As I was about to respawn, I suddenly found myself back in the AV-4 with a klaxon sounding and a computer voice saying intently, "PLATINUM. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE."
Well, never mind. I guess I had to get to work. I was pretty familiar with all the user interfaces we used by now, and I had even been off third rider status for several weeks. It looked like we were responding to a trauma, which wasn't surprising. Most platinum calls were trauma-related. Generally speaking, if you had enough money for platinum-related coverage, you also had enough money for regular doctor's visits, including any recommended prophylactic procedures, so you never randomly got seriously ill.
A person could easily live to be over a hundred and fifty years old in this world, and honestly, I didn't know if there was really an upper limit on the age a geriatric patient could reach if no expense was spared. Saburo Arasaka was born before the First Atomic War, and he was still going strong, for example.
Mr Bandbox had finally recovered sufficiently to resume duties, although he had a brand new pair of cybernetic arms. Quite good models, I thought, and definitely combat-rated. The Corp wouldn't let him carry around the giant hand cannon I scavenged for him on company time, but he was very appreciative of having it, anyway. Honestly, I thought that maybe they were making a mistake there. There was a lot to be said for giant cannons, but the Corp had a real hard-on for SmartWeapons. Even the pistol I carried was a Kang Tao SmartPistol; I just lacked the interface cyberware to actually utilise it to its fullest extent.
He joined the clinician's tacnet briefly to give us an idea of what we were going up against. Unfortunately, it looked like it was Maelstrom, which wasn't great. They were one of the highest threat values we faced in Night City — not only were they ridiculously dangerous, but they were actually very technically sophisticated. I supposed you had to be somewhat sophisticated if most of your members were more metal than flesh.
From the statistics I had looked through for the whole of Night City, I discovered that about half the time, we would get the client without Maelstrom doing anything, but the other times they generally fought at least a little bit. I didn't know why they made these choices, though.
The patient looked like he had been beaten up, quite a lot from the internal biomonitor's report. He was unconscious, with a concussion and likely a ruptured spleen. It wasn't a big deal, so long as we could medevac him pretty soon. But an issue was the location; it was the famous Maelstrom club Totentanz. It was unknown whether our client was a customer or some victim of one of the booster gangs dragged to the club.
"Going to Totentanz with just one team is fucked," Bandbox said over the common net, which I tended to agree with.
Mr Mercy sighed and said, "Another bird is coming along, or rather being scrambled, to help support us. Hopefully, it will be nothing, you know?" That still meant we were responding alone, though, at least at first.
That wasn't surprising when the pilots threw the aircraft off its perch and into a steep dive down towards the city. Maybe if this was a Gold client, we would wait, but there was no way the bosses would OK adding a delay to a Platinum call. That would increase the average response time this quarter, and that was the main selling point of our service.
Honestly, it was kind of stupid but entirely predictable. Almost universally, middle management in corporations wasn't the brightest of people. I thought that maybe that was intentional, but I didn't really know for sure.
"Weapons check. Client location is inside the club, but close to the entrance, so that is good, at least," Mr Mercy came on the net. I pulled out my pistol and did a quick function check on it before replacing it in the holster. I did a quick test of the electronic taser-type weapon we also carried, too. In a large crowd-type situation, it was standard procedure to zap anyone who came too near us, after all. I wasn't sure that was going to be a great idea in a booster gang club, but we would see.
The AV-4 barely spent more than thirty seconds on the ground. After we all hopped out, it lifted slowly into the air and loitered outside of easy gunshot range, doing lazy circles over the area. I guessed that the pilots felt that the aircraft wasn't safe to wait for us on the street in front of such a place.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing-UGHGHGHH..." A stupid-looking boostergang member, not even one of the 'Strom, approached us from my side and started yelling at us. I was always of the opinion that it was better to be scary than it was to be scared, so I casually pulled out the taser weapon and discharged it point-blank into the chest of this loud person, which caused him to shake and then slump to the ground.
