The madman laughed wildly and attacked faster. I growled... this guy seemed crazier than a soup sandwich. My damn Disable Cyberware hack was still running on the other guy, and I didn't have the fancy ability to run multiple hacks in parallel like Kiwi did. I was also still pretty slow with Short Circuit, so I instead queued up a Reboot Optics while I fended him off with quick short motions with my monowire while backing up and giving ground.
He was attacking just enough that I had to use both hands to control my monowire to keep him from getting much closer or wrapping my wire around one of his blades. Otherwise, I would have pulled out my Omaha pistol and popped him in the head by now.
The instant the hack finished uploading, I sidestepped to the left while beginning an upload of Short Circuit to the other man. I anticipated that Mantis Blades would lash out, and I wasn't wrong. He leapt straight at the location I was at previously, flying past me with hands and blades splaying wildly. I hesitated for less than a second.
I had intended to subdue all these guys non-lethally, as this was just supposed to be a "friendly message" to a wannabe gangster, but this guy was just too dangerous. I also thought he was a cyberpsycho, so I lashed out with my left hand and quickly and cleanly took off about two-thirds of his skull from his shoulders, most of his skull and its contents plopping onto the ground with a sick wet sound.
I wanted to sigh, but I didn't have enough time; I ran forward and grabbed the dart gun off the ground about the time the short circuit caused sparks to fly out of the arms and head of the last man standing, with the horribly familiar pork-like smell of cooking human flesh. Wincing, I quickly loaded the dart gun and popped the last man in the neck, which caused him to slump to the ground almost instantly.
I slowly reeled my monowire into my arm as I just sat there panting. That was the most dangerous guy I had ever fought. Finally, I turned off my stealth system, as it was starting to get close to the time when it would automatically shut down for heat control.
I would wait until this was all over to be thoroughly introspective about where I had fucked up, but I felt the main problem was that I both snuck too close to the enemies, and I tossed the grenade too close to them. "Close enough" worked for horseshoes, grenades and nuclear weapons. I could have tossed it so that he would never have a chance to intercept it, but I just never in my wildest dreams thought he would chop it in half or that would work.
If I had tossed the grenade from ten metres away, I would have had time to pull out my Omaha and pop the speedster as he rushed me instead of being forced to use the quicker deploying monowire to keep him at bay.
Should I just leave now? I frowned. The danger level was pretty high. No, I would continue. Chances are that these three were just a fluke.
I walked over to the target's door, seeing an impressive array of security devices that caused my eyebrows to raise. I softly rapped at the door with my knuckles, testing it. Solid steel. Very difficult to get through, and I wasn't actually a cat burglar either, despite my go of it with the cameras in this building.
I pulled a small device off my belt. I had begun adding little utility devices that I thought would be useful, so long as they were small, compact and lightweight. To be honest, the idea of having a "utility belt" made me giddy. I was sure I didn't have a tenth of the things Armsmaster had, but still...
I held the small box, which had a penetrating radar transceiver inside of it, over the door and nodded. Completely solid. I sidestepped the door and held the device over the wall. Just drywall, as I thought. I was getting enough radar returns from inside the room that I was pretty sure that no one was waiting to ambush me in the first room, too.
Replacing the scanner on my utility belt, I sighed. I know I often think this lately, but most people are stupid. I tried to keep a lid on these thoughts because thinking I was vastly superior to normal people wasn't really good for my mental health, even if it was true, but I saw signs of this fact every day.
Like, for example, spending loads of money on a security door and placing the door in a housing project where the walls are paper-thin. I shook my head and reached up to my breast, and yanked down on my Kendachi Vibroknife, pulling it free from its hilt-down sheath on my chest.
I had yet to try this thing, so I squeezed the button on the hilt and immediately could hear a humming start ratcheting up, slowly increasing until it got high enough frequency that it popped my ears. Nodding, self-satisfied, I carved a rough door-shaped hole into the drywall and thin aluminium studs of the wall about a metre from the security door. Deactivating the knife, I resheathed it and casually used a little bit of my strength to push. The drywall fell inwards, crushing some knickknacks the guy had arranged on his coffee table.
