I decided that I would "klep" everything useful here when the job was over, too, it wasn't likely this gang of idiots would need it, and it was a bit better than my current equipment, which was mostly two or three generations old.
"We're gonna head out and start installing Kiwi's gear, ya?" said Jean, to me, and I nodded, waving them off.
I didn't mind being alone with the gang leader because he didn't scare me at all. He was older than me, but not by a lot which kind of said something about how short a lifespan these little gangs had, "Can you find a few more of those cots, in case you actually get people that are hurt?"
He nodded, "Yeah, whatever. I'll tell one of the boys to scrounge some up. It might be an hour or two. Gotta go see my input. Bitch be cray." With that, he strutted off, and I wondered why precisely we, but especially I, were taking this job. Oh well.
"Comms check," Ruslan said over our encrypted conference call.
I unmuted the channel briefly and said, "Loud and clear," and listened to Kiwi and Jean repeat the same.
I got the room set up. I wasn't really getting any extra pay for the consumables I was using; I was getting a flat fee that was proportionally larger in the assumption that I would use them. So, I would be practising the Brockton Bay General style of medicine, which is to say, medicine on the cheap. They always had such a bad reputation, despite being the hospital that Panacea worked at, compared to MedHall.
After I got everything set up, I waited, watching through the cameras and drones that Kiwi had begun to set up for lack of a better thing to do.
I got one customer a lot sooner than I thought; a man was dragged in with a gunshot wound to his shoulder, apparently the result of the nascent gang war beginning on the periphery. In popular culture, gunshot wounds to the shoulder were considered very survivable flesh wounds and a common wound for the plucky hero to receive at the conclusion of some adventure.
In truth, the proximity of neural, osseous, vascular, and muscular structures caused wounds of this nature to be especially challenging sometimes. Having a particularly expansive knowledge of medicine and anatomy led me to believe there really isn't a "good" place to be shot, just some that are less bad than others.
About the same time I started working on this gang member, a second showed up with a literal sack, dropping it on a table that I had been using as a desk and saying, "Boss said this is for ya." I sighed after getting to a stopping point with the whining gang member I was working on to grab the sack and look inside, ignoring the complaint from my patient.
Pulling out a small packet of which there were over a hundred, easy, I frowned, looking for some sort of chemical name or dosage marking on the flimsy package, before opening it and casually sniffing delicately at the opening before turning to the second guy who was about to leave, "Hey! Wait! This is fucking heroin!"
"Uhh... yeah? Youse asked for painkillers, and there ain't no better than this. What are you, a gonk?" the man asked philosophically.
Her patient said, "Fucking awesome, give me some of that shit, doc, this hurts like a motherfucker!"
I closed my eyes and counted to ten mentally before opening them and said, "You know what, whatever." After eyeing my patient for a moment, I came up with a dosing strategy for an opiate that I neither knew the strength nor purity. I would titrate until this man stopped annoying me, and if he stopped breathing, I would know I had gone too far. Easy peasy.
Hours later, I had a handful of other customers, some of which were wounded quite severely and wouldn't be fighting any more this evening. They were either in cots themselves or had been dragged to other rooms in the apartment building to "convalesce" after I had stabilised them, and we'd finally reached the stage of conflict where Ruslan, Jean and Kiwi had begun ambush operations.
Now, Kiwi had returned and was sitting in the desk area I had prepared, insensate, as she looked through dozens of cameras and traversed the local subnet, launching attacks against attackers several blocks away. The staccato of automatic gunfire, interspaced with loud booms, was becoming increasingly more common.
"Things are going to plan. I'm not sure these suckers will even reach your block," Ruslan said over our tac-net conference call. I hummed and nodded while casually prizing a small piece of shrapnel out of the aorta with some extra long forceps in one hand, then sliding an ultrasonic bleeding control wand back into the wound to cauterise the outside layers of the artery belonging to the idiot I was working, before he bled out.
The fighting had heated up quite a bit, but I hadn't had one death yet, although I had a couple of DoAs, including one man dragged in absent a head with his buddy looking at me expectantly. I kicked him out and made him body bag his own friend, too.
