"You kept my car." It was a plain statement, giving nothing away with inflection. A simple observation to fill the awkward quiet that took hold after the message was delivered. He stared at the Porsche 911 Classic parked inside the shipping crate, now woefully out of date for whatever the modern style of vehicles were, but painfully familiar to him.
He walked over and laid a hand on it, opening up the hood and prying up the trunk cover to make sure the engine was still good. He didn't know much about cars, but he knew how to take care of his baby well enough. The inside had none of the expected wear or rust from fifty odd years since he drove it, not exactly polished but still completely functional.
He kept going through the motions of checking his ride as Rogue replied.
"No. Adam Smasher gave it to me a few weeks ago." She sounded angry, provocative, challenging him to say something that would distract him from his mission. He didn't rise to her bullshit.
He paused at that, and glared down into the engine. "Smasher had my baby?"
"Your gun too, it's in the glovebox." He walked over to pop open the door and check. Sure enough, his old Malorian 3516 was in the glovebox, and a box of extra ammo on the floorboard. He took it out and tucked it into his right side leg-holster through the torn pockets of his pilfered jeans.
"Why the fuck would Adam Smasher give you my shit?" He could understand why the big metal gonker might keep his shit, little trophies of the Legends he's killed, Smasher seemed like that kind of guy.
"He said he was cleaning out his storage, found them, and decided I wanted anything to do with them." She growled out at him, and he almost growled right back. He was restrained by his current need to have Rogue give him info.
Her answer didn't tell him what he wanted to know. Why the fuck did Adam Smasher give it to her specifically? That made no fucking sense unless…
He clenched a chrome fist.
…He didn't give a shit about this. Rogue might be working with 'Saka these days. He didn't care about them right now. Alt needed him, that's all that mattered. He was about to leave it at that before Rogue decided to speak up again.
"Not going to ask why the fuck Adam Smasher is giving me shit?" She slammed the hood of his baby down and glared at him. She was clearly trying to piss him off and it was working.
"I don't care." He simply replied, walking around the back of the car to open the driver's side door and settling in. He ignored her for a moment and looked for the keys.
He noticed very quickly that there were no keys. He turned his glare up to Rogue, watching her give a small flinch at his sudden movement.
"The keys." He ground out.
"Do you even give a shit about me!" She yelled out, to which he finally lost his patience. Throwing open the door to his car and standing up, he smacked a silver hand on the roof and yelled back.
"I don't have time for this fucking drama! Alt needs me! Pull this bullshit later and stop wasting both of our fucking times with it!"
She glared at him, breathing heavily and face flushed in fury. He could hear her teeth grinding, but maintained his glare at the woman who seemed content to prioritize garbage like this.
She suddenly stopped, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. Fists clenched on the hood of his car, she looked away from him for a moment.
She then turned completely away and called out. "Boys! Grab the heavy guns and load up!". Not looking at him, she walked over to the passenger side and got in. He kept up his glare, she explained her actions icily.
"You're a dumbass who will get yourself and Alt killed if you go in alone. I don't give a shit about you, but Alt's a good woman." Her face scrunched up and she pointedly didn't look at him. "She deserves better than this, better than you."
He really didn't care what she had to say anymore. "The keys." He ground out again, hand held up. She handed them over, pulling them out of her front jacket pocket, careful to not touch his hand with her own.
"Pull to the side, give the boys a few minutes to load up." She demanded. He audibly growled at this, but she spoke again before he could express his frustration with being ordered.
"Alt's lasted this long, she'll last a few moments longer. What do you want more, to wait a little longer to see her, or to die right as you get there?!"
He ignored her, starting up the car, hearing it purr, and pulled over to the side that she designated. Two dumb looking guys came out the side-door with two heavy looking guns and a couple boxes of ammo. Popping the trunk to let them load it, there was a minute or two of tense silence in the car.
There was a faint sense of regret in his mind. The moment he noticed it, he crushed it as low as it could go. He wasn't here to make amends for his past actions, he was here to save Alt and burn a city down.
Rogue would get out before the fires got her, she was a smart woman, and the best in the business in a gunfight. She'd be fine.
She didn't need him around, they brought out the worst in one another. They both knew that.
So why the fuck was she wasting her time?
He kept his hands on the steering wheel, and optics straight ahead, waiting to get the clear to move on. The back doors opened up eventually, and the two gonks with dumb looking haircuts got in carrying good sized machine guns and vests covered in grenades.
If they died, they died, oh well.
He began to drive out, getting onto the main street and starting to drive.
"Straight north past the next two intersections, then drive straight east. We'll get to Maelstrom territory in a few minutes." Rogue spoke, he nodded in confirmation.
Slowly teasing his baby for a moment, he began to accelerate, ignoring the gunfights going on around him. A few minutes? He'd make that two minutes, tops.
Zooming forwards, he saw the police blockade to his right. They weren't taking potshots at him this time.
