INSID_GALLYRE
VISTA_DEL_REY
The message Fiona had received from Ryo was cryptic, as per usual when it came to her friend's proclivity for sparseness in her texting. When she had sent out her message to Ryo earlier in the day, asking for some face-to-face time, the only reply she had gotten back was "Insid Gallyre, 9:30pm", along with a nav point that was placed squarely in Vista Del Rey. Fiona had assumed that Ryo had been dictating quickly, hence the misspelled locale, so she put little thought towards it.
When she drove up to the designated location at the appointed time in her stolen Herrera Riptide, Fiona thought she had been given a bogus address. She was parked in the middle of a steaming alleyway, cathode tubes buzzing along mounted streetlamps, with the concrete below soaked to reflect the artificial transitways that gridded the sky far above. Nothing else here except backdoors embedded against featureless buildings where all of the windows remained shuttered, the crude fire escape scaffoldings against the worn brick and mortar blanched and rusted from the years they had spent doused in acid rain.
Fiona parked the car, locked it, and double checked the coordinates again. She was in the right place, if she was looking at her map correctly. There was only one way to find out for certain if the mistake had been Ryo's.
She adjusted the fit of her half-mask, finding it tight enough over her mouth, and headed across the alley, Errata at her back and a .45 caliber pistol in her jacket holster. Off in the distance, a series of roars from motorcycles street racing upon the highways, the buildings and elevated roads catching the sound and amplifying it, turning the city into a massive amphitheater.
The address she was looking for was right in front of her. A black door with no doorknob, up against a brick façade painted the same shade of midnight. There was no intercom button for her to press, so she knocked on the door with a firm fist.
Immediately, the door opened, and to Fiona's surprise, a man with a face so smooth and pristine she was sure was cut by laser scalpel opened the door. He was wearing a sharp and subtle black and white suit, as if he was attending a cocktail party. In addition to his wardrobe, he wore a small grin on his face, the kind that was meant to be welcoming to visitors, like a restaurant host, but Fiona found it strangely unnerving.
The man looked to Fiona to speak first, who eyed both sides of the alley in suspicion.
"Yeah, hi," she started rather brusquely. "I don't know if this was the right address or not, but I had to make sure."
The man dipped his head. "Are you an expected guest of Insid Gallyre?" he said, pronouncing the venue as "Inside Gallery."
So this was the right place. A ruffle of slight relief passed through her. "I believe a friend is inside already? Ryo Kurata. She might have mentioned I was coming?"
"I take it that makes you Fiona?"
"It does."
The man stepped aside and motioned with an arm for Fiona to enter. "You'll find your friend further in the interior. I must ask, please be quiet while the artists are working and to turn off any recording software you might have on your person, otherwise we will have to remove you. The Gallyre prides itself on discretion."
Fiona found that were terms she could agree with and she nodded as she sidled past the bouncer. She was now in a thin hall, barely the width of two people side-by-side, that was flanked by black velvet drapes, spotlamps on the ceiling providing the barest waft of illumination that made it feel like she was plunging her way through a dead thicket at night. Off in the distance, there was the spacey echo of a synthesizer that sounded like someone was holding onto a chord forever on their keyboard. [1] She headed towards the sound.
As she traveled down the undulating pathway, she took care to switch to her thermals, just out of paranoia in case there were any miscreants lurking behind the curtains waiting to leap out at her for whatever reason. So far, she was not picking up any disturbances, but she did not allow herself to relax.
A screen of curtains barred the way after she turned a corner. With a hand, she gingerly pushed them aside.
She did not know what she was expecting, but whatever her imagination was capable of conjuring, it was certainly not this.
The film set was situated in the middle of a room about the size of a hotel ballroom. A white rectangular sheet had been spread across the floor, blue tape plastering it down so that it did not fold or bunch up. Surrounding the set were at least a dozen people, some of them holding glowing tablets as they consulted notes, each one of them respecting the Gallyre's mantra of silence. There was the slight wisp of air displacement from the three separate camera drones that were surveilling the room, each of their lens firmly fixated into the center of the arena.
Upon a chair in the middle of the sheeted area, an obese man, dressed in a thick red robe, was shuddering as he ran his hands upon his body through the parting in his outfit. He was completely nude underneath the robe, sporting an erection. He had not a stitch of hair on his body—his skin was glistening wetly from oil that had been poured over him beforehand. Gentle cybernetics at his temples blinked sonorously and his eyes pulsed with multicolor as he continued to twitch in place as if he was being electrocuted.
As if that was not bizarre enough, surrounding the man were four women, each of them thin and moving slowly, like they were all in an underwater dance. Fiona thought the women were also nude, but upon closer inspection, they were wearing a skintight chrome bodysuit that hugged every curve, outlined every rib, revealed every nipple, which covered their entire face. Silver spun hair in various ponytail shapes blasted from the backs of their heads like grayscale fistulas of gore after a bullet had blown through their skulls. They almost appeared like drones, a bizarre melding of organic and synthetic. The bodysuits were smooth and precise enough that, without a scan, there was no way to tell if this was just the most exquisite chrome one could buy, that the women were in fact lifelike mannequins, or if they were just extremely talented performance artists. Dancers, perhaps. They were lithe enough for that.
The women in-artificialis were not just for eye candy, though. They were active participants to the film shoot as they helped rub the oil upon the naked fat man in the center, allowing some of the thick liquid to dribble on their own bodies in the process. And if Fiona listened hard enough, she could hear the muffled feminine noises of sighing emitted through what sounded like vocabulators in their outfits, as if they were in the throes of orgasm.
Fiona was watching the spectacle, arms crossed, eyebrows raised, a very confused look adorning her. It was so strange, but she could not look away for some reason, and it was only when she felt a tug at her arm did she finally break eye contact from the scene.
"Hey," Ryo said around a grin, her shiny black hair tied into an immaculate, tight bun. "You're here, great. You get to watch it."
"Yeah, I'm watching, all right," Fiona whispered monotonously, staring back towards the five individuals in their naked and semi-naked states. "What… the hell am I watching?" Someone shushed her.
Ryo took a drag of the German cigarette that she had perched between two fingers. Fiona noticed that Ryo had altered the nails of her hand to look like charred wood. "Sim DeGrasal's latest work. The man's a genius in the art BD circuits. He uses the Gallyre's in-house cast a lot when he does his performances. The idea is you can inhabit the man, or any one of the women, once the BD is released to the public. Jump from body to body, cycle through the emotions. Feel the desire pounding in your veins and experience the stimulation as your body releases at the end."
Fiona lifted her chin, studying the scene. "Porn with very little plot, it sounds like. DeGrasal's BDs are popular in that market?"
"Oh yes," Ryo nodded animatedly, watching as the four females were beginning to insert small impulse nodes into the man's body—tiny pins that penetrated into the skin. Small beads of blood wept from the sites, which were left to drip down the man's hairless stomach. "DeGrasal likes to paint with emotions, for lack of a better way to put it. Says it gets people closer to god if you intermingle pleasure with pain. Arousal and fear. He had a more pretentious way of putting it, honestly. Think you can find it on his website. Artists, what can you expect? But anyway, it's all quite interesting, don't you think?"
