I looked at him strangely. I didn't really know the difference between the two places, and they sounded basically the same to me, too. Was the difference of a hundred kilometres really a big deal? I guessed for some in Eastern Europe, it was!
"Sorry. Help me take to carry that guy into the OR; I need to work on this woman first, though," I told him, and he nodded and picked the man up and left the room.
"Woah, this is fucked up, Madison," Kiwi said as she walked in.
I had heard that a lot lately. I nodded as I put my firewall around my neck and connected to it. Connecting to the woman's interface socket, I hummed as I picked her up. "Kiwi, can you please grab that backpack and follow me into the OR."
Kiwi nodded and followed me into the OR, and I took a quick look around at the equipment available. There is more than what is on the list, so the scavs had to have brought some of that with them. We'd be making off with that stuff.
"Oh, sweet..." I said aloud, "Ruslan, can you place your guy into this chair? And then roll that hemodialysis machine next to him?"
He laid the guy down but scratched his head, "Uhh... what machine?" I sighed and pointed, "That one, the green plastic on the wheels. It should just roll; just put it next to him. Kiwi, set that there and get out one litre of normal saline."
As I sat the woman down on the operating biobed, she fished out the large bag of saline. I glanced at it, "Nova. Go find a microwave and nuke that bag of saline for about four minutes." I didn't know precisely how long it would take to heat up, but I could always let it cool back down if she brought it to me too hot.
Glancing down at the woman and judging that I could spare a moment before she started actively attempting to die on me, I darted over to the man in the chair and turned on the dialysis machine. It was actually a combination dialysis and heart bypass machine made by some Chinese company that I couldn't recognise, but it was just a clone of a popular line of Meditech models. I powered it up and frowned at the Cyrillic text. I mashed buttons until I got English again and then rapidly adjusted the settings. This guy didn't need blood dialysis, but he was about to die from hypothermia, and a hemodialysis machine could warm the blood as well as filter it.
It took me a minute to start him going, and I watched the machine chug away and nodded, satisfied.
"Alright, everyone, look around for where they keep their looted cyberware. We need to find the pieces they cut out of these two people. Especially a Transgenic Ltd brand liver. I need that... right away," I told all three of them, both Kiwi and Jean arriving to see what I was up to.
I sent Kiwi a list of cybernetics that was taken from both the man and the woman, and she nodded. "I take it nobody has any complaints if we return the stolen property?"
"Nah, mon, that's just doing the right thing. But what are you going to do?" asked Jean.
I sighed, "I'm not a cybernetics implantation specialist, obviously. But it shouldn't be too hard to at least put these specific stolen implants back in."
That was a lie. A bald-faced lie. It was, in fact, much harder to do that than put in an implant in the beginning. The Scav doctor hadn't exactly been gentle when he removed anything, so I would have to repair a lot of damage surgically while I did so, especially with the woman and her liver.
Ruslan and Jean shrugged; it sounded plausible to them. I glanced at the nuked bag of saline, using my recently added FLIR mode in my eyes to gauge its temperature. Still a bit too warm, so I just placed it next to the woman's body for the moment.
"I got the liver!" cried Kiwi from the other room. She ran back in, carrying a clear plastic bag that covered the implant. I glanced at it and nodded, "Good. Get me a pressure infuser from my bag. We don't have many blood products here, but this warm saline will help both her pressure and warm her up." There was some synthetic blood, the types borgs used, and I could use that on her in a pinch, but it really wasn't a good idea to do if it wasn't life or death. We'd see how much blood she lost in the surgery when I put her liver back in.
"A what?" asked Kiwi, perplexed.
Fuck! "Look for a squeezy pressure ball-looking thing. Like an old-fashioned blood pressure cuff," I told her, too busy to get it myself. After a moment, she found the correct thing, bringing it over to me.
"We're gonna go watch the prisoner until you're ready to disarm him," Ruslan said, snickering at his own pun.
"Okay. This might be a longer night than I thought," I told them.
