Weapon
It wasn’t the first time I’d woken up face-down on a tiled floor with a splitting headache and my vision swimming. Everyone’s had a night like that, right? Normally I’d pick myself up, get some painkillers and a glass of water and then work out if I’d lost anything last night, but my legs didn’t seem to be cooperating and the chorus of errors screaming from my chrome were making it impossible to focus. Muted those. Shut up, I’ll get to you when I don’t have a hangover. The tiles looked wrong, too. My bathroom was supposed to be grey, and to be fair this floor was as well, but it looked like it had been allowed to get that way rather than starting out there. I groaned, closing my eyes again, and rolled onto my back, feeling… Something smear across the floor beneath my shoulders as I rolled them to stretch. No, I cleaned my bathroom last week, it couldn’t be that bad already, could it? I’d been the only one in there, and messy as my job is, I hadn’t mucked it up that badly. Ugh. Five more minutes and I’d get up and work out where I’d ended up and how to get home.
I only got to one before the errors came back. Can’t a girl rot on her own floor in peace? Fucking techies. Somehow, the list flickering across the inside of my eyelids was even worse than it had been with my eyes open, which really didn’t leave me with much choice but to open them again. No, that definitely wasn’t my ceiling, old Styrofoam tiles riddled with black mould. Light fixture but no bulb, bare-ended wire hanging where it should have been. Well, whoever’s pad this is, it’s a shithole, but in Night City you don’t always get a choice. I forced myself to concentrate through the hail of screeching warnings long enough to start a diagnostic.
Scanner offline. Legware functioning but repulsors offline, weird. Eyes functioning but suboptimal. Biomonitor offline, reboot failed. Again, weird. Arms normal, OS normal, integumentary systems normal. Skeleton undamaged, so at least I hadn’t been hit by a truck. The last readout was something about clearing a virus from my system, and that must have been the core of the problem, because with that done the errors finally fucked off and my headache started to fade. Not a hangover, then. Best see a ripper sharpish about the issues, but I could make my way there once I got up and dressed. Not sprinting halfway across the city with my tits out for free, I have more self-respect than a lot of the gonks living here.
Where the fuck were my clothes anyway?
Head clear and eyes no longer wobbling, I hauled myself up to a sitting position and got a proper look at the room I was in. About eight foot square, one door – probably sliding, recessed into the wall. Bathtub in one corner. Drain in the middle more or less underneath me, caked in grime. Well, that explained the greasy sensation on my back. Smelled pretty rancid, actually, now I was waking up fully. Smashed mirror above an equally smashed sink to my left, opposite the door. Hole in the floor which presumably used to have a toilet attached to it, but the dominant smell definitely wasn’t sewage. More like rust, actually. God, this bathroom sucked. If someone was actually living here I’d consider hiring myself out to clean the damn thing, I’d been in gunfights that had left rooms less of a mess. Rare that I leave a bathroom needing a shower more than I did on the way in.
…Gunfight. Closed my eyes and ran back over what memories I had from the last day. Couple of minor gigs dealing with Heywood locals’ problems. Protection racket, klepped data recovery, reappropriating a bike. Nope. Bar? Nope. How had I gotten the hangover, then? Something fucking with my firmware? How had it gotten in there?
I sighed and shook my head to try and get some sparks going. All I could think of was picking up a new BD from the store on the way home from the last gig. The shop had always been legit but the cashier had been a little on edge today. Might have been spiked? Whoever had given it to them had done a shoddy job with the virus, or possibly I was a harder target than they’d been counting on. How they’d gotten into my apartment was anyone’s guess, even if they’d followed me home. Probably best I found that out on the way out. The grime on the tiles felt supremely unpleasant on my hands as I got myself standing, and not much better on my feet. Buck naked in a room with – oh, the bathtub was full of ice, fantastic. Organ or cyberware theft, then. Anyway. Naked in a room with only one exit and no idea what was on the other side of the door. I could guess, because most of Night City’s gangoons have better plans than this – most likely scavs, but they would have me outnumbered. Not that that’s unusual, but normally I have clothes on for this kind of thing. And, y’know, guns other than lefty and righty. Decent throwing knife. A sword. I liked my sword, I hoped they hadn’t taken that anywhere. Scavs aren’t what you’d call smart goons, but they’re greedy enough to have tried selling it straight off.
So no armour other than my implants, no clothes. GPS told me I was in Westbrook somewhere, but evidently the scavs had messed with my phone and I was getting no signal for that at all, so no calling for help. No gun, no knife, no katana. Bare hands and bare skin against who knows how many presumably armed morons.
Well, I say bare hands. I’m an edgerunner, I would have to be pretty stupid to not plan for this kind of thing to happen at some point.
I flexed my wrists, and let my arms split open.
