Megabuilding H8 advertised the Paradiso Apartments with glossy stills of clean and efficient rooms, and endless holos of all the amenities that were conveniently available on the same floors. Food courts, shopping centres, activities from virtual arcades to gyms, and all in easy reach. Monitored at all times by the finest available security personnel. For the conscientious saver, there was no better place in Night City.
Shouldering her way down the hall, Lucy conceded that the ads had been right about the gym. It did exist. It was only everything else that fell short. In the same way that a missile exploding in the launch bay was falling short. Though she thought the missile would have made less of a mess.
Trash was piled against the walls, and it was a fight not to be shoved to the side and forced to walk through it. Lucy glared at anyone who dared to look at her, and kept her hand on the gun she'd brought along for her evening cardio. The combination kept most from trying to test her, but her other hand was loose at her side and ready to cast a loop of monowire around anyone who did.
She'd only had to kill two people in the month that she'd been living in the lower floors of the Megabuilding. Not enough to develop a reputation that might force her to move, but also not enough to develop a reputation that would keep her fellow streetscum from shoving her.
The security hadn't even bothered to look for who killed them. FedSolve Inc didn't pay them to bother, and the Corp that was actually sub-letting the floor from the Megabuilding Corp hadn't contracted FedSolve to care about casualty numbers below a certain level.
It was a familiar kind of horrible, which was almost the same as being fine. She'd lived this way all across Europe, and throughout the string of states that had marked her path from the shores of the Atlantic to the slums of Night City. Throughout her journey Lucy had crashed in places worse than Paradiso and places about as bad. Only recently had she felt safe enough to settle in somewhere that approached comfort, and…
There was no point getting mad about losing her apartment. Anyway, if she thought back to when she had been a child, to true comfort and security, or at least the illusion of it-
Lucy force-jacked out of those thoughts. It was dangerous to think of herself as Lucyna, and stupid to do it in public where her wandering thoughts might get her killed.
Just to ground herself, she sent out a Ping, custom tuned to propagate through meatbrains but fizzle out before it triggered a Watchdog or hit a 'Runner. It bounced through the crowded hall, then out into the wider networks of the Paradiso Apartments, then out to the edges of the floor before she cancelled it. A glittering web of connections, temporary and otherwise, were revealed to her optics. All of it as expected. No gaps or alerts where her Ping had detected Defender software and aborted its spread. She was safe.
Except for the guy who had been following her since the gym, but he'd been working up the courage for a few days already. She gave him to the end of the week before he found the nerve to give her an excuse to flatline him. Until then she had him marked, and had scoped him enough to be sure he was what he looked like. A very specific kind of meat in place of that brain.
Lucy made it to her door and ducked through it in a smooth sequence of unlock-open-check-enter-close-lock-lock-lock. Then she checked the single room again, including the alcove that almost completely hid the toilet from sight of the door, and finally let herself slump against the door.
Being used to it did not make hypervigilance any less exhausting.
"Exhaustion is no excuse." Lucy muttered to herself. It had been so long that she wasn't sure which of her parents she was echoing. Only that the translation to English had turned the saying to SCOP, and she had hated it even in the odd mix of Polish and Japanese that they had adopted in those days.
To prove that she didn't care what they thought, Lucy slid down the door and grabbed a beer from the tiny fridge she had crammed into the space beside it. She opened it with the edge of her monowire housing and took a long slow sip. Then, because she did have to get to work soon, she clambered to her feet and began kicking her way through the mess that filled her room.
Between her bed, an icebath, a coolchest, and her externals, there wasn't a lot of floor space left over. Which meant that her customary clutter filled it much quicker than it had in her apartment. Combined with the lack of any chance of guests, and an attendant lack of motivation to pick up after herself, Lucy had found herself with a sort of second layer of floor. Mostly composed of dirty laundry, with the occasional food container clean enough not to bother throwing out into the corridor and other disposable but hygienic enough trash. She figured that as long as she didn't add anything that would encourage the cockroaches to visit her, she was well ahead of some of her neighbours.
