Chapter 30: The Solo's Manual
The weeks and couple of months following my "revenge" were more or less pretty quiet. No ninjas had shown up, and as far as I could tell, the leader of that mercenary team hadn't realised anything had gone wrong, or if he had, he had decided to keep it to himself. The latter might have made more sense, considering he had been relatively certain he would be murdered.
At first, it kind of felt wrong that he didn't remember anything, but I finally came to the conclusion that he was of no consequence and that everyone of importance, namely myself, had remembered it. So, I didn't care if the bullies of the world themselves were beneficiaries anymore; it was enough for me to know that I had won.
I had worked one additional job with Kiwi's crew, but it was surprisingly pretty tame. It was a similar job to the last one, a defensive mission. However, the employer was an unnamed corporation, and the people we were defending were just regular people in residential areas. The threat was much less than a full-scale gang war and amounted to just preventing Scavs from assaulting them.
I wasn't sure how the Corp knew that Scavs would attack; it could have been anything from detecting such movements through traditional intelligence operations, or it could have been as nefarious as instigating the Scav attack themselves and hiring us to defend their employees as a morale-building exercise. There was really just no telling.
Scavs were a lot less likely to fight to the bitter end; they were after easy prey, after all, so as soon as a few of their groups were wiped out, they cut their losses and departed the area. I hadn't even needed to do anything myself.
It was a gig that, surprisingly, nothing went wrong during. However, I was starting to notice certain behaviour patterns that suggested that both Jean and Ruslan might be experiencing the incipient symptoms of cyberpsychosis. They were still both gregarious and outgoing, but now their humour had a mean edge to it, even if it wasn't directed towards Kiwi or myself.
I had offered them a supply of the antidepressants I had invented and took religiously once a week, but they declined, so all I was able to do was verify that their cybernetics, especially the new pieces they both got installed recently, were installed correctly and start a file of clinical findings on them. I had researched cyberpsychosis more and more, and I was growing more confident that cybernetics generally acted as an amplifier for any existing mental illness. Both Ruslan and Jean were, arguably, well into some parts of anti-social behaviour simply by their past history and current occupations.
It wasn't as though I could really criticise too much, either. I might like to pretend I had no issues myself, but my continuing issues of self-esteem and irrational distrust of authority were not exactly sub-clinical findings. Also, I didn't particularly have problems murdering people anymore if I thought that doing so would protect myself or even if I just thought they were "really bad people." But that wasn't exactly a strange opinion to have in this world.
In fact, my original opinion that violent criminals should be carefully subdued and tried for their crimes would have been seen as incredibly naive. So much so that I was glad that I had never really spoken to anyone about it, as it was incredibly out of character for a Corpo girl.
Honestly, I blamed the PRT back home, and I was more and more perplexed why they treated villains with such kid gloves. It did make me wonder if I could copy the famous containment foam that Dragon, the best tinker in the world, had made, but my only ideas were using organometallic foams, which would more or less work, but you couldn't breathe through it, so it would immediately asphyxiate anyone caught with them.
In between my work weeks at Trauma Team, I began accelerating my plans to sell my antibiotics to, preferably, Biotechnica. I had already finished synthesising it on video camera, carefully explaining each of the steps in the process in such a way that even an undergraduate could likely follow along in the process. That had actually taken quite a bit of time, as I had to create most of the precursors as well, which I left out of the video.
I had just finished visiting the corporate offices of Veritas Corporation in downtown Night City. They were an interesting corporation and had almost as good a reputation as Trauma Team did. They were a European company, and their services were essentially what you would expect some parts of governments to provide, provided in areas where trust in government was non-existent or governments themselves were non-existent.
For example, you could hire them to conduct depositions and to perform binding arbitration, and for my purposes, you could hire them for a number of notary services. Even the government courts wouldn't really trust a notary public these days, but they did trust Veritas Corporation. I left three copies of the video, along with the full steps needed to create the chemical, encrypted, at their offices.
This was a necessary precaution, as I would have to give Biotechnica a sample of the drug to entice them. If the deal fell through, they would definitely follow through on reverse engineering it anyway, so I would need to provide the second party I sold it to proof that I had invented the drug before Biotechnica had, and the European Community, as well as US courts, would trust the timestamps on the digital and physical vaults of Veritas. In my case, the vaults were digital, and while the contents were encrypted by myself, the Veritas Corporation would attest to both their cryptographic hash and the time the files were uploaded, which should be sufficient proof.
My next step was one I was a lot more hesitant about, but I could find no better solution. I definitely couldn't approach them alone, as I wanted to stay anonymous. My distrust of authority extended to those that had authority merely by force of arms; in fact, I probably trusted them the least. Still, I had made an appointment to see Mrs Okada once again.
Walking through the pachinko parlour, I noticed that most of the people here were the same people who were there the first time I was here, months and months ago. Were they animatronic constructs, plants in Wakako's employ, or did people really like pachinko that much? I didn't know.
The guard at the back of the parlour was different while being almost indistinguishable, including the grunts of the last guy. Stepping into her office, I was greeted by the old lady, "Ah, Taylor. Have a seat. You weren't precisely verbose about the reason for this meeting, except that you would be a client. What do you need?"
I sighed, "I need someone to act as an intermediary to a Corp. I have something that is worth a lot of eddies that I want to sell them, but it is intellectual property, so I don't want them to just shoot me and take it, or black bag me and see if they can wring me dry like a dish rag. I want your help in making contact, providing them a sample, and ensuring my anonymity during the exchange if they're interested."
Wakako raised a single eyebrow like Spock and placed her hands on her oversized desk, "I actually get requests like this fairly often, but virtually all of them never pan out to anything or are from people who are delusional. I very rarely proceed with gigs like this because I don't want my Corp contacts to think I am an idiot. You don't look delusional, so tell me more about what you think you have and how much you think it is worth."
