The first was a large man, easily over a hundred-and-ninety-centimetres and with the dark skin common amongst Caribbean Islanders. His biography stated he was born in Jamaica, and his accent as he laughed and talked with his friend seemed to bear that out. However, his last known location before arriving in Night City was Port-au-Prince, but there were no further records for the period in between when the entire island of Hispaniola was destroyed in a massive earthquake and tsunami a couple of years ago. Records started again when he arrived in Night City about six months ago, with him suspected in a number of crimes, but the NCPD didn't really prioritise crimes committed by mercenaries, so long as they were smart about the targets they chose.
His friend was also a bear of a man, and his Eastern European accent also agreed with his biography, although his exact place of birth wasn't listed in the report I had paid for, listing either Belarus or eastern Ukraine. Everyone paused when I approached their table, and I said, in a friendly manner, "Wakako sent me."
That caused the two men the grin and usher me into a seat, "Come, sit, sit," the bear told me, and I slid in next to the much smaller blonde woman. She looked like she was in her mid to late twenties, and from Mrs Okada's brief precis, she was a netrunner. I also didn't get any matches on the gumshoe site for her, aside from a list of possible aliases.
The Jamaican man said, "Hello, hello! I am Jean..." which correlated with his actual name of Jean Ventura, "... and this gonk is Ruslan." That definitely wasn't the bear's real name, but it didn't really matter. "The anti-social one over there is Kiwi." That definitely didn't sound like her real name, but it was listed as one of her aliases.
That caused the woman to narrow her red eyes and say, "I'm not anti-social; I'm just not an idiot like you two. She looks pretty young, but Wakako says she is at least as good a Med Techie as Trauma Team is." Well, that is a very interesting way to describe my skills, I thought.
I nodded, "You can call me Madison. I am very good, yes." Madison Clements had such a debt to me that merely stealing her identity in a different universe a million times wouldn't come close to repaying, but it was a start.
The man calling himself Ruslan nodded, "We thought we'd discuss the gig over dinner and set out right afterwards if that's okay with you, Madison." He waved a hand over to Kiwi and said, "Kiwi, if you mind?"
She shook her head and pulled something out of her purse and sat it on the table, and turned it on. I noticed an odd noise briefly, but other than that couldn't figure out what it was doing. She enlightened me, "It's a white noise generator, but inside the radius, you can't hear it. But outside, the people in the next booth won't be able to hear us talk. Doesn't stop lip reading, obviously, though."
I was impressed. Mainly because it seemed every time I turned around, I found some interesting piece of technology that I hadn't even known was possible. How would this thing even work? Also, wouldn't that thing make more sense if it was incorporated into your body? I fidgeted a little, stopping myself from an urge to disassemble it.
The runner called Kiwi also handled a conference wireless connection as I saw and accepted a wireless connection from her and discovered that it was a combination conference vidcall as well as a four-way collaborative presentation. Basically, any of us could use the screen as a whiteboard or show images to all the others.
Kiwi blinked at me a couple of times and said, "The girl has black ICE protecting her OS. Nice."
"It's not fatal," I hurriedly told her. At least, that one wasn't.
That was true, too. In fact, the first layer of my defence was black ICE. Black ICE didn't really mean it killed you; it just meant something that interfered with your bodily processes. It was called black because for the longest time, and still, officially, everyone claimed such a thing was impossible. My first line of defence was a piece of black ICE that I partly took from the Dragoon and partly Tinkered with myself, and it should put someone to sleep. More like a brief coma, really, that might last a few minutes or maybe even longer. This was followed by a series of traditional ICE layered after this in slowly elevating danger levels, for example, one that would short-circuit the deck of an attacker, followed, finally, by my last defence, which was the heart-stopping fatal black ICE that I also recovered from the Dragoon.
"Whatever you say, choom. I don't recognise it, and that makes me interested, but we can circle back to that later, maybe," the blonde woman told me.
Everyone shut up briefly for a moment while a waitress brought over plates of duck for each of us. I didn't even have to order. Nice.
