I wondered what bisected him, but I didn't ask. If I recalled correctly, her gig last night involved recon of an abandoned area that was, until recently, used by a gang very similar to Maelstrom. They were called something stupid, like Alligators or something like that. They totally would have made off with this guy's body if they had done him in, but who knows how he did. A trap, perhaps?
"Give me about thirty minutes to take all of this out, identify any tracking systems and disable them. Once I get the deck removed, I'll hand it to you, and you can do your magic; then, whenever you want it installed, let me know," I told her.
She grinned and gave me a thumbs up, and asked, "So, why'd you call me in the first place? Also, do you have one of those nova stealth systems you use in stock?"
Oh. I almost forgot in the excitement. As for the other request, I winced. I had two in Night City, but that wasn't any help here, "Not right now. It's kind of difficult getting Arasaka products shipped here. I'll see if I can find a substitute... And I need a gig on a fast turnaround. Today, preferably. That Dynacorp guy you investigated for me."
She looked interested and tried to effect a terrible New York accent, asking, " You wants me to rubs him out for yas, boss? "
I sighed, "No. I would like I his apartment wired for sound... and video, too, if possible." I then spent about ten minutes working and simultaneously explaining both why I had asked her to investigate him in the first place and the contents of the discussion he and I had earlier.
She frowned and said, "You sure? He sounds like a problem waiting to happen." She shifted to a different terrible accent, " He sends one of yours to the hospital; we send one of his to the morgue! That's the Night City Way!"
I groaned, "Okay, no more one-hundred-year-old mobster movies in the evenings for a little while. Yes, I'm sure." That caused her to pout. That had been almost a direct quote, sans the Night City part, from a film that this world had but that I did not recall existing in Brockton Bay. It was about Al Capone and was filmed in the eighties. It was really good, and I did think that this character Jim Malone was on to something.
His philosophy mirrored my own, almost word for word, so I preferred thinking about it as The Taylor Hebert Way. However, my Way did have some morals attached to it. I didn't have to wait and soak up the first attack like a gonk, but I did need to know with some degree of certainty that it was coming. I wouldn't "whack" this guy, especially since his father was one of the higher-ups in Dynacorp in this city unless I was pretty sure he was going to attack me first.
It grated on me that he would get special treatment, but I really did need to be wary of his father. So, even if he tried something stupid with me, I would also send him a "message" first, too. Although, since I decapitated the last man I wanted to send a friendly message to, I think I would contract this work out to Kiwi.
She nodded, "We already did a preliminary on his apartment. Might not be able to do it today, but should have everything by tomorrow. A rush job like this carries a fifty per cent premium due to the risk, plus we'll have to use a lot of consumables and speciality equipment. We'll also need to pay out bribes that we might not have needed to do if we paced it out a week or two."
I waved a hand, "You have a blank cheque, within reason."
That got a grin, and she said, "Preem."
October 2066
Night City
At about the same time that I was disabling a couple of physical tracking devices in one of NetWatch's premiere cyberdecks, I was also taking a call from an unusual number. My Agent had screened the call, and I raised an eyebrow at the report that came through.
I picked up, answering, "Taylor Hebert speaking."
The man's voice was British, and my Agent had identified him as "Sir John Stewart, Dean of Oxford University Medical School." I thought it was a prank call at first, but the address he was calling from matched an Oxford publicly available number associated with their telepresence exchange. He coughed, "Yes, Miss Hebert. I am calling you today to arrange a time that you can come in for testing."
For fun, at super speed, I searched through the drawer at my desk until I found the shard I was looking for and surreptitiously inserted it in the side of my head. It was the same accent English language chip that included a number of accents. It was still set in Miss White's posh Received Pronunciation setting. I said in the accent, "Testing? I'm not sure I understand, sir."
He sounded put out with me and continued, "Although I was instructed to graduate you, I will not allow anyone to risk the reputation of our hallowed institution of learning, no matter the personage that made the demand. If you want an MBBS from this College, you will need to present yourself, in person, for testing. If you somehow manage to pass the knowledge and practical skills evaluation of what you would have otherwise spent six years learning, then I will accede to the demands made to me and issue you a degree."