"I gave them a call, they won't stop us so long as you don't do something stupid." Rogue explained, noticing his glance.
"Lawman contacts? You a fixer now or something?" He asked idly, shifting gears and swerving around a pothole at close to eighty miles per hour. His tires screaming at him as he twisted around potential slowdowns on the road.
"Queen of Afterlife. Best goddamn fixer in Night City." She snapped at him.
"Not content just being the best solo around huh?" He drifted around the intersection corner at ninety-five miles per hour, letting his baby twist into a 360 to prevent a flip and straightening out into a clean shot down the road. About a mile or two down, he could see the start of crude fortifications and tire spikes…
…how was his vision this good?
It didn't matter.
Rogue didn't respond after that, letting him focus entirely on driving. He narrowed his gaze and carefully considered his approach into what he could now see as guns pointed down from the windows.
He lied. He didn't need to consider it at all.
He drifted into a second 360 to bleed off momentum safely and drove on the north road he was just passing. He had a good feeling about this.
Namely, the road was much wider, clearly meant for industrial shipping, and thus much harder for anyone to block off with spikes and firing lines. It twisted back east again too, still taking him where he wanted to go. He swerved around an RPG that was fired at him from a rooftop.
"Where are they holed up in?" He demanded as he shifted gears and built up speed again. He bounced the car off the curb to get over the roadspikes with tires intact.
"Allfoods, old abandoned nutrient factory. Strommers all have more than two optics." Rogue replied, tightly gripping the car to prevent being thrown about by his (very skilled, thank you very much) driving.
"All of you have speedware?" They better, otherwise they'd be deadweight. He accelerated through a shitty barrier of scrap metal, snapping the welds on the rusted plates and barrelling through.
A round of confirmations came from the three in his car, so he sped up even more. He turned a particularly brave fucker into red mist.
Most deadly thing on the streets was never a borg, or an ACPA, or anything like that. The most deadly thing on the streets was a car moving very fast. He turned on the windshield wipers.
Spotting the dilapidated sign over the factory two miles away, he pressed the gas to the floorboard straight at it. He really didn't need this car anymore, it would serve him better like this. Sorry baby, mind helping daddy out one last time?
His baby roared in affirmation.
Subtly twisting and weaving his approach to make all those guns aimed at him bounce off the armored hull of the car instead of his tires or windows, he pushed his baby as fast as it could go down the two mile stretch.
The max speed of the Porsche 911 Classic was around 195 miles per hour. It weighed around 2300 pounds unloaded, and was currently filled with ammo and explosives in the front-mounted trunk space.
He aimed his baby at a curb right outside the target factory, and shouted.
"Now!"
The inhabitants of his car activated their speedware, and comparatively calmly they hopped out of the suddenly very slow car. The three of them did some sort of strange crouching stance, not behind cover, but rather in an open space of the road.
Not having time to ponder this much, he deactivated his speedware.
A 1.15 ton bullet traveling at nearly 200 miles per hour turned the front of the building into shattered rubble. He had no time to appreciate it however, as he suddenly realized that he wasn't braced to bleed off the momentum of the ride at all.
A second bullet, this one only weighing around 350 pounds, followed the first closely, flying through the hole and tumbling through the air as his foot clipped something.
He spun, unable to control his flight through the air, and crashing into something very solid and very hot to the touch. He couldn't see, couldn't hear, his whole world was pain.
Alt's cry for help echoed in his mind.
His optics burned with static, coming back online very quickly as he was distracted by white static- pain, it was pain. Activating his pain editor, all of it rushed away, replaced by cool nothing as he threw himself up and behind the nearest cover, a large metal basin on his left.
There was someone here already. The multiple optics told him all he needed to know.
Pulling out his Malorian as the strommer stumbled with his own weapon, he took aim within the same fraction of a second that it took for him to leap from where he crashed.
"Bang, bang." He whispered. His finger twitched twice.
"Bang, bang." Said his friend. His arm compensated for the recoil without any trouble.
The strommer had two fresh new holes opened in his head and torso as he dropped to the ground. Silverhand threw his gaze around the inside of the factory, trying to get his bearings.
That was his plan. That plan was quickly aborted as his instincts screamed at him to move. He threw himself to the side as bullets began to scream out, turning where he just was into swiss cheese. He turned to see what had fired at him, only to be forced to dodge again.
He jumped up, legs propelling him into the air and away from the screaming chrome junkie, limbs making a good impression of a blender and body only vaguely human.
He was forced to put up an arm to defend himself from the burst of bullets that came for him from just about every shadow in the massive factory.
This was a poor situation. It was made better by his sandevistan cycling again, he activated it immediately.
The bullets slowed to a crawl around him, surrounding him like a swarm of angry brass bees. Glancing around as quickly as he could, he saw that the front side of the factory was open to the outside, and that Rogue and those three were hunkered down and firing at anything coming for them.
