I'm just scratching my head trying to think of why a TT crew would even bother with trading with scavs under the table. TT employees make decent scratch and if scavs were rich they wouldn't be scavs. I also don't see scavs or those associated with them successfully infiltrating TT without raising a lot of flags. Are they being blackmailed? Are they Russian spies? Is it an elaborate sting?
Skitterdoc 2077
- Thread starter SpiraSpira
- Start date
- Crossover
AzrielIlluminare
Mothman Cultist
- Pronouns
- They/Them
From the Shards found on the scene Barry Alken (the Scav leader) is buying cyberware specifically made for TT operatives from someone in Trauma named Manny who also contracts Barry and Co. for work, Barry being an absolute genius decides to use these implants to try and jump TT teams. Which results in dead Scavs who have implants specifically made for Trauma, which is drawing their attention, something Manny is quite upset over.
I started working again today, and if this week is the same as the week before last, expect a lower tempo of chapters this week, although I did manage to get half of chapter 22 written while sitting at an FBO waiting for it to stop snowing after a flight.
I've been continually employed. But my schedule is 7 days on 7 days off, 12 hour shifts on my days working. So I will work about 80 hours one week, and then none the next. So that's what I mean when I say "I started working again." 😂
I intended the first arc, although I guess it's approaching "book" size actually, to be Taylor's optimistic rise in Night City. Arc 2 will be different.
Cloak&Dagger
Definitely Insane
I don't understand why medical fields have insane hours.
I'd much prefer my medical professionals do 8 hour days 5 days a week than treat me on hour 11 of their 7th 12 hour shift.
That sounds like the first two Dune books.
Please no grimderp. I love your fic because it does not go into stupid unreasonable bashing or powerups (even if Taylor does feel a bit like a Main Character). Making it bad and dark just because the setting demands it would be a turn off
Doesn't have to be Grimderp to put a major damper on her rise or optimism, currently she's having all of the winds in her sail:
A Meteoric rise with not a single string attached, she's young and talented enough to be valued, yet new/insignificant enough that she effectively has no rivals, nor is she in a position to get used as a piece in any big brain powerplays etc.
Med school or rising to a higher position would change that, as would her fame for that matter. (Hell, just the fact that Bandbox and her other acquaintances keep singing her praise is likely going to paint a target on her back.)
Also it does not even need to be something personal happening for things to change one, jest remember that a corporate war is coming which will really effect how things go in night city. I'm actually looking forward to seeing how things will turn out for her though that, I'm guessing she is going to get really scary.
- Location
- london
It's worth saying that humans are also susceptible to a sufficiently powerful EMP, once you get past a certain point it's gets to a "localised lighting strike" or "Thousands of gauss"… this is also coincidentally point your house keys (and anything else remotely metal) will take the fastest route out of your pocket via your pelvis or simply melt a hole through your leg.
There is a physics based limit on the amount of EMP that can be made portable unless you are powering it with the strong nuclear force or mater annihilation.
What I'm getting at is that if you can't reasonably shield electronics with a faraday cage around the important stuff, the EMP you are up against is no longer "man portable" and instead a facility/tank mounded heavy weapons platform. If things are getting knocked out by EMP it speaks of poor design, or design choice. I would imagine military/industrial grade cyberware is not nearly as susceptible to electrical interference considering that many places with heavy electrical machinery output just as much if not more electrical interference than any EMP that can ever be built.
Although along that line of thought- how do you MRI someone with cyberware without having their eyes try to exit stage left through their skull?
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A gig to build a dream on
I didn't follow up with Mrs Okada for about two weeks. She did say to settle into my job first. We averaged three or four calls a day, although yesterday was a fluke where there were no calls all day long. Most of the calls were traumas, which wasn't surprising, but also acute cardiac cases were pretty common.
Surprisingly, it wasn't that common for there to be combat on the calls. People, even their client's assailants, tended to run or scatter when a Trauma Team AV-4 showed up, and neither the pilots nor security guys would shoot people in the back if they were running away and clearly not a threat to the client anymore.
Corporate said that the subscribers paid for rescue, not revenge, after all. The few times when it was necessary were usually with the stupider segments of society that didn't know when to quit, and thus far, I hadn't needed to fire a shot in anger yet, and I was perfectly content for things to remain that way.
Walking through Jig-Jig street didn't frighten me as much as it did when I first arrived in this world; I wasn't quite as vulnerable as I used to be, nor did I look overly much like an easy mark. I didn't fit in, still, but I had taken to wearing simple clothes in dark colours, along with a dark grey light ballistic vest over my chest. It was only considered light armour, but the nice part about armour was that it was cumulative and designed to protect against differing threats. The vest, while certainly impact resistant, was really designed to protect against slashing attacks, which was one of the weaknesses of my ballistic skin weave biomod.
I didn't think I looked like a badass by any definition, but I did think I looked like someone that was too much effort for too little gain.
If working on a ground ambulance for almost a year taught me anything, it was that most low-level violent criminals were scum; they acted very much as predators might in the wild. They generally went for the weak amongst the herd, the low-hanging fruit. That was certainly not something that could be relied upon, as a starving cougar would attack anything that moved, but it was a good rule of thumb.
Mrs Okada ran her business in the back of a pachinko parlour, although I wasn't entirely sure why. It was more of an upscale place compared to other small pachinko or gambling spots, and Mrs Okada had a reputation for running a clean game without her fingers placed anywhere on the outcome of the games, probably because she didn't really care about the place as a profit centre, although I imagined it made money in spite of that.
I timed my arrival to neither be late nor especially early. The former was impolite, but so was the latter, if less so in social situations, as far as I was concerned. Two minutes before the time she asked me to come when I contacted her, I showed up at the back of the pachinko salon, smiling good-naturedly at a giant man wearing a suit, with his eyes hidden behind polarised dark sunglasses, despite the fact that it was relatively dark in the parlour.
"Good afternoon. I'm here to see Mrs Okada," I told the man.
He grunted, paused for a moment, and grunted again in a slightly different intonation. After that, he silently stepped aside so that I could walk past him. 'Lovely gentleman,' I thought.
As soon as I passed the threshold of the back area, all of the sound and clamour of the pachinko playing, which was a cacophony of electronic sounds and ringing, cut off entirely. I blinked and was curious how such an abrupt noise cancellation was possible, but I didn't have enough time to investigate it any further. Instead, I continued in. The paths could diverge, but Wakako's office was obvious on the left, with the right path going deeper into an area behind the pachinko machines.
I stepped into her office, whose door was open. It was tastefully decorated in a wood and bamboo theme, and a woman that was past her middle age but not really elderly sat at a desk at one end of the room. I found it interesting that she did not opt for externally obvious rejuvenation treatments, as they were definitely within her budget. My eyes, zooming in on her neck briefly, expertly judged both her pulse rate and even rough blood pressure just from the subtlest movements in her arteries as her heartbeat.
A number of liver spots on her skin were not congruent with my knowledge of dermatology. Her skin looked in good condition, too. My conclusion, the age spots were applied intentionally and cosmetically. She was in good health but liked to give the impression she was older and frailer than she actually was.
"Ah, Miss Hebert. Thank you for your consideration in both accepting my invitation and your timely arrival," the old woman told me, her voice just holding a slight Japanese accent; she held out a hand and indicated a comfortable-looking chair in front of her desk, "Please, have a seat. The tea service should arrive momentarily."
I didn't nod so much as incline my head slightly, before walking, very slowly in my subjective experience, to the chair. While not making it obvious, my eyes glanced both at the chair and then the walls to either side of me in the small office. They were wood panelled and tasteful. I was wondering why she had allowed me to enter her office armed. She certainly relied upon her reputation significantly in business, but I did not believe for a moment that she would rely upon that for her protection. There had to be something that would protect her from or instantly incapacitate a guest.
Explosives in the chair? A small shaped charge could turn me into mince while not overly ruffling her expensive kimono. That was my guess. That or an automated heavy machine gun in the walls, hidden behind the tasteful wood and bamboo features. I couldn't really tell from seeing the room from outside if the walls appeared too thick. In either case, if the meeting went south, my best tactic would probably be to leap as quickly as I could, tackling the old woman so that her automated defences couldn't either blow me up or differentiate between the two of us.
"Thank you for the invitation, Mrs Okada. Although, I find myself a little perplexed at the reason," I told her as I settled my tush onto what might be the most comfortable bomb I had ever sat on. Possibly the only one, too, although one never did know.
A young woman walked into the room carrying a European tea service, which surprised me. I was expecting some sort of Japanese tea ceremony, so I reviewed that yesterday. However, when one ended up looking up formal tea ceremonies, one tended to read a lot more than one intended to when one started out.
Asian tea ceremonies were ritualised and ceremonial, while the English drank way too much tea to go through such lengthy affairs, even occasionally, when they sat to have tea. As such, it was much more of a casual affair. Still, there were certain proprieties and etiquette in a high-society cuppa.
It was just chance that I had read a little bit about it yesterday, and of course, my predilection for both reading Jane Austen and similar Victorian period novels and watching a number of Earth Aleph programs in the UK, like Downton Abbey, that I wasn't entirely at my wit's end. I hoped I wasn't making a fool out of myself; I hated that more than perhaps anything else.
I internally sighed at the thought of missing Downtown Abbey; it had recently started its second season before I had been transported here, and it usually took about six months for an Earth Aleph program to arrive on Earth Bet. I'd never see if Matthew and Lady Mary got back together or if he survived the outbreak of World War One.
I took the napkin that was provided and carefully unfolded it, and placed it over my lap.
"Care for some sugar?" she asked me as she poured black tea into two small china cups using a tea strainer.
I nodded and told her, "One lump, please." After that, I carefully used one of the spoons to agitate the tea, back and forth, without touching the spoon to the side of the teacup and creating an obnoxious racket.
As I took my first sip, she said, "It's the chair, dear."
I coughed, not quite aspirating the tea and asked, "I beg your pardon?"
"There are two kinds of people who come into my office, dear. The kind that wonders wear the bomb is, and then there are the idiots," she said mildly, "I couldn't help but notice you glancing between the chair and the wall. That's a good sign, really."
