It was even worse than the Scav den assault! Perhaps I shouldn't be doing any more gigs with these people.
Both Jean and Ruslan laughed awkwardly, with Ruslan even rubbing the back of his neck, embarrassed, before saying, "Yeah, it was kind of bad. But who would have expected 6th Street to show up?"
"Me, but only looking at things in retrospect. Ever since we got out of there, I have been researching. The NCPD is now reporting a large-scale gang war, with the area affected including both the Diablos and the Demonios territory. The Diablos weren't fighting back tonight; they hoped to just annihilate the attack, then counter-attack tomorrow," Kiwi said, shaking her head, "I think 6th Street rolled them both up."
That sounded about right to me. The way I saw the 6th Street combatants approaching from the south didn't speak to me of an opportunistic attack; it spoke of preparation. I wonder if any of the patients I treated were still alive or if they all got a coup de grâce after 6th Street took over the Diablos' headquarters. It didn't really matter, I supposed. All the people I treated would have lived, even if a couple would have needed new limbs, and that's enough for my professional pride.
I didn't know much about 6th Street, but at least they pretended to be the good guys, which neither small gang actually did.
"Did we lose any equipment?" asked Jean, curious, and when I looked at him in the rearview mirror, I gasped, "You're shot!" I exclaimed.
He shrugged, holding up his arm that had a bunch of bandages wrapped around his forearm, "I mean, a little, mon." But then he reached down and grabbed something I hadn't noticed and held it up. It was two cybernetic arms tied together with some duct tape, "But I took these from the guy who did it, ya? I've been meaning to see about replacing these 'ganic arms, anyway. Don't worry; I'm headed to the Ripper first thing."
I just blinked at him and pulled the van over the road, and ordered, "Ruslan, you drive." After getting in the back with the dumb man who might have been Jamaican or might have been Haitian, I spent a few minutes examining his wound before rebandaging it and making him take a huff of a combination of anti-inflammatory and antibiotic from an inhaler I pulled out of one of my bags. I wouldn't bother wasting any MaxDoc, a general nanomed-based trauma medicine made and sold by Trauma Team, if he was actually going to have the arm replaced, "Don't carry anything with this arm. Your ulna is fractured, but you're a gonk, and you probably haven't noticed yet."
"Ahh... that explains why it hurts so much," he said genially.
I rolled my eyes and said amusedly, as a joke, "If you want anything for the pain, all I have is heroin."
"Hmm... I mean, a little heroin never hurt anyone. If a dirt, a dirt, ya?" he asked philosophically and, in my opinion, incorrectly. I stared at him for a moment. However, it was his body, but I wasn't about to enable intravenous drug use in the back of a van, so instead, I fished out another inhaler. I had dissolved measured doses of heroin in saline after figuring out its purity based on my first patient. Some of that I loaded in syringes, but this was set in an inhaler, along with a bit of topical anti-inflammatory that would make it easier on the mucosal tissues.
I handed it to him and said, "One puff per three hours." Then I frowned and readjusted based on his mass, "Make that two puffs, I suppose." There was quite a lot of drug in there, but it was a measured dose now. I emptied a majority of the heroin packets into a pot with some boiling saline in order to achieve some measure of sterility for the product before introducing it into the bodies of my patients earlier. Most I loaded into bags of saline in order to provide long-term pain relief, but some I drew up into syringes and also this inhaler.
He nodded and used the inhaler twice. Absorption by the mucal membranes was a pretty fast route of administration, so he should be fine in a few minutes. It was also a dose calibrated so he wouldn't get really snowed, which I felt might lower the abuse potential, "Thanks, Madison. Hey, Rus, you want some?"
I stopped myself from shrieking by force of will but instead said quite firmly, " Not while driving. Not when you have to drive within four hours. Not recreationally! " Although perhaps that last was too much to hope for. Most edgerunners abused some sort of narcotics, and some of the possibilities made heroin look like vitamins. After my outburst, I spent the rest of the time Ruslan was driving, looking over the two arms that Jean had brought with him, finally deciding that they were alright. It probably wasn't the first implant Jean had ripped out of a person, I guessed.
