The city was in uproar, and he didn't know why. People screaming and sirens wailing in the distance, the occasional muffled explosion, the screeching of rubber tires clawing at pavement.
Echoing in his mind, the distress call was played over and over. He found out how to change the channel on the radio that his mind was apparently linked to now, and he set it to listen to her. Over and over, echoing in his mind to keep him focused on what he had to do.
The car wasn't his, and he didn't care for it either. He left it parked on the side of the road, key in hand, and stepped up to the seedy looking bar that was at the bottom of the building he parked next to.
The city looked different. It was filled with neon lights even during the day, and archways that filled the skyline and connected towering corporate obelisks together overhead. Massive complexes that allowed those beavershits to loom over the neo-serfs. Hundreds of AVs flew about through the towers and overhead bridges, more than he had ever seen in one place before but common in the modern day.
Banners of holographic advertisements on every building and floating through the sky, Maglev trains rushing along their silent tracks, and a hint of red on the horizon that he didn't remember.
The heights of Night City were completely different. Where he was standing looked the exact same though. Concrete roads that were worn down and coated in a fine layer of fluids and garbage. Old flickering signs and wary looks from alley dwellers around him.
New tech, old problems.
He kicked down the door leading into the bar. Just as he did so, a gunshot rang out. He noticed it, and twisted to the side, letting a burst of pellets fly past him and into the street. Twelve pellets total, he could count them as they passed.
How did he do that? His speedware wasn't activated…
It didn't matter.
He stayed still and let his glare sweep the room, looking at the tense inhabitants. All of them had some type of gun out and pointed at him, lots of them had fancy little lights glowing on them. Probably the newest trend in looking good these days.
Alt needed him. She was captured by Maelstrom. He was familiar with Maelstrom from back in the day, Relative small-timers then hung out in an abandoned building on the west side of town. He didn't know where they were right now, and he needed to find out.
Best way to do that was to ask. A bar like this? The best way to ask was direct, blunt, and with an incentive or two.
He held up the keys to his temporary car and announced loudly to the bar and its inhabitants.
"I'm new in town." He told a technical lie. He didn't know what the city looked like anymore. "I'm looking for Maelstrom, they took something from me, and I'm going to take it back."
"Hah!" A bar goer with a submachine gun laughed. "What? They take a fancy new implant you were going to chip in? You're looking mighty borged up already, choom!" There were grumbles of agreement from the bar-goers, of course, they didn't answer his question. He glared at the assembled and shook his keys.
"Whoever tells me where I can find them gets my ride out there."
That got their attention, a few of the lowlives straightened their backs to look outside at the shiny new armored car, and their eyes began to shine with a little greed.
"They're up in Watson, north of the city center, now pay on up chrome-dome." A bulky looking guy spoke up, grubbing hand out and grabbing at air. He turned his glare over to him.
"You got a map?"
"Wasn't part of the deal boy."
"You want the fucking car or not?"
Another man, a reedy looking guy with three eyes, tossed a tablet his way. Catching it without looking away from the first guy, he glanced down and saw that it had a labeled map of NC pulled up on the screen. He nodded and tossed the keys to the second guy, and began to walk out.
The click of a gun alerted him. He activated his sandevistan and turned around to see the first man angrily pointing his gun at him.
Fucking drunks, wasting his goddamn time with this. He needed to make sure they wouldn't follow him now.
He walked over and behind the man, letting the holster on his thigh open up and pulling out his new iron.
He deactivated his sandevistan and let the man realize that a gun barrel was pressing up against the back of his head. The man froze, as did most of the bar-goers.
"You consider yourself a gambling man?" Silverhand asked coldly. "Must be, with how quick you played a losing hand right there."
"...I-I don't want any trouble." The now very nervous man spoke. He must have realized that Silverhand had a solid six inches on him, and a much bigger handgun.
"Strip." There was a pause in the room.
"W-Wha-?"
"Your clothes and gun. They're mine now. Unless you want to gamble again." He kept his voice low and straight as he talked. He needed to make sure none of them would follow him. The best way to do that was to utterly humiliate one of them, it would give the rest something to laugh about.
Five minutes later, in a new set of leathers and with a backup gun, Silverhand walked out of the bar and away from the man reduced to his undergarments. Checking his new mini-tablet again, he nodded before putting it away in his new trench-coat pocket.
Man had a little walkman on him, a more portable boombox or something like that. He pressed play to have something to listen to on the road, before letting it sit in his inner-jacket pocket. Then he began to run, slowly at first, but moving faster and faster. He wasn't getting winded anymore, so a full-sprint wouldn't hold him back when he got there.