I smiled and took another sip of tea before setting the cup delicately back on the saucer to take a polite nibble out of one of the offered miniature sandwiches, "To tell me that means that you have almost certainly told other people the same thing. That means it is absolutely both, plus something else as an ace in the hole. My dad always said to have a plan, a backup plan and then an ace in the hole." Alt-Dad had told Alt-Taylor that, at least. It seemed like good advice.
My eyes took in the overly large desk and started noticing that it didn't actually have any visible drawers, at least that I could see. I couldn't, of course, see everything from this side, but it looked odd for a desk. There wasn't actually any force field technology in this universe, at least as far as I could tell, but there was crazy electromagnetic field and even gravity manipulation technology that was almost as good. Perhaps if I tried to jump over the desk to tackle her, I'd get thrown back straight out of her office with significant force or get squashed into the desk like a bug under the force of twenty gravities. There was no way to know, really.
My statement got what I thought was a genuine laugh from her that didn't look forced at all, "That's why I wanted to talk with you."
"My dad? I somehow doubt that," I told her, being slightly and intentionally obtuse.
She waved a hand, "Not at all. Your father's services were already spoken for, and at his level, moonlighting wasn't really an option. You, however, I am always looking for capable individuals with capable skills for odd jobs every now and then."
That was one of the possibilities I had considered, but I hadn't thought it very likely. I tried to think of a delicate way to turn her down, "Mrs Okada, I am already gainfully employed, plus there is no way I want to become an edgerunner. I want to live more than a couple of years." I wasn't quite sure of the actual life expectancy of an Edgerunner actually, but it was probably similar to Matthew Crawley's life expectancy on the western front.
"Over a third of Trauma Team security specialists in Night City moonlight as mercenaries, Miss Hebert. I don't even think it's against the rules in your employee handbook until you become a supervisor. I employ a number myself. And not every merc is an Edgerunner. Edgerunners are a subset of mercenaries, true, and they're mostly ... crazy," Mrs Okada said reasonably. Then she continued, "It's mostly a distinction as far as the risk profile that a merc will accept. If they accept virtually any job, then they're almost definitionally an Edgerunner."
She shrugged, "There's nothing wrong with that, and I certainly have gigs where that type of thinking is necessary, but over ninety-five per cent of the clients I take are much less glamorous. For every raid against some hypothetical corporate black site, there are fifty gigs for bodyguard duty for a suit when they go into a bad part of town, to find out if a husband is cheating on their wife, to steal back a car that was jacked by scavs. That sort of thing is what keeps my doors open, actually."
She sighed, finishing her tea and said, "And you have an excellent reputation as a medic, even when you were working in an ambulance. I often lack those specific skills. Adding you to a gig is a surefire way to reduce the risk profile significantly, even if you were only peripherally involved by staying to provide medical care after the gig was completed."
"You had the option to attend medical school but declined Kang Tao's offer. Based on the information available, that is your goal, however, so it stands to reason that you may be seeking to finance your own education. That won't be possible by just collecting your salary at Trauma Team. Although I'm sure they'd be happy to pay your way, too, eventually," she finished her pitch.
I nodded slowly, understanding what she was saying. I did actually know that a number of Trauma Team employees moonlighted on the side like that. I finally told her, "I won't insult your intelligence or your Intelligence by acting surprised at the amount of information you collected on me, and your guesses are good ones. I suppose I would be open to certain work like that from time to time, so long as the risk profile was acceptable. I couldn't be involved in any missions against corporate interests, though."
I was pretty sure Trauma Team would just disavow I ever actually worked for them if I got caught in such a "gig", but I did take the promises I made when I got hired a little seriously. I wasn't a company girl by any means, and neither did I believe that they would reciprocate such loyalty if I was, but I was like an honest politician; namely, if I took a bribe, I would stick to the terms of the bribery, if I could.
I had agreed not to do anything to hurt their reputation, so until such a point as they broke faith with me, I would try my best to hold myself to that agreement, too, for my own sake. My actual dad, Danny, told me that you became the type of person you practised being, so if you had a habit of breaking promises, even if you wouldn't get caught, then you would become someone who broke promises as a matter of course. He should have taken some of his own advice after mom died, I thought, but it wasn't like I wasn't just as guilty myself.
"Of course, I have a number of workers who have similar constraints. Really my job is merely to find the correct contractor and connect them to the requirements a client provides. I am just an insulative middle-man, providing a service to both sides," she said mildly and set her napkin aside on the table, signalling that the afternoon tea was probably coming to a close. It wasn't surprising; she was a busy woman.
The idea that I should keep promises if I made them was a very old-fashioned opinion for the world I found myself in, and perhaps, someday, it would bite me on the tush, and then I would have to change. However, there was no need to rush headlong into Perdition; around Night City, that was sure to find me in its own good time.
I, of course, had my long-running and tentative plan to potentially sell some of my intellectual property to a biotech or pharmaceutical company, but that was much, much higher risk than occasionally taking small jobs like this.
Plus, networking this way would be one way to mitigate the risk of that "big gig" in the future. I would definitely need a fixer I could trust. From what I could tell, Mrs Okada was on the top tier of fixers in the city, with perhaps only the famous owner of the Afterlife having a better reputation, and I didn't like the idea of returning to Mr Delgado for anything.
After he paid me the final payment for the drugs themselves, he offered another couple thousand eurodollars for my pill press. I spent an evening rebuilding it, trying my best to make it less Tinkertech by slowing its operation and giving it time to physically cool the vanilla coating mechanism, which was kind of hard because I didn't really know how it worked. I just replaced weak-looking parts with tougher-looking parts, though, and had the feeling that it might last months, maybe four or five, before totally breaking down.
I tried to get him to pay me for it in advance, but he would only agree to half up front. However, after picking up the machine, he did not leave the last half of the money in the location I demanded, claiming there were unstated difficulties and redirected me to a different locker at a location I had never used before. I never picked up the last payment, and as far as I was concerned, that anonymous identity was burned.
I wasn't a professional paranoid like Alt-Dad was, but I had been an avid hobbyist for years. With the benefit of hindsight, as well as a more natural neurotransmitter balance in my brain and not constantly being bullied, I realised that I had been working up a very large persecution complex in Brockton Bay. I had the feeling that everyone was out to get me, based on my experiences at school. However, thinking about it, I realised I never approached the teachers or even that witch Principal correctly.
I approached them with the assumption that they cared about their students and then used the fact that they didn't help me as evidence that they were out to get me when the truth was much more banal. It was the distinction between the Stasi dragging someone away for interrogation and a person who just watched it happen. They were the latter, although I still couldn't precisely understand their motivations, as they protected the Trio a little too thoroughly. My best guess was Emma's dad threatened them with lawsuits or something.
In any event, even though I no longer felt that everyone was out to get me, personally, I still thought that most people would stick a knife in if they had the opportunity and something to gain by doing so. So it was best to avoid giving them the opportunity.
I felt that if you had a continuing business relationship with someone that you did not trust, you should always be wary of being fucked over if they knew it was coming to a close. To me, it seemed like it was better to let such arrangements fizzle out rather than having a set end to them; that way, the untrusted party wouldn't be tempted to get one over on you when they no longer had a reason not to. You would know that this was the last deal with that person, but they wouldn't know.
However, I was tempted by twenty-five hundred eurodollars for my pill press, but in the end, I only got half that. Alt-Dad had told Alt-Taylor to always beware of the sunk cost fallacy and never second guess herself if her instincts were telling her to walk away, even if doing so was leaving something on the table. My instincts told me to run away and fuck the last half of the money, so I had.
Fizzling out the relationship was why Gloria still brought about half the cybernetics she came across to him, even though I had cultivated a few contacts with ripperdocs in Japantown, which we used for most of the better pieces. I didn't make as much as I did before from this venture because my only job was to refurbish the cybernetics Gloria brought me, but she was making more than she had in the past, to the point where she was putting a little money away every month to go to the same Paramedic school I went to, possibly in a year or two. NC Med Ambulance would pay part of the tuition if you agreed to work there for three years, but you still had to come up with about half yourself.
One nice thing about living three times as fast as everyone else was that I had a lot of time to think, and it didn't really look out of place even if I went on mental digressions for a while, as such I carefully and slowly dabbed my mouth with the napkin and sat it aside as well.
"So, how will this work? You call me when you have need of my special skills?" I asked her, which caused her to nod.
She told me, "Precisely. Some jobs are solo affairs, but I think most of the ones where you would fit the bill would be part of a support element for an existing team. You would have to trust me to some extent to assign you people that you could trust to watch your back, of course, but I definitely wouldn't pair you with random newbies."
I nodded. I didn't really think I would accept any kind of solo job unless it was something very simple and low risk, like perhaps accompanying a client to a black market ripperdoc for both bodyguard service and professional consultation. That would be right up my alley. There were any number of reasons an otherwise law-abiding person might not want to go to a legit clinic for work done, with privacy being the main one.
It was more polite for me to offer to end the tea than if she was to dismiss me, from what I could tell from Downton Abbey, so I said, "Well, I again appreciate your invitation, but I know that you are a busy woman and I shouldn't keep up any more of your time today."
"A young woman like yourself is always welcome. It is clear your mother taught you manners, as a mother ought to do," she said cryptically, rising from her desk as I did.
I smiled at her as she rose to her feet and said, "There's no need, ma'am. I'll show myself out." I wondered what she meant by that.
Before I left her office, she said, "Oh, and I have to thank you for helping my son with that matter at Clouds."
I sniffed delicately, "I'm sure I don't know what you're referring to." I didn't even admit I had anything to do with what happened at Clouds to other Tyger Claws; in fact, I wouldn't even admit it if Mr Inoue asked me again, and he knew for a fact I was involved! My statement caused her to smile even wider as I left her office. Secrets were for keeping.
As I stepped back onto Jig-Jig street, I considered. Although the grandma-seemingly lady had been unfailingly polite, the entire meeting had me feeling vaguely uneasy. As if I had spent twenty minutes petting a purring mountain lion. An enjoyable activity, so long as the mountain lion didn't decide it was hungry instead.
