Ronnie Vint

Session 01 — Operation Living Bomb

Ronnie arrived at Las Vegas Airport with nothing but a duffel bag and the comfortable certainty that someone else was paying for everything. He met Guy LeFleur and Sammy Castaneda at the terminal, sized them both up in under ten seconds, and decided the Canadian was dangerous and the American was useful. Sam Elliott shepherded them into a corporate limousine with an open bar and a corporate AmEx, which was exactly the kind of arrangement Ronnie respected. He produced his own deck of cards before the limo cleared the airport perimeter, suggested a friendly game of poker, and immediately began palming aces. Guy spotted it and said nothing. Ronnie lost anyway, badly, which was worse than getting caught. His Bad Temper fired like a trip flare: he accused Sammy of cheating and knocked the cards off the table.

At the Voss Campus, Adrian Voss and Major Jenkins laid out the brief. Since The Meteor Event, super-powered individuals had been surfacing across the globe, and the current target was The Exploding Man — a young man who walked into crowds, detonated, survived, and repeated. The mission was capture-alive, deep inside a Taliban cave complex in the Afghan mountains. One hundred thousand dollars per operator for a live retrieval. Yi Jiangku distributed three sealed folders labelled “Hungry God,” “Toasty Titan,” and “Jens” to various team members, which meant Voss was running compartmented intelligence on threats the team hadn’t been fully read into yet. Ronnie filed that away and focused on the money.

The insertion was a night parachute drop into the Afghan mountains, five kilometres from the target cave. Major Jenkins found a tripwire, Jens disarmed it, Guy identified the safe lanes through a minefield using insurgent paint markers, and Sammy killed two sentries with a knife. Ronnie’s contribution came when an Arabic radio query crackled from the cave mouth — he crumpled paper against the mic to fake static, buying the team a few seconds before six insurgents emerged anyway. Inside the cave, Guy’s gas grenades dropped three guards but the target was completely immune. Major Jenkins hit the target with the Sonic Weapon and dropped him cold. Ronnie rushed forward, bashed the prone figure with his rifle butt to make sure he stayed down, and secured him with restraints. During exfiltration by helicopter, four insurgents on flying carpets intercepted the aircraft. Guy killed two with a perfectly timed grenade. Ronnie manned the rear .50 cal turret and shredded the remaining two carpet-riders out of the sky. At dawn, the team debriefed at a NATO base in Afghanistan. Major Jenkins raised a glass of whiskey and announced that their own Voss Combat Suits were waiting back at the campus. The payout was $150,000. Ronnie was overheard later that morning making “future arrangements” with the camp cook regarding certain supply-chain irregularities. The side-hustle never sleeps.

Session 02 — Terra-ble First Impressions

Back at the Voss Campus, the debrief was straightforward until Guy produced a button he claimed could summon Major Jenkins. Ronnie slapped it without hesitation. It played smooth jazz. Even Jenkins laughed. Down on R&D Level -1, four combat suits hung on the wall like medieval armour redesigned by someone with a defence budget. Ronnie found a scientist nursing a coffee mug and began slowly pushing it toward the edge of the desk with one finger, maintaining unbroken eye contact until the man snatched it away. He punched Sammy’s unoccupied suit across the room, ripped an office divider clean in half, and sent sticky notes scattering across the floor. The suit’s strength was extraordinary. Ronnie intended to use every ounce of it.

The Obstacle Course turned into a race. Ronnie and Guy ran it in full armour with the barely-concealed competitiveness of two men who would never admit they cared about winning. Ronnie seal-hopped through the wire crawl, powered up the thirty-foot rope, rang the bell at the top, and then ripped it clean off its mount. He dangled one-handed from the rope, holding the bell out like a trophy, grinning. Suit customisation followed: Ronnie requested dual-linked storm chain guns, Retractable Forearm Blades, and a Thermo-Optic Chameleon Surface. The chameleon surface installed successfully — TL9 stealth that adapted the suit’s colouration and thermal signature to the surroundings. He pushed for advanced TL10 targeting software and the scientists failed to deliver it. The guns and blades went into the modification queue.

Voss took the team down to R&D Level -2, where The Portal shimmered in the centre of a restricted chamber. On the other side: Terra, a dead alien world with two suns, cracked ground, and an atmosphere thin on oxygen. The previous recon team had gone through a month earlier without suits and never returned. The team swept the landscape methodically — found a giant insectoid creature gnawing a human femur in an underground chamber, recovered the bloodstained fatigues of Hernandez from the previous team, and pushed north to a ruined alien city. The city had been destroyed by conventional weapons roughly a century ago. Three-legged furniture, three-wheeled vehicles, a statue of a three-eyed, three-armed, three-legged humanoid at the city centre. From a twelve-story building, they watched a swarm of two to three hundred insectoid creatures digging across the northern plain. Ronnie pocketed Hernandez’s fatigues and every alien artefact he could carry. At debrief, he turned over half. The other half stayed in his pockets.

