JAPANTOWN
Beyond the periphery of the overpass, rain sluiced down and whited out the rest of the world in dwindling sheets. The ground frosted and boiled and became mirrored. A stiff breeze furled the rain under the concrete pass, throwing out a thin veneer of mist that flapped the precipitation like a sheer cloak.
The incoming mist beaded on the windshield of the Thornton Mackinaw MTL1 pickup truck that Ramses sat in, parked underneath the bridge. Automatic wipers flicked the offending beads of water away before the acidity could begin to eat into the paint. While it had been decades since the Time of the Red, the weather still could carry traits of the planet's old scars. Occasionally, the acidity of the rainwater was enough to make the pavement begin to steam. Most people learned to cope with the inconvenience.
The Mackinaw sat with half of its wheels mounting the curb, the road soaked under its treads. Ramses was behind the wheel, the engine long cold, his arms crossed as he gazed past the disintegrating landscape and to the buildings at the intersection beyond, where figures of chrome glinted and neon signage burned, the glow like that of the gas refineries to the east.
He had been sitting there for hours. Waiting. He could wait for that long. And longer. This was a job that he was doing for himself, a battle that only he could fight. He could wait for as long as it took.
He could not shake this weary feeling, though, as if he should have headed back to his condo a long while ago. For a job like this was only worth it if it meant something to someone else.
But personal battles needed to be fought. Live and let live could not apply here. Not in Night City.
The windows were beginning to fog. With an armored sleeve, he wiped the driver's side glass, exposing the dark continuation underneath the overpass and the fields of multicolored and ripped tents that ran the entire length of the elevated road. Homeless in their dirty clothes huddled for warmth atop planks of cardboard, wrapped in rotting blankets. Somewhere in the distance, there was the smell of a roasting cat.
The few pedestrians that were out, dressed in their plastic ponchos, tried to give the homeless as wide of a berth as they could muster. They kept their heads down, as though they feared that eye contact would damn them to some unholy act of servitude.
Ramses adjusted himself in the seat, invisible to the masses.[1] The Mackinaw was not his—he had stolen it out of a Little China lot before coming here. It still had SoCal plates on. He had checked it for trackers before nicking it from an apartment garage, so he was confident its owner would not chance upon him anytime soon. He was going to have to bleach the interior and set fire to it when he was done with the truck, of course, but for today's purpose, it would suffice for one last job in its lifespan.
The gray sky was starting to darken, already assisted by the rain. Ramses kept his attention trained on the unmarked door that stood between a mahjong parlor and a dumpling shop at the upper left corner of the next intersection in front of him. For anyone not paying attention, they would just assume it was a side door to one of the nearby businesses. Ramses knew differently; he had figured out that the door did not lead to the housing tenements on the stories above—he had downloaded the blueprints to the building beforehand and had found that the door in question led to a basement that spanned the entire length of the block. He had also lapped the neighborhood twice to triangulate the location on his tracker. Wherever this mystery netrunner was, they were somewhere behind that door, down in the building's basement.
Luckily, the spot where he had parked provided him a relatively unobstructed view to his target of infiltration. And he was going to have to go in there. Eventually. It was a foregone conclusion, no matter how much his conscience tried to protest.
The merc referenced his tracker again. The IP address was still registering fluctuations in the bitrate—far too active for an idle process. The netrunner was still on-site. Still possibly trying to find him.
Won't they be surprised to discover that he found them first?
He studied the building again from behind the windshield. While NetWatch was not the sort of corporation to slap their logo all over their property like Arasaka, for them to surreptitiously have a site in Japantown, Tyger Claw territory, showcased a more cautious tradecraft than Ramses had seen from them before. What was the point of such an offsite location from their main hub in City Center? A staging area for something bigger? Or perhaps this was hiding something that someone didn't want the higher-ups to see?
All he had were questions. Without the answers to back them up, Ramses quickly put them out of mind. Distractions—he would do well to be without them.
What he could not stop thinking about, however, was his plan once he was inside. How many people was NetWatch staffing here? Was this just one lowly operative's hideout or did they staff an entire bunker's worth of drones underground? There was just no way to be sure—he couldn't hack the camera system from this distance. He would need to link directly into it. Inside.
NetWatch and their airgapped networks—always a pain.
"Hmm," Ramses grunted, the yellowed blaze from his optics filling the cabin of the truck with a warm light.
From the closest highway exit, Ramses tracked the glare of headlights as they slithered along the retaining wall. A nondescript van stopped at the light after coming from the steep ramp, turned right and then took an immediate left, stopping right in front of the door Ramses had been looking at.
Interesting. No doubt he knew which company owned that van.
He watched as the driver, who was smartly dressed in an unlabeled uniform, jumped out from the van and into the rain. He moved behind the vehicle and towards the door, out of Ramses' sight.
The merc zoomed in on the truck. Thermals and sonicwave vision allowed him to see past the armored chassis. It was not carrying any equipment or bodies on board. It just had a bench configuration that took up three rows of the vehicle. Since the van had come here empty, best guess that it was here to pick someone up. Maybe even several people.