That wasn't much, because he was taking up most of the attention. Dozens of almost-human shapes filled the factory around him, a few dozen now smears and scrap from his baby crashing through the wall and turning a swathe of them into red paint.
That still left a few dozen strommers, each with guns that he would have struggled to lift while alive, each with more eyes than a person should have, each tracking him better than they normally would be able to.
They all had kerenzikovs or sandevistans. Every one of them. He was suspended in the air, surrounded by bullets the size of his pinky, with very little ways to defend himself.
C'mon Silverhand! Think! How the fuck are you going to get out of this situation? He didn't have anything that could move him…
He paused, then scanned around for the biggest mass of strommers he could find.
His left thigh-holster opened up.
His hand grabbed his new iron, three bullets still inside the four-shot revolver design. He had two more reloads worth of bullets left outside of this. He'd make them count.
He aimed for the largest mass of strommers.
"Boom." Silverhand declared. His finger pulled the trigger.
"Boom." Said the Gun.
Nine strommers were turned into blood and oil. A truck-sized cone of concrete shrapnel exploded out from the floor behind them. Even in the slowed time of the sandevistan, it was nearly instantaneous.
His sandevistan deactivated.
He was thrown back harshly, away from the swarm of bullets, crashing against the far wall almost to the ceiling. His pain editors currently on, he felt very little of this impact.
Letting himself slide down, he saw two strommers having already turned to keep firing at him. They were behind an improvised fortification, good enough for him.
"Bang, bang." He and his Malorian spoke in unison. The two strommers collapsed, one after the other, as their heads and upper torsos were punched right through with a nice, big bullet.
He landed on their corpses, crouching behind the cover for a moment and waiting for his speedware to refresh again. He was faster than them when it was active, those were the windows of opportunity he had to use to kill them.
He stayed crouched, and waited with his guns pointed in either direction. The first thing he hears, he's firing at.
The scream of gunfire echoed over his head, bringing back memories of hot, muggy trenches. His arms were smaller, and made of flesh and bone. His helmet didn't quite fit over his head. His legs were shaking with nerves.
His eyes unfocused for a moment…
Alt's cry for help echoed on his radio again.
He snarled and forced himself back into reality. He shot twice with his Malorian and turned a strommer who ran up on him into a corpse. He smashed the memories down. He could deal with them later, Alt needed him now.
His sandevistan cycled.
He holstered his Malorian, and drew his new sword as he activated his speedware again.
Kicking off the ground, and then again off the wall he was near, he threw himself down into the crowd of strommers trying to come up the stairs. This wasn't time for restraint or skillful swordplay, so he didn't bother with either.
He just started swinging, and let the sword do the rest.
A limb. A head. A torso. A few tentacles of chrome. Another sword. A club. A gun. Another gun.
He hacked his way through the mass of strommers, pushing and tackling them aside when their corpses didn't get out of his way fast enough. When he reached the bottom, he kicked off the stairs and forwards again.
That looked like a mighty large mass of strommers huh?
He raised the Gun, took aim, and pulled the trigger.
"Boom." Said the Gun.
Another seven strommers suddenly learned that their limbs were filing restraining orders. This caused such immense heartbreak that their internal organs ceased to exist. The wall behind it turned into open air. The building shook with the impact.
One bullet left before he needed to reload, he'd save it for when he needed it again.
There was a sudden lull in the combat as the remaining strommers hid behind cover. He could hear them reloading all around him. He took this chance to talk.
"You have Alt. Give her back." He demanded, glaring at everything that took a peak at him.
There was a hush in the factory, even as the sound of bullets continued outside from Rogue's defensive point. Good, they should stay right there and not inside the factory.
A dull boom of metal crashing on metal. He looked to the far wall, behind the heaviest fortifications.
A second boom, he turned fully to face it.
A third boom, and a cellar door behind the fortifications was thrown open. A giant of metal stepped out.
Almost nine feet and probably a ton of metal stepped out. Its steps cracked the ground as it slowly rose from the apparent basement level. Rusted plates welded over the top of more plates, all covering a crudely humanoid form like a parody of an armored knight.
In one hand, a massive hammer was clutched. In the other, an equally massive and crude slab of metal. Like the walls of a train cart, cut out, and strapped to a giant's arm.
From its face, nine red optics glared down through a transparent visor.
"Well, well, well…"
A completely inhuman voice came from the armored giant. It sounded like an avalanche, a mass of stones grinding against one another.
"I wasn't expecting Johnny Silverhand to come back from the grave. Much less with a respectable level of chrome in him."
He decided that, quite frankly, he didn't care about whatever this gonk had to say.
"Alt. Now. Before I flatline your entire gang."
The armored giant paused, before chuckling briefly.
"Sorry to say, Silverhand. I need her for a little while longer. You can have her back when me and my boys are done."
"Boom." Said the Gun.
The armored giant's shield turned into scrap, along with a good chunk of its upper arm, and the wall behind it. It staggered back and crashed against the fortifications.
Silverhand's optics burned orange.