JAPANTOWN
The brutalist architecture only allowed splinters of morning light to siphon through the filter of metal, concrete, and glass that spiderwebbed overhead. Tram lines, highways, and streetlamps made a complex mandala that further fragmented the dizzying cityscape the more one craned their head upward. Heavy roadways slathered in caution-orange created a maze of restriction, almost as if one were driving through a multi-tiered construction zone.
Ramses angled the car towards one of the avenues that tunneled through a megabuilding at the ground level. Zoetrope holographic advertisements blasted the sides of the tunnel, peddling some cheap liquor that was not worth using as lawnmower fuel or the latest in pornographic BD entertainment. The interior of the car would have been filled with strobing neon had the windows not been tinted. Fiona only glanced at the advertisements for a second through the car windows before losing interest.
She didn't ask where they were going. She figured that she was going to find out eventually, so there was no use in asking.
The sedan took the next exit and they were still underground by the tunnel spat them out, but the surroundings were strange here. Lining the sides of the street were apartment blocks, tenements, made of old brick with rusting air conditioners bolted onto the sides of their windows. But just three stories up, instead of the open air, was a ceiling of dully glinting rebar and massive ventilation tubing. A corporation had not even bothered to demolish the neighborhood here—they had just erected a megabuilding on top of the already-existing infrastructure, without a care in the world that they would be subjecting the inhabitants to an existence of darkness and subdued lighting from nearby gas lamps.
The roads shone with a permanent dampness. Electric blue lampglow spread upon the upper walls and the distant rafters like faint brush strokes. A nearby vent belched steam and the sounds of horns bounced wetly across the constricted area.
"We're here," Ramses said as he parked the car by running its rightmost tires atop the curb. He activated the sedan's passive defenses and exited. [1]
Fiona joined him in crossing the street after she had shut the door to her side of the car. They were approaching what looked like a night market, which was pronounced by a sprawling holographic tree with pink petals that had been "planted" next to the entrance, the branches artificially grasping out in some vague and fractal display. A sign bolted onto a concrete arch read something in Japanese, but Fiona didn't have enough time to translate the words for Ramses was walking too fast. Several vending machines flanked the entrance to the market, which was a series of lit stalls interspersed an area riddled with crisscrossing steel supports. Paper lamps hanging from the piping provided a low crimson glow. Graffiti marked the far walls and thumping techno music from scratchy speakers stuttered erratically from stall to stall, with each vendor lost to the vibe of their own soundtrack.
She had to stop for a moment. Just to take in everything. The noises of twelve different songs all raging at once. The smells of noodles, spices, scorched scop. The multicolored glistening from the screenlight bouncing off of the wet surfaces, throwing a constant sheen around the market.
And she was scanning everything, too. Honing in on anything that she could see. Her new optics could focus on anyone just walking by and she could have their name, their blood type, their registered political affiliation, and even if they were currently wanted by the NCPD all rattled off in a text box in the corner of her vision. If she were to scan an item like a piece of food, she would be able to report on its temperature and consistency. She could even switch between infrared and ultraviolet frequencies and see things in false-color imagery.
It was almost overwhelming for her to take in.
She was turning in place, face drenched in neon, the smile on her face so wide it was like she was a newborn seeing the world for the first time. She only stopped once she realized that Ramses had been standing a few feet away at a half-turn, just watching her. Not harrying her along, but just staring. Waiting for it all to sink in for her.
Fiona flushed as she realized she was wasting his time, and hers, by extension. She trotted back over to him, expecting the merc to deliver a dry comment, but nothing ever came. He was just staring straight ahead, towards his destination, as if conversation was meaningless right now.
They headed up a staircase that was dripping with water from a nearby broken pipe. Atop was another street crossing, but across was an alleyway soaked with pink and green gas tubing, marking what was "Jig-Jig Street." A quick scan with her optics told Fiona that this was the red-light district of Night City, and a few city warnings quickly popped up in her HUD after the scan had completed, most of the alerts essentially revolving around organized crime activity in the area.
"Stay close," Ramses told her as they walked past the embedded roadblocks to get into the alley. "Keep a hand close to a weapon. No telling what might happen."
Was he scared for her or just nervous in general? Fiona had a hard time believing that anything could unnerve Ramses at this point—he had a plan for everything and was far too composed to let anything catch him off guard.
She glanced at a couple of the storefronts as she passed them by. One particularly glowing establishment had a large circular window at the front—through it a woman in a leopard-style two-piece was performing quite the show upon a pole for an audience of three businessmen, who were sitting upright in their beanbag chairs as though they were continually being jolted with a cattle prod, forced to sit with a straightened posture. The woman had an artificial pallor about her, as if her facial features had been diamond-carved to an almost unsettling degree. The spark in her eyes was lifeless—she was joylessly going through her aerial routine, a mimicry of enjoyment within that tiny smile as she spun for her patrons.
Elsewhere across the alley, women in sparkling trench coats approached men who were wandering by their lonesome—parting their clothing slightly to reveal glimpses of bare skin, sometimes even exposing their breasts for a quick second. Joytoys. Night City angels to be taken back home or to a hotel room to fulfill any fantasy imaginable, with few restrictions and with minimal forms to sign compared to the corporate models that could be rented through the Net.
More sex shops lined the thin avenue, along with sloping bystanders leaning against the walls, constricted within clouds of smoke. Ramses ignored them all and instead led them towards a pachinko parlor at the far end of the alley.
"We're meeting someone here?" Fiona asked as she took in the sight of the place.
"Yes," Ramses said. "A fixer by the name of Wakako Okada. She's been in the biz for a while, built up a rep, so mind what you say to her. She's shrewd, calculating, and dangerous. Get in her good graces and your network doubles. Piss her off, let's just say you wouldn't want to step in this neighborhood for a good long time."