"Attacking a scav den? Ma'am, was I perhaps unclear when I told you that I didn't desire to become an edgerunner? Because, and please forgive my crassness in advance, but this sounds like edgerunner shit," I told Mrs Okada over a vidcall.
She had forwarded me a supposedly end-to-end encryption transport layer module for my phone app. It was an open-source module, so I could examine the source code, but I wasn't at the level of understanding of the mathematics involved in cryptography. So while I spent a few minutes looking through it, there were no obvious backdoors or malware. However, everything else looked Greek to me.
I did know enough about cryptosystems to know that it was theoretically possible to design, mathematically, a secret vulnerability into an encryption algorithm. Encryption systems almost always had a number of constants in their programming, and it was theoretically possible to precompute a compromised constant that would give the party who created the constant, but no other, the capability to crack the encryption with little effort.
I didn't know and couldn't tell if that had been done, but I verified the source code with the copies on the net from the developer and even asked a number of friends on the hacker BBS that I had become a frequent reader. The friend who bought my first netrunner suit replied and told me pretty much the same thing, that I couldn't really tell, but these were open encryption standards and were widely relied upon, even by corporations themselves, so they were probably good. She told me that most corporations and net runners don't attack cryptosystems themselves, anyway, but use malware and similar attacks to read the cleartext after it has already been decrypted or by stealing your private encryption key or similar methods.
That made sense; as such, I had begun to trust the encryption, at least a little.
"Well, it is a small scav den. And your partners on this mission, if you accept, are edgerunners. But you don't need to be just because you accept an occasional job with them. Despite their risk profile, they are professionals. They've completed a number of successful jobs for me over the past few months. You are here on this job less because they might be injured and more for the aftermath," she told me, "You see, this is a revenge gig. The client's grandson was one of these Scav's 'donors' and did not survive the experience. A previous gig traced those responsible to this location. However, the client is barely offering enough money to make this a worthwhile gig. He's just one man. But it is pretty well known that Trauma Team Med Techies, often very rapidly, make off with any cyberware in a downed enemy, time permitting."
That was true. It was one of the ways to get bonuses, in fact. Generally, it would only happen in rescue-type calls where the patient's acuity permitted it. We wouldn't delay patient care to do so if they were actually in any danger. However, it wasn't uncommon to give rescued and stable patients a little Vitamin A (Ativan) to relax them and then spend five minutes or so removing a few choice pieces of cybernetics from any downed enemies if there were any.
If the expected haul was large enough and the patient couldn't be delayed getting to the hospital, occasionally Trauma Team would dispatch a second aircraft to systematically scavenge all the cybernetics from every downed enemy. Other times they would redirect ground teams that only consisted of security specialists in vans to just grab the bodies and bring them back to the Tower, where an on-call med techie might be called in to work a few hours of overtime in the building's morgue.
"You want me along to Counter-Scav the Scavs?" I asked, flabbergasted. Then I thought about it for a while and nodded. It did make sense. Especially if they were raiding a scav den that already had some medical equipment in it, it might not take that long at all. A lot of cybernetics had a perishability period where they had to be extracted in a certain amount of time after their owner flatlined, or they'd be ruined. It was why Scav took down people alive, after all. Finally, I nodded, "Okay, yeah, that makes sense, I guess. And fuck those guys, really."
Everybody hated the Scavs. Yet there still seemed to be more every day. Not all of them were Eastern European immigrants, either. It was almost like we were living in a video game where they would just respawn every so often if you stopped looking in their direction.
"Excellent; I'll set up a meeting with the team you'll be working with this time. As an aside, there is a small bonus for each living Scav they deliver, compared to each one they flatline, and a moderate bonus if they deliver the leader of this den. All of that will be in the detes," she said, seemingly happily, "There is a time limit in that nobody really knows when a scav den will relocate, so I expect you not to drag your feet on this. I don't appreciate it if my contractors make me look bad in front of one of my clients."
Yeah, that was the old satin-covered iron fist routine. Mrs Okada didn't have the bearing of someone you'd want to come back with failure if you had already agreed to do a job for her. That last bit made me raise my eyebrows, "Do I want to know why the client wants some of them alive?"
"Probably not. But he is a very traditional old gentleman. Have you heard the word Língchí before?" asked Wakako in a conversational tone, pronouncing the tonal Chinese word differently from the rest of the English words in the sentence.
I shook my head at her in the vidcall, "I definitely don't want to do an image search on that, do I?" I asked her, aghast.
"Again, probably not. Sending you the location now," she agreed.
The Golden Duck restaurant was a pretty good Chinese place in Japantown. It was scop, like almost everything else, but they were real artists here. They not only got both the taste and texture somewhat similar to actual Peking duck, but even the appearance looked close to what I remembered from a few of the Chinese places in Brockton Bay.
There were only three places that my dad and I would regularly order from, and only one of them had Peking duck, so I only had it a handful of times, but I couldn't tell that much of a difference the couple of times I had tried The Golden Duck.
As such, the food here was actually on the pricier side, but I supposed a group of three edgerunners wouldn't care about that. Wakako had sent me details on three people, but there were no names attached. Just a portrait and a single paragraph that described their speciality. Two men and one woman.
That didn't stop me from running their likenesses through my gumshoe service, pulling up their full names and abbreviated life history, nor would it stop them from doing the same to me, so I suspected it was more along the lines of courtesy. I would allow them to introduce themselves as whatever they liked, and they would reciprocate the courtesy.
I found them right away; the two men were quite boisterous, laughing and drinking beer from glass bottles, while the blonde woman with the pageboy cut and pink lipstick held to the side, being more laid back.
The first was a large man, easily over a hundred-and-ninety-centimetres and with the dark skin common amongst Caribbean Islanders. His biography stated he was born in Jamaica, and his accent as he laughed and talked with his friend seemed to bear that out. However, his last known location before arriving in Night City was Port-au-Prince, but there were no further records for the period in between when the entire island of Hispaniola was destroyed in a massive earthquake and tsunami a couple of years ago. Records started again when he arrived in Night City about six months ago, with him suspected in a number of crimes, but the NCPD didn't really prioritise crimes committed by mercenaries, so long as they were smart about the targets they chose.
His friend was also a bear of a man, and his Eastern European accent also agreed with his biography, although his exact place of birth wasn't listed in the report I had paid for, listing either Belarus or eastern Ukraine. Everyone paused when I approached their table, and I said, in a friendly manner, "Wakako sent me."
That caused the two men the grin and usher me into a seat, "Come, sit, sit," the bear told me, and I slid in next to the much smaller blonde woman. She looked like she was in her mid to late twenties, and from Mrs Okada's brief precis, she was a netrunner. I also didn't get any matches on the gumshoe site for her, aside from a list of possible aliases.
The Jamaican man said, "Hello, hello! I am Jean..." which correlated with his actual name of Jean Ventura, "... and this gonk is Ruslan." That definitely wasn't the bear's real name, but it didn't really matter. "The anti-social one over there is Kiwi." That definitely didn't sound like her real name, but it was listed as one of her aliases.
That caused the woman to narrow her red eyes and say, "I'm not anti-social; I'm just not an idiot like you two. She looks pretty young, but Wakako says she is at least as good a Med Techie as Trauma Team is." Well, that was a very interesting way to describe my skills, I thought.
I nodded, "You can call me Madison. I am very good, yes." Madison Clements had such a debt to me that merely stealing her identity in a different universe a million times wouldn't come close to repaying, but it was a start.
The man calling himself Ruslan nodded, "We thought we'd discuss the gig over dinner and set out right afterwards if that's okay with you, Madison." He waved a hand over to Kiwi and said, "Kiwi, if you mind?"
She shook her head and pulled something out of her purse and sat it on the table, and turned it on. I noticed an odd noise briefly, but other than that couldn't figure out what it was doing. She enlightened me, "It's a white noise generator, but inside the radius, you can't hear it. But outside, the people in the next booth won't be able to hear us talk. Doesn't stop lip reading, obviously, though."
I was impressed. Mainly because it seemed every time I turned around, I found some interesting piece of technology that I hadn't even known was possible. How would this thing even work? Also, wouldn't that thing make more sense if it was incorporated into your body? I fidgeted a little, stopping myself from an urge to disassemble it.
The runner called Kiwi also handled a conference wireless connection as I saw and accepted a connection request from her and discovered that it was a combination conference vidcall as well as a four-way collaborative presentation. Basically, any of us could use the screen as a whiteboard or show images to all the others.
Kiwi blinked at me a couple of times and said, "The girl has black ICE protecting her OS. Nice."
"It's not fatal," I hurriedly told her. At least, that one wasn't.
That was true, too. In fact, the first layer of my defence was black ICE. Black ICE didn't really mean it killed you; it just meant something that interfered with your bodily processes. It was called black because for the longest time, and still, officially, everyone claimed such a thing was impossible. My first line of defence was a piece of black ICE that I partly took from the Dragoon and partly Tinkered with myself, and it should put someone to sleep. More like a brief coma, really, that might last a few minutes or maybe even longer. This was followed by a series of traditional ICE layered after this in slowly elevating danger levels, for example, one that would short-circuit the deck of an attacker, followed, finally, by my last defence, which was the heart-stopping fatal black ICE that I also recovered from the Dragoon.
"Whatever you say, choom. I don't recognise it, and that makes me interested, but we can circle back to that later, maybe," the blonde woman told me.
Everyone shut up briefly for a moment while a waitress brought over plates of duck for each of us. I didn't even have to order. Nice.
"Okay, so this is really a combination gig," Ruslan said. I didn't know what that meant, but I was hoping I would learn from context, "Our main client wants the scavs dead or alive, and we can keep any loot. That's the main reason you're here, Madison."
I nodded, and he continued, "However, I just got word from Wakako that she lined up a second client that wants the same thing. This client is the real estate company that owns the building the scavs are held up in. I'm not sure if they rented the space to them or if the scavs are squatters, but they'd like them evicted. Preferably with extreme prejudice. This does mean we won't be able to rip out some of the fixed medical equipment, although if the Scavs brought anything with them, it's fair game. We have a list of things that are no-touch with this second client. It does mean this gig is paying better than we thought, though."