Slowly, he reached for the glovebox and flipped the latch. From within the lit compartment, he grabbed his nine-millimeter and the detached silencer. He worked the slide back a half-inch, saw that it had a bullet in the chamber, and gently eased the slide back into position. With slow turns of his wrist, Ramses then screwed the silencer on the threaded barrel, keeping his eyes trained through the glass, not once appraising his handiwork until the silencer refused to rotate anymore.
He also reached for a circular device that he had stowed in the glovebox, black, about the size of a hockey puck. He stuffed it in his jacket.
There was a knock at the driver door. Ramses whipped his head to the side so fast that the thin glare from his helmet's optics blurred into a single line.
It was a heavily bearded homeless, hooded, and dripping musty rainwater. "I need some eddies, man," he complained, his voice muffled from the glass. "Come on. Just for my next dose of huff. You got eddies?"
Ramses did, in fact, have eddies, but he was on a job and not terribly inclined to share.
Instead, he just raised his silenced weapon, returning his stare back to the van down the street, and lightly tapped on the glass twice with the elongated barrel. The homeless man recognized the meaning and, eyes widening, backed away from the truck, muttering, "Sheeit, man. Forget I fuckin' asked…"
Ramses waited until the hobo had slinked off to accost someone else. He then glanced at his digital watch, estimated the amount of time it would take to travel between his truck and the van, and opened the door so that he could exit.
Cold air battered his frame. His armor protected him from the temperature differential—he felt nothing. Ramses shoved his silenced weapon into his jacket holster and he locked the truck behind him. A habit. He quickly walked across the road, not bothering to look for traffic, and stepped out into the rain.
His audio receptors filtered the sound of the precipitation hitting the city as a muffled white noise, a soothing tone. Were he unhelmeted, the sound would have been deafening. His jacket quickly became slick and shimmering, and his covering became saturated with veins of tainted liquid. Ramses did not let the weather hurry him any further. Panic just draws attention. Act as if everything is normal. Or rather, don't act at all.
Along the sidewalk, he reached the intersection and obeyed the crosswalk directions as dutifully as if he was jaunting to his favorite restaurant for the night. From his position, he could get a look around the van back over to the door he had been casing for hours—no one was standing watch, but there was a camera embedded into the door. He was lucky—doorcams had a lot of blind spots. And with the truck that had been parked directly in front of it, the driver had just provided the largest blind spot imaginable.
Ramses crossed the street, now on the side of his target building, and headed toward the door, but he walked out just slightly back into the road, the camera only picking up his form for a split-second before he got behind the van, obscuring the lens' line of sight.
The road was quiet, traffic light this time of day. No one to notice what he'd be doing. His cyberdeck was still performing its continuous jams, so if the van was at all wired, it would have to sift through a bunch of junk data to unjam its feeds. He would still remain undetected.
The merc knelt next to the van, as if he meant to tie his boot. From his jacket pocket, he withdrew the flat puck, peeled off the covering to the adhesive layer, and reached down so that he could place it on the underbelly fuel tank. He kept his ears trained for the door opening, in case he needed to make a quick exit. He counted to five and let go—the puck stayed where it was. In a smooth motion, Ramses straightened, his body language calm and unhurried. He jaywalked back across the street and headed back in the direction of his truck, as though he had always been traveling that way.
He unlocked the driver door and got back in. A few silent moments as he settled into his seat, his wet jacket leaving dark marks upon the sagging velour.
His optical overlays then swiped a matrix of menus across his eyeballs. Ramses directed himself to the range extender that he had just placed upon the truck and linked it to a set of preprogrammed hacks that he had collected over the years. All he needed to do now was wait.
It turned out it would not be long at all, because ten minutes later, the driver emerged from whatever depths the door hid, five other similarly dressed men following him. Ramses noted that it was miraculous how all of the men looked similar—crewcuts, Nikon implanted optics, Aryan features. It was as if NetWatch had a clone template they only lazily tweaked from time to time when they wanted to increase their staff.
Ramses waited until the six NetWatch men had entered the van. He did not wait, however, for them to start the car, because he had initiated the control feature through his cyberdeck before the driver could turn the key.
The electronics to the van pulsed once. Then it coughed to life, the exhaust curling from the pipe in deep black tendrils. Ramses indicated another control and the locks to the van slammed all the way shut, trapping the occupants. The range extender did not have a mic installed, but if it did, no doubt he would be hearing a lot of panicked exclamations from the driver as he realized that someone had just taken control of his ride.
He selected another control and the signal dampener function activated. No one inside that van would be able to mayday their way out of this one now. The only signal that could punch through the shield was his. And the only way to stop this van was to rip out the computer—not a simple task while trapped within the cabin.
Ramses quickly brought up a programmed route and sent it to the van's GPS. Tires squealed on the wet road, rubber smoking on the acid-scarred pavement, as the van leapt from its place at the curb out into the open street.
A repo man couldn't do the job better, he considered.