"Ryo, I'm looking at a fat naked man who looks like he's about to be strapped to a battery and get his testicles fried off. You're telling me people pay for this?"
Ryo smoked, utterly absorbed by what she was watching. "Never underestimate the drive for people to keep chasing the newest high. There's always some dimension out there that is yet to be tapped. DeGrasal is just the start of this new trend of sensorium."
Fiona scanned the crowd. "Which one is he?"
"Oh, he's not here."
"It's his exhibit, his show, and he's not here?"
Ryo shook her head. "He never directs his work in person. Says it allows him to maintain the idea of spontaneity by keeping the concept in his head while others carry out the work."
That made no sense to Fiona, but she had come to the conclusion a while back that she was not going to understand the art world, much less modern art, and decided that she was just going to stop asking questions about this topic while she was in the studio.
"So," Ryo said, tearing her gaze away from the lurid display, albeit with a hefty reluctance, "you wanted to talk about some kind of job? Must be high risk if you wanted to brief me on it."
Fiona was already making a mental note to never discuss work in a film studio ever again. "High risk, high reward, that kind of thing."
"I'm listening."
She swallowed down a lump in her throat that briefly made its presence known. "I have to tell you, a corpo's behind the contract."
"A corpo?"
"Arasaka."
Ryo looked Fiona up and down, impressed. "Look at you, moving up in the world."
Fiona's eyebrow raised again—she thought that Ryo would have recoiled away in disgust. Her fellow merc never exhibited any fondness towards corpos or their lifestyles and figured this would warrant some additional explanation in order to sell the job to Ryo.
But Fiona was not interested in talking about her current lot in life. All she wanted was Michiko's shard. Everything else was secondary in order to accomplish this job to the letter. "The contract's about klepping some tech up in San Jose. And no, I don't know what kind of tech."
"Keeping you in the dark, then?" Ryo blew a stream of smoke from her mouth. "What did you expect? Corpo tradecraft, to a T."
The lie had not come without drawing blood, but Fiona gritted her teeth, trying her best to move away from it. "They're willing to shell out a significant amount of eddies. More than you get from your average fixer out on the street."
"What are we talking?" Ryo asked, her attention finally slipping away from the shoot before them as the background music began to increase in volume.
"Eight hundred thousand," Fiona said. "I'm getting paid in info, so if I manage to fill a team of five, the contract is split four ways."
Ryo did not say anything at first, but her mouth twisted in the universal expression of welcome surprise.
"Enough to rent out a high-rise for a year," Fiona added.
Returning her cigarette to her mouth, Ryo coolly smiled. "An Arasaka job paying out beaucoup eddies, but you don't know what the job really is, do you? You ever think it could be a setup?"
"Why would it be? Neither of us have ever antagonized Arasaka before. They have a grievance with more than half the city before it becomes our turn. It's just—" There was a zapping noise and Fiona momentarily turned her head. The nude man sitting in the chair was now spasming, his arms and legs quivering in all directions, his eyes rolling up into the back of his head, as sparks from the embedded nodes that punctured his skin snapped and fizzled while his shoulders and calves were being massaged by the faceless women around him. "Is he all right?"
"I'm sure he's fine," Ryo flippantly waved a hand. "You were saying?"
Fiona tried to ignore the scene, but the man's muffled whimpers were making that difficult. "The only reason they asked for me is through my relationship with Ramses, otherwise I wouldn't be a blip on their radar."
"'Relationship?'" Ryo teased.
The netrunner was glad for the half-mask, else Ryo would able to see that she was slightly blushing. Ryo had no inkling of Fiona's feelings towards Ramses, but that did not stop her from making the occasional conjecture.
Regardless, Fiona narrowed her gray eyes towards the ex-Tyger Claw and gave a synthesized huff. "You be quiet. Anyway, because Arasaka didn't have many details with me to share regarding the job, that was when I asked them if I could bring backup. They agreed to that, which would be a mistake if they were trying to make a trap. If I was running a setup, I would want to make sure that my target would be as alone as possible, wouldn't you? I've turned it over in my head from every angle. There doesn't seem to be a catch."
"At least not one that you can see."
"Which is why," Fiona pressed, "I'd feel much better if I had someone I trusted by my side throughout the whole thing. You really going to make me beg, Ryo?"
"As amusing as that would be," Ryo smirked, "I'll let you keep your dignity."
Fiona unleashed a small breath. "So, is that a yes?"
Ryo dropped her cigarette and ground it out with a heel. "Anything to have a little variety around here, choom."
She mentally pinched herself. Try not to appear too giddy. "Thanks," she said breathily. "I'm going to owe you one."
"You're going to owe me two hundred thousand," Ryo said, returning her attention to the shoot, but with a twinkle in her eye this time. "Oh, one thing I forgot: who else have you asked?"
"Aside from you? No one. You're the first."
"Ah. Will I know the rest of the team once you've assembled them?"
"I should think so," Fiona said as she turned to leave, running a hand across the arm of Ryo's expensive leather jacket. "They're all old faces."
Behind her, the BD actors continued to groan and splutter. The sounds of voltage just kept increasing.
TOTENTANZ
WATSON
As the evening wore on, Fiona now promised herself that she would never conduct business at a club in addition to a film studio.
She was crammed into one of the rectangular booths near the edge of the Totentanz dance floor, hunched forward with her forearms upon her thighs. Kross was sitting across from her, sipping on a drink that smelled of lighter fluid. The air was being smashed to pieces from the neo-death metal music that blasted from scratchy-sounding speakers which seemed to be on the verge of blowing themselves out. [2] The band on the stage, Tinnitus, was doing the usual round of crowd hype while manipulating their best-known tracks. Sweeps of yellow lasers brushed the room, up and down, and deep capillary red hues clung at the base of the support pillars, the throbbing color inhabiting the very air and walls of the club to the point of infection.
Fiona refused to let her guard down in this place. The Totentanz was a Maelstrom club, located in the underground floors of an abandoned hotel that never had its construction completed. While Maelstrom did allow outsiders to come onto the premises, it was usually at the risk of their own neck. It was said that an evening at the Totentanz without at least a dozen deaths was a remarkably dull affair. Considering that Fiona had already seen one hapless person's throat get slashed in the middle of the dance floor tonight—some personal spat that had been brewing for a while now, she supposed—she was inclined to believe the rumors.
The patrons were mostly Maelstrom, which were obvious considering that they all looked like their flesh had been pulled too taut over a spiked tungsten endoskeleton that was just itching to burst past the fleshy barrier and reveal the mechanisms within. Flesh rimmed red wherever it came up against the intrusive cybernetics and tubes underneath the epidermal layering looked like black veins, which brought a sallow sheen as though their bodies were contaminated. Even their dancing during the rave was slightly robotic, with a brief delay in their movesets against the clearly defined beat.
