"Yeah, no shit, Breaker," he said exasperatedly, paused and then continued, "Just keep hiding behind this fucking thing; Alpha and Charlie are both responding and should be here soon, as is a full platoon of SecForces on the ground."
I didn't nod, but I continued glancing to the side. I was a little concerned that with us so effectively suppressed that the enemy would seek to flank us and direct fire enfilade, raking us with automatic weapons from the long axis. It was the textbook response when you had a dangerous enemy, like us, suppressed, and it was what they had taught me in basic training.
I had decided I would immediately activate my stealth system and leap out, trying to eliminate anyone who tried to flank us if that happened. However, it would be dangerous, as the HMG was obviously using armour-piercing rounds on account of the damage it had done to the AV-4, which had to lift off and conduct a forced-landing several kilometres away on the interstate.
There was a brief hiss as I saw a rocket flying above our heads, and less than a second later, a loud explosion was heard in front of us, muffled somewhat by the giant excavator machine; my helmet quickly normalising the sound and flash to something that wasn't harmful. Mercy glanced at us and said, "Stay down; let's let them pacify the entire area from range first."
I snorted but managed to mute my vox in time so nobody heard it. He didn't have to tell me that. I wasn't stupid.
Suddenly, a very familiar sound started up again, the sound of that heavy machine gun firing off long bursts, but this sound was coming from a different direction. An additional gun, in a separate emplacement, then. Still, there was barely a second of it firing before a second explosion silenced that gun emplacement as well. How interesting. This sounded like an attempt at a double trap. Just what had we done to piss someone off? Really, there was no telling. We did kill a lot of people, especially if they were gang members and in the vicinity of any of our calls, much less responsible for client injuries.
We still didn't move, and I could tell that Mercy was talking on the tacnet with the new arrivals. About five minutes later, our ground-based backup arrived in four armoured scout cars. Modern scout cars had shifted a lot over time, and today they were mostly indistinguishable from wheeled armoured personnel carriers but usually featured a small calibre autocannon and micromissile launcher instead of a machine gun, similar to wheeled infantry fighting vehicles.
One of the cars drove right up to us and opened the back ramp, and Mercy nodded at all of us, and we ran into the vehicle with a quickness. The ramp automatically closed back up, and the vehicle started driving away before I had even secured myself into one of the seats.
Back at the base, we finally were conducting an after-action report now that the pilots had returned with their damaged AV. Mechanics had fixed it on the ground there on the interstate in record time, as it didn't do anything good for our PR for people to see one of our AVs with a mechanical in front of god and everyone.
Mercy began, "So, the ground team found two destroyed, remote-controlled, fifty-calibre Dushkas. They were apparently connected to net-controlled servo motors. We have our runners working on it, but this explains why they weren't taking more advantage of the situation."
I raised an eyebrow. That gave me an idea, actually. I still had the Dragoon borg in my storage, halfway disassembled. It was a good source of parts, but I didn't think I could ever get it working again. However, the weapon system was one of the things that were in perfect condition, as far as I could tell. It was equipped with a shortened version of a popular 23mm Soviet rotary cannon that they sold far and wide on the export market.
I wondered at the valuation Alt-Dad had put on the borg because that was an expensive gun just in itself and could easily be removed from the borg by anyone with some tools. It was too big for any person that wasn't borged as fuck to use, and I'd have to ask Wakako to get the ammunition, though, as I didn't have any way to do so that wouldn't paint a huge target on my back in the event we had to use it.
Could Kiwi and I rig a quick and dirty firing platform and have her control it for our exfiltration? We had already planted a number of explosives along our route. The second team was made up of Tyger Claws, which Wakako was providing. Most Tyger Claws weren't what I would call elite combatants, but some definitely were, and she was making up for the rest with numbers. They would be waiting in ambush at an abandoned building that was about four kilometres from Konpeki Plaza.
The idea was that this location was a very good ambush location, but since any theoretic pursuers wouldn't know our precise route leaving Konpeki Plaza that they would only be able to rush to this location after a few kilometres made it clear we would be driving by it.
