A Dream Job Offer.

Shotgunner.

The soldier tossed and turned on his bunk. Not that it was really 'his' bunk; just a cot in a room he'd rented while he waited for an offer of employment.

Tonight the atmo-recycler seemed to be malfunctioning, with the temperature high enough to make him sweat right through the off-white singlet and boxer shorts which served him as pyjamas. He grunted in his sleep, kicking off the sheet without waking. His strong jaw clenched as troubling dreams flitted through his mind.

Urban pacification is always an infantryman's nightmare, and as a shotgun specialist, Joe had been the tip of the spear on numerous occasions, blasting locks and breaching doors. The fact that the city around his squad seemed to carry on as usual was very disturbing. As much as he shouted at the civilians to get out of the active combat zone, they just carried on strolling down the sidewalks, sipping their lattes and browsing their net feeds. Every so often one of them would get obliterated by a stray round or explosion, but the rest just ignored the flying viscera, save for perhaps an annoyed sigh as one tripped on an errant dismembered arm or slumped cadaver.

Refocusing on the task at hand, Joe braced his trusty shotgun against his shoulder and applied the twelve-gauge lockpick to the door in front of him. Booting the remains of the door out of the way, he charged in with the rest of his squad, weapons at the ready.

The interior of the building was a cafe, with people sitting at the tables enjoying typical greasy-spoon dinner fare, while mercenaries in urban camo used them as cover to take shots at Joe's squad. Blood, bodies, mashed potato, chequered table-cloths, silverware, shards of crockery, gravy and tomato ketchup all went flying as a storm of lead flew between the combatants. Within seconds, the entire cafe had been reduced to a slaughterhouse, with just Joe, a couple of his squadmates, and bizarrely, one miraculously untouched table and its occupant left standing.

The woman at the table took a sip of her cup of tea, and stood up. She was tall and very attractive, wearing an odd get-up featuring a large array of black feathers across her shoulders, and was carrying a staff taller than she was with a raven's head moulded on top. She flicked a strand of her long, black hair out of her face with her free hand as she delicately picked her way over the bodies strewing the floor in her high-heeled boots.

She smiled at Joe.

"Hello Joe, what do you know?"

Joe reached up and raised his helmet flash visor as he stared at her in puzzlement.

"Who in the Sam Hill are you, lady?

"A prospective employer. I just so happen to be in the market for some muscle. Nothing specific, I'm just putting a crew together and it seems like a good idea to have someone who knows how to, hmm, well, this basically." She gestured at the scene of carnage around them. "Let me know if you're interested and we can work out some details."

She reached up and touched him on the side of his head.

He sat bolt upright in bed, drenched in sweat. The dream was already fading from his memory, as is the way of dreams, but for some reason two things stuck in his mind; the woman in the feathered outfit, and a net address he suddenly had memorised.

««««﴾﴾۞﴿﴿»»»»

Argus Mackenzie.

The medic dozed peacefully in his seat. He'd had an interesting stop off at Perikroium station, but the local authorities had gotten a little… sniffy with him after he'd been involved in a scuffle at one of the local bars, so he'd thought it best to move on. Now he was on a transport shuttle taking him to a large, interstellar-capable mass-transport ship. The tiny micro-vibrations on every surface were irritating for some, but Argus had always found them somewhat soothing, plus the seat was very comfortable, and what with having been up for some time answering pointed questions from station security about the bar-brawl, it wasn't really all that surprising that he'd drifted off.

His mind's eye wandered back.

Back

Back to his childhood.

He was a boy of eleven again, playing with one of the farm dogs in the yard. An old hank of rope gave a good game of tug-of-war until they were interrupted by the passage of the farm-robot. The hulking industrial automaton looked like a caterpillar excavator given humanoid form. It had been bought by Argus's grandfather back when he inherited the land, and was slow, clunky and kind of dumb compared to more modern models, but it was reliable as hell and it got the job done. It was currently leading the ornery old bull to the cow sheds to service the cows, the hydraulically-powered machine effortlessly manhandling the two-thousand-pound bovine on the end of its leash.

"Mind out now, young 'un, this here bull's as bad tempered as a horny toad in a spelling bee!"

Before he left for college, Argus's older brother had installed an app on the robot which caused it to spout procedurally-generated homespun gibberish at the drop of a hat. It annoyed his father, but the old man couldn't figure out how to uninstall it, so the robot remained abrasively folksy.

Suddenly, the bull somehow slipped its restraint, and dodged the robot's clumsy attempt to grab it. Fixing its beady eyes on Argus, the massive creature charged for him. In the manner of dreams the boy now found himself fleeing down endless cornrows, pursued by the rampaging bull, running and running until he felt as though his little legs were made of lead, going slower and slower as the bull gained and gained.