Seals retracted along the back of my forearms, plates slid aside, synthetic skin parting along lines worn from doing this a hundred times before. The chrome where my bones had once sat wasn’t gleaming, it was scuffed and scraped from use, but who polishes the inside of their arm? My fingers twitched a little as the coverings settled out of the way. Stage one fine. Now the fun part.
Hydraulics, pneumatics and motors hum into action, and the pistons raise a whole slice of arm out at an angle. Skin splits further, alloys and tubing exposed to air, and razor-edged serrated steel slices through the gap. When my skeleton was a matter of biology rather than engineering, I’d always thought it seemed a waste to just have a space between the bones with nothing practical in it, though I’m told it’s needed so the bones can cross over when you turn your arm. Keeping a two-foot blade in there just seemed so much more efficient, and why not a matching pair? Lefty and righty might as well make themselves useful if I have to bring them everywhere with me, and these blades have seen me through more emergencies than I’d like to admit. My chooms stopped calling me paranoid after the third time we had to disarm to get through a security check and everyone else was stuck with their fists until we’d zeroed enough guards to get irons for the whole squad.
A girl can get used to this kind of thing, but it never really gets old knowing how much you’ve improved yourself from baseline, and I like to think of myself as a self-made woman in every sense. Mantis blades ready, I cracked my knuckles – I had to get my ripper to tweak the joints specifically to let me do that, it’s just not the same without – and braced myself against the side of the doorframe ready to open it as quietly as possible. I really didn’t expect to get out of this quietly, but the less I could get shot, the better. Even with all my augmentations, getting shot on bare realskinn isn’t my idea of a good time, and it hadn’t been a great day anyway with the whole getting-abducted-for-organ-theft thing, so I was hoping not to let it get worse.
I reached out and, as gently as I could, pulled the door sideways towards me making absolutely sure that my armblade wasn’t going to scrape against the metal. Too easy a mistake to make. Fortunately, whoever was holed up in this place didn’t seem to have damaged the door and it was almost completely silent as it slid back into the frame. No shouts of alarm, no obvious reactions. I peeked around the doorframe and was rewarded with the sight of exactly one scav, not even looking my way – and why would he, when I was supposed to be unconscious? Maybe I’d been lucky, maybe my ICE was stronger than their virus, didn’t know, didn’t care. Unfortunately for him, his gang had picked up me rather than a random civvie, and given the situation they’d put me in I didn’t see a reason to be polite about it.
I dropped back to a crouch, then leaned forwards onto all fours. Fingertips to the floor, blades up, legs braced. My scanner might be out but I don’t need it to fight, and I had no intention of letting first blood go to the other guy.
My lunge was whisper-quiet. Ten metres in an instant, and steel scythed into flesh almost without resistance. Both lungs punctured in one blow, no chance to speak and now no pressure to get any sound out of his mouth, just the gurgling as blood and air spurted from the open wounds. I could feel him trying to get his right hand to his weapon, but I had all the leverage I needed and tore sideways with the blade, shattering his ribcage and severing the arm at the elbow. The splat as it hit the floor was the most noise he’d made, and it wasn’t enough to alert anyone else over the humming of whatever equipment they had set up in here. I brought my right foot up and planted it against my victim’s spine, shoving the corpse sprawling to the ground and ripping my left blade back out. I was covered in gore already, but that might work to my benefit, even if it would take me ages to clean up later.
Might as well check the body. A gun I couldn’t fire without everyone in the place hearing it, a couple of eddie chips I drained immediately – guy’s dead, and I’d better be getting something out of this mess… And a gas mask. Some kind of metal, by the looks of it, haphazardly spray-painted Maelstrom red and filters in surprisingly good condition for a scav in a rotting apartment. Probably stolen. Nothing that would really protect my face, but maybe for intimidation? And it might keep the worst of the mould out of my lungs.
I ducked back into the bathroom. The mirror was a complete mess, but there was one piece big enough to get a proper look at myself, and what I saw would probably count as an actionable threat in any other city. Still naked – the scav was bigger than me, and everything else he’d had on was shredded, soaked in entrails or piss or all three so it was only going to make things messier. Blood splattered across my chest and arms, blades bare as the rest of me and dripping red. Jaw hidden under what might as well have been a muzzle stained with even more of the scav’s internals in this half-light, hair matted with grime from the bathroom floor. Probably half-dried blood from a previous abduction.
If you asked me to pick a word to describe what I saw in that mirror, I think I’d have gone with nightmare. Or maybe werewolf. There were urban legends about Nomads being wound up with those, but they were probably bullshit. Think I kind of liked it for myself, though. I’d been called a bitch plenty of times by people who hadn’t survived meeting me, but I’d never really considered living up to it. Hell, I was short a good nickname, maybe I could make something of this once I was out of here. No doubt in my mind that I was going to get out, either. Without my scanner I couldn’t check how many of them were in here – I’m too used to being able to see through walls, going without that feels like losing a whole sense- but scavs are gutter trash, and there was little to no chance any of them were equipped to deal with someone like me.
