If it did burn down, then I would still probably come out ahead slightly, as the value of the lot was slowly increasing, but most of the property's value was still in the improvements on it, like the warehouse.
She smiled, "Excellent! Let's talk about this first, then."
What she wanted from me was quickly made obvious. Despite being a fairly gifted information broker, she had less contact with the shady side than I did, which was a little weird. Apparently, this was a bit of a new industry for her, but she appeared to be gifted at it. She had some contacts who would buy and sell her information, but none appeared that willing to help her expand, instead keeping her siloed.
She wanted me to sell her team restricted cybernetics and not report any of them to the psychosquad. Basically, be a back alley Ripperdoc with the contacts and safety of a legitimate cybersurgeon, to which I could agree to an extent as I simply would refuse to perform surgery if I thought my patient was dangerously unhinged. Besides, I did some of this service for the Lotus Tong, too, so I couldn't claim to be squeaky clean.
She also wanted to buy other restricted and technically illegal items from me, too, as I clearly had some sort of black market access to them due to the fact that I had autonomous combat robots.
That clued me into her background. Not a real Corpo, but probably a sheltered family. Upper middle class or maybe even parents who were kind of rich. Professionals of some kind. Like lawyers or a doctor like me, perhaps.
If she were from a real Corpo background, she would have realised that all you need to do to buy "illegal combat robots" is to call the Militech sales rep, ask for security systems and not sound like a goober. Then, they'd sell you City Council-approved end-user certificates for the hardware right along with the bots for only a small upcharge.
Moreover, she was hopeful that "my team" could offer some limited training, as in going together on gigs. That one might be harder, as it wasn't my team at all, and I didn't know if Kiwi would be down to handhold them. She might be, though, if sufficiently compensated. I'd ask her.
We settled, for now, on me selling her and anyone she sent to me any kind of restricted cybernetics that they wanted at a modest discount, although I did point out to her that I would not operate on anyone I thought was possibly unhinged.
That got me the identity of the firebug and his motive. I had been looking in all of the wrong places. He was a real estate investor and saw an easy buck if he could get some properties on the cheap in a rising-value area. Shouldn't I have had a number of offers to buy the place, then, followed by threats?
I frowned, and as she was explaining, I used a couple of proxies to log in to the net address for the shell company I used to buy the building. Ah. Yes. There were. How embarrassing. This man didn't even know I owned it. Of course, Sarah, the smug elf, had better information than he did. Otherwise, he would have sent the offers and threats to me personally and not to the net address and voice mailbox of the front company that I never checked. Or maybe he wouldn't if he knew anything about me.
I sighed. I really needed some sort of trustworthy personal assistant or AI to sort through all of my correspondence. Things like this were starting to slip through the cracks.
While I was trying to convince a very sceptical elf girl that my version of a notoriously shitty product wasn't shitty, I slipped out of the building under stealth in the old combat outfit that I sported when I was still Taylor. It felt nice.
I jogged about ten blocks east and away from Chinatown proper, crossing the Los Angeles River and got into a cab that was waiting for me near the rail yard.
It wasn't the Moldavan gentleman this time, but this cabby wasn't much better, but at least he seemed quiet since I was conspicuously armed and dressed in a very militant fashion.
By the time I got to the location, the dossier said he most likely would be at, I had my full attention available. The elf-girl had agreed, after much coaxing, to try one of my prototypes for a one-hour sleep cycle in one of the cushy chairs in our break room.
I had pencilled in Mr Abs for a consult later that day. Apparently, he acted as something of her bodyguard. He was a former NUSA military member, but he wasn't like special forces or anything, and he didn't have that many augmentations, either. I had just done a normal exotic biosculpt workup for him the first time, so he had fewer augmentations than she did, even.
She was paying for him to get the same muscle and bone lace, ballistic skin weave and nanosurgeon organs that she had, but also a Smart-Gun link and one of my new specials, the entry-level Sandy. The last two were "technically" restricted cybernetics, like Sarah was wanting, but really most everyone would sell them to you with no problem. You got a lot more questions when you wanted to buy a Projectile Launch System or Mantis Blades, for example-especially the PLS.