The parlor was half-empty, most of the clientele elderly. They were numbly grasping at levers, pushing buttons, the holographics of the pachinko machines and the arcades replicated in miniature in their drooping bifocals. They sat in hunching postures, their jaws slackened, the food they had brought in their travel packs going cold at their feet. Their eyes, dead and filled with static, were glued to the screens, numbly watching as their life savings slipped away from them, eddie by eddie.
A few suited enforcers, all young Japanese men, sat in the quadrants of the parlor, pretending to be distracted by either the newscasts or whatever articles they were reading on the Net, but their quick glances towards the two mercs that had walked in indicated they were always aware of who infiltrated their premises. They lifted their heads in interest, trying to gauge whether the two of them were a threat or were simply here on biz.
Ramses supplied each foot soldier with a look, confirmation that he knew he was being watched. He then headed to the back of the establishment and parted a curtain of cheap blue beads with a hand.
Beyond in the next room, an elderly Japanese woman with large circular glasses turned in her fake-leather chair to greet her guests. The only light in the room was supplied by the prismatic lamp at the right of the woman's desk, which filtered a warm yellow through a paper screen. The room was ribbed with artificial darkwood, which sectioned a shoji mural upon the leftmost wall of a green-winged bird with a sprawling tail in flight. Behind the woman, another circular painting of a bird, a quail this time, mounted the completely wooden wall. Upon a small cabinet, a knotted and gnarled bonsai tree had been carefully arranged, the branches white and twisting like old bones, not a solitary leaf out of place.
The woman, who Fiona could only assume was Wakako, had been smoking a cigarette and she carefully perched it between two fingers as she leaned back in her chair. She was wearing a dark black suit in the Japanese fashion, with scaled dragon motifs gracing her shoulders. A line of flesh ran down her chest where the suit parted, no other garment interrupting. "You usually just call, Ramses," Wakako said, her voice creaky with age and smoke, but each syllable delicately enunciated like she had to think before speaking each word. "The last time I can remember you stepping into this place was years and years ago. When your relationship with this city was still young. I cannot say for certain what the occasion would be for you to break your usual routine." Her eyes then flicked over and found Fiona, no other part of her body so much as twitching. "Though, perhaps the reasoning is already clear to me."
There was a chair situated in front of the desk that the woman was sitting behind, but neither Ramses or Fiona made any motion to utilize it.
"There are some things that can only be communicated effectively in person, Wakako," Ramses said. "Otherwise, you'd be correct in that I would not have bothered to show my physical presence here."
"And to show off who you've brought along?" The light from the lamp glinted off of Wakako's bifocals, momentarily obscuring her eyes in pools of yellow light.
"Yes," he made a stiff and shallow gesture to the netrunner next to him, the same one that he had been making over the past few days to everyone that he had chanced upon. "My new shadow for the foreseeable future. Fiona."
The cigarette nestled between Wakako's fingers curled smoke. A wan smile tugged at her ancient lips. "A partner?" Her eyes looked Fiona up and down, as though she had scanning software in her optics, too—but if she even had optics, then they had to be quite expensive for Fiona noted that the fixer's eyes looked real. They glistened too wetly to be artificial. "I don't believe I know your rep."
"We're starting in on the ground floor," Ramses answered for Fiona, who suppressed a glower as she had been about to speak for herself. Again, he had done this to her. It was like he didn't trust her.
Wakako made a tsking sound. "I never knew you were in the habit of working with others on the amateur level. You've been very much all biz the entire time I've known you, Ramses. What changed?"
A shorter list would be to rattle off what hadn't changed. "You implying I'm resistant to change? The short answer is that circumstances panned out to be mutualistic for the both of us. Being obstinate to a point doesn't do one's life expectancy any favors around here. Case in point, you never thought you'd embrace the fixer lifestyle at all, Wakako, and now…"
The Japanese woman allowed a brief smirk. Point taken.
"So," she now turned to Fiona after taking a drag of her cigarette, the smoke flushing from her mouth, "did he tell you who I am?" She gave a slight tilt of her head towards Ramses as she spoke.
Fiona nodded. "He… he told—"
"Sit down, girl, and speak a little louder. Ears haven't been the same since the 50s."
Fiona obeyed on leaded feet. The chair had no cushioning and was already hurting her back. Perhaps it was how Wakako added to her already unnerving aura by making the whole experience as uncomfortable as possible. Ramses positioned himself behind the chair, a hand brushing the backrest as though he was posing for a family portrait.
She swallowed, composing herself. "Ramses told me that… that you were a valuable contact in the city. Someone who could help out mercs."
"Ha!" Wakako laughed, the sound surprisingly loud for such a frail-looking woman. She slapped the top of her desk, the sound loud and dry. "First mistake, there. I don't help you out. You help me out. The risks that mercs take on my behalf is an extension—a direction—based solely on the information that I provide to them. I no longer have the means to take on the jobs myself, so it is my role to curate and to support the interested third-party that enacts the terms of the contract. But if it weren't for us fixers, it would be harder for you to have this as a career. Is this sinking in? I hope it is, because I would ideally have to assume that you'd rather me not, as a token of your actual capability, perceive you as an imbecile."
Fiona was at a loss for words. She did not know that one could be both chastised and respected in the same breath.
"It's sinking in," she said with a little more deference than she would have liked.
Wakako smoked again, satisfied. She glanced up at Ramses. "She listens."
"It's why I have faith in her," Ramses said. "Now we just need a means to put theory to the test."
"You're asking if there's a contract that she can take?" She jabbed the cigarette towards Fiona, trickling a slight stream of ash upon a well-placed saucer.
"Connected as you are, I'd be surprised if there wasn't one available."
"And how will this translate to your fee?" Wakako regarded Fiona this time as she spoke, her eyes narrowed in a suspicious squint.
"It will have to increase," Ramses said. "Additional manpower equates to additional effort. But, you're sponsoring new blood on the scene. Comes with the extra guarantee with regards to the coverage."
While they were talking, it was hard for Fiona to control the beat of her heart. This was really happening. They were talking about a contract. For her. Finally, something where she could put her training to use.