In the end, the space was liminal. A place to put her body while she worked or slept or waited for her life to start again. It didn't need to be anything more than that.
It would have been nice if it smelled better, or if the heating worked worth a rusty enny. Then again, those problems just gave her an excuse to spend time at the gym instead of sitting around feeling sorry for herself and drinking her savings in crappy beer. Running warmed her blood and sweating masked the chemical reek with a more natural kind of stink. Not like she had anyone to impress.
The lack of any alerts from a certain daemon was almost an ache sometimes. Of course she'd given more than one person the Kabuki dataterm address, but she'd been expecting her crew to take months to reach out to her, assuming Kiwi had just been talking tough about cutting her off if she brought trouble down on them. She hadn't expected the other person to leave her-
Lucy scowled and chugged the rest of her beer. The empty was abandoned on top of an external cyberdeck as she went about connecting wires and pulling a fresh bag of ice out of the coolchest. Except the added ice raised the water level in her icebath above the line she'd scratched into the finish, prompting Lucy to swear in three languages and kick a pair of shorts across the room. She went back for the empty so she could get rid of the excess water, filling the bottle and pouring it into the toilet over and over until she was satisfied she could get in without dumping water all over the floor and the bottle was clean enough to drop and forget.
Long ago, her mamusia had told her that overflowing an icebath was the sort of mistake you only made once. Lucyna had nodded her head, but it was Lucy who learned the lesson. Years later, in a French slum, with her fingers bleeding from prying a panel loose enough to crawl into the next room before the gangoons could kick down her door.
The amateur drug lab operating a floor down from her didn't scare Lucy like the hulking biopunks had, and she'd made sure her room was on a level divisible by five, meaning the floor below her was structural and it would take a long while for water to get through. She'd even sprung for waterproofing on all her externals, but none of that was enough for her to shake the habit.
Lucy told herself that she was worried about breathing in mould, on top of whatever construction material was filling the place with the stench of things not yet proven to cause neurological damage. Then she reminded herself to think of that woman as Shimmer, not the other word, and wasted three minutes setting her gear up like Kiwi's instead of how Shimmer had once shown a wide eyed little girl to do it.
Considering eyes strayed to the fridge, but two beers was one too many. Wandering thoughts would just make her miserable. Slow reflexes got Netunners derezzed.
An alarm flashed in the corner of her HUD. Time to jack in.
Her workout clothes joined yesterday's on the floor and, despite her bravado, Lucy cringed at the smell of 'ganic.
She itched for a shower, for her own shower where she could get clean without having to sweep for cams and keep an eye out the entire fucking time.
After her Run, she'd make the effort.
That resolution in mind, Lucy triggered her startup protocol and slipped into the frigid water. Cold as it was, her internals were already heating her up just from the pre-Run checks. Her nerves shivered and hummed inside her, fire pooled in her brain and pulsed out all the way to her toes. Her cyberdeck confirmed all systems green and she jacked in.
Without moving, she fell.
Into nothing.
Darkness.
Falling.
Falling.
Fall-
She caught herself, and forced her way through the wave of disorientation that debilitated most amateur 'Runners. Then she checked her time, and frowned in the Net and Meatspace simultaneously. The fractions of a seconds that a Netrunner was vulnerable when jacking in or out weren't dangerous with the right startup and exit protocols running, but she took pride in keeping her times to a minimum regardless.
"That beer was was a mistake." She thought-spoke, relishing the way intention and action blurred together in the Net. Words might not always be able to keep up, but that was language's fault for falling behind. She'd never known a 'Runner who cared.
She had known a lot who would have cared about the state of her lobby, but there was no helping it. Not with her serious gear in storage, alongside the things she wasn't ready to lose if she had to delta in a hurry.
