"2K, Welrod, this is Grizzly, we've located the target."
"Keep us patched; relay your location," I reply immediately as Welrod and I reflexively bounce into position; I swiftly pick up my sniper rifle and Welrod practically slides on her knees next to me and fishes out her pair of binos to spot me.
"He's down by the north docks, the Exploratorium. Do you have LOS?"
My partner and I both angle our lines of sight towards the north, in the direction of the docks.
"Negative, Grizzly, no LOS, you're on your own," Welrod responds first.
"Copy that, figured that'd be the case. FAL, let's go."
"Already tracking him. He's moving quick, we must hurry."
"Target wasn't dining in some high-rise restaurant somewhere," Welrod scoffs, lowering her binos as our task is more or less made irrelevant. "Wanted some action tonight; s'pose that won't happen."
"Any day with no combat action is a good day to me," I sigh back, not bothering to hide the relief in my voice.
"Become used to mercenary life now, are we?" Welrod smirks.
"Not so much that, but more so that killing people gets old after a while."
"Ah, so you're not like the others, huh."
"Not like Thompson? No, I'm afraid not. That SMG just wants to shoot everything that moves."
Welrod sits down properly, still with a cigarette butt in her mouth, facing me.
"I'm assumin' Tommy's got somethin' screwy with her too?" she asks.
"PC decay. Technically, it's emotional inhibition malfunction, but it's easier to think of it as PC decay." PC stands for "Personality Codex".
"I thought it was AOCD." Welrod's talking about acute obsessive compulsive disorder, a mental disorder common among veteran T-Dolls.
"Initially we thought that was what it was with Thompson, but we had her inspected one day to find out exactly what it was, and it's not AOCD because the bug wasn't in her behavioral processes, but rather in her emotional caches."
Welrod scratches her head. "Blimey, how's that supposed to work?"
"Thompson was one of the few back in the war who actively took stim packs. Remember those?"
At the mention of stim packs, Welrod shudders somewhat.
"Ah shite, how can I forget those? Watched Calico fuckin' off herself over the course 'a five months," the pistol sighs heavily.
I nod with sympathy. "Similar thing happened to Thompson. In her case, the aggression amplifiers in the stim packs caused her brain to produce too much aromatase; normally stim packs don't have any permanent effects if they're used sparingly, but Thompson kept taking them to help her fight off pain from wounds so that she could keep fighting. Eventually, her body produced too much aromatase over a prolonged period of time, and it corrupted several of her codexes. So what ended up happening to her is that whenever Thompson shows any sign of anger or aggression at all, her first reaction is to just shoot whatever it is that's causing her trouble. And if she can't do that, she'll just shoot the nearest person because that's what she's been doing for two years straight. And if she can't do that, she'll just shoot something, anything."
"Huh, interestin'. So as long as she doesn't get pissed off, that problem won't actually be triggered?"
"No. The problem then is, Thompson gets angry really easily."
"Ah, right." Welrod scratches her head irritably. "T-Dolls sure are flimsy, huh."
"We're based off human anatomy. It doesn't surprise me that we have all sorts of problems, just like humans do." I close the lid of my fake violin case over my Walther sniper rifle and lock the clasps. "The only differences are physical. Everything else..."
"...prone to internal failure," Welrod finishes for me.
That response gets a bit of a chuckle out of me. "That's one way to put it."
"All callsigns, this is Grizzly," Grizzly's voice alerts every one of us in the area in a low whisper. "We've got a situation."
"Go ahead, Grizzly," I immediately respond this time, standing up with my sniper rifle case in my right hand, and Welrod jumps up to her feet with me.
"Target is meeting a small group of men, two of them, by the Waterfront restaurant at the north docks...looks like he's sitting down with 'em for a drink or two."
"These men the target is meeting with are suspicious; they're both wearing suits, and they don't appear to be friends with the target," FAL also reports.
I switch frequencies to contact Kalina.
"Evenin', Walter! How's the mission going ~ ?"
