Zahul turned to Melloh, he kept it stupidly simple. He reached over and pointed to Zhon, flashed his hand open to indicate Zhon should lead the breach with a grenade. Then he pointed to himself, indicating that he would be the breacher after the fire in the hole.

  Melloh understood perfectly. So, he turned to Zholl and pointed at Zhon, indicating that Zholl should beckon his twin brother over to help his Dad.

  But Zholl, used to be the de facto talking face for both him and Zhon collectively, had no idea that pointing at a squadmate in this scenario meant that he should be involved in the breach, and so he just looked at Melloh, shrugged, and wiggled his head left and right in that Monsoon Subcontinent way that did not indicate nodding of the head yes in understanding, or a nodding of the head in not.

  Melloh lightly smacked his forehead and just shoved Zholl out of the way up against the wall to pull Zhon by the arm. But Zhon was missing that arm, so Melloh grabbed him by pinching a lock of his overgrown sideburns instead, and pulled him forward.

  That was enough to clue the twins in so Zhon promptly grabbed a grenade and pulled the pin out with his teeth. There was no other way he could do it currently. Lobbed the grenade at blunt smoker boi.

  Blunt smoker boi stared at the little egg-shaped thing in front of him curiously, before leaping straight upwards in alarm like a stoned idiot. The grenade promptly exploded- PANG! In retort at his dumb ass and ripped poor blunt smoker boi apart flying limb by flying limb, crotch outwards. His scorched torso splattered to the ground, his rocket jump lifted even further by the grenade blast.

  Shielding himself with an arm, Zahul waited for the blast to stop ringing, then surged along the exposed wall leading to the back exit, now with a big, black, sooty blast stain, and of course some red blood stains, where blunt smoker boi was smoking his blunt. He stopped in front of the door, kept his shoulder touching the wall for cover, waiting.

  The inside guard kicked open the door to see what was going on, and Zahul promptly shoved his combat knife into his throat so hard the orc flew backwards and didn’t even choke or gurgle, the knife had severed clean through his brainstem. Leaving the knife in – he’ll retrieve it later – he swept Nastya for any other contact, but it was clear. Just the two.

  And the lug was brimming to the roof with big, boxy, brown paper packages, tied up with string. Some copper kettles, but not bright and shiny and instead stained sooty with smolder residue, and mutt-wool woolen mittens. From scent alone it was obvious that the kettles had been used to cook meth, the woolen mittens to hold the kettles above flame. And inside these big boxy brown paper packages, tied up with string, were, of course, bundles, and bundles of vacuum sealed crystal meth, dyed blue, even though it was of middling grade.

  “Clear!” he roared, since it was clear there was no need to rely on unreliable hand signals. “Melloh, you and Zhon take top. Zholl, you’re with me.”

  Melloh patted Zholl on the shoulder, “Swap kanons, boi.”

  Zholl was all too eager to comply, happy to trade up from the crappy, orcan submachine clone that the Chief supplied him with the Street Sweeper.

  Without hesitation Melloh began climbing up a water pipe on a side of the lug he knew was not exposed, unwilling to risk turning blind corners and sure that he could pop over the ledge and sweep any roof dwellers. Zhon could have followed up the same way but couldn’t be arsed to what with missing an arm and everything. So, he took the stairs. Thankfully he didn’t get ganked.

  Zahul and Zholl rushed to the windows facing the next warelug. It was quite a way away though. Zahul peeked and-

  CRACK-CRACK! Little flecks of rock and pebble sprayed from where the shots had grazed the window sill of the stone bricked lug.

  Damn! Pinned! He slid to the ground, under the window. “Get cover, boi!” Tarnation! Now he had to use the gadget.

  He pulled the wandpad out of the pipboi and poked the lens – hand crafted by Zhak from a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor sensor he scavenged and a disc of fluorite he polished himself, it was no Zeiss and it was a bit blurry, pixelated, low res, and high contrast, but it did the trick – just above the windowsill. The wandpad didn’t get shot because whoever was covering wanted Zahul’s head, and wasting a shot on a wandpad – most orcans had no idea how to even use these relics – would give Zahul the brief window of opportunity needed to counter snipe.

  He pressed the other volume button with his thumb, and pop- the rough image quality of the scene above him through the window appeared. He had to angle the wandpad just right, it was his periscope of safety, but then he could easily square the opposing warehouse in the very clear crosshairs, just two thin three-pixel green lines overlaid on each other on both axes, that Zhak had coded into the viewfinder. He marveled at the magick, and perhaps in another time, another place, another universe perhaps, Zahul could have made a good photographer.

  But instead, he tapped the touchscreen. See? An old sharku can remember something as simple as that. The crosshairs flashed from green to red.

  Crackle, “Aye, that lug? Over.” Yahka didn’t need wyvern eyes to see that.

  Zahul held down the volume up button, “Aye, over.” And released it.

  Yahka licked his thumb and held it up to test the wind, looked at the numbers one last time before slipping off his hilariously thick pop bottle longsightedness glasses, closed his eyes, sniffed the air (?), winched Big Bertha forwards a teensy bit, then just an angle or two to the left, pumped his foot on the pedal to winch the angle once, twice, just to get it just a bit of a taller parabola, and then smashed the big red button with his fist.

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  PH-THUNK! Big Bertha loaded up her ordnance and spat it into the air.

  The 152mm heavy explosive artillery shell sailed high, high up, through a cloud, back into it once it reached the vertex, and plummeted down straight into the targeted lug, cracking right through the flimsy scavenged aluminum siding roof.

