Mercenaries

Loyalty can always be bought.

Recorded history

The archive files mercenaries as a faction because there is nowhere else to put them. They are not one, and would take the suggestion as an insult or a joke depending on the individual.

What they have in common is a refusal that predates the current arrangement. When the Wasteland fractured into banners, some operators declined to pick one, not out of principle in most cases, but because a contract pays and a flag does not. The war that destroyed two of the three founding factions did nothing to change that calculation. If anything it confirmed it: the people who joined something are largely dead, absorbed or occupied, and the people who did not are still working.

Both surviving sides use them. The Remnants hire muscle for work the uniform makes awkward. The Scattered hire it because they are short of everything including bodies. Neither trusts the arrangement, and neither has found an alternative.

Terms

Mercenaries are paid assets, not free force multipliers, and the Wasteland has settled into a set of conventions about this.

Payment goes through the Banker, who logs the contract, holds the terms and is the reason a hired gun can be reasonably confident of being paid by an employer who might otherwise prefer not to. His desk left the Dust Market when the market emptied; the book did not close with it.

A mercenary can turn a fight. A mercenary cannot hold ground. That takes numbers nobody is paying for, which is a limitation everyone involved understands and periodically tries to work around.

The rest is reputation. A mercenary who completes contracts gets more of them. A mercenary who does not tends to have a short remaining career, and the Wasteland's memory for this particular kind of failure is unusually long.

Known operators

Several individuals filed in the archive's People section work on these terms, and the arrangement produces a recurring problem for the record: an operator's affiliation is accurate only for the duration of the contract they are currently under.

The archive has stopped attempting to keep affiliation current for this group and records instead who has hired them in the past.

Archive notes

• Not a faction. Filed as one for indexing purposes.
• Contracts are paid through the Banker, who records and holds the terms.
• Can decide an engagement; cannot hold ground unsupported.
• Hired by both surviving sides, frequently in the same week.
• Affiliation on any individual record should be read as provisional.