protocol_01.03: interconnection
The Docks at night are far creepier than they are during the day, but that really isn't saying much. It's an industrial part of town, by the edge of the water obviously, but the high rises and overhangs and sky bridges criss-crossing the Upper City blot out much of the daylight anyway. Like most of the undercity, it's the difference between night and an artificial twilight. But it's worse by the Docks. Maybe it's the spots across the horizon, where you can actually see the sun, taunting you. Maybe it's the rusted metal and crumbling warehouses, kept in use as much as they're able with money going to line people's pockets instead of actually keeping up the buildings. Maybe it's the desperate eyes of the homeless squatters hiding in what shelters they can, dodging gangs and bullets until they can't anymore.
No, the worst part is the smell.
Polluted brine filled with rotting algae, the smell blown in from off the water mixes with chemical fumes and rotten blood. Mix that in with night and meager light from broken streetlights, and Anna wishes she was almost anyplace else.
"Why can't people give us jobs nice places? Like antique stores. Or sunny beaches," she mutters under her breath. She hears Adze's snort from behind her. He steps lighter when he's on the job than when he's not. Sven too trails behind them, trotting softly.
"Maybe you can pass that on to T next time. I'm sure it will have no detrimental effect on the number of job offers we get."
"Ugh, you at least don't have to smell this." Anna picks her way through the shadows, dodging the puddles of light that are few and far between. The last thing she wants is to get spotted by some kid running with the Green Street Boys before this op even begins.
"...yeah, well. You're almost there."
And they were, right as they turn the last corner, they see the warehouse sitting right at the end of the alley. Elsa's directions have them coming up the back way, on the side with the papered windows and crumbling brick, closest to another building so that they can hide in the shadows. Anna scurries across, trusting Adze is following. She runs a hand along the brick. Some comes loose in her hand, but it stays pretty solid when she digs her hand in for a hold. For a wild second, she wishes she had chalk, but white handprints are a bit obvious, even for the Docks.
"Want a boost?" Adze's voice comes over the comm as he steps up next to her. Good, he knows that it's a subvocal. God only knows how many jobs sent south because the people she was working with were too stupid to realize. She glances back and sees Sven padding off into the darkened alley. She looks up questioningly at Adze. "Sven knows what to do. He'll watch the perimeter. If you hear barking, something went wrong." He grins a little.
"Kinda figured that." She tilts her head back to check the wall. "And yeah, I'll take that help."
He crouches down to give her a foothold and she uses him as a springboard to nab a handhold on one of the covered windows halfway up. She's able to clamber up the wall the rest of the way, and once she's on the roof, she anchors and then drops the rope down to help Adze up.
The roof thankfully has one of those high edges so they can't be seen from below as long as they crouch down. Mindful of the gravel, Anna makes her way over to the HVAC vent shaft Elsa indicated while Adze does a crouch-shuffle across to his planned sniper nest. Once she's there, she unscrews the cover, which was mostly broken anyway, and pulls on a thin pair of gloves. No sense getting friction burns from shafting. As she does, she eyes the entrance route her sister's given her.
It's small, but as far as shafts she's had to go through, it's not the worst. Sometimes, she wonders if Elsa makes a game of finding the most unlikely route that Anna can still squirm through. It's about the only time her size works for her instead of the other way around. Maybe that's why her sister does it.
"Have I mentioned I really do hate you when you make me do this?"
"Shut up and keep moving. My camera feed inside is not the best."
Anna pauses. "You sure we should continue? Do you need me to use a corm?" She always carries one of the little devices Elsa designed and had made for her, for when someone was actually clever and had a system not connected to the Net. Slap on a corm, though, and she'd be able to piggyback onto it and get inside anything that used anything bigger than a logic chip. If the warehouse had an isolated camera system...
"Yes. I'm sure. Keep moving. I'm working on getting a better feed."
She goes, shimmying down the shaft until she reaches the grate she wants. There doesn't seem to be anyone right below it. Still, she hasn't lived this long by taking stupid chances. "Need a ping."
"I've got five marked," Adze rumbles. "None of them are by you."
"There are at least two more I've seen, but they're on the opposite side of the warehouse, lower level. You're clear, Arc."
Anna quietly removes the grate and drops down, silent as a cat, and immediately ducks behind a shipping crate.