I frowned but nodded, then reviewed the list of equipment that we were expected to find as Ruslan forwarded the data to the conference call. Well, it wasn't anything that would be easy to move or sell, nor would I have any real need of it, and it was older than even my own equipment. The equipment was of such middling to poor quality that I assumed this real estate company probably marketed it to Scavs or similar bottom-of-the-barrel ripperdocs, which made me kind of want to screw them over but I supposed being professional was the better choice.
He then discussed the details he knew from the expected number of scavs, which was between eight and twelve, and their basic plan. He and Jean would clear the building, with the help of Kiwi, who would mostly hang back and provide remote quick hacks and situational awareness from hacking the local subnet while I would hold back at the back entrance in the event someone tried to run out the back.
I nodded; that was an acceptable risk profile for me. My backup plan would be just to run away. However, I had two aces in the hole, and since they needed to be used relatively soon before they became inert, I didn't mind offering one of them to the group.
When he asked if anyone had any potential changes to make to the plan, I pulled out a small grenade; it looked exactly like a smoke grenade as that was what I had built it out of, "This is an anaesthetic gas grenade. It's pretty potent and will put down an unprotected person, through inhalation, within five to ten seconds. The gas becomes inert and safe to be around after around a hundred and twenty seconds after it's used, but the victims will still be down for quite a bit longer than that."
"Fucking preem, Madison. Are you sure you want to waste it on this gig?" asked Ruslan, with the other two looking impressed, too.
I shrugged, "It's about to expire. It's still good now, but in another month, the active ingredient will have broken down into inert chemicals, similar to how it does after it's been used."
That caused them all to nod. They were familiar with using surplus equipment acquired through god knows where, too, and assumed this must be something similar.
"Nice, I wasn't going to bother with trying to keep any of them alive, but maybe the top dog. His bonus is pretty good," Ruslan mused, causing me to fidget. I didn't particularly want to help get someone tortured, but everything I learned about this man caused me to believe that if anyone deserved it, he probably did. I wouldn't say anything, as I knew that was a possible outcome when I offered them the grenade.
They adjusted their plans briefly, taking into account the new resource, and after we finished all of our duck, we got on our way.
I thought it would be the industrial area of Watson, which was a little sketchy, but it turned out the scavs were holed up in the overcrowded Heywood district, which was even sketchier.
I supposed that was a kind of hide-in-plain-sight type of thing. But it made me wonder how they camouflaged taking bodies in and out of the building, or maybe they just didn't.
The adjustment to the plan was that instead of following Ruslan and Jean in, Kiwi instead scaled the top of the small one-story building and started hacking from there. She also took some tools with her, and the plan was that she would toss the gas grenade in the input ventilation of the building's HVAC system, then hack it to turn it on full blast, circulating all of the gas throughout the building in only twenty seconds or so. I was waiting in the back alley with my Kang Tao submachinegun aimed at the back door.
"Okay, we're ready," Ruslan said over the conference call we were using as a jury-rigged tacnet. Maybe it was just the fact that I worked at Trauma Team, but I felt they needed to get some better commo gear.
Kiwi came back with, "Alright. I'm in the subnet. Looks like ten people in, including the top dog and possibly two donors still alive," she said calmly. I winced. Maybe I would get to save a life today? "Alright, the HVAC system is hacked, and the blower is locked into high-speed. I'm throwing the grenade in... now!"
About thirty seconds after Kiwi threw the grenade in, Ruslan and Jean, both wearing gas masks, kicked the front door in and started shooting. A little bit after that, an urgent voice told me, "Madison, two targets headed for the back door, including the big man."
"Will the big man come through the door first or second?" I asked her, not feeling very anxious but needing additional information.
There was a pause before she came back, "Second, it looks like! They'll be at the door in three, two, one..."
The door burst open as if a man had kicked it, and from my position of cover behind a dumpster, I lined up the reticle on my red dot sight on the mook's abdomen. Using my highest speed, I quickly pulled up the image of the target they wanted alive and nodded before gently squeezing the trigger, unleashing a six or seven-round burst that took the random Scav in the chest and neck, the man going down in slow motion in a gurgle and spray of blood that caused me to ick a little bit. You'd think with all I had seen working traumas over the past year that I would be immune to that, but it was a little bit different when you were responsible.
"Ну все, тебе пизда!" yelled the boss man of the den; however, he was yelling it behind him and shooting back the way he came, apparently thinking that the shooter that took out his minion was coming from behind him. He emptied a whole magazine of shotgun shells down the empty hallway and started backing uneasily out of the door, swaying a little. It looked like he took at least a huff or two of the anaesthetic, but not enough to put him down completely.
As he was fumbling with a fully rotary magazine to reload in his automatic street sweeper-style shotgun, I just darted out of cover and approached him at my full speed from behind, slamming the buttstock of my SMG into the side of his head. He went down like a sack of potatoes, and I smiled, nodding.
I glanced down at him and searched him for both weapons and anything dangerous. He had a set of mantis blades in each of his arms, so I carefully disconnected the powerpack from them, defanging him. Then I used a set of superstrong zip-ties to tie his ankles together. His legs, at least, were organic and not biomodded.
"The big guy is down, alive," I told Kiwi and the rest over the conference call. Perhaps it would have been more merciful to kill him. But he was the Scav's "doctor" here, so I didn't feel a lot of sympathy for him. Plus, he was worth an extra thousand dollars alive.
Ruslan's amusing accent came back, "Awesome! It was like shooting fish in a barrel in here. Should I call Wakako for a pickup for the boss?"
I sighed and told them, "Negative. Not yet. He has a nice set of Arasaka mantis blades on each arm. I doubt he will really need them anymore, given what Mrs Okada implied our client is going to do to him. We may as well be thorough."
After the timer, which I started when Kiwi threw the grenade in, reached two minutes, I dragged the Scav doctor back inside his own operating theatre.
"Kiwi, highlight the two possible living donors on my HUD, please," I told her.
"Stand by; I'm getting off this roof. It's fucking windy," she complained, but after a moment, two particular locations were highlighted, right next to each other, and I started walking fast to them, "Ruslan or Jean, one of you, can you grab the backpack I brought with me, please? It's the back seat of your van."
"Da!" came a happy response back.
I found what I was looking for, a large tub full of water and ice and five naked bodies. Completely disgusted, I tossed the Scav doctor into a corner, and I wondered at the same time if they had an industrial-sized ice maker like a convenience store if one of them had a chore to go out and buy a half dozen bags of ice every night.
I zeroed in on the two living victims easily and fished them out of the tub one at a time, eyes glancing rapidly between the two as I mentally triaged their condition. Nodding, I sat down next to the woman. Her skin somehow managed to look both pale and jaundiced.
Ruslan came back with my backpack of medical gear and sat it down, "Woah, this is fucked up, Madison."
"Yeah, no shit. Sometimes your countrymen are kind of dicks, you know?" I told him as I quickly started an IV and began administering some trauma nanomeds. The fact that they were almost dying from hypothermia was working in my favour, as it was preventing either of them from dying from the ham-handed way they were chopped up. The man, at least, only lost his eyes, one arm and a leg.
The woman, however, had her eyes and what I thought was a cybernetic liver taken, and they clearly did only a minimal amount of work stopping the internal bleeding from that surgery. She was slowly internally haemorrhaging to death right now.
"Hey!" Ruslan said loudly, offended. "These aren't my countrymen! I am not Russian! I am Belorussian! I was born at least one hundred kilometres from this zasranec!" He said, giving the Scav doctor a light kick, "I hate these assholes!"
I looked at him strangely. I didn't really know the difference between the two places, and they sounded basically the same to me, too. Was the difference of a hundred kilometres really a big deal? I guessed for some in Eastern Europe, it was!
"Sorry. Help me take to carry that guy into the OR; I need to work on this woman first, though," I told him, and he nodded and picked the man up and left the room.
"Woah, this is fucked up, Madison," Kiwi said as she walked in.
I had heard that a lot lately. I nodded as I put my firewall around my neck and connected to it. Connecting to the woman's interface socket, I hummed as I picked her up. "Kiwi, can you please grab that backpack and follow me into the OR."
Kiwi nodded and followed me into the OR, and I took a quick look around at the equipment available. There is more than what is on the list, so the scavs had to have brought some of that with them. We'd be making off with that stuff.
"Oh, sweet..." I said aloud, "Ruslan, can you place your guy into this chair? And then roll that hemodialysis machine next to him?"
He laid the guy down but scratched his head, "Uhh... what machine?" I sighed and pointed, "That one, the green plastic on the wheels. It should just roll; just put it next to him. Kiwi, set that there and get out one litre of normal saline."
As I sat the woman down on the operating biobed, she fished out the large bag of saline. I glanced at it, "Nova. Go find a microwave and nuke that bag of saline for about four minutes." I didn't know precisely how long it would take to heat up, but I could always let it cool back down if she brought it to me too hot.
Glancing down at the woman and judging that I could spare a moment before she started actively attempting to die on me, I darted over to the man in the chair and turned on the dialysis machine. It was actually a combination dialysis and heart bypass machine made by some Chinese company that I couldn't recognise, but it was just a clone of a popular line of Meditech models. I powered it up and frowned at the Cyrillic text. I mashed buttons until I got English again and then rapidly adjusted the settings. This guy didn't need blood dialysis, but he was about to die from hypothermia, and a hemodialysis machine could warm the blood as well as filter it.
It took me a minute to start him going, and I watched the machine chug away and nodded, satisfied.
"Alright, everyone, look around for where they keep their looted cyberware. We need to find the pieces they cut out of these two people. Especially a Transgenic Ltd brand liver. I need that... right away," I told all three of them, both Kiwi and Jean arriving to see what I was up to.
I sent Kiwi a list of cybernetics that was taken from both the man and the woman, and she nodded. "I take it nobody has any complaints if we return the stolen property?"
"Nah, mon, that's just doing the right thing. But what are you going to do?" asked Jean.
