Maybe, if I had a lot larger amount of money, I could be sure that NC Dams' price would crater eventually, but I thought that it was possible that the market could remain corrupt longer than I could remain solvent, so perhaps I wouldn't bother with it, but it was an interesting thought. I wished this old man luck in his efforts, though. Regardless of if he made a fortune or lost his shirt, he would be a lot healthier if he did it somewhere far away from this reservoir.
Maybe Wakako would be interested in this factoid, though; it was exactly the kind of intelligence she liked to collect if she wasn't already aware of it anyway.
I nodded at him, "Try to get out of here as soon as possible. Organophosphate exposure can be treated easily, the heavy metals not so much, but if you get rich, you shouldn't have an issue paying for the nanomachine treatments it takes to remove heavy metals from your body. Thanks for spotting."
"Yeah, whatever. If you ain't shootin' me, then git, girl..." he waved a hand threateningly from his pastel-pink lawn chair. Not exactly threatening. He was sure focused on people coming out to his dump and shooting him, but that might have been a symptom of the exposure to organophosphates. Still, I didn't turn my back on him once. It was clear that the man was, at one point in time, probably dangerous. The tattoos on his arms indicated service in the NUSA Navy, and one particular one, which featured an eagle grasping Poseidon's trident and a flintlock pistol while perched on a ship's anchor, looked especially prominent.
The design of the tattoo was too stylised for me to get any hits from a reverse image search that I took with my Kiroshis, and I didn't have enough time to look into it further. It seemed familiar to me somewhat, though, as if I had seen it on the TV or in a film.
I waved one last time before getting back in my car and departing the area, heading due west. I mostly took the roads, but the ground was flat enough and my tires big enough that I could depart the roads briefly if necessary. I did so when I got a couple of kilometres from the target area, driving a good hundred metres off the dirt road and shutting my car down next to a large tumbleweed. Then, whistling, I carefully used some desert-coloured camouflage netting to cover the entire vehicle.
That only cost five eddies at the Army surplus store and was exceptionally useful. Even moving ten metres away, if I looked at my car, it looked more like a large piece of desert brush. I bet most city mercenaries would have forgotten something like that out here, but I was so sure I didn't know anything at all that I researched every single job I accepted.
It was clear in my jog to the west that I didn't know the first thing about running or jogging silently in the desert, I seemed to step on every piece of crunchy brush that existed, but at least it was already pretty dark, and I was only able to navigate without tripping and spraining something due to the low-light vision mode on my eyes.
The two-klick jog was nothing to me, as I ran a ten-kay run most every morning, but the uneven ground made me proceed rather slowly. Checking the overhead map, I was already in the circular area of probability as far as the area reported by the client, so I slowed to a crawl.
Up ahead, about five hundred metres, I sighted a few structures. I had been running in that direction because they had artificial lights on all sides of the buildings, which was visible from kilometres out on the low-light vision mode, and it seemed a pretty obvious point of interest.
Taking a knee, I zoomed in on the buildings, looking for obvious signs that could indicate this was the location downing drones. I was looking for large transmitters used to jam control signals or possibly radar-layed machine guns, as I didn't particularly know how the drones were being shot down. Instead, I found something out of a horror movie.
"What... the fuck?" I quietly whispered as I saw what appeared to be two people being crucified. I zoomed out and shouldered my rifle, which had a better 16X optic and sighted down the barrel. Yes, two people being crucified. Wait, would you call it two people crucified if they were already on the cross? Because they were. Or would it be "still being" crucified because they weren't dead yet? Was the act of crucifixion concluded when you put them up or when they died, since it was technically an execution method? Also, why the fuck was I thinking this now?
It was a man and a younger man, barely more than a child, with a strong familial resemblance, at least as much as I could see from this far out.
I walked forward slowly, holding the rifle in a high-ready position.
