I snuck close to the building that had four dots in it. From my minimap it appeared the dots were all in the same room, the living room area. That was fortunate and was where I was next to.
I started to hear a few voices from inside the building, but I couldn't make them out except for a firm voice saying, "Stay here. There's only one entrance into this building; we'll light up whoever it is when they walk through the door."
' Yeah, no, you won't,' I thought as I set my pilfered shotgun down briefly, then I grabbed two spherical fragmentation grenades from my belt and carefully pulled the pin on each of them. The window to this building was already shot out, and I was crouched next to and underneath it.
Carrying a grenade in each hand, I released the spoons simultaneously but held onto them for a full one-Mississippi count before tossing them both through the shattered window into the living room, amongst the four dots who thought, smartly, to ambush me.
I ran a few metres and threw myself to the side, landing prone on the ground with my hands over my ears as I wasn't entirely confident about the ability of these cheap motorhome walls to stop shrapnel. Rather than two distinct explosions, I heard just one large boom and felt a wave of hot air of the shockwave pass over my head.
I could hear a couple of groans from inside the building, but they didn't sound very healthy. Still, I would explore that building last to give them a chance to, hopefully, bleed to death. Grabbing my shotgun, I sprung-up, still invisible and ran to where the garage was, noticing the last dot start to move rapidly.
Fuck, he was backing out in one of the cars, a shitty-looking Thorton Galena. There was no cell or data service out here, and I was hopeful that even if they had a network connection using directional antennas or satellites, it was limited to data terminals, and they hadn't been able to call in any assistance, but that could change if one of them drove off.
The Galena looked like shit. Still, it had an aftermarket Crystal Dome environmental protection system installed instead of a windshield, so I didn't know if the buckshot I presumably had loaded would penetrate. Instead, I took careful aim and shredded each tire on the right side with a single shotgun blast apiece as the driver shifted the car into gear and started a straight shot out of the compound.
I didn't know if they had run-flat tires, but even run-flat tires won't help you against eight double ought buckshot pellets hitting it. Both tires exploded, flying off the wheel rather spectacularly and causing the vehicle to veer to the right and slam into the building I had just thrown two grenades into.
For a moment, the driver attempted to put the vehicle in reverse and back up, but that wasn't accomplishing much. Finally, he leapt out of the driver's side of the vehicle while I stayed completely still, holding the pistol-gripped shotgun close to my chest to ensure it stayed within my stealth field. He waved a submachine gun in my general direction and fired off a burst without looking, thankfully missing me by over ten metres. Well, that was stupid of me. I expected he would have shown me his head so I could blast it, and I wasn't expecting stupid wastes of ammunition like that. He could have easily hit me with that if he was lucky, so perhaps it wasn't as stupid as it looked.
As he lifted his weapon to repeat the action, I darted off in a tangent to his arc of a possible fire, moving more or less perpendicular to another long burst of fire he let off without looking. Continuing my vector, I darted past the rear of the car he was hiding behind before turning and bringing up the shotgun and shooting him in the back. I went to fire again but stopped myself. Once was definitely enough at this range.
Kneeling down next to the car, I deactivated the stealth system as I had less than thirty seconds of charge remaining and just remained still, listening and repeating a Ping quickhack on the garage terminal. I didn't see any people still connected to the subnet, and the only thing I could hear was the woman and her family in the distance where I had left them.
I carefully sat my stolen shotgun down and just shook silently as I came down from the adrenaline spike I had been working on for the past few minutes. I grabbed something from one of my pockets and quickly took several bites out of a chocolate bar, my medical sense telling me that the simple and complex sugars would help a lot.
I finished half the chocolate bar before I stood up and yelled, "I think that's all of them." Grabbing the shotgun, I checked it and only had two more shells, so I set it aside and grabbed the submachine gun from the guy I had just shot. It was a Militech Saratoga, which was pretty nice, and the dead guy had two full magazines, which I took, dropping the mostly empty magazine out of the weapon and replacing it with one of them.