It still stung to drop into the Net in a blank space. It made her feel like she was operating in the field even after a month in the same hideout. Worse, it made her look like an amateur.
Not that she was inviting anyone back to her lobby. Kiwi wasn't reaching out, and the best she had outside of her grouchy self-appointed mentor was a handful of acquaintances that she did not trust a tenth of the way to giving them a potential trace. Not with the bounties she had found Arasaka -and every other Corp on the planet- offering for info on anyone tied to that biopsycho.
So there was no point wasting time fixing it up. Lucy left the blank space as it was and entered the City Net itself. Her lobby faded away to reveal the true beauty of Night City. The view that appeared was one of the few things she would miss when she finally escaped it.
The real city was made of metal and concrete, but the true city was made of light.
In place of streets, datastreams were written with the lightning of a billion data transfers a second.
Where buildings loomed in Meatspace, data fortresses and city servers made neon obelisks against the simulated sky.
Everywhere she looked there was the glimmer of data flowing and pooling and processing and living. In the face of that beauty, she could only dream of what it would have looked like before the DataKrash. Who could still imagine the wonder of a Net that didn't end at the borders of a single city?
Probably the things that she wasn't allowing to render could. Disabling the Ihara-Grubb Transformation Algorithms would turn a 'Runner into a cave woman, but modifying the final output was scriptware stuff. In her case, the code was something she'd written personally, and it made sure that she never had to see the Blackwall squatting on the horizon. Her nightmares didn't need the reminder.
Though she still knew it was there. A bleeding darkness where the City Net connected to Old Net hardware that the Corps were too greedy to shut down.
Rumours liked to claim that there was more to it than that. That some of the Old Net was physically compromised as well. That there were servers in dead submarines and silent bunkers. Maintained by robotic bodies, or nanobots, or the psychic will of the AIs reaching out into Meatspace.
Having gone into the Old Net enough times to develop a healthy fear of the actual dangers, Lucy considered her opinion an expert one. That opinion was that the rumours were full of shit. The Old Net was dangerous enough for mundane reasons. Inventing new ones was bad enough when meatbrains did it, and in her fellow Netrunners it was completely short-circed behaviour.
Not that she had had much luck convincing anyone of that. One of the many downsides of being on the run, her old life abandoned entirely, was that she couldn't use the events of that life to win arguments with gonks on the Net.
With a static sigh, Lucy shook off her latest bout of spiralling thoughts, and dived into the nearest secure datastream.
The traffic was encrypted, but she could piggyback off the connection itself. Hiding herself amongst other data let her avoid the local security, and using the connection bypassed NetWatch's eyes on the public City Net. A trick so widely used that even the dumbest Netcrawler knew the NetPigs were onto it, but then what did they care?
Despite all the stories of chromed out super agents, most of NetWatch were low level corpo-cops looking for amateurs starting out and meatbrains who didn't know what they were doing. The real agents were the ones who went after Netrunners worth the name, and those overworked slabs of SCOPbacon weren't going to fuck up their own ability to travel the Net without painstakingly working their way through the public systems.
So Lucy was free to dive in near the anonymity of the port she'd used to enter the Net, and emerge halfway across the city, a few 'steps' from the pirate servers she'd been aiming for.
The riot of activity that greeted her was nearly physical in its intensity. Ads screamed and glared in every direction, while the flow of data was so thick that she could barely find the bandwidth to move forward. Sympathetic sensations played across her skin in Meatspace, consequences of a brain being convinced that its body was being buffeted by a surging crowd. All the while she felt the thrum and whir of her cyberdecks -internal and externals alike- starting to heat up from the strain of it all.
Normally she had the necessary countermeasures preprogrammed into her avatar, but the featureless figure she was using couldn't support anything that complex. Intentionally so, since she was trying to avoid people looking for a high spec Netrunner.