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in flagrante delicto
Moving at my maximum speed, it only took about ten minutes to get the woman's old liver transplanted back in and her hepatic portal repaired. Then, after her condition was stabilised, I darted over to the Scav doctor, who had awoken and was hurling streams of invectives at me. Luckily Kiwi was already all over that, and she had installed a foreign data shard in his head that had locked down all outgoing wireless transmissions from any of his implants.
That was good; I hadn't thought of that. I made a mental note to remember it the next time I was in a similar situation. It wouldn't do if he was able to make a phone call to his friends or, worse, the police.
There was a surprising breadth of narcotics in their clinic, including my old favourite, ketamine, even if the total quantity was small. That was a drug I administered more than any other in my year of working on the ground ambulance. Honestly, I would have given it to almost every single patient I saw if I could have gotten away with it.
So, rather than listen to the man any further, I drew up a very large dose and dropped the man firmly into the K-hole. At high doses, the disassociative and anaesthetic properties of this drug really shined, blocking the neurotransmitter glutamate, which the brain required for... well, everything. Long story short, he shut the fuck up, and rapidly too.
"Ooh... lucky," I said, as I used some tools to carefully disconnect each of his arms. The interface points at his shoulders were generic, so there was no need to actually conduct any real surgery to remove them. I was sure I would find a number of others around here, plus that was one of the parts that needed to be somewhat customised to each person, too. They were the cheapest parts of a modern arm system, too. It probably wasn't uncommon to show up at a ripperdoc without them.
I sat his two Arasaka Mantis blades to the side and yelled, "You can call Mrs Okada now to send someone to take this guy away."
At that, Jean and Ruslan walked into the room. Jean glanced at him and then around and nodded, "Cool. That didn't take as long as I thought. Those two going to make it?"
"They should, but I plan to keep them out of it until we're pretty much ready to leave. Then we can just dump them at a hospital, probably. I still need to reinstall the rest of their chrome, too. I'd rather they didn't see us, plus if we called emergency services, that would strictly limit our time here," I told Jean.
Jean nodded slowly, and the other man spoke briefly on the phone before turning to us, "Alright, a car should be here in five minutes." Then he paused as he parsed what I had said while he was on the phone, "How long do you expect to stay here?"
"Well, however long it takes. Probably takes a few hours to go through all the dead Scavs and loot everything worth an ennie. We're still going to end up leaving a lot on the table here, but there's no helping it," I told him, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, "That's basically why Mrs Okada invited me for this job, wasn't it?"
Ruslan nodded, "Da, but we thought it would just be like fifteen minutes or so at the most. I'm honestly not sure why we thought that, thinking about it now..." He hummed and nodded, "Not a problem, I guess. We might have to just get Kiwi to set up some of our sticky cams outside, so we can see if we get any company while we fort up here."
The self-same Kiwi walked into the room, "Did I hear my name?"
"Da, here, let me tell you what our new plan is...." Ruslan told the blonde woman.
I used one half of the clinic as an impromptu ICU, with mainly the woman donor recuperating. She was already looking a lot better, too. The man was already put back together, as I had quickly found the implants that were taken from him amidst the other haul of the Scavs.
I had done a quick investigation of both people, and neither appeared to be anyone particularly important just on the basis that they lacked Trauma Team memberships. That obviously didn't mean that they weren't important to all the people who loved and might miss them, though.
Before the pickup for the Scav doctor, I had scrounged around and found some benzos and dosed him with them, both to keep him docile for the ride wherever he was going and also because the particular chemical I chose had both a strong retrograde and anterograde amnesiac effects. The man probably wasn't long for this world, but just in case, I didn't want him to remember what I looked like. These were the same medications that were used for light sedation, for example, in dentistry and minor in-patient surgeries.
I was keeping the donor man insensate with the same cocktail of drugs, using one of the IV pumps that I was going to steal out of this place to slowly drip a number of drugs I dissolved into a bag of saline slowly into him. He'd be good for hours.