"It's a pharmaceutical. A novel one. Specifically, it is an extremely broad-spectrum antibiotic that is very effective at killing single-celled eukaryotes while at the same time not being toxic to human or even animal cells. That last part is the key, as otherwise it would just be a poison and pretty common. It is much more effective than the current state-of-the-art in discriminating nanomachine-based treatments, and I believe it is worth at least one to two billion eurodollars in sales per year," I finished, setting my hands in my lap.
She tilted her head to the side but didn't mention, "If it is as effective as you say, wouldn't it be worth a lot more than that? And how can you be sure it is a novel pharmaceutical and not just kept as a trade secret?"
Those were insightful questions, so I coughed, "Because there are certain complications in utilising it, that would make it suitable only for hospital-based situations where the patient is under the care and supervision of medical professionals. You see, it is so effective in destroying bacteria that a single dose will eradicate the entire body's microflora biome or digestive bacteria that exists in your stomach and intestines. This is treatable, but realistically only in a hospital-based setting. That is the same reason I know it isn't merely a trade secret, as like I mentioned, the current state of the art in medical-based nanomachines can accomplish a similar thing, but it is much more expensive."
"Perhaps they know of it and don't want to introduce a product that would compete with these nanomed-based products?" she asked mildly.
I shook my head, "You of all people should know that there is no real monolithic 'they'. The nanomachine-based immunity treatment is also something that can only be accomplished in a hospital and MedTrans are the market leader in this segment -- it is really more of a medical device compared to a pharmaceutical treatment. The patient has to be hooked up to computers the entire time, as discriminating between cells to kill and cells to not to kill is too computationally intensive for nanomeds to do on their own, at least this current generation." This was one of the main reasons I wanted to sell this as a product. It wouldn't shake the entire world up, and would just compete with an existing product line, "We definitely couldn't sell it to MedTrans, but we could sell it to one of the traditional Pharmcorps -- I was thinking Biotechnica, as they don't have any similar products this would compete against."
She hummed, "Why not the Trauma Team? They have a lot of pharmaceutical products, and moreover, they have a lot of hospitals. If its a product that can only be used in a hospital setting, that would be a good synergy. Plus, you work there."
I shook my head emphatically, "The fact that I work there would queer that deal. If they managed to find out my identity somehow, they might argue that I invented this product while working for them, and therefore, they own it entirely without compensating me, even if I don't work in a research capacity."
"You invented it? I was worried you had stolen it, possibly from Trauma Team, which was why I mentioned them... You didn't steal the tech from anybody? I won't care if you had," she said amusedly.
Well, my power invented it, but that was basically me, I felt. I certainly didn't feel bad about taking credit for it, and in fact, I felt a feeling of satisfaction come from my medical sense as if it was happiness I might be getting the accolades I deserved. Silly power, it didn't realise that would likely kill me. I was even a bit leery of admitting this to Wakako, but I did, "Nobody will be looking for this. Yes, I invented it. However, I would like very much if Biotechnica merely thought that it was stolen from a competitor. That's why I'm willing to accept ennies on the eddie as far as price is concerned."
Wakako looked at me for a moment before nodding slowly, "Okay. How do you recommend you prove to me that this thing works, then?"
I fished a small plastic bag with about a half dozen small gel capsules inside and slid it over her desk, "I'm sure you could find someone with a bacterial infection, even a very difficult-to-treat antibiotic-resistant infection that the hospital has given up on since they didn't have the money for the expensive nanomachine treatments." I paused and then explained the eccentricities of the treatment, including that the patient should be near a toilet within twenty minutes of being administered, "After a day, the person will need to undergo bacterial replacement therapy, preferably at a hospital. Although, if you want to keep the patient's sudden condition confidential, which I would appreciate, it might be alright to do it at home, too, if you had the supplies. I just wouldn't recommend it for patient outcome reasons."
The small packet disappeared quickly, and she said, "Okay. I'll tentatively accept this gig, then, subject to verification. Now, we need to discuss costs. I doubt very much you will be able to afford this type of job if you intend to finance it yourself."
"Hmm... I'm not sure. I might be able to, but I thought a contingency basis might be the best if you're interested. That would give you some skin in the game, as well, and would help motivate you to help me achieve the best price possible as well as for the operation to succeed without me getting murdered or kidnapped," I said mildly.
That caused the old lady to grin widely, "Now, let's talk numbers."
I had offered ten per cent, and she had countered with forty, but eventually, we had settled on twenty-five per cent for the old bat. I had told her that the minimum I had to get was one million eurodollars, and that just caused her to laugh, and that assuming I wasn't bullshitting her that we shouldn't accept less than three, and she would try for four. That would put the payout in the range of one to two per cent of expected annual revenues, which was the going rate for stolen technology that wasn't patented.
She agreed with me on Biotechnica, as she had a few contacts in the corporation, but she felt that it would take at least a couple of months before we could provide them with a sample. After that point, she agreed with me that the clock would be running.
I didn't particularly know how long it would take them to reverse engineer a synthesis for the chemical, but as it wasn't chemically related to either existing natural or synthetic antibiotics, I felt that it might take the research a year or two to do it, so at that point, if they didn't respond favourably within two to three months we would proceed to offer it to the second choice, which was Arasaka.
Wakako seemed to detest Arasaka, though, despite having connections to a number of their subsidiaries, which made me feel a little confused. It was probably something personal, though, so I didn't press. It surprised me a little bit that Arasaka had a pharmaceutical division, though, but it probably shouldn't have since they were pretty much the definition of a conglomerate.
