Hi all, I recently finished a short narrative story for the White Noise podcast and thought that maybe you’ll enjoy it, too :) If you want to listen to it rather than read it you can do so right at the start of episode 72 of the aforementioned podcast. http://benandmarty.libsyn.com/72-winning-is-everythingright I hope you’ll like it! ————————— Welcome to the Company Ikari. The embodiment of every negative prejudice about mercenaries. Rabid dogs and madmen, more likely to cause collateral damage than not. Known to take on any contract if the price is right. And the mere word more often than not accompanied by a gob of spit directed at the floor when uttered aloud. Jaxon looked over to where his sister was working on his battered Ramhorn-327 T.A.G., currently replacing a piece of shoulder armor where a Hulang spitfire round had gotten through in their last engagement. He sighed. Amelia had of course suggested StarCo after their contract with DBS had run out, but both of them knew that that wasn’t going to happen after Caledonia. A mercenary with his reputation doesn’t make for a good Nomad poster boy after all. So with the Japanese Secession still more bloody than the news channels of the Human Sphere would have you believe, the next best option had been to take up arms with this particular vile brand of scum. Ikari. Welcoming enough to be sure, seemingly owning a gun and the willingness to use it being all the requirements necessary to join, no questions asked. And, sure enough, at first everything had seemed just as advertised. Yuan Yuans diving headfirst into combat zones, courageous but poorly trained Keisotsu as the backbone of the fighting force, and lots and lots of irregular troops backing them up. Or charging ahead of them, depending on your viewpoint. Ikari. His dad had often said that if something seems painfully obvious, it's almost certainly not the whole story. He barely remembered him now. The same was true with the company however. At first all he had been brought along to had been some fairly basic hit & run actions. A T.A.G. does make for an excellent bruiser after all. But for some reason - and to be fair, Amelia had first brought that up - lately both of them had been involved in somewhat more intricate missions. A data retrieval here, a HVT extraction there. Nothing for your average trigger-happy rambo, she’d said. Sometimes Jaxon wondered if she deliberately chose to ignore the state of his T.A.G. after almost every engagement, even though she was the one repairing all the damage and soundly scolding him for it. Either way, on those more complex missions he had noticed a different kind of Ikari Company. The nut job irregulars where still there, no question. He still remembered that hired Krakot dodging several shotgun blasts from some suddenly appearing drop trooper faster than seemed possible, then obliterating him in a hail of hot shrapnel from his chain rifles. But at the same time, almost unnoticed in the chaos, a Wu Ming fireteam had breached a high security lab that no one else had know was there and recovered god knows what. The way they had moved in unison in their hightech power armor had spoken volumes about their training, experience and tactical skills. Those weren’t the rabid dogs Jaxon and the rest of the Human Sphere were used to seeing. Those were more like ... a pack of hunting wolves. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed possible that the image of screaming mad men had been gladly accepted by the company, and was even encouraged. What better way to make an enemy underestimate you, he mused. What better way to conceal your tactical acumen than to hide it behind a barking pack of rabid dogs. The one question that remained though, provided that he was right of course, was - did the company view him as a dog, or as a wolf? With sirens suddenly blaring he lazily rose from the deckchair he had appropriated, flicked his cheap cigarette behind himself without looking and made his way over to his sister. As Amelia always liked to say, “there’s only one way to find out, right?” Roach Exo-suit_002by Matthew Burke https://www.3dartistonline.com/image/14752/roach_exosuit_002