He watched the chaos unfold as he jumped the CCTV mounts that were interspaced at the city's intersections. He controlled the van with tiny blips of code, throwing power to the wheels as it weaved through the lanes like a madman was at the helm. It was probably not far off to assume that the van's occupants were surely in a state of hysteria right about now—the driver was probably trying to yank the wheel or slam the brakes with all his strength, only to have his commands go unheeded. The van's high center of gravity caused it to teeter back and forth as Ramses took wide turns, knocking streetlights and road signs loose, while nearly taking out a few street vendors in the process.
Like the world's most immersive videogame. For the occupants, that is.
The van swooped down the narrow streets of Japantown—the NetWatch passengers were now well outside of transmission range of their base, if they had even been able to get a signal out at this distance. Walls of plyboard and ridged iron swept by in a flat blur as the van picked up speed, at the whim of its far-away controller.
Ramses was still registering a green signal—full strength—thanks to the range extender. Another mile or two and it would start to dip into the yellow range. Best to start wrapping this up.
More hacks wormed their way into the van's electrical systems and it now hurtled through red lights, smashing aside a car that had been hapless enough to get in its way, the shattered windows spraying over the surprised passengers, coolant and other fluids leaking from the ruptured engine.
Ramses switched his cam view to a streetpost that stood tall next to the elevated highway, just in time to see the van swerve into view in the distance. To the left of the van, a forest of graffitied concrete supports that kept the wide and pristine road from interacting with the neighborhoods below that threatened to sully its character. Ramses sent another codeburst and the van's wheels sharply arced to the left. The vehicle mounted a small dirt rise, sending up a small cloud, and bounced twice on the ground before it rammed into one of the columns, throttle open.
The view from the CCTVs was so impersonal that it felt like Ramses was merely watching a sports game. He felt nothing as he watched the front of the van crumple and the windshield white out before it shattered as something—the body of the front passenger—flew out of their seat, through the glass, and impacted their face on the pillar so hard they left a thick streak behind that wrapped nearly a quarter of the way around the totem.
Two seconds later, Ramses initiated another quickhack and the van's engine detonated, sending a white burst flaring through the cabin like a brilliant flashbulb had ignited. The ground shook, flaring an echo of white dust and the van lifted into the air as the resulting pressure wave blew the remains of the glass in their insets out back into the street. Flames licked through the gashes in the van and smoke slithered up, crawled its way along the underside of the highway, and finally billowed into the open air.
The merc waited for a couple of minutes to confirm there were no survivors before he logged himself out. It would take NetWatch half an hour at most to confirm that it had just lost a few employees. More than enough time for what he needed.
He got out of the car again, locked it back up, and made for the building, this time with no van obstructing his way. [2] Out into the rain he headed, walking a straight line down the middle of the road, hands in his pockets. As casual as could be.
The doorcam would be subject to Ramses junk packet transmission as he neared it—the lens would register nothing but a clear street. He reached for the handle as he hacked the lock, twisted it, and it opened with a whisper.
A dry staircase beckoned. Corrugated metal walls. A rusted handrail.
Ramses headed inside, desperate for respite from the rain, and shut the door behind him, throwing his body into a veil of darkness.
His helmet's night vision let him see the world in a distorted orange wireframe, like he had broken everything down to its coded building blocks. He reached for the silenced pistol he had kept protected under his jacket and brought it out. His thumb felt for the safety and slowly clicked it off.
On the clock.
His clock.
Weapon outstretched, Ramses crept down the staircase, listening for any sounds down below. In the corner of his HUD, his IP tracer was providing him the distance of the culprit router where the netrunner was working. Thirty meters away and closing.
Water dripped from his jacket, beading on the scuffed porcelain ground. Nothing he could do about that. An incandescent bulb flickered upon the next landing down, providing a paltry cone of light that spasmed and clung to life.
The staircase ended three stories down, with the only other door in the shaft awaiting at the end. Ramses still had not come across anyone yet. The blueprints had indicated that this was the only way in and out of the hideout, so it stood to reason that he would chance across someone sooner or later. He was just going to have to find out for himself just how much NetWatch truly prized this place.
If you can't make a clean getaway, get out of here.
Too late, wasn't it? He was already in the building because he could not leave well enough alone.
You're not following the plan, Ramses. There's no upside to what you're doing.
He shook his head to ward away the second thoughts. There were no cameras in this part of the building. Sloppy of NetWatch. He reached for the door handle, armored gloves making a gentle tapping noise as he gripped it. Pistol still raised, he made his way inside.
Dim electric light flared across the floor. Halfheartedly hung strips of cathodes seared across a damp and shining floor. Plastic square tables had been setup around the first room, which looked like it had once been a hub for laundry machines. Damp cardboard pieces lay scattered upon the ground. Unopened boxes had been stacked at the walls. Empty bottles and packets of ramen collected upon any flat surface available.