Movement in my periphery caused me to shift the rifle towards one of the buildings, and I sighted a man dragging a woman out of one of the buildings by the hair, clearly laughing at the shock and horror on her face. Frowning, I moved the optic out of the way before zooming in and checking the range with my Kiroshis. Four hundred. I wasn't that good of a shot. Although I had theoretically zeroed my rifle at two hundred and twenty-five metres, my first shot of the night was a metre off target, and it was windier now.
If that happened again, I could easily shoot the captive lady. Wife of the crucified man, mother to the crucified boy? I'm not sure why, but my mind always tried to wonder and fill in details like this, but in this case, I didn't care because, wrong or not, it made me want to murder these people all the more.
Sighing, I shouldered my rifle and triggered the stealth system, and just started running flat out, trying to cover as much distance as possible before the man dragged the lady back inside or just violated her right here in front of her dying family.
'This is a bad idea, this is a bad idea,' I kept thinking as I ran in the direction of the two buildings; now I noticed that it was more like a compound, as I could see some chain-link fencing, too.
Skidding to a halt, I panted as quietly as I could while I checked the distance again. One ninety. Wow, I ran over two hundred metres quite quickly. That would have been an Olympic-level sprint in my old world, and it was mostly to do with my Kerenzikov. Although the implant sped up my reflexes and sense of time by three times, it didn't speed up my movement by that much — that said, it did speed it up a lot just from the fact that it took a lot less time for the movement signal to traverse the spinal cord and reach the extremities, which allowed me to run and move very quickly.
Glancing around, I deactivated my stealth system and shouldered my rifle again. The man was waving a handgun at the woman's family members and unzipping... no, that wasn't going to happen tonight. At least, not again.
I didn't try to take a fancy shot; I wasn't good enough to go for a headshot at this distance. Instead, I carefully placed my reticle over the centre of his chest after clicking the distance down to two hundred metres. I let out a breath and squeezed the trigger, then quickly reacquired the target after working the bolt action, gratified to see him on the ground and the woman glancing left and right before grabbing the man's pistol and a long knife off his belt. Ah, she was going to cut down her family... well, maybe, but apparently not before stabbing the downed man over and over again. In the dick. Good for her.
Now that I was closer, it looked like they hadn't actually nailed them to the cross, merely tied them to it using ropes. I wondered why, but internally I was quite pleased that I wouldn't have to treat a number of no-doubt infected puncture wounds and bone fractures, assuming I didn't get my fool self killed with this stunt.
As the lady moved to cut down her family, I, however, stayed motionless but instead used my eight-times zoom to scan the area of the compound for any movement. They had to have heard the shot, but it wasn't actually that unusual for a random gunshot to be heard even out here, I assumed.
Fuck, it was too much to think that nobody would check it out. If they were Scavs, nobody probably would have. However, another man stepped out the door, some sort of carbine in his hands, and I quickly acquired and shot him with my rifle. If the damn woman had been faster with cutting down her family, he might not have saw anything. He came out of the other mobile home-type building and didn't have a direct line of sight on the first guy's body, but he definitely saw the woman trying to get her husband down. She had already freed her son, who wasn't looking too good while writhing on the ground.
That did it. I think they were all alerted now. So much for the sneak mission. If this was a video game, then I wasn't going to get the Unseen Spectre rating on this mission anymore. I saw movement in one of the windows and quickly fired, then saw another guy leave the first building, and it took two shots to bring him down, as I missed with the first shot.
The last shot I took hitting a man that came around a detached garage area. It looked more like a small hay barn or a hangar, actually, but it had a few vehicles in it, so its purpose was pretty obvious. I didn't have multiple magazines for the scout rifle, as I mainly intended to use it as a telescope on this gig. I didn't actually intend to have to fire it at all. I had a bunch of loose rounds in one of my pockets, but instead of trying to reload it, I carefully set it down, triggered my stealth system and began another sprint directly for the small compound.
I yanked out my monowire as I got close, but instead of throwing it at the steel of the chain link fence, I sliced up a small wooden post that it was attached to at one of the corners and then leapt through the small gap in the fence that it created, in time to see the surprised face of an armed young man that was likely not much older than myself coming out of the building, half-dressed. He had likely seen the wooden post disintegrate and might have even seen the invisible outline of my body as I leapt through the small gap, as my stealth wasn't perfect when I was moving.