Wakako pursed her lips for a moment, but found that she could not really argue the point with Ramses. "We'll work out the final price later. Knowing you, I'm sure we can reach an amenable conclusion." To Fiona, she said, "You don't know how lucky you are, girl, to have this merc vouching for you. There would be people killing for the opportunity if they even knew it existed."
Ramses cleared his throat. "Likely it will never exist again. But, the contract, Wakako…?"
The fixer lifted a hand as if she needed to clear her train of thought. "Of course, of course. And luckily, I happen to have something for you here."
"Perfect. Just attach the details to our contacts and we'll review—"
"One thing," Wakako flexed a finger. "The contract itself is raw. Fresh by mere hours. I don't have that many details to deliver because I have not fully scoped out the conditions of the request. My men still have to complete their recon for the other jobs that I've got in progress before I send them out to scope this one."
Privately, Ramses was musing to himself. Raw contracts were something that he tended to avoid out of principle. Anything could happen if one wandered into an AO without proper intel. Any inaccurate reporting of enemy numbers, their capabilities, or outlandish contingencies that he could not possibly conceive were more and more reasons to avoid taking such jobs. There were many stories told around Afterlife of mercs, seeking to make a name for themselves, infiltrating a particular area on a raw contract, only to be met with a lion's den of enemies when they had been expecting minimal resistance. They never escaped with their lives.
He almost told Wakako to try again some other time… but Fiona needed a contract. She needed to see what this city was truly like.
His hand gripped the backrest of the chair in front of him tighter. The wooden seat creaked in protest to the point where Fiona had to turn to look back at him. "The job. What's it entail?"
"Assassination," Wakako casually took another drag of her cigarette, for dealing in lives had become routine to her after decades of work that she could openly discuss it without hesitation. "Rich bastard up in North Oak. I have the location where the target is residing, but can't tell you the manpower numbers or their loadouts. You'll just have to see for yourself."
North Oak. If there was anything as a hive for rich bastards, that would be the place. The Buck-A-Mansions had carved themselves into the hillsides, monuments to human stupidity—the very hillside that had been doused with radioactive substances just decades ago. They were tightly guarded compounds, with huge retaining walls and 24/7 security staff. If anyone was hiding in one of those villas, then it would be guarded as tight as an Arasaka family member's retreat.
Letting go of the chair, he unconsciously smoothed a hand over the front of his long coat before he shoved his hands into his pockets.
He turned to go. "Send over the GPS tags," he told Wakako. "We'll scope it out and make our own conclusions, see if it's viable."
"Already done," the fixer said. A digital ping rippled through both Fiona and Ramses' heads, which corresponded to their mail icons making a little animation in their HUDs—a new message in their inboxes.
Ramses was already leaving and Fiona was rising from her chair before she suddenly turned, looking back at Wakako, who was cautiously observing with the demeanor of a praying mantis.
"Wait," Fiona said, blinking rapidly. "What did this guy even do? Who are we even going after in North Oak?"
Ramses had placed a hand upon the doorframe and dipped his head. Slowly, he came back around, a feeling of roughened sandpaper in his throat. Wakako had raised an eyebrow and was looking at Ramses with slight anticipation, as though she was expecting him to intervene.
He felt a stab of annoyance towards Fiona—why did she have to ask for details? Didn't he already go through this with her, that this sort of information was not important? That they were distractions?
Ramses might have hesitated for too long that Wakako finally spoke up. "Your very private man may have neglected to inform you of how these things go, so allow me to illuminate. If such information was considered at all important to the contract at hand, I would have told you. Of course, you have the right to distill that information down to your heart's content. But if I don't say otherwise, then it isn't important for you to know. And you don't get to be the judge of that—that decision resides solely with me, got it?"
"She gets it," Ramses said as he placed a hand on his shoulder, so close to her ear that she could hear the servos of his armor whirring. "I'll be reinforcing that point, count on it."
But this time, Fiona resisted against Ramses' grip. She kept her stance square with Wakako, silver eyes narrowed into fine spears, a granite frown etched on her face from some newfound courage. She was not going to budge until she got her answer.
Wakako's eyes flicked from Fiona to Ramses, finding that none of them were showing any chinks in their armor. Each one was so devoutly sure of themselves in this moment that they could not be swayed to perform any other action.
Her wizened smile cooled, but in the fixer's possibly-organic optics, thunderclouds raged.
"You may soon learn that it is not wise to annoy someone like me," Wakako said.
"I'm not asking for anything significant," Fiona said hotly. "I just want to know if what I'm doing is for the right reason. Shouldn't I be guaranteed that, if you don't have anything else to tell about this job?"
"Fiona—" Ramses tugged at her shoulder again, but Fiona just wrenched her arm, throwing his hand off.
The merc just stared blankly at the back of the woman's head. Where did this come from?
Sensing this tension, Wakako lifted her cigarette to her lips again, took one last drag, and deposited the smoldering butt into a small plastic container. "If idealism is how you want to operate by, we just might be able to do business." She turned in her chair slightly, staring at the shoji mural. "I was like you, once. A radical. A romantic."
Wakako then stood from her chair and opened the drawer at her desk, coming up with a pair of stubby shears. She then headed over to the bonsai tree perched upon her cabinet and began to examine the curved trunk.
"The contract," Wakako said as she trimmed a spry piece of bark that had curled away, "came from the Tyger Claws."
Fiona slowly unleashed a breath that had been painfully lodging in her lungs. "And they are?"
The fixer affixed Fiona with a look of disbelief. "They run Japantown, honey. Immigrants from the other side of the world, bringing their Yakuza and Triad sensibilities together."
"So we're being hired to take part in a gang war?"
"Not in the least." The trimmers clipped a singular leaf away from the bonsai. "The target in your contract has no affiliation to the Tyger Claws whatsoever, nor to any gang. The same goes for his recently traumatized wife… but the sisters of said wife are another story. You could consider themselves to be quite wrapped up in Tyger Claw business. To a serious degree, if you catch my meaning."
"'Traumatized'?"