"Now's not the time for niceties; Grizzly's reporting that our target's meeting with a pair of men at a restaurant north of Salesforce Tower; these men are suspicious and don't appear to be the target's friends, please advise."
"Hmm, let's see, the target is a known hacker, it's possible he's meeting with clients to broker information."
"That's not how normal hackers operate; they don't just come out in public like this to meet with their clients."
"Well, given how much our client's paying for us to eliminate him, he might be an exception. Maybe he's such an exceptional hacker that it doesn't matter if he shows himself in public or not."
"Or, that he's a major dickhead," Welrod adds.
"Either or, whatever fits your fancy, I guess."
"Roger that." I cut the call with Kalina. "Grizzly, FAL, be advised, those men might be the target's clients, proceed with caution."
"Copy that, but we can't make a move here, we have to wait for them to move somewhere else...no, wait, stand by..."
We wait for Grizzly or FAL to update us on the situation.
"Uh, confirmed, targets are exiting the Waterfront, we're tracking them."
"Targets returning to their vehicle. SPAS, C, report."
"We're standing on the northern corner of Sue Bierman Park. If they drive down south, we'll be able to track them," SPAS replies. SPAS almost sounds like two different people depending on whether she's eating something or when she's on duty and being serious about it.
"Copy your last, we'll track 'em if they drive north. Vehicle is starting up..."
"Walther, get ready to jump," Welrod warns me quietly, pulling tighter the ends of her black fingerless gloves.
"Vehicle is heading north. SPAS, C, try to follow us; use HAVOC to track target vehicle if you need to," Grizzly calls. "FAL, get on!"
As we can hear the tail end of Grizzly's motorcycle engine revving to life, Welrod breaks into a run, and I follow closely behind her, and both of us are headed straight for the northern edge of the tower roof. Welrod leaps off the edge with a boost-jump, and I jump right after her and catch her by the ankles as she flings off her black jacket, which bursts into a sort of makeshift parachute. Using the high-altitude winds to guide us, Welrod triangulates the moving position of our targets with the help of HAVOC and glides us thorugh the San Franciscan skyline, weaving in between skyscrapers as we descend slowly to a more manageable height that'll help us keep tabs on our target better.
"You feel heavier than before, Walther!" Welrod calls from above. "You haven't been binging on too much ice cream, have you?"
"I'll have you know that the last time I had chocolate ice cream was five days ago, thank you very much!" I shriek back, feeling my cheeks start to burn somewhat.
"Oh, what a surprise, that's five days longer than I would've thought!"
"Shut up, Welrod, I swear to God!"
We glide through the night like a pair of silent bats, well, Welrod isn't so silent as she roars with laughter for a moment. We make a hard landing on top of a two-story corner shop, and I let go first so that Welrod can have a clean landing. She pinches off the cords of her parachute even before she lands so that when she hits the roof, she hits it running, and together we run across the roofs and leap across them to keep up with the target vehicle. While running, I use HAVOC to locate Grizzly's motorbike, and they're not too far behind the target vehicle; there's still a good degree of traffic, which'll give them cover from being noticed by the target vehicle.
We track our targets to a set of small apartments in southern Russian Hills district, one with a lot of trees growing in it, which differentiates it from the other blocks we've been passing by. The vehicle parks in the parking lot drawn straight into Broadway street, and Welrod and I arrive just in time to see the targets exiting the vehicle and walking towards the apartments on which we stand.
"Targets entering the apartments on our location," I report to the team.
"Can you see exactly which apartment they're going into?" Grizzly asks.
"I'll take care 'a that."
Stepping up to the plate, Welrod dons her jacket properly and throws the hood over her head, and her image quickly bleeds into the surroundings. Optical camouflage, emergency parachutes...what can't her jacket do?
As I'm standing on the roof of this apartment marveling at Welrod's James Bond-like arsenal of tricks and gadgets that is her jacket, a familiar voice plays in my ears.
"Walther, come in."