She said it would take her a week or so to verify my claims, and we would discuss things further then. As such, I was preparing myself to work a solo gig. I had taken a few from Wakako, but they were mostly low-paying jobs, like medical consults or bodyguard work. I also declined one where she offered a job with medical services for a captive, and I felt that it was likely I would be helping prolong someone's torture, so I turned it down.
This one, however, was a job to investigate a location in the Badlands. Apparently, Wakako's client was some manner of a contraband smuggler, using long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to fly his contraband into Night City, and a number of them have been lost around a specific stretch of the Badlands.
Although there was a bonus if she could, somehow, take action if she found proof of something going on, this was really only a recon job which was the only reason she had taken it. The reasons the drones had been downed could be numerous, but Wakako was expecting it to be some kind of human intervention, and in the Badlands, that usually meant the Wraiths, which were something like a much more organised and competent group of Scavs, that usually only operated outside of major metro areas.
I wasn't like most girls from a Corpo background in thinking that absolutely any nomad was the same as the psychos, but there wasn't any shortage of the psychos. Some of the files that Alt-Dad had left behind included general information about any of the movers and shakers in and around the city. Data on nomads was a bit more sporadic since there were a number of nomad families, and they didn't always loiter around cities, but Wraiths were a bit different in that they often did -- preying on people stupid enough to leave the protective confines of a city's metro area, kind of like me, actually.
My car was a pretty good fit for driving in the Badlands, it even fit the aesthetic more or less, but I wasn't stupid enough to drive straight to this location and ask anyone there if they had seen anything suspicious lately, perhaps some drugs falling from the sky? That would get me killed.
Honestly, the entire job was pushing right up against what was acceptable in my risk profile, and I would not have accepted it had I not had a stealth system installed. But I was kind of curious about the Badlands, and if I had to be honest regular people didn't frighten me that much anymore. That feeling was a bad sign and something I had to be careful to reign in because a big enough bullet could kill me regardless of who shot it.
Pulling up to the checkpoint that separated Night City from the Badlands, I didn't get hassled by the NCPD manning it. They even double-checked that I had a full tank of CHOO2 and a lot of water, which I did even though I only intended to drive thirty kilometres at the most. I was obviously well armed, even if I was forgoing the Kang Tao submachine gun this time in favour of a small folding stock scout rifle with a sixteen times optic and suppressor. The suppressor wouldn't do much to hide the sonic boom of the supersonic 7.62mm NATO projectile, but it would help a lot in preventing someone from noticing a muzzle flash, especially at night like it was now.
The rifle was Alt-Dad's, a customised version of a bolt-action rifle made by Steyr, and the cop manning the barricade saw it in my passenger seat and nodded, "Nice rifle."
"Thanks, it was my father's," I told him honestly.
He hummed, "Well, be safe out there." I nodded and pressed my foot against the accelerator, smoothly taking off into the lawless desert.
[Taylor, you have entered a degraded service area. Trauma Team response times to your locations can exceed ONE FIVE minutes! Please take care!]
My target area was in the southwest, but before driving off to my destination, I drove straight south to the former town of Laguna Bend, which was now a giant reservoir, the last of the straggling citizens of the town having been dragged out over sixteen months ago. I remembered watching a News piece about it that characterised them as crazy people who were getting in the way of Night City's need for fresh water.
The truth was that they were probably getting in the way of something but judging from the rainbow sheen on top of the water detectable even after sunset. There was clearly some chemical contamination of the reservoir.
I pulled my car in next to a shack that was built next to the bank of the reservoir, figuring it empty but I was surprised when a man stumbled out as I was leaving my car with my rifle.
"Ya hear to finally kill me?!" the man asked, his speech slurred slightly and a bit uneven on his feet after taking in my militant appearance.
I didn't see a weapon on him, but I kept the muzzle of my rifle carefully pointed in the air but still in a position where I could sweep the muzzle in his direction very quickly; it was a fairly lazy port arms stance. I peered at him some more, "I don't even know who you are. Why the hell are you living next to a toxic lake?"
"Cuz that fucking lake used to be my home!" he said angrily, gesticulating wildly.
I hummed and walked past him to stand on his deck. His house wasn't much, it was a mobile home, but it was set right on the bank of the reservoir. That alone made me think that the company NC Dams was having a lot more trouble than they were letting on. Not only was the water here obviously toxic, but allowing an agitator to live right at the bank? Alone? Why hadn't they shot him? They clearly hadn't cared much about the rule of law when they flooded his entire town.
Even if they didn't want to shoot him if it might have been bad optics, why hadn't they just closed the dam's gates briefly? It would only take a day or two to completely flood away the man's house. That could have been managed well enough that I wouldn't have been surprised if it got thirty seconds on one of the late-night comedy shows in an "idiot Luddite does something stupid and pays the price" type of segment. Good for a laugh at his expense. The fact that neither of those things had happened was telling me things weren't roses at NC Dams Limited.
"Anyway, I'm not here to shoot you, old-timer. I was just told the reservoir looked nice at night, and I have to admit that rainbow sheen does look rather pretty, even if it doesn't seem very healthy," I told him, carefully positioning myself so that he remained in my peripheral vision as I used my 8X optical zoom and infrared vision to look at the opposite side of the reservoir's bank. Two twenty-five metres, according to my Kiroshi's built-in rangefinder. That was good enough. I carefully clicked the optics on the rifle a few times, setting it to as close to that as I could, but I was guessing.
Keeping him carefully in sight, I used his deck as a brace as I took sight of an empty can on the other side of the reservoir. Just because I wasn't here to shoot him didn't mean I trusted some crazy prospector-looking guy. He didn't actually look that old, despite me calling him old-timer. He could have been in his late forties or early fifties, but he looked unkempt as hell.
