TULELAKE
FREE_STATE_OF_NORTHERN_CALIFORNIA
A shimmering haze blanketed the xeric shrubland, where a basin of dirt-colored vegetation crackled in the sparse wind, the faint outlines of ancient mountains to the north. To the south, the poison deserts of the valley, where the land was baked until it had broken in wide fissures. A sea of emptiness, sound serenely carried upon given voice. A land where ancestral humans had fought and bled in the name of their vain hopes.
Heat distortion warbled the horizon, where the ground ever so gently began to slope up. Two hours from one side of the plain to the other, as the crow flies. Compressed motes of pressure soured the glint of the sun. Dust in the air, speckling like diamonds.
The Extremaduran had picked this spot for a reason. He had been picking it for years. This place had been a national park once, but collective interest in such outdoor pursuits had been thoroughly stamped out, even before the Time of the Red, except for niche extremists who wished to explore all corners of the physical continents in a manner the Net could not provide them with. The closest town, or the nearest thing that approximated a town, was a good hour's drive away and was full of people that took great pleasure in minding their own business. The corps had no sites in this vicinity either—poor farmland, so there was nothing to grow after decades of extreme drought. And since there were no corps, there was no police presence. No Net connectivity, either.
Out here, one could do as they pleased.
He was leaning into the forty-year-old truck through the passenger door that he had driven out here, in the middle of nowhere. He wore a thick bomber jacket and gloves. A disassembled automatic pistol lay on the velour seat. Calmly, he began slotting in the various parts, connecting the spring to the central block, and ensuring the mechanism slotted nicely against the barrel. He then gently set the contraption into the metallic frame and slotted it into the polymer receiver. He then reached out, grabbed a magazine, tapped it against the dashboard of the truck, then fed it into the weapon, priming a shot by pulling the slide back and letting it snap into place with a ferocious clang of steel.
Every so often, the Extremaduran's eyes swept the horizon. The land around him was gnarled, marred by jagged craters. The occasional dead pine burst through the distressed ground, white branches stretched out like a skeleton's. The volcanic field had been formed thousands of years ago, the basalt rocks dark and rough. Lava had once stretched through here from the many cones that now dotted the landscape in the distance, burning everything in sight before solidifying into the long taluses of flatland, flattened tongues of black acrylic.
He turned away from the truck, slammed the door shut, and walked down the trail that led away from the dirt road, pistol clenched in a hand. He kept walking even after the trail disappeared beneath his feet. The landscape was more varied here, with buttes of old lava tubes mounding against the deepening sky, ridges of fault breaks creating low walls of cracked earth.
His captive was where he had left him, bare-chested, trussed up on his knees, his limbs tightly bound, perched on the precipice of a massive pit full of razor-sharp rocks at least twenty meters down, the result of a cave-in upon one of the many lava tubes that ran throughout the valley. The captive was a Voodoo Boy—if the neural implant at his neck was not the only giveaway, then the tattoos of skulls and other profane imagery like dissected organs encrusting his dark skin certainly were, some of the symbolism entwining around the raised lines where dermal implants shunted like highways.
The Voodoo Boy coughed, red bubbles bursting from a ruined lung. His chest was had been stained from the blood that dripped from his wounds. The Extremaduran had to get creative in getting the captive to be even slightly cooperative. The Voodoo Boy's face had been damaged so much that one side had completely puffed up, swelling an eye shut. Old blood crusted his cheek and mouth.
"Mon… please…" the captive begged, hearing the Extremaduran approach, his Haitian Creole accent thick. He shook his head, his dreadlocks swinging like a languid metronome. "De… De tracker. Thought we had it clear. Didn't know… didn't know NetWatch was watching datafort. Blackwall… I had to see what was behind. I had to see…"
The Extremaduran was only partially listening. He simply stood before the Voodoo Boy, his hands folded in front of him, one still gripping the pistol. The captive had been pleading the entire drive up from Night City. He had paid him little mind back then, too.
Spitting a gob of red onto the ground, the Voodoo Boy looked up at his captor. "I-I leave town, mon. Swear to god. Disappear. Yes, will disappear. You… you see! I can do it! Never interface again!"
Whatever the Voodoo Boy had done to earn the wrath of those that were far more important than him, the Extremaduran would never know. His terms to his clients were simple: give him a name and a price, they'll get a result. Context not required.
"—maybe I can pay. Celebrate job well done! No one ever need know. It was Brigitte—she made—"
The Extremaduran flicked his eyes briefly to the Voodoo Boy's face, maintaining eye contact for just a second. Enough to determine his shining expression, tears mixed with blood as they rolled down his face, clotting wounds on his chest performed by a slashing weapon, and burn marks around the metallic neural interface port.
