I checked my weapon just in case, as was the protocol, shaking my head.
As soon as the AV touched down, we all jumped out with our weapons out. We, as a team, entered the first room, but then Mr Mercy held a hand up, "Scanning, scanning. Hostiles identified. Four targets selected." I glanced around but then, as soon as the outline of the four dognappers was rendered in front of my vision I realised that Mercy was using some method to scan through the thin walls of this office area into the main room of the warehouse.
"We'll take our shots from here, Bandbox, Teddy and I. Rest, hold fast," he said, and both security guys and Mr Teddy Bear raised their weapons. I suppose Teddy had a SmartLink. Interesting.
Were we really just going to shoot four guys in the head for dognapping? Well, I guess they shot that lady, too, but...
A moment later, a number of quick shots from the three and all four icons disappeared. I guess, yes, we were going to shoot these guys for dognapping, "Tangos down, move, move, move."
We rushed into the warehouse, still on the bounce in case there were additional threats Mr Mercy wasn't able to scan, but we didn't find anyone. I holstered my pistol and glanced down at a small chihuahua who was growling and worrying at the shoe of a dead dognapper.
Well, mission accomplished, I guess.
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A gig to build a dream on
I didn't follow up with Mrs Okada for about two weeks. She did say to settle into my job first. We averaged three or four calls a day, although yesterday was a fluke where there were no calls all day long. Most of the calls were traumas, which wasn't surprising, but also acute cardiac cases were pretty common.
Surprisingly, it wasn't that common for there to be combat on the calls. People, even their client's assailants, tended to run or scatter when a Trauma Team AV-4 showed up, and neither the pilots nor security guys would shoot people in the back if they were running away and clearly not a threat to the client anymore.
Corporate said that the subscribers paid for rescue, not revenge, after all. The few times when it was necessary were usually with the stupider segments of society that didn't know when to quit, and thus far, I hadn't needed to fire a shot in anger yet, and I was perfectly content for things to remain that way.
Walking through Jig-Jig street didn't frighten me as much as it did when I first arrived in this world; I wasn't quite as vulnerable as I used to be, nor did I look overly much like an easy mark. I didn't fit in, still, but I had taken to wearing simple clothes in dark colours, along with a dark grey light ballistic vest over my chest. It was only considered light armour, but the nice part about armour was that it was cumulative and designed to protect against differing threats. The vest, while certainly impact resistant, was really designed to protect against slashing attacks, which was one of the weaknesses of my ballistic skin weave biomod.
I didn't think I looked like a badass by any definition, but I did think I looked like someone that was too much effort for too little gain.
If working on a ground ambulance for almost a year taught me anything, it was that most low-level violent criminals were scum; they acted very much as predators might in the wild. They generally went for the weak amongst the herd, the low-hanging fruit. That was certainly not something that could be relied upon, as a starving cougar would attack anything that moved, but it was a good rule of thumb.
Mrs Okada ran her business in the back of a pachinko parlour, although I wasn't entirely sure why. It was more of an upscale place compared to other small pachinko or gambling spots, and Mrs Okada had a reputation for running a clean game without her fingers placed anywhere on the outcome of the games, probably because she didn't really care about the place as a profit centre, although I imagined it made money in spite of that.
I timed my arrival to neither be late nor especially early. The former was impolite, but so was the latter, if less so in social situations, as far as I was concerned. Two minutes before the time she asked me to come when I contacted her, I showed up at the back of the pachinko salon, smiling good-naturedly at a giant man wearing a suit, with his eyes hidden behind polarised dark sunglasses, despite the fact that it was relatively dark in the parlour.
"Good afternoon. I'm here to see Mrs Okada," I told the man.
He grunted, paused for a moment, and grunted again in a slightly different intonation. After that, he silently stepped aside so that I could walk past him. 'Lovely gentleman,' I thought.
As soon as I passed the threshold of the back area, all of the sound and clamour of the pachinko playing, which was a cacophony of electronic sounds and ringing, cut off entirely. I blinked and was curious how such an abrupt noise cancellation was possible, but I didn't have enough time to investigate it any further. Instead, I continued in. The paths could diverge, but Wakako's office was obvious on the left, with the right path going deeper into an area behind the pachinko machines.