As we stopped, Ruslan said, "Got paid from the fixer; here's everyone's cut." And with that, he transferred me six thousand eddies. Not bad for a single day's work, to be honest, although it wasn't worth all the risks we had gone through. It would probably have been worth it if everything had gone as intended, though. With that, Ruslan and Jean hopped out of the van, grabbing their gear.
Kiwi jumped in the driver's seat, shaking her head a bit at the conduct of the two men. She glanced back at me, "Thanks, by the way. You might have saved my life in there."
I shrugged but then nodded, "Maybe. Maybe you wouldn't have stayed back at their HQ if I wasn't there to watch your back, though. It's kind of silly to be overly retrospective about things." I told her the last, even though I mostly ignored my own advice because it was different in my case.
As she pulled into my Megabuilding's parking garage, I asked her, "Do you mind helping me carry my loot upstairs?" She nodded, and we both got out of the van, loaded down pretty well. It might take two trips.
It did. On our second trip, the old granny that I buy noodles from that runs a shop across my own place saw us and smiled, waving. She pulled me over to the side and asked me conspiratorially, "Ah, Taylor-san. Atarashī kanojo desuka?"
I wasn't even close to fluent, nor even conversational even, but I knew some words, "kanojo" being one of them, even without the auto-translate on my optics. "No!" I replied heatedly at the old lady, who started laughing, chortling even.
"You live right next to one of the nicest brothels in the city, Madison! Or do you want me to call you Taylor here? Have you ever gone in?" she asked, either not noticing or understanding the old lady or ignoring her.
I grumbled, "Taylor is fine. And yes, but not as a customer. I've done some medical checkups for the dolls. It's quite classy inside, I guess." Then I unlocked the door, and we both stepped into my clinic area. She didn't really get a good look before, but now she does, "Shit, almost looks like you're a Ripperdoc, Taylor."
"I get that a lot, but I don't have the expertise or credentials to do that," I half-lied, "But I do operate a little walk-in clinic here on my days off. Regular maladies, occasionally a gunshot or knife wound, or misconfigured implant. Minor stuff like that."
She grinned and picked up a vibrantly coloured foam sword, taking a couple of swings, "What treatments use this? Stress relief?"
Oh, that was David's "wheapon." I bought it for him. He could say weapon, but he stressed the H-sound a lot. When Gloria asked what it was, he brandished it and said, "It is my wheapon, mom!"
The little gremlin had started going to kindergarten, apparently, this year. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Public school was not going to help that little boy. I had given him a number of general cognitive tests, designed as games I had played with him, and he was close to three sigma above the mean as far as I could tell, at least for his developmental stages.
When I thought about a number of general cognition and IQ tests I had seen both in the Bay and here, my mental sense was disdainful, so I was a bit sceptical that they were accurate enough to be relied upon except for the most coarse of deductions, but I thought the way I had tested David was a bit better, even if I didn't feel it had the resolution or precision to apply a numerical "IQ" value to.
His developmental stages were a lot more cut and dried, though. Not only could little David count to a hundred and do basic arithmetic, including multiplying small numbers, but he could read slowly, so he was already ahead of the average public school kid four, maybe five years his senior. Not only that, he understood conditional hypotheses such as: "If you hadn't eaten breakfast earlier, how would you feel right now?"
Most five-year-olds, from her medical sense, which included developmental stages and disorders, would not understand the question. David, however, did and, after scrunching his face up, replied, "I would be hungry!"
As such, I was worried that public school would tend to harm his development. He would be an anomaly, a nail that would be hammered down all the harder for sticking out. It was that way even back in Brockton bay, but the Night City semi-privatised education system was even worse.
I mentioned all this to Gloria, and she told me she wanted to send him to a Corporate school. Although Militech ran its own school system, most corporations were subscribers to an education Corporation to send their dependants to. Despite being the same corporation that ran the "public schools," their private for-profit Corporate schools really did have a pretty good reputation.
However, NC Med Ambulance was not a subscriber, so Gloria would have to fund his tuition out of pocket. David was smart, perhaps even smart enough for a Corporation to notice him in ten years or so, as they did troll the public school system for likely candidates to invest in, but they wouldn't pay the tuition of a five-year-old, which would probably be at least fifteen thousand eurodollars a year.
