The Vladivostok Gauntlet by Olivier Gagnon

Author:Olivier Gagnon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Catalyst Game Labs
Published: 2013-09-16T06:00:00+00:00

They waited until nightfall to make their way to the Stalin Industrial Complex, where Soren said she had stashed the stolen artifact. The Stalin Industrial Complex, a district to the northeast of the city, comprised warehouses and factories where workers toiled in pitiful conditions. It was usually quiet at night. The night sky, illuminated by floodlights, was tinted a brownish hue, like muddy water. No star shone through the haze; industrial concerns eclipsed their light. Corporate security kept a watchful eye everywhere, usually more on the lookout for tired workers taking an unauthorized break than outside troublemakers. The Vory didn’t cause trouble here. Tails between their legs, they recognized the dominance of an alpha male whose ferocity made theirs look childish: the megacorporation. The factories here churned out bio-material for Evo’s augmentation lines, the by-product of which was fine nanoparticles and other misunderstood compounds, an unholy stew of unregulated hazardous materials. Many of the workers here developed what they called “Stalin’s Cough,” a deep hack that conjured up thick material of a very unhealthy color and eventually led to total pulmonary shutdown. No doctors had studied the condition. No articles about it could be found about it in medical journals. That would require Evo to acknowledge that something was going on. And to care about it. They did one thing, though—they supplied replacement lungs and tracheae to the worst of the sufferers and only garnished five percent of their salary for pretty much the rest of their life as compensation.

Yuri was intimately familiar with all of this. His mother, raising him by herself at that point, had talked of salvation when the Complex went up. The factories were hiring, with decent salaries and even benefits, more than anything a broken-down single mother could ever have expected. A few years later, she was little more than an indentured slave, working to pay for replacement organs. While most obliterated their minds with BTLs, Yuri’s mom was an old-fashioned sort and self-medicated with alcohol. He heard she died while he was in the service. They didn’t let him go back to attend her funeral. He still didn’t know what happened to the body. He preferred to think she’s buried somewhere, even if in some sort of unmarked grave, as that was better than the alternatives.

Soren was being dodgy about explaining exactly what she’d stolen, despite her recent honesty towards him. She wasn’t lying to his face anymore, but she wasn’t exactly being forthright either. That made Yuri uneasy, but at this point the only way out was through. They had borrowed a vehicle from the neo-anarchists, a jury-rigged car that was a Frankenstein of parts. They parked as close as they could get to the building Soren indicated, a large three-story warehouse. While recently built, like everything else in the Complex, it looked like something from the turn of last century. It featured a cracked and chipped brick-and-mortar outer shell, with piles of leftover construction materials encircling its docking bays. It wasn’t quite abandoned, as it offered the cheapest storage rates in the entire district.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.