"I am in so much trouble
Busted, arrested, guilty
Oh you got me
Again."
He frowned as he heard the song start playing. It wasn't his kind of music, he made a note to throw the thing out the next time he had to stop.
It was only after he began to overtake some of the cars on the road when he realized just how fast he could move now. His boots smashed against the pavement and propelled him almost as fast as the car did.
Good. Alt needed him.
The sirens increased in volume, as did the gunshots and screams, as he approached the north. Soon enough he began to spot police cars zooming to some location he couldn't spot in the distance.
The cityline cleared, and he saw a blockade erected on both ends of a bridge in front of him. He stomped on the ground to slide to a stop, and glared at it for a moment. He moved to the left of it, towards the edge of the city and looked across.
This was the shoreline in between the mainland and Watson according to the map. Watson wasn't a thing back in his day, that area was called North Oak back then. They must have changed it for some reason.
His gaze searched for an alternative entrance, but all he could see was the ruins of bridges along the channel of water to his left. To his right, a hundred meters or more, was the police blockade and their active shootout with people he couldn't see from here. They were specifically preventing anyone from getting near the… supports? Someone was attacking the bridges then. He checked his map again. The tablet was off.
He glared at it and rotated it in his hand, pressing buttons on the side until the screen lit up again. It was asking for a password.
…He didn't know the password. He chucked it off to the side and rolled his joints.
Only one way to his destination, and that was right through. He began to run as fast as he could, activating his sandevistan just as they noticed and pointed at him.
Right before he reached their lines, he moved to jump over the hood of a car.
It was immensely surprising to find himself rocketed into the air, far above his initial goal of just going over the car. He almost panicked, but clamped down on it enough to land and roll with the impact, throwing himself up immediately to keep running. That one jump had taken him nearly halfway across the bridge.
He didn't know how long this new sandy would last, so he just prepared for it to go out at any moment.
Sprinting past the temporary fortifications of the police lines, he approached the other end of their shootout, and jumped again, now prepared for how far he would go.
…or so he thought, as he smashed through the wall of a building on the other side of the road and rolled to a crash on the interior wall of some club. He shook himself off and pushed up, not really damaged by the sudden impact.
His instincts flared, and he stepped forwards once to dodge a shot aimed for his head. Spinning around and grabbing the hand holding the gun, he forced it up and away from himself.
It was the hands of some scantily-clad woman with tattoos and brightly colored hair. He glared down for a moment, before glancing around the room.
He quickly realized he had broken through the second floor of a stripclub, judging from how the booths up here were laid out, and the numerous women pointing guns at him. It felt a little nostalgic, but he quickly clamped down on it. He wasn't here to feel, he was here to save Alt.
Her words echoed on his internal radio again.
"I need info. Maelstrom took something from me. Where's the nearest fixer?" He could bargain for some accurate information from one. If negotiations failed, he'd simply kill them and then start looking for himself again.
There was a moment of confusion. The woman whose gun he was holding started kicking at him ineffectually. He ignored it and glared around the room.
A woman from the side yelled out. "You think some rockerboy-poser can crash through our fucking wall and demand answers from the fucking Mox? You don't know shit about how Night City works gonkfucker!"
He turned his glare to the woman who shouted that, and raised one leg. These things were powerful enough to send him flying, they must be strong enough to make a point.
He stomped on the ground as hard as he could. The entire floor cracked in spiderwebs, and the room shook. The lights flickered, and dust fell from the roof like light snow. Judging from the suddenly very nervous expressions and tightened grips on their guns, they all felt it too. The woman he was holding stopped kicking at him immediately, freezing on the spot.
Another woman spoke up, looking just sly enough for him to be suspicious. "Best fixer in Night City is just south of here, in a bar named Afterlife. It's built into an old morgue, you can't miss it."
That was good enough for him.
He let go of the woman's gun and walked back to the hole he made in the wall, ignoring their shouting and weapons. Looking down for a moment, he saw nothing below him, so he jumped down to crash against the concrete. It cracked under his weight, but his legs flexed with the impact and left him underharmed.
Aiming his gaze south, and ignoring the police taking potshots at him, he started to run again.
There was open violence everywhere around him as he ran. He ignored it, they didn't matter to him. He just kept running until he reached the shore again. Narrowing his eyes, he searched around for any signs of his destination.