Going through the deceased Scavs was pretty quick, and I had already acquired for myself two sets of high-quality polymer arteries. I was a little surprised at the quality of them, so I took the time to carefully remove them, which caused a couple of odd looks from the netrunner Kiwi, who was helping me secure the more perishable cybernetics in specially prepared cryogenic containers, which the Scavs had no shortage of. Those I would take too; they were always useful and generic enough that they'd slide right into my stock-keeping system, even if I wasn't really a Ripperdoc.
A little more than halfway through the stack of Scav corpses I was working on, Kiwi yelled from another room, "A car is pulling up. A POS Supron, it looks like." I glanced up and reached a brief stopping point, walking over to where I sat my submachine gun on a table. Supron's were really a terrible car, something akin to a van, but they were built using mostly recycled plastics, with an engine from a lawnmower. But for use by Scavs, it was not surprising as they did have a lot of room in the back.
Car and Driver magazine called them "marginally safer than putting your dick in a blender," which I couldn't believe could actually be printed, plus it actually made me chuckle. Things that were rated PG in Night City would be a hard R in Brockton Bay, at minimum.
"Two Scavs, pulling an unconscious woman out of the back of the van. Looks like this might be a drop-off point," Kiwi said as I walked into the front area, which looked like it might have been intended for offices and a waiting room if this was actually a working clinic. As it was, it was set up as a den or living room with televisions and extremely sketchy-looking BDs lying around. I did not want to experience what a Scav considered an entertaining brain dance.
I sat the submachine gun on the table and pulled out my Omaha, double-checking to make sure the charge was good to go on the electromagnetic weapon.
"Woah, those aren't even out on the market yet," Ruslan said admiringly, "How'd you manage to score one?"
I glanced at him and considered lying but decided not to. "Both my parents worked for Militech, and until recently, I was considered a corporate dependent. They have been selling this model internally for over a year as a kind of beta test. It should come up on the regular market next month, far as I know." I then flipped it around and handed it to him by the barrel, nodded my head at the door headed outside, "Want to?"
I didn't particularly want to kill anyone, even Scavs, and although I would if I had to, I had the feeling that the rest of the people here had a bit more flexible opinions on the subject. At the same time, I wasn't a child anymore that had unrealistic expectations about what exactly was going to happen to these two Scavs. He grinned and took it, and nodded, "Fuck yeah. Is there anything I need to know about it?"
I thought about that, "It takes between seventy and eighty milliseconds to recharge the capacitors for a follow-on shot. That's pretty quick, but if you just pulled the trigger as fast as you could, it would only fire every other shot, probably. But for aimed shots, it should just be point and shoot."
That was something that Militech said they would improve with follow-on models. One of the main advantages of these guns was there were no moving parts in the action when you fired, much like firearms that used caseless ammunition. The projectiles were aerodynamic steel darts which were then coated in a thin layer of copper for electrical resistance purposes. That was apparently necessary for the weapon to function, but I didn't really know how it worked. As such, it would, mechanically at least, permit a really high rate of fire if the capacitors could support it!
He nodded, and we all backed up a fair distance, and I grabbed my submachine gun just in case things went to shit.
The door was opened with a kick, and surprisingly, it wasn't a Russian voice; it sounded like a stereotypical surfer boy from California. Although there weren't that many surfers in her past life anymore, on account of fears of Leviathan, and there weren't that many in this world too, on account that most of the shallow waters were somewhat polluted, "Yo, Vasily... bruh... come help us with this bitch! We had to use one of the scramblers on her!"
The sound of the Omaha firing was quite unique. It didn't really sound like a firearm, except that there was a loud crack of the projectile immediately going supersonic before it collided with the surfer boy's forehead, penetrating and out the other side. It really did have excellent penetration. There were only three lanes at the shooting range that I could use it in, the rifle lanes, all the rest, and it would over-penetrate the backstops. He was carrying the "donor" in a princess-style carry, and I winced as she tumbled to the ground with him.
There was also a slight high-pitched whine as it charged the capacitors for a second shot, with the second Scav trying to pull out a gun before being shot three times in the chest in rapid succession. After the last enemy went down, Jean said, "Alright, let's drag them all inside. It wouldn't do for the cops to be called." The last was said with heavy humour.
