AFTERLIFE
Late morning was the only time that Afterlife was not open. The staff kicked out everyone after nine, would wait another hour for the ones that had yet to be roused, or could not be roused until the gestalt of drugs they had consumed had fully dissolved in their system, upon which they would be forcibly dragged out and deposited in the nearby parking lot. The doors would then be locked, not to open until the sun had gone down, ready to accept patrons again.
Getting down to the club had all been a blur for Fiona.[1] She had been going in and out, lying upon the floor of a moving van, seeing, past the bare splinters of the windows, the array of streetlights fluttering by overhead, the fogged tower of the megastructures and their vast and spiked antenna farms that bristled from their roofs as if they meant to scratch apart the cloud layers that coddled them. She had been pale and sweating, flecks of blood crusted to her face, voices fluttering within tortured subharmonics, never quite manifesting as something comprehensible to her ears.
The van eventually had rolled to a stop and the door had been forcefully shunted open. Someone was barking orders in the background. Fiona felt two pairs of hands, one around her arms and another at her feet, grab and hoist her from the vehicle, quickly ferrying her through the humid outside and into a service elevator where the shadowed air was cool and smelled dimly of mold.
She tried keeping her eyes open, but her eyelids felt like weights had been saddled to them. She just saw the agonizing yellow of a medical jacket laced with armored fiber and the kinked ends of long, gray hair.
Something unclenched around her throat and she sighed as she fell unconscious, allowing the tunnel of blackness to suck her away towards her destination, wherever it might be. Her reflection could be glimpsed in infinitude, as if she was falling down a long corridor of broken glass, with panes that shattered into lines of sapphire and crimson data as she crashed through them.
When she next came to, she was lying on a cracked hospital chair, the leather the color of toothpaste. There was a bright overhead light searing her artificial retinas. The whirr of a buzz saw. She could see a man—a doctor in full medical garb, wearing a facemask and a trilens metal goggle contraption, hiding his face away—move in and out of her vision with the practiced speed of a professional, though everything would blur in and out as her eyes refused to focus from some reason. Dust of some kind hissed through the air. A burnt smell reached Fiona's nose, like nothing she could describe. She wondered what it was.
Trying to peer down upon her body, she realized that the thick leather strap that had been tightened over her forehead prevented her from doing so. There was a strange vibration that was originating from her arm, or rather, the stump of it. Trying to repair Rzhevsky's damage. It had almost been surreal when it had happened. One moment there had been sensation, and in the next, nothing. It was almost surprising at how it had not hurt when she had been mutilated. Like someone just pulling lightly at her shoulder.
Blinking, she was about to wonder why the pain had not settled in just yet, until her malfunctioning eyes spotted the IV drip next to her. Local anesthetic—she was drugged to the gills. The buzzing noise continued. Was this doctor cutting away more of her? She wanted to cry out, but she was already so exhausted that the most that she could do was sigh forlornly. She had even expended her tears from the previous night's events. All she could do was sit still and wait for it to be over.
The sawing noise soon stopped, which she had realized with a lurch was from the doctor smoothing out the jagged breaks in her bone with a device like a sander, and then there was a clicking sound of metallic utensils. Now there was a quick tugging sensation at the end of her stump. Pulling away dead flesh from the dismembered end, perhaps, and folding the rest until it was in a neat position to be sutured. The thought made Fiona queasy.
After what felt like an hour, Fiona's redrimmed eyes saw the doctor pass by her chair for the thousandth time, a prosthetic arm held carefully in his hands. Unlike the other ripperdocs she had been to in the past, this doctor made no effort to narrate his process, for he simply ducked down out of her vision and proceeded in what was apparently a trademark silence.
There was a distant sort of pressure that Fiona felt at the end of her arm. Like a painful spear driving through the bone, the arrow splitting the ossein down the middle as it drove further and further into her. She winced and gave a slight gasp.
"Hold still," the ripperdoc said for the first time. She didn't recognize the voice, which was a gruff rasp, the sort of sound that could only be garnered from age. "This isn't going to work if you fidget."
Fiona tried her best to look at the ceiling, past the immense glare that the lamp was exuding.
It felt like black toxins were being exuded from her very heart, spiraling into the tributaries that were her veins. Something in her insides wrenched and she nearly jolted, the pain enough to make her eyes water.
Static hissed in the background. Sparks danced across her vision. The smell of burning flesh.