After hours, Ronnie acquired The Potato — a drained meteorite fragment, shielded in foil — from Xander, an R&D scientist, through Eric the cook. Xander wanted ten thousand dollars. Ronnie negotiated him down to a 7% cut of whatever he could sell it for, which was a better deal for everyone involved except the person who eventually bought it. He has plans to hit the nearest city during R&R to find a buyer. The fragment is a black-market item. If Voss Dynamics discovers its absence, there will be consequences. Ronnie does not appear concerned.

Session 3 — What Happens in Vegas

R&R in Las Vegas began with Ronnie doing what he does best: making catastrophically confident decisions with other people’s money and then his own. He dropped $90,000 on horse racing across two sessions, backing his selections with the unwavering certainty of a man who has read the form guide and misunderstood it completely. By the time the horses had finished delivering their verdict, the only notable outcome was that Ronnie had contributed meaningfully to the retirement funds of several bookmakers. He pivoted without visible embarrassment to Rick Harrison’s pawn shop on the Las Vegas Strip, where he sold off enough accumulated artefacts to clear his losses and bank a modest margin. Rick Harrison drove a hard but fair deal. Ronnie respected a man who knew the value of silence at the right moment. He shook hands, pocketed the cash, and went looking for something more interesting.

He found it through Guy, who had won a Mahjong game on Ronnie’s behalf — money secured by tiles rather than horsefesh. The real transaction came later, in a quiet meeting arranged through discreet channels: Igor, a buyer with the right kind of connections and the wrong kind of smile, paid $500,000 in cash for The Potato. The number was satisfying. What followed was less so. Igor mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the Voss Combat Suit Ronnie was wearing contained a kill switch — installed by Voss Dynamics, accessible to Igor himself. He delivered the information the way a chess player places a piece he has been holding for three moves: carefully, precisely, and with obvious pleasure. Ronnie absorbed it. He is not a man who shows alarm to a mark, and Igor was clearly a man who would enjoy the alarm. He smiled, thanked him for the information, and filed the problem away for later. The problem is now sitting in a very uncomfortable drawer in the back of his mind.

The evening produced further highlights. Gordon Ramsay — his personal culinary god, a man whose cooking shows Ronnie has watched with the focused reverence other men reserve for religious texts — was running a residency at a Strip restaurant, and Ronnie was in the building. The confrontation was brief, loud, and thoroughly one-sided in Ramsay’s favour, though Ronnie considers the signed sticky toffee pudding recipe he extracted from the encounter to be a complete victory. Later, at a club, cocaine appeared and a bridesmaid attached herself to the evening’s proceedings with the cheerful inevitability that follows Ronnie through every city he visits. A troupe of street mimes, for reasons that have been satisfactorily explained, became a fight. Ronnie’s contributions to the mime brawl were two measured punches and a throat strike that he rated, privately, as clean work. He panhandled $5 from a passing tourist while blood was still drying on his knuckles, fed it directly into a slot machine, and lost it without ceremony. He smuggled a portion of sticky toffee pudding out of the restaurant under his jacket. The Ramsay pilgrimage was complete.

Ronnie left Las Vegas sitting on approximately $580,000 in untaxed, undeclared income, a signed recipe from the greatest living Englishman, and a kill switch in his armour that he still doesn’t know how to disable. He is also now in possession of alien artefacts that Voss Dynamics has not inventoried, a fragment buyer’s contact details, and the growing suspicion that Igor is not the last person who will want a conversation. The West Ham fixtures are playing on his phone. He has not stopped watching them. Some anxieties require football.

Session 04 — Fallen Stars

Greenland was an observation. The Dragon swept in and intercepted the first fragment before the team reached it — a massive thing, fast and controlled, and Ronnie clocked it with the calm attention of a man filing an appointment for a later date. Sammy got to the Iceland site a half-second ahead of him, which was not acceptable. Ronnie caught him mid-air and threw him backward — nothing personal, purely logistical — and hit the ground first. Then he stripped off his glove and picked the fragment up bare-handed. There was a flash, a surge, the fragment went dead, and every nerve in his right hand felt like a struck tuning fork. He held onto it. Command was watching through the suit cameras. He could feel them watching. He smiled for the feed.

Norway is where it went wrong. He spotted the next fragment from the jump arc, activated the chameleon camo, and launched himself at it. Then his suit locked. Every joint froze simultaneously — a puppet with its strings cut, hanging in the air for one nightmarish instant before he hit the ground like a side of beef. Voss Dynamics had hit the kill switch. He lay there, rigid and furious, while Jens crouched over him and announced that he could probably fix it. “Don’t fucking touch me,” Ronnie said, and the clarity in his voice was the kind that works better than volume. He was unlocked twenty minutes later without explanation. Nobody apologised. He has not forgotten.

