“First of all, where is your headquarters located? It’s late now but I can come by in the morning.” Leonard began. While he was eager to start the work right away he couldn’t lie about the way his body felt. He had done a lot today, although most of the exhaustion stemmed from the matches he had in the simulator pods. 

“Yeah,” Kyle nodded, grabbing hold of Leonard's words like a life raft. “Yeah that’d be best, though I'm probably gonna have to stop by Salvador's place to start the process of moving assets. Even if I have no idea how to do that.” 

“Don't worry we'll figure it out, I’ll stop by your place first and we can go together.”  Leonard tried to lighten the man's mood. “What’s your current set up looking like?” 

“Ah ha…” Kyle looked embarrassed. “I've been assigned a small warehouse building but I don’t have any staff yet… That’s what I was going to get today but now I'm stuck with Salvador’s crew.” His hands came up over his head as he huddled down over the table. “And I'm not so sure they’ll be very happy with me. Especially after their last boss just died.” 

“Got killed you mean?” Leonard couldn’t help but say, but immediately wished he hadn’t as Kyle's face went even further into the table. He reached over and gave the downtrodden man a pat on the shoulder. “It’ll all work out, I'm counting on it after all.” 

“You and me both,” Kyle sighed, standing to his feet. “It’s getting late, I’ll see you in the morning then?” 

Leonard glanced at his comm unit. “Considering It's 2am now, that would be in six, err, maybe seven hours?” 

Kyle sighed for the umpteenth time, rubbing his forehead. “Yeah… I guess so.” 

“We’ll push it back to 10,” Leonard said as he stood. “Make sure to get some sleep, yeah?” 

“I’ll try.” Kyle replied before he made his way out of the conference room, leaving Leonard alone. 

“It’s going to get busy these next few days,” Leonard rubbed his shoulder as he leisurely made his way out into the empty corridor. “I don’t really know how to run an operation like this, but I can always just think of it like I'm back in the Mech Corps and run it like a military... Though I doubt thugs would much appreciate being treated like soldiers.” 

The work ahead of him gave Leonard a small headache, although he couldn’t help but feel the experience would be good for him. 

It took him longer than he would care to admit to find his way out, almost getting lost in the winding halls leading to either dead ends or restricted areas. The way he had been brought in through the large hanger bay was obviously not a way he could go back out, and so when he finally felt the cool night, or extremely early morning breeze on his face he let out a small sigh of relief. 

“That place is much bigger than its footprint might suggest, considering the amount of stairs it must go quite the ways underground.” Leonard thought as he began to call for a taxi through his comm unit. “Who knows how much is inside that I haven't seen yet. But just the fact that it has even a single squad of mechs surely makes it one of the larger bases.” 

He had briefly considered spilling the beans right then and to convince his family to raid the warehouse. But he swiftly pushed aside such notions. Firstly even if he saw them with his own two eyes that was hardly proof enough for the family to break the law and raid what could easily be just a plain warehouse. Secondly even if they did it was just one of many bases, he would burn any bridges he could build into the core of the organisation and would no longer be able to pull it out by the root. 

Leonard was sure their roots ran far deeper than he could imagine, an operation like this couldn’t exist without various organisations turning their eyes away. If he wanted to rid them all completely, raiding a single base just wasn’t in the cards.

“That's not to say that I can't raid their bases, or that I'm not going to,” Leonard rationalised internally. “But I need to be smart about it, and not let it come back to me in any way.” 

The air taxi arrived quickly and Leonard collapsed into its seat with a heavy sigh. It took some large amount of effort to stop himself from falling asleep right then and there, forcing himself to stay awake as he took his disguise off and placed it into his briefcase. By the time he stumbled back home he was completely beat, the second his face hit his pillow he was out like a light. 

(/)

“I may have made a mistake…” Peter Watson lamented as he rushed through a cramped and narrow alleyway filled with all manner of filth. He had been on the tail of one of the many air cars that had left the warehouse, following it all the way into the middle of Citadel’s downtown region. A small nano drone tracker he had installed on the underside of the air car had allowed him to track it all the way here, and while his tech itself may have gone unnoticed, his presence when he arrived at the hidden base had not. 

“I should have just destroyed the drone, why did I have to go try and retrieve it?” Peter cursed to himself, his years of squalor and lack of work had made him be very reserved with his expenditures. But now that bad habit had come back to bite him in the ass. “Guess I'm still not used to having enough money to replace it.” 

The base he had been led to was extremely discreet, tucked away on ground level between an unassuming flower shop and a convenience store. He looked up to see a small parking garage for flying vehicles built six stories up the skyscraper's face, being flying cars they didn’t need to build car parks on the ground level, although some still existed to service ground based vehicles. 

The issue he had faced was how to get into the parking lot. The tracker pinged from underground, but the digital route it had left on his map had it enter this parking lot before taking some unknown means to descend through the building into an underground area. Although the signal still originated from the shop in front of him, a little ways below street level.  

The shop in question had a simple front, a bright neon sign overhead reading ‘Raven’s Laundry Services’. He tried to get a peek inside from the otherside of the street, but its frosted glass windows left him with little information as to what was going on inside. And so he did something that he could see now with hindsight, was considerably stupid, and went inside. 

The dingy interior of the laundromat was lit with a series of harsh fluorescent lights, painting the room a bright stark white. Peter took a few cautious steps inside, the automated shop being completely vacant save one man sat in front of a tumbling washer, his bored uninterested eyes staring at the spinning machine as he waited for it to finish washing the clothes inside. He gave a small curious glance at Peter as he stepped inside, a small bell over the door ringing as he pushed it open. 

“Evening,” Peter greeted, and the man grunted in return before turning back to staring at his machine. “Friendly,” Peter quipped internally as he looked around the small laundromat. The space was fairly sparse, the walls stacked two high with machines while in the centre sat lines of benches. Peter could spot a small service door heading into the back, but with someone inside he wasn’t sure if he should try his luck, let alone the fact he could see security cameras in each corner of the shop lock onto his position, their lenses following his movements. 

“Seems I’ve already been spotted,” Peter cursed as he turned to leave. He may have wanted to get his drone back but he still valued his life. His eyes caught the only other person in the shop, the man staring back at him, one hand raised up to his ear. “Shit.” 

He burst into a sprint, dropping his shoulder and barging through the door. The man was not far behind him, chasing after him as he booked it down the street. “He’s running!” The man yelled into comm, and as Peter reached the corner and briefly turned back, he saw another three men file out of the laundromat and begin rushing in his direction. 

“Thank god I'm getting paid well for this shit.”