Then there was quiet. No thundering of hooves, just his own heavy breathing, and the birdsong. He slowed down, and risked a backward glance. No bull was to be seen, but he could hear singing. He wandered back the way he had come a little, and there, in middle of a trampled patch of corn, was the bull, now completely placid, eating an apple from the hand of a tall, dark-haired woman with a feathered collar as she sang some old folk song to it in a language he didn't recognise. As the young boy emerged from the rows she turned and smiled at him.

"Argus Mackenzie?"

"Yes'um?"

The bull having finished the apple, the raven-haired woman moved her hand to scratch it behind the ear, which it seemed to enjoy very much.

"I have a job offer for you."

"A job?" Oh, he thought, that's right, I'm not a boy, I'm a grown man, and as it is in dreams, he was a man again.

"I'm trying to assemble a reliable crew to do a little S.C.R.A.P.ing, if you see what I mean, and it's just good sense to have a decent medical man along. If you're interested, get in contact, won't you?" Leaving the bull, she stepped forward and tapped him on the temple.

He awoke with a slight start. One of the shuttle crew was shaking him by the shoulder to wake him as they had docked with the transport. He vaguely remembered some dream about the bull which had frightened him as a child, but mostly he remembered a vision of a tall, beautiful woman with dark hair, and a net address apparently fixed in his memory.

««««﴾﴾۞﴿﴿»»»»

Dr. Yvette Toyosaki.

The doctor, as often happened, had passed out at the work-station in her lab, and was sitting on her stool, face-down on the cool, smooth surface of the work bench, surrounded by instruments and tools, notes and papers, snoring softly.

She was a very anxious woman, and her dreams showed this. Currently she was standing in front of the review board of her old university, who seemed to be simultaneously examining her for her defence of her PhD thesis, severe academic malpractice involving plagiarism, and some vague, but very serious, criminal charge which they point-blank refused to tell her about.

She fumbled with her papers, as she was apparently defending herself, and realised that she had quite forgotten how to read, and in any case her teeth were falling out, then turning into little gremlin monsters and stealing her precious papers.

The head of the review board, who for some inexplicable reason was dressed like a British high court judge from the nineteenth century with a long, white, powdered wig in curls and black robes, banged his gavel furiously on the impossibly high table which towered over her.

"HOW DARE YOU WASTE THE BOARD'S TIME WITH THIS NONSENSE!!!" He bellowed. "YOU WILL GET YOUR PAPERS IN ORDER OR I SHALL HAVE YOU HELD IN CONTEMPT!!!!"

"I-I-I'm very sorry you honour-ship!" She babbled, trying to wrestle a sheaf of the unintelligible documents away from the horrible little tooth-gremlins as he continued hammering away at the table.

"AND PUT SOME CLOTHES ON FOR GOD'S SAKE! THIS A REVIEW BOARD NOT A BURLESQUE SHOW!!"

Dr. Toyosaki gasped as she realised that, yes, she was indeed as naked as the day she was born. Instinctively trying to cover herself she lost her grip on the papers she'd been grabbing, and her teeth ran away with them, scurrying under the review board's table. This outrage caused the head of the board to elevate his rage to near apoplexy, walloping the desk with his gavel so hard the end flew off.

"RIGHT! THAT'S IT! I SEE NOW I HAVE NO CHOICE!!!" He stood up, looming even more menacingly as he whipped out a square of black cloth and draped it over the top of his head. In a calmer, more solemn voice he continued. "Doctor Yvette Toyosaki, I find you guilty on all charges, and hereby sentence you to be taken from this court to a place of execution, and hanged by the neck until you are dead!! May God have mercy on your soul! Bailiff, take her away!"

"Right away, your honour."

Yvette noticed that the bailiff was a strangely dressed young woman with long, black hair and an arrangement of raven feathers about her shoulders, who walked with a tall, bird-headed staff. The woman took Yvette by her arm and led her through the double doors at the end of the room. Once they were in the corridor beyond she yanked the doctor into a side room, which turned out to be a women's bathroom. Passing through the door, Yvette found she was once again clothed, and, searching the inside of her mouth with her tongue, she could feel her teeth had grown back.

"Feeling a bit stressy lately, are we?" The tall, dark-haired woman inquired, popping out a lipstick and re-applying it in the bathroom mirror.

"I don't… uh, I mean, that is to say, I guess so."

"Well never mind, I have an offer that might help. Specifically, paid employment. I'm putting together a S.C.R.A.P.P.E.R. crew, and an expert of your calibre would help a lot." The woman finished with her lipstick and smacked her lips, then stepped up to Yvette and tapped her gently on the side of the head. "Get in contact if you're interested."

With a groan, Dr. Toyosaki sat up, a post-it note with some back-of-the-envelope calculations scrawled on it was stuck to her forehead. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, picturing the image of the tall woman, and moving to jot down the net address she now had memorised.