The Voodoo Boy kept on coming up with an impressive array of excuses. He was blackmailed into doing it. His sister was in the hospital and needed money for an operation. He was just an idiot and didn't know any better. The Extremaduran had heard every one from the people that had come before. They all said the same thing.
It never resulted in the outcome they wanted.
The Extremaduran preferred to wait until the excuses had burned out, when the pleas finally stopped, the hope having run dry, so that he could see that final spark in those eyes flicker before extinguishing into nothingness like the last gasps of a dying candle. Work brought so very few pleasures these days.
He was waiting for that moment, concentrating on it, that he nearly missed out on the fact that he had received a text in the lower left portion of his HUD. From his usual client, oddly enough.
Without a sound, he turned away, opening the message with a thought, leaving the Voodoo Boy to splutter at his back. The header of the text simply read: URGENT – STOLEN PROPERTY. A list of details, locations, and timestamps had been provided.
The Extremaduran read the message twice, committed it to memory, and closed it. He looked down the way he had traveled, where his truck sat in the distance, illuminated by the evening sun, the floodplains parched and brown beyond, stretching out to a country once lauded in the fables of the cattlemen that had called this place home. Quiet as a tomb.
He looked down and flipped the pistol's safety off. He pulled the slide back a quarter of an inch, exposing the briefest gleam of brass. He then let the slide spring back into place.
When he turned back around to face the Voodoo Boy, the man was still pleading for his life. "I mean you no disrespec'—dis all I knew how to do. Dere are others. Others who've done worse. I can give them to—"
The Extremaduran raised the pistol, already looking down the sights. He shot the Voodoo Boy once in the chest, then in the head. The shots from the pistol wafted loudly and lingered long over the lava field.
The .45 slugs snapped the body back, over the lip of the cliff, and into the open air, dark ropes flinging from where the bullets struck. There was a faint thump as the Voodoo Boy landed among the rocks below.
Blood marked the spot where the ex-gang member had been squatting. The Extremaduran just scuffed dirt over it. He peered over the lip of the crater—the body was lying amidst a tangle of boulders, arms at awkward angles, the bones having burst through the skin. The Extremaduran stood there for a minute, waiting to see if the body twitched. When that passed, he shoved the gun into his holster, and headed back to his truck, ready to begin the long drive back to Night City.
JAPANTOWN
The cooling day revealed the groaning steel noises from the streets. Sounds of commuters desperately trying to withstand the snarls of traffic, the bridge and tunnel crowd. The lowing of horns from ships down in the river. The city never died at night, nor did it come alive. It was just another stage, another face for it to wear. [1]
Ramses stood in the loping shadows of twilight, looking down on the streets below as they became more and more lit from the lamps that lined them. He was standing on the twenty-first floor of a skyscraper currently under construction in Japantown. None of the floors had been finished yet. The one he was on was frightfully bare—there were no windows to protect against the savage coastal wind that ruffled his coat, the floors were caked with dirt in the pattern of work boots, and plastic sheeting lay draped over pallets of plywood as if they were to remain indefinitely disused. According to the streetlevel signage, this was supposed to be a high-rise exclusively for affordable housing. However, the planned completion date had come and gone several times over its premature lifecycle. Lack of both funds and any city support. What a surprise.
He had taken the exterior construction elevator to get up here, a cramped and rickety thing with scratched coral paint. Just a skeleton security crew had been monitoring the site. Easy enough for him to jump the fence thanks to parking a boxtruck alongside the barbed wire boundary. No one was patrolling the actual building, though Ramses had left motion trackers around the area just in case someone tried to get the drop on him.
A Soviet-made rifle sat on the ground next to his boots, high-caliber, the barrel pointed at an upward angle courtesy of the stand that propped it up. A half-opened bag lay next to it as well. The rifle was equipped with a five-power Militech scope that could actively target hostiles in red outlines when viewing through it. Charles Whitman could have tripled his killcount with such a thing.
From his vantage point, he was facing directly across the river, gazing down towards the large cargo lot and harbor on the opposite shore. There was a private complex there that was nestled against Republic Way and Lincoln Boulevard. Looked like a distribution facility, judging by the multiple cargo bays and the trucks parked into them. Around twenty stacks of cargo containers—ISOs—were situated to the right of the facility upon the flat asphalt. A quick search on the Net confirmed that it was indeed a distribution facility for raw materials that would be sent to Biotechnica fields to make scop for the city.
