Bandits

 

On the outskirts of the city the bandits roamed the streets, basically unchallenged, at least formally. Anyone with means had long since joined one of the collectives or towers in the middle of the capital leaving only the poor to risk life in the suburbs. Ironically the street thugs weren’t as violent or as ruthless as the more sheltered people feared. If they acted too strongly there would be repercussions and even a handful of neighbourhoods joining together could quickly rout a troublesome gang. In this, the line between predator and prey shifted quickly and an uneasy truce kept all but isolated travellers safe most of the time. The criminals of the area had their own illegal economy that most people refused to participate in and outside of seeing each other in the same area, generally stayed separate.

Mick Greenstone was a courier and did his best to keep the pockets of society that were left, running. Fortunately for him, his employer only shipped the most obscure of items. Nothing that would interest anyone but a handful of clients and none of whom would buy the goods from anyone else. As such he kept his routes and hours as public as possible without seeming suspicious.

Occasionally other couriers would team up with him, pretending to be shipping more of the same unpopular goods. As long as the final convoy size seemed reasonable and no particular vehicle stood out, it usually worked too. Too often someone with a high security rig would try the same thing and the bandits saw through the ruse almost instantly. Even then, Mike was still safe, by reason of never lying about his cargo manifest.

Other jobs would pay higher, because of the danger, but for his long term survival prospects, being known as “Mick Junk” was priceless. In fact though, his cargo was quite precious, part of a very unique compound that played an irreplaceable role in high tech parts. There were a very small number of groups that knew that, but they also knew that any interruption in deliveries would mean the other parts of the compound would stop shipping till the missing materials were found. Any groups that acted on this knowledge would also find themselves part of a high end media attack that would almost always find the group torn out by the roots by the end of the week.

The weak link in the chain was Mick himself, but again, the long term consequences of being anything but reliable were daunting.