Corporate Synergies is a modestly epic 14-part space opera of questionable ethics and dubious morality centred on the ongoing conflict between two mega-corporations and their quest to dominate the retail landscape of Earth’s ever-expanding colonial reach.

New to Corporate Synergies? Start here!

9

Horizontal Deployment of Assets

Seventy-two hours later, Molly found herself on a planet of which she had never heard.  A planet that smelled like wet dog and stale cigarette smoke.

She tried to breathe through her mouth as she and the handful of recruits with whom she’d been deployed were led into a medium-sized domed structure.  Though Molly was still moderately excited at being deployed – she was finally in space, or at least had been for the trip out – and was very glad that Chocolate and Helion had been assigned to her deployment group, there was an undercurrent of disappointment in her mood.  The planet stunk and it had rained from the moment they’d arrived.  It seemed almost… dull.

“You okay?,” asked Helion.

“Yeah, I just thought deployment would be more exciting.”

“I know, right?,” said Chocolate.  “I hope we get to shoot at something soon.”

She was, of course, still completely missing the fact that what they would be shooting at would be other people.  Either that or it just didn’t bother her very much, which may be the more disturbing of the two options.

Molly’s impression of the planet – which was in fact Big Anus – changed dramatically once her group was lead inside the domed structure.  It was a large meeting hall, the place where all, or most, of the EMD personnel stationed on-world would assemble for special events, visits from UniRe executives and other carefully-constructed team-building bullshit.  As such, it was an impressive structure, spacious, with a stripe of shimmering gold taking up the top fifth of each navy blue wall.  As with the HR tower back on earth, poster ads for various UniRe and UniRe-owned companies graced every wall, but every wall also featured one large, framed photo of a famous Earth landmark to give the recruits some kind of connection to home.

A stage had been set up at one end of the hall and a long, low table at the other.  Molly, Helion and Chocolate immediately gravitated toward the low table.

“So what now?,” said Chocolate.

Molly just stared blankly, not having a clue.  Helion shrugged.

“Probably a welcome speech.  My last CO welcomed all the recruits before assigned them to specific squads.”

“What does CO mean?,” said Molly.

“Sorry, that’s a military term.  Means Commanding Officer.”

“Oh, our Operations Manager, you mean?”

“Yeah, exactly.”

“Cool.”

Any other conversation was thankfully, for our sake, cut short by the appearance of several official-looking people in perfectly tailored and perfectly pressed UniRe uniforms.  At the head of the group was a young man with chestnut-coloured skin, a perfect smile and perfectly sculpted hair.  He was one of those people who was so good-looking you really just wanted to slap him until he started crying.

“My name is Zaggerty Shah,” he said, grinning like a dipshit.  “And I am your Operations Manager here on Biccaneus.”

As Helion had predicted, Shah launched into a welcome speech.  Something about the great things UniRe does, the EMD being a core part of…

Look, I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really listening.  You can only hear so much of that self-aggrandizing mank before it starts going in one ear and immediately out there other, am I right?  Come on, you’ve been to corporate events before, don’t tell me you haven’t totally zoned out once one of the big-shots starts droning on.  They just use a whole lot of words to say absolutely nothing, and that’s what Shah was probably doing.  Remember all that ‘rah-rah we’re awesome!’ stuff from Zalia Rushworth?  Yeah, that’s pretty much what Shah said, just with a deeper voice and probably more product in his hair.  Same amount of eyeliner, probably.

Once Shah finally shut his gob, a second member of the stuffed-shirt brigade stepped forward. She was short, attractive in a bland, soccer-mom kind of way, but Shah was prettier.

“Now,” she said.  “We have our unit managers present.  Rather than us assigning you to your unit, we’ve decided to allow the unit managers to select their recruits.  Would anyone- ah.”

The woman, much to Molly’s surprise, seem to be staring right at her.

“Honzo,” said the woman.  “Would you like to select first?”

“That would be great, yes.”

Molly jumped slightly at the sound of a voice almost directly behind her.  She turned, as did Chocolate and Helion, to see two people standing between them and the long low table – a table which was now laden with dozens of different kinds of food.

The man – who was obviously Honzo – smiled at her. He was some kind of Asian, but Molly, as previously discussed, had little experience with ethnicity and so had no idea if he was Chinese or Japanese or anything else.  She would actually never figure it out, but between you and me, he was of Japanese ancestry, but actually born in a small town in Northern Ontario, Canada.

Beside Honzo was a woman who may have been average height, but looked much taller due to the wild mass of curls firing off in every direction from her scalp.  And if Molly had a difficult time with Honzo’s rather straightforward ethnicity, she had no hope here – Frog’s skin tone was vaguely Middle Eastern, her eyes vaguely Asian, her nose decidedly Slavic and her mouth… I don’t know, Australian.  Let’s move on.

Frog smiled a half-hearted, bored smile, while Honzo looked back to the stuffed shirt brigade and pointed to Molly, Helion and Chocolate.

“We’ll take these three, if that’s okay with everyone?,” he said.

There were murmurs of agreement from the other unit managers and the woman at the microphone nodded and smiled to the trio of recruits.

“Congratulations on your selection, recruits!”

“Welcome to the Red Roosters,” said Honzo, once Molly and her friends had returned their attention to him.  “I’m Honzo, this is Frog.”

“I’m Molly Morgan.”

“Helion Creek.”

“Chocolate O’Connell.  Yes, really.”

Frog grunted at them.

“Pleasure to meet you all.  “I’m Honzo, this is Frog.”

“You made your selection pretty quickly,” said Helion.  “You must have read our files before we got here.”

“Once we make our selection, we can start the buffet line,” said Frog, jerking a thumb over her shoulder.  “You three were closest to the table.”

And then she walked away and began filling her plate.

After a moment of stunned silence, the three recruits slowly began doing the same, but hadn’t made it very far down the table when Helion paused.

“What’s going on?,” he said, addressing no one in particular, but clearly directing the comment at Frog.

She looked up from her plate and glanced around the room.  All of the unit managers as well as Shah had a hand their left ear, a sure sign they were receiving some important info via their earpieces.  That all of them were receiving it was a bad sign – whatever was going on, it concerned the entire EMD presence on Big Anus.

And Frog had a gut feeling she knew what was happening.

“Dammit,” she said around a mouthful of croissant.

They all watched as Shah dropped his hand to his side and stepped to the fore of the stage once more.  Though none of the recruits would have noticed, his smile was slightly weaker than usual.

“I’m sorry, but we’ll have to cut the celebration short.  Please see your unit managers for further instruction.”

He had barely stopped speaking when Honzo turned back to Frog and the newest members of the Red Roosters.

“The deal between UniRe and GCon has fallen apart.  We need to re-establish our presence here or we’re going to lose the planet.”

Tossing her plate aside, Frog set off at a run, Honzo on her heels.  After a split second of confusion, Molly, Helion and Chocolate sped after them.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Enjoying CORPORATE SYNERGIES?  Check out my full-length novel that involves fewer douche-bags, Radko’s War!