Orpheus - Haunting the Dead.pdf - Dice

HAUNTING THE DEAD
SETH LINDBERG
“I know there’s something to it, dude.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Definitely.” Frick sounded firm. “Layoffs.”
“Layoffs? No way, not Orpheus.”
“Believe it, dude. Word around the water cooler is,
some of the kids down in Accounting are none too
happy about the cost overruns some of you agents are
piling up. They’re looking over all the books, and the
board’s furious about something. They might even call
some consultants. It’s like a pall over every department.”
Frick’s voice sounded ominous, almost Vincent
Price in his delivery. A ghost, well, the Orpheus Group
could handle a ghost or two. It was, after all, their
business. But layoffs, that was another thing entirely.
“Christ. Layoffs. That’s a frightening thought.”
“You said it, dude. You know, you should think about
going back to Engineering. Screw all this field stuff. We’re
doing a lot of interesting things, some pretty secret stuff,
handling new tech. It’s really exciting.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?” Anders thought back to
when he was “discovered” by the field operative team.
There had always been an uneasy, jealous tone to
Frick’s voice after that. Everyone in the company knew
who the hotshots were, and it certainly wasn’t the
engineers.
“Can’t tell you,” Frick replied, smugly. The tone
was just insincere enough for Anders to doubt if Frick
told him that it’d actually be that interesting at all.
Anders had started in Engineering. It was only later
when someone in Investigative Consulting looked
over his medical records more carefully that he went
through the tests to become a field agent. Before that
it had just seemed like a neat new job to him, a chance
to test out some interesting gear. He’d fallen into the
tech sector mostly by accident: he had the kind of
personality to spend ages up late at night fixing some
vital problem, then slack off for the next week. Tech
groups like Orpheus’ Engineering section tended to be
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