Anyway. One down, who knew how many more to go. I made my way back out of the fetid bathroom and crept through the room where I’d left the first corpse. One computer on a desk, maybe for whatever amateur ripper the gang had on call, maybe for emails. I am not a hacker and I wasn’t going to be fucking about with that when someone could walk in on me at any moment. Two doors onward, one left, one straight ahead and really more of a hole in the wall, which led out onto a balcony of sorts. Really more of a ledge on the edge of what had to be an apartment block. Definitely voices outside, which probably meant at least two more of them out there, and I crouched next to the doorway to listen in.
“….Fucking loaded with chrome, choom, we’re gonna be rich.”
“Like hell did Pepe bring that in by himself. Fuck did he do to her?”
“If you ask him nice maybe he’ll show you.”
“I’m not going- Did you see what he did to Andrews? Man’s a goddamn psycho.”
“You really scared of our own fucking guy?”
And then some mumbling I couldn’t make out clearly, which seemed to be the end of the conversation for now.
I rolled my eyes. Not getting anything useful out of these, then. Checked around the room, nothing really useful, but there was that gun I’d left on the body. I wasn’t about to fire it, but I had an idea. Peeking around the doorframe, just enough to get a look at them, told me one was sitting in a rickety old plastic chair and the other was standing looking down at the city. Long way down, by the looks of it. Must have been three or four floors up. Guardrail didn’t look like it was in the best condition. I was pretty sure I didn’t need my blades for this, but I wasn’t fool enough to put them away in the middle of what would immediately become a fight to the death if I screwed this up.
Retreating for a second, I picked up the dead man’s iron to examine it. Basic, boring submachine gun. No smart link, even if I had the implant for that, and no tech coils. Not particularly powerful, wouldn’t do real damage if either of the gangoons had dermal plating of any kind. Definitely not what I needed. I took a second to dismantle it, just in case, and turned my attention instead to the computer set up in the corner. Now, that had some mass to it. An older design, industrial-looking case with a fairly heavy metal frame. I paused to listen for movement. My hearing is pretty good anyway, thankfully, but with ambient noise filters I could block out the whirring from the machine’s fan struggling against the musty air. No footsteps that I could make out. It only took me a second to pull the cables from the back of the machine and get it loose. Never killed a man with a computer before, but hey, first time for everything.
The scav standing by the guardrail had maybe a second to react when the computer whistled out of the door and smashed into his choom, snapping the chair’s front legs as it slid from the force of the impact. That was enough to unbalance him entirely, sending the guy toppling under the guardrail and out into thin air. That second would have been enough for him to scream, but he spent it staring at the space where the other guy had been sitting in confusion. I suppose I couldn’t blame him for that, really, I was used to dealing with people who are trained to respond to this kind of thing rather than some drugged-out rat. Anyway, he didn’t notice the flicker at the edge of his vision as my optical camo disengaged, and given the titanium in my bones and the synthmuscle under my skin, the kick I landed might as well have been a sledgehammer. I swear I heard his pelvis shatter, though that could have been the guardrail snapping as he collided with it.
The second guy did take the chance to scream before he hit the ground, but he was probably out of earshot for anyone inside by the time he’d dropped a floor down. Three of my problems were solved, and I was the only one that knew it unless someone walked past the two corpses below. In Night City, I doubted anyone was even going to bother calling the cops about that.
It didn’t take long to work out that I wasn’t getting out this way, though. Yeah, four floors up, as far as I could tell. Buildings around looked familiar but I would have seen them lower down than this. Tough as I am, there was a very long drop from the last ledge below me to ground level, and without my repulsors I wasn’t about to try my luck with that. The only other door inside, then.
Sliding that one open gave me another equally promising, but much larger, room. I could make out a few more chumps through a hole that had clearly been hammered through the wall, but none of them were looking my way. That told me they had the entire floor occupied, and also that there was probably nobody else in the place. Not that either of those came as a surprise, but it at least saved me wondering if the neighbours were in. One goon to my right, distracted by a TV. An extremely convenient sofa between him and the hole in the wall. Well, no point wasting the opportunity. The floor in there was covered in junk, but fortunately for me, not the kind that rolls around rattling if you knock it while you’re sneaking up behind someone. Old takeout containers, shitty mattresses, cardboard boxes.
I had to time it so nobody was looking straight at me, at least, but the sofa gave me more than enough cover. Getting a grip on his shoulder was easy, and he wasn’t expecting a guest, much less to be yanked backwards and have his legs shoved out from under him. His head met the floor with a crunch I was used to hearing in my line of work, but it didn’t kill him immediately, even if he wasn’t going to be getting up. I span myself around and over him to straddle his shoulders – given I was still completely naked, maybe this one got to die happy – and drove my left armblade into his trachea. Okay, maybe not so much the dying happy bit. Nobody would see the body without walking over, anyway, and I took advantage of my leverage to grab onto his head and twist. His arms felt armoured, but his neck wasn’t, and I didn’t have to break a sweat snapping his spine. Between that and the stab wound, he wasn’t going to be yelling for help before he bled out.
