When we had downtime, I quizzed her on the syllabus for the Advanced EMT, and she was planning to go get tested in a couple of months. She already had all the practical skills down pat; she just needed a little help with the bookwork.
We carried our monitor and field bag into the building, and I immediately realised this was a mistake. I saw who I thought our insured patient was, but the man looked beat unconscious rather than overdosed. And the four gangers that appeared as soon as we walked in the door were a clue, too. They weren't all carrying firearms, but two were with the other two carrying aluminium bats, including one baseball enthusiast that looked pretty borged out. Great. That guy looked more at home with Maelstrom.
They were the poser Voodoo Boys, who had been taking a real drubbing in their gang war. Nobody much liked them. One of the smarter of the four yelled, waving the pistol in our general direction. Alt-Taylor's memories and my own experience quickly identified the pistol as a decades-old Dai Lung .44 auto magnum, which was almost as dangerous to the user as it was the enemy, even when it was new. Dai Lung was such a shitty arms company that most hoods would rather use a disposable pistol from BudgetArms instead.
Still, I wouldn't stand in front of it if he pulled the trigger. He yelled, "You fucking medic cunts! Give us all your drugs!" Gloria glanced at me, and I shrugged, "You heard him."
She pulled the small container of narcotics out of her jacket and tossed it to the man, who surprisingly wasn't so high that he fumbled the catch. I thought that was going to be the end of it, thinking they might even let us take the guy they beat when we left, but he opened up the container and looked shocked, "What the fuck is this? Where's the rest? There's hardly any shit in here!"
Well, what the fuck did you expect?! Paramedics carrying giant Santa Sacks full of narcotics? We had to restock after two or three calls, usually, depending on the type of call. I didn't like the way this was going, and as he pointed the pistol at Gloria and started squeezing the trigger, I began acting.
Trying to think that this was just one of the many simulations I had done and not real life, I triggered the monowire to pop out and grabbed it, unreeling a large coil. I had to get a little bit closer, so I started running towards him at my full speed, which was one hundred per cent on my Kerenzikov and had been for a few weeks.
However, I wasn't fast enough to get to him before he pulled the trigger, with Gloria taking a round directly on her chest, knocking her to the ground. Growling, I flipped my wrist, sending out the coil and wrapped it easily around his neck, yanking hard and taking his head off like the cork in an overpressured champagne bottle, blood spraying everywhere.
I intended to go for non-lethal takedowns until he had shot her. Shaking off the bits of viscera off the monowire was a new and awful experience, as the enemies in the VR simulation simply derezzed when you killed them. However, that didn't slow me down too much, and I had the second pistol-armed guy minus both hands and one pistol a moment later, with my wire scything out.
Turning around to see the two guys with the baseball bats, they finally start to realise things are going wrong for them, and suddenly, the borged-out one starts moving at about my speed, running straight at me. Shit. A Sandy.
I reeled my wire mostly back, holding just a couple metres as I decided to just... stay away from him. I didn't fancy a contest of strength; the fucker had obvious Gorilla Arms, some knock-off brand, though. I would probably die if he managed to brain me with that bat, and I didn't particularly want to try to cut it up with my wire, either. If it was hollow, it might cut through it, but solid aluminium bats were a common weapon for gangers that had super-strength. They were, in fact, the most common weapon for such gangers.
I finally just turned around and started running away from him, with him yelling, "Stop running, bitch! I'll just brain you when your Sandy runs out!"
I yelled back, "No, thank you!" I'm not sure why I did that, but he didn't like it and started chasing me faster. I ducked under a swing, and his bat took a huge chunk of cement out of a structural pillar in the large empty room, exposing the rebar beneath. Yeah, that thing is definitely solid and would kill me in one hit.
We were working our way back to the entrance of the room in a lazy circle, and his friend had barely moved from his spot. When someone says they move three times faster than everyone else, it doesn't really sound like super speed, but it really is very fast. Not so fast that I wasn't visible or anything crazy like that, and his friend was trying to line up a swing on me as I was coming by him.