Ramses studied the squalor. Not the sort of digs he expected from NetWatch. But the logo that had been stamped on the rear of the door he just entered through served as proof against what his eyes were showing him. Corpo-surveillance at its finest, yet they could never resist the branding. It was like sanctioned graffiti. Making a mark.
He made sure to never cross paths with some of the beams of light that reflected off of the floor tile so that his shadow would distort across the walls. He stuck to the corners of the place uncorrupted by the light, always holding his weapon in a two-handed grip, body taut like a drum.
Noise from an adjacent hallway. Ramses hid behind the wall that separated the main gathering area from the small kitchen. He pressed his back against the wall and heard the faucet hiss. A gurgle. Filling a glass.
The merc looked down at his gun. No sense in firing this thing in an enclosed space. Even silenced, it would be enough to draw the horde. He still did not know how many people there were in this place.
Slowly, he shoved the weapon back into his holster. Carefully, he craned his head out from the corner.
The kitchen was brightly lit, flaring white from the stainless-steel surfaces surrounding the sink and fridge. A man in an unbuttoned shirt, tie hanging loosely from their neck, was drinking from a spotted glass.
Ramses checked his IP tracker. Twenty meters out. This man wasn't his target, but he was in his way.
Sliding away from the wall, as quietly as a waterpulse, Ramses reached into his jacket, coming up with a hydraulic spearpoint knife. He walked into the kitchen, innocuously enough to not be noticed, just as the NetWatch employee was setting his glass down. The merc positioned himself behind the man, held up his arm, aiming at the man's back, and pressed the button to extend the blade.
There was a sharp pneumatic hiss followed by a sound of steel meeting flesh. A wet punching sound. The breath exited from the NetWatch employee's mouth in a startled gasp—though pain had set in, the punctured lung ensured he could not scream. Ramses withdrew the knife after the hydraulic canister automatically ejected from the handgrip, a red blotch staining his victim's shirt, and kicked the back of the employee's leg in a smooth motion. He grabbed for the man's head so that he wouldn't loudly crumple to the ground, held him still for a moment, then shoved the blade into his eye socket.
There was a horrible spasm, a gurgle, then the man ceased all activity, falling limp in an instant.
Ramses yanked the knife free, leaving behind a bloody socket, wiped away the gore using the employee's now-ruined shirt, and slid it back into a hidden pocket in his jacket. Gripping the dead man by the armpits, he dragged him into a umbrous corner, sitting him up with his arms crossed as though he was sleeping.
He straightened just in time to see a shadow fall across the hallway, giving him enough time to squeeze into the corner with the dead man, just as another NetWatch goon appeared in the aperture of the corridor.
His optics cut a thin gleam through the darkness. Ramses folded his hands in front of him, waiting for the man to leave.
The goon paused, as if he were scanning the room. Perhaps he just had one of those sixth senses that could tell when something was amiss. He wouldn't be wrong, considering the murder that had just taken place in the kitchen.
But the employee just reached up and scratched the back of his neck, heading into the living area where there was a ripped and sagging couch. A half-empty bottle of whisky sat on the nearby counter. He headed for it, with the intention of taking a long draught.
Ramses gave a dry snort. This guy wasn't going to leave anytime soon. And the longer he stayed in the hornet's nest of NetWatch agents, the greater the chance of discovery.
Just as the employee found a plastic cup and began to pour a glass, unseen in the corner, Ramses made a slight gesture with a hand.
Immediately, the TV blared on at the far side of the room, showing a football game at full volume. The sudden ignition of the set startled the employee so much that he spilled whisky all over the counter.
"Motherfucker!" the NetWatch goon grumbled as he shook liquor from his fingers. He then stomped over to turn the TV off. "Mike, you prick," he called out, "it was funny the first time, but I swear to Jesus that—"
Whatever he was going to swear would have to be a mystery because Ramses shot from the corner the second the employee had turned his back, plucked up a thick plastic bag that had been hanging from a rack, and quickly shoved it over the man's head so fast that his mouth had scarcely time to close while midsentence. Before the employee could fight back, Ramses reached around the man's neck, found the monowire port in his left gauntlet, withdrew the molecularly thin cable, and yanked it so that the line began to cut into the flesh of the throat underneath the plastic bag.
The NetWatch goon tried to cry out, but his voice was muffled from the bag encasing his head. His arms scrambled up, trying to pry the helmet off of Ramses.
But the merc powerfully sawed his arms twice—the monowire sliced through skin and tore through the carotid arteries in an instant. Twin sprays of blood gushed from the cuts, splattering the interior of the bag and flooding his victim's mouth. A dark scarf dribbled from the edge of the bag, splattering the man's clothes, most of the blood contained within the impromptu covering.
Ramses released the grip on the monowire—it automatically retracted into the port on his left arm like a tape measure. He gave a shove and the goon fell to the ground, his throat slit from ear to ear.
He left the bag atop the man he had just killed. It would just leave an even bigger mess. The body was dragged to a nearby closet and unceremoniously stuffed into the thin space. This was not subtle, seeing as a smeared bloodtrail clearly marked the spot from the kill to where the victim had been deposited. Ramses had no time to clean up after himself—he had decided this was to be a full sweep, as if that had not been obvious from the first second in this place.
