It would be ideal if nobody ever went inside the building, but I didn't think I could exactly achieve that level of deterrence with the force levels I had. Making it a no-go zone for different reasons might work, though.
I just needed someone to act as the leader of the gang. Someone that other Borgs would be kind of afraid of and respect, who could keep some of them in line so that I didn't just reinvent Maelstrom.
I blinked as I had a sudden idea. Perhaps I could repair it after all?
July 2067
Pacifica, Night City
I was already annoyed when I had to fill up the tank on my Type-66. Fuel from my algae was starting to trickle into the market, yet the price of CHOOH2 was higher than ever. I knew why, of course. It was because traditional wheat farms were in the process of shifting crops to grow something other than wheat, but in the interim, it meant that there was a shortage before the algae harvesting could take over the slack.
Grains and cereal prices were dropping, though, worldwide. I wondered how many farms that had hyper-specialised in the cultivation of these crops would remain. It would be nice to have cheaper bread, after all and it was without doubt that something would be used in the arable parts of the world.
I had wanted to smack my forehead when I heard that some farms were shifting to produce a type of special, genetically engineered latex-producing flower which was similar in appearance to poppies instead of actual food, but it wasn't really realistic that all excess capacity would shift to food.
I wanted to population to boom. I felt that two billion people were much too small, but I recognised myself as a bit of a radical in my opinion there. I felt that we could easily house one hundred billion people on the planet in luxury if only we had the will to do so. But, no... I wouldn't go down those thoughts of AI-assisted quasi-centrally planned economies again.
I parked in a different spot this time, and I had installed a "vehicle theft deterrent system" that basically shocked someone half to death if they tried to force my car's door open. The vehicle garage that I had bought it from had winked when he called it a "less-lethal deterrent." That caused me to test it myself just in case it ever malfunctioned using a multimeter and voltmeter, and I came to the conclusion that it... probably wouldn't kill anyone. If their heart rate was already in the tachycardia range from chronic stimulant abuse, then that was a different set of circumstances.
The building I had finally closed on was on the northern side of Pacifica, fairly close to bridges into Wellsprings and Heywood, and that was intentional. The building I bought wasn't the only option; there were at least five other places with semi-secret subbasements, too. But most of them were further into the district that I thought would become lawless soon.
Kiwi was back, but her team was down for rest and medical recuperation. She had two fatalities on the last gig and was a bit shaken by the whole affair. Thankfully, she didn't get wounded, and her core team weren't among the dead. She had been attempting to expand her team into something platoon-sized, into a real PMC, but I thought this setback might cause her to re-evaluate her priorities, namely staying as safe as possible. I would support her either way, but you started getting a lot more attention when you moved past the squad level for mercenary teams.
Still, she was handling overwatch for me even if I didn't have any physical backup, and a few of her team would be available afterwards for cleanup. As I unpacked all of what I would need, I checked in with her. She replied back, "I'm here. Are you sure you don't want to wait a week or so while my team recovers? Going solo on these things is a way to get killed."
That wasn't wrong, but I had already done this a few times. If one of these guys shot me, it would be luck, not their skill. Besides, a girl liked to get out a little and have a little fun.
It would be easiest if I just killed everybody in the building, but these guys didn't actually reach the level where I thought that they should be done away with. They did drugs, and they broke things. That was basically it. I would be evicting them instead.
In addition to my normal weapons, I had a semi-automatic pneumatic dart gun and a lot of darts. It would be something akin to that "paintball" game back in Brockton Bay, so I was expecting an entertaining day out of it. I sent on the net, "I do have my Trauma Team Gold subscription, just in case. Their response times to Pacifica are still pretty good." Besides, I had to do this in the next few hours because I had to be home when David came home from school. Gloria had entrusted me with his safety while she was in indoc and basic training up in Seattle.
That got her to sigh and say, "Alright. I'm ready. This might be the only time I've done this when I actually had all of the legitimate login credentials and permission to invade a subnet."