Color dribbled in and out, momentarily flickering gray, until reality snapped back in.
"You're done," she heard the ripperdoc say, but by then she was already halfway down her mental corridor again, where her body was freezing, the levels of megabuildings whipping past her like a zoetrope, and the sensation of falling had gripped her with a powerful hand.
She was so relieved that she finally fainted.
She awoke to the sound of running water.
The strap that had been applied to her head had since been removed, allowing her to rise with a cough. Something behind her ribs ached, a fresh stab.
"I wouldn't get up if I were you," she heard the ripperdoc say. "Injected you with inhibitors as I couldn't fully anesthetize you. However, means your balance is going to be shot for at least another half hour." A pause. "Or, disregard my advice. See if I care. You'll be wishing you listened to me when you're lying on your face on the ground."
Weakly, Fiona turned her head. The ripperdoc was next to a grimy sink with a large basin, washing his hands. The medical goggles had been removed by now, but he was angled so that she couldn't see his eyes. Finally, he dried his hands and turned around, exposing his bloodstained clothes. Inanely, Fiona wondered whose blood it was at first before realization finally set in. Some AI I am, if I'm limited to the downsides of the human mind.
The ripperdoc then reached up and removed the facemask that covered the rest of his features. A bearded face that was nearly completely gray, flecked with brief color. Broad frame, almost like a Cro-Magnon descendant. Sour eyes, but there was an almost kindly and exasperated glint to them, a conspiratorial secret that only a few would truly be privy to.
Fiona licked her lips, for they were cracked and dry. "Water…" she coughed.
Nodding, the ripperdoc crossed the room, silhouetting himself against the flares of several industrial lamps that barely did anything to rid the room of the gloom that obscured it. He kicked open a nearby fridge, snapped open a can of filtered water, and placed a straw into it. He walked back over to where Fiona lay on the chair, highlighted from the spotlights like some magnificent animal for sacrifice, but instead of putting her to the knife anymore than he already had, he simply held out his hand and aimed the straw so that Fiona could drink from the can.
The water was cold and seemed to freeze her gullet as it traveled on its way down, but all she could imagine was a rainstorm upon the parched nuclear deserts. She took big sips at first until the water went down the wrong pipe. She spent several seconds coughing, her gut threatening to give the fluids up, each wrack producing a fresh wave of pain in her chest, feeling like she was being ripped open.
"Want to try smaller sips this time?" the ripperdoc asked sarcastically, his tone indicating that he was used to patients who would not listen. Either that, or he had children.
She obeyed but she was only able to suck down half the can's contents before the ripperdoc abruptly pulled it away from her.
"That's enough for now," he told her. "The medicine will interfere too much with the fluids in your stomach. Don't worry, the drugs will cycle out of your system in a few hours. After that, you can drink to your heart's content." He then reached up and tapped his temple. "Check your HUD. Should see a device requesting a new connection."
Fiona actually had to turn on her HUD, since it had somehow been deactivated sometime during the night. She flipped to her local network menu, which displayed a map of her entire body and the different systems within. On it, she saw that her right arm, just above the area, was nothing but a gray zone, nothing for her nerves to register. But, in a textbox just to the side of where her arm was portrayed, she could see the incoming prompt: NEW DEVICE DETECTED. CONNECT?
She had not even fully cognized what she was about to do. She only knew there was one reality in which she needed to accept this request, so she did.
The textbox went away as soon as she sent the command to connect.
There was a click in her head and, immediately, there was a virulent disc of pain that seemed to shred at her arm, a redhot saw that was turning at supercharged speeds, ripping apart her flesh so quickly that it was disintegrating into a meaty dust. But that pain vanished nearly instantaneously, as if it had never been there, and, in its place, like branching nerves had suddenly sprouted from her shortened limb like sprouts, relief. A blossoming sensation that felt as if she had dipped her arm into a warm spring.
But she was feeling. She could feel her arm.
Now trembling with anticipation and relief, Fiona finally had the strength to look down at herself.
She mustered the will to look past the sweat-stained clothes that she had been adorned in. The ripperdoc had done a good job with the surgery. There was just a faint line where her real arm ended and the cybernetic limb began. Thin lines of cyberware cycled around the prosthetic arm like metallic embroidery and her digits were looped with the same metal as if she was wearing an assortment of rings. But the shade of skin was identical to her natural hue. The same for her nails. The synthSkin even mimicked the faint tracing of veins underneath an epidermis, regardless of the fact that there was no use for a circulatory system there.