Instead, I lashed out with my wire and popped his head off just like the first guy, feeling vaguely ill as I did so. Killing the first guy was instinct after he shot Gloria, but this I decided to do. Now that I had a little time to think about it, I was pretty sure our "differences" were all but irreconcilable after I killed their friend, so it was pretty much the definition of them or us by this point.
"You fucking joytoy! I'm going to knock your head off and then fuck the-" yelled the guy chasing me. However, mid-threat, he suddenly started talking really slowly as his Sandy deactivated. I continued running, grabbing the dead guy's bat from his hands as I passed him, reeling my wire back into my left wrist completely as I did so.
I was starting to gas out as far as my exercise was concerned, so I briefly stopped to give myself time to take in a lot of oxygen with practised quick deep breaths. I could run for about ninety seconds if I was going my full speed, flat out, but I functioned a lot better if the exercise I was doing wasn't anaerobic. If I had some kind of lung replacement, then I could probably run flat out a lot longer, though.
I watched the borg approach me, him grinning wildly as he must have assumed we were both back to the same relative speed, and if so, he had the advantage. That was true. He did have the advantage if we were both operating at the same relative speed.
I didn't let him get within swinging distance but instead zipped behind him at my max speed, planted my foot squarely and swung for the fences. I was nowhere near as strong as this guy... but I was still quite strong. I could bench two hundred and fifty kilos, doing slow but steady reps. If I gave it my all with a solid metal bat to the back of even a chromed-up asshole's head?
With a sick crack, the guy went down like a sack of potatoes. It said something about the workmanship of his Sandy because I didn't feel his neck break, but there was a really good chance he was dead anyway. He was down for now, in any event.
However, instead of bashing his brains in some more, I casually walked over to the guy that didn't have any hands, who was screaming in slow-motion and picked up his pistol in one hand, which was a much better Constitution Arms automatic in fifty calibre. A really nice one, actually. It was the local equivalent of the Desert Eagle and just as large and hardly anyone bought or carried them except if you wanted to show off. You could get better penetration with hypersonic flechettes in a much smaller form factor, after all.
'This is going to hurt my ears,' I thought as I levelled the gun down at the handless guy and pulled the trigger, blowing his head clean off his body like I was Dirty Harry. Turning back around, I gape as I see the downed borg stirring as if he was planning on standing up. I didn't want to just beat his head to paste with a baseball bat, it was why I had gotten this gun, but maybe I should have.
Nope. That's not going to happen. I tossed the metal bat away and used both hands to hold a steady sight picture and put two rounds into his chest, right over his heart. There was some subdermal armouring, but not enough to stop even the first oversized bullet. The second was just to make sure.
Then I saw Gloria staring at me wide-eyed. Well, at least she doesn't appear to be dead.
"Are you okay? Did that round penetrate? Do you need to go to the hospital?" I ask her, switching back to my slow level of speaking and moving.
She nodded rapidly, "Yeah. I'm gonna have a hell of a bruise, I think, though. But shit! I saw the whole thing, and you were like, zip zip slash, woosh! You took off that gonk's head like it was a bottle cap! That was totally nova and totally fucking gross at the same time. I didn't know you were some kind of ninja, Tay!"
I started getting queasy and dropped the hand cannon, running to a corner and throwing up my Fat Burger all over a structural column. Gloria stood up and came over to me, and said, "Shit. I'm sorry. Was that the first time you ever had to flatline somebody?"
"Yeah..." I told her a little morosely.
She sighed, "I'm sorry. When I was sixteen, a scav attacked a friend of mine, and I stabbed them from behind. I'm pretty sure they died."
Fuck, it was a wonder the population didn't drop by half in this city every generation if everyone seemed like they had killed at least one person. And why were there so many fucking Scavs?! I shook my head, "It's alright. My dad kind of prepared me for this. He always told me to just ask myself... would I have done anything differently?"
"And would you have?" asked Gloria.
I shook my head, "I mean... I guess we could not have come in here, but we would have gotten in trouble. These guys were crazy, though, to attack medtechs working. I kind of think they didn't intend to let us live to begin with. Dead men tell no tales, right?"
Gloria nodded slowly, "Yeah. Although the new Voodoo Boys don't really have a territory, this part of Watson is as close as it is to their territory. You mostly see them around Watson. A setup to make them look bad, maybe?"