I risked a peek over the rotting sofa. Without my scanner, I couldn’t tag the other scavs in the next room over, but I could identify three from my hiding spot and hear muffled conversation from further across. I could probably take them, but I wasn’t planning to make that much noise just yet.
To my left, a shuffling noise and a clank caught my attention. I hadn’t really looked at that side of the room, but there was another doorway there. No door in it, just a frame again, but clearly there was someone in there and that probably needed fixing before they noticed me. I felt one of my sensors ping that I was being observed as I crawled over to the opening. One of the others in the next apartment must have turned around in the meantime, though it seemed dark enough that he couldn’t really see me, just happened to be looking in my direction. No shouting, no shooting. Lucky break for the moment.
This room looked like it might have been in use as a kitchen, though it was pretty crap even for NC. A busted SCSM against one wall, some plates and bowls on a shelf next to it, looking nearly as grimy as the floor at this point. On the far wall, another shelf unit covered in decaying boxes, probably left by the previous tenants. No scav was going to be doing paperwork. One woman in the room, and judging by her bodysuit and shaved head this one might have been a netrunner. Seemed like a waste of the skillset to be using it here. Really doubted she was going to just let me go if she saw me, somehow, so she was going to have to go instead, and she was paying attention to her food rather than looking my way.
As I started to creep forward, though, my luck ran out. The ‘runner wasn’t just going to stand there watching her meal heat up, apparently, and despite activating my camo, I was not going to get away with that at ten feet in this light. She might not have had a good look at me, but even on all fours I’m too big to pass for a Kiroshi malfunction, and I felt the sparks down my spine as she started running some kind of hack on me. My ICE is geared toward people trying to shut me down entirely, or disable my chrome – I can tolerate being on fire or getting zapped or poisoned, but it is astonishingly difficult to keep my mouth shut when half my skeleton and nervous system are on fire or being short-circuited, so when I felt my skin starting to heat up I knew I was out of time. I had perhaps two seconds, and I chose to spend them lunging forward and plunging the blur where my right blade was into her stomach so she couldn’t do anything else to me. It turned out not to be fast enough, and as my camo crapped out and all my systems began blaring overheat warnings, I felt the shiver of another hack going through and my vision went black.
Shit.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been on fire, but even when I’m running at capacity on combat stims with my pain receptors turned down, it sucks. Being on fire, screaming, blinded, naked, mostly unarmed and well aware that a whole clownshow just found out you exist and are going to start shooting? High up on my list of worst situations to be in, if I’m honest. I can think of a few I’ve been in that are worse, the scavs are making this much less precarious than a megacorp kill team would, but this had already gone past my normal threshold for “SNAFU” and well into “I’m charging the client extra for this” and I wasn’t even getting paid for what had just turned into a clusterfuck.
I ripped my arm back out of the ‘runner’s corpse and dived forwards as the bullets started, crashing headfirst into what I presumed was the cabinet with the heatlamp on it. Whatever was in there was hot, sure, but it absolutely stank and I was not in the mood to be trying to steal their scop in the middle of a gunfight that I’d brought two knives to. Familiar spots of white heat blossomed across my back, complimenting the general sense of agony from the red-hot metal under my skin. Pain’s something of an old friend, and I was more than well acquainted with the sensation of being shot – my chrome helps a lot with processing this, and I could turn the pain off entirely if I really wanted, but I refuse to let myself start feeling invincible. The feedback is how you know where you’re getting shot from, anyway. Blindly groping my way around the edges of the cabinet, I kicked a box out of the way and shuffled into what I hoped was a corner out of their sight to let my eyes reboot. Vision was coming back in flickers, but I still couldn’t see clearly and although I could probably take this lot in a fight, being able to see was pretty critical to any plans I could put together. I had maybe a second or two before one of them tried a grenade and I just wasn’t confident that I could take a hit from that after the damage I’d already taken. I mean, I probably could, but with my biomonitor offline I was having to keep track of my vitals manually and you have no idea how much of a pain in the ass it is to do that kind of thing yourself even when you’re not being shot at.
Or maybe you do, I guess. You don’t look like a desk jockey type.
Anyway. My eyes were back at half functionality – that’s half each, mind, not one full and one empty, which might have been easier - and I was pretty sure that grenade was due if this lot had any kind of gear at all. Their guns were mostly junk, but they were still guns, and you’d have to be a complete gonk to not have something heavier around in case someone like me shows up. Normally I’d like to have some kind of music playing for a fight like this but with my radio offline and none of my onboard storage dedicated to a personal soundtrack, I was going to have to make do with the sounds around me for once.