That would be a lot of augmentations to be added to someone at once, but he agreed to follow all of my post-operative care instructions and to meet a therapist of my choice every fifteen days for a month. I probably would not have agreed to implant a higher-tier Sandy than the Militech one immediately, but they had both baulked at the costs of a QianT unit anyway.
I wasn't forcing him to get therapy; I just wanted the therapist to examine him and make sure he wasn't about to crack. Former NUSA Army idol-fans turned mercenary elves had to have a few issues, but he seemed remarkably stable in my brief exam of him.
From what the elf-girl told me, the man I was after was kind of like a mafia poseur. He was mostly a legitimate "businessman", but he liked to pretend like he had a lot of connections to criminals, including hiring muscle to guard him and, apparently, try to burn down my fucking buildings. The elf said he was the type of guy who would yell, "Do you know who I am?!" I understood what she was trying to say immediately.
So I was expecting some resistance tonight, but this was more on the nature of a friendly visit. Something like, "Sorry, I forgot to check my mail", while hanging him out of his thirtieth-floor window.
I intended to scare him, send him a message, not kill him. As such, I was loaded with mostly less-lethal weapons, including a dart gun and anaesthesia grenades. Everyone got second chances, after all.
I paid the cabby in cash and jogged a few more blocks to the tall building my target was in. It wasn't quite what I'd call a Megabuilding, but it was a Skyrise along the same idea, so I would have to approach this a little carefully. Anytime this many people were around, especially well-to-do ones like my target, it meant security.
This wasn't a luxury highrise, though, it was more along the lines of a housing project like Megabuildings mostly were in Night City, but that didn't mean the security wouldn't be there. The Tyger Claws ran the security of my old place as tight as a drum, including sensors on every floor and autonomous drones circling the exterior.
If I was smart, I would back away and get Kiwi's team on this. She'd spend a couple of days researching the gig and approach it systemically and safely. If I was still stuck in this one body, I would have definitely done that too. But I felt a little stifled lately and felt the risks were acceptable enough. I already had an idea of how to infiltrate the building after all.
It was pretty simple, but there was no need to get really complicated. Someone wise once said that a good plan violently executed today was better than a perfect one next week. I hid next to the vehicle entrance to the garage, and finally, when a large panelled van was about to enter, I turned on my stealth system and ran out, hopping onto the bumper and riding it inside.
Part of me started sending Pings to every networked device I found and trying to breach the local subnet. I was a poseur, but the security here wasn't great, so I was able to use my barely-above-script-kiddie abilities to piggyback each successful hack to the next one. I didn't turn off the cameras, as that might be noticed, but I turned each of them in unusual directions that created a blind spot as I ran up the stairs.
The unusual feeling of being able to do all of this while I was still in full control of my body, running upstairs and on the lookout for any ambush, did make me feel very elite, though, just in a different way. How did regular people survive just being able to think about one thing at a time? How had I?! If I had to go back to that life, it would feel as though I was barely conscious!
A level below his floor, I noticed that the security rapidly improved on all devices connected to this subnet, such that I had to stop, crouch and wait while I penetrated each of the cameras. It seemed that, as the foxy elf had surmised, he had the entire floor to himself. That would be insanity in a Megabuilding, but this place was a lot smaller. There were two loitering security drones on this floor, but they were of a cheap model. Not armed, and sensors that only included the near-visual. They wouldn't be able to see me.
Next to his door was a large round table with three men sitting at it playing cards. I scoffed. This was straight out of a drama or something. The guards playing cards bit? I shook my head and inched closer, using my sixteen times gyro-stabilised zoom to examine each of them from half a floor away.
Okay. Maybe they're stupidly playing cards, but these guys looked legitimately dangerous. One had an obvious PLS, another Mantis Blades, and the last had a giant blunderbuss-looking shotgun right next to him. I'd have to hit them in the head or neck with the dart gun, and I didn't know if I could reload it fast enough.
This was, however, the perfect situation to use the great equaliser. No, not a Colt Peacemaker, but a grenade. As I got about four metres away from the table, I stilled. I had about two minutes left on my stealth system, which would be more than enough. I casually pulled the pin on my anaesthetic grenade and lobbed it in an easy, slow, underhanded toss aimed to land in the centre of the table, thinking to myself, ' I got the big blind this hand, boys.'