I stepped into her office, whose door was open. It was tastefully decorated in a wood and bamboo theme, and a woman that was past her middle age but not really elderly sat at a desk at one end of the room. I found it interesting that she did not opt for externally obvious rejuvenation treatments, as they were definitely within her budget. My eyes, zooming in on her neck briefly, expertly judged both her pulse rate and even rough blood pressure just from the subtlest movements in her arteries as her heartbeat.
A number of liver spots on her skin were not congruent with my knowledge of dermatology. Her skin looked in good condition, too. My conclusion, the age spots were applied intentionally and cosmetically. She was in good health but liked to give the impression she was older and frailer than she actually was.
"Ah, Miss Hebert. Thank you for your consideration in both accepting my invitation and your timely arrival," the old woman told me, her voice just holding a slight Japanese accent; she held out a hand and indicated a comfortable-looking chair in front of her desk, "Please, have a seat. The tea service should arrive momentarily."
I didn't nod so much as incline my head slightly, before walking, very slowly in my subjective experience, to the chair. While not making it obvious, my eyes glanced both at the chair and then the walls to either side of me in the small office. They were wood panelled and tasteful. I was wondering why she had allowed me to enter her office armed. She certainly relied upon her reputation significantly in business, but I did not believe for a moment that she would rely upon that for her protection. There had to be something that would protect her from or instantly incapacitate a guest.
Explosives in the chair? A small shaped charge could turn me into mince while not overly ruffling her expensive kimono. That was my guess. That or an automated heavy machine gun in the walls, hidden behind the tasteful wood and bamboo features. I couldn't really tell from seeing the room from outside if the walls appeared too thick. In either case, if the meeting went south, my best tactic would probably be to leap as quickly as I could, tackling the old woman so that her automated defences couldn't either blow me up or differentiate between the two of us.
"Thank you for the invitation, Mrs Okada. Although, I find myself a little perplexed at the reason," I told her as I settled my tush onto what might be the most comfortable bomb I had ever sat on. Possibly the only one, too, although one never did know.
A young woman walked into the room carrying a European tea service, which surprised me. I was expecting some sort of Japanese tea ceremony, so I reviewed that yesterday. However, when one ended up looking up formal tea ceremonies, one tended to read a lot more than one intended to when one started out.
Asian tea ceremonies were ritualised and ceremonial, while the English drank way too much tea to go through such lengthy affairs, even occasionally, when they sat to have tea. As such, it was much more of a casual affair. Still, there were certain proprieties and etiquette in a high-society cuppa.
It was just chance that I had read a little bit about it yesterday, and of course, my predilection for both reading Jane Austen and similar Victorian period novels and watching a number of Earth Aleph programs in the UK, like Downton Abbey, that I wasn't entirely at my wit's end. I hoped I wasn't making a fool out of myself; I hated that more than perhaps anything else.
I internally sighed at the thought of missing Downtown Abbey; it had recently started its second season before I had been transported here, and it usually took about six months for an Earth Aleph program to arrive on Earth Bet. I'd never see if Matthew and Lady Mary got back together or if he survived the outbreak of World War One.
I took the napkin that was provided and carefully unfolded it, and placed it over my lap.
"Care for some sugar?" she asked me as she poured black tea into two small china cups using a tea strainer.
I nodded and told her, "One lump, please." After that, I carefully used one of the spoons to agitate the tea, back and forth, without touching the spoon to the side of the teacup and creating an obnoxious racket.
As I took my first sip, she said, "It's the chair, dear."
I coughed, not quite aspirating the tea and asked, "I beg your pardon?"
"There are two kinds of people who come into my office, dear. The kind that wonders wear the bomb is, and then there are the idiots," she said mildly, "I couldn't help but notice you glancing between the chair and the wall. That's a good sign, really."