A clink, clink, clunk next to me signalled the arrival of the explosive I’d been waiting for. Very poor choice by whoever had thrown it to not cook the thing first, but I couldn’t really blame them. Most people aren’t brave enough to hold on to a live grenade after lighting the fuse. It was about to give me an opening, though.
Remember earlier when I said my operating system was running normally? Let’s pick that back up. Every edgerunner will get some kind of chrome to give themselves the edge they need, even if it’s something basic like eyes with a scanner and an ammo counter for your iron. We all have our favourites, styles, ways we like to get things done. Choom of mine called Torres has a Berserk implant makes him basically bulletproof, I’ve seen him use it to fistfight an armoured truck and win. Netrunners like the one I gutted earlier have their cyberdecks, can’t do a thing without them. I’ve heard some folks came up with something that lets your mind and body handle more chrome at the cost of not doing anything by itself.
Me? I like to go fast.
The electricity down my spine as my Sandevistan boots up is, frankly, better than sex. Sets my nerves tingling in a way I can’t easily describe to anyone who hasn’t used one. A little like driving fast enough to lose the cops. Almost, but not entirely, unlike being struck by lightning. There are more efficient models, but I insisted on top of the line, and my Apogee’s six second capacity is all I need.
Count with me:
Six.
I don’t bother standing. The grenade is about a yard away, and I lunge for it. No idea how long the fuse has left, doesn’t matter. I throw overarm, aiming at the ground. Across the room, the scavs react to me too slow to save them. Guns held ready begin to drip fire like molasses, bullets creeping out of barrels. The grenade leaves my grip at higher speed than any of them.
Five.
I follow the grenade. Normally, suicide, but it’s faster than me on all fours. It smashes into the floor and bounces past them. The scavs’ aim is poor, and I can see them panicking. I have maybe ten metres to cross. Bullets start to reach me, but I bring my blades to bear. Hardwired reflex blurs my arms and a dozen rounds return to sender. Half a shotgun shell follows, but only half.
Four.
The grenade detonates. Shrapnel fills the air and I watch gangoons crumple, legs and spines shredded. Their bodies shield me from the worst of it. The other half of the shell’s shot is a red-hot brand on my left shoulder. Tech rounds spray wide from guns in ruined grips and punch through floorboards. None of them make contact.
Three.
Four still standing, and I am on them. My right blade scythes left and I take a leg at the knee. Its owner begins to scream as I follow through. His other shin fractures where the edge strikes it. Blood sprays like molten glass. I bring my left hand down and twist into a kick. The force spins him sideways and he falls as though through water. I hook my knee around the next leg in range and pull.
Two.
My left arm is weakened but not done. The second scav is falling now and I spring to my feet. My left blade cleaves into the third’s neck but not through it. The fourth has found a knife somewhere and it rakes across my torso. I let it. I lock eyes with her as she realises her mistake. My right blade takes her elbow. I shove her backwards and she trips over the second, right arm ruined, left hand empty.
One.
The fourth has the shotgun. It took him this long to reload, I presume. He takes aim too slowly. I shift right, and the spray is nowhere close. I bring my left blade back like a hook, and it punches through his back around his kidneys. I picture a plane covered in red dots and wrench it free. He begins to slump. The second is still alive. No time. I take my best kick at her neck and hope the nerves shear.
Zero.
I staggered as time caught up with me, thrown off-balance by the force of my own kick, and fell to my knees on the pile of shredded corpses. One of them let out a really nasty gurgle, I guess the air left in its lungs being forced out by my weight. Cases and shells finished hitting the floor, rattling like spare change in the puddles of gore I’d redecorated both myself and the apartment with. Even with my shoulder damaged and a gash across my ribs, I should have been able to get back to my feet easily, but normally I get to brace myself before going into Sandy time and I’m not buck naked when I do it. My suit helps… reduce the vibrations from speeding myself up, let’s say. Stop looking at me like that, I told you how it feels. I could feel the knife wound itching already, and the shiny black layer under it looked to be knitting back together nicely. Chitin implants cost a packet, and they’re close to illegal in NC proper, but again, completely worth the cost in my line of work. Keeps my insides inside even when I take a hit like this. It still stings like crazy, but it’ll heal fully in hours rather than weeks and I can be fighting again immediately instead of having to call a Ripper on the spot. Decided to take the knife with me, though. It wasn’t close to my own, but I wasn’t going to argue with a free knife. The shotgun might come in handy too, before I got home and had my own gear back, but I had nowhere to carry it right now.
I paused and closed my eyes to listen. Humming from what was left of the air conditioning, and the electronics around the place. Traffic barely audible from the doors leading outside. A wet splat, which on opening my eyes turned out to be viscera peeling off a bloodstained crate. No obvious footsteps, no shouting, no audible sign of anyone else panicking. The grenade would have been pretty hard to miss, so I could presume either everyone was dead or anyone left had fucked off to hide until I was gone or they got backup. I don’t like relying on luck, but I was hoping to be gone before the last option became a problem and the quiet was a good sign for now.