Ramses swept his gaze around the site from what he was able to see. He didn't need the sniper scope—his helmet optics viewed to the same power.
Nothing but warehouse workers milled around the area, identifiable from their hi-vi vests and blue hard hats. Interchangeable amongst all others. Wherever Michiko's target was, they were not among any of them. Not yet, at least, because according to Wakako's info, they were due to arrive on-site for some kind of deal. Tonight.
He had been monitoring the site for almost fourteen hours now, remaining on constant overwatch. Just waiting for the moment to strike, for his target to unknowingly get into his gun sights.
He brought up an image of the man he was paid to kill in the corner of his eye. Memorized the face. Triangular-shaped skull, gold loop earring, dark blue lipstick, sides of the head shaved. A Mr. Monos Cathcart. Night City junior ombudsman. Been in the position six months. Positive endorsements on his work bio. Not even a record as far as the NCPD was concerned.
So why was Michiko, the Ms. Who of all Whos, so keen on flatlining this guy?
Ramses was a professional who prided himself on doing every job by the book, never once caring why someone wanted their target dead. Now that he knew who the client was, by no fault of his own, everything had changed. There was now a nagging question that had infected his subconscious: "why?"
Why was Arasaka getting into beef with the city?
Why was he going along with a plan not of his own design?
And especially the big why concerned the young woman who was still resting and healing in his condo right now. Why. Why her?
Why, why, why, indeed.
He started to pace the perimeter, getting agitated, considering Fiona's whole existence. He passed by rows of height-adjustable tables, empty barrels for rotating concrete, pillars of rebar and more graycracked concrete, darkened yellow stalks of industrial lighting, and plastic tarp scattered aimlessly across the ground.
Fiona. When she had stared up at him in that ice bath back in that NetWatch facility, when their eyes had met, Ramses had just known he could never kill her. There had not been malice in that woman, just confusion. Not worth the iron price. He had embraced his fault, his weakness, just to let her live.
Was it truly a weakness, though? Was it even a mistake? She was not an enemy, even if everyone else was. She had just had the rotten luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, same as him. They both had deadly intentions when their paths crossed, only borne of instinct and discipline instead of taking in the full context. Fiona should not have had to pay for her unfocused attack—she had not known any better, nor did she have a choice.
Ramses wondered if anyone else would buy such an excuse had his place been swapped. Would he have been at the mercy of someone just as understanding? Or would their logic forbid empathy to the point where he would be flatlined in a heartbeat, just to satisfy the self-control they had placed upon themselves, even if they might not have understood the consequences?
Dwelling on the past. Wouldn't help anyone now. Ramses momentarily brought his gloved hands to his helmeted temples and gave a ragged hiccough.
"Fucking gonk," he told himself. "Uncharted territory. Just going to have to deal with it, whatever comes."
Still… no one deserved to spend their whole life like that. Trapped in an ice bath, netrunning until their synapses blew from overheating. What kind of a life would Fiona have had if not for him?
But why was he so quick to castigate himself over saving someone? Was this not an occasion to pride himself on? Perhaps not—a rescue op had not been the intent of his original mission. He had deviated. Improvised. Just on a mere feeling.
Feelings. Christ, he was slipping.
Thankfully ripping him away from his thoughts, his phone started to ring. Unknown number. He did not even need to guess who it was.
Despite his better instincts, he answered. "I thought I told you never to call me," he said, looking at the starless sky between the gaps in the glass skyline. Just how the hell had she gotten this number, anyway?
"I knew that you would be trying to find the angle to this job," Michiko's voice purred into his ear. She had left her avatar off, so all he could see was the Arasaka logo. "So, I decided to help ease your mind."
"I'd rather know less than I already do. If word gets out that I'm running a hit for Arasaka—"
"It won't. And you'll sleep better at night, knowing what you've done. Check your mail. Preem info at your fingertips. Thank me later."
Before Ramses could respond, Michiko ended the call, leaving him feeling oddly empty within the exposed room.
His mail icon was indicating an unopened message in his inbox, true to Michiko's word. The message was empty, save for a single attachment. It was actually a zip file of dozens of scanned documents. Each of them had the same NCPD logo stamped on the top-right. Michiko had helpfully highlighted portions of the documents that he was supposed to pay attention to.
He opened a few and organized them side-to-side. Police after-action reports—documentation of cops who had killed civilians in the line of duty. Or at least, the repeat offenders. Ramses noted many of the cops' names showing up on multiple reports. It was no secret that the NCPD had a problem with collateral damage. For every firefight that erupted in the city, there was always at least one hapless civilian that managed to get caught in the crossfire. Then there were the many instances of cops that tried to jump the curb with their cruisers while chasing down a truck full of perps, only to mow down an entire crowd of people from their overzealous stunt. Half the graves in the city could be filled from the NCPD's direct actions, and more than half of that would be from people killed unintentionally, in the line of indirect fire.