It still sucked to have to add exclusions for the ads in real time, especially with the slowdown to her system from so much junk data. It sucked enough that she ducked into a low traffic server to get it done quicker. She flashed from the glow of the streets into a space styled like an ancient dungeon, and she lost a little more time ensuring that the system wouldn't flag her as a visitor and make the other users aware of her presence.
Then she sat down in a simulacrum of a wooden pew. Simultaneously casual and painstakingly aware of every detail of the movement's translation into piggybacking on server resources to fractionally ease the strain on her chrome.
The whole reason the IG Algorithms were so ubiquitous was how easy they made everything. Systems that weren't even in the same operating system could talk to one another seamlessly. Files whose formats were less than a memory could be decoded without effort. Tasks that would once have taken extended work from a skilled hacker were at the fingertips of any kid who could get the chrome to jack in and a little scriptware to get started. Complex programming translated seamlessly into identifiable sights and sounds, while every action was transformed back into both code and execution.
Only, just like someone who thought they were a Techie because they downloaded a bunch of helper programs and bought the tools to follow their instructions, the result of blind reliance on the IG Algorithms was trash not even worth calling an amateur. As bad as meatbrains pressing buttons on a dataterm and discovering what they did when NetWatch knocked on their door, or a Corp's hit squad blasted through it.
A Netrunner had to know how it worked. Just to get started, they had to know the whole mess of languages and protocols that were cobbled together to keep the modern Net running, and understand how the IG Algorithms made it all work together as though it had been designed as a single system from the start. Then, once they had the basics down, they had to learn where the cracks were. Not in the actual code, where the IG Algorithms would do their work for anyone who waved a hand in the Net, but in the ever-shifting aether of the IG Algorithms themselves.
Netrunning, real Netrunning, went beyond the archeotech programmers. It wasn't about manipulating the systems, it was about manipulating the Net itself. A task that necessitated a live system -since the IG Algorithms were incomprehensible junk when not in motion- and direct connection of the human brain, or a supercomputer powerful enough to keep up with a world constantly rewriting itself.
One of her trainers with Arasaka had said comparing it to what programming once was, was like comparing a wizard to a physicist.
Back then Lucyna had mostly been angry at Ikara and Grubb for how their work forced them to enter the Old Net, but looking back, Lucy could appreciate how he'd helped her to understand. She almost regretted what they'd done to him.
Almost.
Not that it mattered.
What did matter was updating her program to deal with the latest round of ads. Something she'd have to do again tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after, and every day after that until she could emerge from hiding and use something substantial enough not to lose to the daily efforts of Corpo 'Runners.
The chatter of the forum around her wasn't helping her to focus on the drudge work, especially when she lost focus for long enough to realise what they were talking about.
They were discussing the biopsycho.
Her shift in focus brought her to an occupied part of the dungeon, and reminded her of the downside of rendering herself invisible to the regular users. A hundred packages flew through her every second and she got to experience snippets of every single one of them.
By the time she hauled herself out of the way her internal's temperature was spiking slightly, and she was surrounded by a scene from a holo with the telltale glitching of a shitty holo-edit. She recognised the actress who had been fighting monsters in the torn remains of clothing on a vidboard outside her window for the last two weeks. Sure enough a monster appeared behind the woman, literally, probably relying on a hard-coded point of view for that scene and obviously being mocked for it. She would normally have appreciated the joke, but the monster had a furry hat and horribly familiar features poorly mapped to it.
She managed to close it before she could take in whatever text someone had slapped over their attempt at a meme. She also managed to resist the urge to take out her increased heart rate on the gonk who made it.
Instead she finished updating her shitty scriptware adshield and went back out into the Net streets without acknowledging how the water was rippling in her icebath. She had no reason to be shaking anyway. It was David who had been left with that lunatic, not her.
Compulsively, she checked for an alert from her daemon. Nothing. Obviously.
