Write-Off! (NEW VARIATION? Taking signups!)

I spontaneously decided to do another one of these. Sai, Chwoka, and Credit provided our plot, characters, and setting respectively (who did what was chosen at random) and Sanzh was roped into being my opponent.

So before I show my entry, here's the conditions we were working with:

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Spoiler
Setting:
<Cred> paleolithic age, but all the dinosaurs are made of nano-bots

Plot:
<Sai> Character A has achieved a position of military authority through politics rather than merit and finds themself beset by an invasion led by Character B. Character A must turn to the unlikely advice of Character C to save their outpost.

Characters:
<Chwoka> #1, a hardboiled private eye who speaks with his fists
<Chwoka> #2, a hardboiled egg eating champion whose addiction to hardboiled eggs is ruining their life
<Chwoka> #3, a dead architect

And this is my version of the story!

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SpoilerIf there's one thing I've learned in this business, it's that things can always get worse.

I thought it was bad when I messed up and punched the Minister of Finance in his nanotech jaw, only to have it turn out that the Minister of Justice was the real brains behind the money-laundering scheme.

But then it got worse when, after the cabinet shuffle, the Minister of Finance was shifted to Minister of Defense and he pushed through a bill mandating that all hard-boiled private eyes be drafted into the defense forces.

At first that didn't seem so bad, but then I got a sudden "promotion". Specifically, they gave me the lowest possible rank they could that would legally let me be assigned to take command at Fort Labrea. The place was a dump, and worse than that, it was the least-defended spot on the border. So if anyone did try to invade us, they'd be going right through there. It was exactly the sort of place politicians send nanosaurs they never want to see again.

I knew we'd be facing an invasion, but I didn't expect it two days into my command. And I especially didn't expect her to walk back into my life.

They called her the Eggsecutioner. She was an oviraptor who liked her eggs hardboiled. I mean, really hardboiled. Everyone joked that was what she saw in me.

Of course, it was never gonna last. It was only a matter of time before she wasn't satisfied with the cloned nano-eggs and took to robbing nests. She could never get enough eggs. When I found out, I let my fists do the talking with their integrated speakers, and she was exiled for her crimes.

Apparently she'd done okay for herself in exile, judging by the army of stegosaurs and triceratops behind her. She was mad - mad at the country that had abandoned her, and mad at me for my role in it.

And I had no goddamn clue what I was gonna do about it.

I didn't know military tactics. I only knew punching. And there were way more nanosaurs out there than I could punch.

The best hope I had was to find someone in this dump who was more qualified than me. I stayed up all night scouring personnel files for someone, anyone who might have a chance at turning this fight around.

Then I saw it.

Private Hardy Boyle. Before joining the army, he'd architect, but not just any old architect. Fort Labrea had been his work. There wasn't much we could do to stop the Eggsecutioner from getting in here, but maybe, just maybe, we could use some kind of trick in its construction to gain an advantage when they arrived.

Thrilled, I called the nearest grunt and asked her to get Hardy Boyle into my office. She just sort of stared at me.

"You mean, dig him up?" she asked in disbelief.

That's when I noticed just which personnel files I'd been looking through - the casualties folder. Hardy Boyle had been dead for three years.

On the other hand, in my old line of work, when your only lead was a dead man, that was just a Tuesday. I decided to dig a little deeper into what had happened to old Hardy.

Turned out, his death hadn't been on the battlefield. It had been ruled an accident - but, on the other hand, you didn't hire the good investigators to check out Fort Labrea. The case might be cold, and I might have an invasion to fight off in a few hours, but the last thing we needed was a murderer in our ranks when it all went down.

So I started with Hardy's quarters. Turned out the place hadn't been touched since his death - everyone thought he was a little weird, and bad luck, and generally all sorts of unpleasant rumors. I had to run my internal dust filters on high once I opened the door to check out the scene of the crime.

According to the report in his file, Hardy had been killed when the titanium-alloy bookcase he'd been building in his spare time crushed him, and then his nanokettle malfunctioned at that exact same moment and blasted him with an EMP that shut down his self-repair functions.

It was all nice and clean. Too nice and clean. You had a better chance of getting fried in a lightning storm at the exact same moment they announced you'd won the cyber-lottery jackpot. Not to mention that nanokettles without hypersurge protectors were even more decades out-of-date than most of the shoddy equipment we got here at Labrea.

That kind of old junk would be stuck in the storerooms, and that means there should be a record of who requested it, and who filled the request. Keeping records was the one thing they took seriously around here, after all.

I checked the serial number against the storage computer, and it turned out that Hardy had requested a kettle... but according to the timestamps, the request was made five minutes after his life support systems had stopped sending updates.

Something smelled here, and it smelled like foul play. On a hunch, I ordered them to dig up Hardy's grave.

It was just as I suspected. The body was gone. The EMP hadn't fried him - it'd just disabled his transmitters and taken him off the grid. Hardy hadn't died, at least not when everyone thought he had - he'd just found his way out of this hell.

And he might just have shown the rest of us a way out, too.

---

When the Eggsecutioner arrived, she found the place littered with inert bodies. A quick check of her scanners showed all essential systems inactive. She laughed.

"I knew my ex was incompetent, but disabling his whole unit? Never thought he'd mess up that badly. Oh well, guess that just makes things easier for us. Everyone rest up, tomorrow we start marching on the capital. And see if you can find any eggs to boil up! I'm hungry!"

Of course, Eggsy didn't know what my new pal Hardy had taught me about hiding essential life-sign transmissions. That night, when the invaders were in sleep mode, we all got up from and took the enemy by surprise. They didn't know what hit 'em.

Namely, my fists.