However, he surprised me by just shaking his head, causing me to gently donk him on top of the head with my knuckle to get him to stay still. He said, "No way! Chicks dig scars, and this one is one of those vertical down-the-eye deals, like Jake from Bushido X!"
I tried to avoid groaning. Bushido X: Fade to Black was released half a year ago, and it was just now filtering down to the "poor as fuck demographic" who didn't or couldn't afford full price to stream it. It was undoubtedly one of the worst films I had seen in either world.
I did all of the work on his face myself, but when I was done, I shifted the biobed into bed mode and said, "Kumo-kun, finish the rest of the sutures." This time all four arms dropped down excitedly, and I once again had to calm my patient. I watched Kumo-kun carefully just in case he went rampant, but he was doing a fast and efficient job.
Hiro asked me suddenly, glancing at the wall of the room where I had a number of firearms set into pegs on the wall. I had gone ahead and started selling guns, too. "What's the cheapest pistol I could buy that is still really reliable, and he could carry in his pocket? It needs to be able to put down an average Scav."
I raised an eyebrow, glancing between the wall of weapons and Kumo-kun carefully suturing the patient's chest closed. Now that I was selling guns, I had a lot more people trying to pay me for firearms, which I accepted if the weapons offered were not total shit. I finally pointed to the corner where a small snub-nosed revolver was hanging off the peg, "That's a snub-nose .357, five shots. Good pocket pistol, about as reliable as can be, and you don't have to worry about policing your brass, either."
"Policing your brass?" asked the younger boy.
I sighed. Oh, sweet summer child. I educated him, carefully and slowly, "Most modern civilian pistols have a firing pin that stamps a uniquely identifiable marking into the base of the primer, and theoretically, the police can recover the ejected brass and identify the firearm that shot it. Furthermore, most vending machine-sold ammo has its batch number printed on the brass also. Policing your brass is picking up the ejected cartridges after you shoot someone so as to stymy this avenue of forensic investigation. Revolvers don't eject their brass, so there is no need to worry about it unless you have to reload." I accepted that revolver as payment last week; it was old as hell and reminded me of a gun a private detective in a noir film might wear on his ankle.
He looked suitably enlightened but asked, "What do you do when you shoot people, then, Miss Taylor?"
I narrowed my eyes at him and lied blatantly, "I don't 'shoot people.'" I saw him roll his eyes and continued, "But hypothetically, if I ever had to and couldn't immediately pick up the brass, I would have long before replaced all of the firing pins I used with ones with no identifiable marks, either by carefully filing down the firing pin using a steel file or buying a standard, unmarked, firing pin from any gun store." It went without saying that every firearm I sold in my "clinic-pharmacy-gunshop" had this already done to it. It wasn't illegal; the requirement was only put in place for firearm manufacturers-it wasn't a requirement to own a firearm that it be equipped with microstamping technology.
He nodded, then, and asked, "How much for that revolver? And do you happen to have a spare firing pin for a nine-millimetre Lexington subcompact? Like that kind you sold me a while back."
I smirked at him, "One fifty for the revolver. It's over sixty years old but still in good condition. Twenty-five for the firing pin, thirty if you need another spring too."
He tried to haggle down the total combined price of my medical services, the gun and parts on account of it being a package deal, but I only let him get a five per cent or so discount. The prices I charged were already quite low. However, I relented when he asked for some 'loner eyes' for his minion while I was waiting for the replacement lens. I had over five pairs of this model of eyes, so I just swapped his left eye with one of my left pairs.
"Most features won't work until your other eye is repaired. Call me if you get a fever, aches, or there is any sign of infection at the wound sites," I told him, although I specifically left integration unfinished on the implant so he would have an incentive to return my eye to me. I wasn't a swap house, after all. I took this eye, undamaged, out of a Wraith's skull myself. I didn't want to swap it with an eye that was damaged, even if I repaired it later.