Oh. How interesting. Gram had said that she had a more concrete way to compensate me for the "trauma of remembering being interrogated." That rubbed me the wrong way when I heard it because it seemed to imply that they had ways to remove memories, just like I did, and only consider it traumatic because I remembered it. Still, I wasn't going to say no to free stuff. I had expected it to be money or something equivalent to money, although perhaps that was stupid because she had said it would take a little while to arrange.
Could she have known about my plans to just bribe my way into a degree from some small medical school somewhere? Well, perhaps not, but I got the impression that she thought that this "hereditary power" that the Astors had was the bee's knees, so she might have assumed I could pass any test that this upset man demanded of me since she thought I had the same thing. Silly old bint, I had something much better than that. The man on the vidcall really did look put out, too-kind of like he had just bit into a lemon.
This beat the West Virginia University School of Medicine. I was pretty sure I could bribe a degree from there, but this would be much cheaper, too. It would have cost several hundred thousand dollars to do even that. This would just cost me however much a trip to England would cost. Besides, this guy was starting to piss me off with his smarminess, "Oh, certainly. I'm presently in the States right now. But I believe I could be there by the eighth of November; that would be a Monday, I believe. How long do you suppose I should schedule for this... ah... assessment?"
He frowned even more somehow, "It would be best to free at least ten days, madam, for the entire battery of tests. The eighth is fine. Please come to the John Radcliffe Hospital Cairns Library at nine o'clock." With that, he disconnected without so much as a by-your-leave.
What a dick. Sure, Oxford had been teaching medicine since at least the 12th century, but the United Kingdom, which only included England, Scotland and Wales these days, was widely considered the "sick man of Europe." A lot of the lustre of many of its hallowed institutions has been lost, at least for the moment.
While they were doing a lot better than NUSA was, on average, that wasn't saying a whole lot. The Navy of His Royal Highness, the King of Ireland, often sunk ships containing refugees from England. Well, perhaps not often, but it happened once or twice a year. From what I could tell online, my Gram's family had a long history in both countries, although with a bad reputation from "Irish patriots" for being too cosmopolitan or even English-like.
At least I had a valid passport. I had requested one from the State Department before the exchange with Biotechnica in case "Taylor Hebert" needed to flee the country. Things would have been fucked if I had to wait for the twelve-to-sixteen-week turnaround time to deal with that first.
Getting a visa might be a pain; there was no UK consulate in Night City, and although I could apply online, there were occasions when countries would "defer" the application until you showed up in their embassy or consular office for unknown reasons. Well, I'm sure they had a reason, but nobody seemed to know what they were.
"... never mind," I said to myself, as the webpage refreshed with an approval and digital visa milliseconds after I submitted the initial application on the UK government net site. Either they had an extremely rapid turnaround, or perhaps more likely was that my name had been added to a whitelist. Well, either way, I was set there.
I hadn't been really trying very hard here in Night City, compared to my day as Dr Hasumi, which was more akin to a workaholic, or Hana, who also was quite busy learning to live in space.
Here, I ran a little pharmacy, and I usually had an employee work the till. I also occasionally did some Ripperdoc work for the Tyger Claws or the dolls, and that was it, but it was mainly a lot slower pace. I kind of liked it; it gave me a chance to relax. I've noticed that if even one of my bodies was relaxing, then I didn't feel as though I was burning out, even if my other bodies were working twelve or even sixteen-hour days.
Long term, Hana was the part of me that I was going to earmark into taking it easy, in so much as one could take it easy in space anyway. For a while, though, she would be working quite hard, both learning what amounted to a new trade and gaining enough experience to be considered credible at it. Eventually, I thought I might start my own business as I have everywhere else, but that wouldn't be possible unless everyone thought I was skilled. Spacers, I had discovered, were extremely clannish.