We would then ambush the ambushers and then proceed to meet Wakako to finalise the deal, with me and her splitting up the loot between ourselves at that point.
It was something to think about.
I was putatively driving back home, but in truth, I was driving on the loop 210 highway that circled downtown for fun. Although Night City was a city that never slept, there were definitely times when traffic was bearable or even non-existent, and we had recently shifted to a 0300-0300 schedule at work, which I hated, but it had the advantage of allowing me to let loose on the highway with the speedo currently inching above two hundred kilometres an hour.
It had taken a surprisingly long amount of time, a couple of weeks, to completely refit my Type-66. In addition to removing all of the previous paints and doing a full respray, they also sold me on a number of physical cosmetic changes, adjusting a faring here and there to make it completely indistinguishable from the previous vehicle. It still looked like a Quadra, of course, but now it was more in line with what a traditional Nomad vehicle looked like, except in purple, which used to be one of my favourite colours once upon a time. This was instead of the obviously Wraith-inspired panelling that it used to have.
Honestly, until the mechanic pointed out the differences using a number of images, I had no idea there were different "styles" of customised vehicles, as they both looked like Nomad cars to my untrained eyes. Still, I took the mechanic at his word. The Nomads did sell their cars sometimes, costly and gas-guzzling varieties like my Type-66, but Wraiths never did.
I hadn't been found out yet, but the mechanic insisted it would only be a matter of time before some Wraith that was in town for some reason noticed me driving, and then the best I could hope for was them following me and stealing or torching the car when I went into a cafe for lunch.
As I downshifted a little bit at a curve before placing my foot firmly on the floor as the loop straightened out, I hummed tunelessly. Listening to Wakako's voice message again, I passed three cars in a flash.
"Taylor, Biotechnica is very interested. I'm in the process of negotiating a final price now, but we should be good to go within ten days. He's already agreed on an exchange in Konpeki Plaza like you wanted, although he grumbled a little bit about it. He is insisting on a technical expert being present on our side, and I have tried to give him the impression I have hired a chemist. I'll make sure we have at least three or four-day notice before the meeting is scheduled," she said and paused, "Let's plan on an early lunch tomorrow to discuss things more in detail."
That last bit amused me. She had made a lot more time for me when it became more and more clear that she was likely to make many hundreds of thousands of dollars off of me. Plus, I had already reviewed the accounting for the enterprise, and she charged every working lunch to the venture, which I couldn't really complain about, but I found amusing. I supposed one didn't get to Wakako's station in life without being thorough with details.
I let off the accelerator as I topped out the speed at over two hundred and sixty kilometres an hour, with the engine closing at seven thousand revolutions per minute at ninth gear. I let the machine coast, slowly losing speed. I was asking to be pulled over going as fast as I was, Corpo or no Corpo.
I certainly wouldn't survive a traffic collision at this speed. My brain had gotten a lot better at doing quick calculations due to offloading them onto my cyberdeck. Two hundred and sixty kilometres an hour was a little over seventy-two meters per second. Deceleration was a simple formula of end velocity minus starting velocity over time, and if I assumed a very, very conservative time of 0.06 seconds to decelerate in a full-on crash, that gave an effective deceleration of over a thousand meters per second squared, which was the equivalent of over one hundred Gs on the body which wasn't survivable even with my augmentations, and that was before all the associated trauma like being crushed.
The weakness, as it usually was, was my brain. A body could be engineered to survive such decelerations, and in fact, my bones might not break even now. But without a very sophisticated shock-absorbing life support pod, of which my skull definitely was not, my brain would still be turned into mush. A borg could survive that, but anybody with their actual brain in their skull couldn't without some sort of high-tech gravity-manipulation-based inertial compensation helmet, the kind that hot-shot Corpo astro-pilots wore in combat spacecraft.
And that was assuming such things weren't just bullshit to begin with, as the only time I had seen them had been on films and entertainment BDs.
It took me five kilometres of coasting to slow down to a reasonable enough speed to take the next exit at a safe speed, and I winced a bit when I glanced at the fuel gauge. I had used quite a lot of fuel, but that wasn't all that surprising.