I had probably given myself longer than was necessary to settle down, but in my defence, most people would have been an absolute wreck by this point if they’d woken up at all. I’m no stranger to violence, even if I’m self-taught rather than professionally trained, and even I normally have help and gear to make this sort of mess easier on myself. I clawed my way back to my feet with the aid of a shelving unit and made a note of the brand – it survived a grenade, that’s rare quality for this kind of thing – before taking a proper look around the room. More junk on the floor, newspapers and rotting cardboard. A couple more shelf sets covered in shattered glass, wasted booze and grimy rags. Some shitty chairs piled up against one wall, and on the back wall, some lockers. The doors had mostly been punctured, but one of them looked better built than the others, and there was an electronic display on the front where the rest were blank steel. Allegedly, it was locked, but I had a mind to dispute that, given that the scavs would either have stolen this or bought it as cheap as possible. Lockpicking isn’t my forte, but there’s more than one way to open something that doesn’t want to be opened, and even if it was sturdier this was not a well-designed locker. For starters, the hinges were on the outside of the door.
I wedged my right blade into one of them between the leaves, felt the shudder down my spine as I triggered my Sandy again, and twisted with inhuman speed. The door might have been thick, but the hinge pins were not, and it snapped like so much glass under the strain. One of the advantages my Apogee has over a conventional Sandevistan is I can switch it on and off whenever I want as long as there’s some charge in it, and I took the chance to deactivate it before my knees started to wobble again. A girl could give herself some kind of complex like this and I wanted to be out of this shithole before getting introspective about it. With one hinge broken, I was able to lever the door far enough to wrench the other out and rip the door entirely off its mounting. The lock was still closed, as far as the circuits were concerned, but this is why you look at the entire door rather than just the lock when you’re securing things.
Black bag inside, thick plastic one. Not a body bag, more like a trash bag. Inside that, as it turned out, were my clothes. No suit and no weapons, though. At this point I had to presume they’d left them at my apartment, most likely they couldn’t open my armoury before dragging me out. I wasn’t putting those back on while I was caked in several people’s worth of blood and bile, but I also wasn’t leaving them behind, so the bag was pretty handy right now. They’d probably still need washing given I’d just put my hands all over them in the process of checking the bag, but I was pretty sure that would come out. I closed the top as best I could and made my way towards the only door I hadn’t already checked, which led through to another knocked-out wall and what I presumed had to be the next apartment’s bathroom. This one was much cleaner, I guess this must have been the one the scavs were actually using while they were here. It was still pretty unpleasant, but it looked like it had been cleaned in the last six months rather than upwards of a decade ago and hadn’t been holding involuntary organ donors in the meantime.
I did not consider stopping to shower, given that I still wasn’t sure if there were more coming, but I did take a moment to check myself in the intact mirror and at this point I looked like absolute hell.
The blood was caked on thick enough I could have mistaken it for body paint if I hadn’t known how it got on me. The mask I’d taken was plastered with gore and covered in scrapes from the grenade shrapnel, my hair was congealing into a series of solid blocks between the grime and the viscera and I could still see some of my chitin glinting where the slash across my chest hadn’t finished sealing up properly. My mantis blades were still sharp if I needed them again, thankfully, but I was probably going to have to get them rehoned after this, especially having broken the one guy’s leg with the edge. They’re not really designed to be used as hammers or crowbars.
At this point it occurred to me that with no way to contact anyone for pickup, or and no idea where I was, I was probably going to have to go back to the plan I’d already rejected and walk or run home mostly naked. If any of the corpses even had intact clothes I would have a lousy time trying to get them on over this much congealing blood, and most of them had been hit either by the grenade or by my armblades, which meant burns, lacerations and slashes all over the place. I decided to burn that bridge when I got to it and kept moving.
Beyond the bathroom was a surprisingly well-equipped surgical room, at least for a place like this. Coolers against the walls, presumably for klepped internal implants. A corpse still strapped to an operating chair with its arms and lower jaw missing, and a gaping hole in its chest cavity. At a guess, they’d taken something like gorilla arms and a second heart from the poor bastard – fuck knows how they’d managed to take in someone with that sort of hardware, though I suppose if they caught me out they might get anyone. I took the opportunity to yank out a few of the more important-looking cables from the electronics, shutting off the fridges and the computers closest to the body. With any luck, anyone else who made it back here would be too late to save whatever was in the coolers, but I pulled the lids open to warm them up faster just in case. Even if someone did try to salvage the tech, they’d have to sterilise the whole thing first, and they were not going to be doing that in an apartment like this.