Wakako put the clippers away in the same drawer from which they had been taken, but remained standing. "Stop me if you've heard this one before. A man, rich and powerful, falls in love with an immigrant woman. A beauty. The wedding comes only months later and soon the woman is pregnant. However, it only comes to light shortly thereafter, once the flowers have wilted and the joy has died, that the man has a darker side, one that he had kept hidden from his wife until now. He was not looking for a partner, but for someone to control."
Watery images, surrounded by sheets of frozen gas, blotted Fiona's mind. Pale faces, ghostly against the blackened expanse past her freezer door, her skin translucent and sickly as she sat in the supercooled liquid while the warmer world burned around her. She had been privy to that control for longer than one could believe.
"The man begins to take control anytime he sees fit," Wakako's story continued. "He starts beating her, and the violence only escalates as time goes on. One day, the woman returns home from a night out with friends, one of the few times she gets to escape his watch. Upon arriving back, she then finds out that she has unintentionally broken his arbitrary curfew by only seven minutes. Her husband is not happy and he decides to let her know that." The fixer sat back down and folded her hands over the table. "The woman is put into the hospital. She loses the child."
A deep shiver had started to run through Fiona. Her breathing had slowed and her focus had narrowed to a fine point. She thought she should say something—a word of acknowledgement—but kept silent.
Wakako kept speaking, "Naturally, the man knows that his wife's sisters would want retribution. Such a miscarriage could not be concealed from the family. He flees to his compound in North Oak, biding his time until he can think of a way to properly escape the wrath of the Tyger Claws. He's holed up there right now, and he won't be dragged out without a fight. That's the sort of man you're going after. That's what he did to deserve a contract put out on him. Now, does that satisfy your curiosity?"
Fiona pushed away from the chair, managing a firm nod. She could feel Wakako's gaze boring through the flesh of her skull. Hot and cold sensations attacked her all at once, the scribbling in her mind refusing to settle upon a color. Hard to tell if Wakako was trying to push her buttons, a form of hazing, or she was doing an admirable job in masking her contempt for the netrunner just for asking questions.
Her expression unbroken, Fiona had nothing else to inquire the fixer about. She turned on a heel, heading towards the sounds of the street, not looking at Ramses as he was undoubtedly holding her in disappointment. Then came the smog-choked air against her face once she stepped outside the parlor, and soon she could breathe better.
North Oak is a twenty-minute drive away.
NORTH_OAK
The poisoned sun was lighting the city into prismatic crystals once Ramses drove out of downtown and into the swanky hills of North Oak. The ride proceeded in silence, the stout thrumming of the engine the reliable soundtrack as the horsepower urged the vehicle up the twisting switchbacks. The sounds of the city still surrounded them, but had diminished into their own disembodied white noise, a noise of progress and metal all interconnected together in a grotesque marriage.
The GPS blipped a solitary point that Fiona recognized as the coordinates that Wakako had given them. Somewhere up in a neighborhood filled with non-native shrubbery, made evident by the greenness of the leaves that tangled within the massive bushes that formulated the hedgerows on the sides of the road. Ramses was driving casually, not drawing attention to the multitudes of security vehicles that were prowling the streets. They were after one rich bastard among rich bastards, and rich bastards could afford safety, or at least the semblance of safety. Seeing fully-armored tanks in front of some of these mansions, parked in front of guardhouses and tightly shut gates, was not an uncommon sight around here.
The road soon ended in a cul-de-sac, where bright yellow construction vehicles sat upon freshly levelled and empty plots of land just off of the concrete. Cultivating the area for more rich bastards to move in with their gaudy establishments. Ramses pulled to the side and shut off the engine, but he did not exit. He simply sat there in silence, biding his time.
Fiona thought she should be the one to break the quietus. "I didn't want to leave it to chance." She turned in her seat to face Ramses, the light from the buildings in the desert throwing shards over her eyes. "If I was going to kill someone who didn't deserve it for my first ever job—"
"Then it wouldn't have mattered," Ramses interrupted, not meeting her gaze, staring straight out the windshield. His words were quiet, but they slashed at her like glass. "You would be performing the job you were provided."
"You make it sound so easy," she said, which almost came out as pleading. "That you can kill whoever you want and not feel guilty afterward."
"Sometimes we don't have the luxury of choice. The city isn't just going to bend itself to your whim. If someone wants a person dead, that bounty will be claimed in due course. If it isn't you, then someone else will take the job."
"Sounds like you're just slaved to the idea of fate," Fiona huffed.
Ramses rotated his head, his breathing a series of scraping sounds from his vocabulator. "You may think that I'm being too restrictive and I understand that. But sooner or later, there will come a time where you wish you did not know the explicit details of a job that you're on. This is the nature of the work we have to do and it's never in black and white. You and I cannot afford that. One day, you'll understand, though I very much hope you never do."
The netrunner raised an eyebrow. Something in the merc's tone tipped her off. "Because it happened to you?" she guessed.
Silence for a full five seconds.
Then, Ramses said, "Yes." He yanked the car door open before Fiona could follow up.
There was a path etched at the bottom of a soft limestone cliff that ran southward as they left the vehicle behind. Foreign fauna obscured the trail from the roads below, the perfect sort of place to look for a good vantage point. They walked for fifteen minutes until the trail opened up to an overlook, a bald patch that jutted slightly outward towards the sprawling city. Below, they could see the zoned boundaries of several mansions below, their jagged and carbon aesthetics a scar upon the land. The gurgling of the many pools and water features could be heard even from this distance, the blue of the water searing at this time of day.
From this distance, Fiona didn't need her optics to see which of the estates belonged to her target. She had memorized the GPS location and she had a good head for her current position. The location of interest was a two-story monstrosity just a quarter of a mile down the hill, with a driveway that was made out of a pavement that glowed snow-white. A gigantic pool was in the backyard, along with a hot tub. Umbrellas like white flowers spread over bespoke lounging chairs situated around the water. A vineknotted terrace ran around the house, the boundary between the gate and the doors. A petaled antenna droned over the entire construction. Fiona could also see that, milling around the property, there were several armed guards in reflective clothes and bulletproof vests, each of them handling what looked like automatic weaponry.