I pulled into the first filling station I saw with a deep sigh at the cost.
Our working lunch didn't take that much time, and towards the end, I asked her about the high-explosive armour-piercing shells I wanted her to source, which surprised her.
"What in the world do you have that would fire those?" she asked, half-amused but mostly curious.
I said, "It's a six-barreled Soviet rotary autocannon, an export model. I thought I could build a simple control mechanism and turn it into a remote-control turret that Kiwi could operate. We'd leave it in the same building the Claws will be watching out from. One of the biggest what-ifs is if they bring armoured vehicles. I don't think they have any actual military vehicles in town, but they definitely have a bunch of bullet-resistant trucks and cars. This would put paid to that threat."
She blinked at me for a couple of moments before shaking her head, "You know, Taylor. You think too much. Why would you build a remote-controlled turret? There are dozens of such models commercially available that support pretty much any weapons system. Tell you what, I will acquire one, as well as a goodly amount of shells. In exchange, you let me buy this gun after the mission. I can both by tomorrow, and my team will set it up at the primary ambush site."
Ah. Yes, that probably made more sense. The Trauma Team after-action report said that it was likely Maelstrom that had attacked us, and I just assumed that they had built the turrets from scratch as that was something that they tended to do, but I still occasionally forgot what world I was in. Of course, there were dozens of models of remote-controlled or autonomous turrets that you could buy in this world. Why would I have expected there wouldn't have been?
I kept my mouth closed for a moment because I was honestly expecting to leave the turret after the fight if we did need to use it. I intended it to be a one-use, disposable device. But if she could cart it off again, selling it to her would be fine. Ideal, even. Weapons in Night City were like sand on a beach, very easy to find. But large rotary canons that fired explosive shells and would be more at home mounted on a combat aircraft were a little more difficult to get.
Again, I wondered why Alt-Danny considered the hulk of the Dragoon valueless. Irreparable, I agreed with. Perhaps he didn't want to part it out for sentimental reasons. It made me wonder who was piloting the device before, presumably, Alt-Danny killed it.
I got a sly expression on my face, which Wakako instantly mirrored, "Let's talk price, then." I wouldn't walk away without at least a quarter of its MSRP!
It was finally the day, or rather the day before the day. I was gathering all of what I would need, some of which I would take into the hotel with us and the rest, what could be considered dangerous, would have to be in their lower-security parking garage, along with our vehicle. We weren't using Ruslan's van this time, but a stolen one.
I was a little concerned about that, but he reassured me that he knew precisely which vehicles wouldn't be missed for several days. Nobody would be reporting it stolen until we were well and truly done with it, which I would just have to accept on faith. They were the experts on this sort of thing.
However, it was Ruslan's van that pulled up to pick me up. I guessed he had the stolen van stashed somewhere so that it wouldn't be able to be associated with any of the buildings we lived in, just in case the authorities later attempted to backtrack the vehicle through the city's camera and traffic system.
I waved at them; it looked like it was all of them picking me up. I got into the passenger side door. Once I had closed the door, I triggered my techhair to change from what was indistinguishable from my standard to a straight, glossy blonde, lengthening by over twenty centimetres in the process, "'Ello, Rus, Kiwi, Jean. Are you lot ready to get a wiggle on and get this bleedin' thing started, eh?"
They looked at me like I had grown a second head, "Don't yer worry, I jus' bought a British accent skillchip. I figgered it'd be one more bleedin' layer in me attempt to disguise meself. Dead cheap, it was, too."
Kiwi started laughing at me, having to quickly press the auto-drive button because she was closing her eyes in her mirth. This caused the other two to start laughing at me, too. What? What was the problem?
Finally, Kiwi said, "Uh, Taylor... you may want to check the settings. It sounds a little low-class, which is the opposite impression of what you were trying to go for."
I frowned. Certainly, the accent sounded a bit different from my favourite characters on Downton Abbey, like Mary Crawley, but was it really so different? It wasn't like I was an expert in British dialects. I paused for a moment to pull up the settings for the skillchip, my mouth coming to a fine line when I realised it was set on "Cockney Whore." This had better not be the only option.
