Thorn Farmer was one of many twenty-somethings who had come to the city of Aba from the surrounding villages and towns, desperately looking for his lucky shot, to make it off this backwards planet, and to see the rest of the galaxy. Like many, he grew up in a frontier village established by the Agrarian Guild. He’d spent his childhood skipping school, running through the surrounding wilds, and then getting beat up by one of his eight sisters after they caught him.
Unlike many, he didn’t just leave his village; the elders had kicked him out. His mother had sniffed once and said he’d have to feed himself from now on. His father’s last words to him were, “Go be a thorn in someone else’s side.” Which, he supposed when he was thinking rationally, was indeed an excellent piece of advice.
It’s what he did well. And was currently doing well, at his job as a sausage delivery man.
“The purchase order said five boxes of Stellar Eats Wild Sausage,” Thorn said evenly. “I brought you the five boxes. I need you to accept delivery and forward payment.”
Thorn was standing at the mess hall loading dock at a frontier outpost of the illustrious Crow Mercenary Guild. The Crows Guild was famous (possibly infamous) across this part of the galaxy, well-known for their professionalism, lethality, and high prices. If you wanted quality, you had to pay for it.
Across from him stood an irate Quartermaster, veins bulging in his neck.
“Listen here, you little System glitch. I ordered ten boxes. And you have ten boxes,” he said, pointing into the back of Thorn’s light truck. The integrated machine tech in the quartermaster’s left eye glowed a subtle blue through the pupil as he scanned through the boxes. “I’m not blind. Gimme what you got and get out of here.”
The Quartermaster continued to rant, while Thorn’s eyebrow twitched. He’d been called a lot of things in his young life, most of them accurate, and he liked to think he had developed a thick skin. But he was particularly sensitive to insults regarding his System.
A person’s System was possibly the most important thing about a person, the biggest single factor that would influence a person’s success or failure in achieving their dream. That didn’t mean they were rare. All adults on the planet Agrotis, the surrounding solar system, the explored parts of their galaxy… all sentient beings within the known universe had a System.
But not all Systems were created equal.
Once you reached a biological age of maturity (usually around seventeen or eighteen years old, when the body and brain were mostly done growing), whatever Guild, government, church, militia, cult etc. your parents were a part of would sponsor your initial System choices. Were your parents Farmers? Highly likely you would be too, if you showed the necessary aptitude for the {14.2-02 “Agricola”} agricultural System monopolized by the Agrarian Guild. If your basic intelligence, fitness or proprioception were balanced in a different fashion, then maybe you could inherit a shard of a more advanced or specialized System, like a {14.2-08 “Yeoman”} or even a combat-oriented one, such as {14.2-09 “Warden”}.
Local governments, neighborhood cults, mercenary Guilds, even massive powers such as the Wayfinders Guild, all of the principalities and powers in the galaxy were on the lookout for new talent whose unique brain structure, nerve bundles, and mind-body connections could best adapt their powerful Systems. So most young people on the brink of the rest of their lives would be given choices: maybe some good, maybe some bad, and others in between.
On the same day he was kicked out of his village to fend for himself, Thorn was given one single option for a System. A System he utterly despised.
Before responding to the Quartermaster, he decided to triple check, and mentally sent a query to his System.
Thorn pushed his rising irritation down with a friendly smile.
“No,” he said. “You ordered five, and you get five. And I’d appreciate if we could move this along, I still got other customers to get to.”
Thorn had had a long day, but he wasn’t too tired yet. He still managed to eke out an impressive yawn, not bothering to cover his mouth with his hand.
“You got other customers like the Crows?” the Quartermaster snarled. “I told you already. We had some really high-up officers drop in last minute. Like really high up. Some idiot at the gate told them your stupid sausages were the best thing on the menu, and now, I don’t have enough for the officer’s mess. I need more or I’m screwed.”
The veins in the Quartermaster’s neck were beating a furious tempo.