Fiona thought it was a wonder that most of Maelstrom had not gone completely cyberpsycho just yet. Their fetishization of chrome was beyond extreme—certainly, she had her own view of her true self, but she still thought of her as something human. Malestrom's augmentations all tended to lean too far, in her opinion.
It certainly did not seem to bother Kross, who bore his carved appearance with a casual air as if it were a work suit he donned for the rat race. The spikes that protruded from his skull would have given him some issue in an office setting, though. That, and the menacing orange glow from his X-shaped optics that appeared to have been shoved into his skull without much of a second thought—gnarled scar tissue marbled around the chrome, slightly brown from being burnt repeatedly from all the heat the cyberware generated.
"You're looking a little stiff there, Fiona," Kross called across the booth, his square teeth grilled in a maw-like grin.
Fiona's entire body was coiled like a spring, all of the tendons stringing whitehot tight. "What gave you that impression?"
"Totentanz can have that effect on people. Not meant to be the prettiest place, but it serves its function well. Shit, you should see the bathrooms here. Got no running water, just a trough."
They were talking, but Fiona was not really hearing his voice. Not completely. The software in her optics was analyzing the unique vibrations in the airwaves that were not being destroyed by the loud music and timing it to Kross' lip movements—the subtitles of his words were printed at the bottom of her HUD and she simply responded to the text once it flashed up in her view.
She tried to force herself to relax. Kross had been part of Maelstrom back in the day and they had let him retire of his own volition because he had been a loyal and reliable soldier. Of course, the gang had wanted to keep him around, but Kross was the stubborn sort who tended to not listen to people trying to sway his long-term goals. In the end, he was allowed to leave and get all the privileges of a legacy member. If anything, the safest place in the Totentanz was with Kross.
Kross set his drink down, rubbing his gloved hands together. Fiona had just finished going over her pitch for the Arasaka job and he had been hemming and hawing, unable to come up with a straight answer.
"You remember that joint-op we took two months ago?" he asked her, also leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner, his Spanish accent causing a delay in her transcription software. "That Voodoo Boy lair we were called up to clear out?"
"I remember," Fiona nodded.
"We were sent in there with minimal info and even less in the way of support. Intel was worth fuck all, considering how much of it was wrong. Client thought there'd be fourteen Boys at most. We get there, squeeze under the half-closed garage gates, and we find forty. Remind me, what did I say about the client the moment the shooting started?"
Fiona looked up to the ceiling, momentarily in thought. "I think it was, 'Some people are fucking lucky that they can be rich and wrong while still succeeding in life.'"
Kross smiled, a frightful visage, and waggled a finger. "Corpos can afford to be wrong, you see. The only risk is to their wallet. The risk you and I take is a little more," he tapped his ragged chest with a metallic knuckle, "tangible."
"I agree, Kross," Fiona said. "Which is why I'm going overkill on this one. You're not the only one I've asked or will ask to join me on this. I don't know if we're going to be facing a firing squad when we get up to San Jose, but I want to be damn sure that I'm already part of a firing squad to counter whatever is awaiting us up there."
There was a thudding noise in the direction of the dance floor. A Maelstrom had swung a huge haymaker towards another chromed-up goon. Sparks and blood were flung into the air in a thin whip. Curses in multiple languages were exclaimed. Then there was the rhythmic clanging noise as the two combatants launched themselves at the other, their cybernetic knuckles becoming scraped and gouged as they punched against reinforced armor, splitting the diseased skin that barely stretched across their chrome.
Someone on the upper landing, a heavyset man whose fat could be mistaken for muscle, grabbed at another Maelstrom who had been in the middle of necking a girl. The man shouted something and brandished a pistol, pressing the muzzle against the head of the Maelstrom. The cybernetic creature was waving his hands, trying to deescalate the situation, when the gun suddenly fired. The shadowed strobes masked the brains flinging out from the Maelstrom's skull, but the spotlamps that frantically swung into place illuminated the large and fat man just in time as a submachine gun burst from below caught him in the side, ripping him all the way open and causing something dark and slimy to burst from the ragged gash in his abdomen.
Kross watched the scene with a disinterested air as the people around him fought and died, and returned to his drink. Fiona had to fight to turn away. Have they reached their dozen deaths yet? she thought.
"There are better ways to get rich in this city," Kross said as he swirled his glass before he took a draught.
Fiona leaned forward so far she was nearly about to topple over. "I'm not doing this for the money, Kross."
"So what would a corpo be able to offer you that money wouldn't solve?"
The music cradling her, the redrimmed rave lights catching her gray optics in their withering color, she narrowed her gaze towards the man.
"Direction. They can tell me who I was before Ramses found me. They have the missing pieces, which I might add, I'm willing to do anything to get back. If you'd rather sit this one out, Kross, that's fine. But I can't afford to walk away from this. Not after all that's happened."
Kross said nothing for the longest time. Just swirled his drink, his fingers perilously close to the rim of his glass.
He then set the glass down and leaned back in the booth, spreading his arms out wide. "Take one corpo's money, but fuck another at the same time?"
We'll see. "That's the idea."
The angle of the ex-Maelstrom's optics cycled upward, mimicking thought. He then gave an overdramatic shrug. "I guess it'll be a while before I get to become rich and wrong about everything in my life."
Fiona nodded. Two for two, now. This was going great so far.
"Thank you, Kross. I can't begin to—"
"One condition, though," Kross raised a finger.
Blinking, Fiona straightened in her seat. "What's that?"
"You get Tobin to come along as well. That bastard keeps putting me on Afterlife's dead pool every time I step out to take a piss and I'm just sick of it. Always with the same mocking tone as if I'm about to drop of colon cancer or something. I'm about ready to punch his jawbone out if he keeps it up, so I want to make sure that he's not betting on my death for this go-around. You'll either get us both, or you'll get nothing."
EBM_PETROCHEM_STADIUM
DOGTOWN
The death of Kurt Hansen last year had resulted in some unanticipated developments for the subdistrict of Dogtown. A former NUSA colonel, Hansen had carved out the entire district to rule as a despot, refusing his orders to retreat, as he fundamentally disagreed with the terms of the Arvin Accords that had ended the Unification War back in 2070. For seven years, Dogtown had been designated as a Combat Zone after the local governments abandoned it, an area in open warfare with the rest of its surroundings, and had cut itself off from the neighboring law, letting the gangs move in for the plundering that his own outfit either did not control or had no interest in controlling.
Hansen's death was still the subject of rumor. Many thought he was the victim of a long-gestating NUSA black-box op, assassinated by members of his own cabal. That certainly held water, for the two individuals that had jointly seized command of the rest of Hansen's gang, BARGHEST, had been incapable of plugging the leaks in the ship. With Hansen gone, there had been multiple defections from the gang, some of them violent. Funds were mysteriously vanishing. Everyone was pointing fingers and the writing was on the wall for Dogtown, as everyone was predicting the district would eventually be bereft of a ruler again if this rate of decay kept itself up.
This certainly explained why Fiona was able to drive up to the BARGHEST checkpoint off the Pacifica boulevard, without so much as anyone waving a gun in her face. [3] A massive wall ringed around the Dogtown district, alleyways of collected trash and tent cities jamming the arteries near the entrance. Hobos warmed their hands from fires collected in rusting oil cans, their stained faces hardly sparing her vehicle a look as she drove by.