Kiwi said ominously on the digital link, still staying motionless, "Uhh, guys... we may have a problem."
I glanced at her and casually looked around, verifying the locations of all the things I intended to klep out of this room, plus the stuff I had brought with me. I had intentionally set up my clinic in such a way that it would only take about five minutes to depart in a hurry.
"What's wrong, Kiwi?" asked Ruslan.
She sighed, "I'm seeing activity as close to three blocks to the south. It isn't the Demonios, either. Here, take a look." With that, she transferred a number of images to us, and I peered at images of armed people in fatigues and camouflage moving slowly, with a purpose, towards our location. I asked, confused, "A paramilitary unit?"
"Fuck! Not really, but sort of. It's 6th Street. Okay, start closing up shop. We contracted to defend the Diablos from the Demons, not from one of the biggest gangs in the city," Ruslan said.
Frowning, I did so while trying to act like I was not. Kiwi roused herself, glanced at me and nodded, also arranging some of my equipment as well. A minute or two later, Ruslan came back, "Bad news, our 'allies' realised something was wrong. We're going to try to just tell them we're backing out in accordance with the contract, but if that doesn't work, we may be in a Charlie situation." He used the code word when our client was betraying us.
Not long after that, the gang leader comes rushing into the room with a large pistol, waving it around. For some reason, he didn't have any minions with him, and the wounded in here would be no help to him. I had increased their painkiller dosage already in anticipation of running off, and they were almost all insensate now. He screamed at Kiwi, "Yo, bitch! Tell that fucking Soviet piece of shit that if he doesn't keep fighting like we fucking paid him to that, I'm going to fucking shoot you in the face!"
He was an actual threat to Kiwi, too, because, oddly, he didn't have any cybernetics at all. There were some people like that around, but most people at least got an operating system when they turned thirteen. He was, for the moment, ignoring me, which was very stupid. I didn't like the idea of gunshots in here because it might tend to cause a bunch of our supposed allies to swarm us. I triggered my stealth system to begin pre-chilling and casually popped the monowire out on my left wrist.
The end of the monowire terminated in a tiny weighted cylinder. This was both so someone, such as a maintenance technician, could handle it, even without the monoresistant ceramic treatments on their fingers as well as to give the wire a little bit of weight when performing whip attacks. Single-handed whip attacks were one of the hardest moves when using the monowire. The traditional whip attack was a two-handed affair, where your dominant hand held the end or a length of the wire, and you used both hands to whip a loop around. However, I had practised single-hand attacks quite a bit.
I casually stepped around a patient and, after unspooling sufficient monowire, threw out my left hand, fast. The sudden movement in the man's peripheral vision caused him to half-turn to me, a shocked look on his face. He got his pistol moving around towards my direction in time for the wire to coil around his neck like a snake. I didn't waste any time and just yanked back quickly with my offhand, causing his head to pop off with a gross plopping noise. Thankfully, he hadn't fired his weapon, and I glanced around to see if anybody around had noticed, but no one had.
"Eww.. ahh thanks, though," Kiwi said aloud while saying over the tacnet, "Our principal threatened to kill me, so Madison decapitated him with her monowire. So, uh... yeah, Charlie."
I quickly used one of the provided bodybags to bag up the gang leader and his severed head, placing him in a corner so that if someone walked in, it wouldn't immediately look like something had happened. There were already a couple of dead bodies stacked there, after all, 'Your boss? No, haven't seen him!'
"Get our things ready; I'm going to go see how we are going to sneak out of here," I told Kiwi, who nodded. She already knew I planned to steal anything valuable that the gang had already stolen. She had helped me jailbreak all of the medical electronics earlier, too, so they all worked and no longer had any tracking code installed.
Spooling my monowire back into my wrist, I triggered the stealth field for the first time in an actual real-life situation and ghosted out of the room. The Diablos weren't really an on-the-ball organisation, but they did have about four guards that would be a problem, I discovered after searching each floor of their headquarters, plus at least two across the street. Their state of vigilance was low, even for an ongoing gun battle, but they would still see us departing the building and driving away in Ruslan's van, for sure.