Ramses knelt down, the bushes obscuring him from view from anyone further down the hill. Fiona mimicked his movements alongside him, though she couldn't help but steal a few glances at how he positioned himself, wanting to ensure she was doing everything correctly. If it meant the difference between life and death, she needed to be perfect.
"All right," Ramses said, the sun burning whitehot off of his armor. If he was sweltering under that helmet, he gave no indication. "Surveillance is all yours. Tell me what you see."
Fiona frowned. It seemed that Ramses was planning on throwing her off the deep end to see if she could swim.
"I'm just looking for the guy we're supposed to kill, right?"
"Don't discount the environment," Ramses told her. "If you know the layout, you know the mission. Everything you need to pull off the job is all down there. You just need to know what you're looking for. Call the items out as you see them and I'll advise."
Somewhat assuaged by the fact that Ramses was not totally abandoning her to this, Fiona switched the position of her knees, leaned in slightly, and upped the power on her optics. [2]
She focused on the driveway first. Seemed the logical place to start. A gate with golden bars, a pair of initials, "C. V.", intertwined in cursive upon them. Not very subtle. Red outlines automatically warped around the moving individuals down there—she hovered her gaze over each.
"Got a guard shack, occupied" Fiona started narrating, her tone sotto. Her pulse was quick and she had to fight to control it. "Two men flanking the gates. Assault weapons, medium-range scopes."
"Mark every security personnel you see on your HUD," Ramses offered. "You'll be able to track their position indefinitely after you move onto the next one. The guards out front won't be a problem, though. There's more than one way to enter this place. We don't need to rush in shooting. Keep going. What else?"
Fiona craned her view up, looking past the gate and into the driveway. The security personnel stood out quite clearly against the pavement with their black clothing.
"Got three in the front in standard patrols," Fiona reported. "Submachineguns and shotguns. There's… one manning the balcony with a sniper rifle. It looks like there's more in the back, but I can't be sure on the count."
"Yes, you can," Ramses pointed out.
Exiting from her zoomed in view, Fiona chewed her lip. "How?"
"Did you see any security cameras when you were looking down there?"
She did. It was hard to miss them. They had not been put in places where no one could find them. Anyone who lived in such a place would have wanted to broadcast the fact that they had every inch of their property monitored.
"Counted about five camera positions from my view," she said.
Ramses gave a shrug, like he had known what the routine was going to be from the very start. "Means that place is wired with a security system all slaved to the same network. Try looking at one of the cameras again, see what comes up."
A tad skeptical, Fiona upped the power to her optics again and quickly honed in on one of the cameras, which was on a pole atop the guard shack. When she hovered her retinal view upon the device, a small popup window levelled to the immediate right of the object: access_camera_network_system_A01
She provided the neural input and a new screen for the user/password combination popped up. It was based in OBJ-Em9, an older code created in the 60s from Denmark. She had the programming language memorized in her head and it was barely an effort for her to write the code and insert it, packet by packet, past the firewalls of the system so that she could be provided with root access.
Immediately, the screen changed for her. Her perspective had now shifted to a fixed point, able to see the entire compound from several different angles. An array of ten different camera icons had been arranged for her at the bottom of her view. She retained control of the camera mounting and was able to move it around its axis. She ran a defensive program just to be safe. It returned with no flags—her incursion had not been detected. The system was not smart enough to discover if there were any foreign presences taking control, it seemed.
"Got it," she said through her neural link, still peering through the cameras. When interfacing in a cyberspace environment that was not slaved to her direct perspective, the muscles for speaking did not translate too well after receiving filtered instructions from the neurons in her brain. It was far simpler to talk via her deck on an encrypted channel. "Gonna switch the views, see what else we got here."
The backyard had two different cameras that covered that portion of the compound. Fiona rapidly flicked between each one.
"Okay… there are two security mechs—Arasaka make—patrolling around. Three more organic personnel, all heavily armored."
"The mechs won't be an issue," Ramses' voice hummed into the space just past her ears, as if it were an echo originating inside her mind. "They may be resistant to bullets, but are vulnerable to cyberattacks and EMPs. If that's everything, take a look inside."
Fiona flipped the feeds and she was soon shown a plush foyer that had been decked out with polished marble tile and a golden chandelier light fixture in the shape of an abstract galaxy. More mechs were manning their stations here as if they were the royal guard—as they needed little in the way of sustenance and could barely keep up a conversation, the owners perhaps thought it was practical to keep them inside as guard staff.
She toggled the feeds again and was thrust into a spacious living area, where the walls were scorched darkwood, inset with lines of gold, and the ceilings were razed with platinum runways that banded a circuit from room to room. A billiard table with the cue and balls scattered upon it aimlessly sat next to the far window that looked out upon Night City—a quick scan of the window's composition told Fiona that it was bulletproof. Seems like a sniper rifle wouldn't be the tool of the trade for this contract.
Her stomach twisted as she noted that, aside from the occasional accoutrement, the place was mostly empty. Sure, Ramses' loft was stark to the same degree, but at least he was not taking up more real estate than what was considered acceptable. This… one could have comfortably fit ten families within its walls and would still have enough room to carve out space for themselves. All this money and they were doing nothing with it except to keep up appearances.
Moving on, she noted that the pillars were made out of a polished black stone riddled with veins of the same gold that motifed within the house. Aside from a couple more guards taking up positions near the poster windows, she could not spot anyone that looked like they owned the place.
"Find him yet?" Ramses asked.
"Still looking. One sec."
Fiona punched to the next camera on the second floor. A hallway, flanked with paintings wreathed in bronze frames. More armed guards manned every door. Whoever this guy was, he was certainly paranoid.
She flipped again and this time she was perched in the top corner of an elaborate bedroom. A low king-size bed with disheveled covers manned the center of the room and a rectangle of light from the adjacent bathroom flooded in across the dark floors.