One last time I checked over Kumo-kun's work before placing bandages on his chest, finding the stitches to be very neat and professionally done. While Hiro and his minion were leaving, I used a simple app I had created to rate the effectiveness of each task Kumo-kun tried to complete on a number of factors. Altogether he had performed admirably. Kumo-kun self-supervised during neural network training during simulations, and its guess as to how well it had done was in line with mine, too. Excellent!
"So, what are we doing again?" asked Jean curiously, in between bites of his Chinese food. We were in one of the private rooms of The Golden Duck again, although this time, I was just eating some regular Kung Pao chicken. I had been ducked out recently.
Ruslan growled at him, "We are brainstorming a strategy for the gig. The way Wakako told me, you're trading something to a Corp and are concerned they might just murder you and take it?" He scrunched up his face, "As the customer, why are you being involved in the handoff in the first place? That isn't standard."
He was right. Normally, in a gig like this, Wakako would have shielded me from the mercenaries involved and shielded the mercenaries involved from me, in turn.
Moreover, if safety was my real primary concern, I wouldn't be involved at all, or I would act through a proxy. The reason I was involved was in case there were technical questions, as I was presenting myself as a hired subject-matter expert that the mercenaries had hired instead of being the source of the invention. But I could, theoretically, do that through a comms net and have Kiwi pretend to be me, just telling her what to say over the comms.
But... I just had the intuition that I needed to be there. If I sought to attend the exchange remotely, there was a non-zero per cent chance that the Biotechnica people would utilise a low-range but broad-spectrum frequency jammer during the meeting for privacy, and I would be stuck, and whomever or whatever I selected for my proxy would be without the benefit of my wisdom, such as it was anyway.
"It isn't necessarily non-standard. We've all done bodyguard jobs before. They may have some questions about the package, in which case I may need to be present," I rationalised to him, but privately I admitted he had a point.
He made a non-committal noise, and then Kiwi jumped into the conversation, "So you have three real concerns, then. Ambush prior to the meeting, betrayal at the meeting or ambush after the exchange has taken place? I presume you are receiving either money or some other easily fungible store of value and are concerned they might just take it back from you after receiving the goods you are selling them."
Jean popped up, "Hiring us and, you said, another team as backup must mean this is worth a lot of eddies!"
Ruslan cuffed him about the back of the head and said, "It isn't our business how much it is worth, you gonk, only how much we're getting paid, and ten thousand each for a half day's work is definitely worth it. Taylor may be our friend, but you still need to be professional."
I chuckled a little, privately pleased he referred to me as a friend, but I turned to address Kiwi, "Close. I'd say there are three concerns, but a betrayal at the exchange is not one of them. We are going to insist on conducting the handoff either at Veritas Corporation's headquarters or at Konpeki Plaza. Both places rent conference rooms, and both places offer a sort of arbitration service for this type of exchange if it becomes necessary." They weren't an escrow service, precisely, but if either side of the deal tried to welsh on their terms, either the Veritas or the Konpeki Plaza arbiters could be called upon as a trusted interlocutor, with the goal of arriving at a compromise.
If a Corporation had a history of perfidy to the opposite party and being unreasonable to the arbiters, its reputation in more important deals and negotiations would take a hit, so it was one of the few things we could demand that would be more important to the Corporation than us.
I knew for a fact that middle managers in Corps had no authority to damage their standing with important third parties like this. That said, it would only affect the actual deal and exchange. Neither Veritas nor Konpeki's people would bat an eye if we were murdered before the deal took place, for example.
I continued, "So the three main concerns are, first, as you say, an ambush prior to getting to the exchange location. Two, an ambush after leaving the exchange location, and three, us being identified during the exchange and then later being black bagged. This is more of a concern I have for myself, but it is something all of us should be cognisant of." After all, hadn't they helped me kidnap a mercenary to interrogate him about the people paying for his services just a short few months ago?
She looked interested, "How should we go about preventing ourselves from being identified? We can make sure all of our chrome is locked down hard, so they don't get any identifiable R/F spillover. But that is just one way that they could identify us."