I’d been reasonably sure that everyone in the apartment was dead at this point, so it came as a surprise to round the next corner and find something like a break room with a scav sat at a table eating pizza. Guy had the telltale digital blur of a braindance over his face, but he was somehow managing to get his food more or less into his mouth regardless. Proprioception is a hell of a thing, I guess. He was completely oblivious to my entering, though, and that gave me an opportunity to give someone else the rudest awakening of their life as well today. As quietly as I could muster, I crept across the room to crouch behind him, taking care not to trip over the rug and entirely waste the first stroke of luck I’d had in a while. I set the bag with my clothes down a few feet away just in case this got messy again, and made sure I had a good grip on the knife, then reached forward and gently plucked the wire from the BD wreath out of the port behind his ear.
The scav got about a second to wonder where his entertainment had gone before I yanked his chair over backwards, activated my Sandy for a third time – battery fully charged, but I only needed a second – and swung myself around to straddle his torso with his arms pinned under my shins and the knife pressed against the side of his neck. I was well aware of the view I was giving him, especially with the buzzing from the speed boost again, but my dignity was currently losing a fight against the idea of running home naked and was prepared to compromise.
“H̷̛͍̜͈̺͒͠i̸͉̮͚̍́̂.̴̛̭͎͐̃̍͝”, I rasped.
“What the fuck?!”
Fair, honestly. I could feel him trying to fight against my weight, but he wasn’t going to get anywhere given my skeleton is full of metal. I leaned forward a little and made an effort to clear my throat a bit – between the screaming while I was on fire and the time I’d spent unconscious in the mouldy bathroom, I wasn’t surprised that my voice was that rough, but I kept my pitch as low as I could. What came out on the second try was still pretty rumbling, but at least it was intelligible.
“Hi. Want to get out of this alive?”
“Holy shit, what the fuck are you?”
I rolled my eyes and slapped him with my left hand. Not hard, but hard enough.
“Last chance, cunt, I’m out of patience. You want to live?”
“Fuck! Uh. Yes?”
“Good. You’re going to be my proxy for a phone call. Stay very, very still.”
I pressed the tip of the knife tighter against him and flicked my personal link – bloody, but thankfully not enough to obstruct it – out of the palm of my left hand to clip into the port behind his ear. The connection was far from smooth, most likely a combination of the gunk I hadn’t been able to keep off my link cable, lingering effects of the virus and the scav’s junk chrome. It was enough for me to get into his systems, though, and I pulled up his phone to use my own contacts on it. I half expected not to get a response, but it picked up on the third ring and I have never been so glad to hear a voice like someone shovelling gravel.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Torres? It’s J.”
“You sound like shit if it is. You been eating fuckin’ tofu tuna again?”
“Nah, I get locust pepperoni now. Just mild today.” Yes, I know it sounds gonk as hell, it’s sign/countersign bullshit. He insisted we come up with it a few months back and I figured I’d go with something memorable. Mild is a duress code, if I ordered a pizza without chilli on it he’d probably go for a chokehold thinking I was a spy.
“…Wait, really? Where are you right now?”
“Good question.”
I turned my gaze down to meet my antenna’s eyes.
“Hey, guy who wants to live. What’s the address for this building?”
“Uh. Japantown, near Crescent and Broad. Fifty metres south? Ish?”
“Good boy.” I could feel him squirming more than I could see it, he wasn’t making progress. “You get that, Torres?”
“I got all of it, and I’m going to want the deets sooner rather than later. You need a pickup, yeah?”
“Soon as you can, please. Uh, maybe put a tarp on the seat.”
“That bad? Thanks for the heads up, I guess. I’ll meet you at the junction. Twenty minutes, max.”
The app beeped as Torres hung up, and I returned my attention to my hostage. The guy was too shit-scared of me to do much, I think, and he didn’t notice me flicking through his contact list.
“Well, look at you doing what you’re told. I like you. Not planning to keep you, but I said I’d let you go and I’ll stick by it. Killed enough of your chooms on the way through.”
I reached down and withdrew my link cable from his skull, letting up with the knife at this point. He wasn’t armed, and with his bare hands he wasn’t really a credible threat to me. Pulling myself to my feet – and putting my full weight on his arm with one foot as I did, with an audible crack as organic bone gave way under mechanical pressure and elicited a howl from the debatably fortunate scav – I drove the knife through the shitty composite table with one stab.
“You can probably get that arm fixed, but consider it a reminder that you got lucky here. Didn’t have to let you go. Your chooms are mincemeat. Whoever’s in charge of this operation, you don’t warn them about this, hear me? Go and be better than this. Start a fucking scopdog stand or something. If I run into you again I’m not doing mercy twice.”
He nodded mutely, clutching his broken arm, and I stalked back into the surgical room to cut the plastic curtains off to cover myself. They were still translucent but it was better than going completely naked in the street. By the time I got back, he’d disappeared, and I thought it was high time I did the same. With the bag containing my clothes in one hand and the curtain held as shut as I could get it with the other, I made my way out into a hallway with – hallelujah – an elevator door at the end.
Someone had scratched “NO FUTURE” onto the inside of the door with a knife. I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or a wandering nihilist.