A commando waved her through the automated gate that led through the barrier wall. Inside the checkpoint was a scale for vehicles—Fiona stopped the car over the four tire placement ridges. Bright orange lasers spat out from emitters on all sides while sentry turrets whirred into place as the car was scanned for contraband. Despite the fact that Fiona was carrying weapons, BARGHEST had no interest in controlling the flow of firearms. They were simply checking for persons of interest, whether they were trying to infiltrate or otherwise immigrate from the chaotic area.
Another bored commando waved Fiona on through the next gate after the scanning had completed. She drove until she reached one final checkpoint after moving back out into the open air. A guard standing by a series of orange portable bollards made the motion for her to roll her window down.
"You here for the convention?" the commando asked Fiona.
Fiona had no idea there was a convention going on here, nor what it was about, but she nodded anyway. "Yeah," she said.
The guard pointed up and to the left. "Parking's by the stadium. Don't leave valuables in the car. They will get stolen. Go on, now."
She was about to ask him where she could locate Tobin, but the guard was already patting the car's roof, an indication for her to get a move on.
Fiona kept the speed at a modest twenty-five miles an hour as she drove through the dilapidated streets. The pavement here was cracked and parts of it were in extreme disrepair, having been blown apart by shells from the past war. Off distant intersections, she could see the glow of sirens from armored vehicles as they pursued speeding hot rods with gangsters hanging out the windows who potshots at the commandos that gave chase. Deep scars in the earth exposed old and cracked pipes, the hissing of gas warbling the air overhead. Airdrop containers funneled columns of red smoke in the air in the middle of the streets, which were filled with military provisions from sympathizers on the other side of the wall. Down near the favela at the southern edge of the district, Fiona could spot the crackle of sniper fire, along with the still-burning husk of a treaded BARGHEST tank that had nearly melted down to its chassis, for it must have been lit on fire for days to get to that point.
Dogtown never had a chance to become a place worthy of note. While heavy investment had been thrown into developing the area as a wealthy tourist destination a couple of times, those attempts had all been thwarted, once from a gas explosion from a buried Militech lab where the corp had been working on a Soulkiller analogue, and twice when the Unification War had resulted in Hansen's arrival to the city. Heavy construction on hotels, expo halls, as well as state of the art laboratories and high rises had nearly been completed by the time that Hansen had decided to take Dogtown for himself, throwing the district into a permanent state of work in progress.
All around, if Fiona angled her head to peer through the windshield of her car, she could spot the rusting spines of the cranes that still held their dangling loads nearly eighty stories above. The buildings were half-finished, glass glistening upon them in segments like massive fish scales. The mega-constructs loomed over the gray night sky, as though they intended to raze it open like a scalpel.
There was something foreboding about this place that gave Fiona a chill. Something empty.
She drove by a massive onyx pyramid that was razed with sea green neon. Dead and drying palms flanked the avenue that she was on, which laid out her route as though it were a red carpet.
Another block and Fiona pulled over into a small lot in front of what would have been a massive sports megaplex. She exited from the car, the stale air warm upon her neck, and turned towards the blazing structure that shone in the deepening night. Angler glow within the murk of the neighborhood.
A long and tall stone staircase marked the entrance to the EBM Petrochem Arena, flanked by two bronze sculptures of kneeling and armored Furies, their wings spread up to the heavens. The arena occupied a square block a half kilometer wide and the front of the structure was completely coated from head to toe in holographic advertisements, as though each logo was fighting a battle to the death for supremacy in a valiant but misguided effort to catch the eye of a passerby so that they could infect their subconscious and resurface within the vast of their mind at a later date. Fiona could barely recognize half of them—their loss.
At the roof of the arena was the remains of an aerozep that NUSA had tried to use against Hansen back during the war. According to the stories, it had crashed completely through the roof after being shot out of the sky, becoming wedged in place within the rafters, but BARGHEST had left it where it was stuck because the aerozep had a working atomic fission engine on board that they repurposed to send power to the arena and the surrounding block. Waste not, want not.
She began to climb the steps, feeling small amidst the massive statues and the wide path that lay before her. The sacrifice climbs the ziggurat for the last time, she thought inanely, her breath hissing in her ears.
Inside, the outer concourse of the stadium had been totally converted by the populace—a ringed path upon which proprietors sold anything imaginable: illegally modded weapons, salvaged power armor from the Vegas desert, crates upon crates of XBDs, dumpsters full of military clothing positioned next to nude cream-colored mannequins. Sparks from fraying wires dribbled to the ground, the passerby stepping around the splash zones, unconcerned to the failing infrastructure. The remaining lamps in the building were not enough to completely dispel the shadows—a few side passages that led off to the hidden hallways of the arena looked to have been doused in black.
The bulk of the crowds seemed to be heading towards the entrances that led from the concourse into the stadium proper. Fiona chose an annex at random, funneling along the artery of bodies until she was thrust into the spacious expanse.
The first thing that Fiona noticed was that the roof had a hole in it. The cockpit of the aerozep, windows blown out years ago, was hanging from its perch where it had punched through the ceiling, a thin light bleeding around it from the neon-soaked world beyond. The ringed levels of seats in the upper levels around the arena were in a state of destruction—entire rows had been ripped out, leaving bare spots reminiscent of cancerous zones.
Down below, at ground level, the entire area had been cleared away to make room for more temporary installations. Rows upon rows of booths, denoted from colorful curtains that were hung up by aluminum supports, had been propped up, a city in miniature, nearly taking up the entire floor of the arena. The booths contained plastic signage, each with a corpo's logo adorning it. What Fiona found curious about the sight was that several BARGHEST commandos in full regalia were frantically milling about the rows, going from booth to booth, speaking to several slickly suited men and women who were wearing lapels that matched the nearby business insignia upon their jackets.
Then Fiona finally noticed the holosign that was rotating above the whole affair.
DOGTOWN JOB FAIR
Wow, things are really that bad, huh?
Fiona made it down the last of the steps, and slowly began to browse the aisles. She was in no hurry, but the chaos of the moment fascinated her.
BARGHEST mercs were running up to any manned booth they could so that they could scrawl their name down for some automated convocation that would take place at a later date. Many of them stood in line, desperate to talk to a representative of one of the dozens of companies that had taken the hour out of their day to come and speak to potential applications in Dogtown. Anything to snag a career line that got them out of the district.
She stopped and listened to a couple presentations—corpo representatives had reserved podium time at separate ends of the arena where they could address a buzzing crowd. She could only stomach the preplanned spiels for so long as they all started to sound suspiciously alike from the shared usage of buzzwords that kept on cropping up during their speeches.