That caused him to snort, "That it ain't." He looked at me slowly, then sighed and said, "Wait a second." He departed back into his house, and I casually put my hand on my sidearm at my side in case he returned with a weapon, but instead, he came out with a fancy set of Zeiss binoculars. Raising an eyebrow, I watched him track my target. He asked, "That can near the water's edge?"
I nodded and shouldered my rifle again, going on one knee to brace the barrel on his deck's wooden handrail. I carefully sighted down the can, and he said, "Go ahead, send it." Realising what he was doing, I squeezed the trigger gently, trying to surprise myself with the report of the rifle just like Alt-Dad taught Alt-Taylor.
"High, one metre. Left half a metre," he said dispassionately. I was surprised I had gotten that close on my first try. I wasn't exactly a markswoman, much less a sniper; however, my increased strength, the steadiness of my hands and my reflexes allowed me to fake it a little bit. I worked the bolt action quickly and adjusted slightly before firing again.
"High, close. Left, close," he said, and I casually corrected the crosshairs before firing a third time again.
"Hit," he said. With that, I reacquired the bouncing oil can and shot it three more times until the magazine was empty, nodding with satisfaction.
I sat my rifle down and glanced at him, my medical sense tingling. "Thanks. Now sit down for a moment." He frowned at me but took a seat in his lawn chair that he had on his deck.
"Oh, now is when you're going to shoot me," he said knowingly.
I rolled my eyes and said, "Are you suicidal? Nobody is here to shoot you! I'm a Med Techie; just sit there for a moment." I didn't have any of my equipment with me, except for my highly calibrated eyes, fingers and a flashlight, but those would be enough.
Sighing, I said, "You need to leave this fucking house. You're starting to show signs of chronic low-level organophosphate toxicity, as well as possible exposure to heavy metals."
"But this is my fucking home!" he growled, waving his hands.
I stared at him, "And if you don't want it to be your fucking grave, leave. At first, I thought you were just drunk, but that doesn't explain everything. It's clear you have some money; ordinary people wouldn't be able to set this mobile home up here, complete with power hookups. Get the fuck away from this place, or you won't last another six months." I paused and then shook my head, "Even I'm not planning to come back here now."
He sighed and went limp in the chair, "Ain't mains power, but some off-grid solar and battery system." He then shook his head, "Maybe you're right. It just doesn't feel right what they did."
I shrugged, grabbed my rifle and said, "If it makes you feel better, they're undoubtedly going to go out of business. This was supposed to supply the city and Biotechnica's farms with fresh, clean water. That's not fucking going to happen without a lot of expensive remediation. I doubt that is in the budget."
He growled, "I've thought that for months, girl, but that just makes it worse! They did all this for nothing, then!" He then stared off into space and said, "Except... maybe... you're not wrong, I do got some money -- not here though, iffen you plan to rob and murder me... but enough in the bank that maybe I could order a big bag of puts contracts on NC Dams Limited. Their share price hasn't moved at all, but that can't last. Maybe you're right. If I can't have my old town back, at least I can get rich off these bastards' failure."
Puts contracts? A quick net search told me that was one of the ways to "short" a publically traded company. It was a type of security that allowed you to make money if the share price of the company fell, but if it didn't, then you lost the entire amount you spent on the contract. I didn't precisely know how it worked, but I mentally made a note with my deck to look into such short positions on NC Dams Limited when I got back to the city. The only problem with that was the stock and securities market was undoubtedly corrupt.
Maybe, if I had a lot larger amount of money, I could be sure that NC Dams' price would crater eventually, but I thought that it was possible that the market could remain corrupt longer than I could remain solvent, so perhaps I wouldn't bother with it, but it was an interesting thought. I wished this old man luck in his efforts, though. Regardless of if he made a fortune or lost his shirt, he would be a lot healthier if he did it somewhere far away from this reservoir.
Maybe Wakako would be interested in this factoid, though; it was exactly the kind of intelligence she liked to collect if she wasn't already aware of it anyway.
I nodded at him, "Try to get out of here as soon as possible. Organophosphate exposure can be treated easily, the heavy metals not so much, but if you get rich, you shouldn't have an issue paying for the nanomachine treatments it takes to remove heavy metals from your body. Thanks for spotting."
"Yeah, whatever. If you ain't shootin' me, then git, girl..." he waved a hand threateningly from his pastel-pink lawn chair. Not exactly threatening. He was sure focused on people coming out to his dump and shooting him, but that might have been a symptom of the exposure to organophosphates. Still, I didn't turn my back on him once. It was clear that the man was, at one point in time, probably dangerous. The tattoos on his arms indicated service in the NUSA Navy, and one particular one, which featured an eagle grasping Poseidon's trident and a flintlock pistol while perched on a ship's anchor, looked especially prominent.
The design of the tattoo was too stylised for me to get any hits from a reverse image search that I took with my Kiroshis, and I didn't have enough time to look into it further. It seemed familiar to me somewhat, though, as if I had seen it on the TV or in a film.
I waved one last time before getting back in my car and departing the area, heading due west. I mostly took the roads, but the ground was flat enough and my tires big enough that I could depart the roads briefly if necessary. I did so when I got a couple of kilometres from the target area, driving a good hundred metres off the dirt road and shutting my car down next to a large tumbleweed. Then, whistling, I carefully used some desert-coloured camouflage netting to cover the entire vehicle.
That only cost five eddies at the Army surplus store and was exceptionally useful. Even moving ten metres away, if I looked at my car, it looked more like a large piece of desert brush. I bet most city mercenaries would have forgotten something like that out here, but I was so sure I didn't know anything at all that I researched every single job I accepted.
