"You actually have them still?"

"Megan makes me wear them at least once a week." I shook my head and turned toward the stairs.

"I don't need to hear this." He appeared over my shoulder to whisper in my ear.

"Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"

"I'm not listening."

"Into the garbage chute, flyboy!" My walk down the stairs approached the speed of a jog. Nathan pursued.

"You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought!" I stopped dead and turned. He was five steps up, grinning like an asshole and wiggling an eyebrow. Sighing, I asked, "If I admit defeat, will you explain how I escape something like this in the future? Like, teach me to counter whatever this was."

"I don't know where you get your delusions, laser brain."

"You wanted to see me?" I stood in the doorway of Enforcer Chapman's office at the start of another CDM shift.

"Come in. You can leave it open." She gestured at the empty chair in front of her desk. I sat.

"You took a cull with a settler the other night." Any will I had to fight what was coming drained out of me, taking my strength as well as my entire capacity to care. This was bullshit. I tried my best, and I screwed it up, but if that was my best, what was there to be upset about? I could have only done worse. I wasn't capable of succeeding in this system.

"He informed his CDM contact that one of our people gave him a ride when his tire was flat," Chapman continued.

"He was grateful and wanted us to know that, so good work. Keeping the peace until this is behind us is the best path to take. Thank you for supporting that." I waited for her to continue. She didn't.

"Is that everything?"

"Yes. Everyone thinks I'm unfair, but I have no problem praising something that's deserving."

"Uhh… Right. Yes. Thank you, ma'am."

"That was all I needed, Enforcer Gray. You're dismissed." On my way back to the RAID room, I reconstructed my confidence and my will to continue this job. Isaiah's pressure still pissed me off, but he could have torpedoed me with that call. Given my standing with Chapman, an irate settler could do a lot of damage if they wanted to, whether or not their complaints were fair. If I was supposed to be grateful he put in a good word with my boss, I wasn't. I couldn't be.

"Good morning, champ," Cortez said.

"Ready to babysit some robots?"

"Always."

"Overnight team claims they counted twenty-three cats. There's no way that's true, right?" I shrugged.

"Can't say I know a lot about the stray cat population in Pittsburgh."

"I bet they found a mom with some kittens. That would juice the count pretty good."

"Could be." Once my start-of-shift checklist was complete, I scrubbed back through recent reports of RAID monster sightings. These were automatically forwarded to the EPA now, and the occasional goblin appearance didn't seem out of the ordinary for them. Of the five we had so far, three were near known SOCs. That didn't sound all that remarkable to me either. My phone buzzed, and I dared to check it. Domonkos sent me a blurry picture of a white snake.

I was partway through typing a reply that was a gentler version of "... Okay?" when I stopped to look at the photo again. My sense of proportion was all wrong. Two figures in the corner looked up at the snake. Was it actually in the air? I couldn't make sense of it. Another photo came through.

"Oh shit," I said aloud. Cortez turned away from the drone monitors.

"Everything good?" I hid my screen.

"Yeah, sorry. It's nothing." But it was something. A very big something. The second image from Domonkos was better than the first. It was still grainy, and I suspect that was because his phone was older, but I could distinctly see a helicopter rising into the air with a white, snakelike creature dangling from straps below. The snake that looked a couple of feet long a moment ago was closer to 40 or 50 now that my sense of scale had adjusted. And it wasn't a snake. It had four legs.

They were small, making the body look like the Chinese interpretation of a dragon instead of a snake. I hope that comparison isn't too obscure, but if you haven't looked at Chinese art pre-gates, I highly recommend it. That was a ghost salamander. It had to be. Where the frost salamanders from the frost giant crisis resembled iguanas, ghost salamanders looked far more like the kind of salamander we found under rocks as kids. Long and slithery, like super-fast earthworms that sprouted dinky little legs.

I forwarded the photos to Megan and added my guess at what monster it was.

"I know the name but not much else. Guessing they're tough?"

"Uncommon C-ranked boss, sometimes appears in A or S as pets, kinda like the frost giants and their pets."

"Geez. Way to bury the lede."

"What?"

"I just looked them up, Dor. Are you freaking serious that one of those was in the caves? In the caves WITH US."

"You know as much as I do."

"wtf wtf wtf wtf"