He walked down the hall, leaving the entry room behind—a searing low gleam at the far end, past an ajar door, beckoned. Moving on. Ramses checked the closed doors that he passed—storage, mostly. At least the floor was tile and not wood, which muffled his footsteps better.
Pushing the far door open just enough for him to slide in, a curtain of thick plastic strips barred the way into the next room, which was lit by a tableau of screens that created a thin haze of bluelight upon the room. [3] The screens scrolled endless cyberware diagnostics. Encoded columns of data that only a dedicated netrunner could hope to interpret, even with a good deck program. A tech at the end of the room sat in front of the segmented consoles, fingertips tapping away at a mechanical keyboard. Windows and tables popped up on one of the screens to the tech's right—biorhythms and life support information.
Was this him? Was this the netrunner?
Ramses eyeballed the distance to the console and to the IP tracker's targeted radius. No… the distance was smaller in his readout. Whoever it was, they were… between him and the tech?
He studied the room more closely. The merc was now able to see four waist-high chest freezers flanking both sides of the room, pressed end to end. Cables spilled from the cracked open gaps—mist crawled out from the same gaps, pooling on the ground.
He had a suspicion, one of which he was almost completely certain.
The tech got up from his chair and Ramses pressed himself into the side of the threshold, where he couldn't be easily seen. He watched as the tech stretched his arms, cracked his neck, and walked over to one of the freezers at the left of the room, hand stifling a yawn. The merc kept his pistol trained at the tech's head as he opened one of the freezers, allowing a burst of cold air to waft forth.
Ramses tilted his head for a better look. Inside the freezer was a body. A woman. Stark naked, partially submerged in a bath of ice cubes and freezing water, with cables extending from the back of their head, some of them dipping into the frozen cauldrons.
Netrunner.
The one he was tracking? There were four freezers here—four possible netrunners. The freezers had to be for deep Net diving. The load on a central nervous system from delving into the Net for a long while could be taxing, if not outright fatal. 3D rendering, speed, and dangerous handshake connections all took a toll on a netrunner who jacked in via a plug, instead of using a separate device to surf the Net for them. The overclock speeds for a netrunner's cyberdeck could be overridden, allowing connection speeds previously unobtainable, but the tradeoff was that the overheating metal that connected right against the brain could fry the meat within. Hence, the ice bath as a rudimentary but effective method of preventing issues with heat.
What Ramses did not understand is why NetWatch would have to resort to such primitive measures for these Net activities. Their netrunners were some of the best-equipped in the world. They had their own custom rigs that flowed supercooling liquid as coolant for a cyberdeck. They could use latest in nanosuit netrunning tech, bankrolled by the endless funds of the government and the corps. So why fall back on a back-alley lab to house staff?
Ramses felt that his earlier theory about this being an off-the-books locale to the higher-ups might not be such a crackpot idea after all.
Reaching into the freezer, it looked like the tech was going to check the cabling attached to the nude woman, but what Ramses saw instead was the suited man place his hand upon the cold woman's bare breast, holding it there for several seconds. Intentional. Not just an idle brush.
The merc grunted and he adjusted his aim, protruding the silenced muzzle beyond the plastic partition. He was not going to feel bad about flatlining this man, that was for certain. If there was anything that he couldn't stand, it was—
He was paying too much attention to the man he was about to kill, finger already pressing down on the trigger, when he heard footsteps just behind him. A fraction of a second too late.
It felt like a Basilisk tank had run into him. Someone had rushed from the shadows and had charged headlong into him, slamming him through the plastic curtains and out into the netrunner room. The tech gave a startled shout as Ramses burst into view, and he withdrew his hand from the naked woman as if burned, interrupted, the freezer door sliding back shut.
Ramses felt his gun slide from his hand and he dropped it upon landing on his back. It bounced somewhere, sliding out of sight.
Grunting, he sat himself up and beheld an absolute unit of a man, the one who had charged him. It looked like he was an ex-Animal, for he was bulging at the seams with so much muscle that one wrong flex looked liable to tear the black cashmere turtleneck he was wearing. Angry scar tissue around his eyes rimmed red, the result of an infection from the implantation process. The fuck have they been feeding you?
The brute gave a menacing grin and bent to grab Ramses by the lapels of his jacket. "You took a wrong turn, choom," he growled. "Now, I get to play."
Before the monstrosity could demonstrate what he meant by "play," Ramses flexed his core and twisted his body so that he launched his feet in the air, delivering a booted uppercut to the brute's chin. The giant whipped back, an arc of blood-tinged spit sailing from his mouth. Ramses used the momentum to execute a reverse somersault, flipping onto his feet in an instant, his jacket flapping behind like a cape.
His HUD couldn't locate his pistol. He didn't think his knife would penetrate through his opponent's muscle layer, either. And his cyberdeck was refusing to target the people in this room—NetWatch had their own passive hacks running that interfered with his own, it seemed. Apparently, his only option at the moment was brute force.