"Nice, 'Breaker..." Mercy said, amusedly, over the tacnet. The crowd of people around us immediately thinned quite a bit, but I was glancing down at the man I shocked. I thought I might have accidentally stopped his heart or rather knocked him into a dangerous arrhythmia where a cardiac arrest was likely going to occur. However, we definitely weren't about to stop and treat that guy. I think the label "non-lethal" on these shock weapons we were issued was a bit of an optimistic intent rather than any kind of statement or guarantee.
As we started moving, I carefully aimed the toe of my boot and struck the guy's sternum somewhat hard. That caused him to gasp and start breathing again, which caused me to smile beneath my helmet. Although it looked like I had just kicked a man while he was down, in actuality, I had performed a carefully calibrated precordial thump, which was an ancient medical procedure and would sometimes snap a person out of a dangerous arrhythmia in a way that was similar to using a defibrillator, if much less reliable.
After that, I carefully dialled back the electronic weapon to about medium and replaced it in the holster on the opposite side of my pistol. We were met by one of the 'Stromers, a woman with the tell-tale glowing red optical replacement, who was standing over our client inside the club, not too far away from a dance floor that looked more like an unorganised floor of violence. It looked like our client was attacked by two other guys armed with baseball bats, one of which our client turned into sashimi with a pair of mantis blades.
The woman Stromer says, her voice digitally post-processed, "You can take him just as soon as you provide an equal amount of entertainment..."
"No, we will just be taking him..." Mercy said, and he and Bandbox lifted up their small carbines.
That caused the Strom woman to snort, "Well, that would definitely be entertaining..." However, while Dr Anno started to kneel down to look at the patient, something made me glance over to the mosh pit just in time to see one of the revellers pull the pin on a grenade and start to throw it in a high arc towards us.
I zoomed in on it instantly. It didn't look like a fragmentation grenade which made me feel better; it had the cylindrical look of a smoke grenade, a flashbang or possibly a concussion grenade. I figured it was the latter, so, moving at my maximum speed, I grabbed the baseball bat off the floor and repositioned myself. I had time to do one practice swing before I set myself up and teed off the grenade, knocking it back towards where it came from.
Thinking it was a concussion grenade, I knocked it high into the air so as to minimise the possible damage to the people dancing. However... I was wrong in my identification of the munition, and behind my featureless mask, my mouth opened in shock as the grenade exploded several metres over the location of the guy who threw it at us.
Rather than a concussion grenade, it was clearly some kind of pyrotechnic device. The filters in my helmet quickly polarised, saving me from a bright flash and white smoke, which rained down on ten or so people who immediately started shrieking in pain and terror, including the guy who threw the grenade at us in the first place. My aim with the bat was good, although I hadn't ever been that great with sports, and the man who threw the grenade originally seemed to be getting the worst of it.
The band playing started a new set immediately and somehow managed to sync the beat with the screams of the people who were on various stages of on fire, and everyone started going crazy like it was the best thing they had seen in their lives. I couldn't understand what the fuck was going on.
This madness caused the Strom woman to laugh, a short snort of a laugh and yell, "Fucking preem, Trauma! Whiskey Pete! I gotta go and turn the ventilation system on overdrive before more people asphyxiate to death! Take your fucking suit!"
I glanced between Mercy and Bandbox, and we all just sort of shrugged. I tossed the baseball bat back on the floor and knelt down, setting up the gurney. I shared a glance with Dr Anno, and we both nodded, just putting the patient on the gurney without actually treating him at all. It would be best to get him out of this place first, then treat him, we both agreed without having to say anything.
I frowned at the result of my chemical experimentations. In order to prevent anyone from deducing the chemical synthesis of the antibiotic, I started about four steps before the actual synthesis, and I was creating precursors to precursors using the most common and available chemicals.
Most chemical precursors you could buy online, and they'd ship them right to your door. You could do this even if you wanted to produce illegal drugs — it was still illegal, but nobody seemed to care. It was only things like Glitter and Black Lace where the police seemed at all interested in stopping it, and those drugs seemed carefully calibrated to be as addictive and harmful as possible, and these highly complicated synthetic drugs were as much as a trade secret as the stimulant I made tic-tacs out of months ago.