Instead of wasting any more time, she headed straight for the distraction of her gig. Not that it was worthy of the name. She'd gotten it off of a messageboard purporting to be run by a top Net fixer that she knew for a fact had been dead for years, and found it to be exactly the sort of work that would take an anonymous Netrunner with no reputation of any kind.
Grunt security work. The most tedious thing she could imagine short of literally watching paint dry.
Lucy accepted the transfer of data from the previous runner as the shifts changed. Of course she checked it, but the work was so soul crushing that her predecessor hadn't even tried to leave a surprise for her. It was just a series of reports on what had happened for the last ten hours, same as she would have to file to get paid for the 'gig' that a piddly Micro Corp had handed out.
She blew out a sigh and settled amongst the cluster of Control Nodes that linked to cameras, security gates, and a handful of turrets. Then she opened a report template and began.
'Hour one, minute one, three gangoons in store zero five, Tyger Claws, no threatening activity.'
'Hour one, minute two…'
.
.
.
Twelve mind-numbing hours later, Lucy finally gave up on waiting for her relief to arrive, and decided to leave before her icebath became dangerously warm.
Since there was no way they'd pay her for leaving without a replacement to handover to, she spent all of five minutes stealing her pay on the way out. Then she deleted the reports and went through the motions of burning the ID she'd been using for the last month before she finally, finally, could jack out.
The bath was still cold enough, barely, so she heaved herself out of the icebath before the heat of her cyberdeck could fade completely. Sweat beaded on her skin, but that was better than trying to warm up without heating.
Lucy grabbed for a towel and was thrown across the room. She had a split second to process that the floor had bucked beneath her. She glimpsed the edge of a structural plate, slammed up through her room. A shower of junk was flying through the air with her and-
She hit the wall.
By the time the second explosion went off, she was already unconscious.
After a month away, David had started to miss Night City's streets.
Within a few minutes of being teleported into an alley in Little China, he had nearly been knocked down by a gang of Tygers dodging traffic via the sidewalk, had a stranger try to sell him everything from XBDs to a night of fun with a passing Joytoy, broken the fingers of the guy trying to rob him while his choomba played distraction, and been offered a great deal on tickets to a fight night deep in Animal turf by the man whose fingers he'd just broken.
David waved them both off and fought not to laugh. Night City never did disappoint. Compared to the sub, well it wasn't as dangerous as training with the Heart Pirates, but it was definitely more exciting.
More than any of the places they'd lived, the NC Streets were David's home. He really had missed them. The combined roar of traffic and crowds and overlapping ads and a gunfight off in the distance. The smog blended with the smells of a hundred stalls and restaurants just in the one block of Little China he stood in, until he could have choked on the air alone. The endless variety of people that surrounded him.
The sidewalk was crowded enough that he got dirty looks from the people who had to step around him as he took it all in. He let them glare.
Then he shook it off and reminded himself that looking like a tourist was why people were trying to rob him. He'd long ago perfected the art of looking like an unappealing target, but it was hard to adapt those lessons to the hulking frame he had been forced to adapt to. Making himself look confident but nonthreatening wasn't an option any more, and despite having gotten his mission by finally landing a hit on Tich, David struggled to channel the intimidation he knew he had to.
Having graduated from just the four gonks to getting beat up by Teak might have had something to do with that. The man was more than a foot shorter than him now, and fully blind, but it still felt like trying to fight a mech. Hard to feel strong when he kept getting taken out by a guy in a fursuit.
Someone tried to shove him, rebounded, and ended up on their ass in the gutter. David turned to look down at them, finding an Animal -if on the smaller side for them- staring up at him like he was a monster. She scrambled to her feet and went back the way she'd come, while David took the cue to get his head bolted back on and get to work.