Russia was better. Thirty-five feet of regenerated bear — something that should not have existed, something that had already died once and hadn’t the decency to acknowledge it — came at the team across the snow. Sammy blew a hole through it with a device that would have killed anything reasonable. It stood back up. Ronnie made a decision and went up the back of its neck with both blades out. It is difficult to describe what the next several minutes felt like except to say that he was riding something that was trying very hard to shake him loose and he was trying very hard to remove its head, and the two objectives were not compatible with anything a sensible person would do. Eventually the head came free. He claimed the skull. He has already spoken to Guy about having it made into a cloak. He is serious.

Back at base, Ronnie drank himself unconscious to avoid the mandatory blood draw — a straightforward medical countermeasure, he would argue, and not entirely unsuccessful. Security found him anyway and took the sample while he was out cold. He woke up in the medical bay with a needle mark and the kind of headache that signals a lost argument. He went to the mess hall and stood behind a cafeteria worker reaching for a tray and felt something pull out of the man — not violently, more like a tide going out — and the worker sat down hard on the floor with his eyes unfocused while Ronnie felt a clean, buzzing warmth spread from the contact point up through his chest. Pleasant. He tested it again, deliberately, on the security guard outside R&D. Same result. The guard stayed upright but looked distinctly unwell. The warmth was better the second time. Ronnie is not particularly troubled by this. He has acquired things before without asking for them. He intends to find out what it’s worth.

Session 05 — Deep Sea Fragments and Desert Swarms

Xander was in the corridor with a phone to his ear and a Chinese area code on the screen. Ronnie saw it, filed it, said nothing. Xander handed him another spent fragment — for Igor, for later — and Ronnie pocketed it with the same ease he’d pocket a restaurant mint on the way out the door. He passed Miller on the way to the briefing room and gave him both barrels about the IED in Kandahar: the wrong wire, Guy’s missing eye, the finger that never grew back. Miller went red. Ronnie felt nothing about it except a mild professional satisfaction. Some men need reminding that other people remember.

The sub was his. He sat in the pilot’s seat and drove it like he’d been born at depth — evasive rolls, vertical climbs, creative lateral positioning that kept both turrets active while the Chinese submarine below fell to pieces under Sammy’s beam fire. Guy worked the mechanical arms with the same quiet precision he brought to everything, snatching fragments from the seafloor while Ronnie threaded them past torpedoes and hostile vessels. When the anglerfish appeared — vast, bioluminescent, and hungry enough to bite a submarine in half — Ronnie dove past it without hesitation. Jens was useless, staring at the creature’s light like a moth at a flame, and Sammy put a turret shot through its eye that sent it screaming into the dark. Two fragments secured. Three enemy subs destroyed or crippled. Not a scratch on the hull. Ronnie considered this acceptable work.

Vegas was earned. The honeymoon suite at The Bellagio — leopard skin rug, heart-shaped bed, mirror ceiling — was a deliberate choice made by a man who knows what he likes and is not embarrassed by any of it. At the casino, Guy went on a streak that drew security like sharks to blood. Ronnie stuffed thousand-dollar chips into their breast pockets and patted them firmly on the chest. Problem solved. He noticed a guard near him falter and go pale — the drain again, involuntary, pulling something from the man without permission. Ronnie noted the effect, felt the warmth, and moved on without breaking stride.

The real business happened at Medieval Times, under cover of jousting and Caribou. Igor was there. Ronnie slipped him the fragment and received in return a half-million dollars and a piece of paper bearing a complex master password — root access to every power suit in the program. Every suit. Not just his. He read it once, committed it to memory, and destroyed the paper. The kill switch that had frozen him rigid in Norway, that had turned him into a humiliated statue while command watched through the cameras — he now held the other end of that leash. He told nobody. He offered Rick Harrison a collection of Terra alien artifacts at a million apiece and watched the man’s eyes catch light. Then every phone at the table buzzed and the screaming started outside.

The parking lot was full of bugs — nine feet tall, armoured, eating tourists. Ronnie shifted into something cold and methodical. The central eye was the weak point; he’d seen it on Terra, remembered it like a ballistics chart. He put rounds through two of them with his pistol while Sammy fired rockets and Guy commandeered a Lexus. Brittany was there with her copies, all of them screaming Sammy’s name. The fight had only just begun and Ronnie was already thinking about blade range — the antennae, the underbelly, the soft places where chitin gives way to something a knife can reach. He does not know how many are out there. He knows he has the password now. If this goes sideways enough, he can shut down every suit on the field. Including his own team’s. Including command’s. The weight of that sits in his chest next to the buzzing warmth and the Chinese phone number and the half-million dollars, and none of it troubles him. Ronnie Vint does not carry things he cannot use.