Thorn minimized the annoying notification from his System with a practiced reflex. As if he didn’t know the Quartermaster was angry enough to try and punch him. His System gave him so few benefits and yet distracted him with observations like this all the time.
“You smug little crotch-stain. Do you really want to piss off the Crows?” the Quartermaster said, puffing his chest out and lifting his hands. “What power level are you, anyways?”
The Quartermaster’s left eye glowed once more as he scanned Thorn from head to toes. “Ha! You can’t even be more than a Level 2.”
Level 1, actually.
“What a joke.” The Quartermaster raised his right hand and snapped his fingers once. A gout of flame burst upwards, heating Thorn’s face.
“One snap of my fingers and I delete your pencil neck from existence. But you know what? Forget it. I’m the good guy, so I’m going to comm your boss. And I’ll have all those boxes and your pathetic job within minutes.”
“If you have any dissatisfaction with the service from Stellar Eats, we appreciate any and all feedback,” Thorn said with a polite smile, his heart hammering a little harder in his chest.
Thorn’s boss was Cook. Name or title, or both, Thorn wasn’t sure and didn’t really care. Cook was literally the cook whose secret recipes and high-level food preparation System made Stellar Eats’ packaged wild meat products a hot commodity on this flea-bitten corner of the planet.
Thorn knew the threat to call his boss was a laughable one. One of the main reasons, if not the only reason, that Cook had hired Thorn was to take care of situations just like this. Cook liked to cook. He hated most other things, including other people, so it was Thorn’s job to deal with the customers.
“I am sorry to hear that you are unhappy with your order,” Thorn continued. “You may take receipt, match your invoice to the purchase order, and confirm the System handshake so that I may complete delivery.
“Or…” Thorn said and patted the boxes of sausage in the back of his truck. He’d helped make this batch; the raw meat came from humpers he’d hunted himself in the scrub a couple weeks ago with his friend Lief. He’d gotten a taste-test and it was amazing. Stuffed full of quintessence, that magical vacuum energy that powered Systems, and the flavor… easily the best sausage he’d had in his life. It was amazing what Cook could do with his System.
“I can drive out of here and tell my boss that you refused to take delivery.” Thorn raised his eyebrow as if to consider the option, then shook his head.
“Look, I’m a reasonable guy, I’m not looking to piss anyone off. The Crows are a powerful Guild, if not the most powerful mercenary Guild in this sector, and anyone would want to join them.”
Thorn included. He’d sell all of his sisters down the river for a chance to join the Crows.
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“But. You’re getting what you ordered, or you’re getting nothing.”
The Quartermaster’s neck turned from red to a shade of purple. His eyes de-focused for a second as he concentrated on his HUD, an obvious tell that he was attempting to comm Thorn’s boss again. When it didn’t go through, he grunted once, twice, and threw his hands in the air. Thorn got a ping from his System, and he pulled up the notification.
Thorn grabbed five boxes off the truck and set them on the loading dock.
“Enjoy,” he said with a wink and nod of his head, then hopped into the truck and drove off to the pleasurable sounds of the quartermaster somehow choking and cursing at the same time.
Thorn drove the light truck towards the gate and across the open staging area in the middle of the outpost. This outpost was a smaller one, located a ten-kilometer hike up the mountains from the nearest city, an industrial center by the name of Aba. Nestled on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by a river, Aba was a small but important part of the trade flowing through this part of the planet Agrotis.
He idled the truck on his way through the gate and leaned out the forward hatch. The gatekeeper, a wizened older woman by the name of Gammon, was waving at him to stop. Thorn didn’t have many people he could call friends, but Gammon was one of them. She was a veteran Crow and close to retirement; her many years of service in the Guild had earned her the cushy (but important) gatekeeping role. It wasn’t evident at first glance, but most of her body had been replaced with machine hardware integrated into her combat System.
“You got plans for the weekend?” Gammon asked him. “Hot date or two?”