He could understand her terror. Part of it would be his frame -he was more than eight foot tall and still had growth left, according to Skulk's theories- and the muscle he'd packed onto it. Part of it had to be his teeth, gleaming sharp whenever he forgot how he had to hold his jaw to keep his lips from drifting apart. However, David wagered most was because of the blend of optics he'd given himself. Maelstrom-style multi-lenses on one side, and a single oversized unit on the other. He'd needed to change the lines of his face, and making himself intimidating could only help with what he had been sent to do.
Violence, despite his mom's objections, was what he had volunteered for. Violence that needed not to be traceable back to the Heart Pirates. A perfect task for someone who had changed in ways even the finest biomods couldn't have done so quickly.
purupuru purupuru
If only he hadn't been given babysitters.
He answered, grudgingly impressed at how quickly Ikkaku had picked up enough to not only be able to outfit him with a clean agent, but give it the voice of one of her beloved Snails. Only instead of the voice of Sogeko, by far the more talkative of the snipers shadowing him, David heard his mom yell, "¡Mijo! Are you okay?!"
'Mom!' He shouted back, glad that replacing his internal agent was as simple as eating the new one, because this was not a conversation he was having out loud. 'Get off off the line!'
He knew that he shouldn't raise his voice, but he'd never been good at hiding emotion in internal calls.
"D." As always, there was no warning in his mom's tone. That had never been her style. Though by the look she had once given a neighbour who made some shitty joke about shoes, David thought it might have been his grandparents'. Unfortunately for him, Gloria Martinez used something far more terrifying than threats and beatings.
"They said you got in a fight D, with an Animal. Tell me you're okay."
Guilt bubbled in his gut, 'I'm fine - good - no worries. Was more more like a kitten.'
He couldn't even muster the anger he should have been feeling at Sogeko for reporting the brief bump like it was a full-on brawl. He also didn't manage to think any other reassuring words across the connection before his mom said, "So you didn't get stabbed?"
'N-' David started to think a denial, then his instinctive patdown of his jacket found a knife handle dangling from where the shattered remains of the blade were caught on the cloth. The four gonks had hastily tailored it along with his pants, making knock-off neokitsch designs out of material that felt heavier than it looked. Material that had resisted the knife like an armoured jacket, while his body did the rest.
"David?"
'I'm fine - fine - not stabbed. It didn't go in - fuck!' He hadn't meant to say so much, and the way his mom started reeling off medical jargon was exactly why. 'Said I'm fine. You knew that I snarfed plenty of - wait - is this line safe secure?'
"No worries, Big Sis took care of that!" Ikkaku chimed into the call and reminded him that there were witnesses. "Snowy is all linked up and making sure nobody can touch our end." David matched the name to a memory of a round white Transponder Snail, that Ikkaku had given a fake moustache and a monocle. "They might flag the call on your end, but only if you draw attention. And Sogeko and Sogemaru have Koko and Loko." Those names made him shiver at the memory of an enclosure full of tiny Snails that he had refused to go near.
He wasn't putting one of them in his ear. No way. No matter what Ikkaku claimed about the Corps not looking for Transponder Snail signals.
"D?"
Without any excuse to end the call, David flexed his power. 'I had have my sub-dermal on.' He let the jumbled wording of thought-to-speech obscure any question of whether he'd had it on at the time, and hoped that his jacket was dark enough to obscure the slow trickle of blood he was finally starting to feel. It wasn't anything to be concerned about, but he had seen how crazy the snipers' eyes were. 'Ganic or not.
"Okay mijo. I love you."
Of all the things he did not want to do, David wanted to have this conversation the least. Only the memory of his mom, limp and motionless on the road, made him swallow his pride and think back to her, 'Love you too mom-ma.'
Then he hung up and tried very hard not to feel like a child being trusted to use the SCSM for the first time. He was doing a serious job, for a crew that had made Night City tremble twice in as many months.
He was hunting a man down, and robbing him.
Luckily, the hunting part was just a case of following directions.
David wandered the streets of Little China as he fine tuned his new attitude. When people started to follow him, or pay too much attention, he turned up the confidence and tried to look hard. When people started to follow him with their eyes, seeing him as a threat instead of a mark, he slumped his shoulders and tried to be less memorable.