My superpower did not help me a lot with chemistry, but it did help a little, so long as I kept in mind that everything I was making was intended for human consumption, eventually. However, the yield on the precursor I was making right now wasn't very good, but there was little I could do about it. I didn't really need to make this an economical process; all I needed was to demonstrate the feasibility of the synthesis. I wasn't even recording these preliminary steps, as I would just record the actual synthesis — I intended to sell this to a Corporation, after all. They didn't need to know how to do the boring steps I had to do to hide what I was doing — they could buy chemical precursors weighted in tons if they wanted to, and nobody would care.
I carefully used a small amount of suction to extract all of the organic layer of the chemical process I had just finished, then shifted beakers and drained the rest into a beaker for disposal. In this process, the aqueous layer was just waste, and I could dispose of it however was convenient.
As I was cleaning the glassware, I got an alert on my OS; it was an e-mail to my work account. I rolled my eyes when I read it. It turned out that the guy who I had shocked had made a complaint of "excessive brutality" to corporate in my interaction with him. The big bad booster ganger was making a complaint; it was kind of ridiculous on its very face.
I was very tempted to spend a few hundred eddies on hiring some kids to place flyers up around his neighbourhood, "apologising" and thanking him for cooperating with the investigation. That would have likely got him killed, as while Trauma Team wasn't exactly like the cops, nobody in boostergangs particularly liked cooperating with any Corp, even Trauma. Except... I couldn't tell where he lived. He didn't look like any of the poser gangs and wasn't an Animal or a member of the Tyger Claws or similar Asian gangs, so he was just a nameless mook that could have lived anywhere. The three minion NPCs that chased me in World of Heroes had more personality than this guy did.
Reading the e-mail sent me giggling, and I sat down for a moment. The complaint wasn't a big deal and would have been ignored, except that I told the person asking me about it that I thought that the guy might have had a pre-existing cardiac problem, as our taser seemed to cause him to enter into an unstable arrhythmia. My kick, therefore, wasn't excessive brutality but a carefully calibrated cardiology treatment!
That was true, too! I was really convinced that he would have likely died if I didn't do anything.
As such, the complaint was closed, and the man was billed for one hour of "cardiology treatment," and it was recommended that he inform his primary care physician so that screening tests could be conducted. I would be very surprised if that man ever had seen a doctor in his life, except perhaps when he was arrested, so that was just adding insult to injury, and I was all for it! Asshole!
Complaints weren't really a thing the Corp cared too much about, but it still annoyed me. The last time I heard about someone actually getting in trouble was when they accidentally dropped a napalm canister on the LZ, killing both the gang members and the client. And even then, it was just treated as a verbal counselling session — the sort of "Tsk, tsk" don't do that again, if you can help it, sort of thing.
My phone rang as I was finishing up, and I was about to ignore it until I saw that it was Mrs Okada calling me. I picked up and said, "Hello?"
"Miss Hebert. I have a gig for you if you're interested. A client wants an escort around Japantown, which concludes with seeing a Ripperdoc. You're paid partially for protection for a couple of hours, but mainly to ensure the client doesn't get ripped off at one of the Jig-jig street doctors," Mrs Okada said, not wasting any time.
I got the rest of the particulars. The pay was only about five hundred Eurodollars, but that was still quite a good amount of money for just a few hours of work, so I agreed to the proposal. I didn't feel in danger anywhere in Japantown these days, although that wasn't to say I wasn't actually in danger, just that the danger level was something I had grown accustomed to.
I spent several minutes getting dressed in my "don't mess with me" outfit and left my apartment. I had agreed to meet the client at the NCART station in my building, and we'd drop down to the street level from there. After he saw his fill of the seedy underbelly of Japantown, I would take him to one of the Ripperdocs that I knew didn't really screw their patients over. I had something of a relationship with a few of them, just from selling them stock that I would refurbish from what Gloria brought to me. She mostly did most of the selling herself these days, though.