He looked at some more highlighted portions a few lines down, which were indicating case numbers. Lawsuits that linked the incidents of police abuse within the court system. Apparently, the city had been trying to take action against the cops committing the most frequent offenses against civilians. But a few lines below where each case number had been typed was the scrawl of the official that dismissed the city's efforts in their suits, one after the other, ensuring none of the officers would see their day in court, able to continue their bloodbath upon the streets, scot-free.
The same signature on each document: Monos Cathcart.
Ramses closed the files, leaving his vision clear once again. "Don't tell me you're doing this as an act of altruism, Arasaka," he murmured to himself. "The city won't care if you try to attack what it has institutionalized."
The thought was starkly hilarious. Michiko Arasaka… concerned about justice in Night City? What a naïve point of view. No doubt she had spent too much time up in that ivory tower of hers, disconnected from how life on the ground was run.
Behind-the-scenes PR, then? Arasaka creating some common ground to get into the city's good graces? Who really knew? At this point, he had so many questions that he forced himself to shut that inquisitive part of him down. Distractions, remember. Questions were just distractions.
He returned to his original position just in time to see lights smear against the wall of the facility on the other side of the river. He zoomed in.
Villefort coupe in a deep black. Cortes V5000 Valor, his readout read. Two inside—driver and passenger.
The coupe made a slow pass around the stacks of ISO containers until it found a place heavy with adumbrations that hid it from view of the dockworkers. The passenger exited, a young man in his early thirties, scrawny beard, tattooed sleeves, puffed up jacket/vest, smoking a cigarette. He put some distance between him and the car—his driver also having exited but keeping himself in proximity to the vehicle—and leaned against one of the containers as he smoked. Eyes peeled. Waiting.
Ramses scanned the man, even though he already knew he wasn't his target. Werner Hoska. If he had a streethandle, nothing was coming up. Nothing except parking tickets in the NCPD's database. But Ramses was able to cross reference the man to varied mentions on the Net—according to several blog posts, Werner's main specialty was in dealing BDs. And, if these comments were to be believed, he was the sort of dealer that could get his hands on any sort of BD out there. And they really did mean any sort.
Braindances, or BDs, were all the rage in Night City. Been that way ever since the tech was invented in 2020. Put on a headset, slot in a shard, and relieve the moment in its HD glory. Spasmodic flashes in the headset could override nerve functions through rapid path reconditioning, allowing the data on the shard to overlay onto one's thought patterns. Braindances could contain anything imaginable, as long as there was someone there to record it. A calm day on the beach? Just name the beach and you're there. Want to have sex with Lizzy Wizzy? Someone has whipped up something for you—any position you'd like. Want to be Lizzy Wizzy? The editors can make anything seem real.
Was it any wonder that BD addiction was a real problem in the city?
Turns out neither Ramses or Mr. Hoska would have to wait long. Two minutes later, a Herrera sedan crawled out from between a pair of eighteen-wheelers on the other end of the staging area, low beams burning a path upon the ground. Fire against crumbled gray.
The Herrara parked itself behind another stack of containers, diagonal to the one the BD dealer's car was behind. Ramses still had a good angle, enough to witness Monos Cathcart rise from the sedan, two Arasaka Mk.2 robots exiting from the back and immediately forming to flank.
The robots were humanoid, their joints cybermodified and reinforced. They looked like someone had connected a series of scaled down ISO containers to make a vaguely human shape. Quarter-inch plate armor covered their torsos. They could run at speeds of up to 80 KPH and had at least 130 Newtons of force in their grip.
Ramses grunted. How much pull did Cathcart have to obtain a robot retinue? Those things were expensive to maintain. Dumber than a bag of hammers, yes, but they were more skilled at patrolling and shooting rather than thinking for themselves. Arasaka had programmed them like that.
Cathcart and Hoska headed towards the other, their vehicles out of their sight, but still clear within Ramses' field of view.
His helmet had an embedded directional microphone. He could hear everything.
"…your boy has it out for me," Hoska was whispering to Cathcart. "Three raids in one month, choom. All my shit in my apartment, man, turned over. Plus, got a lot of heat poking near the studio. That seem fuckin' suspicious to you? How much proof do you need when I tell you that someone's paying them under the table to harass my business?"