It was clear in my jog to the west that I didn't know the first thing about running or jogging silently in the desert, I seemed to step on every piece of crunchy brush that existed, but at least it was already pretty dark, and I was only able to navigate without tripping and spraining something due to the low-light vision mode on my eyes.
The two-klick jog was nothing to me, as I ran a ten-kay run most every morning, but the uneven ground made me proceed rather slowly. Checking the overhead map, I was already in the circular area of probability as far as the area reported by the client, so I slowed to a crawl.
Up ahead, about five hundred metres, I sighted a few structures. I had been running in that direction because they had artificial lights on all sides of the buildings, which was visible from kilometres out on the low-light vision mode, and it seemed a pretty obvious point of interest.
Taking a knee, I zoomed in on the buildings, looking for obvious signs that could indicate this was the location downing drones. I was looking for large transmitters used to jam control signals or possibly radar-layed machine guns, as I didn't particularly know how the drones were being shot down. Instead, I found something out of a horror movie.
"What... the fuck?" I quietly whispered as I saw what appeared to be two people being crucified. I zoomed out and shouldered my rifle, which had a better 16X optic and sighted down the barrel. Yes, two people being crucified. Wait, would you call it two people crucified if they were already on the cross? Because they were. Or would it be "still being" crucified because they weren't dead yet? Was the act of crucifixion concluded when you put them up or when they died, since it was technically an execution method? Also, why the fuck was I thinking this now?
It was a man and a younger man, barely more than a child, with a strong familial resemblance, at least as much as I could see from this far out.
I walked forward slowly, holding the rifle in a high-ready position.
Movement in my periphery caused me to shift the rifle towards one of the buildings, and I sighted a man dragging a woman out of one of the buildings by the hair, clearly laughing at the shock and horror on her face. Frowning, I moved the optic out of the way before zooming in and checking the range with my Kiroshis. Four hundred. I wasn't that good of a shot. Although I had theoretically zeroed my rifle at two hundred and twenty-five metres, my first shot of the night was a metre off target, and it was windier now.
If that happened again, I could easily shoot the captive lady. Wife of the crucified man, mother to the crucified boy? I'm not sure why, but my mind always tried to wonder and fill in details like this, but in this case, I didn't care because, wrong or not, it made me want to murder these people all the more.
Sighing, I shouldered my rifle and triggered the stealth system, and just started running flat out, trying to cover as much distance as possible before the man dragged the lady back inside or just violated her right here in front of her dying family.
'This is a bad idea, this is a bad idea,' I kept thinking as I ran in the direction of the two buildings; now I noticed that it was more like a compound, as I could see some chain-link fencing, too.
Skidding to a halt, I panted as quietly as I could while I checked the distance again. One ninety. Wow, I ran over two hundred metres quite quickly. That would have been an Olympic-level sprint in my old world, and it was mostly to do with my Kerenzikov. Although the implant sped up my reflexes and sense of time by three times, it didn't speed up my movement by that much -- that said, it did speed it up a lot just from the fact that it took a lot less time for the movement signal to traverse the spinal cord and reach the extremities, which allowed me to run and move very quickly.
Glancing around, I deactivated my stealth system and shouldered my rifle again. The man was waving a handgun at the woman's family members and unzipping... no, that wasn't going to happen tonight. At least, not again.
I didn't try to take a fancy shot; I wasn't good enough to go for a headshot at this distance. Instead, I carefully placed my reticle over the centre of his chest after clicking the distance down to two hundred metres. I let out a breath and squeezed the trigger, then quickly reacquired the target after working the bolt action, gratified to see him on the ground and the woman glancing left and right before grabbing the man's pistol and a long knife off his belt. Ah, she was going to cut down her family... well, maybe, but apparently not before stabbing the downed man over and over again. In the dick. Good for her.
Now that I was closer, it looked like they hadn't actually nailed them to the cross, merely tied them to it using ropes. I wondered why, but internally I was quite pleased that I wouldn't have to treat a number of no-doubt infected puncture wounds and bone fractures, assuming I didn't get my fool self killed with this stunt.
As the lady moved to cut down her family, I, however, stayed motionless but instead used my eight-times zoom to scan the area of the compound for any movement. They had to have heard the shot, but it wasn't actually that unusual for a random gunshot to be heard even out here, I assumed.
Fuck, it was too much to think that nobody would check it out. If they were Scavs, nobody probably would have. However, another man stepped out the door, some sort of carbine in his hands, and I quickly acquired and shot him with my rifle. If the damn woman had been faster with cutting down her family, he might not have saw anything. He came out of the other mobile home-type building and didn't have a direct line of sight on the first guy's body, but he definitely saw the woman trying to get her husband down. She had already freed her son, who wasn't looking too good while writhing on the ground.
That did it. I think they were all alerted now. So much for the sneak mission. If this was a video game, then I wasn't going to get the Unseen Spectre rating on this mission anymore. I saw movement in one of the windows and quickly fired, then saw another guy leave the first building, and it took two shots to bring him down, as I missed with the first shot.
The last shot I took hitting a man that came around a detached garage area. It looked more like a small hay barn or a hangar, actually, but it had a few vehicles in it, so its purpose was pretty obvious. I didn't have multiple magazines for the scout rifle, as I mainly intended to use it as a telescope on this gig. I didn't actually intend to have to fire it at all. I had a bunch of loose rounds in one of my pockets, but instead of trying to reload it, I carefully set it down, triggered my stealth system and began another sprint directly for the small compound.
I yanked out my monowire as I got close, but instead of throwing it at the steel of the chain link fence, I sliced up a small wooden post that it was attached to at one of the corners and then leapt through the small gap in the fence that it created, in time to see the surprised face of an armed young man that was likely not much older than myself coming out of the building, half-dressed. He had likely seen the wooden post disintegrate and might have even seen the invisible outline of my body as I leapt through the small gap, as my stealth wasn't perfect when I was moving.