Instantly recognizing the gruff Russian voice, I stiffen up a little.
"Reporting, Overlord."
It's Kryuger.
"Enabling Demon Hunter protocol, Walther. The client for this assignment has contacted me to provide a few details that he has only entrusted me with, which I will now relay to you. The target possesses a dossier labeled 'PM' in his apartment. Find and secure that dossier before the others find the target. Good hunting, Overlord out."
Short, concise, and to the point; Mr. Kryuger has not changed one bit throughout all his years. Or, at least, all the years that I've known him.
My Demon Hunter protocol is now in effect. This means that I am to complete my objective with whatever means necessary.
Dropping my violin case where I stand, I draw my dual suppressed Hardballers before dropping down silently to the ground below within the compact apartment complex.
"Walther, I'm Demon Hunting. I'm going in."
"Righty-o, rendezvous with me, I'm holding position outside of target's house."
I track Welrod's signature and arrive at its coordinates, though I don't actually see anything. But Welrod's voice does hiss out at me quietly:
"5455, third door on the right."
Nodding, I round the corner and head to the third door, number 5455. The door has been left ajar, which makes my life easier, and peeking in first, I don't see anyone watching the door, but I do hear voices inside. The target is speaking with the men in suits about something, by the sounds of it.
"...still need, like, another week on it."
"We'll pay you extra to get it done within the week."
"No, I'm sayin', I can't do that. Not 'cause I don't want the money, but 'cause there're problems that I gotta work out, and even if I were ta work on it the whole week, I still wouldn't get it done. It's not that I don't want to, it's because I can't."
"Then we'll find someone better."
"You can't find someone better, I'm the best there is."
A moment of silence.
"Pullin' your guns on me won't do a fuckin' thing if you really care about this, y'know. I'm not lyin' to you fucks, this isn't something that can be finished in just a week."
"Then what's the problem? We need something to report back to our boss."
"It's a psi...ah fuck it, you guys won't understand. Just tell him that the software's still buggy as hell, it's gonna take a while to debug it entirely."
"Walther, hurry up, the others'll be here in two minutes," Welrod reminds me urgently.
Acting on this ultimatum, I swiftly push the door open with my left shoulder and stride straight into the apartment, both of my suppressed handguns raised.
A Siberian husky walks around the corner from the small living room, curious to know what this new foreign scent that I exude is, and for a moment, we lock gazes.
Oh my God, it's so cute, I just wanna hug it right now.
"Troy? That's weird, he usually doesn't get up unless - "
"Hold on, you stay here, I'll check."
A pair of soft footsteps, the sound of dress shoes trodding on carpet. I flatten myself quietly against the wall next to the door that leads into the bedrooms, and as soon as the first suited man walks out, I smash the butt of my handgun against the side of his head to knock him out cleanly.
"What was that?"
The second suited man hurries over to investigate the noise that the first guy's made dropping to the floor, and I can hear him flicking the safety off his own pistol over the husky barking a few times. I'm guessing that it's not suppressed like mine are, so I can't let him fire a shot. So instead, I readjust the grip of my Hardballer and poke the man hard in the left eye with the end of my suppressor, and flinching hard, the man lets out a painful yelp, instinctively dropping his gun to the floor. Turning the corner, I grab the guy by the collar and plant my knee into his left thigh, hitting his femoral artery to give it a good shock and knocking him out too.
Walking into the target's room, which is plainly furnished but loaded with computer equipment, equipment that you'd never find in an ordinary civilian home, I align the target's face with my pistol's iron sights.
"The PM dossier. Hand it over," I demand quietly.
The target, a middle-aged Caucasian man with glasses, gives me a wry smile. It's as if he's grown accustomed to being held at gunpoint.
"That's all you want? Sure, I guess."
He rummages through his bottom desk drawer and tosses the dossier file like a frisbee to me, which I catch.
"Not sure why you'd want that for, but tell your client, whoever they are, they ain't gonna do what they wanna do with it."