"Trust me, money's not part of this. You've pissed off every lawman from here to Los Angeles with that little stunt you pulled last year, Hoska," Cathcart shot back. "Trust me, no one needs to pay anyone off to get them to shakedown every unlicensed BD dealer in the area. Someone sells an XBD to a kid and that kid gets fucked up as a result, the city wants to see results. Common law of the street, the one thing everyone has solidarity on."
Hoska prodded his own chest, his cigarette making a swirling trail of smoke. "You think I had something to do with that? Man, I ain't never dealt to no kids before!"
"Maybe. But you dealt to the person who then dealt to the kids, and everyone knows it. Cops got to put on a show for a while, demonstrate that they're doing everything to ensure this doesn't happen again."
"Then do something about it! You're city, man. Can't you make some noise, send out some smoke, or something?"
Cathcart laughed. "Tell the NCPD to ease off on their so-called terror campaign in the wake of a kid going schizo and carving up his baby sister because he looked at the wrong shard? Tell me, you don't think that would look suspicious at all?"
Hoska made a disparaging sigh as well of a show of waving his hands in dismissal. A battle he had no hope of winning. From his perch across the river, Ramses watched with crossed arms as the wind whipped at him.
The BD dealer then calmed down and took a breath. "Askin' for too much, I suppose. Fuck. I can ride it out—pigs won't notice nothing. Virtus are locked down, they'll never find 'em."
"That's the attitude. And maybe you need to be a bit more discerning about who you sell to."
"Don't you condescend me, choom. Anyway, this is going nowhere and I got other deadlines to meet. Unless you're having second thoughts about this supplier/dealer relationship?"
Cathcart just shrugged. "We have a good thing going. That opens a lot of doors for you, not to mention some air cover. If you're having problems with your identity, I could put you in touch with a Shoemaker, get this sorted out—"
"Fuckin' forget about it," Hoska smoked like his lungs could give out at any second. "Nothing's going to change tonight. Let's just get this over with and carry on with our lives, yeah? Got the virtus?"
The ombudsman reached into his suit pocket and withdrew a thin aluminum case. He held it up, where it twinkled from the light of the streetlamps. "Got my edits?"
Hoska rummaged in his pocket and came up with a shard. "Taster." He handed it to Cathcart.
Ramses, half a mile away, saw Cathcart take out a foldable wreath, extend it, and fasten it to his head. The official took the shard and slotted it in his deck, the brainwaves connecting via the trodes upon the wreath.
The merc was already running a network scan and saw that there were some open ports on the wreath that he could utilize. Braindance wreaths typically did not jack in directly to a user's cyberdeck—they had their own RAM that could amplify the neurological impulses that transpired through the suctioned connections at the wearer's temples. The natural neurological link was weak, too weak to develop an image, which was why the wreath had machine-assisted tech embedded that could stabilize the images on the shards, give them meaning.
It also meant that any passing hacker could hack into a wreath while midway through playing a BD, though without the direct wreath connection, a hacker would only get flashes of images, sometimes a hint of sensation if the scroll was raw. Good enough for Ramses—he just wanted to get an inkling as to what the two were looking at down there.
His program hitched the wreath's signal, a line that disguised itself as a brainwave scrawl. Whether it was his or Cathcart's, the wreath didn't give a shit.
As he expected, the images were obtuse. Grainy and stuttering like they were viewed through a malfunctioning zoetrope. His own software could not clean up a hijacked file, he was just along for the ride.
He screwed up his eyes so that everything went dark, and concentrated.
Bloodbeat in his ears. Sounds of something wet. Peeling? No… ripping.
Breath so fast it sounded like a motor. Verge of hysteria.
Flickerings of pink flesh. Naked bodies. Faces and details obscured by blurred myopia.
Then… pain.
A sensation—a needle through his eyeball (which made Ramses wince) that lasted for just half a second. Cold steel caressing a belly. Slicing through and letting warm guts poke from the wound.
Vision spiking red. Jolting over and over again. Another presence… someone red-faced and sweaty moving between someone's legs. The screams too high pitched to be an adult—
Ramses ripped away the connection with a growl, softly swearing to himself. He reached out to the nearest concrete pillar and set his weight against it. He stood there for the longest time, looking at the ground, trying to parse the sights and emotions that had battered him in that brief moment.
He turned slowly, the optics in his helmet burning shards. Even zoomed out, he could still see Cathcart perusing through the XBD, hand on his chin like he was a connoisseur of the finest wines.
At last, he was glad that Michiko had given him this contract.
The sniper rifle was still sitting where he had left it. Ramses had half a mind to pick it up and begin firing on his target down below, but decided against it. He would have to kill too many people in order to keep his involvement down, which would almost certainly include some of the innocent dockworkers. This required a light touch, something that would work to his ultimate advantage.