Although Gloria was making fairly good money both picking up extra shifts in my "clinic" as well as continuing her Scav-operation. Apparently, she found a new partner that was open to assisting her, just like I had done. Perhaps she would be able to fund his tuition herself next year? I would be replacing some of my standard clinical equipment with the stolen goods I had, so perhaps she would be interested in purchasing my old kit. I would give her a good deal on them, maybe let her pay them off over six months to a year or so.
"It's the wheapon of a little boy. Son of an EMT that I used to work with, she works shifts in this clinic when I am on duty at Trauma Team," I tell her the truth, which gets a grin and another couple of swipes with the sword.
Before she got up to leave, I told her, "Not sure how many more gigs I intend to take with you guys if they're all going to be like this."
She grimaced and nodded, "They've been inching up my personal risk matrix as well, although the dosh has gotten a little bit better too." She sighed, "It's not to the point where I am thinking of breaking up the little team we have, but I might have thought differently if I had to exfiltrate that gang trap-house by myself."
I nodded. It was really more of a trap-building, though, I wanted to say. "I might have a job for you guys soon. With me as the client. I'm looking for someone, and when I find them, I want to ask them some questions." My eyes shifted to the half-built brain scanner on my workbench. It would work a fair bit better than the one they put my head in, at least how I thought that it worked. What was good for the gander was good for the goose, right?
At first, my power didn't want to help me a lot with it. I got the idea that I needed to perform more research on the human brain, but I had managed to find a broken twenty-year-old military fMRI machine designed for on-the-battlefield diagnosis. This machine was interesting because it had a "secret" secondary mode that functioned as a primitive version of these scanners intended for battlefield interrogations. This secret was well known, so a number of the devices were on the private market and I had found this broken one in an electronics store. My power was a lot more willing to help me repair and upgrade this device. I even got a sense of interest as I disassembled it.
I was starting to think my power was... not myself. I got the feeling of it as an excited dog as I took the machine to bits, but other times I got the feeling of boredom if I was helping someone with a rash. I didn't know if this was normal and parahumans just didn't talk about it or if I was an outlier. Perhaps powers worked differently on this planet, too.
Her eyebrows rose, "Like a black bag job?"
I nodded, "Yes, precisely. We'll need to wear disguises... well, except me. But I intend to drug them, so hopefully, the guy won't remember a thing, anyway." The Trauma Team intel guys told me they found a number of amnesiac drugs on site when I was rescued, although they wouldn't let me keep them nor even tell me what chemicals they were.
Still, I had considered similar ways to do the same thing, and I was pretty sure I had a way to chemically disconnect a person's short-term memory from their long-term memory temporarily. That would mean that nothing would be stored in their long-term memory, and they would forget everything after a few hours but wouldn't really notice they were impaired at all unless the questioning lasted for hours and they forgot how they got there.
It wasn't Armless I wanted to question, either. I didn't take him as the team leader, but if I could find Armless' actual identity, I could hire Kiwi on the side to help me find anyone connected to him.
"You're a bleeding heart. Usually, people ensure the people they interrogate don't talk about it by throwing them in the marina with concrete shoes," Kiwi said amusedly, and I got the feeling she wouldn't particularly mind such a mission. I was already very confident that neither Ruslan nor Jean would care.
I snorted. Maybe I was, but also doing exactly as they had done to me or intended to do to me, and that had a sort of moral symmetry to it, in the biblical eye-for-an-eye sense at least. I didn't tell her that, though, since I didn't want any more people to know about my incident. Plus, there was another important factor.
"It'll be better if he doesn't go missing afterwards," I said quietly, still a little afraid of that ninja man. If the mercenaries he hired suddenly vanished a month or so after he hired them, perhaps he wouldn't care, but perhaps he would investigate it? Who knew? But if the mercenary he hired had a hangover and woke up in a seedy brothel with a headache, well, that was just a regular day for a lot of mercs. The merc himself might not even realise anything untoward happened. That was exactly the sort of thing I couldn't do by myself at all, but a small team of edgerunners could easily accomplish it.