This is what you wanted, wasn't it?
The merc charged, carbonblade silent, and gripped the brute around the waist in a bone-breaking bear hug. Together, they went down to the ground, but Ramses scrambled atop the man and started to punch him in the face. Armored knuckles shattered the brute's orbital and smashed teeth, spraying coughs of blood onto the ground. Strangely, this didn't seem to affect the roided-up man, who just smiled through his broken teeth and bashed Ramses on the side of the head hard with an unarmored hand. Ramses grunted as he was knocked off—spots flared in his vision. Had he not been helmeted, that would have guaranteed a concussion.
Both men were now unsteadily getting to their feet. Ramses could hear the tech in the background trying to shuffle out of sight. He afforded a glance at the more diminutive man, whipped out his knife and extended the blade. The brute laughed at the sight of the weapon's meager length, thinking it was meant for him, but Ramses suddenly turned and hurled the knife toward the tech. It stuck in his thigh and the tech screamed, spun, and went down, hands scrambling at the blade that jutted from his leg.
One less idiot to worry about.
The brute seized his chance and charged at Ramses again, throwing cinderblock blows towards his target. Unwieldy, not at all controlled. Ramses sidestepped and evaded, ducking the blows with his jacket searing in his wake like an afterimage.
One punch caught Ramses in the shoulder and he spun, partially collapsing upon one of the freezers. Fire beneath the armor. The flesh tender and bone throbbing. Had the plating cracked?
Someone had left a baseball bat propped up against the freezer. Ramses groped for it and, as soon as he heard the brute behind him prepare to level a hammerblow, he threw himself to the side. The brute's blows slammed on the top of the freezer, indenting the hatch several inches. Ramses straightened and counter-attacked with the bat, striking the brute in the temple with a well-placed blow, trying to knock him out. The enormous man just yowled and held a hand to the afflicted area, refusing to topple. Ramses switched tactics, aiming his blows at the man's shins, trying to drive him to the ground.
One nasty hit to the knee cracked the brute's kneecap. He went down. Ramses quickly went behind him, and having no time to get out his monowire, swung the length of the bat over the crazed NetWatch man's windpipe and pulled the length of aluminum towards him, seeking to break the man's neck.
Froth blistered from the brute's mouth as he tried to breathe, absolutely enraged. He tried jumping up, but his bad knee was inhibiting him too much.
Then, he grabbed at the bat with both hands. Gripped it hard.
Before Ramses realized what the brute was doing, the man bent forward, as if in prayer, flipping the merc head-over-heels. His arcing ankle caught a wall-mounted monitor, cracking the liquid crystal and causing it to dangle by a singular cable. Frantic blue and white strobing lights patterned the room, sparks jutting from the stressed outlet. His other leg crashed into a series of shelves, destroying what looked like a blinking modem and spilling the fractured plastic parts all over.
This is certainly going well. Ramses shook his head, getting back up again.
The tech he had stabbed was moaning in the corner, the knife still wedged in his thigh. The brute, on the other hand, looked positively gleeful as he took the baseball bat in his hands, flexed his arms, and the aluminum bat finally bent with horrid wrenching noise. He cast the ruined bat aside.
"You're prolonging the inevitable, merc," the brute mocked as he struggled to stand. He placed a meaty hand atop one of the freezers for support. "Your fixer sent you here to die if that was—"
While he had been talking, Ramses blinked as he realized that his HUD had centerlined upon the brute's outline. He could target him again. That modem he had destroyed, albeit unintentionally, must have been a cyberware jammer and no one knew it was malfunctioning. Except him.
Immediately, he focused his reticle upon the brute's optics and fired out an overload. Two seconds later, the wired pathways began to overclock in the man's optics, the heat immediately exceeding the temperatures it was designed for.
The brute screamed and clasped his hands to his eyes. It must have felt like his sockets were becoming medium well. There was a frightening sound of something sizzling. Curls of smoke wafted from his face. Desperate, the brute's fingers dug at his optics, as though he meant to rip them from his skull.
Ramses stood, thinly coughing, grabbed at the bent handle end of the bat from the ground, and thrashed it upon the back of the brute's head. The massive man pitched forward and slammed his forehead upon the freezer door, slicing it open and pouring blood in a grisly deluge.
With one hand, Ramses yanked the chest freezer door open, upward like a hatch. With his other, he grabbed at the brute's head and positioned it between the door and its latch. Ramses glanced inside the icy tub, found a piercing gaze from the naked woman inside—arctic blue eyes, hair the color of an ozone-stained morning, a fearful shimmer upon her face as she stared up at the masked mercenary and of the bloodied man he held in his grasp.
The distraction only lasted a second as Ramses returned his attention to the brute. Holding tightly onto the freezer door, he slammed it down on the brute's head, heavy steel meeting flesh and bone. A deep gash nicked all the way to the skull, spurting a violent excess of blood.