  There was a good reason why this other lug was situated well away from the lug that Squad Zed had now occupied, with all the precious merchandise.

  Now, methamphetamine in crystal form is not flammable, not really. Yes, in smoking and vaporizing it, it requires flame, but this flame is held to the substance, and it bubbles and crackles and then thick, disgusting vapor is emitted. It doesn’t exactly explode.

  The precursor chemicals for making it, however, do explode.

  There were two major ways, the pseudoephedrine way and the methylamine way, or benzyl methyl ketone / phenyl-2-propanone ‘old school style biker crank’.

  Now here in San Martin they had been growing their own ephedra, and nearly all nearby municipal shoreline had been completely converted to crops of ephedra sinica, bushes and bushes of yellow tipped spiky grass.

  The ephedra sinica had to be steeped in methanol for the ephedrine and pseudoephedrine to leach out in extraction soaks, and methanol was extremely flammable, to say the least. It was volatile, and so the vapors of evaporated methanol had filled the entire lug, trapped under the aluminum siding.

  And methylamine was flammable. Methylamine, the key ingredient to the benzyl-methyl-ketone production method, and the hardest ingredient to acquire, therefore being the one most stocked up on, was also extremely flammable.

  Methanol, bundles and bundles of dried ephedra grass on hand for the next soaking, and barrels, and barrels of methylamine.

  All extremely flammable. They do explode, indeed.

  And so, the lug exploded.

  KABOOM!

  Instead of collapsing into a heap of embers and rubble, the stone bricks were blown away at great force, flaming projectiles, heated, but not seeking. Melloh had to throw him and Zhon into the staircase to guarantee that they wouldn’t get clobbered by some stray part of the blast, and they tumbled painfully down the stairs all the way to the bottom since Zhon was missing an arm and could not help catch them as they tumbled down the steps.

  Zahul and Zholl still had their backs to the walls facing the blast, and this far away they were safe. The merchandise was unscathed, that was the whole point of all the San Martin skai’s hard work. But the glass of the windows were all blown out and now glass shards littered the floor, which one should be careful not to step on barefoot.

  “WOO!” Yahka pumped his fists into the air. He craned his neck up to look at the crow’s nest. “Gnosta! Didsha see that?”

  Gnosta waved politely to indicate that yes, she had indeed seen the big explosion.

  The infliction of Senjya’s meth scourge was beginning to be felt across Orca. Village wars had erupted between Vostok and Concordia, Mizuho and Syowa, Progress and Druzhnaya, Gangotri and Maitri, Aboa and Sanae, Wasa and Maudheim, and in the Peninsula with all the island villages like Rothera, with orcan pirates and rogue traders in the mix, it had really become quite a free-for-all. McMurdo itself was caught in so many entangling alliances that there was now a five-way gang war for control over the capital city’s corners. This was all how San Martin was surging up in wealth anyway. All over this gezzno ice rush.

  And yet what Senjya had hoped to come to pass did not happen. Though she restricted the more crucial exports for development, such as ferrous powder to sprout algal blooms, or wood and steel to raise lugs, those still ran freely with smuggling, and in fact it was just a few lunas ago that Zahul was offered a smuggling contract, but he was not yet in such dire need for money that he was willing to risk his neck, removing himself forever from his dear children should things go wrong. Even if the pay was magnificent.

  And so, instead of prices crashing right away as Senjya wanted, they just kept going up.

  Sometimes. Sometimes not, but then it would just swing back up even higher. Or sometimes lower. The markets had swung into an extremely volatile crab pattern, full of wild Barts to ride up and down, and it was these crazy swings of movement that really got the rogue traders and speculators frothy and rich. Senjya had awakened the animal spirits of the market. Indeed, without any real regulation anymore since it had all become black market, trade was surging completely out of any control of Clan Amallark policy, of course doubly so with all the meth Senjya was throwing in, in the mix. If there was one behavior that smoking meth encouraged- it was risk taking behavior.

  Worse, the village wars had the opposite effect of weakening the Horde. With all these internecine conflicts, arms productions had shot up, arms dealers were raking it in, so more orcans were getting into the gunrunning game. Even if a village wasn’t pulled into a war, it was afraid it would be. And so, atul began arming themselves to the teeth and tusks. Which made a ground invasion – capturing wombs was the whole point after all, can’t do that if everything’s razed to ash by dragonbreath – astronomically more difficult.

  All this frustrated the Princess to no end. But she was used to getting smacked down by failure, unlike Amefrid. She would learn and adapt.

  And so, there were a lot of these precursor chem warelugs, and one of the flaming bricks smashed right through a window of another production facility – they didn’t bother to space those apart – and KABOOM! Up went another one.

  Not ghash in the hole. Inappropriate to say ghash in this situation. Ghash was good. Fire… not necessarily so. ‘Ghash in the hole’- maybe more appropriate for the butt zug-zug.

  Why’d you jump up of all directions, blunt smoker boi?!

  Some of my favorite things.

  The magickal CMOS Sensor converted photons into electrons, allowing for dissemination of a light reflected image into chromatic pixels.

  We have no idea why this helped. A calming breath maybe? But it was just a short sniff.

  ‘My name is ASAC Schrader, and you can go fuck yourself.’

  This explained how Hangdru Hyde, flamethrower boi, got access to all the methanol he could drink.

  ‘Yippee Ki-yay, motherfucker.’

  ‘Aye carumba.’

  Si vis pacem, para bellum.