I sighed, "I'm not a cybernetics implantation specialist, obviously. But it shouldn't be too hard to at least put these specific stolen implants back in."
That was a lie. A bald-faced lie. It was, in fact, much harder to do that than put in an implant in the beginning. The Scav doctor hadn't exactly been gentle when he removed anything, so I would have to repair a lot of damage surgically while I did so, especially with the woman and her liver.
Ruslan and Jean shrugged; it sounded plausible to them. I glanced at the nuked bag of saline, using my recently added FLIR mode in my eyes to gauge its temperature. Still a bit too warm, so I just placed it next to the woman's body for the moment.
"I got the liver!" cried Kiwi from the other room. She ran back in, carrying a clear plastic bag that covered the implant. I glanced at it and nodded, "Good. Get me a pressure infuser from my bag. We don't have many blood products here, but this warm saline will help both her pressure and warm her up." There was some synthetic blood, the types borgs used, and I could use that on her in a pinch, but it really wasn't a good idea to do if it wasn't life or death. We'd see how much blood she lost in the surgery when I put her liver back in.
"A what?" asked Kiwi, perplexed.
Fuck! "Look for a squeezy pressure ball-looking thing. Like an old-fashioned blood pressure cuff," I told her, too busy to get it myself. After a moment, she found the correct thing, bringing it over to me.
"We're gonna go watch the prisoner until you're ready to disarm him," Ruslan said, snickering at his own pun.
"Okay. This might be a longer night than I thought," I told them.
Surprisingly, it wasn't that common for there to be combat on the calls. People, even their client's assailants, tended to run or scatter when a Trauma Team AV-4 showed up, and neither the pilots nor security guys would shoot people in the back if they were running away and clearly not a threat to the client anymore.
Corporate said that the subscribers paid for rescue, not revenge, after all. The few times when it was necessary were usually with the stupider segments of society that didn't know when to quit, and thus far, I hadn't needed to fire a shot in anger yet, and I was perfectly content for things to remain that way.
Walking through Jig-Jig street didn't frighten me as much as it did when I first arrived in this world; I wasn't quite as vulnerable as I used to be, nor did I look overly much like an easy mark. I didn't fit in, still, but I had taken to wearing simple clothes in dark colours, along with a dark grey light ballistic vest over my chest. It was only considered light armour, but the nice part about armour was that it was cumulative and designed to protect against differing threats. The vest, while certainly impact resistant, was really designed to protect against slashing attacks, which was one of the weaknesses of my ballistic skin weave biomod.
I didn't think I looked like a badass by any definition, but I did think I looked like someone that was too much effort for too little gain.
If working on a ground ambulance for almost a year taught me anything, it was that most low-level violent criminals were scum; they acted very much as predators might in the wild. They generally went for the weak amongst the herd, the low-hanging fruit. That was certainly not something that could be relied upon, as a starving cougar would attack anything that moved, but it was a good rule of thumb.
Mrs Okada ran her business in the back of a pachinko parlour, although I wasn't entirely sure why. It was more of an upscale place compared to other small pachinko or gambling spots, and Mrs Okada had a reputation for running a clean game without her fingers placed anywhere on the outcome of the games, probably because she didn't really care about the place as a profit centre, although I imagined it made money in spite of that.
I timed my arrival to neither be late nor especially early. The former was impolite, but so was the latter, if less so in social situations, as far as I was concerned. Two minutes before the time she asked me to come when I contacted her, I showed up at the back of the pachinko salon, smiling good-naturedly at a giant man wearing a suit, with his eyes hidden behind polarised dark sunglasses, despite the fact that it was relatively dark in the parlour.
"Good afternoon. I'm here to see Mrs Okada," I told the man.
He grunted, paused for a moment, and grunted again in a slightly different intonation. After that, he silently stepped aside so that I could walk past him. 'Lovely gentleman,' I thought.
As soon as I passed the threshold of the back area, all of the sound and clamour of the pachinko playing, which was a cacophony of electronic sounds and ringing, cut off entirely. I blinked and was curious how such an abrupt noise cancellation was possible, but I didn't have enough time to investigate it any further. Instead, I continued in. The paths could diverge, but Wakako's office was obvious on the left, with the right path going deeper into an area behind the pachinko machines.
I stepped into her office, whose door was open. It was tastefully decorated in a wood and bamboo theme, and a woman that was past her middle age but not really elderly sat at a desk at one end of the room. I found it interesting that she did not opt for externally obvious rejuvenation treatments, as they were definitely within her budget. My eyes, zooming in on her neck briefly, expertly judged both her pulse rate and even rough blood pressure just from the subtlest movements in her arteries as her heartbeat.
A number of liver spots on her skin were not congruent with my knowledge of dermatology. Her skin looked in good condition, too. My conclusion, the age spots were applied intentionally and cosmetically. She was in good health but liked to give the impression she was older and frailer than she actually was.
"Ah, Miss Hebert. Thank you for your consideration in both accepting my invitation and your timely arrival," the old woman told me, her voice just holding a slight Japanese accent; she held out a hand and indicated a comfortable-looking chair in front of her desk, "Please, have a seat. The tea service should arrive momentarily."
I didn't nod so much as incline my head slightly, before walking, very slowly in my subjective experience, to the chair. While not making it obvious, my eyes glanced both at the chair and then the walls to either side of me in the small office. They were wood panelled and tasteful. I was wondering why she had allowed me to enter her office armed. She certainly relied upon her reputation significantly in business, but I did not believe for a moment that she would rely upon that for her protection. There had to be something that would protect her from or instantly incapacitate a guest.
Explosives in the chair? A small shaped charge could turn me into mince while not overly ruffling her expensive kimono. That was my guess. That or an automated heavy machine gun in the walls, hidden behind the tasteful wood and bamboo features. I couldn't really tell from seeing the room from outside if the walls appeared too thick. In either case, if the meeting went south, my best tactic would probably be to leap as quickly as I could, tackling the old woman so that her automated defences couldn't either blow me up or differentiate between the two of us.
"Thank you for the invitation, Mrs Okada. Although, I find myself a little perplexed at the reason," I told her as I settled my tush onto what might be the most comfortable bomb I had ever sat on. Possibly the only one, too, although one never did know.
A young woman walked into the room carrying a European tea service, which surprised me. I was expecting some sort of Japanese tea ceremony, so I reviewed that yesterday. However, when one ended up looking up formal tea ceremonies, one tended to read a lot more than one intended to when one started out.
Asian tea ceremonies were ritualised and ceremonial, while the English drank way too much tea to go through such lengthy affairs, even occasionally, when they sat to have tea. As such, it was much more of a casual affair. Still, there were certain proprieties and etiquette in a high-society cuppa.
It was just chance that I had read a little bit about it yesterday, and of course, my predilection for both reading Jane Austen and similar Victorian period novels and watching a number of Earth Aleph programs in the UK, like Downton Abbey, that I wasn't entirely at my wit's end. I hoped I wasn't making a fool out of myself; I hated that more than perhaps anything else.
I internally sighed at the thought of missing Downtown Abbey; it had recently started its second season before I had been transported here, and it usually took about six months for an Earth Aleph program to arrive on Earth Bet. I'd never see if Matthew and Lady Mary got back together or if he survived the outbreak of World War One.
I took the napkin that was provided and carefully unfolded it, and placed it over my lap.
"Care for some sugar?" she asked me as she poured black tea into two small china cups using a tea strainer.
I nodded and told her, "One lump, please." After that, I carefully used one of the spoons to agitate the tea, back and forth, without touching the spoon to the side of the teacup and creating an obnoxious racket.
As I took my first sip, she said, "It's the chair, dear."
I coughed, not quite aspirating the tea and asked, "I beg your pardon?"
"There are two kinds of people who come into my office, dear. The kind that wonders wear the bomb is, and then there are the idiots," she said mildly, "I couldn't help but notice you glancing between the chair and the wall. That's a good sign, really."
I smiled and took another sip of tea before setting the cup delicately back on the saucer to take a polite nibble out of one of the offered miniature sandwiches, "To tell me that means that you have almost certainly told other people the same thing. That means it is absolutely both, plus something else as an ace in the hole. My dad always said to have a plan, a backup plan and then an ace in the hole." Alt-Dad had told Alt-Taylor that, at least. It seemed like good advice.
My eyes took in the overly large desk and started noticing that it didn't actually have any visible drawers, at least that I could see. I couldn't, of course, see everything from this side, but it looked odd for a desk. There wasn't actually any force field technology in this universe, at least as far as I could tell, but there was crazy electromagnetic field and even gravity manipulation technology that was almost as good. Perhaps if I tried to jump over the desk to tackle her, I'd get thrown back straight out of her office with significant force or get squashed into the desk like a bug under the force of twenty gravities. There was no way to know, really.
My statement got what I thought was a genuine laugh from her that didn't look forced at all, "That's why I wanted to talk with you."
"My dad? I somehow doubt that," I told her, being slightly and intentionally obtuse.
She waved a hand, "Not at all. Your father's services were already spoken for, and at his level, moonlighting wasn't really an option. You, however, I am always looking for capable individuals with capable skills for odd jobs every now and then."
That was one of the possibilities I had considered, but I hadn't thought it very likely. I tried to think of a delicate way to turn her down, "Mrs Okada, I am already gainfully employed, plus there is no way I want to become an edgerunner. I want to live more than a couple of years." I wasn't quite sure of the actual life expectancy of an Edgerunner actually, but it was probably similar to Matthew Crawley's life expectancy on the western front.
"Over a third of Trauma Team security specialists in Night City moonlight as mercenaries, Miss Hebert. I don't even think it's against the rules in your employee handbook until you become a supervisor. I employ a number myself. And not every merc is an Edgerunner. Edgerunners are a subset of mercenaries, true, and they're mostly ... crazy," Mrs Okada said reasonably. Then she continued, "It's mostly a distinction as far as the risk profile that a merc will accept. If they accept virtually any job, then they're almost definitionally an Edgerunner."