"I'm going to pay for us all to get techhair implants, as well as a simple biosculpt treatment. There are mathematical ways to adjust your face to prevent any level of confidence from facial recognition software, while if a person looks at you, you will appear barely different. A different hair colour and this change will make it difficult to be casually identified," I said confidently. I was also going to wear a face mask, in addition to actually enabling my Kiroshi's camera dazzler system. These precautions, along with my temporarily straight and blonde hair seemed like they would be very effective.
I also had a few different devices I had been Tinkering with that would prevent the casual collection of DNA from such things as shed skin cells or saliva, just in case.
Although I was a bit hesitant about getting rid of my natural hair, I already had a specific brand of tech hair in mind for myself that replicated straight or very curly hair without an issue. The simulator on their net site had a configuration that looked very similar to my own natural hair, even if it was labelled "extreme" curliness under its settings.
She nodded slowly, a hand reaching up to touch her hair. Jean did the same thing, except he was scowling because he was shiny-head bald. Kiwi rolled her fingers on the table for a moment before nodding, "In that case, I think I have a way to minimise your exposure to ambushed prior to the meeting."
I raised an eyebrow, "Oh?"
"Yes, insist on the Azure Plaza and pay for a hotel room for one or two nights prior to the exchange. It is most likely that their ambush team, if they have one, would be watching for people approaching the hotel the day of the exchange, especially if you set the exchange time to be in the afternoon," she said, smiling at her own cleverness.
That... was a good idea. A simple double occupancy room was about three to four thousand eurodollars a night. I think a six or seven-thousand-dollar expenditure for the likely elimination of one of the threat surfaces was a cheap cost.
Both Ruslan and Jean looked excited, but I put a damper on things, "This is a good idea, so Wakako and I will pay for two rooms, me and Kiwi and one and you two in the other. But we won't pay for any hotel amenities, especially of the prostitute variety, so that's on your own dime if you want. If you don't have a custom liver, then no drinking within ten hours of the meeting, though."
They both nodded, and Ruslan said, "It seems to me the easiest way to ensure you won't be ambushed on the way out of the meeting is to charter an aerodyne, then."
I scowled. I had thought of that, but there were serious issues with that idea, "Can't do that without leaving a trail right back to me, plus it isn't as good an idea as you think. I'm a nobody, so a flight plan out of Konpeki would have to be filed one or two hours in advance of the trip, with the real identities of all passengers listed on the manifest. They'd notice and would have enough time to swarm me if they wanted to when I landed."
There were occasionally Nomads around that you could pay for wildcat charters using aircraft, including aerodynes and aircars, but none were around Night City at the moment. Wakako had the horsepower to arrange a charter, no problem, even an anonymous one in most situations, but definitely not the horsepower to arrange an anonymous one to and from Konpeki Plaza.
If we were having the exchange in the abandoned warehouse, she could have several options, including runners stealing automated cargo drones or maybe even a gunship, but there was no way I was going down the "exchange at a seedy, dangerously empty location" path during this playthrough of my life.
He nodded, "Alright, that makes sense. That leaves a ground exfil, then." He glanced at Kiwi, "Let's plan out a route that we can take. We can see the most obvious spots where we would ambush someone, and take precautions, including where the other team will be in overwatch. Perhaps this is a time for that idea you had, Kiwi."
Kiwi looked really excited, and I looked confused, "What idea?"
"Stealing a city services truck and filling a bunch of potholes with command-detonated explosives to create a prepared killbox for pursuing cars!" she said, "Do any of you know how to fill in a pothole?"
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Anything that can go wrong...
I got word from Wakako at an inopportune time, as we were currently huddled behind a large heavy-duty tracked excavator machine as heavy machine gun bursts tinged off of it. The fire was coming from an elevated position, in the second story of an unfinished construction project just ahead of us. The excavator wasn't an armoured vehicle or anything, but it was made out of solid and very thick steel and was definitely stopping the rounds before they made it to our much less armoured bodies.
Ignoring her message for now, I glanced over at Mercy, who was in cover along with the rest of us, and I decided to say something obvious, sarcastically, over our tacnet, "I think this call was a trap."