By the time he found the mahjong joint he was looking for, David had found his stride again. Nobody looked at him twice, even as he towered over the crowd.
Just another Juice freak. Probably someone's fancy biomodded huscle, but nothing special in his off hours. David slipped into a seat at a food stall across the street from his target and began to eat.
He'd worried that upscale food would have ruined him for a good meat skewer, but the SCOPchicken still tasted fine. The ones in Santo were better.
He ate slow, but packed away enough to make sure he wouldn't piss off the woman running the stall. All while his eyes stayed fixed on the building where his target spent most of his time.
David didn't know much about him, or what was on the datashard that he had stolen. He just knew that the plan needed it. What the plan was, David wasn't entirely clear on. Training and learning had not left him the time for curiosity.
All he knew was that the plan would give them time, and without it they had less than a month before things started to go bad.
So when the thief -a whip thin man with a long braid and hands that never stopped fidgeting- left the building across the street, David gave him a minute to get some distance then paid his bill and got up to follow him.
No amount of the right body language would stop the thief from noticing an eight foot tall man following him if he spotted him more than once, so David began closing the distance as quickly as he could. As soon as he was close enough, David wanted to make his move, but it wouldn't have been clean. Instead he just drifted to the side, until he was right at the edge of the sidewalk, traffic close enough he could have touched it.
A few seconds later the thief walked past an alley with busted lights, and the chance was there for the taking. Even as he noticed something and began to glance back, David's Sandy was starting to slow the world to a crawl.
Teak called it a crutch, and had repeatedly beaten humility into him despite it, but David was happy to break his crutch over the thief's head if that was what it took. He ran onto the road and cut ahead in the moments between cars rushing by. Then he stormed back onto the sidewalk beside the thief and planted a boot in his side.
The target went flying into the alley, David followed, and then it went wrong.
'Cause the target had a Sandy of his own.
Midair he twisted and turned his flight into a roll. He'd hardly gotten his feet under him before he was bouncing from wall to wall to dumpster, then up onto a fire escape.
David refused to let him get away. Refused to fail. Plus, he had all the cyberware that the crew had cared to take from a horde of freshly bribed Maelstrom. At least the bits that they hadn't wanted to hold onto for long.
With a thought, his lower legs were chrome, and he could just compress and-
-the release took him high enough that he could grab the fire escape and guide himself over at the peak of his jump. When he landed, his ankles were normal again but his arm was unfolding into a projectile launcher.
In a blur, the thief shot up the stairs towards the roof, and David lost precious moments shifting his aim up only to decide that he was not the kind of psycho who fired explosives next to windows he could see people through. He broke into another sprint, his nerves, even enhanced as they were, screaming from the second activation with so little break between.
But when he reached the roof, the thief was still in sight.
The projectile launcher was too messy. Lucky for David, he'd spent a lot of time training with things other than his fists, even if Sogemaru had used one of the only full sentences David had heard from him to say that the path of the gun was a long road to walk.
It occurred to him to wonder where the two snipers were, but they weren't meant to get involved and risk linking him to the crew unless things got dangerous.
So he did not hope for a bullet to come from a neighbouring roof and bring down his target. He just drew his own gun, a prototype lexington variant that Sogeko had handed him personally, and…and…
Somehow, he could hear the sound of the bones breaking as 'Saka soldiers had gone under the wheels of a stolen bike.
He hadn't heard those sounds at the time, hadn't even been sure that he killed them, but the sounds still haunted him. Especially as he drew a bead on a man who had done nothing to him. Tried to decide if it was worth risking a leg shot. Told himself that it was the only way and it was him or them.
Stood and watched the thief vanish around a corner.
David holstered his gun with shaking hands, and dreaded the call that he knew was coming.