A man in expensive sleepwear was sitting at the corner of the bed, barefoot, hair unkempt as if he had just woken from his rest. He looked particularly gaunt and his face was unshaven. He was rocking back and forth, almost uncontrollably, in an agitated state. A tall and thin African man in dark sunglasses was standing before the other man, body erect like he was about to deliver a sermon.
"Target in sight," Fiona said as she zoomed in on the man in the bed. Her HUD was detecting that she had intruded in the middle of a conversation. She started the recorder.
"—the lawyer's coming by at two in the afternoon tomorrow," the man in the pajamas was saying. Fiona scanned the man and the ident of Villareal, Chad popped up. He was sleepily scratching his scalp—a gold watch glinted on his wrist. A nose stud sparkled where it had been nailed through his flesh. "That's the fastest I could expect him, he said. I don't know how many times I've tried to explain the situation I'm in, here. She won't go to the cops, she can't. She'll go to her family. To them. Fuckin' immigrant gangbangers. This was the excuse they've been looking for—months they've been waiting. Now I gotta deal with this shit."
"They don't know that you're here, sir," the dark-skinned man tried to assure him. A scan showed that he was Lawrence Iver, head of security for Macedon Solutions, a private outfit. "You said that you kept this place off the books from your wife. If you're holed up here for a couple more weeks, we'll be able to slip you out towards the East Coast. The Tyger Claws' influence wanes the further from the Pacific you get. Just need to wait for things to cool off."
"Why the fuck do I need to be the one who has to cool off? This is my country, Iver. I was born five minutes from here! Where's their home? Across the other side of the fucking planet, that's where! She thought she was getting the full citizen treatment, but I had to convince her of that otherwise. And quite frankly, that night she… went to Good Samaritan Hospital… that was a light dusting. If she couldn't take blows like that on my bad days… then…"
Iver, to his part, remained resolute, not at all seeming convinced. "It's beside the point. She lost the child. The Tyger Claws emphasize a firm bond with family—something that connects the majority of the gangs in this city—and you just lessened it by one. If you stay in this city, sir, there's no doubt they'll find you eventually. Leaving is your only option.
Villareal savagely beat the edge of the bed with an open-faced palm. "Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! She's never going to let it go. She's kicking me out of my own city. After I took her in when she was on the street! And this is the thanks I get?! That little cunt didn't even get what she deserved!" He put his head in his hands, as if the act of assaulting his bedspread had exhausted him. He then straightened, a panicked look about him. No doubt the gravity of the situation was starting to weigh heavily. To Iver, the younger man pointed. "How many guys do you have on the premises now?"
"Eighteen."
"Double it."
"That's not possible," Iver said, dark sunglasses masking what Fiona detected as annoyance.
"Why not?" Villareal leaned forward and an empty whisky bottle that had been perched on the edge of the bed tumbled to the carpeted floor and bounced once with a thick bonk. "I'll pay them all the same shares!"
"It's logistically not possible," Iver made sure his words came out clear so that there would be no misunderstanding. "Macedon doesn't have the personnel to devote on such short notice. Half the neighborhoods in North Oak are contracted with the company after the riots last year. And forgive me for saying so, sir, but you aren't the only one here who's trying to hide out. North Oak is a popular place for that sort of thing."
Villareal groaned and held his head in his hands again, fingers clenched through his hair. "I should've just thrown her out the window. Then I could've claimed it was an accident…"
That was enough of that. Fiona cut out the audio lest her own anger boil over. Her fears over being tasked with killing someone who might not have deserved such a fate had all evaporated. There was no question about it that Villareal did, in fact, deserve what was coming to him. [3]
"Find out anything?" Ramses voice bled in.
"Just that I'm not going to feel bad about flatlining our target."
"Relax. You're making this too personal. Was anything said that could help us on the contract?"
Fiona felt a prickle in her spine. Disregarded it. "He—Villareal, the target—is going to be on-site for two weeks. Probably. They've got eighteen security staff protecting him. It'll be hard to sneak in and take him out." Still in the camera system, she peered around the room, noting that the carpet was covered with foodwrappers and that a foldable desk, at odds with the otherwise elegant décor in the rest of the house, had been piled with empty beer bottles. "From the looks of it, he's never left the room since he got here."
There was a beat as Ramses collected his thoughts.
"What about the camera system?" he asked. "Are you able to initiate a hack in his cyberdeck from here?"
She had actually already thought of that and had cross-referenced the serial numbers of the cameras when she had first jacked in. The system itself was low-voltage and didn't have enough bandwidth to support any hack that could result in major damage. Going about this from a distance was looking less and less likely.
"That's a dead end, too," she said. "I just don't know how we're going to get this guy."
"You'll find a way," Ramses voice was smooth and quiet now, assuring. To Fiona, it was the first time that she felt he actually believe in her in some way. "There's always a weakness to exploit. Another angle. It's right in front of you. You just need to see it."
With the camera as her "eye", Fiona just was staring at the scene in the room, blankly trying to compose herself.
Villereal had risen from the bed by now—the feed was still on silent, so she couldn't hear his complaining—and he was roaming around the room, waving his hands in a manic fashion. No doubt continuing to curse and wish death upon the person that he had promised himself towards, in sickness and in health. Iver just stood where he was, placidly observing his client, not so much as passing judgment even within this den of snakes and wolves.
Another angle. But where?
I just need to see it.
To see.
It hit her like a roundhouse kick.
She returned the crosshairs of the camera back to hovering over Villareal. His name and occupation began hovering over his head in a simple-UI textbox. Fiona opened another window, connected it to the Net, and input Villareal's name through the ServeDB after providing the correct connection addresses.