I shrugged, "I don't know. Maybe. Go check on our client." She nodded, grabbed the box of narcotics that had fallen to the floor and our monitor and went to assess him.
"Phew... none of the vials broke," she said of the half-opened box of narcs. That was good. It was an incredible amount of paperwork, including mandatory drug tests if you lost your narcotics to such an "accident." She glanced back at me, "Should we call the cops?"
"Not if you want to keep any of the chrome these jerkoffs have. This one is pretty borged out. Gorilla Arms, Sandevistan, some kind of skull reinforcement, generic legs, some kind of ankle reinforcement, micro rotors, Kiroshis MkIs, a few years old, a couple other things," I tell her after connecting my personal link to his interface socket. Although he was well and truly dead, his OS was still running slightly in safe diagnostic mode. The model of Sandy was a common and widely available Militech model. Almost definitionally the My First Sandy that any merc would buy.
"Uhhh... yeah, fuck these guys. They tried to kill us, so we get to keep all of their stuff," Gloria finally said. "This guy has a pretty obvious concussion and a serious one. I think he's got a pretty serious TBI. Blown pupils, his sats are shit, too."
I sighed. If he wasn't badly injured, I could have rationalised delaying his care, but that didn't sound good at all. Sounds like one of those assholes knocked him in the head with a solid metal bat. I said, "Alright, I'll get the ventilator; get the RSI drugs ready. I'll bring some body bags back with the gurney. We'll bag the three with the most interesting chrome, and I'll hide them here. Once we drop him off, we'll swing back here and go out of service for a bit. We have enough break time, and the call volume is finally low."
She nodded firmly, starting to get to work despite probably having a cracked rib or at least a giant bruise.
I walked out to the truck to get what we needed. Was I actually okay with what just happened? The scav that had his legs shot off died at the hospital, but I wasn't really responsible for that, but these four...
I shook my head. I wouldn't have done anything differently. Except maybe bring my anaesthetic grenades to work. Could I hide one or two in my lunchbox?
There were no heroes in this world, but then again, even Miss Militia and Narwhal had a lot of blood on their hands. Could it be the same with me? Scavs and murderous gang members weren't exactly S-class threats, but that was only because they didn't have the capability.
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Treading water
We ended up taking the patient to the hospital and returning back to the scene as planned. Thankfully, our defeated enemies were still there, so we stacked three of them in the back of the ambulance. The one we were leaving didn't have much chrome to speak of, aside from his head which was conveniently not attached to his body, so I just shoved it in the bodybag with one of the others.
Since the other guy I decapitated had a lot of chrome in his body but none in his head, I just swapped their decapitated heads. Would anyone even realise or bother to check that the head went with the wrong body? If I was back in Brockton Bay, I would be immediately labelled the Head Swapping Killer or something and have a PRT or FBI task force dedicated to bringing me to justice. Here? I would be surprised if anyone noticed or cared.
We were in Watson and not too far away from my storage unit, so I headed there.
The storage unit did have cameras, as most places did, but like most places, they were connected to the net, and their firmware hadn't been updated in over a year. I wouldn't be able to do anything fancy like loop the camera footage like in Mission Impossible, I wasn't that cool, but I could temporarily disable the cameras. This would normally be an issue and result in an immediate security alert on a truly high-security facility, except that I knew this place was unattended. There were no security guards, and the cameras were only checked in the event of incidents, and I wouldn't cause one.
After hacking the exterior cameras, I briefly shifted into a deep dive perspective and trawled through the storage unit's subnet, hitting each of the other cameras in turn. They'd stay deactivated for some time unless this place had a security watchdog daemon, which I doubted.
I then left Gloria in the car and carried all three body bags awkwardly. It was more weight than I could carry comfortably or very far, but I figured one trip would be less suspicious than two. I sent the key electronically and was admitted into the building. It would be really embarrassing if I wasn't the only person in the storage unit right now. I wasn't sure what I would do if I saw someone carrying three obviously full-body bags into their storage unit... I probably would just nod and pretend I didn't see anything, actually.