Ramses slammed the door again. The gash widened, the skin peeling away, exposing the thin webbing of blood vessels that nestled the crown of bone.
Again. He felt part of the brute's head give.
Again. The head began to soften. Thick cracks sounded from the blow, the skull deforming.
The netrunner, her world flashing by in fits of violence, just stared up at the melee as her prison was used as a weapon, seeing past the trodes and data scrolls that illuminated and obscured her face. Her mouth parted as she watched Ramses in his brutal ministration apply his force over and over and over again.
Ramses only ceased once the skull to his opponent could no longer be compressed as much as it already was. The sounds of cracking bone had long been replaced by flat squelches. He rudely shoved the body away, not bothering to look at its face, presumably because it didn't have one anymore, and closed the freezer door back up, locking the netrunner's gaze away from his sight.
Breathing wearily, Ramses straightened, counting the bruises his body had accumulated. Tonight had certainly been messier than expected. He flexed his fingers—miraculous that none of them had been broken. He ordered a hit of MaxDoc and he inhaled the vapor that flowed through the tubing mounted in his armor's cowl. Antihistamine and narcotic all at once. Smelled like burnt sawdust. His extremities began to tingle, the pain fading.
"Damn," he said, glad that he was not being paid for this type of work. It would not do to have his fixers learn of this anomaly in his work ethic.
He turned to deal with the tech, only to find that the man had worked the blade free from his leg, resulting in a flat bubbling of blood, unstoppered, from the nasty wound. Ramses' eyes flicked to the tech pistol the man had somehow found, already in the process of disengaging the safety.
The tech raised the weapon. Ramses kept himself still.
"You son of a—" the tech shouted right as he pulled the trigger, emitting a three-round burst from the pistol.
The caseless steel flechettes arced through the air, courtesy of the mag-guidance in each round. But instead of hitting Ramses, who had not bothered to move, the three shots all jerked to the side at the last second, as if pushed aside by a strong wind. They hit the row of monitors to the merc's right, shattering the screens and causing another source of electrical flickering to intensify the nightmare in the room.
The tech blanched, uncertain as to how he missed.
That gave Ramses enough time to bend for his pistol, which his HUD had relocated. Straightening, he loosed one round, a cough punctuating from the silencer.
There was a clatter as the tech dropped his weapon, his hands shooting from his throat as a jolt of blood misted from the hole in his trachea. The console behind him became splattered with his life—he groped for the controller chair, but his legs gave out, sending him to the ground.
Ramses walked up, pistol centered on the tech's head. His victim was peering up at him, eyes scrambling for understanding, his fingers drenched in red.
The merc indicated the back of his own neck, where his cyberware was. "Dermal implant," he spoke, voice ragged as it burst from his vocabulator. "Interferes with tech rounds. A paperweight would've been less useless."
He let that bit of knowledge linger in the air for only a single second. He shot the tech in the face immediately afterward.
Quiet in the room. Apart from the occasional sparking and discharges from the ruined monitors and the ever-present hum of the freezers.
Ramses cased the room, checking all corners, returning to a two-handed grip for his pistol. He would appreciate not having any more encounters like that for today. His exploration yielded no additional NetWatch personnel, but he did find a side door tucked away at the far end of the room—he cracked the door open, seeing that it led to a staircase. He surmised that it probably led back up to the street. A handy exit.
He looked at his IP tracker again. He was within three meters of the target now. The netrunner was in one of these freezers.
Slowly, he walked through the room, brushing by each freezer in a counter-clockwise sequence until his rangefinder was showing a reading of 0.0. It was the same freezer that he had used to dispatch the brute with.
The one with the red-haired woman inside.
The brute was still lying on the ground in front of the freezer. Ramses shoved the body aside with a foot, wanting the entire real estate in front of the crate to himself. [4] A scratched gauntlet reached out and gripped the door and parted it from its vacuum seals. Oxygen and condensed gas flowed from the lip of the freezer.
The naked netrunner sat in the superchilled pool, those blue eyes staring up at him, as if she had expected him to return. Ice cubes obscured her body from the neck down. Despite the load that her Net activities were taking on her chrome, she still had enough heat left in her to shiver.
Ramses studied the woman. She was young. Early twenties, he guessed. Skin as pale as the moon. Face just brushed with freckles. Waterlogged hair trailing behind her shoulders, partially obscuring the implant tubes and ports that dug into the base of her skull.
Wisps of sublimated gas curled through the air, a smoky filter. The merc nearly melted in with the darkness from the netrunner's point of view, with just his thin optics searing through the adumbrations like tears in a swath of black fabric, looking upon his true target.
This was the one who nearly compromised him, then. The gap in Faraday's analysis—the major one, at least.
The pistol was softly twitching in a fist. He knew what he needed to do next. Just one more pull of the trigger and his job here would be complete. What would another body be among the many he had created today?
The netrunner exhaled, pale gas in a thin stream. Her chest heaved and her eyes watered.
