Chrome Dogs
The Wick's gangs run on chop-shop chrome, and the chrome is wearing out.
What they are
The Chrome Dogs are what Legends look like with no faction behind them. Each faction treats them as proof that its own answer is right.
They do have rules. A pack keeps its promises and writes none of them down.
The name
In the Kindling, chopped-in kids used to run behind the licensed Legends, hoping to be in the frame. The crowd called them the dogs. The chrome came later and the insult stuck.
Nobody calls themselves a Chrome Dog. A Dog names a pack, or says nothing. Meridian's manifests file them as unaffiliated, the one official word some Dogs will use about themselves.
A Dog is named by the pack once, out loud, at the bench, and never again in any medium. A Dog will fight past sense over a name.
Every answer in this city has a room where a thing is done in front of people. The Dogs have a bench and a torch.
Three ways in
Nobody chooses a way in. A Fast-Splice counter turns you down in front of the whole queue. Or you were spliced and the works never answered. Or you were never warm at all, and you have only the bench.
A cold body with enough chrome in it moves like a Legend from forty metres, and that is exactly as far as most people ever see one from.
The three packs
| Pack | Who they are | How they fight |
|---|---|---|
| The Strays | The ones who cook. Failed splices, Fast-Splice rejects and kids: the largest, youngest and poorest pack, and the only one that feeds people. | Ragged rush-down in numbers: Scrap Rat, Hound, Hopper and Crawler bodies. |
| The Muzzles | The ones with a supply. They run the off-manifest gun pipeline and fight over routes, not territory, with hierarchy and manners. | Disciplined. They hold range and will let you walk away. |
| The Pedigrees | The ones on the clock. Suture seconds, visibly grafted and worn as status. They traded years for a fortnight of being looked at. | The heavies and the elites. The Bonebreaker is one Pedigree. |
Between the packs
Ware moves a Dog up the packs, and failing chrome moves them down.
Pedigree
The apex, and the shortest-lived.
Muzzle
Stray
The bench
Where the chrome comes off.
What a pack owes
A pack does not owe a burial, a name said aloud, or a record.
You get carried once
The bench is open
Nobody is refused hardware. It is the kindest rule, and it kills more of them than Meridian Security does.
Nobody speaks for you
No pack sends anyone to speak for you.
The ware comes back
Ferro signs. A pack unbolts.
The warranty period
The Dogs are being killed by a warranty period. What kills a Dog is chrome wearing out on schedule. They talk about failure dates and never about the Seal.
Drift
Tremor, heat and lag.
The count
The pack says your number out loud.
The walk down
Three ends
The bench, the Toll, or a line item at a Recovery Desk.
How the city reads them
Meridian clears the packs. Scrapline mourns them, and once got a Stray out. The Undercurrent argues with itself about them.
Meridian is weather with a budget, the union is a family that will feed you and then write your name in a book you cannot read, and the cell is a group of people who have never once come back to see how the delivery went.
Arm it.
Arm it. Sure. Then next Tuesday go and count it.
They fed me for eleven days before anybody said the word union. That's the whole trick, and nobody's done it since.
How they fight
In the build, street fights run in the Wick only, and the Wick is Chrome Dogs country.
Partly built These units are in the Wick's enemy deck in the development build.
The Dogs are the Wick's largest enemy pool, beside Meridian Security and Bleedthrough.
| Unit | What it is | In a fight |
|---|---|---|
| Mutt | Chaff at your ankles | Knee-high and fast, and they come in packs. |
| Chrome Ganger | The Dogs' own grunt | A person in scrap plate, in crews. Slightly tougher and slower than a Hound. |
| Scrapshot | A junkyard shooter | A braced pipe cannon in the hands of a Dog, and no soldier. It hits harder than a Spitter and cycles slower. See ICE. |
| Bonebreaker | The brute | It does not stagger from chip damage. It is the first street unit whose answer is to stop trading blows and move. |
| Collared machines | A chassis a pack has chopped, collared and pointed at something | Scrap Rat scurries, Hound packs, Hopper arcs and Crawler facade work, all in Dog custody. See One chassis, three custodies for how the same machines turn up under Security and under Bleedthrough. See Street machines. |
What they say in a fight
Designed These lines are written for the game's design.
That's a nice one. That's a really nice one.
Six of us, one of you, and you're still the expensive thing in this street.
Pot's still on! Somebody get the pot!
Hold the route. He's not on the route.
Rounds cost more than the ground does. Let it walk.
Cycles to spare. Let's spend some.
Left one's the good one. Aim wherever you like.
Not that street. Nothing in that street wears out at the right speed.
They're at the Shutter Line again. They'll be gone by dark, they always are.
Sad, mostly. Sad and then very fast.
The Toll
Designed The body exists in the build. The fight is designed.
The Toll is the Chrome Dogs' apex and one of the city's enforcers. He has never been heard to speak. In a street mouth he is he, and in Meridian's files and the codex he is it.
Packs do not federate, so nobody follows him. He arrives at a pack, not at a fight. He takes ware off living bodies, leaves, and does not come back for months. Nobody negotiates the price, and nobody resists.
People who crossed his ground and lost something said they had paid the toll, and the name stuck to him. The throne was a gantry seat before it was a throne, and somebody in the Wick can still tell you which gantry.
Each pack believes something different about him. The Strays say he was a Pedigree once. The Muzzles say he is a collector for a real debt. The Pedigrees say he is the bench, walking. The game gives none of them an answer.
He rides a scrap throne carried by four bearers. The sound of him is four sets of feet trying to stay in step and a scrap frame that was never built to be carried.
In the design he rides the throne as destructible cover. Break the bearers and the throne comes down: he gets faster and more aggressive, and easier to break. He can appear once your heat reaches the third tier.
One thing every account agrees on: he has never taken a working piece.
Price went up Tuesday. Toll came through and took nine kilos off my stock.
He'll want the left one. He's got taste, I'll give him that.
He takes what's finished. I've met worse men with better manners.
Four bearers, a chair built out of other people's fittings, and a price the Wick quotes in chrome.
It has never been heard to say the price.