I snorted. Some of the security systems were still functional on the site, and some of the exterior cameras. They'd trashed or disabled most of the interior cameras, but there were many other things that could be useful. For example, most rooms had a passive infrared sensor that was attached to the lighting system. There was also the data rate coming from any devices in a room, which Kiwi could see. Taking these datums, as well as others, in aggregate, she would be able to tell me if any room I was approaching had people in it and possibly if they were involved deeply in their sims or BDs. It would be enough.
"Alright, your AV is streaming, good. Proceed," Kiwi said after I started streaming my audio-visual and GPS location data to her. I jogged a few blocks to get into position and noticed that, like the last few times that there was a gang member in the little security box that used to control access into and out of the building and its parking garage. I started to just approach him but paused. In the past, I had just scaled the wall and bypassed him. My first thought was to just approach him and pop him with a dart as soon as he challenged me, but that was needlessly risky. He could shoot at me, or worse, he could alert the others. Instead, I crouched and took aim with the carbine-sized dart gun from across the street.
The weapon was pneumatic, so it only had a reasonable effectiveness to about fifty metres, and there was a significant projectile drop due to the low-velocity darts. Fortunately, the optic had a built-in laser rangefinder and helpfully automatically added a circular lead indicator to correctly aim for distant or moving targets, factoring both movement and projectile drop.
The guy looked unaugmented, like most of the gang, so I just lined up and aimed for the lead indicator hanging slightly above his head and squeezed the trigger. With a soft puff, the dart shot out in a visible arc and struck him in the chest. He made a kind of yelp and glanced down at it quizzically before slumping off his chair, his body hiding itself inside the guard shack. Nice, no need to find some closet to hide his body on this sneak mission.
Whistling, I jogged over and hopped over the little movable arm that would in no way actually stop a determined vehicle from driving through the checkpoint. "One down, I guess," Kiwi said amusedly, "There are no x-rays on the exterior cameras, but we don't know if they still have access to them either, so it is best to avoid them. Accept this overlay request."
I did so, and my Augmented Reality system changed slightly, a new layer overlaying my vision. Ah, it was the cameras, which had both been highlighted, as well as a cone of their field of view drawn in low opacity in my vision. This was cool; it was like that game Metallic Gears that Greg Veder kept talking about. I darted around the view of each camera, not activating my stealth system yet until I found the entrance I had used each time I snuck into the building.
This time, I would be clearing the building. By myself, if I was dealing with a real threat, that would be kind of stupid. In fact, the Drill Sergeant at basic training said the safest way to clear a building involved calling in an artillery strike. We trained for it anyway because, well... Trauma Team couldn't blow up their own clients with artillery too many times before people stopped paying for service.
"Hallway's clear," Kiwi said, and I entered the building, and now my overlay included a minimap of the building itself. Nice. I paused by the first door that I knew led to a large room with a dozen or so braindance recliners, and Kiwi said, "Definitely people in here. At least three in this room are in an MMOBD, unknown how many are conscious."
I nodded and activated my stealth system and opened the door as quietly as I could, and slipped inside. Two people were talking to each other, and I darted them immediately, then shifted and put a dart into each of the guys in the recliners. I started to move on, but Kiwi said, "Wait. They were on an RPG; maybe they party together? If so, you drugging three might just trigger a team wipe. Wait for the angry guildmates to come and bitch them out."
Ahh... That was a good point. I hid behind one of the recliners and deactivated the stealth. Sure enough, about a minute later, two guys came running into the room, kicking the door open angrily, yelling with a very surfer-boy accent, "Bruh! You just got us all killed! I lost my Fleet Carrier! What the fu-"
I popped my head up, and these two each got a dart. I smiled and carefully reloaded the dart magazine for my weapon; I said, pleased with myself, "That's already eight if we count the guy in the guard shack."
Although I was waiting for something to go wrong the whole time, this was how the rest of the building was cleared as well. There were thirty-five people here between the gang members and their whores, and I disabled all of them. The only one that got anything more than a dart was their leader, who had a subdermal armour system that was semi-decent.