I didn't know for sure that they hadn't gotten any communications out; that was just my hopes and my guesses based on where we were located. So I couldn't waste a lot of time here, on the off chance fifty Wraiths showed up pissed to all hell. Still, I intended to loot. I mean, this was a dangerous and foolhardy exercise that I came out of alive; of course, I was going to loot.
I started moving with a purpose, half-jogging to the building I hadn't thrown grenades in as I figured I'd start with things less likely to be broken by shrapnel. However, as soon as I grabbed the doorknob and started pulling it, I felt myself get punched in the chest several times. Growling, I leapt over the handrail sideways and rolled out of the line of fire as another three or four-round burst shot through the door. I backed up, now out of the line of fire, as I gingerly touched my chest. I didn't feel like I was going into shock, and my biomonitor wasn't reporting any penetrating trauma, so the rounds likely either hadn't penetrated my vest or my skin. I couldn't really tell which at the moment.
How fucking stupid. If that was an assault rifle instead of the submachine gun it likely was, I could have just died or at least been grievously wounded. I was acting as though everything was already over, and it nearly got me killed. I fucked up more the longer a mission went on, it appeared.
Sighing, I raised the Saratoga but and fired a burst of my own through the walls, trying to gauge where the shooter was; then another burst above that, shattering the window. I was out of frag grenades, but I had one flashbang and one anaesthetic grenade left. I selected the flashbang, pulled the pin and tossed it inside, through the shattered window and closed my eyes firmly. Even out here, the explosion caused my ears to ring a little. Instead of rushing through the door, which was being shot through, I just crouched and used all of my strength to leap straight up, activating stealth and rolling through the window I had just thrown the grenade through.
As I hit the floor, I saw a single man firing wildly in the general direction of the door. I didn't think he could see much, but I didn't give him a chance to observe me and shot him in the head and neck with a quick burst, which put him on the ground with a sick gurgling sound that, thankfully, did not last very much longer. I guessed that he either didn't have an operating system or he had it carefully set to accept no network connections, even from this trusted subnet. Some paranoid people, like me, did configure their systems that way, after all.
I had less than fifteen seconds left, so I deactivated the stealth system again. I could use it for a similar quick tactical use, maybe once more, before it would have to recharge.
But hopefully, I wouldn't need to. This time, I carefully cleared each room of this building, trying to be as safe as a single person doing the job that was meant for four or five could, and then did the same to the garage and the other building. Only then did I relax a little. I was trying not to beat myself up too much, but I had almost gotten myself killed in a really stupid way just now, so it was kind of hard not to.
I ran back to the family, and said, "Okay, now it really is clear." I could see that the two males had started getting the feeling back in their legs and were standing on their own power now. The woman had recovered her pistol but didn't look like she would sweep me with the muzzle this time, so I didn't disarm her again.
"Sis! We can get out of here, now!" said the younger male, causing me to frown. In my head, I had this boy be her son. But at least the story I had concocted, which got me to do something incredibly stupid, was close. I glanced between them and was still thinking the older man was their father.
I handed the father the shotgun I had used after reloading it, and he took it gratefully, and then I handed the woman the Saratoga I had been using. She nodded at me before glancing at the younger boy, who looked expectant and sighed, handing him her pistol. Well, that was their business who they trusted with firearms, so long as they didn't point any of them at me.
I had already found a lot of loot, including four carefully packaged drones. I still hadn't found how they had downed them, but it clearly wasn't a machine gun. I was leaning towards them being hacked somehow. They were kind of pricey, so I was going to take them with me, along with some implants, which I would spend a few minutes extracting. I found a safe with a little over two thousand eurodollars in it, but more importantly, it had the owner shards to the two other cars inside. One was a Colby like I owned, except with a Wraith paint job and a fully customised CrystalDome system. It was nice, but the other was even better; it was a Quadra Type-66 with similar modifications, including oversized off-road tires.
I didn't think I could take both of them, so I would give this family the Butte. Both cars only had two seats, so some lap-sitting would have to be done for a while in either case, so I was going to keep the nicer car. I found the family inside the garage trying to hotwire the Colby.