The time for stealth had passed with the loud crunching of his knickknacks. It was time for speed and violence of action now. Hopefully, the target didn't have any more guards inside, but if he did, I would need to rush them. I leapt through the hole in the wall, dart gun in hand, yelling loudly, "Surprise, motherfucker!"
The target was kind enough to yell, "What the fuck?!" in another room, so I knew where he was and instantly began running in that direction. It looked like he had a large penthouse here and was in the master bedroom. I turned the corner and skidded to a halt at what I saw.
What I saw caused me to slowly holster the dart pistol and, without further thought, strike out with my left hand. I deployed my monowire in a tricky one-handed lasso that snaked around the neck of the target and popped his head off like the cork in a champagne bottle.
This caused a high-pitched squeal of fright, which caused me to shake my head. Fuck. I had scared her. I should have taken the guy in the next room and then killed him, but it was instinct. I quickly grabbed both parts of the man and carried him and his severed head out of the room and back into the living room.
Glancing back at the master bedroom, I hopped back through the hole into the wall and back into the hallway. I casually pulled out my trusty Militech M-76e Omaha, took careful aim and put a copper-coated steel slug through the heads of the two surviving guards before ducking back inside the apartment.
Stoically, I walked back into the master bedroom and ignored the cries of fright. I was a little scared sometimes, after all, so it wasn't weird for a little girl to be frightened of me.
"I'm not going to hurt you," I said in as calm a voice as I could manage as I gathered what appeared to be the girl's clothes, my warehouse and the initial reason for coming here now totally forgotten.
You know, I had been wrong. Only some people deserved second chances.
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Tinker, Taylor, Entrepreneur, Spy
I had gauged the girl's age, factoring in her signs of malnutrition, at approximately twelve years and three months. However, she looked a bit younger than that due to the aforementioned nutrition issues. Nevertheless, after she realised I wasn't going to murder her, which took a fair bit of cajoling, she quieted down and seemed remarkably at ease now in the man's kitchen as I made her a sandwich.
So at ease that, for an instant, I was worried that I had made a bit of a mistake. Could this twelve-year-old girl be an adult sculpted to appear as a pubescent child? That did happen sometimes. Perhaps her being tied up was some manner of consensual kink, too. I knew such things happened and would be considered mild.
It was a bit of a trope, but in my experience running a successful biosculpt clinic for eighteen months, it was mostly true to say that every girl under eighteen wanted to look older while every woman older than eighteen wanted to look younger. Some of them wanted to look younger than eighteen, even.
I sometimes acquiesced to these requests if they were reasonable, but I had a bottom line. I would never convert someone to a pubescent bodymorph. Beyond the obvious "ickiness", there was an actual cost to the mental health of the person. Regression was a positive symptom of many mental illnesses, and reinforcing it wasn't a good idea.
That said, I definitely knew there were clinics that had absolutely no scruples at all. They'd do this, create doppelgängers of real people, the works. For example, I heard in China that a man got his brain transplanted into a specially-created tiger body, which Biotechnica created as a custom job through partially-humanised stem cells for a ridiculous sum.
He was the warlord of some area and occasionally would just eat some peasant. Talk about cyberpsychosis... wait, wouldn't that be tigerpsychosis?
I shook my head. Well, there was no way I was wrong. There were way too many signs of the girl having lived and grown up in the body she was in for a long time. I saw that immediately when seeing her, and that was what made me kill the guy.
Although, perhaps it wasn't good to have an instinctual murder reaction. Sounded kind of psychotic, in fact. I should have killed him after careful consideration, not as an instinct. I'd think about that, but as far as the girl was concerned, I was just second-guessing myself now due to the way she was effectively handling trauma, which might have implied this wasn't the first time she had been abused. Or maybe she just had a more generally shitty childhood.
Now, what to do? I blushed, embarrassed. I didn't want to call Kiwi to bring her team and a van around because I would get, rightfully, lectured. I could just leave. I could find out where the girl lived and take her there.
But there was a fair bit of loot here. A few weeks ago, I probably wouldn't have cared, but I had either spent or budgeted about two point seven five million Eurodollars already for my product launch. The components for the ten thousand sleep inducer units cost about two hundred per unit, and I was budgeting about twenty-five to sixty Eurodollars for all the overhead to assemble and market them.