"…if you submit an application to GMI, you will be making the world a better place from the fabrication of armored transport to viable military markets…"
"…Hydrosubsidum is saving the world, one Gilbear lung at a time, and by being a leader in the oceanographer mapping industry…"
"…when you work at Zetatech, you will realize that you are making the world a better place through its unified, hybrid platform that can build and deploy custom apps, integrate with existing data and systems, and automate manual workflows…"
"…there's no doubt that Heckler & Koch is making the world a better place through thoughtful innovation in self-defense technologies. That, and the trusty HK45 sidearm line, the favored service pistol of NUSA!"
Fiona could only take so much self-serving bullshit, plus her eyes could not roll up any farther into the back of her head if she tried. In a dark cloud, she pried herself away from the last presentation, where an overly enthusiastic speaker (who probably had too much coffee, judging by the fact that his hand gesticulations were way too animated) was espousing the pride and hopes that the sales teams at Desnaiworld had been able to achieve, either not knowing, or knowing full well, that he was talking to an audience of mercs and not desperate kids straight out of the VR schools that would debase themselves in a hundred ways for an entry-level salary.
She found Tobin standing in the back of a crowd in front of another small stage where some faceless corpo was espousing the benefits of a closed end-to-end computing system. The grizzled merc was leaning slightly back, his arms crossed, face in a scowl as his attention span was slipping further and further away the more the speaker did his job.
"Are you as riveted as I am?" Fiona asked as she sidled up to the man.
Tobin spared her a glance, not even seeming surprised that Fiona was here in Dogtown. "It's a sixty-five-billion-Eurodollar company, got offices on four continents, owns three private armies, and the only jobs they're pushing here are unpaid internships. I've been here for two fuckin' hours and no one's posted a single job that I can actually do. It's all tech shit. Data entry. And not VR-work, too. Manual filing. Might as well kill me now."
"The corps probably smelled blood in the water," Fiona hypothesized. "With Hansen gone and Dogtown bleeding populace, they probably saw an opportunity to draw BARGHEST members away."
"It's a shitshow, that's what. Many of these corps probably don't have any job openings. I think they just want to give off the impression that the grass is greener on the other side of the wall. Make BARGHEST eventually abandon Dogtown once it loses enough members. And when that happens, Militech and Arasaka can move right on in. Development on the half-finished buildings can resume after nearly ten years in limbo. Foreign investments can come back on in, et cetera, et cetera."
Fiona folded her hands behind her as she glanced at the BARGHEST commando in amusement. "You probably don't get told very often that you have a very optimistic view on life?"
"You're talking to someone who's seriously starting to consider taking drugs while on the job just to cope with the boredom," Tobin said flatly as he scratched at a scarred check that was flecked with white whiskers.
That was as much of an opening that Fiona had hoped for. "What if I said that you might not have to take up a new hobby quite so soon?"
Tobin's eyes flashed in interest. "You mean a job?"
"I have one lined up and ready to go, yes. I'm just trying to get a crew—"
"Say no more," Tobin held up a hand, whirling to face her. "I'm in."
Fiona's mouth was halfway open after getting midway through her pitch, but no words were being emitted.
"I haven't told you what the job is," she said, recovering her composure.
"You want a crew? You're here asking me to be part of it. You think I have any prospects lined up right now? Hell, I'd take the job even if it was sponsored by a corpo."
Under her half-mask, Fiona made a face. "About that..."
Tobin's face flattened. "It's sponsored by a corpo."
"Yep."
Mouth parting slightly, as if he was about to level an objection, Tobin appraised the ceiling, where the damaged aerozep continued to spew sparks upon one section of the arena's upper rafters, and shrugged. "Eh, it's a nitpick anyway. How bad could it be? How much intel are we going out with?"
"Low to nil," Fiona lifted a hand.
"Fuck."
"But the payout is high. Your take-home would be two hundred thousand."
"Fuck," Tobin rasped a bronchial laugh. He looked around the room. "That'll be more than the annual salaries of all the idiots who somehow snag jobs from this place. Anyone who would refuse such an opportunity would be an absolute moron."
Truthfully, Fiona figured she would have had an easy time in trying to convince Tobin to join the crew, but never could she have predicted that it would have been this easy.
"Still," she tried her very best to be transparent, "there's a lot of risk to this thing. No telling what we're going to be up against over in San Jose."
"I get to leave Dogtown for a bit and I get a tax-free lump sum all in one go. I'd say that's worth taking the extra risk."
Fiona wished she could be so certain with her own life. People like Tobin, who were satisfied with their lot in life, were the continued subject of her envy. It seemed like they had everything figured out and, if they currently lacked the ability to get to a position of comfort, they knew exactly what they needed in order to attain it.
Meanwhile, the corpo talking stooge was still trying to demonstrate to an increasingly disinterested crowd about the merits of their walled ecosystem, his voice rising in pitch as he paced back and forth on the podium while a slide deck cycled through images of esoteric electronics and fancy flowcharts that were constructed of nothing but acronyms.
Tobin made a show of sliding his hand down to his holstered sidearm, unbuttoning the fastening strap, as he eyed the presenter. "Guy's voice is grating on my ears. You think anyone would object if I shot him?" he asked, referring to the speaker.
Fiona thought for two seconds. "People would be buying you drinks, most likely, but you'd still be in a bit of hot water with the corp for killing one of their suits. Besides, I need you out of jail for the next twenty-four hours. Transport out of the city is tonight."
"Temptation's still there," Tobin said in a tone of mock disappointment, but he pulled his hand away after he buttoned his weapon back up.
Fiona was feeling rather claustrophobic, what with the crush of bodies around her and the insipid drawlings of the various speakers echoing into one formless chorus that assaulted her ears. She figured that she could leave with her objective completed, but Tobin still had one more question for her.
"Oh, you haven't asked Kross about coming on this job, have you?"
She turned around. "Yeah, he's coming too. Asked for you to come along, as a matter of fact."
Tobin snorted. "Did he ask because he's hoping I get killed?"
"Tobin, you keep putting him on Afterlife's dead pool whenever he goes to the bathroom."
"Yeah," Tobin spread his hands. "And?"
"He doesn't find it funny."
But a sly smile spread upon Tobin's face. He tapped his forehead with a finger, the universal gesticulation of being a bearer of some secret knowledge.
"Well, Kross doesn't know that I hacked his medical readout months back. Hell, he doesn't even know that he has chronic kidney disease. Tell me, what kind of guy doesn't trust doctors but still submits to the installation of a medical amp? The guy is just asking for someone to mess with him. Anyway, when the urinary tract finally lets go when he's in the john, the knowledge of his continued placement on the dead pool just might bring him some amusement in his final moments."
"He's going to kill you when he finds out the reason, you know," Fiona rolled her eyes, her tone taking on an acerbic tinge.
"Probably," Tobin shrugged. "Guy never had a sense of humor."
NUS_101
The fourth member of the crew was going to be the one that would give Fiona the most grief. She had already come to accept as she drove out of Dogtown, taking the immediate exit that led to the ring-road around the city, the NUS 101. It had still been an unexpected hiccup—she had expected Ramses to be her first recruit, but then he had gone and surprised her yet again when he had rebuffed her offer the other night, among other things, indicating that he wanted nothing to do with Arasaka. In a way, she understood his conundrum, but the whole day she had been fighting with thinking about him in the first place.