She shrugged, "There's nothing wrong with that, and I certainly have gigs where that type of thinking is necessary, but over ninety-five per cent of the clients I take are much less glamorous. For every raid against some hypothetical corporate black site, there are fifty gigs for bodyguard duty for a suit when they go into a bad part of town, to find out if a husband is cheating on their wife, to steal back a car that was jacked by scavs. That sort of thing is what keeps my doors open, actually."
She sighed, finishing her tea and said, "And you have an excellent reputation as a medic, even when you were working in an ambulance. I often lack those specific skills. Adding you to a gig is a surefire way to reduce the risk profile significantly, even if you were only peripherally involved by staying to provide medical care after the gig was completed."
"You had the option to attend medical school but declined Kang Tao's offer. Based on the information available, that is your goal, however, so it stands to reason that you may be seeking to finance your own education. That won't be possible by just collecting your salary at Trauma Team. Although I'm sure they'd be happy to pay your way, too, eventually," she finished her pitch.
I nodded slowly, understanding what she was saying. I did actually know that a number of Trauma Team employees moonlighted on the side like that. I finally told her, "I won't insult your intelligence or your Intelligence by acting surprised at the amount of information you collected on me, and your guesses are good ones. I suppose I would be open to certain work like that from time to time, so long as the risk profile was acceptable. I couldn't be involved in any missions against corporate interests, though."
I was pretty sure Trauma Team would just disavow I ever actually worked for them if I got caught in such a "gig", but I did take the promises I made when I got hired a little seriously. I wasn't a company girl by any means, and neither did I believe that they would reciprocate such loyalty if I was, but I was like an honest politician; namely, if I took a bribe, I would stick to the terms of the bribery, if I could.
I had agreed not to do anything to hurt their reputation, so until such a point as they broke faith with me, I would try my best to hold myself to that agreement, too, for my own sake. My actual dad, Danny, told me that you became the type of person you practised being, so if you had a habit of breaking promises, even if you wouldn't get caught, then you would become someone who broke promises as a matter of course. He should have taken some of his own advice after mom died, I thought, but it wasn't like I wasn't just as guilty myself.
"Of course, I have a number of workers who have similar constraints. Really my job is merely to find the correct contractor and connect them to the requirements a client provides. I am just an insulative middle-man, providing a service to both sides," she said mildly and set her napkin aside on the table, signalling that the afternoon tea was probably coming to a close. It wasn't surprising; she was a busy woman.
The idea that I should keep promises if I made them was a very old-fashioned opinion for the world I found myself in, and perhaps, someday, it would bite me on the tush, and then I would have to change. However, there was no need to rush headlong into Perdition; around Night City, that was sure to find me in its own good time.
I, of course, had my long-running and tentative plan to potentially sell some of my intellectual property to a biotech or pharmaceutical company, but that was much, much higher risk than occasionally taking small jobs like this.
Plus, networking this way would be one way to mitigate the risk of that "big gig" in the future. I would definitely need a fixer I could trust. From what I could tell, Mrs Okada was on the top tier of fixers in the city, with perhaps only the famous owner of the Afterlife having a better reputation, and I didn't like the idea of returning to Mr Delgado for anything.
After he paid me the final payment for the drugs themselves, he offered another couple thousand eurodollars for my pill press. I spent an evening rebuilding it, trying my best to make it less Tinkertech by slowing its operation and giving it time to physically cool the vanilla coating mechanism, which was kind of hard because I didn't really know how it worked. I just replaced weak-looking parts with tougher-looking parts, though, and had the feeling that it might last months, maybe four or five, before totally breaking down.
I tried to get him to pay me for it in advance, but he would only agree to half up front. However, after picking up the machine, he did not leave the last half of the money in the location I demanded, claiming there were unstated difficulties and redirected me to a different locker at a location I had never used before. I never picked up the last payment, and as far as I was concerned, that anonymous identity was burned.
I wasn't a professional paranoid like Alt-Dad was, but I had been an avid hobbyist for years. With the benefit of hindsight, as well as a more natural neurotransmitter balance in my brain and not constantly being bullied, I realised that I had been working up a very large persecution complex in Brockton Bay. I had the feeling that everyone was out to get me, based on my experiences at school. However, thinking about it, I realised I never approached the teachers or even that witch Principal correctly.
I approached them with the assumption that they cared about their students and then used the fact that they didn't help me as evidence that they were out to get me when the truth was much more banal. It was the distinction between the Stasi dragging someone away for interrogation and a person who just watched it happen. They were the latter, although I still couldn't precisely understand their motivations, as they protected the Trio a little too thoroughly. My best guess was Emma's dad threatened them with lawsuits or something.
In any event, even though I no longer felt that everyone was out to get me, personally, I still thought that most people would stick a knife in if they had the opportunity and something to gain by doing so. So it was best to avoid giving them the opportunity.
I felt that if you had a continuing business relationship with someone that you did not trust, you should always be wary of being fucked over if they knew it was coming to a close. To me, it seemed like it was better to let such arrangements fizzle out rather than having a set end to them; that way, the untrusted party wouldn't be tempted to get one over on you when they no longer had a reason not to. You would know that this was the last deal with that person, but they wouldn't know.
However, I was tempted by twenty-five hundred eurodollars for my pill press, but in the end, I only got half that. Alt-Dad had told Alt-Taylor to always beware of the sunk cost fallacy and never second guess herself if her instincts were telling her to walk away, even if doing so was leaving something on the table. My instincts told me to run away and fuck the last half of the money, so I had.
Fizzling out the relationship was why Gloria still brought about half the cybernetics she came across to him, even though I had cultivated a few contacts with ripperdocs in Japantown, which we used for most of the better pieces. I didn't make as much as I did before from this venture because my only job was to refurbish the cybernetics Gloria brought me, but she was making more than she had in the past, to the point where she was putting a little money away every month to go to the same Paramedic school I went to, possibly in a year or two. NC Med Ambulance would pay part of the tuition if you agreed to work there for three years, but you still had to come up with about half yourself.
One nice thing about living three times as fast as everyone else was that I had a lot of time to think, and it didn't really look out of place even if I went on mental digressions for a while, as such I carefully and slowly dabbed my mouth with the napkin and sat it aside as well.
"So, how will this work? You call me when you have need of my special skills?" I asked her, which caused her to nod.
She told me, "Precisely. Some jobs are solo affairs, but I think most of the ones where you would fit the bill would be part of a support element for an existing team. You would have to trust me to some extent to assign you people that you could trust to watch your back, of course, but I definitely wouldn't pair you with random newbies."
I nodded. I didn't really think I would accept any kind of solo job unless it was something very simple and low risk, like perhaps accompanying a client to a black market ripperdoc for both bodyguard service and professional consultation. That would be right up my alley. There were any number of reasons an otherwise law-abiding person might not want to go to a legit clinic for work done, with privacy being the main one.
It was more polite for me to offer to end the tea than if she was to dismiss me, from what I could tell from Downton Abbey, so I said, "Well, I again appreciate your invitation, but I know that you are a busy woman and I shouldn't keep up any more of your time today."
"A young woman like yourself is always welcome. It is clear your mother taught you manners, as a mother ought to do," she said cryptically, rising from her desk as I did.
I smiled at her as she rose to her feet and said, "There's no need, ma'am. I'll show myself out." I wondered what she meant by that.
Before I left her office, she said, "Oh, and I have to thank you for helping my son with that matter at Clouds."
I sniffed delicately, "I'm sure I don't know what you're referring to." I didn't even admit I had anything to do with what happened at Clouds to other Tyger Claws; in fact, I wouldn't even admit it if Mr Inoue asked me again, and he knew for a fact I was involved! My statement caused her to smile even wider as I left her office. Secrets were for keeping.
As I stepped back onto Jig-Jig street, I considered. Although the grandma-seemingly lady had been unfailingly polite, the entire meeting had me feeling vaguely uneasy. As if I had spent twenty minutes petting a purring mountain lion. An enjoyable activity, so long as the mountain lion didn't decide it was hungry instead.
"Attacking a scav den? Ma'am, was I perhaps unclear when I told you that I didn't desire to become an edgerunner? Because, and please forgive my crassness in advance, but this sounds like edgerunner shit," I told Mrs Okada over a vidcall.
She had forwarded me a supposedly end-to-end encryption transport layer module for my phone app. It was an open-source module, so I could examine the source code, but I wasn't at the level of understanding of the mathematics involved in cryptography. So while I spent a few minutes looking through it, there were no obvious backdoors or malware. However, everything else looked Greek to me.
I did know enough about cryptosystems to know that it was theoretically possible to design, mathematically, a secret vulnerability into an encryption algorithm. Encryption systems almost always had a number of constants in their programming, and it was theoretically possible to precompute a compromised constant that would give the party who created the constant, but no other, the capability to crack the encryption with little effort.
I didn't know and couldn't tell if that had been done, but I verified the source code with the copies on the net from the developer and even asked a number of friends on the hacker BBS that I had become a frequent reader. The friend who bought my first netrunner suit replied and told me pretty much the same thing, that I couldn't really tell, but these were open encryption standards and were widely relied upon, even by corporations themselves, so they were probably good. She told me that most corporations and net runners don't attack cryptosystems themselves, anyway, but use malware and similar attacks to read the cleartext after it has already been decrypted or by stealing your private encryption key or similar methods.
That made sense; as such, I had begun to trust the encryption, at least a little.
"Well, it is a small scav den. And your partners on this mission, if you accept, are edgerunners. But you don't need to be just because you accept an occasional job with them. Despite their risk profile, they are professionals. They've completed a number of successful jobs for me over the past few months. You are here on this job less because they might be injured and more for the aftermath," she told me, "You see, this is a revenge gig. The client's grandson was one of these Scav's 'donors' and did not survive the experience. A previous gig traced those responsible to this location. However, the client is barely offering enough money to make this a worthwhile gig. He's just one man. But it is pretty well known that Trauma Team Med Techies, often very rapidly, make off with any cyberware in a downed enemy, time permitting."
That was true. It was one of the ways to get bonuses, in fact. Generally, it would only happen in rescue-type calls where the patient's acuity permitted it. We wouldn't delay patient care to do so if they were actually in any danger. However, it wasn't uncommon to give rescued and stable patients a little Vitamin A (Ativan) to relax them and then spend five minutes or so removing a few choice pieces of cybernetics from any downed enemies if there were any.