There was that feeling in his stomach again. Doubt. It burrowed into his guts, a festering presence. He fought to excise it, but it rooted there, making him second-guess himself. What else was there to consider? This 'runner nearly cracked open his entire system, potentially leaving him open to be flatlined. She would have caused his death without a second's hesitation.
So why was he the one hesitating just now?
Everyone is an enemy, he told himself. Don't let emotion control you.
But he could not shake what he had seen here today. The pieces just didn't add up. The ramshackle facility. The personnel taking advantage of the motionless 'runners. The rudimentary tech utilized in this place.
There was something else going on. Something that gave him the feeling that this woman and NetWatch were… apart. Like she was not here by choice—a story that sadly permeated many a life in Night City.
Everyone. Is. An. Enemy.
The netrunner's eyes glanced to the pistol that Ramses had clenched in his right hand. She looked up fearfully, as though she tried to glean some sliver of humanity from the inhuman mask he wore. Perhaps she had always known what Ramses had come here to do, but never imagined it would be so soon.
Her terror was palpable. It conveyed abhorrent memories that had been accumulated over a lifetime. But inevitably, as though Ramses could predict what would happen next, she began to relax. As though she finally realized that he was here to offer her an escape from this place. He was her route out from this frozen prison, as well as this life. A life that had left no impact, no meaning. And now, here was a blissful end to the days without comprehension, the endless nights spent in cyberspace.
Ramses looked at the pistol he held. Then he gazed back to the netrunner. A bullet for a problem that never truly originated here. It would solve nothing.
No—he had already solved the problem.
But it was never his problem in the first place. It was hers.
Think carefully before you act. Is this part of the plan?
"No," he murmured aloud that only he could hear his words. "But that isn't the point."
He shrugged off his jacket, revealing the entirety of his armored torso, a tangle of tubes stemming from his neck and hissing at ports in his waist. The polished plates of obsidian black, mingled with the bright orange warning labels made him look like an iridescent crab slinking about a dark cave. He placed the jacket atop the open freezer door, his body language almost frantic, as if he was running out on some unseen clock.
His hand reached for the netrunner. She closed her eyes and flinched away. But his fingers simply closed on the pressure points for the cables that snaked into her deck at her neck, depressing them so that he could pry them out from the circular metal miters. He was gentle here—he did not want to violently yank the woman from her deck. With each tube he disconnected, he moved with a methodical slowness, making sure that each connection was broken before he removed the physical mounts. Spinal fluid dripped from the needles of each cable. Ramses just deposited the wiring over the side of the freezer.
Carefully, Ramses dipped his hand into the freezing liquid and gently lifted the limp netrunner from the pool. Her body was bleach-white. Bloodflow was low. She needed treatment after being pulled from the freezer otherwise she would go hypothermic.
He set the woman on a nearby table, retrieved his jacket where he had hung it, and draped it over the woman. He then lifted her with both hands again. The netrunner moaned and clung to him, her neck covered with goosebumps. She made no point to resist. She just accepted his actions, his guidance.
Echoes moved from the stairs he had come down, fading amongst the cabling and cinderblock walls. NetWatch's next shift had arrived.
As interesting as it would be to see their reactions upon witnessing such a mess, Ramses did not feel the need to linger. He stepped towards the side door, the woman clinging to his armor. He kicked the passage open and made up the stairs until he could go no further.
With a shoulder, he bashed open the final door and he was deposited into the alley behind the building. It was still raining—streetlights reflected in the little channel of water that bisected the alley. Holograms bounced from the reflections on the ground. Noble gases in their colorful tubes danced underneath that sky of dark chrome. Steam rose from a vent in the street. The windows here were frosted over—soot or asbestos.
Rain beading on his armor, Ramses jogged until he reached the main street, trying not to jostle the woman he carried. He checked both ends for unmarked vehicles and found the street deserted.
He headed for the sound of the roaring highway. His truck was still parked underneath the overpass. Past the dripping of water off the concrete lip, he hurried for the vehicle, managed to yank open the rear door with a hand, and gently deposited the netrunner across the bench seats.
Ramses shut the back door after making sure that his passenger was secure and scanned the area again. Still no cars on the street. Just a few veterans milling in front of the dumpling restaurant, smoking. One of them was playing a handheld, azure holograms spun and sparkled around his head.
No such thing as a clean getaway.
Just how much did he believe that?
Shaking his head in silent, savage admonishment, Ramses swung open the driver's door, got in, still soaked from head to toe, and twisted the key.
The truck roared to life and quickly jumped onto the highway exit, blending in with the endless sea of red and white headlights in an instant. Within the river of illumination, the truck sailed back to the condo, in search of a respite that was now perhaps unobtainable.
Playlist:
[1] Remote Control Antics
"Fight Your Way Through"
Joris de Man
Killzone 2 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
[2] Out from the Overpass / Into the Lair
"99¢ Rental"
woob
Ad4ption
[3] Brutal Clash
"The Northmen"
David Garcia
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
[4] The Choice
"They're Not People"
Hans Zimmer
The Creator (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.
The Netrunner: [NO DATA AVAILABLE]
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.