The choices the both of them had made that night still resonated in her mind. Her knuckles ached as she gripped the steering wheel, wondering if she had made the right decision or not to accept his wishes. That damnable man. He knew how much he meant to her and he was content to leave himself out of this crucial part of her life. If she was not able to put herself in his shoes so easily, she would not have forgiven him.
Clutching the wheel, stuck in gridlock, she forced herself to take a breath. There would be time later for her to leave everything on the table. As little as it was.
She still needed a fourth person, though.
There was no one else that had come to mind, so she had sent out a message to Rogue, asking if she had any suggestions on a merc that worked well with a group and had a reliable-enough skillset. She half-expected Rogue to come back and offer her apologies for being unable to find someone like that on such short notice, but the fixer replied back within minutes, knowing that Fiona had, what some in the city would call, standards.
Fiona, there's one person that comes to mind that could help you, but it's a bit of a long shot. He's been out of the game for nearly two years, so it may take some convincing. He's good as a wheelman and as a jack-of-all-trades. Easygoing type. You might even like him. He's worked well with a team before, so he doesn't have any authority problems. I've included his contact in the message, but don't assume that he'll accept your proposal.
-Rogue
The number was embedded as an attachment in Rogue's message. Fiona opened it, using her neural commands as she crawled down the highway, the air-conditioning whipping her hair to combat the growing heat of the day.
A square icon popped up in the corner of her vision as the call commenced. A slow ring. Once… twice… three times…
It picked up before the fourth ring. The speaker's avatar didn't initiate and the caller icon reverted to a gray void.
"Who is this?" A raspy sound across the protocols.
"I assume that I'm talking with Falco right now?" Fiona asked. "My name is Fiona and I wanted to—"
She had been talking a full second after the line had clicked dead. Fiona made a stammering noise and she instinctively growled in annoyance. Sure, she didn't mind being hung up on, but not until she had said her whole piece. She would be damned if anyone was going to cut her off and get away with it. Steaming mad, she tried the number again.
Falco didn't pick up. The call went straight to his VM inbox. Fiona, not a fan of leaving messages, simply hung up the call and redialed. It took two more tries until the line finally registered a tight connection again.
"You're not going to give up, are you?" His voice was a tired drawl, one that carried the laconic Western accent that reminded Fiona of a few cowboy films she had seen on the television.
"I've got a few hours and a phone card that's filled to the max," Fiona replied grimly as she drove. "You figure it out."
A sigh on the other end. "Rogue gave you this number, didn't she?"
Fiona would not have admitted it straight away, but the fact that Falco had immediately honed in on the truth threw that strategy out the window. "She seemed to think that you'd be a quality candidate for what I need."
"For a job, you mean. You're a merc, aren't you?"
"Yes and yes."
"She did mention that I've been out of the game for a bit, right? Haven't carried out a job since '76."
Fiona looked over her shoulder as she merged into another lane while the car just immediately behind her honked. "Would it be any better if we talked this over, face to face? I don't care for conversations like these being handled over the phone."
A long pause. Falco undeniably trying to think of any excuse he could muster that would plausibly extricate him from such obligations.
"North Oak," he finally said. "The columbarium. Fifteen minutes."
"I'll see you then."
The columbarium was only a ten-minute drive from where Fiona was right now. She arrived at the parking lot in twelve, delayed by the usual clog of traffic and some maddingly timed traffic lights.
Ascending the shallow stone steps and passing under an arch the color of basalt, Fiona slowly plodded into the small courtyard within the columbarium, which was a rectangular plot of land comprised of a series of wide totems that ran seven across and twelve down like pins on a breadboard. Internment within columbariums was the preferred choice of remembrance after death for Night City residents, as full-body burials had fallen out of favor in the past several decades since grave robbers had become something of an epidemic given that they were after the expensive cyberware that people typically buried themselves with. Niches with holographic symbols and expressions were the new headstone.
This early in the day, there was hardly anyone at the columbarium. Fiona scanned the rows between the pillars as she passed them—there were a few mourners either sitting on the hard and gray benches or standing in front of the niches where their loved ones were buried, their heads bowed in some form of prayer. None of them looked like what she imagined Falco to appear as, so she kept walking.
Her footsteps echoed, wet and alone, upon the flat slabs of tile. There were a few squares of formal gardens—branching palms tufted with waxy green ferns—that added a few splashes of color to the otherwise dreary landscape.
She passed by a few more rows, at this point her direction becoming more and more aimless, when she spotted something on one of the niches. One of the fuzzy blue holograms—a symbol she remembered. A dual-clipped hair band with crossed shotguns underneath. Emblazoned upon the front of the insignia was the same "E" and "R" that she had seen adorning all of the shards that Ryo and her had been actively seeking out.
All those times she had used those BDs and she had never known that Rebecca was here.
Fiona stood in front of the wall in a daze until she realized that someone had written in a message along with the insignia.
I regret not finishing our conversation.
Had it been from a fan of Rebecca's? Someone close? There was an inside meaning to the message that was clearly not meant for Fiona. Whoever wrote it had a cancerous regret that they were unable to offload, doomed to shoulder it for the rest of their lives without the ear they required to receive it.
"I haven't been here after she was interred," a voice from behind Fiona said. "Guess I couldn't find the courage until now."
She spun around. A man was sitting on the bench just across from her. Either she had been completely blind to his presence or he had slipped in while she had been distracted. He was wearing a brown duster, which was patchy in places and replete with dark stains. His hair was wavy and covered half his ears, and he had an impressively full mustache that looked like it was two seconds away from springing out of control. Now Fiona was starting to believe that this man might just be a real-live cowboy.
"You worked with Rebecca, didn't you?" she asked. She then jerked a thumb behind her. "Did you write the epitaph?"
With a groan, he stood from the bench. The dull light slipped around his right hand, which was a cybernetic model with carefully crafted components of quicksilver and obsidian. In contrast to the rest of his wardrobe, the chrome was spotless.
"No, Rebecca and I had said all we needed to say between us," he said, walking up to the panel and running a hand across it. "Whoever wrote it had a whole lot more to lose than I did. But that's what we deserved after running with David Martinez for so long. We were a tight bunch, the lot of us. A crew constantly on the edge, taking jobs for the cash and the juice. I've just about seen and done all I have the stomach for, which begs the question…" Falco turned around and put his hands in his pockets, revealing that a revolver and a bandolier of bullets had been looped around his waist as his coat slightly parted, "…why do you think I could possibly have an interest in what you're after?"
Fiona looked Falco up and down, trying to parse out the perspective of the man. His eyes were like burnt wood, nearly inscrutable. She wondered if they were really organic and what they might have seen.
"Tell me about the crew," she said instead. "About Rebecca. About David. What happened to all of them?"
"What happened?" Falco shook his head. "Arasaka happened, that's what."
She frowned. "How so?"
"Happens to anyone in Night City who flies too close to the sun. They get their wings clipped." He glanced over his shoulder. "David and Rebecca found that out firsthand."
"They became Night City legends, didn't they?"