If the expected haul was large enough and the patient couldn't be delayed getting to the hospital, occasionally Trauma Team would dispatch a second aircraft to systematically scavenge all the cybernetics from every downed enemy. Other times they would redirect ground teams that only consisted of security specialists in vans to just grab the bodies and bring them back to the Tower, where an on-call med techie might be called in to work a few hours of overtime in the building's morgue.
"You want me along to Counter-Scav the Scavs?" I asked, flabbergasted. Then I thought about it for a while and nodded. It did make sense. Especially if they were raiding a scav den that already had some medical equipment in it, it might not take that long at all. A lot of cybernetics had a perishability period where they had to be extracted in a certain amount of time after their owner flatlined, or they'd be ruined. It was why Scav took down people alive, after all. Finally, I nodded, "Okay, yeah, that makes sense, I guess. And fuck those guys, really."
Everybody hated the Scavs. Yet there still seemed to be more every day. Not all of them were Eastern European immigrants, either. It was almost like we were living in a video game where they would just respawn every so often if you stopped looking in their direction.
"Excellent; I'll set up a meeting with the team you'll be working with this time. As an aside, there is a small bonus for each living Scav they deliver, compared to each one they flatline, and a moderate bonus if they deliver the leader of this den. All of that will be in the detes," she said, seemingly happily, "There is a time limit in that nobody really knows when a scav den will relocate, so I expect you not to drag your feet on this. I don't appreciate it if my contractors make me look bad in front of one of my clients."
Yeah, that was the old satin-covered iron fist routine. Mrs Okada didn't have the bearing of someone you'd want to come back with failure if you had already agreed to do a job for her. That last bit made me raise my eyebrows, "Do I want to know why the client wants some of them alive?"
"Probably not. But he is a very traditional old gentleman. Have you heard the word Língchí before?" asked Wakako in a conversational tone, pronouncing the tonal Chinese word differently from the rest of the English words in the sentence.
I shook my head at her in the vidcall, "I definitely don't want to do an image search on that, do I?" I asked her, aghast.
"Again, probably not. Sending you the location now," she agreed.
The Golden Duck restaurant was a pretty good Chinese place in Japantown. It was scop, like almost everything else, but they were real artists here. They not only got both the taste and texture somewhat similar to actual Peking duck, but even the appearance looked close to what I remembered from a few of the Chinese places in Brockton Bay.
There were only three places that my dad and I would regularly order from, and only one of them had Peking duck, so I only had it a handful of times, but I couldn't tell that much of a difference the couple of times I had tried The Golden Duck.
As such, the food here was actually on the pricier side, but I supposed a group of three edgerunners wouldn't care about that. Wakako had sent me details on three people, but there were no names attached. Just a portrait and a single paragraph that described their speciality. Two men and one woman.
That didn't stop me from running their likenesses through my gumshoe service, pulling up their full names and abbreviated life history, nor would it stop them from doing the same to me, so I suspected it was more along the lines of courtesy. I would allow them to introduce themselves as whatever they liked, and they would reciprocate the courtesy.
I found them right away; the two men were quite boisterous, laughing and drinking beer from glass bottles, while the blonde woman with the pageboy cut and pink lipstick held to the side, being more laid back.
The first was a large man, easily over a hundred-and-ninety-centimetres and with the dark skin common amongst Caribbean Islanders. His biography stated he was born in Jamaica, and his accent as he laughed and talked with his friend seemed to bear that out. However, his last known location before arriving in Night City was Port-au-Prince, but there were no further records for the period in between when the entire island of Hispaniola was destroyed in a massive earthquake and tsunami a couple of years ago. Records started again when he arrived in Night City about six months ago, with him suspected in a number of crimes, but the NCPD didn't really prioritise crimes committed by mercenaries, so long as they were smart about the targets they chose.
His friend was also a bear of a man, and his Eastern European accent also agreed with his biography, although his exact place of birth wasn't listed in the report I had paid for, listing either Belarus or eastern Ukraine. Everyone paused when I approached their table, and I said, in a friendly manner, "Wakako sent me."
That caused the two men the grin and usher me into a seat, "Come, sit, sit," the bear told me, and I slid in next to the much smaller blonde woman. She looked like she was in her mid to late twenties, and from Mrs Okada's brief precis, she was a netrunner. I also didn't get any matches on the gumshoe site for her, aside from a list of possible aliases.
The Jamaican man said, "Hello, hello! I am Jean..." which correlated with his actual name of Jean Ventura, "... and this gonk is Ruslan." That definitely wasn't the bear's real name, but it didn't really matter. "The anti-social one over there is Kiwi." That definitely didn't sound like her real name, but it was listed as one of her aliases.
That caused the woman to narrow her red eyes and say, "I'm not anti-social; I'm just not an idiot like you two. She looks pretty young, but Wakako says she is at least as good a Med Techie as Trauma Team is." Well, that was a very interesting way to describe my skills, I thought.
I nodded, "You can call me Madison. I am very good, yes." Madison Clements had such a debt to me that merely stealing her identity in a different universe a million times wouldn't come close to repaying, but it was a start.
The man calling himself Ruslan nodded, "We thought we'd discuss the gig over dinner and set out right afterwards if that's okay with you, Madison." He waved a hand over to Kiwi and said, "Kiwi, if you mind?"
She shook her head and pulled something out of her purse and sat it on the table, and turned it on. I noticed an odd noise briefly, but other than that couldn't figure out what it was doing. She enlightened me, "It's a white noise generator, but inside the radius, you can't hear it. But outside, the people in the next booth won't be able to hear us talk. Doesn't stop lip reading, obviously, though."
I was impressed. Mainly because it seemed every time I turned around, I found some interesting piece of technology that I hadn't even known was possible. How would this thing even work? Also, wouldn't that thing make more sense if it was incorporated into your body? I fidgeted a little, stopping myself from an urge to disassemble it.
The runner called Kiwi also handled a conference wireless connection as I saw and accepted a connection request from her and discovered that it was a combination conference vidcall as well as a four-way collaborative presentation. Basically, any of us could use the screen as a whiteboard or show images to all the others.
Kiwi blinked at me a couple of times and said, "The girl has black ICE protecting her OS. Nice."
"It's not fatal," I hurriedly told her. At least, that one wasn't.
That was true, too. In fact, the first layer of my defence was black ICE. Black ICE didn't really mean it killed you; it just meant something that interfered with your bodily processes. It was called black because for the longest time, and still, officially, everyone claimed such a thing was impossible. My first line of defence was a piece of black ICE that I partly took from the Dragoon and partly Tinkered with myself, and it should put someone to sleep. More like a brief coma, really, that might last a few minutes or maybe even longer. This was followed by a series of traditional ICE layered after this in slowly elevating danger levels, for example, one that would short-circuit the deck of an attacker, followed, finally, by my last defence, which was the heart-stopping fatal black ICE that I also recovered from the Dragoon.
"Whatever you say, choom. I don't recognise it, and that makes me interested, but we can circle back to that later, maybe," the blonde woman told me.
Everyone shut up briefly for a moment while a waitress brought over plates of duck for each of us. I didn't even have to order. Nice.
"Okay, so this is really a combination gig," Ruslan said. I didn't know what that meant, but I was hoping I would learn from context, "Our main client wants the scavs dead or alive, and we can keep any loot. That's the main reason you're here, Madison."
I nodded, and he continued, "However, I just got word from Wakako that she lined up a second client that wants the same thing. This client is the real estate company that owns the building the scavs are held up in. I'm not sure if they rented the space to them or if the scavs are squatters, but they'd like them evicted. Preferably with extreme prejudice. This does mean we won't be able to rip out some of the fixed medical equipment, although if the Scavs brought anything with them, it's fair game. We have a list of things that are no-touch with this second client. It does mean this gig is paying better than we thought, though."
I frowned but nodded, then reviewed the list of equipment that we were expected to find as Ruslan forwarded the data to the conference call. Well, it wasn't anything that would be easy to move or sell, nor would I have any real need of it, and it was older than even my own equipment. The equipment was of such middling to poor quality that I assumed this real estate company probably marketed it to Scavs or similar bottom-of-the-barrel ripperdocs, which made me kind of want to screw them over but I supposed being professional was the better choice.
He then discussed the details he knew from the expected number of scavs, which was between eight and twelve, and their basic plan. He and Jean would clear the building, with the help of Kiwi, who would mostly hang back and provide remote quick hacks and situational awareness from hacking the local subnet while I would hold back at the back entrance in the event someone tried to run out the back.
I nodded; that was an acceptable risk profile for me. My backup plan would be just to run away. However, I had two aces in the hole, and since they needed to be used relatively soon before they became inert, I didn't mind offering one of them to the group.
When he asked if anyone had any potential changes to make to the plan, I pulled out a small grenade; it looked exactly like a smoke grenade as that was what I had built it out of, "This is an anaesthetic gas grenade. It's pretty potent and will put down an unprotected person, through inhalation, within five to ten seconds. The gas becomes inert and safe to be around after around a hundred and twenty seconds after it's used, but the victims will still be down for quite a bit longer than that."
"Fucking preem, Madison. Are you sure you want to waste it on this gig?" asked Ruslan, with the other two looking impressed, too.
I shrugged, "It's about to expire. It's still good now, but in another month, the active ingredient will have broken down into inert chemicals, similar to how it does after it's been used."
That caused them all to nod. They were familiar with using surplus equipment acquired through god knows where, too, and assumed this must be something similar.
"Nice, I wasn't going to bother with trying to keep any of them alive, but maybe the top dog. His bonus is pretty good," Ruslan mused, causing me to fidget. I didn't particularly want to help get someone tortured, but everything I learned about this man caused me to believe that if anyone deserved it, he probably did. I wouldn't say anything, as I knew that was a possible outcome when I offered them the grenade.
They adjusted their plans briefly, taking into account the new resource, and after we finished all of our duck, we got on our way.