Several news articles whipped up from the forgotten corners of the Net—the Villereal name was apparently a storied one in Night City. Young Chad was the son of cryptofinance bankers who had gotten rich after the last couple of market crashes. While the middle class had cratered into oblivion, the family had amassed an obscene amount of wealth by hawking digital currencies that had no inherent value beyond what people were told they were worth. The new generation of fiat currency. And people, desperate to get rich quick after losing everything during the economic depressions, bought into the crypto world in spades with everything they had left, only to lose it all when the value of the instruments would inevitably collapse due to speculative bubbles bursting along with increased governmental regulation snagging up the works. The Villereals had cashed out by then, and had used their ill-gotten gains to build a separate banking empire and, apparently, enable their boorish son at the same time.
Still focusing the lens upon Chad Villereal, Fiona tabbed through the amounts of information that she was able to derive, both from what the Net told her and from what she could siphon from his deck.
FName: Chad
LName: Villereal
Address: 101a Jupiter Road, Night City, NC
Blood Type: B+
Conditions: Seasonal allergies, gluten-free, Type-1 diabetes
"Huh," she said aloud into the thin space of the call.
"Find something?"
"Yes. He's a diabetic. Type-1."
Throbbing silence over the comm.
"Diabetic. Interesting. A good catch, there."
"How's that?" she asked.
"Diabetics need a constant supply of insulin in order to stay functional. But insulin isn't at all cheap—even the average rockerboy couldn't hope to afford regular doses. Someone in a higher tax bracket—someone like Villereal—is bound to keep a large inventory on hand. Find it."
Through the camera network, Fiona descended down to the ground floor and entered the kitchen. She found the fridge—which was a smart model that had a small screen upon its anodized aluminum face for peering into it without needing to open the doors—and accessed its limited memory. The fridge kept a digital record of all the foodstuffs it stored, but insulin was not among them.
"Not here," she said.
"Try the garage," Ramses offered.
She did, and nestled in the corner of the unfinished room, in front of a sleek German saloon, was a scratched freezer chest, much like the one that Ramses had found Fiona floating around in. It was also a smart model, like the fridge, and it was registering that sixteen packages from MedQuick were located inside it, happily chilled. The barcode readings were also registered in the freezer's inventory: insulin.
"There you are."
She was struggling to think of the next step, though. Now that she had located Villereal's insulin, she was at a loss at deciding what to do with it. Was the plan to swipe it and hoped that the target would fall into a diabetic coma?
But Ramses was there to guide her. "You able to get a scanlock on the freezer?"
Fiona nodded, but realized that the act of nodding felt weird while she was still looking through the network, so she said, "Yes."
"Okay. Now, do this in order: cut the power to the freezer but don't overload the circuitry or do it in a way that's at all noticeable. Then leave behind a trace program in the network that can monitor all inbound and outbound calls—that'll be critical. Got it?"
She did, but did not fully understand why. Regardless, she obeyed her instructions. With the freezer selected, she copied its digital presence in the network, spoofed its transmit code so that a duplicate with the same name appeared within range on the wireless band. With that done, Fiona simply turned the fridge off and erased its icon from the webbed tangle that was the digital grid. Anyone trying to search for the freezer would just find a ghost, a false icon that led to absolutely nothing, while the actual device would be stone-dead quiet.
Fiona wondered what the effect of a dead fridge was going to have on the insulin. Assuming the medicine was frozen, the act of thawing it to room temperature would presumably spoil its efficacy. Why else would Ramses offer this as a recommended course of action if not for an act of pure sabotage?
"Okay, I'm done."
"Good. Jack out."
The world blurred backwards as she twisted herself back out of the house network, but not before she completed her final direction. She inlaid insidious bits of code that latched itself to the inbound/outbound ports, an audio siphoner. Anyone who would made a call on an unclean line, she would be able to hear it.
A dim frizz of static prickled over her and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. The bottom of her lungs took on a chill—it hurt to breathe for a moment. She tried to blink, but the static had temporarily encased her in blackness.
Then, like a hood being whipped off her head, she was in sunlight again, but her eyes were unaffected by the perceived change in illumination.
Ramses was kneeling next to her, still in the position when she had "left."
He let her have a moment to compose herself. "How are you feeling?"
She grimaced and ground the back of her teeth. Truthfully, the shifts in perspective from cameras to real life were a little disorienting. When she had been hooked into NetWatch's servers, she had spent nearly day and night jacked into the Net, and even when she was semi-conscious, all that she knew of the real world was the inside of a freezer.
"Fine," she lied.
"Good. Let's head back to the car."
They headed back down the path they had come, the dawn of the day bleeding into something gray while white sparks floated in atmosphere, locked to their grid patterns. They stepped over roots that had dried out long ago, leaving the gnarled husks behind.
Frantic red sparks were fizzing in the back of Fiona's mind as she tried to mull over the plan. Signs of worry, or confusion. Perhaps even anticipation. She no longer feared this job, and that frightened her. What if she screwed it up, in the end? What if she couldn't meet Ramses' expectations?
"So," the merc said once they reached the cul-de-sac, the pavement beneath their feet already hot from the scorching sun, "give me a rundown of the plan."
Fiona had nearly jumped from being addressed so soon. The plan… the plan. It was like he had said, all of the pieces were in front of her and she just needed to see how they all fit together.
"Okay," she said slowly, as if she was taking great care to say everything correctly the first time, "we found out that Villereal is a diabetic. So, if he needs insulin to combat his condition, that explains the trove we found in his freezer. And most diabetics need an injection—" she quickly looked up the information she needed on the Net in a separate window, "—once a day. So, assuming that's the first thing he does every morning, we have less than twenty-four hours until he realizes that the insulin in his fridge has spoiled."
Ramses had reached the car, but had turned around to lean upon it and address Fiona at the same time. "Good. What else?"
"Well, I sabotaged his fridge, which means that his whole supply will go bad in a matter of hours. He'll need to re-up with the pharmacy to replenish the lost stock. I saw one of the labels. MedQuick."
"They're a medication delivery company," Ramses nodded. "They charge high premiums just to bring pills to the front door. That'll be your in."
She blinked. She had not thought this far ahead in the plan yet.