It was the shards that gave him the idea. The BD dealer had indicated that Cathcart was only now just sampling some of his wares. Now, if it were Ramses, he would have hidden the full BD somewhere, back in the vehicle, most likely. Just made common sense—never establish a deal with the merchandise on you.
He just needed to get to where those shards were.
Bit of an issue, there—there was a river in between him and the distro center. He appraised the polluted water. Brown, with an upper layer of slimescum. Chemicals congregated at the bed, the plant life killed off. Spend a minute in that water and that'll take a year off your lifespan.
Ramses was not one to give into minor roadblocks. He reached down to the opened bag, where a black cylindrical attachment was easily accessible. He retrieved the device—a grappling launcher—and quickly screwed it onto the barrel of the sniper rifle so that the attachment was hanging below the rifle's muzzle. He also grabbed a four-pointed aluminum arrow and fit it through the barrel of the attachment until he felt the lower end of the arrow click against the notch point. Grabbing a nylon cable from the bag, he tied it through the exposed end of the grappling arrow that protruded from the front of the launcher. He tied the loose end of the cable around a pillar close to the edge of the floor and knotted it.
Momentarily aiming the rifle upward, Ramses fiddled with the launcher's hydraulic pressure knob, setting it near the maximum limit. He needed all the velocity he could get to fling this thing over the river without anyone noticing.
Kneeling, Ramses then oriented the heavybarreled rifle, the crosshairs in his scope settling on one of the containers—the third in a particular stack—a position that would give him some coverage from the two men just below. His finger flicked a switch, toggling trigger control to the underbarrel launcher. He was able to hold the sniper rifle without strain with just his hands, not needing the stand.
He waited several moments, listening to the wind, waiting until the velocity dipped beneath a certain threshold.
Massive projectile like this—the drop in hundred-foot increments would be severe. He tilted his aim up. Two tics on the scope.
The pressure at his side lessened. The pitot gauge dipped a hair.
Ramses pulled the trigger. There was no primer—no explosion. The cable shot out from the launcher in a puff of steam, assisted by the hydraulic operation and the maglev effect. The coiled bundle of rope just to his side began to diminish, creating a whipping sound as the cable rapidly uncoiled, carried aloft by the heavy metal arrow.
He watched the trajectory through his scope. Saw a small scarf of sparks emit as the arrow found its target. Actually a little higher than he had expected. Must have been an updraft over the river.
He twanged the cable and found that it was tight. Tight enough to support his weight—carbon fiber had been woven into the cable.
Quickly, Ramses disassembled the sniper rifle and shoved the pieces into the bag. Zipping it up, he threw the bag over his shoulder, but not after retrieving a handbrake that he proceeded to lock around the rope. The handbrake just had a handle that Ramses could clench to slow himself down. He tested it with a few squeezes. The handbrake would not move down the rope if fully applied.
Right now, most people would have looked to check how high up they were, just to see if they were having second thoughts about what they were planning on doing.
Ramses was not like most people.
Without hesitation, he grabbed onto the handbrake and walked to the very edge of the floor, moving the brake along the taut cable until his feet left the ground, bound by the trajectory of the zipline that now spirited him across the river. There was a buzzing sound that escalated into a shrill whine as he picked up speed, dangling by just his grip on the handbrake. He did not look down, the water dozens of meters beneath his feet, only concentrating on the stack of containers that was now rapidly approaching. The wind whipped at him, the flapping of his coat like a bird's wings. He squinted his eyes, counting down the meters in his readout. Fifty… forty… thirty…
He squeezed the handbrake and found resistance. The metal grip began to turn hot rapidly—if he had not been wearing gloves he would have already been burned. His velocity immediately slowed just enough that he was able to drop upon the containers, roll to dissipate the excess speed, and execute a move back onto his feet, fiddling with his coat's cuffs as though he had merely stepped out of a car after a long drive.
With a flick of the wrist, a diamond-edged blade extended from the wrist cuff in his armor. He slashed and the cable trailed away, hiding the evidence of his excursion. There was a ladder at the edge of the container stack. Ramses quickly headed down it. The overpass of the abandoned highway ran over his head, strangely absent from the noises of tire wear, making the deepening night all the more noxious.
He peered around the corner of the container stack. Cathcart and Hoska were still by themselves, haggling over price and content. The driver of Hoska's car was still leaning upon it, inhaling vapor through a plastic device, not paying attention.