Falco gave a rueful laugh. "Oh, yeah. All of their gallant exploits across many months and these days all anyone remembers them by are from the names of their drinks at Afterlife. We went up against Arasaka—not entirely by choice, mind you—and we paid the price. We were just trying to save a friend. Bringing out everything we had to do this one last job. And then Adam Smasher shows up and humbles us all out of sheer boredom."
The name rang a bell with Fiona. Arasaka's once-terrifying enforcer, a cyborg who barely had any humanity left within his synthetic shell. A full-blown cyberpsycho held together by an extreme sense of self and desire for mayhem. There was a reason why his name still sent shivers down the spines of those that frequented the underworld—one could fill fifty columbariums from all the people he had killed over the decades.
Fiona glanced at Rebecca's blazing hologram. "He's the one who killed her and David, then?"
"It was a trap. Meant for David. He had made too many bold moves against Arasaka, and they were not going to ignore him anymore. Instead of gradually escalating their efforts against him, they resorted to the nuclear option. Smasher tore through us all in minutes, out there in Corpo Plaza. Destroyed nearly the entire goddamn neighborhood, trying to put David down. Ground him to a pulp right in the middle of the whole expanse. Wasn't much left of the body to recover."
It was as if she was reliving memories that did not belong to her. Hearing the roar of rotors overhead in the cold night. The sweeping of spotlamps. The battlefields of shattered concrete and broken glass while the flashing of police lights caught the world in arterial strobes.
"David was… something," Falco drooped his gaze to the ground. "Young, headstrong. But who wasn't like that at his age? But unfortunately, the kid was on a doomsday clock and his time was running out."
"How so?"
"Overloaded on chrome. Started with a Sandevistan implant, but he didn't have enough of a cortex barrier to handle the strain. His mental facilities were failing him as he loaded himself up more and more, to the point where his reality was starting to crumble. Kid would've gone cyberpsycho within a week if Smasher hadn't cut his life short, as does the fate of everyone who went up against that monster. Sans that one merc, of course."
The rumor mill had been swirling quite a bit last year about the fact that Adam Smasher had finally met his match from a merc that had been making a name for themselves all over the city. No one could confirm it, of course, because there was no footage of the fight nor was there a body to prove anything, but everyone had slowly started to believe that Smasher had the last vestiges of meat inside his metal shell finally blown away, with his corpse rusting somewhere at the bottom of Arasaka tower.
"And Rebecca?"
Falco smiled, a thin expression that peeked behind his mustache. "A firecracker. A gift with a shotgun and the foulest mouth I've ever seen on someone so small. She stayed with David until the very end. You couldn't get her to part from him willingly unless you drugged her."
"I saw the BDs that she made," Fiona said. "She loved David."
"Yeah," Falco nodded, his eyes closed. "Everyone knew. Everyone but David. Kid was as blind as a bat because he had eyes for someone else, though that by itself was something that was problematic."
That definitely tracked with the vibe that she had gotten from all of the BDs that Fiona had seen. Rebecca's longing stares at the man, which was only returned by confusion and, at the worst, indifference.
Falco side-eyed Fiona, then raised his arms for a moment. "So, out with it. You wanted to talk about a job, didn't you? I could regale you with tales from that past life for a while, but I don't think that's why you wanted to speak to me, isn't it?"
But Fiona just looked to the ceiling and shrugged. "Honestly, it's been something of a day for me. I've had to go around the entire city twice over, just trying to convince three other people to be a part of this job. I'm a bit tired of repeating myself."
"Ah, so I'm the last guy you're hoping to shanghai into whatever you have lined up, is that right?"
Instead of responding immediately, Fiona opened up her message prompt in her HUD, attached a packet, and sent it over to Falco, the entire process taking only a few seconds. "That's all the information that I have on the job. Light reading, but it has the client, the locale, and the payment. No guarantees on anything not mentioned."
Falco's eyes were flashing as he quickly scanned over Fiona's document. "So this is an Arasaka job, then? After what I just told you…"
"The client is Michiko Arasaka, not the corp," Fiona clarified, "and you know as well as I do that the Arasaka clan had no part in what happened to your crew. For that matter, all of the major players, Smasher included, are now dead, so it's not like you have a score to settle with any of them."
"All the same—"
"Rogue trusted you enough to recommend you as a potential team member. And I have enough people to comfortably take this mission on, but with you, it'll be even easier."
Falco leaned back and laughed, backing up a few paces as he seemed to concentrate on a specific point on the ground in front of him.
"That makes one of us, at least."
"In terms of?"
"Trust," he lifted his head. "You seem to know a lot about me but I," he paused a quick beat, "know very little about you."
"That can be rectified," Fiona slightly spread her arms. "Ask me anything."
Falco's eyes narrowed, for it was rare that gift horses of such type had been offered to him. But such horses needed to have their mouths looked at, for no one would be so forthcoming under usual circumstances. Not in Night City.
"I'm not concerned about the sort of odds that I go up against while on a job," he said. "Or rather, when I used to go out on jobs. No, everything about this job is just window dressing. What I really want to know, and the crux of this whole thing right here is, why do you want to take the job? Is this going to be one of those moments where you prove yourself to the Arasaka clan to get into their good graces? Am I meant to be used in some sort of crusade for power, tossed up and thrown aside at the end? Or is there something here that I'm missing?"
The implication that Fiona was using all of this as a stepping stone for Arasaka was so outrageous that she nearly exploded with a defensive fury, intent on proving Falco wrong. She prevented herself from doing so before she could make an ass out of herself and tried putting herself in Falco's shoes, finding that the wheelman had a point. A very good point. She had just showed up into his life, seemingly out of nowhere, and started making offers based on nothing but secondhand comments. How else could he have seen her?
She made a mental note to slow down and lifted her hands slightly in contrition. "I'm not doing this for money or for a rep," she said, her voice having lost its harsh tone through her mask's vocabulator. "I used to be a netrunner for NetWatch. An indentured servant. You know what that entails?"
Falco's face shifted into something resembling understanding and he nodded. "There was a member of David's crew—a woman he was close with—who had a similar backstory. Only she had been a member of an Arasaka pet project, not NetWatch."
"Well, up until two years ago, I was lying in a tub of icewater, having my brain deep-fried from the various runs NetWatch made me undergo in the Old Net. I don't know how many years of my life I had lost to those bastards. Everything from the moment I was ripped out of that tank is nothing but a blank in my memory."
"I'm sorry."
Her mouth bunched at the corner under her half-mask and she made a tsking noise. "Yeah, it… hasn't been easy."
"So where does the Arasaka connection fit in for you?"
"Arasaka was able to lift my NetWatch dossier. They have my complete file that can fill in the gaps in my memory. They promised me that, if I do this job for them, they will give me the file in its entirety. No strings attached."
"No strings attached," Falco repeated and he crossed his arms. "Sounds a little too good to be true, coming from Arasaka."
She thought of the reactions of Ryo, Kross, and Tobin. They had all expressed their surprise and discontent when the Arasaka connection had been revealed. It was the specter that hung over them all, the obvious caveat to a job filled with caveats. It was only her luck that the solution to everything she had ever wanted lay across the biggest minefield that had ever existed in her short life.