"Okay, so this is really a combination gig," Ruslan said. I didn't know what that meant, but I was hoping I would learn from context, "Our main client wants the scavs dead or alive, and we can keep any loot. That's the main reason you're here, Madison."
I nodded, and he continued, "However, I just got word from Wakako that she lined up a second client that wants the same thing. This client is the real estate company that owns the building the scavs are held up in. I'm not sure if they rented the space to them or if the scavs are squatters, but they'd like them evicted. Preferably with extreme prejudice. This does mean we won't be able to rip out some of the fixed medical equipment, although if the Scavs brought anything with them, it's fair game. We have a list of things that are no-touch with this second client. It does mean this gig is paying better than we thought, though."
I frowned but nodded, then reviewed the list of equipment that we were expected to find as Ruslan forwarded the data to the conference call. Well, it wasn't anything that would be easy to move or sell, nor would I have any real need of it, and it was older than even my own equipment. The equipment was of such middling to poor quality that I assumed this real estate company probably marketed it to Scavs or similar bottom-of-the-barrel ripperdocs, which made me kind of want to screw them over but I supposed being professional was the better choice.
He then discussed the details he knew from the expected number of scavs, which was between eight and twelve, and their basic plan. He and Jean would clear the building, with the help of Kiwi, who would mostly hang back and provide remote quick hacks and situational awareness from hacking the local subnet while I would hold back at the back entrance in the event someone tried to run out the back.
I nodded; that was an acceptable risk profile for me. My backup plan would be just to run away. However, I had two aces in the hole, and since they needed to be used relatively soon before they became inert, I didn't mind offering one of them to the group.
When he asked if anyone had any potential changes to make to the plan, I pulled out a small grenade; it looked exactly like a smoke grenade as that was what I had built it out of, "This is an anaesthetic gas grenade. It's pretty potent and will put down an unprotected person, through inhalation, within five to ten seconds. The gas becomes inert and safe to be around after around a hundred and twenty seconds after it's used, but the victims will still be down for quite a bit longer than that."
"Fucking preem, Madison. Are you sure you want to waste it on this gig?" asked Ruslan, with the other two looking impressed, too.
I shrugged, "It's about to expire. It's still good now, but in another month, the active ingredient will have broken down into inert chemicals, similar to how it does after it's been used."
That caused them all to nod. They were familiar with using surplus equipment acquired through god knows where, too, and assumed this must be something similar.
"Nice, I wasn't going to bother with trying to keep any of them alive, but maybe the top dog. His bonus is pretty good," Ruslan mused, causing me to fidget. I didn't particularly want to help get someone tortured, but everything I learned about this man caused me to believe that if anyone deserved it, he probably did. I wouldn't say anything, as I knew that was a possible outcome when I offered them the grenade.
They adjusted their plans briefly, taking into account the new resource, and after we finished all of our duck, we got on our way.
I thought it would be the industrial area of Watson, which was a little sketchy, but it turned out the scavs were holed up in the overcrowded Heywood district, which was even sketchier.
I supposed that was a kind of hide-in-plain-sight type of thing. But it made me wonder how they camouflaged taking bodies in and out of the building, or maybe they just didn't.
The adjustment to the plan was that instead of following Ruslan and Jean in, Kiwi instead scaled the top of the small one-story building and started hacking from there. She also took some tools with her, and the plan was that she would toss the gas grenade in the input ventilation of the building's HVAC system, then hack it to turn it on full blast, circulating all of the gas throughout the building in only twenty seconds or so. I was waiting in the back alley with my Kang Tao submachinegun aimed at the back door.
"Okay, we're ready," Ruslan said over the conference call we were using as a jury-rigged tacnet. Maybe it was just the fact that I worked at Trauma Team, but I felt they needed to get some better commo gear.
Kiwi came back with, "Alright. I'm in the subnet. Looks like ten people in, including the top dog and possibly two donors still alive," she said calmly. I winced. Maybe I would get to save a life today? "Alright, the HVAC system is hacked, and the blower is locked into high-speed. I'm throwing the grenade in... now!"
About thirty seconds after Kiwi threw the grenade in, Ruslan and Jean, both wearing gas masks, kicked the front door in and started shooting. A little bit after that, an urgent voice told me, "Madison, two targets headed for the back door, including the big man."