Not thinking about it, I lashed out with the monowire and took his head off in one quick, smooth motion, his surprised expression not changing while his head and body went in different directions. I glanced down at the piece of shit Budget Arms submachine pistol and quickly discarded the idea of picking it up. Instead, I reeled the built-in weapon system back into my wrist and pulled out my pistol.
Instead of my normal Militech Omaha, today I was carrying a Constitution Arms Unity, in 10mm. I picked this calibre specifically because it was barely subsonic, and the sound of the Unity's action was relatively quiet too. With the suppressor, which I had screwed onto the threaded barrel, it would have made an excellent sidearm to a theoretic sneaky mission, but at the moment, I was wishing I had the Omaha, which had a much larger magazine capacity and unparalleled penetration and stopping power, or even a Lexington with its three round burst or automatic fire options. I had thought about it and picked this pistol for a good reason, but sometimes you out-think yourself, though.
I still had over four minutes on my stealth system, so I moved quickly. First, I jogged to the front, just in time to see a man in slow motion start to raise a shotgun to shoot the woman. My arms snapped up, and I fired three times on the bounce, quick reflex shots from retention and hit him in the upper chest twice. He wasn't quite dead yet, so I shot him once in the head before holstering my pistol and grabbing his shotgun. It was a Constitution Arms model as well, a fairly nice pistol-gripped pump action shotgun.
I glanced around and picked the corner of one of the mobile-home buildings, out of sight of any of the exits and windows and deactivated the stealth system. I didn't see anyone else moving. Had I really shot everyone?
Something told me I had not, but I had likely shot most of the stupid ones. I triggered the augmented reality mode of my cyberdeck and glanced around for any networked items, finally finding a terminal in the garage which I picked to launch the simplest and yet one of the most useful quickhacks for me right now, Ping.
Glancing around as the quickhack bounced off a number of other items, including people still on the subnet, I identified five more people, including one that looked like he was hiding right behind my line of sight behind one of the Wraith-painted vehicles. Sighing, I turned on my stealth system again and darted out to woman who was still in front of the two crucifixes, attempting to help both males stand up. I snuck up on her.
"Fucking stay down," I said to her, right next to her, causing her to stumble and wildly try to sweep my general area with her pistol's muzzle, which I ducked inside of before deactivating my stealth system and pushing, forcing all three of them back on the ground. As she started falling onto her butt in slow motion, I casually kicked the pistol out of her hand so she wouldn't accidentally or on purpose shoot me when she hit the ground and had a clear shot at me. I was actually more worried about her shooting me than most of the Wraiths here because she was so wound up.
Her pistol clattered a half metre away at the same time her butt hit the dirt; she glanced at me with wide eyes, but she wasn't stupid. Her eyes narrowed, and then she said, "You're the one who shot them, aren't you?"
Crouching down, glancing left and right, I nodded, "Yes. I need to know if there are any other captives or if it is just you three here." If some or all of those four dots in one of the buildings were captives, it would drastically change how I intended to proceed. I glanced at the two males and judged they likely had been hanging for hours, which was why they were so noodle-legged. The Wraiths hadn't been Biblically accurate here either, as I was pretty sure they smashed the person's legs with hammers after putting them on the cross. I couldn't quite remember where I read that from, though it definitely wasn't the Bible.
She shook her head, "No, it was just us. They captured us earlier today, stole our car... and..." I waved a hand, dismissing her before she started talking about all the unspeakable things they likely did to her. I wasn't specced as a therapist at the present time, nor did I particularly want to hear it -- I had already made my decision to kill everyone here after all.
"Okay, that's all I needed to know. Stay down, stay low. Maybe try to get to the garage, and see if any of the vehicles have their shards inside, on the off chance they manage to get me. But there is at least one of them hiding in there," I told her and activated the stealth system again before she could say anything else, leaving her sitting in the dust.
I snuck close to the building that had four dots in it. From my minimap it appeared the dots were all in the same room, the living room area. That was fortunate and was where I was next to.
I started to hear a few voices from inside the building, but I couldn't make them out except for a firm voice saying, "Stay here. There's only one entrance into this building; we'll light up whoever it is when they walk through the door."
'Yeah, no, you won't,' I thought as I set my pilfered shotgun down briefly, then I grabbed two spherical fragmentation grenades from my belt and carefully pulled the pin on each of them. The window to this building was already shot out, and I was crouched next to and underneath it.
Carrying a grenade in each hand, I released the spoons simultaneously but held onto them for a full one-Mississippi count before tossing them both through the shattered window into the living room, amongst the four dots who thought, smartly, to ambush me.
I ran a few metres and threw myself to the side, landing prone on the ground with my hands over my ears as I wasn't entirely confident about the ability of these cheap motorhome walls to stop shrapnel. Rather than two distinct explosions, I heard just one large boom and felt a wave of hot air of the shockwave pass over my head.
I could hear a couple of groans from inside the building, but they didn't sound very healthy. Still, I would explore that building last to give them a chance to, hopefully, bleed to death. Grabbing my shotgun, I sprung-up, still invisible and ran to where the garage was, noticing the last dot start to move rapidly.
Fuck, he was backing out in one of the cars, a shitty-looking Thorton Galena. There was no cell or data service out here, and I was hopeful that even if they had a network connection using directional antennas or satellites, it was limited to data terminals, and they hadn't been able to call in any assistance, but that could change if one of them drove off.
The Galena looked like shit. Still, it had an aftermarket Crystal Dome environmental protection system installed instead of a windshield, so I didn't know if the buckshot I presumably had loaded would penetrate. Instead, I took careful aim and shredded each tire on the right side with a single shotgun blast apiece as the driver shifted the car into gear and started a straight shot out of the compound.