However, instead of seeing the grenade land on the table and start billowing gas as I expected, I saw one of the men facing me on the table notice the grenade before it even reached the height of its parabola. His eyes locked onto it like one of those automatic CIWS turrets on a Naval ship, and he pushed off of his chair with speed that could only be the result of boostware.
Instead of diving away, though, he deployed his Mantis blade and chopped the fucking grenade in half. I gaped. My anaesthetic grenade worked like traditional smoke grenades in that they required a pyrotechnic initiator, and this madman just essentially chopped the burning fuse before the fucking thing could get started. Before it was ignited, my "anaesthetic gas" was a fucking tightly packed powder that was slowly leaking from the diced polymer grenade onto the floor.
Unless someone snorted it up like syn-cocaine, it wasn't going to be putting anybody to sleep. My hand dropped down to my dart pistol, pulling it free, but before I could aim it at the speedster, he grabbed a Big Hoss off the table and just flung the contents into my general direction. The Big Hoss was the largest-sized brand of fountain drink you could get from a particular convenience store, and this one was close to full. He had a good aim too, so I got drenched in the distinctive scent of my least favourite carbonated beverage. I was not tasting the love.
The liquid covering me refracted my stealth field, distorting the air until I was more or less clearly visible as a wildly distorted outline of a human shape. This caused his two slow friends to start to cry out, but the guy with the boostware was already moving in my direction.
Although he was moving about as fast as me, he was still too slow. Sucker! Just as I reached my aim point and started to squeeze the trigger, though, he grabbed his friend, the one whose back was facing me, and threw him in front of his body just as I fired the dart. It wasn't even the guy with the PLS, either.
Shit. I immediately regretted trying to dunk on this guy preemptively, even if it was in my mind. I had done it twice, and I had been burned twice.
I dropped the dart gun, not bothering trying to reload it and thought to myself, ' Alright, fuck non-lethal.' Instantly my monowire shot out, and I used some quick whip attacks to keep the demon at bay. I had to be careful, as he was trying to use both of his Mantis blades to cause my monowire to wrap around his blades and bind me up, so I couldn't use my normal one-handed whipping attacks and instead had to use precise scythe-like attacks.
The slow but unfortunately conscious man with the missile launcher on his arm began the deliberate process of raising his arm in my direction, which caused the speedy motherfucker to grin evilly at me as if he knew he could keep me off guard until his friend could shoot a fucking missile at me.
And he certainly tried, darting in and out, forcing me to spend considerable attention swiping at him with my wire, carefully using both hands to scythe out at him from unusual angles in an attempt to keep him off of me. But, at the same time, I was penetrating the other guy's system slowly with a Cyberware Malfunction quickhack. I only had Ping, Cyberware Malfunction, Reboot Optics and Short Circuit, the latter of which I had acquired from Kiwi when we were with the Bakkers.
The unusual competence of at least one of my enemies made me realise how stupid I had been to come here. If I didn't have the ability to multitask, then their strategy of keeping me distracted and keeping myself from being turned into sashimi until chucklefuck over there gibbed me with his PLS would have likely worked.
Before he got his cannon wrist even half raised, the quickhack settled in. The man froze, twitching, and the barrel of his PLS resecured itself into his arm while the little doors that usually hid the mechanism opened and closed repeatedly. Then, the man bent over with his hands over his head, probably either blind or seeing something psychedelic as his operating system glitched out. He was, for the moment, out of the fight.
I slowed in my fight, waiting for Murderblender Junior's Sandy to wear off so I could sidestep him and either take his head off or disable him some other way. But when that didn't actually happen even after many objective seconds, he just started grinning wider.
He didn't have a Sandevistan but a Kerenzikov like me. And one that was about as good as mine too. It was my first time meeting a fellow slow life appreciator; I just wish he didn't seem so murderous. I also really regretted not spending the time to perform the same upgrades on this QianT version boostware that I had on the old Type K-02. That might have given me an edge.