"Will the big man come through the door first or second?" I asked her, not feeling very anxious but needing additional information.
There was a pause before she came back, "Second, it looks like! They'll be at the door in three, two, one..."
The door burst open as if a man had kicked it, and from my position of cover behind a dumpster, I lined up the reticle on my red dot sight on the mook's abdomen. Using my highest speed, I quickly pulled up the image of the target they wanted alive and nodded before gently squeezing the trigger, unleashing a six or seven-round burst that took the random Scav in the chest and neck, the man going down in slow motion in a gurgle and spray of blood that caused me to ick a little bit. You'd think with all I had seen working traumas over the past year that I would be immune to that, but it was a little bit different when you were responsible.
"Ну все, тебе пизда!" yelled the boss man of the den; however, he was yelling it behind him and shooting back the way he came, apparently thinking that the shooter that took out his minion was coming from behind him. He emptied a whole magazine of shotgun shells down the empty hallway and started backing uneasily out of the door, swaying a little. It looks like he took at least a huff or two of the anaesthetic, but not enough to put him down completely.
As he was fumbling with a full drum magazine to reload in his automatic street sweeper-style shotgun, I just darted out of cover and approached him at my full speed from behind, slamming the buttstock of my SMG into the side of his head. He went down like a sack of potatoes, and I smiled, nodding.
I glanced down at him and searched him for both weapons and anything dangerous. He had a set of mantis blades in each of his arms, so I carefully disconnected the powerpack from them, defanging him. Then I used a set of superstrong zip-ties to tie his ankles together. His legs, at least, were organic and not biomodded.
"The big guy is down, alive," I told Kiwi and the rest over the conference call. Perhaps it would have been more merciful to kill him. But he was the Scav's "doctor" here, so I didn't feel a lot of sympathy for him. Plus, he was worth an extra thousand dollars alive.
Ruslan's amusing accent came back, "Awesome! It was like shooting fish in a barrel in here. Should I call Wakako for a pickup for the boss?"
I sighed and told them, "Negative. Not yet. He has a nice set of Arasaka mantis blades on each arm. I doubt he will really need them anymore, given what Mrs Okada implied our client is going to do to him. We may as well be thorough."
After the timer, I started when Kiwi threw the grenade in reached two minutes; I dragged the Scav doctor back inside his own operating theatre.
"Kiwi, highlight the two possible living donors on my HUD, please," I told her.
"Stand by; I'm getting off this roof. It's fucking windy," she complained, but after a moment, two particular locations were highlighted, right next to each other, and I started walking fast to them, "Ruslan or Jean, one of you, can you grab the backpack I brought with me, please? It's the back seat of your van."
"Da!" came a happy response back.
I found what I was looking for, a large tub full of water and ice and five naked bodies. Completely disgusted, I tossed the Scav doctor into a corner, and I wondered at the same time if they had an industrial-sized ice maker like a convenience store if one of them had a chore to go out and buy a half dozen bags of ice every night.
I zeroed in on the two living victims easily and fished them out of the tub one at a time, eyes glancing rapidly between the two as I mentally triaged their condition. Nodding, I sat down next to the woman. Her skin somehow managed to look both pale and jaundiced.
Ruslan came back with my backpack of medical gear and sat it down, "Woah, this is fucked up, Madison."
"Yeah, no shit. Sometimes your countrymen are kind of dicks, you know?" I told him as I quickly started an IV and began administering some trauma nanomeds. The fact that they were almost dying from hypothermia was working in my favour, as it was preventing either of them from dying from the ham-handed way they were chopped up. The man, at least, only lost his eyes, one arm and a leg.
The woman, however, had her eyes and what I thought was a cybernetic liver taken, and they clearly did only a minimal amount of work stopping the internal bleeding from that surgery. She was slowly internally haemorrhaging to death right now.
"Hey!" Ruslan said loudly, offended. "These aren't my countrymen! I am not Russian! I am Belorussian! I was born at least one hundred kilometres from this zasranec!" He said, giving the Scav docker a light kick, "I hate these assholes!"