Coming back into the clinic, I deactivated my stealth field and turned off the cooling systems entirely. There was no sign of any automated cameras, defences or men with infrared goggles. I had spent almost four minutes sneaking around, though, so I had used most of the charge for the stealth system. It would recharge on its own in about fifteen minutes, but that wasn't the only way to recharge it. I plugged a standard power and data cable into one of my interface sockets, using mains power, and watched the system quickly recharge.
"Alright, fuck. We managed to zero the fucking group of Diablos that was with us, but I don't think we're going to be able to make it back to their HQ to extract you before 6th Street gets there. We're having to move west to dodge the fighting," Ruslan said worriedly.
I told everyone what I had discovered over the net, and Kiwi nodded, "I think we should be able to get out ourselves. If so, we will meet at RP two, okay?"
I glanced at Kiwi and asked, "So, what do you want to do?"
"If you can get to the guards in this building, I'm pretty sure I can take out the ones watching us from across the street," she said simply, all business now.
I nodded, grabbed a handful of premade syringes and said, "Okay, give me a few minutes." I unplugged myself and triggered the stealth system again. It wasn't difficult to find the guards again. The one that was by himself was easy; I just used one of the syringes to give him a fairly large dose of heroin. I doubted it would kill him, but he wouldn't be caring about guarding anything for a while.
The other three were together, playing cards but in a game, I didn't recognise. How much of a trope is it for guards to be playing cards? I saw it in every film I watched; it was weird to see it actually happening in real life. I sat there, invisible, for a hand, and when one of the men threw his cards down in disgust, he stood up and said, "I'll be right back."
I followed him, and as soon as he turned a corner, I dosed him as well. Quickly returning, I glanced at the last two, sitting across from each other. Well, it was worth a try. I had a syringe in each hand and quickly dosed the one that had his back to me, dropping the used syringe and shifting the unused one to my good hand, but the man across from me yelled, "What the fuck!"
I think it was more luck, but he struck out with a hand in a reflex move that knocked my last syringe away when I was leaning across the table to jab him with it. Frowning, I just activated the paralysis pads on my fingernails and casually swiped his arm like an annoyed housecat. I didn't draw a lot of blood, but four deeply red lines were visible on his arm as he yanked it back, bleeding slowly.
That was good enough, and it only took him a couple of seconds of looking confused and terrified before he slumped to the side, falling out of his chair, and twitching.
He hadn't gotten a large dose, and I could see some of his muscles were working on and off, and it seemed like he could take breaths if he tried really hard about it, so I thought that he had more than a fifty per cent chance to survive. If he lived the next five minutes, he would likely survive, I thought. I didn't really have enough time to treat him, nor did I have anything to do so with besides intubating him back in the clinic, so I just left him there. As I was returning to the clinic, I glanced outside a window and used my eight-times zoom just in time to see a man looking terrified and not entirely in control of himself point his gun at his head and pull the trigger. Shit! Was that Kiwi? Could you do that? What kind of virus made you kill yourself? I wanted to know.
I would ask her later. Without speaking, we started taking loads of equipment and threw it in the back of the van. It took us three trips to steal everything. Kiwi said, "You drive; I'm gonna have to pick out a route for us that won't get us shot to pieces. 6th Street is already one block to the south. If I had a guess, I bet they are also approaching the Demonios from the north. I think this was a set-up all along, or they're being real fucking opportunistic."
Well, that sounded good. I didn't want to get shot to pieces. I jumped in the driver's seat, pressed the ignition button and put the van into gear. Kiwi said, "Left, take this left!"
Amusingly, on the radio started playing a rap song. I didn't particularly like rap too much, but both Jean and Ruslan did. The lyrics were prophetic, though, so I vowed to download this song.
The radio played our escape song, "We're getting the fuck out! Getting out! Of this shit town and this shit life! And none of you gonks can stop us!"
Well, I still had to stay in town, though.
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I'm that girl!
We picked up Ruslan and Jean five blocks away. I just slowed to a stop in front of an alley, and they hopped into the open sliding door of his van, and I accelerated smoothly, leaving Santo Domingo behind. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I said much more mildly than I was thinking, "That was a clusterfuck, guys."