She takes a moment to settle herself, to let regulate her breathing and descend into that state of focus, where everything becomes sweet and sharp. Getting into that state still wasn't automatic, despite the years of dropping into it all the time. Her approach is hodgepodge, thrown together by necessity, no training. It works, though, and it's getting easier. She'll take it.
She ghosts up behind the first lookout as she dances through the shadows of the shipping containers. Might as well keep this stealthy as long as possible, she thinks as she slides one forearm around his throat and throws the other across his chest to pin his arms, twisting one leg and dropping her hips to knock him off-balance and fully into the technique. He's too startled to fight the hold, much less scream, and the hard pressure on his carotid artery has him out in under ten seconds.
"One down."
"Make that two," she hears from Adze as she moves forward to the target. He must have gotten the skylight open, given the lack of shattering glass.
The next one she won't be able to get into the chokehold, so she doesn't even try. There's no way she can subdue him before he raises an alarm, and even with Adze up above, five-to-one odds are not her idea of a good time. And sniper rifles are not generally renowned for their non-lethalness. So Anna clenches her jaw and pulls her knife. She tries to ignore the blood as she carves his neck open, his dying scream drowned out on it. This never gets easier, even when she knows the people she kills would do the same or worse to her given half a chance.
"Three."
She continues on, avoiding stepping in the mess she made and picking her way across the warehouse floor. She's close.
"Four." Another falls to Adze's shot, and still no one's been alerted to their presence. If this is Doc's definition of "good enough", she wonders what "actually good" is. She's almost there.
"Oh fishsticks." Elsa's voice sends her diving for the shadows. "Arc! Ixion is here."
Anna will give her sister shit about her complete inability to swear when she's not freaking out. "What?!" she barely manages subvocally. "Couldn't you have told us that before we walked in here?"
"I told you the camera feed was crap. So no. I couldn't."
"What the hell is she doing here?" Adze demands.
"Guarding the package herself it looks like."
Fantastic.
Ixion is not someone one takes on lightly. The fact that she's the leader of the Green Street Boys is only half of it. The half where she's a stone-cold, sadistic psychopath is the part Anna's more concerned about. She's only heard rumors, but the woman clawed her way up to the top of the gang in very short order, and every ex-Green Street shuddered at her name. Well, until they couldn't, because all of them ended up dead in very short order. In a very messy fashion.
"Okay. Give me the dossier, Rime."
Because of course Elsa had it. "Pertinent parts: she's fast and a sadist. She'll want to make you bleed before she puts you down. She favors knives, and oh, how charming: rumor has it she's replaced her arms with cybernetic ones that she can electrify. Judging from the battery pack I can see under her coat, it's likely true. Basically, don't get hit if you can help it."
"Of course. Thank you for that advice."
"Five." At least Adze is taking care of the rest. They don't have much time until someone notices.
"You said you had a corm?"
"Yeah."
"If you can get it on her, I should be able to help."
"You want me to get close enough to slap it on her? What happened to not getting hit?" But Anna's already pulling out her ceramic knives, the ones she keeps around for when she needs to do something stupid like stab a cyborg and doesn't want to get electrocuted. This is just...more than that. Okay, she can do this.
"Arc. Be careful."
"I'm always careful." Anna pokes her head around her cover and spots a long black coat moving past. Time to go.
"That's what I'm afraid of," Elsa mutters as Anna moves. She's got a shot at this, she thinks as she lunges, knives out, at Ixion's back.
Almost a hair too late, Ixion spins around. Anna slices through leather only, and falls into a roll to absorb the impact. She's back on her feet and in a defensive stance almost immediately. Dammit.
Ixion's eyes nearly glow green in the lighting. The woman's blonde hair is so slicked back, Anna wonders if she has to worry about being blinded by the glare. Her grin is savage as she pulls eight knives, four per hand, settled between her fingers like claws, out. "So you're the blacksider Dominic hired." Anna can see the speculative gleam in Ixion's eye as the woman gives her a once-over. "Tried to take me out from behind. I can admire that."
Anna dodges the knife as it flies past her head, and she's pretty sure she lost some hair from that. Dammit.
"But I'm still going to make you bleed," Ixion hisses before leaping. Anna manages to catch Ixion's knives with hers, gritting her teeth as she holds up under the other woman's weight. The knives start sparking. Yep, Ixion's arms are definitely conductive.