"I don't have a choice," Fiona whispered. She glanced at the hologram over Rebecca's niche, wondering again what sort of conversation that the shotgun-toting artist needed to have finished. What would she have to warn Fiona about? "And I need to know why I never had a choice."
Gray eyes shifted, cold above the boundary of her half-mask where it sealed against pale skin. A thin breeze whisked through the columbarium, whipping the hems of their coats. Dead leaves scraped across rough concrete and a thin wedge of sunlight peeked through the clouds, punching through the square skylight.
"So," she whispered to the man standing across from her, the mausoleum so quiet it was almost ringing in her ears, "you going to come along or not?"
NORTH_SUNRISE_OIL_FIELDS
BADLANDS
The wind that surged off of the dark gray waves was cold and smelled of chemicals. Fiona stood next to the thick guardrail, staring across the bay at the jeweled city where the aerodynes and the adver-blimps danced among rivers of light. Boats bobbed in the bay, the diseased water barely reflecting the sonorously blinking lamps that oozed their alerting colors. [5]
The night here seemed to have mass. If she were in the city, the darkness would feel like a faraway concept. From a distance such as this, the city played out just like it did behind her apartment window. Silent and nearly motionless, as if she were staring at a painting. The undercurrent of violence and deceit locked away from such a wonderous first glance.
With a shuddering sigh, Fiona zipped up her coat as she realized she was getting too cold. Her body always had an issue with regulating its internal temperature—years of being trapped inside an ice bath did not do wonders for one's immune system. She turned on a heel, the light of the city now at her back, looking towards the scorched plains of the oil fields before her, just across the archaic spur that lazed across the coast that was the 101.
The twisted and collapsed skeletons of drills made a metallic boneyard before her. In the hills above, the frozen and decrepit-eaten ossein of wind turbines, some fallen blades a football field in length sticking up from the ground from where they had snapped off the rotor. Rusting lengths of pipe scrawled a maze across the oil-soaked grounds, acid-eaten holes bored into them. The flares of gas flames atop some of the still-standing structures looked like tender comets arrested in their heavenly plummet. Pools of oil afire in the distance snarled across the ground, creating a ghostly mist of flame.
Fiona's half-mask was working overtime to filter out the airborne toxins from all of the smoke and the fumes from the spilled oil that had completely saturated the earth here. She would have to perform a canister swap sooner than expected if she kept on breathing in these chemicals.
She turned and looked at the vibrant city again over the lapping bay. Violent and destructive though it was, she had known no other home.
Her chronometer read 11:45pm. Almost time to depart for San Jose.
She thought about calling Ramses. For what purpose, she was still deciding. Just to hear his voice, perhaps. Maybe to tell him how she had decided against what they had agreed upon. To perform one fateful act of defiance in front of him.
In the end, she decided against it. Ramses would know the motive behind her calling right off the bat. She could not disguise her intentions, her innermost desires, anymore. There was nothing left that she could offer except selfish demands, promises of a future that had never been in the cards for her. Unfair though it was, it was something that she was going to have to accept. Ramses did not deserve such a thing from her and it would be nothing but a show of ungratefulness if she pretended otherwise.
The noise of boots on concrete behind her. Slowly, Fiona turned back around, facing towards the road.
Ryo was walking up to the bus stop awning. A lit cigarette perched between her lips, oozing smoke. An assault rifle was slung across her back and she was twirling a throwing knife between limber fingers. She nodded at Fiona, who returned the gesture.
Thirty seconds later, Kross appeared out of the darkness, the glow from his optics cutting through the murk like the reflection trapped inside cats' eyes. He was dressed in a military jacket, pockets brimming with rifle magazines and grenades. He slunk across the ground until he was bathed in the buzzing light from the bus stop, gave a grunt to Fiona and Ryo in greeting, but said nothing else.
A taxi arrived soon afterward and Tobin extricated himself from the back, decked out in his BARGHEST uniform and tactical helmet, the visor portion pushed up onto his forehead, exposing his cybernetic-wreathed eyes. He approached, gripping a gray duffel bag in a hand that was bulging with heavy weaponry—the barrel of a machinegun was poking out from the zippered seam.
As the taxi left, it revealed Falco standing upon the other side of the highway, his wardrobe unchanged since his meeting with Fiona. He crossed the street without looking and made it up to the bus stop. Tilting his head, he beheld the netrunner in front of him for a moment before he gave a slow blink of acceptance.
Under her half-mask, Fiona smiled as she appraised the group. A loose conglomeration they may be, she felt leagues better knowing she had them all at her side. An operative for every function.
There was the sound of a truck downshifting on the highway, a loose whine that carried throughout the night. Coming from the direction of the city, a dark eighteen-wheeler muscled into view and slowly made the turnout into the bus stop. Chromed grill, the logos removed from the vehicle, and the trailer was blank sheet metal that had been colored completely black. The brakes hissed and spat as the massive truck rolled to a stop before the group, the engine growling in its throttled cage.
With a noise of something heavy shifting in the back, the rear of the trailer suddenly swung open and a ramp noisily dropped to the pavement, sending out a line of sparks.
Rzhevsky stomped out into the night from the trailer, the heat vents in her conversion distorting the air around her neck. Fiona felt a ripple rush through the group as they beheld the cyborg—they had not been warned ahead of time that they would be dealing with such a creature.
Bristling with weaponry, the mechanical denizen swung her singular optic towards Fiona and the others that had collectively clumped together like a singular biomass. Whirring sounds from Rzhevsky's lens, like she was scanning every one of them in turn. She placed a hand upon the side of the trailer and straightened up from her hunched position, hydraulics hissing as they supported her enormous frame.
"Well?" the terrible voice hissed from the vocabulator. "Time to earn your pay."
A/N: Later this month, I will be undergoing surgery that will no doubt knock me out for a few days or several, so just warning you all in advance that my productivity will probably take a hit around that time.
Playlist:
[1] Insid [Source Music]
"6006"
woob
6006
[2] Totentanz [Source Music]
"On My Way To Hell"
Połoz & Tinnitus
Cyberpunk 2077 (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
[3] Dogtown
"Homecoming"
woob
Overrun Exe
[4] Holographic Epitaph (Rebecca's Theme)
"Her Light Faded"
Daniel Pemberton
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (Original Music from the Netflix Series)
[5] Bus Stop / Rzhevsky's Arrival
"Main Theme (Opening Version)"
Hajime Mizoguchi
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
THE CAST (so far):
MAIN_CAST:
Ramses: Night City merc. Solo. Unknown age. Unknown origin. Adept in: precision weapons, infiltration, assassination.
Fiona Merrick (JP422-7C): Netrunner, formerly in the employ of NetWatch, now an independent merc. 22 years old. 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. DECEASED.
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. 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, not the cash.
Falco: Ex-mercenary. Formerly worked as a wheelman for David Martinez's crew. Prior to contact with Fiona, he was laying low in Night City, having thought he was out of the game for good.