After checking to see if there was no one else around, Ramses quickly made his way out from cover, using the shadows to his advantage. He headed for the car first, where the driver was. He needed to remove this guy before he could make his play. The driver was staring out into space, zonked out on whatever designer drug was hip on the street right now, and didn't notice Ramses approach from behind, not even until the merc levelled his silenced pistol and shot him in the back of the head.
The driver pitched forward, the blood spray arcing over already wet concrete. The cough of the shot had been drowned out by the city's natural rumble. Ramses glanced at the car—it had not been splattered. Quickly, he grabbed the driver's leg and dragged him away from the car before the blood could pool in such a way that even the most oblivious prole would notice. He carted the corpse over to a nearby ISO, broke the cheap lock simply by twisting it in his powered grip, opened the door, and stuffed the driver inside among pallets of flash-frozen ground mealworms. He did not even bother locking the ISO back up.
Returning to the car, Ramses quickly hacked the lock to the trunk and swung it upward. After checking to see if Hoska was still concentrating on his conversation with Cathcart, he applied his attention to the trunk.
There was a box that was wrapped in synthetic leather. Ramses flipped the locks and saw a bed of black foam inside. A single shard lay on the foam, next to where an insert had been carved out for a BD wreath. Guess that shard held the XBD on it—Hoska was treating the damn thing like an expensive watch.
Ramses got out his firebox and withdrew one of the shards that he had previously inserted into the reserve slot. What it contained was far deadlier than any XBD. He had paid top eddie for this Finnish virus, which was so volatile that it had to be contained in an isolated system. Didn't think he would ever get a chance to see it in action. He swapped out the BD shard in the crate for the tainted shard and slipped the BD chip into the firebox, making sure to purge its contents so that no one would ever know what was on it.
Fiddling with another shard from his pocket, this one blank, he quickly slotted it into the port at his neck and copied the files that Michiko had sent him. The evidence of NCPD misconduct and the city's compliance in the matter, along with a trigger that would disperse the files to the media whenever the next person would slot the shard into a deck. He pried away of the corner of the foam and dropped the evidence shard in. Easily accessible but not totally obvious. The NCPD would have no trouble finding it.
With that done, he managed to close the trunk without attracting any attention and headed to find a perch so he could watch his handiwork.
Good timing, too. Cathcart and Hoska were on their way to the car, with Hoska making some animated hand movements. Guess whatever deal the two had landed on had not ended up going his way. Cathcart's Mk.2 robots were also following in their wake, looking to ensure the safety of their client, gripping their construction-yellow assault rifles.
Ramses had climbed on top of one of the containers, hands behind his back like a perching falcon picking its next target to divebomb.
Hoska walked the length of the car, not noticing his driver was missing, opened the trunk and rummaged around for a bit, finally coming up with a shard between his fingers. He held it out to Cathcart, who plucked it from his grip.
"Content's preem, as always," Hoska said, now within Ramses' earshot. When Cathcart supplied him with his own shard that contained the unedited footage, he hefted it in his hands like it had a significant mass to it. "I'll have this chopped up within a week. Your virtus take priority. What's the length on this one?"
Cathcart was in the process of swapping out the teaser shard in his wreath for the one that he had just retrieved from Hoska. "Long one, this time. About fifty minutes, uncut. The sensory feedback is intense, so just warn your editors before they dive in." He then raised the wreath above his head and smiled. "Mind if I take a look at the full article?"
"'S your funeral," Hoska said, his eyes flashing with static as Cathcart's payment went through.
Might just regret those words, Ramses thought placidly, just as Cathcart shoved the wreath atop him and connected the trodes.
If Cathcart had been expecting to be thrust into a situation where he was able to indulge in his sick kicks for the fun of it, the last moments of his life must have been filled with an incomprehensible confusion as the Finnish virus immediately kicked in.
The virus bypassed Cathcart's ICE via the trode connection and replicated itself ad infimum within his source code. There was no stopping it, no warning. The man's adrenal gland began production at 900% its usual rate, dumping hormones into his system before he even knew what was happening.
There were several brief moments in which Cathcart just froze up. Then, he gave a withering shriek, clutched at his chest, and went completely into rigor mortis, flopping upon the ground with the stiffness of a plank of wood. The arteries had been nearly completely constricted from the adrenaline, immediately sending him into arrythmia. Hypertension also set in and the veins in Cathcart's head began to bulge from the skin, pulsing in a sickly and desperate rhythm. Something had popped in both eyes and they went completely bloodshot, the red vivid and almost glowing in those wet lobes.