Sure enough, Sogeko recited, "Oh hesitation, you let the target escape. Assistance young David?"
The sting of failure was not something David liked, and the idea of risking that someone would tie the snipers to the target felt like failure to him. Fortunately, as he considered his options, David realised he didn't need them to get involved. He just needed to know, 'Where where is the target?'
Training with Teak had made him painfully aware of the radar sense that the Pirates all had to some degree. Training with the snipers had made him realise just how useful it could be.
And there was a trick that he could do himself, that David thought might help mitigate his first fuckup.
As he climbed down to street level, David flexed his power again, and shifted his entire head. It was an exotic with the head of a bull that stepped out onto the street. Jacket now inside out and tied around his waist.
He stayed a full street over from the target this time. Until he stopped somewhere for long enough that David could run ahead without drawing attention. When he set off again, he was walking up the street towards where David was sitting. Nervous optics bouncing everywhere as he scurried along.
The thief looked right at David, and kept walking. He looked at him again with the vague curiosity most people had for exotics. Then he turned around to check behind him and David made his move a second time.
Only this time he didn't kick the slippery fuck. He tackled him.
When he activated his Sandy to get away, David simply tightened his grip, reared back, and began headbutting the gonk.
To his credit, it took nearly ten seconds before the speedware's effect faded enough for David to land that hit.
Not that that helped him when it did connect.
The target slumped, and David set about flipping him over and prying the shards out of his sockets. One was a wallet, and the other was some kind of encrypted who knew what. Exactly what he had been told to look for.
David dragged the guy up against a wall of the alley, and after a long moment reminding himself that he had no way to buy anything with electronic money anyway, slotted the guy's wallet back into his neck. The other shard David left secure in his own slot, having checked and confirmed weeks ago that they would be unharmed even if he transformed with a datashard inside.
His agent rang, and David was treated to a rare thing, Sogemaru's voice, saying something even rarer, "Well done."
It was already obvious to David that the senior sniper did not give out praise lightly. So it felt strange to hear it and disagree, but he couldn't accept praise after nearly screwing up a job as simple as jumping someone and stealing a shard. Not after he'd frozen like a fucking coward.
'Was was it? Any idi-idiot could have grabbed this.'
"No. Well done not shooting." Then he hung up.
David sat and stared at the wall, completely baffled, until his agent rang again and Sogeko 'explained', "My grandfather used to say 'The only thing more mournful than a miss, is a needless bullseye'. You could have done better elsewhere, such things you will learn in time."
'I hesitated.'
"It is not shameful David, to hesitate to shoot a man in the back." Sogeko cleared his throat. "If you would make your way to the designated place beneath the bridge, then the Captain will retrieve you. Well done."
'Wait stop.' David had made another plan for after the job was done. 'I have a place I want need to go first.'
As they had talked David had crossed to the other side of the alley to the one he had dragged his target into, and through that end he could see Kabuki. The place Lucy had asked him to go. The place where he could maybe, possibly, find the girl with a smile like a nuclear sunrise.
He could also see the Japantown Megabuilding across the water. H8 loomed large enough that he could see it even with the smog as thick as it was. Especially when a distant flash of fire blew out several of the windows.
The distance made it look like a lighter flame, but David could do the maths.
When Sogeko asked, "Are you out of sight?" David was already ducking back into the alley, away from anyone who might see what was about to happen.
He'd barely thought 'Yes' when he was standing in the recovery room on the Polar Tang, surrounded by activity and being handed a stretcher. He hadn't finished fumbling for a hold of it when a breathing mask was dragged over his head and Law was in their midst.
"Expect smoke!" The Captain shouted. "Ready?!"
David joined the affirmative cry, and then they were somewhere full of smoke and embers and he was rushing to force open the nearest door and find a patient for the better trained crew to help.
Instead, he found a girl with blood in her hair and only the barest rise and fall in her chest to keep his heart from stopping.
"Lucy!"