Some of that was me paying myself for rent, as my sleep-inducer company, Cherry Limited, paid myself rent as I sublet the second story entirely to them. There were a lot of things like that where the left hand paid the right, most of which were for tax avoidance purposes.
"What are you going to do now, lady?" the kid asked in a slightly British accent. I was kind of curious, as besides the fact that it made her seem like something out of a Dickens novel, immigration across the world wasn't too common, "Is it okay to just stay here after you flatlined everybody?" She asked the last question pointedly.
I held my hand up and made a waffling gesture, "Nobody called the cops." Part of the end-user agreement that the city issued for my ownership and operation of military-grade drones was that I had to give the LAPD a feed on all of my surveillance drones. In exchange, I got a feed for their encrypted police band and could use it as kind of a real time police blotter. No officers had been dispatched to this building in the past forty-eight hours.
I had taken the guards out pretty quickly. The entire fight lasted twenty-nine seconds of objective time. The speedster could have gotten the word out to someone, but he seemed a bit far gone. The rest were either unconscious or had their implants disabled pretty quickly. I still had control of most of the cameras in the building, so I just figured I could watch the exterior and parking garage. If I saw a huge amount of scary guys show up, I'd grab the kid and run.
The girl nodded. Her pockets were already full with the jewellery the guy was wearing and had in his bedroom as well as a small low-calibre pistol that she had stolen from his pocket. The fact that I had let her keep it did a lot to convince her I didn't mean any harm. Since then, her eyes had been darting around for easily salable items that she could cart off. I hadn't stopped her. I sighed, tossing the keyshard of the guy's small sports car up and down in my palm. It was a roadster that barely had a trunk, "If only I had a van, I could cart most of this stuff away."
The girl got a cunning look on her face, "You're going to rob him blind after assassinating him? Preem. How much is all this crap worth? A couple of thou?" she glanced around at the apartment. It wasn't really furnished super luxuriously, merely nicely, and I suspected that this wasn't actually where the man lived full-time. The master bedroom looked more set up for his particular brand of "recreation" than for rest.
"I didn't intend to assassinate him; it just sort of turned out that way," I grumbled, and it was true too. Nevertheless, some self-reflection might be in order. If I had wanted to assassinate him, I would have taken his guards down hard or bypassed them. It would have been a lot easier, plus I would have carried entirely different weapons and tools. But most importantly, I would have had backup.
It would have been a lot less trouble, was the main point, though. I continued and said, "I'm not sure. There's a safe I haven't opened yet. You got most of his jewellery. The real value is in the cybernetics in him and his guards. All of them have quite a bit, maybe eighty to ninety thousand dollars in value if they were sold at MSRP."
"Eighty grand?!" the gaki exclaimed in shock. Then she got a cunning look on her face, "Half. Fifty per cent and turn off this jammer, and I can get you a van in five minutes. If I could access the net, my gang would already be here!"
Wait, there was a jammer installed and operating? I hadn't noticed as I used one of the Haywire comm units in my cyberbrain to access the net. It was both faster, providing a direct connection to my fibre-optic connection at home, as well as not radiating any emissions. The controls over my operating system's subfunctions were a lot more intuitive and natural-feeling on this MoorE cyberbrain than they had been in my Biotech Sigma operating system.
There, you had to navigate a bunch of graphical user interfaces to change settings. However, here, turning on the full electronics suite felt like mentally relaxing a muscle, and I nodded. The near-field frequencies were working so I could control the television and refrigerator and send the girl files if I wanted, but all of the longer-range net bands were awash in a pervasive white static.
"Firstly, no way. I'm the one who flatlined all those gonks. I did all the work; you don't look like you could flatline a mouse," I told the girl, who looked outraged, placing her hands on her hips and looking as though she might princess stomp any second, her freckled outrage reminding me of Pippi Longstockings sans any long stockings. I countered, "Ten per cent, and only of what I'll get for them, which is probably about half. Plus, you can loot whatever else you want from this place, minus what's in the safe."