I didn't know if they had run-flat tires, but even run-flat tires won't help you against eight double ought buckshot pellets hitting it. Both tires exploded, flying off the wheel rather spectacularly and causing the vehicle to veer to the right and slam into the building I had just thrown two grenades into.
For a moment, the driver attempted to put the vehicle in reverse and back up, but that wasn't accomplishing much. Finally, he leapt out of the driver's side of the vehicle while I stayed completely still, holding the pistol-gripped shotgun close to my chest to ensure it stayed within my stealth field. He waved a submachine gun in my general direction and fired off a burst without looking, thankfully missing me by over ten metres. Well, that was stupid of me. I expected he would have shown me his head so I could blast it, and I wasn't expecting stupid wastes of ammunition like that. He could have easily hit me with that if he was lucky, so perhaps it wasn't as stupid as it looked.
As he lifted his weapon to repeat the action, I darted off in a tangent to his arc of a possible fire, moving more or less perpendicular to another long burst of fire he let off without looking. Continuing my vector, I darted past the rear of the car he was hiding behind before turning and bringing up the shotgun and shooting him in the back. I went to fire again but stopped myself. Once was definitely enough at this range.
Kneeling down next to the car, I deactivated the stealth system as I had less than thirty seconds of charge remaining and just remained still, listening and repeating a Ping quickhack on the garage terminal. I didn't see any people still connected to the subnet, and the only thing I could hear was the woman and her family in the distance where I had left them.
I carefully sat my stolen shotgun down and just shook silently as I came down from the adrenaline spike I had been working on for the past few minutes. I grabbed something from one of my pockets and quickly took several bites out of a chocolate bar, my medical sense telling me that the simple and complex sugars would help a lot.
I finished half the chocolate bar before I stood up and yelled, "I think that's all of them." Grabbing the shotgun, I checked it and only had two more shells, so I set it aside and grabbed the submachine gun from the guy I had just shot. It was a Militech Saratoga, which was pretty nice, and the dead guy had two full magazines, which I took, dropping the mostly empty magazine out of the weapon and replacing it with one of them.
I didn't know for sure that they hadn't gotten any communications out; that was just my hopes and my guesses based on where we were located. So I couldn't waste a lot of time here, on the off chance fifty Wraiths showed up pissed to all hell. Still, I intended to loot. I mean, this was a dangerous and foolhardy exercise that I came out of alive; of course, I was going to loot.
I started moving with a purpose, half-jogging to the building I hadn't thrown grenades in as I figured I'd start with things less likely to be broken by shrapnel. However, as soon as I grabbed the doorknob and started pulling it, I felt myself get punched in the chest several times. Growling, I leapt over the handrail sideways and rolled out of the line of fire as another three or four-round burst shot through the door. I backed up, now out of the line of fire, as I gingerly touched my chest. I didn't feel like I was going into shock, and my biomonitor wasn't reporting any penetrating trauma, so the rounds likely either hadn't penetrated my vest or my skin. I couldn't really tell which at the moment.
How fucking stupid. If that was an assault rifle instead of the submachine gun it likely was, I could have just died or at least been grievously wounded. I was acting as though everything was already over, and it nearly got me killed. I fucked up more the longer a mission went on, it appeared.
Sighing, I raised the Saratoga but and fired a burst of my own through the walls, trying to gauge where the shooter was; then another burst above that, shattering the window. I was out of frag grenades, but I had one flashbang and one anaesthetic grenade left. I selected the flashbang, pulled the pin and tossed it inside, through the shattered window and closed my eyes firmly. Even out here, the explosion caused my ears to ring a little. Instead of rushing through the door, which was being shot through, I just crouched and used all of my strength to leap straight up, activating stealth and rolling through the window I had just thrown the grenade through.
As I hit the floor, I saw a single man firing wildly in the general direction of the door. I didn't think he could see much, but I didn't give him a chance to observe me and shot him in the head and neck with a quick burst, which put him on the ground with a sick gurgling sound that, thankfully, did not last very much longer. I guessed that he either didn't have an operating system or he had it carefully set to accept no network connections, even from this trusted subnet. Some paranoid people, like me, did configure their systems that way, after all.
I had less than fifteen seconds left, so I deactivated the stealth system again. I could use it for a similar quick tactical use, maybe once more, before it would have to recharge.
But hopefully, I wouldn't need to. This time, I carefully cleared each room of this building, trying to be as safe as a single person doing the job that was meant for four or five could, and then did the same to the garage and the other building. Only then did I relax a little. I was trying not to beat myself up too much, but I had almost gotten myself killed in a really stupid way just now, so it was kind of hard not to.
I ran back to the family, and said, "Okay, now it really is clear." I could see that the two males had started getting the feeling back in their legs and were standing on their own power now. The woman had recovered her pistol but didn't look like she would sweep me with the muzzle this time, so I didn't disarm her again.
"Sis! We can get out of here, now!" said the younger male, causing me to frown. In my head, I had this boy be her son. But at least the story I had concocted, which got me to do something incredibly stupid, was close. I glanced between them and was still thinking the older man was their father.
I handed the father the shotgun I had used after reloading it, and he took it gratefully, and then I handed the woman the Saratoga I had been using. She nodded at me before glancing at the younger boy, who looked expectant and sighed, handing him her pistol. Well, that was their business who they trusted with firearms, so long as they didn't point any of them at me.