I got more than a few stares hiding under a footbridge with only a see-through plastic sheet for modesty. Fortunately, while I prefer not to give the public an eyeful of the goods for free, Torres has seen me suiting up enough times for gigs that it doesn’t bother me at this point, and I only had a few minutes to wait before his lime-green FS3-T pulled up. I don’t know why he keeps it that colour, it’s hideous and it’s easily recognisable, but I have never been so glad to see the damn thing, and I dropped the curtain to dash across to it. Nearly ripped the door off its hinges, I think. He’d taken my advice on the tarp and I dropped onto it with a squelch that was unsettling even by my standards.
“Hey, Chica, take it e- What the fuck happened to you?”
“Long story. Tell you on the way home.”
-------
TWO WEEKS LATER
Highway bridge near the Dynalar campus, East Charter Hill, Westbrook
-------
The swiped contacts list from the last scav got me everything I needed to track down the asshole who actually built the daemon in the BD that caught me.
Highway railings are designed to withstand much heavier things than me, or I’d be worried about sitting on one like this, but I can still hear it creaking a little between my perching on it and Torres leaning over it next to me. He’s a foot taller than me even when I’m standing, but right now he positively dwarfs me. We’ve been through a lot of bloody messes together, many of them literal, and he didn’t have to come along for this one so I appreciate having him with me more than usual. Think he took the whole abduction thing personally.
Behind me, in the hideous green van, there’s a crackle from the police scanner as the netrunner I hired finally gets through the encryption. Officially, we’re subcontractors, but they’re stingy with the info and I need this up to date.
“Reckon we’ve got about five minutes,” she mutters. She asked me to call her Strife, and I kind of hope that’s her given name, but nobody’s parents actually call them that. “Big guy, we good to move?”
“Sure,” he mutters. Claps me on the shoulder with one massive hand, almost knocks me off balance. “J, you sure you’re good for this? We’ll be down there ready, but it’s your call.”
“I’m fine. I’ve got this, don’t wo-“
“J, seriously. You’re wearing a groove in that guardrail scratching at it. Are you sure you want to do this? We can get them somewhere else if you need to, trail them back to wherever they’re hiding.”
“I’m fine, Torres. It’s not them that’s bothering me.”
He glances down and I can see his pupils shift a little. “Yeah… Yeah, I get that. If you miss...”
“Not planning to.”
Strife pipes up from the van. “Four minutes. Now or never, boss.”
I sigh and swing my coat off, tossing it back into the van. It hits Strife in the face, though not hard, and she grumbles about it as she puts it into the back seat. With that out of the way, it’s just my suit and boots between me and the world. Not a formal suit, you understand, it’s like a netrunner bodysuit with some adjustments. Aramid weave throughout, dampening circuits for my Sandy, magnetic clamps for my guns. Didn’t bring those today, though. I’m travelling light for this one, the last thing I need is extra weight for what I’m about to do.
Torres squeezes his fridge-sized ass back into the Supron and pulls away, heading for the nearest ramp. In the distance, I can hear sirens, gradually getting louder. Strife crackles in my ear: my quarry have managed to pick themselves up a tail. Torres is politely asking the cops to back off and let us handle this as subcontractors. The stream of Spanish curses in the background tells me that’s not what he actually said, and I allow myself a smirk as I flex my wrists and unfold my mantis blades. I’ve got a new accessory to go with them this time, too. I reach down to my belt with one hand and take the new mask off one of my mag clamps, clipping it on just in front of my ears. The piece of maelstrom scrap I took home from the apartment was a wreck, but it gave me the idea for this. The faceplate is charcoal grey with spiked silver borders, and blood-red ribs from top to bottom – up close it’s clear what’s going on, but at a glance it looks like my maw is as wide as my head and full of fangs and blood. Literally scared the shit out of the first guy I ambushed with it on. With this on, my blades out and my hair streaming cherry-red behind me in the crosswind, I must be quite a picture, but I don’t have time for vanity right now.
By Strife’s estimate, I have about thirty seconds before I drop. I’m doing my own calculations, and she’s more or less right, but the cops have pulled back and my target must be getting suspicious, because they seem to be speeding up.
I decide to call it ten.
I pull myself upright, balancing on the edge of the rail. With the crosswind, it’s not the easiest thing I’ve done this week, but my balance is pretty good. Kind of has to be, given all the dancing between bullets.
Three seconds. Close enough for government work.
I step forward, back straight, and let gravity take me. Somewhere below, the motherfucker who planted that daemon thinks he’s getting away just because he lost the NCPD. Under my mask, I’m as close as I can get to baring fangs with a humanoid skull. Air howls past me, dragging my hair back like a mane. A black truck, moving at alarming speed, appears in the centre of my vision. Should be right on cue, I think. In the right lane, even. My lucky day. Definitely not his.
I tear through the roof like a wolf into carrion, and I go to work.