I smiled and took another sip of tea before setting the cup delicately back on the saucer to take a polite nibble out of one of the offered miniature sandwiches, "To tell me that means that you have almost certainly told other people the same thing. That means it is absolutely both, plus something else as an ace in the hole. My dad always said to have a plan, a backup plan and then an ace in the hole." Alt-Dad had told Alt-Taylor that, at least. It seemed like good advice.
My eyes took in the overly large desk and started noticing that it didn't actually have any visible drawers, at least that I could see. I couldn't, of course, see everything from this side, but it looked odd for a desk. There wasn't actually any force field technology in this universe, at least as far as I could tell, but there was crazy electromagnetic field and even gravity manipulation technology that was almost as good. Perhaps if I tried to jump over the desk to tackle her, I'd get thrown back straight out of her office with significant force or get squashed into the desk like a bug under the force of twenty gravities. There was no way to know, really.
My statement got what I thought was a genuine laugh from her that didn't look forced at all, "That's why I wanted to talk with you."
"My dad? I somehow doubt that," I told her, being slightly and intentionally obtuse.
She waved a hand, "Not at all. Your father's services were already spoken for, and at his level, moonlighting wasn't really an option. You, however, I am always looking for capable individuals with capable skills for odd jobs every now and then."
That was one of the possibilities I had considered, but I hadn't thought it very likely. I tried to think of a delicate way to turn her down, "Mrs Okada, I am already gainfully employed, plus there is no way I want to become an edgerunner. I want to live more than a couple of years." I wasn't quite sure of the actual life expectancy of an Edgerunner actually, but it was probably similar to Matthew Crawley's life expectancy on the western front.
"Over a third of Trauma Team security specialists in Night City moonlight as mercenaries, Miss Hebert. I don't even think it's against the rules in your employee handbook until you become a supervisor. I employ a number myself. And not every merc is an Edgerunner. Edgerunners are a subset of mercenaries, true, and they're mostly... crazy," Mrs Okada said reasonably. Then she continued, "It's mostly a distinction as far as the risk profile that a merc will accept. If they accept virtually any job, then they're almost definitionally an Edgerunner."
She shrugged, "There's nothing wrong with that, and I certainly have gigs where that type of thinking is necessary, but over ninety-five per cent of the clients I take are much less glamorous. For every raid against some hypothetical corporate black site, there are fifty gigs for bodyguard duty for a suit when they go into a bad part of town, to find out if a husband is cheating on their wife, to steal back a car that was jacked by scavs. That sort of thing is actually what keeps my doors open, actually."
She sighed, finishing her tea and said, "And you have an excellent reputation as a medic, even when you were working in an ambulance. I often lack those specific skills. Adding you to a gig is a surefire way to reduce the risk profile significantly, even if you were only peripherally involved by staying to provide medical care after the gig was completed."
"You had the option to attend medical school but declined Kang Tao's offer. Based on the information available, that is your goal, however, so it stands to reason that you may be seeking to finance your own education. That won't be possible by just collecting your salary at Trauma Team. Although I'm sure they'd be happy to pay your way, too, eventually," she finished her pitch.
I nodded slowly, understanding what she was saying. I did actually know that a number of Trauma Team employees moonlighted on the side like that. I finally told her, "I won't insult your intelligence or your Intelligence by acting surprised at the amount of information you collected on me, and your guesses are good ones. I suppose I would be open to certain work like that from time to time, so long as the risk profile was acceptable. I couldn't be involved in any missions against corporate interests, though."
I was pretty sure Trauma Team would just disavow I ever actually worked for them if I got caught in such a "gig", but I did take the promises I made when I got hired a little seriously. I wasn't a company girl by any means, and neither did I believe that they would reciprocate such loyalty if I was, but I was like an honest politician; namely, if I took a bribe, I would stick to the terms of the bribery, if I could.
I had agreed not to do anything to hurt their reputation, so until such a point as they broke faith with me, I would try my best to hold myself to that agreement, too, for my own sake. My actual dad, Danny, told me that you became the type of person you practised being, so if you had a habit of breaking promises, even if you wouldn't get caught, then you would become someone who broke promises as a matter of course. He should have taken some of his own advice after mom died, I thought, but it wasn't like I wasn't just as guilty myself.