My first reaction was to drop the dart gun, pull out my Omaha and pop him in the face, but since he didn't even see who shot him, so instead I connected to him and used a Reboot Optics quickhack to disable his vision. While he was fumbling for a gun on the desk, I ran up to him and concussed him with a fancy police baton that I had found in the security room of the building. Just for good measure, I triggered its secondary taser function on him as well.
Once he was disabled, I injected the sedative directly into his IV access port, and he was down like all the rest. "This was a bit anti-climatic," Kiwi said drily.
"This is a small gang of like twenty-five people, not Maelstrom, Kiwi. The only reason these guys are still alive and haven't been pushed out of this building is that there are currently way too many targets of opportunity here in Pacifica. Honestly, you guys should consider some looting missions yourself. There's gotta be a lot of places like this that have significant computing hardware that nobody would miss," I told her.
Kiwi sighed and nodded, "You're right. I've already heard that the Voodoo Boys are starting to move into the area south of where you are."
I blinked, remembering the two factions. "Which Voodoo Boys?"
She snorted, "There's only the one, now. The Haitians wiped out the other guys at least two years ago. Honestly, these guys don't call themselves that. It's just what everybody calls them because they co-opted all of the old Voodoo Boy's territory and scams."
I sat my backpack down on the guy's desk and dug out a few tools in time for Kiwi to ask, "How are you going to keep this band of rejects from just coming back? We only have a few auto-turrets and those nine robots right now."
"I'm pretty sure that would be enough to deter these idiots, but I'm going to try something else. I'm going to implant a small explosive in them, which will be set off if they come within twenty metres of the building," I said reasonably. Then paused, saying, "I will, of course, tell them this after they wake up. Maybe you can help me do that, you know... hack their OS to display a message?"
"Taylor!" she said disapprovingly, then paused, and I could see her little shoulders shrug in the vidcall, and her tone was a lot more reasonable, "Actually, yeah... that would probably work."
I nodded, "Get the vans moving; they'll have to make a few trips to dump these guys somewhere relatively safe. Deliver the robots and auto-turrets at the same time."
I was a little concerned that my defences were a bit on the light side, especially when Kiwi said that the Voodoo Boys were moving somewhat close to me. They were expert hackers and net runners, and bypassing or suborning automated security systems was kind of their thing. I'd have to make sure none of it was connected directly to the net and guard the building's subnet access points especially well.
I nodded, "Until the security is up to snuff, you can consider your team on permanent retainer. I want you guys here in Pacifica, inside this building while it is being renovated."
"That's pretty expensive, paying for all of us for an indefinite period of time," Kiwi warned.
Maybe, but it would be cheaper than having the building professionally ransacked by the Voodoo Boys. There were a lot of servers and network infrastructure here that the previous owners had completely written off, thanks to the helpful photographs and videos I had taken in my last missions.
Plus, it would keep Kiwi out of the war that was only heating up. I was pretty sure her last client had been the Free States themselves, and I thought working for either side was a sucker's bet.
Oh. There was that, too. I nodded, "Also, Kiwi, I'm going to need you to help me move something out of a storage locker. It weighs about a ton, so we'll need some kind of small crane."
I pulled a tool out of my bag, and Kiwi asked frightfully, "Where is that long speculum-looking tool going to go, Taylor?"
I chortled with amusement. "Where it needs to go!"
She quickly disconnected the call, which caused me to laugh outright. If I had just said their sinuses, then that wouldn't be as interesting. I loaded the tiny shaped charge into the device and said to the unconscious man, "You're going to feel a little bit of a pinch."
Well, he wasn't. But it was a good idea to practice this in case I ever had to do it to someone that was conscious. For some reason, I was reminded of an old film with a famous Austrian actor.
"Get your ass to Mars," I told each subsequent patient, trying unsuccessfully to perfect the accent.
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Patience, little crystal
AN: Work has been really busy, but if I had to admit it has really been Baldur's Gate 3 that has slowed this release. It is a good game! Speaking of game releases, I will be working some of Phantom Liberty's lore into this story, specifically about Dogtown and the Pacifica combat zone.