"I got the shards for both of those cars, but I'm going to keep the Type-66," I told them firmly, "You don't need to hotwire them."
The woman said, giving me a glance over her shoulder as if I was a very special person who didn't know anything about cars. Which was true, for the most part, "We're not hotwiring them; we're disconnecting the tracking system."
Oh. That would have been embarrassing if I drove this back to my home and was tracked down. "Would you mind doing the same to the Quadra? I'll give you the shard for the Colby in exchange."
The father smiled, "We'd do that for free and more as thanks. We'll also use some spray paint to paint over the Riffen shiv tags, it won't look great, but at least they won't shoot you on sight if you roll up to the city. Still, we'd appreciate the shard for the Colby. Was there a shard for the Galena? We're going to take that too."
I blinked at him. While that thing wasn't completely wrecked, it was sans two tires, at least. I glanced around the garage and did notice a number of tires. Could this family take off two wheels, replace the tires and put them back on quickly enough that they felt confident about not being here if and when the Wraiths came back? What were these guys? NASCAR?
As if reading my mind, the man chuckled and said, "It won't take long at all. When you live in the wastes, you have to be quick with these types of things. I've been working on cars for decades, and my daughter is better than even me. I don't suppose our family hired you to save us? I didn't even think they'd have realised we were taken yet. Normally, the Riffen Shiv would ransom us back after committing sufficient atrocities." Ransom them back?! Were the Wraiths insane? Machiavelli said 'Never do an enemy a small injury.' The idea was because that would just piss them off. You either killed enemies or left them alone. Personally, I felt that applied to 'raping your enemy's daughter in front of them.' From the anger simmering in the way the man had said that I thought that if they did ever release this man, he would have made a Quixotic-quest to murder them all.
Still, it made sense that they were nomads too. I guess there would be a ton of mechanics in a nomad family. I shook my head, but I wasn't willing to break operational security and tell them about the gig. That was one of the biggest rules in Morgan Blackhand's guide. Secrets were for keeping, "No. I'm not at liberty to discuss why precisely I am here, but I adjusted my mission parameters when I saw what they were doing. The Galena's shard is probably on the guy who was uhh.. trying to drive it away. I'll get it for you. If you guys want to loot anything else, feel free. I've set aside everything I'm going to take. I'm likely going to leave right now, but if you could do me a favour before you leave?"
"Of course, anything!" said the woman, with a lot of emotion, after finishing the work on the electronics of the Colby before walking over to the Type-66.
I glanced at the barrels of CHOO2, "After you fill your tanks, if you could please use the remainder of that to burn each of these buildings to the ground?" I thought I would get the bonus for "stopping" these guys, but I still didn't know precisely how the drones were intercepted so was best to be thorough here. Burning the entire compound to the ground was warranted.
"Absolutely," said the man with deep emotion.
Smiling, I darted away. I grabbed the Galena's shard from the dead man and gathered the things I was taking, using a few minutes to chop a couple of arms off here and someone's head off there and dumping them all into a duffle bag. Kind of gross, but I had gotten desensitized to that sort of thing in the six months I had been working for Trauma Team. It took me two trips to dump everything I was taking in the Type-66's modest trunk, glancing at the new "paint job." It was definitely rushed, but at least it didn't scream psychopathic nomad too much now. The kid was the one spray painting each of the cars, while the father and daughter team already had the Galena up on jacks and one wheel off.
I handed the two shards to the kid and got in the Type-66, backing it out of the garage. I stopped by the Galena, and the man gave me a smile, "How long do you think we have? It will determine how much we try to steal."
"I don't know. I couldn't detect any type of satellite or point-to-point communications equipment, and there was no signal here. But I just don't know. You might have all night. Alternately, they might have gotten the word out as soon as I started shooting them," I said honestly.
He nodded, "We'll go with that more pessimistic guess and try to be out of here in thirty minutes. We'll have most of the things worth taking bundled away by then, for sure. We've already found a heavy machine gun, and the boy is going to man it. In the off chance a Wraith car shows up, he'll riddle their cherry asses full of armour-piercing rounds toot-suite."
