Benjamin Wray: Acid Reign: Genesis

“Oh hell, I’m sure she’s fine, just don’t do that.”

Ripp rubbed her sweaty shoulder, wishing that he hadn’t.

“Not your fault, Bean,” Gus added in an attempt to help stop the sobbing. “She has a way of disappearing when she wants to.”

Gus sat next to Bean and took over the efforts of consoling her as Ripp stepped away to check his Pigeon.

He scrolled through the feeds and clicked on a video uplink from Lilly the night before, titled, Just Getting Started .

He watched her take down the two dirtbags in the alley and caught himself smiling. The awkward sobs intensified.

“Bean,” he yelled loudly, trying to shake her out of the hysterical state, she was in, and hopefully put a stop to the awful sobs.

Bean and Gus both look at Ripp, startled at the outburst.

“She’s alive and well. Just stay put. Gus and I are gonna go see Nun,” he said, shifting his eyes to Gus.

“Oh, that’s great news,” Bean said, wiping a very wet face with a dirty sleeve as she leaned on Gus.

Gus jumped up, realizing what Ripp was implying, and almost causing Bean to fall over.

“That son of…”

“We’ll be right back,” Ripp said as he smiled the biggest smile that he could fake.

“Okay,” she replied, slurping her runny nose.

The roar of Ripp’s modified century old Mustang, echoed across the tundra of the Fringe. The shatterplow technology on the front was barely clearing the rocks and obstacles in time for the front tires to keep level traction.

Ripp shifted into a higher gear and kicked the pedal to the floor, pushing the beast to its limits. The engine screamed, but the only thing that mattered was getting to Lilly before it was too late.

Nun’s office was a dark red hue except for the blue light rising out of his holo-desk. Nun leaned forward into the light making his features demonic.

“She came to me. I had a contract and she asked for it. That’s what your kind does and last time I checked, she’s your kind.”

Nun glared at Gus, who was pacing back and forth, pulling at his hair.

“Come to think of it, she practically begged for it. Said she had something to prove to you and Ripp. So whatever is going on between you three is to blame, not me.”

Nun leaned back in his chair and tried to free his arms from the restraints again with no luck.

“No more talkin Nun. She just better be alive when Ripp gets to her.”

Nun knew he could push the situation because there was no way Gus was going to make it out of his building alive. His guards were waiting outside the door, ready for the order to breach, but for now, Nun was willing to let it all play out.

“She can take care of…”

The sound of the chambering shotgun cut Nun’s comment short. The dead cold expression and the fury living inside Gus’ eyes suddenly became all too real for the untouchable market baron. Nun decided it would be in his best interest to sit back in his chair and quietly focus on his own hopes for Lilly’s wellbeing.

Ripp, Gus, and Lilly had been all over the area surrounding Nucrea except for the foundry in the old engineering industrial park. Lilly remembered that Johnny’s dad had searched the place, and said there was absolutely no reason to go back.

“Foundries dealt in junk,” he would explain. “With all of the new material technology that had been developed in the world, metal was obsolete as a viable resource, unnecessarily heavy and too costly to refine. As a runner, if you ever come across a foundry or any type of metal working plant just keep on searching, unless of course it’s a munitions factory. Then you need to take whatever you can carry and keep returning until there ain’t nothing left, or until you die.”

This was definitely a plain old metal foundry, but Lilly was happy that she finally had a contract of her own and in spite of all the logic concerning the whole situation, she felt amazing.

Nun’s box wasn’t specific about what it was she needed to bring back, just anything that was labeled Theonicorp.

She followed two metal tracks that ran from one end of the long building to the other. On the tracks were three wheeled buckets, filled to the top with metal scraps. She tried to make sense of how the foundry worked as she looked around at all of the equipment.

A metal staircase led up to a small office directly above a group of offices on the main floor. The stairs seemed intact, but she knew that would make more noise than she dared. There were a couple of Fringers she had to sneak past to get in, so loud noises weren’t an option.

She pulled out the Skynut and linked the feed to her Pigeon. She pointed at the drone and then at the office. Lilly watched her monitor as the small drone nimbly maneuvered through the rafters and made a quick scan of the inside of the office.

There was a collapsed writing desk, a pair of rusted filing cabinets, an empty wire wastebasket and a decomposed body. Knowing that there was no reason to risk checking out the office, Lilly typed in the return command. The Skynut zipped back to her, hovered, and then landed. Lilly smiled and pocketed her little time-saver.

After a quick search, she discovered there wasn’t anything worth taking from the other offices either, but she was determined to find something. She made her way through a long dark corridor that led to the adjacent warehouse.

The storage area of the warehouse was huge. There were containers of all shapes and sizes everywhere. She wondered if Johnny’s dad had even been inside this foundry.

Most of the containers were, surprisingly, in good condition, and labeled clearly with a bright green Midway . There were a couple of forklifts with containers still sitting on their metal arms.

She didn’t have time to check every container, but she made a location marker on her Pigeon, because this foundry was going to be her “gold mine”.

Two more tracks ran through this room also, but they were thicker than the ones in the adjacent smelting building. She followed the tracks to the wall.

There, sitting on the tracks in front of a giant reinforced door that looked nothing like the outside of the warehouse, was a military rail car. It was heavily armored, and there were two huge guns, mounted on the top. Lilly had never seen guns that big, and the obvious damage those two guns could inflict wasn’t what excited her; it was the Theonicorp insignia on the side.

“That’s not gonna fit in my bag,” she whispered to herself.

She searched every inch of the rail car, but couldn’t find a door or anything that resembled a way in. She went over to a small office that was adjacent to the track. Inside, there was a small control panel and some sort of communication or location relay grid. There were also monitors arranged in a panoramic view, all of which were surprisingly intact.

On a small metal table in the corner of the station, there was a case with the hexagonal insignia of Theonicorp on it.

“That’ll fit, though,” Lilly said with a huge smile. She picked up the case and gently slid it into her bag.

She strapped on the backpack and took a deep breath. There wasn’t any reason to search for anything else. Nun hadn’t been specific about what she needed to bring back other than it had to be something with Theonicorp’s name on it.

She made her way back through the maze of containers to the corridor. This time the end of the corridor was blacked out except for some light near the ceiling. There should have been enough light from the windows of the foundry to be able to see the end of the corridor, but there wasn’t.