They just wouldn't patronise a new business unless they had a previous personal or business relationship with the proprietor or if one of their friends or family vouched for them. It was a completely different culture, focused more on handshakes, or at least their equivalent of them, personal relationships and responsibility. I was planning to rent cubic, or personal space, on one of the smaller orbiting space stations, one in particular with the uninspired name Space Station 13, and I managed to do so with a referral and a handshake.
I remember feeling that the man I had rented from would not merely take me to court if I damaged the space he was renting to me; to him, it would be personal.
In a lot of ways... well, in almost all ways, it was much more honest than the way business was conducted down here. Better, but it was hard to scale, I thought. Such things would work in a community of a few tens of thousands, especially because they shipped everyone who was actively, criminally disruptive back to Earth, but probably not in a few tens of millions.
I wasn't quite in the "in-group" up there yet, so I was treated brusquely and not quite trusted. I felt it might be a while before that changed, too.
Nodding, I got up. I had a lot to do to get ready, then. But for now, some relaxation was in order. Evelyn had shown me this place near my building that did excellent massages. I had never partaken in such things in Japantown before because I was a little concerned they would all come with mandatory happy endings or something else weird.
This, however, was a place that just gave straight massages. Moreover, their clientele was on the paranoid side, with mercenaries and Tyger Claws being common customers. They'd let you have a weapon within hand-reach, and they also had a series of cameras that you could watch of both the room you were being worked on, as well as the front, so you would be warned if anyone rushed back to get to you.
The only real danger was that the masseuse would be a kunoichi and assassinate me. I couldn't really get around that danger, though, because I needed my masseuse to have strong hands, so they had to be augmented in some way, either through biosculpt or cybernetics. As such, there was this one girl who I sort of trusted, and she was the only one I would let rub on me. I gave her the strength-enhancing biosculpt treatment personally so she could get better at the rubbing, and I tipped her very generously.
She probably thought I was insane, as I got a massage for an hour four or five times a week, but it really did help me work hard in my other guises. I pulled on an outfit, strapped on my gun, and walked out of my apartment whistling.
November 2066
Night City
I wasn't such a tycoon that I was taking a suborbital spaceplane flight to Europe. That, I couldn't rationalise paying for. However, I could rationalise first-class on a supersonic jet.
Modern supersonic airliners flew at altitudes of almost twenty thousand metres and were carefully designed with geometry so that the sonic booms were mostly dissipated by the time they reached the ground, sounding no louder than a normal jet flying by, anyway. Without these advancements, they would have been like the Concord I remembered from Brockton Bay, where they only allowed it to fly over the ocean.
Here, they couldn't fly super fast, not like military jets, but it was still about one point six times the speed of sound. There also wasn't a direct flight to London, either. Not the day that I was leaving, anyway. I would have to land at Charles de Gaulle and take a connecting flight over the English Channel.
Oxford was northwest of London, and there weren't a lot of hotels available in that town either. Almost none, and none that would accept a longer-term two-week booking on short notice. I was almost at the point where I was going to give up and secure lodgings in London and just accept the hour-and-a-half commute one-way every day. However, then I received a message from Gram. Well, it wasn't from her. It was from one of her personal assistants. He offered me the use of the a small house they had in Oxford itself, which they keep for any time someone attended the College.
The idea that they would keep a house vacant for years just so it would be ready in case some cousin got admitted to the school was absurd to me, but I suppose if you had what was, in practice, unlimited money, it made some sense-especially since the house itself was an asset.
I thought for hours about whether or not to accept, as I was trying to keep my entanglements with my mom's family to a minimum, but in the end, I did accept. It was just a polite gesture that didn't mean anything to Gram or to me, either.
As such, I was sent the digital keys to unlock all of the doors and alarm systems. Surprisingly, it wasn't some kind of mansion but just a regular three-bedroom house with an attached garage, not much larger than my house in Brockton Bay. Unless there was some sprawling hidden bunker beneath it, this must be "roughing it" standards for Gram.