Not thinking about it, I lashed out with the monowire and took his head off in one quick, smooth motion, his surprised expression not changing while his head and body went in different directions. I glanced down at the piece of shit Budget Arms submachine pistol and quickly discarded the idea of picking it up. Instead, I reeled the built-in weapon system back into my wrist and pulled out my pistol.
Instead of my normal Militech Omaha, today I was carrying a Constitution Arms Unity, in 10mm. I picked this calibre specifically because it was barely subsonic, and the sound of the Unity's action was relatively quiet too. With the suppressor, which I had screwed onto the threaded barrel, it would have made an excellent sidearm to a theoretic sneaky mission, but at the moment, I was wishing I had the Omaha, which had a much larger magazine capacity and unparalleled penetration and stopping power, or even a Lexington with its three round burst or automatic fire options. I had thought about it and picked this pistol for a good reason, but sometimes you out-think yourself, though.
I still had over four minutes on my stealth system, so I moved quickly. First, I jogged to the front, just in time to see a man in slow motion start to raise a shotgun to shoot the woman. My arms snapped up, and I fired three times on the bounce, quick reflex shots from retention and hit him in the upper chest twice. He wasn't quite dead yet, so I shot him once in the head before holstering my pistol and grabbing his shotgun. It was a Constitution Arms model as well, a fairly nice pistol-gripped pump action shotgun.
I glanced around and picked the corner of one of the mobile-home buildings, out of sight of any of the exits and windows and deactivated the stealth system. I didn't see anyone else moving. Had I really shot everyone?
Something told me I had not, but I had likely shot most of the stupid ones. I triggered the augmented reality mode of my cyberdeck and glanced around for any networked items, finally finding a terminal in the garage which I picked to launch the simplest and yet one of the most useful quickhacks for me right now, Ping.
Glancing around as the quickhack bounced off a number of other items, including people still on the subnet, I identified five more people, including one that looked like he was hiding right behind my line of sight behind one of the Wraith-painted vehicles. Sighing, I turned on my stealth system again and darted out to woman who was still in front of the two crucifixes, attempting to help both males stand up. I snuck up on her.
"Fucking stay down," I said to her, right next to her, causing her to stumble and wildly try to sweep my general area with her pistol's muzzle, which I ducked inside of before deactivating my stealth system and pushing, forcing all three of them back on the ground. As she started falling onto her butt in slow motion, I casually kicked the pistol out of her hand so she wouldn't accidentally or on purpose shoot me when she hit the ground and had a clear shot at me. I was actually more worried about her shooting me than most of the Wraiths here because she was so wound up.
Her pistol clattered a half metre away at the same time her butt hit the dirt; she glanced at me with wide eyes, but she wasn't stupid. Her eyes narrowed, and then she said, "You're the one who shot them, aren't you?"
Crouching down, glancing left and right, I nodded, "Yes. I need to know if there are any other captives or if it is just you three here." If some or all of those four dots in one of the buildings were captives, it would drastically change how I intended to proceed. I glanced at the two males and judged they likely had been hanging for hours, which was why they were so noodle-legged. The Wraiths hadn't been Biblically accurate here either, as I was pretty sure they smashed the person's legs with hammers after putting them on the cross. I couldn't quite remember where I read that from, though it definitely wasn't the Bible.
She shook her head, "No, it was just us. They captured us earlier today, stole our car... and..." I waved a hand, dismissing her before she started talking about all the unspeakable things they likely did to her. I wasn't specced as a therapist at the present time, nor did I particularly want to hear it — I had already made my decision to kill everyone here after all.
"Okay, that's all I needed to know. Stay down, stay low. Maybe try to get to the garage, and see if any of the vehicles have their shards inside, on the off chance they manage to get me. But there is at least one of them hiding in there," I told her and activated the stealth system again before she could say anything else, leaving her sitting in the dust.