Not finding any, he activated his sandevistan and raced to the nearest fight.
One chromed up dude with a bunch of eyes brawling with a few in leather jackets. Judging from how the dude glanced over at him and immediately started moving to fire at him, he was probably hostile.
The ganger wasn't faster than him though. He pulled out his new handgun, and aimed a shot from the hip.
"Boom." Silverhand said. His finger squeezed the trigger.
"Boom." said the gun. His hand jerked back from the recoil.
The boosterganger turned into red rain and scrap hail as his upper half disappeared. Behind him, the wall of the building exploded into rubble and had a meter-wide hole open up. This continued through the next wall, and the wall after that. He could see the sunlight on the other side of the brand new windows his gun helped install.
He deactivated his speedware, and stared at the people now shouting curses and hiding behind cover.
"I'm looking for a bar called Afterlife. Where is it?" He spoke, loudly, firmly.
These people, proving that they were polite enough to immediately give him what he wanted, immediately spoke up.
"D-down the block and through the alley on the right, it's underground!" One of them yelled in a panic. He nodded and ran off in that direction.
He found the stairs leading down quickly enough, taking note of the bodies of a beefy dude and two boostergangers outside, and started walking. He could hear violence inside, and frowned. Guess he was going to have to kill something else to get the fixer to talk.
There was a really annoying screaming noise going on, like binary or machine code or something. He drowned it out with Alt's message, focusing on it.
He calmly stepped through the doorway, activating his speedware as he did. The walkman changed to a new song. Another song that he wasn't a particular fan of.
"Thought we were about to get serious
You know me and you
I didn't know you were making love at another place too."
There were two corpses of metal and meat, and two living, screaming gangers of metal and meat. They looked worse than even Smasher did back in 2020, a twisted mess of wires and metal. If they weren't cyberpsychos, he'd be fucking surprised.
Judging from how everyone seemed to be shooting at them, he decided that they probably weren't the fixer he was looking for. He'd have to be careful to not destroy the walls in here, so that meant no big gun for right now.
He drew that monokatana and stepped forwards, moving around the bullets that crawled through the air. The first booster turned to look at him, but not fast enough to really do anything.
"Chop." Silverhand said. His arm swung as hard as it could.
"Chop." said the sword. It passed through the booster with little resistance.
He took a few steps, and repeated the process on the second booster. Afterwards, he deactivated his speedware, and started wiping the blade off on his new jacket. It was covered in oil and blood, he needed to get that off before putting it away.
Behind him, the gunfire slowly came to a stop as the corpses of the two psychos collapsed in bisected halves. He kept working on his fancy new sword, the coat wasn't a very good rag.
Once it was clean, it sheathed it again and turned around, letting the bar see his face. Letting them see his glare.
"I heard the best fixer in Night City hangs here. I need info."
"W-who the fuck do you think you are!" A familiar voice rang out.
He almost jumped in recognition, and turned to the bar to look at the source of the voice.
Rogue and Johnny locked eyes. His breath caught in his throat, although he no longer needed to breathe.
"...Rache..?" He muttered in surprise.
She shouted at him, looking just as beautiful when mad as she always used to. "How the fuck do you know that name you goddamn poser! You think you can walk in here with that fucking face and…" He tuned her out, just staring for a moment to make sure it was her.
Her hair was a light gray, her face just slightly aged, her fashion a tad more conservative, but it was her without question. She had survived all these years…
He was about to say something, he wasn't sure what.
Alt's cry for help repeated on his internal radio.
Silverhand's optics focused into a determined glare, and he cut right through whatever she was saying. "I need a map of Maelstrom territory. They die tonight."
She paused in baffled rage. She blinked once and was about to shout something else at him. He ignored it.
"The radio. Switch to Alt's channel." He demanded.
She froze. Her eyes raced over his form once, twice, before she muttered in almost fearful realization. "...You're not a poser, are you…?"
"The radio!" Silverhand repeated himself, emphasizing his demand. Her face lost its nervous tension and sharpened into a beautiful, angry glare again.
"Everyone keep your irons pointed at this fucker. If he makes a move, flatline him." She ordered, and all the still-living bar-goers fixed their aims at him again. She moved over to the radio near the bar, and adjusted the frequency a few times.
A voice echoed both his internal radio and the external radio.
[…tured. Maelstrom.]
Rogue froze as she listened to a familiar voice. The entire bar stayed silent to listen to what was going on. The voice eventually repeated again, this time in full.
[Help Me. Captured. Maelstrom.]