Hoska had jumped back in shock upon witnessing Cathcart go down, his hands spread widely apart. He was looking in all directions, not knowing what to do. Even if he could administer the correct beta-blockers, the small timeframe had long since elapsed before the damage could be reverted.
It would not have mattered either way, because the resulting heart attack had pretty much killed Cathcart outright. The ombudsman was just twitching on the pavement now, drool leaking from between his clenched teeth, some of it tinged with red. He kicked two more times, uttered a long groan, and died with a expression so clenched it was as if an invisible hand had been yanking the skin from his skull in a rough pull.
"What did—" Hoska was shaking as he stood over Cathcart's body. "N-No… what the fuck happened?"
Cathcart's Mk.2 bots evidentially wanted to know the same thing, but as they had limited processor capability, there was only one action that they could sufficiently enact: retaliation.
And conveniently, Hoska was the only person in sight that was in arm's reach of Cathcart's body. The same man that had supplied the shard that killed their client.
Hoska seemed to realize this and he shrank as the optics of the bots whirred to face him. "No—wait a minute. This isn't what it looks—"
The automatic weapons in the bots blasted scintillating petals of fire. Hoska jerked and spun in place, like a marionette. 5.57mm bullets blasted the dealer's chest and ripped him apart, gore and bits of his vest flinging through the air, the strobing of the muzzleflashes capturing the scene in distinct and seared frames. His face was erased by a barrage of fire, the remains of his mind splattering over the car behind him.
Hoska toppled to the ground, next to Cathcart. The bots stomped over and shot in him again in the head for good measure until his skull had completely been blasted apart.
Watching the whole scene, Ramses just shook his head. Blithe anger. He only left back to where he had parked his stolen vehicle after the bots finally retreated.
The bodies were left on the pavement to cool, rimmed by the light of the faint orange streetlamps.
CHARTER_HILL
Ramses had called Wakako on the drive back to his condo, despite having Michiko's number logged in his recent calls. He had informed the fixer about the job's completion and where to find the planted evidence for the NCPD tipoff. Wakako had been pleased and had sent the eddies his way, along with a bonus, her way of an apology for past mistakes, because she would never say such things aloud.
It was midnight by the time he got out of the elevator and onto his floor, nearly eighteen hours since he had left. He wondered how Fiona fared while he had been away. His account had not registered any takeout orders, but the passive sensors indicated that she was still in the building. He shouldered open the door and walked on in.
Holograms in the distance through the windows, churning away like slow ice. The loft was dark and quiet, immediately raising his suspicions.
Closing the door behind him, Ramses walked towards the couch, making sure to keep his approach nice and quiet. He rounded the nearby corner, expecting to find her lying there—
—nothing but an empty blanket and dangling IV tubes.
"Hmm," he muttered to himself. He was not terribly worried. Fiona was still inside here somewhere and even if she had left and fooled all his monitoring software, he could still track her. But he had hoped that he could have placed a modicum of trust with her. People always tended to disappoint, it seemed.
He turned around, saw a faint splinter of light upon the polished tile floor. The door to the armory was slightly ajar, lit from within.
About to head over there, Ramses then heard a faint shuffling sound behind him.
A click of a hammer.
Slowly, he rotated a hundred and eighty degrees.
Fiona was there, having padded out from the closet she had been hiding in. She was wearing a robe that was parted down the middle—her only article of clothing—a line of pasty skin from sternum, belly, calves, and her feet. Her hair looked burgundy in the dull light, but her eyes were wild and fierce.
And in her hands, she held a pistol. Pointed straight at Ramses' head.
A/N: Do not despair – the next several chapters will be heavily focused on Fiona and Ramses, but I'd keep an eye out for that man in the first part of the chapter if I was you…
Playlist:
[1] Overwatch / Zipline / The Swap
"Stealing the Data"
Patrick Doyle
Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
THE CAST (so far):
MAIN_CAST:
Ramses: Night City merc. Solo. Unknown age. Unknown origin. Adept in: precision weapons, infiltration, assassination.
Fiona (JP422-7C): Netrunner, formerly in the employ of NetWatch. Early twenties. Unconfirmed origin.
SUPPORTING_CAST:
Michiko Arasaka: Corpo. Head of Hato faction of Arasaka and member of the corporation's board of directors. 68 years old.
Rzhevsky: Unknown age. Estonian origin. Housed in DaiOni cybernetic conversion. Personal bodyguard of Michiko Arasaka.
Wakako Okada: Fixer in Japantown. A former mercenary. Known for her brusque manner and high (sometimes unreasonable) expectations with the contracts she holds.
The Extremaduran: Assassin. Hails from Europe. No known affiliation. No Night City identification.