I thought it would be the industrial area of Watson, which was a little sketchy, but it turned out the scavs were holed up in the overcrowded Heywood district, which was even sketchier.
I supposed that was a kind of hide-in-plain-sight type of thing. But it made me wonder how they camouflaged taking bodies in and out of the building, or maybe they just didn't.
The adjustment to the plan was that instead of following Ruslan and Jean in, Kiwi instead scaled the top of the small one-story building and started hacking from there. She also took some tools with her, and the plan was that she would toss the gas grenade in the input ventilation of the building's HVAC system, then hack it to turn it on full blast, circulating all of the gas throughout the building in only twenty seconds or so. I was waiting in the back alley with my Kang Tao submachinegun aimed at the back door.
"Okay, we're ready," Ruslan said over the conference call we were using as a jury-rigged tacnet. Maybe it was just the fact that I worked at Trauma Team, but I felt they needed to get some better commo gear.
Kiwi came back with, "Alright. I'm in the subnet. Looks like ten people in, including the top dog and possibly two donors still alive," she said calmly. I winced. Maybe I would get to save a life today? "Alright, the HVAC system is hacked, and the blower is locked into high-speed. I'm throwing the grenade in... now!"
About thirty seconds after Kiwi threw the grenade in, Ruslan and Jean, both wearing gas masks, kicked the front door in and started shooting. A little bit after that, an urgent voice told me, "Madison, two targets headed for the back door, including the big man."
"Will the big man come through the door first or second?" I asked her, not feeling very anxious but needing additional information.
There was a pause before she came back, "Second, it looks like! They'll be at the door in three, two, one..."
The door burst open as if a man had kicked it, and from my position of cover behind a dumpster, I lined up the reticle on my red dot sight on the mook's abdomen. Using my highest speed, I quickly pulled up the image of the target they wanted alive and nodded before gently squeezing the trigger, unleashing a six or seven-round burst that took the random Scav in the chest and neck, the man going down in slow motion in a gurgle and spray of blood that caused me to ick a little bit. You'd think with all I had seen working traumas over the past year that I would be immune to that, but it was a little bit different when you were responsible.
"Ну все, тебе пизда!" yelled the boss man of the den; however, he was yelling it behind him and shooting back the way he came, apparently thinking that the shooter that took out his minion was coming from behind him. He emptied a whole magazine of shotgun shells down the empty hallway and started backing uneasily out of the door, swaying a little. It looked like he took at least a huff or two of the anaesthetic, but not enough to put him down completely.
As he was fumbling with a fully rotary magazine to reload in his automatic street sweeper-style shotgun, I just darted out of cover and approached him at my full speed from behind, slamming the buttstock of my SMG into the side of his head. He went down like a sack of potatoes, and I smiled, nodding.
I glanced down at him and searched him for both weapons and anything dangerous. He had a set of mantis blades in each of his arms, so I carefully disconnected the powerpack from them, defanging him. Then I used a set of superstrong zip-ties to tie his ankles together. His legs, at least, were organic and not biomodded.
"The big guy is down, alive," I told Kiwi and the rest over the conference call. Perhaps it would have been more merciful to kill him. But he was the Scav's "doctor" here, so I didn't feel a lot of sympathy for him. Plus, he was worth an extra thousand dollars alive.
Ruslan's amusing accent came back, "Awesome! It was like shooting fish in a barrel in here. Should I call Wakako for a pickup for the boss?"
I sighed and told them, "Negative. Not yet. He has a nice set of Arasaka mantis blades on each arm. I doubt he will really need them anymore, given what Mrs Okada implied our client is going to do to him. We may as well be thorough."
After the timer, which I started when Kiwi threw the grenade in, reached two minutes, I dragged the Scav doctor back inside his own operating theatre.
"Kiwi, highlight the two possible living donors on my HUD, please," I told her.
"Stand by; I'm getting off this roof. It's fucking windy," she complained, but after a moment, two particular locations were highlighted, right next to each other, and I started walking fast to them, "Ruslan or Jean, one of you, can you grab the backpack I brought with me, please? It's the back seat of your van."
"Da!" came a happy response back.
I found what I was looking for, a large tub full of water and ice and five naked bodies. Completely disgusted, I tossed the Scav doctor into a corner, and I wondered at the same time if they had an industrial-sized ice maker like a convenience store if one of them had a chore to go out and buy a half dozen bags of ice every night.
I zeroed in on the two living victims easily and fished them out of the tub one at a time, eyes glancing rapidly between the two as I mentally triaged their condition. Nodding, I sat down next to the woman. Her skin somehow managed to look both pale and jaundiced.
Ruslan came back with my backpack of medical gear and sat it down, "Woah, this is fucked up, Madison."
"Yeah, no shit. Sometimes your countrymen are kind of dicks, you know?" I told him as I quickly started an IV and began administering some trauma nanomeds. The fact that they were almost dying from hypothermia was working in my favour, as it was preventing either of them from dying from the ham-handed way they were chopped up. The man, at least, only lost his eyes, one arm and a leg.
The woman, however, had her eyes and what I thought was a cybernetic liver taken, and they clearly did only a minimal amount of work stopping the internal bleeding from that surgery. She was slowly internally haemorrhaging to death right now.
"Hey!" Ruslan said loudly, offended. "These aren't my countrymen! I am not Russian! I am Belorussian! I was born at least one hundred kilometres from this zasranec!" He said, giving the Scav doctor a light kick, "I hate these assholes!"
I looked at him strangely. I didn't really know the difference between the two places, and they sounded basically the same to me, too. Was the difference of a hundred kilometres really a big deal? I guessed for some in Eastern Europe, it was!
"Sorry. Help me take to carry that guy into the OR; I need to work on this woman first, though," I told him, and he nodded and picked the man up and left the room.
"Woah, this is fucked up, Madison," Kiwi said as she walked in.
I had heard that a lot lately. I nodded as I put my firewall around my neck and connected to it. Connecting to the woman's interface socket, I hummed as I picked her up. "Kiwi, can you please grab that backpack and follow me into the OR."
Kiwi nodded and followed me into the OR, and I took a quick look around at the equipment available. There is more than what is on the list, so the scavs had to have brought some of that with them. We'd be making off with that stuff.
"Oh, sweet..." I said aloud, "Ruslan, can you place your guy into this chair? And then roll that hemodialysis machine next to him?"
He laid the guy down but scratched his head, "Uhh... what machine?" I sighed and pointed, "That one, the green plastic on the wheels. It should just roll; just put it next to him. Kiwi, set that there and get out one litre of normal saline."
As I sat the woman down on the operating biobed, she fished out the large bag of saline. I glanced at it, "Nova. Go find a microwave and nuke that bag of saline for about four minutes." I didn't know precisely how long it would take to heat up, but I could always let it cool back down if she brought it to me too hot.
Glancing down at the woman and judging that I could spare a moment before she started actively attempting to die on me, I darted over to the man in the chair and turned on the dialysis machine. It was actually a combination dialysis and heart bypass machine made by some Chinese company that I couldn't recognise, but it was just a clone of a popular line of Meditech models. I powered it up and frowned at the Cyrillic text. I mashed buttons until I got English again and then rapidly adjusted the settings. This guy didn't need blood dialysis, but he was about to die from hypothermia, and a hemodialysis machine could warm the blood as well as filter it.
It took me a minute to start him going, and I watched the machine chug away and nodded, satisfied.
"Alright, everyone, look around for where they keep their looted cyberware. We need to find the pieces they cut out of these two people. Especially a Transgenic Ltd brand liver. I need that... right away," I told all three of them, both Kiwi and Jean arriving to see what I was up to.
I sent Kiwi a list of cybernetics that was taken from both the man and the woman, and she nodded. "I take it nobody has any complaints if we return the stolen property?"
"Nah, mon, that's just doing the right thing. But what are you going to do?" asked Jean.
I sighed, "I'm not a cybernetics implantation specialist, obviously. But it shouldn't be too hard to at least put these specific stolen implants back in."
That was a lie. A bald-faced lie. It was, in fact, much harder to do that than put in an implant in the beginning. The Scav doctor hadn't exactly been gentle when he removed anything, so I would have to repair a lot of damage surgically while I did so, especially with the woman and her liver.
Ruslan and Jean shrugged; it sounded plausible to them. I glanced at the nuked bag of saline, using my recently added FLIR mode in my eyes to gauge its temperature. Still a bit too warm, so I just placed it next to the woman's body for the moment.
"I got the liver!" cried Kiwi from the other room. She ran back in, carrying a clear plastic bag that covered the implant. I glanced at it and nodded, "Good. Get me a pressure infuser from my bag. We don't have many blood products here, but this warm saline will help both her pressure and warm her up." There was some synthetic blood, the types borgs used, and I could use that on her in a pinch, but it really wasn't a good idea to do if it wasn't life or death. We'd see how much blood she lost in the surgery when I put her liver back in.
"A what?" asked Kiwi, perplexed.
Fuck! "Look for a squeezy pressure ball-looking thing. Like an old-fashioned blood pressure cuff," I told her, too busy to get it myself. After a moment, she found the correct thing, bringing it over to me.
"We're gonna go watch the prisoner until you're ready to disarm him," Ruslan said, snickering at his own pun.
"Okay. This might be a longer night than I thought," I told them.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Good to see ol' kiwi doing her thing
- Location
- Phoenix, AZ
Ha, I love this story! Thank you for the chapter.
Cloak&Dagger
Definitely Insane
Wouldn't boiling a bag of water 4 minutes blow it up?
Here is the temp. curve of 1000ml water in a 850W microwave, depending on the size of the bag and the power of the microwave 4 mins seems fine.
Edit: Looking closer at the source I used for the image, it seems like the microwave used less energy than advertised. Saltwater has a heat capacity of ~4kJ/(kg*K) , 850W=51kJ/min, so assuming a perfect absorption of the energy the microwave supplied (and a 100% efficient microwave) you would still need ~ 6 minutes to bring 1L water to a boiling point from ~20°C. I take no responsibility for the accuracy of my calculations, but you can easily check for yourself.
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I don't think so. It should take at least 10 minutes to boil 1 litre.