I had already found a lot of loot, including four carefully packaged drones. I still hadn't found how they had downed them, but it clearly wasn't a machine gun. I was leaning towards them being hacked somehow. They were kind of pricey, so I was going to take them with me, along with some implants, which I would spend a few minutes extracting. I found a safe with a little over two thousand eurodollars in it, but more importantly, it had the owner shards to the two other cars inside. One was a Colby like I owned, except with a Wraith paint job and a fully customised CrystalDome system. It was nice, but the other was even better; it was a Quadra Type-66 with similar modifications, including oversized off-road tires.
I didn't think I could take both of them, so I would give this family the Butte. Both cars only had two seats, so some lap-sitting would have to be done for a while in either case, so I was going to keep the nicer car. I found the family inside the garage trying to hotwire the Colby.
"I got the shards for both of those cars, but I'm going to keep the Type-66," I told them firmly, "You don't need to hotwire them."
The woman said, giving me a glance over her shoulder as if I was a very special person who didn't know anything about cars. Which was true, for the most part, "We're not hotwiring them; we're disconnecting the tracking system."
Oh. That would have been embarrassing if I drove this back to my home and was tracked down. "Would you mind doing the same to the Quadra? I'll give you the shard for the Colby in exchange."
The father smiled, "We'd do that for free and more as thanks. We'll also use some spray paint to paint over the Riffen shiv tags, it won't look great, but at least they won't shoot you on sight if you roll up to the city. Still, we'd appreciate the shard for the Colby. Was there a shard for the Galena? We're going to take that too."
I blinked at him. While that thing wasn't completely wrecked, it was sans two tires, at least. I glanced around the garage and did notice a number of tires. Could this family take off two wheels, replace the tires and put them back on quickly enough that they felt confident about not being here if and when the Wraiths came back? What were these guys? NASCAR?
As if reading my mind, the man chuckled and said, "It won't take long at all. When you live in the wastes, you have to be quick with these types of things. I've been working on cars for decades, and my daughter is better than even me. I don't suppose our family hired you to save us? I didn't even think they'd have realised we were taken yet. Normally, the Riffen Shiv would ransom us back after committing sufficient atrocities." Ransom them back?! Were the Wraiths insane? Machiavelli said 'Never do an enemy a small injury.' The idea was because that would just piss them off. You either killed enemies or left them alone. Personally, I felt that applied to 'raping your enemy's daughter in front of them.' From the anger simmering in the way the man had said that I thought that if they did ever release this man, he would have made a Quixotic-quest to murder them all.
Still, it made sense that they were nomads too. I guess there would be a ton of mechanics in a nomad family. I shook my head, but I wasn't willing to break operational security and tell them about the gig. That was one of the biggest rules in Morgan Blackhand's guide. Secrets were for keeping, "No. I'm not at liberty to discuss why precisely I am here, but I adjusted my mission parameters when I saw what they were doing. The Galena's shard is probably on the guy who was uhh.. trying to drive it away. I'll get it for you. If you guys want to loot anything else, feel free. I've set aside everything I'm going to take. I'm likely going to leave right now, but if you could do me a favour before you leave?"
"Of course, anything!" said the woman, with a lot of emotion, after finishing the work on the electronics of the Colby before walking over to the Type-66.
I glanced at the barrels of CHOO2, "After you fill your tanks, if you could please use the remainder of that to burn each of these buildings to the ground?" I thought I would get the bonus for "stopping" these guys, but I still didn't know precisely how the drones were intercepted so was best to be thorough here. Burning the entire compound to the ground was warranted.
"Absolutely," said the man with deep emotion.
Smiling, I darted away. I grabbed the Galena's shard from the dead man and gathered the things I was taking, using a few minutes to chop a couple of arms off here and someone's head off there and dumping them all into a duffle bag. Kind of gross, but I had gotten desensitized to that sort of thing in the six months I had been working for Trauma Team. It took me two trips to dump everything I was taking in the Type-66's modest trunk, glancing at the new "paint job." It was definitely rushed, but at least it didn't scream psychopathic nomad too much now. The kid was the one spray painting each of the cars, while the father and daughter team already had the Galena up on jacks and one wheel off.
I handed the two shards to the kid and got in the Type-66, backing it out of the garage. I stopped by the Galena, and the man gave me a smile, "How long do you think we have? It will determine how much we try to steal."
"I don't know. I couldn't detect any type of satellite or point-to-point communications equipment, and there was no signal here. But I just don't know. You might have all night. Alternately, they might have gotten the word out as soon as I started shooting them," I said honestly.
He nodded, "We'll go with that more pessimistic guess and try to be out of here in thirty minutes. We'll have most of the things worth taking bundled away by then, for sure. We've already found a heavy machine gun, and the boy is going to man it. In the off chance a Wraith car shows up, he'll riddle their cherry asses full of armour-piercing rounds toot-suite."
Was there an HMG? Well, I didn't really want one of those. I was already turning into a trope without becoming a literal gun bunny. Besides, if a weapon was too large, it would stick out obviously from my stealth field. I nodded at him and felt that their chances were pretty good. I wasn't going to remain to guard them, though. I had done my good deed, stupidly, but I functioned mainly as an ambush predator. I couldn't function as well if the bad guys knew to expect me somewhere, "Good luck then."
With that, I drove out of the compound and directly towards my rifle that I had left behind. I almost ran over it but got out quickly and placed it in the passenger seat. Then I drove to where my car was parked and emptied it of anything that could identify me. Frowning, I wondered if I should drive it further away. Theoretically, I could be identified by the registration and plate number. Nodding, I drove my Colby a good four more kilometres away from the Wraith compound, hiding it in an even better spot before running back to my new, fancier Quadra.
As I got behind the wheel of the Quadra and drove to the nearest road, I saw a crappily painted Colby and Galena driving as a convoy straight to the east. That made me smile. When I got back home, though, I was planning on going over the numerous ways I fucked up. I wanted to live a long life in this world, after all.
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone