The black market, or at least the one Monroe took him to, was located underneath the local tech market he had been to before. To the side of the oblong, bubble-shaped building was another entrance. This one was unguarded, save for the old-fashioned keypad and door that opened directly to an elevator.

  They rode the elevator down several floors, and once it opened, they were confronted by a squad of armed guards. They were checked over and then asked to keep all of their weapons in their holsters and sheathes during their time in the black market. If they were removed for any reason, outside of imminent danger, they would either be killed or tossed out and blacklisted from all locations.

  It was impossible to remove all possible weapons from an augmented person, so they didn’t even try. The best they could do was threaten them with death and permanent expulsion.

  They could remove the visible guns and knives from someone easily enough. How did you remove the mono-filament whips that someone like Ko had inside their fingers? Assuming you even detected them, that is. There were only a few limited options, and NetConnect control blockers had long since proven to be ineffective.

  This place was dangerous and operated on a sense of honor rarely found among those who visited these sorts of places. The black market was just too good a place to risk being barred from, and so they behaved. For the most part. Fists flew, and voices were raised all over the place. However, as long as they didn’t draw a weapon, or cross a certain line, then they were fine.

  It was a lot to take in, too much, if he was being honest. The noise was distracting, and the crowd of people seemed to press against his mind. Within moments, Trace found himself breathing faster than normal, his eyes darting left and right as his heart began to race.

  Monroe placed a hand on his shoulder, causing him to jump. “Hey, are you feeling alright? You don’t look so good.”

  Trace swallowed down some hot saliva, his stomach suddenly feeling nauseous. “No. This crowd, the noise, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed and sick at the moment.”

  Monroe looked around them, his brow raised speculatively. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a pair of earbuds and handed them to Trace. “Put these in. They’ll help filter out the extra noise for you. I wear them when I’m welding, and they help with the noise.”

  It took a moment, but the pressure that had been building in his head began to recede as the cacophony of voices receded. Trace sighed in relief and straightened, taking in deep breaths that in turn helped to settle his stomach.

  “Thanks for that.”

  “I didn’t know you had issues with crowds and noise,” Monroe said, opening a private call to him.

  “It comes and goes. I don’t usually, but then randomly, well, this will happen. The rest of the time, I’ll be fine.” He took a few more deep breaths and then shook his head. “Alright, let’s continue. Maybe, see if we can find me a pair of these earbuds at the same time.”

  The list of items they were looking for had continued to grow, unlike their credit balance. They needed to find someone to sell the rebreather masks to, preferably someone who would put a down payment on them at the same time. However, that was incredibly unlikely.

  They stayed together as they wandered the aisles, and it didn’t take Trace long to realize something. A lot of what he was seeing for sale had also been on sale in the tech market. The difference was that these items had all been modified already in some way. The 3D printer he had bought, and then needed to get the other parts himself on the seller’s discreet recommendation, was sitting down here fully assembled and ready to go.

  There were also more intense modifications, like custom weapons and modules. You could also hire programmers to rewrite code for you and more. The place was everything you might need and more.

  The prices varied wildly from seller to seller. Some were suspiciously cheap, while others were asking far too much.

  With so many booths, it didn’t take them long to find someone selling rebreather units.

  The owner of the booth was interested in buying what they had. However, unsurprisingly, she was not willing to pay for them without seeing them in person first. They agreed to a decent price for the lot, and a meeting location the next day and then continued on their way.

  It wasn’t entirely fruitless, as Stick-Point had sent him a couple of deposits already from the reaper teams that had used his information.

  The amount they paid had actually been better than he thought it would be. Trace had been expecting five-hundred credits a location, maybe a little more, instead he had gotten twelve-hundred credits for one and fifteen hundred for the second. Prior to this, he had only known that the reapers paid for the information, and supposedly paid well.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Everyone’s definition of paying well was different, especially to a former dirt-poor street-meat, like Trace.

  With that fresh influx of credit in the account, he could now actually purchase one or two things. Even if the system-breaching modules were still far out of his reach.

  While they were walking around the place, in addition to looking for items, there was one more goal in going to the black market that night. If they were going to start bringing more items back, then they would need contacts to sell them through.

  The pawnshops only offered the lowest price on everything. If they actually wanted to make some decent money, then that meant working with the people of the black market.

  In the end, Trace did find three items, though he only bought two of them. One was a much better scope for his scout rifle. It was actually a sniper scope that had been modified to fit the shorter rails of the scout rifle.

  The second was a set of earbuds, allowing him to hand Monroe back his pair.

  The third, and last item, the one which he didn’t buy, was a teaching module. It was the first one he had ever come across with even some slight application to stealth. Granted, it was only for walking, but it was better than nothing. The price was still commensurate with its rarity though.

  He managed to talk the booth owner into letting him take it for a test run, during which he promptly ran the ‘Learning’ program. The learning process had originally been pretty slow, with each module taking between one and four hours. The program had gotten faster when Meredith updated the G.H.O.S.T. System to V0.3 for them. It had gotten faster again when his NetConnect had been upgraded after the accident.

  He remembered being so impressed with that NetConnect when he had first gotten it. Now he could only think of it as a slow piece of garbage. Either way, this module took the shortest amount of time of any he had ever done at a mere fifteen minutes. Normally, they took between thirty minutes to two hours to complete.

  As soon as the program had gotten the information it needed, he handed it back over with a shake of his head and walked away.

  Unfortunately, he never saw a portable laser welding unit. When he mentioned what he wanted to Monroe, the man laughed and said that he could get something like that easily enough at the regular. He wasn’t sure, but that he might even have one buried back at his place from when he was first starting out.

  The night had been somewhat productive, with both of them getting a few items each. No major items, as they would have been too expensive, but they had come away with several contacts of people who might be interested buyers in the future.

  Trace placed his new earbuds and scope in his courier bag and then placed them on the back seat of the truck.

  Monroe glanced over at him and tapped his ear. “So, how often does that happen?”

  Trace shrugged his shoulders and put the truck into gear. “I don’t know. Like I said before, it’s random. The last time was a few months ago. I was in the tech market a couple of weeks ago and was just fine. I just have bad days, is all.”

  “Huh,” The big man grunted, still watching him, but willing to let the matter drop.

  “How much longer is it going to take for them to fix the semi?”

  “It should be ready by tomorrow, or the day after. A lot of the seals needed to be pulled, cleaned, and then replaced. The filters were only the tip of how clogged it actually was. I’m also having them touch up all the areas where the paint had been sanded off.”

  “Sounds expensive.”

  “It is. I’m officially so far in the red, I’m looking up at the dripping rectum of the corpo in charge of my account balance. So as soon as I get the semi back, we need to start taking on jobs.”

  Trace recoiled at the… wonderfully pleasant imagery the words invoked. “I did send you a number of jobs to look through earlier.” He reminded the man. “Anyway, the reason I was asking is because of the damage to Betty’s windows. The shop that fixed the glass on my car today did good work. I can give you their information if your normal shop doesn’t do glass.”

  “I meant to you about those jobs earlier. How many do you think Stick-Point will allow us to take at once?”

  “It depends on how close they are together, the estimated length of the job, and if others have already inquired about them. From that list, I gave you,” He mentally reviewed them. “Depending on the combination, two would be a safe bet, but three might be doable with a couple as well.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Trace received a message from Monroe. “Those are the jobs I was interested in, along with my own notes added to your own. Let’s see which ones we can get. As for the glass. The shop I typically go through will do it, but they don’t specialize in it, so yeah, if you can send me the information, I would appreciate it.”

  ***

  Back at the warehouse, Trace attached the new, larger scope to the scout rifle with a grin. It made the rifle a tad unwieldy, but he loved it. The new scope was so powerful that he would be able to study the small hairs of a target’s nose on anything within the gun’s reasonable range. Of course, there was a downside to the scope. It didn’t come with all the extra features that the scout scope had.

  Scout scopes were incredibly useful because they came with a whole host of extra features. Such as wind and moisture meters that worked in concert with the usual distance meter. They could do this because the distance they would be shooting over was generally not that great.

  Sniper rifles, on the other hand, and their scopes, could not do that. Taking in wind calculations over a much longer distance was simply not possible by the onboard chips built into a scope. It would have to be slaved to a person’s NetConnect, and few were willing to do that. It was putting a lot of trust in a company, a data cable, the environment, and more every time you used it, that nothing would go wrong and fry the data port of your NetConnect, or worse.

  Across a distance of a mile, two or more, the wind could easily change direction several times. That wasn’t even getting into how the moisture could affect the shot. Taking one reading of the wind closest to you was how it had been done in the past. Then things had evolved. The amount of information you were required to process for each shot became higher.

  That was why they trained and learned. It was one of the items he had been taught how to do in his enhanced gun module teaching sessions.

  Still annoying, but doable.

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