"How do you mean?"
Ramses lifted a hand a few inches before lowering it. "Companies like MedQuick operate on strict guidelines. They deliver to the home, but require signatures of their clients. Directly. They can't accept any substitutions, so Villereal will have to be the one to sign for the delivery."
The framework of the plan was starting to fall into place. "So… Villereal calls MedQuick to re-up his insulin supply. MedQuick leaves to the estate, here. That was why you had me leave behind that trace program. We intercept the call when Villereal finds out his insulin is ruined and we somehow get into the estate when they're expecting the delivery."
The merc seemed even more focused than he usually did. This is what he was good at. The focus. The drive. He could see beyond the obvious, it was why he was still alive.
"That'll be because you'll be the one making the delivery." He pointed at her.
Fiona's face blanched. "Wait… wait… what are you saying?"
"You're more primed for infiltration than I am, plus you're a woman."
"What the hell's that got to do with anything?" Fiona felt her head grow warm with anger.
"Villereal has a weakness for women," Ramses patiently reminded her. "It's in his dossier. Men who are abusive towards their spouse typically have impulses of dominance towards the opposite sex. Naturally, that'll leave you in a good position because he'll be somewhat distracted, what with his marital issues and his medicine being in the lurch."
A terrible thought came to her mind. "You're making it sound like I'm going to have to put on a stripper show for this bastard."
"Quite the opposite. You'll be dressed as a MedQuick courier."
Now Fiona was silent for a moment, her mouth silently open in puzzlement before she closed it, eyes slightly squinting, though perhaps the brightness of the day had something to do with that. She tried to fault the logic, but kept coming up with a blank.
This was insane. It was reckless.
But somehow… it made sense.
"If I'm going to need to pose as a MedQuick courier," she finally said, "I'll need a MedQuick uniform."
"Fortunately for us," Ramses said, "you will now know when and where a MedQuick uniform will be."
It all clicked. "The trace program. We'll be able to geolocate on the MedQuick vehicle when it gets the call to re-up the insulin. It has a hub somewhere in the city—we'll be able to hone in on it."
Ramses nodded. "That relies on us intercepting the vehicle before it reaches North Oak. We'll incapacitate the driver and you'll swap uniforms. Then, you'll deliver the insulin to Villereal like everything is normal, but," he reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and came out with a vial of clear liquid, "you'll be giving him a dose of this instead."
Fiona almost reached for it. "What is it?"
"A neurotoxin with a chemically delayed reaction. Hits the brain in less than a minute upon injecting. That's with the assumption that Villereal will be eager to take his next dose immediately upon receipt, seeing as he had missed his injection window for the day with his usual prescription. You'll swap it out with his insulin before you arrive at the house. Guaranteed stealth." Ramses' voice then turned stern. "In and out, but that's contingent that you vacate the premises upon seeing him inject the contents of this vial, because you will only have a minute to get back to the truck before he expires. If you're stuck in there when he croaks, security will be onto you, and the place will turn into a shooting gallery."
He watched her intently when he said that. Let her register the fear for a moment. That this was no longer theory anymore. This was her reality and she was going to have to push past that threshold so that she could accept it with herself.
She swallowed that fear down, let it burn away on the outside.
"What do you say?" he asked her. "Are you ready?"
The netrunner looked at him, fiery hair wisping gently in the breeze.
"Let's do it."
The sedan cut its way back down the hillside neighborhoods, driving the speed limit exactly, providing no hint that anything was out of the ordinary. Merc at the wheel, netrunner in the copilot seat, daydreaming as she stared out the window, looking at the mansions, wondering if one would ever be hers someday.
Traffic here was nonexistent, which meant that when the sedan cruised past an adjacent street that led to another dead end where more of the wealthy harbored out, the man who had been sitting in his silent car just past the stop sign had been able to spot their departure as clear as day.
The Extremaduran made no change of expression as he started the car, his movements slow and unhurried. He was holding a styrofoam cup with cold coffee in it. He set it down in the cup holder that had been stamped into the center console. He lifted his hands, which were shrouded in brown leather driver's gloves, and slipped the car back onto the main road, the sleek sedan four hundred yards ahead of him, nearly at the bottom of the hill by now.
He checked his compass. Due east, back towards the city. Whatever the reason the two of them had come out to this neighborhood was still a mystery, but the Extremaduran was not jumping to conclusions just yet. Not that he particularly cared, but he had a feeling that the two of them would be coming back here.
He checked the email he had received one more time. Studied the image of the pale woman with the flowing red hair. He considered calling it in, but decided against it. He would inform the client when the job was done.
With a finger, he tapped the center console of his car, where a red moving dot blipped silently across the GPS screen. Four hundred yards ahead.
The city shimmered like mercury as the Extremaduran slipped his vehicle into highway traffic, the heat smearing the rocky formations that closed the city away, a giant tomb.
A/N: This chapter marks the beginning of a mini-arc that will last for a couple more chapters. This next part's going to be fun.
Playlist:
[1] Optical Joy
"Rooftop"
woob
Lost Metropolis
[2] Surveillance I
"Withered Peace"
Ludvig Forssell
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
[3] Surveillance II
"The Girl's Gone"
Ludvig Forssell
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
[4] "Are You Ready?"
"A Right To Decide"
Clinton Shorter
The Expanse [Season 4] (Music from the Amazon Original Series)
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. Under NetWatch employ. No Night City identification.
Rogue Amendiares: The so-called Queen of the Afterlife and former partner of Johnny Silverhand. Night City's best fixer, highly sought after by mercs due to her lucrative payouts and all-biz attitude.
Ryo: Merc. Former Tyger Claw. An avid collector of BDs from the Edgerunner crew and a friend to Fiona.
Tobin: BARGHEST commando. Based in Dogtown under the command of Kurt Hansen. Moonlights as a merc during rare opportunities of shore leave.
Kross: Ex-Malestrom turned merc. Retired from the gang but quickly got bored of life without the action. Went independent for the juice of the action, not the cash.