Anna twists, breaking the the grapple and getting out of the way. A quick slash at Ixion when she's off balance catches her coat again, slicing it off at the sleeve and clangs against the metal arm. She'd been hoping cybernetics were the cheap kind that the ceramics could damage, but no such luck.
"Shit. Arc, I can't get a clear shot on her!" Adze sounds frustrated. She doesn't blame him, because, oh my god, seriously what is this bullshit? Anna blocks another set of Ixion's furious slashes. Defensive work here is only going to get her so far, but one solid hit from Ixion, and she's down.
"Get the others!" she growls.
The other woman smiles, all teeth and promising pain. "How noble."
"Yeah, well, that's me all over," she hisses, kicking out to break her stance. Ixion dances back neatly, then leaps forward. Anna ducks and stabs one knife up, catching Ixion's wrist and jamming the joint. Ixion drops the knives as a reflex, but recovers and twists in midair, catching the offending knife and tearing it out of Anna's grip and sending it skittering across the floor.
"You're going to pay for that." Ixion clenches her sparking hand.
"Promises, promises." Dammit, Anna's got one knife to Ixion's four, and she still needs to plant the corm.
"Shit! Arc! I lost the last one! He's headed your way!" Of course he is.
Her hand goes for the pistol anyway. Ixion tries a leap again, but Anna's ready for her and snaps her foot out, catching the woman under the chin and flipping her away.
Maybe it's luck. Maybe it's some kind of battle awareness. Maybe divine providence. Whatever it is, Anna feels the hairs on the back of her neck raise, turns her head around, and finds herself staring down the barrel of the seventh's gun. She brings her pistol up, snaps off a shot that hits him square in the chest. He starts to fall, but even here, she can see his finger pulling the trigger.
Until his hand is blown off by a well-placed sniper bullet. Steady hands, said Doc. Shit, she wasn't kidding.
Anna pulls the trigger a second time, putting a neat hole into the last man's skull. And then she's knocked off-balance as Ixion's recovered and leaps again. She barely blocks the wild slash at her throat, but doesn't manage to keep her pistol from flying out of her hand. Ixion's eyes are wild and her teeth are bared as she comes in for another attack.
"Arc, now!"
Anna reaches up, slaps the crom on the exposed metal arm, and braces herself.
The attack never comes.
There's a snarl over the comm, and Ixion's free hand is wrapped around her own throat, sparking and choking her. The woman's eyes are wide, desperate and scared as her own cybernetics turn against her. They widen even further as the hand with the knives jab closer, spearing her through the heart and driving in deep. There's a loud popping sound, and then the smell of cooked meat permeates the air as smoke rises from the arms.
Ixion falls backwards and does not move.
Holy shit. Elsa did...Anna had no idea the corms could do that. But somehow, she knows that now is not the time to bring it up.
"You okay?" Right, Adze still sees her on the floor.
"Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. Just coming down from the fight. You know. Whew." Anna lets herself laugh a little and picks herself up. "Hey Adze, nice shot. I owe you one," she says, gathering her fallen knife and pistol.
"Not a problem. I mean, you had the hard part. We're all clear. Rime, you see anyone else?"
"...no. You're clear. Go grab the package and let's get out of here."
Anna bites her tongue but goes towards the container marked RA43-56. She glances over some of the other things in the warehouse, to distract herself from the body cooling in the middle of the floor. It's a lot of building material, light-weight but durable stuff. She recognizes it from one of Papa's binders full of architectural designs. He had always been interested in using that sort of stuff.
It's not important right now. Mama and Papa are dead, and she's got more important things to do than wander down memory lane. Like finding whatever she just risked her neck for. She pokes her head into the container. Thankfully, in the pile of building material, there is a very obvious metal briefcase. "Got it," she says as she grabs it. "Let's go."
Adze is waiting for her by the door, rifle and rope hanging over his shoulder. "This is it?" He sounds grumpy. She doesn't blame him.
"I hope it holds the secrets of the universe or something, because that was bullshit."
"Yeah, no kidding." His lips quirk up in a small smile. He should do that more. It looks good on him.
"Any time today."
Anna shakes her head to clear it. "Right!" She pushes open the doors and steps back out into the night...and stares a little.
Sven is waiting for them, sitting on top of the body of a Green Street Boy. The body twitches a little. Sven barks and wags his tail.
"I told you he could do it."