“Naw, you know me. The grind never stops,” Thorn said. “Really hoping to get out of the city and do some hunting in the wilds.”
“Best of luck,” Gammon said.
“Hey, you know what,” Thorn said, having an idea. “I got some extra sausages. You want a box? Had a customer cancel an order last minute. Just don’t take ‘em all though.”
Gammon squinted at him. “You sure? I know how good those things are. Don’t know why anyone would ever cancel an order.”
“I guess they didn’t have the quints,” Thorn said with a shrug.
Quints were money, the sole currency of any worth in the galaxy. But they were also captured bits of quintessence, the quantum field that produced the vacuum energy on which all Systems ran. Investing quintessence into your System made you stronger, faster, smarter, more dexterous. It let you integrate with more machine tech, like sensor eyes, drones, hydraulic muscles, hidden weapons, the works. With enough quintessence invested into the right System, superhuman feats were just the start of what you could accomplish.
“I reckon you could sell ‘em to the Quartermaster,” Gammon said. “We got an off-world officer come in tonight. He’s a big fan of local cuisine and…”
“I already spoke with the Quartermaster and delivered his order,” Thorn interrupted. “But between you and me… I’m not sure he’s got things under control. So why don’t you take a box, just to make sure your outpost makes a good impression?”
“I see.” Gammon frowned, looking at the back of the truck. “Maybe two boxes then?”
Thorn laughed. “Don’t forget to take some for yourself.”
Gammon gave Thorn a wink and walked to the back of the truck. She pulled out two boxes before slapping the tailgate. The whole frame shifted slightly under the power of the casual strike; Thorn winced and hoped nothing was bent.
He threw up a hand in farewell and eased the truck onto the road down to the city stretched out below him. The rays of the sun scorched the polluted sky above Aba a deep, sickly red.
Gammon was one of the good ones. She’d been very kind to Thorn when she hadn’t needed to be, and Thorn still remembered that kindness as if it were yesterday. It wasn’t a stretch to say that he was alive today because of her, and he would never forget it.
He hadn’t lied to Gammon or the Quartermaster either. Another customer had indeed canceled their order, and the order for the Crows had been only five boxes. The better business decision would have been to let the Quartermaster have the extra boxes, for free. Or better yet, charge him double. He even could have insisted on hard quints, then split the difference with his boss, keeping the extra for himself.
Instead, he’d pissed off the Quartermaster of the most powerful Guild in the city, given two boxes away for free, and still had three more sitting in the back of the truck that he’d have to take back and explain to his boss.
And speak of the devil… His musings about whether he’d made the right decisions or not were interrupted by an incoming comm.
Thorn willed to his System to accept the comm.
“That Crow Quartermaster is an angry man.” The laconic tones of his boss came through loud and clear on the System-to-System communication channel.
“Well, boss, I don’t know why he’s angry, he got exactly what he ordered.” Thorn swerved to avoid a massive pothole in the road. “I’m sorry he tried to comm you and complain.”
“Do not be sorry,” Cook said. “I am amused by the little angry man. I had a good chuckle at the angry man’s message and wanted to congratulate you. A job that makes me chuckle is a job done well.”
Thorn had never actually heard his boss laugh before, much less chuckle. The concept of Cook laughing at something was mildly frightening to Thorn.
“Uh… thank you,” Thorn replied, uncertain how to take the positive feedback. “We still have a few extra boxes though. What do you want me to do with them? The Red Hand Guild cancelled their order last minute. Do you want me to turn around and see how many quints I can squeeze out of the Crow Quartermaster?’
“You can if you want,” Cook said, then paused. “But we do not want to reward the angry man for being angry. Hmmm…”
“What about handing out some free samples? You know, spread the word around and drum up some more business?” Thorn suggested.
“I like it. This is a businessman’s idea. Do it.”
“Copy that,” Thorn said to Cook, but the comm channel had already closed. Thorn’s boss might have been an amazingly talented chef, but there was a reason he was living in a frontier mining city; he didn’t care about the quints, the business or his customers. He only truly cared about fresh ingredients and his cooking.
Thorn thought for a moment, deciding on where he was going to hand out the free samples, and took a turn off the main road into town. He didn’t bother asking his System for suggestions, since he knew they would be useless.
The city of Aba sprawled like a soggy pile of trash thrown at the bottom of the majestic mountains rising above it. Steel and concrete stacked on top of each other in uneven lumps, a cluster of pale gray and white boxes jumbled together and set against the dark sides of steep granite cliffs spotted with clumps of green. A tangled web of roads, railways, and cargo lifts attempted to hold all of it up while waste from the refineries and factories oozed out into the rushing river Frel below. Thin plumes of steam and smoke rose to cover the whole town in a suffocating miasma, backlit by the flashing of neon signs.
Thorn could never get used to the acrid stench of hot steel, aluminum, and the other, more exotic metals mined out of the mountains and processed here. He’d grown up far to the west, in a farming village out on the frontier. But several million people put up with the stench of Aba’s civilization every day, so Thorn figured he could too.
As he wound his way down towards the south side of the city, he began driving next to the wide river at its base. The Frel River flowed north out of the mountains before emptying into Argos, the so-called Lake of Dreams, and eventually those halcyon waters found their way into the oceans of Agrotis. Those with quints lived on the south side of the river, nearest the fresh water, while those without lived on the north side, where the pollution flowing from the factories and sloughing out into the river was most concentrated.
Thorn eased his truck past a few large potholes and then slowed to a crawl. The swift flow of the Frel was on his left, and on the right were a jumble of tents and shacks, thrown together from bits and pieces of things floating down the river. A few eyes peered out of the shadows at the sound of his vehicle. Most that drove down this road were lost or unwise; Thorn, at least, wasn’t lost.
He slapped the side of his cab door and pointed in the back. A hunched figure sprinted out of a hidden alley and up to the back of his truck. As soon as the unknown figure had grabbed all of the boxes off the back, Thorn gunned the accelerator and sped away.
Thorn didn’t know who had gotten the “free samples,” but he’d rather those sausages go to someone down on their luck. The people that lived in this part of town didn’t have many options. Many were washouts, jacked up on the Glitter being sold on every street corner. Thorn had lived in places like this, and he knew of many a Miner or Laborer out of a job who had been injured, lost a leg or a hand, and didn’t have the quints or the right System for a replacement machine limb.
He couldn’t help but give the sausages to anyone else, really, besides that pissant Quartermaster high on his tiny bit of authority, expecting his suppliers to bow and scrape before him as if he were a founding member of the Crows Guild itself, ascended to godlike power through the technology of quintessence manipulation.
He knew he should have sold those extra boxes to the Quartermaster and gouged him on the price; that’s what his System would have recommended, and what anyone smart enough would have done. He knew better than anyone how much he needed the quints. He might have it better than some people, but he didn’t want to be stuck delivering sausages for the rest of his life.
And he wouldn’t be.
Overhead, a streak of blue light flashed, and a bulky figure in a brown and red uniform flew by, afterburners glowing bright in the failing evening light. The quintessence practically shone off the figure, clearly a high-level mech warrior. Possibly an off-worlder, and definitely someone not to be messed with.
One day, he thought, that will be me.
Thorn spat out the window of his truck and pushed the accelerator harder. He’d finished his deliveries for the week, and if everything lined up, he’d be off into the wilds within hours.
Who knew, maybe he’d even score a huge payday and bag an awakened beast. Thinking of the possibility made his hands clench tighter on the wheel of the truck. The regular game that they hunted paid well, better than any other job in Aba. Better than any other job that Thorn was willing to do, at least. The potential danger and the potential score had him excited.
Next stop: pick up his hunting friend, Lief, then grab a bite to eat and they would be off.