Breathing heavily, Fiona lifted her limb. It felt weightless. Limber, even. As though she had been born with it. But every time she flexed her fingers, there was just the faintest sound of servos. A muted whirr. A constant reminder that she was shedding the very form that made her human, if she ever was one to begin with.
In the background, the ripperdoc was zipping up a black leather case, the glint of silver instruments laden within. He snapped off his plastic gloves and threw them in a nearby wastebasket. "You won't need to run a calibration. Software patch already did that while you were out. Just got to wait for the drugs to settle and then you can go." Finished packing, he took his case and headed towards the door, where the word EXIT dimly glowed above in limegreen neon. To the darkness, he said, "Go easy on her. She's still recovering."
Fiona wondered who the hell the ripperdoc was talking to, for there was no one else in the room. But as soon as she heard the sound of roller wheels upon concrete did she realize that someone else had been here this whole time. Heart pounding, she sat up, already forgetting the doctor's orders, and cycled her optics into low-light mode.
Sitting backwards upon a spinning chair, arms positioned upon the headrest, was Rogue.
"Y-You?" Fiona coughed, nearly stumbling over her own tongue.
Rogue got up from the chair and kicked it away. She walked over to the chair where Fiona sat and smiled down upon her. The look upon the fixer's face was strange. Full of pity, almost grandmotherly. Had anyone seen the queen of the Afterlife express this kind of emotion before? The sight was so foreign to Fiona that she almost registered it as garish.
Taking a moment to look Fiona up and down, Rogue sighed. "Honey," she said, "you really look like hammered shit."
Fiona tried to extricate herself from the chair, wanting to get away from the very thing that had restrained her, but Rogue held out a hand and pushed on Fiona's chest, making her flush with the worn leather curves.
"You heard what the doc said," Rogue chastised the younger woman. "Restriction on movement for a bit. McLeod's very good at what he does, so if he gives you any medical advice, you'd be wise to take it."
Fiona swallowed, the memories of pain shuttling back in. Rzhevsky's bullet. The cold darkness of the underground. Warm blood running down her legs, sloshing in her boots. Headlights blinding her.
"The van… in the garage. That was you?"
Rogue nodded, the aberrations from the nearby lamps illuminating her hair as if it was aflame.
"How'd… how'd you find me?"
"Wasn't hard. You had friends that were doing a better job of looking out for you than I was. You actually closed most of the distance from that little tumble you took out from the tower. All I had to do was just drive a little closer."
Friends. Who could that…
Her thoughts, inevitable as they were disappointing, turned to Ramses, but the preimage of him immediately disappeared in a cloud of smoke as quickly as it had come into her mind as if she had forcefully taken a fan to them. His departure was like a rake in her head, a phantom that did more damage coming out than from its intrusion. Her entire body seemed to reject the idea of him. She wanted to curl up into a ball, frightened and disgusted, but also riddled with a deep sadness that she knew she would never be rid of. For his memory was a parasite that had latched itself deep in the gray matter of her brain. One that she could never extricate.
She clutched a hand tightly. Held it to her chest as though she gripped her own heart, desperate to squeeze the pain out from her as if she was wringing a towel.
"You could've left me for dead," she said, voice hollow. "I wouldn't have blamed you. Nor would I ever have thought to involve you."
Clucking her tongue, Rogue just shook her head. "I've had enough in dealing with martyrs in this city. Everyone wants to find that perfect blaze of glory to go out on, just so they can get a drink named after them. It's a tradition that has just incentivized more young fools throwing themselves at the corps instead of being methodical, being smart, and doing something worthwhile with their lives. I've been at this job for decades, honey. If it were up to me, Afterlife's menu would be noticeably smaller. Very rarely does anyone actually do anything in this city. Something that is… inspirational. Perhaps it's time I started dispensing that advice more often."
Fiona frowned, her brow tightening. She held up her new arm. "This didn't happen because of any suicidal tendencies that I have, you know."
Rogue made a conciliatory shrug and then tapped her forehead with a finger, holographics of a white dragon dancing upon the spotless nail. "Maybe not back then. But now? With that particular bullet in your brain? I wouldn't blame you if you developed a sudden urge to be a little more… reckless."
Fiona stared, trying to use her best poker face. Surely Rogue did not mean…?
But Rogue had retrieved a little tablet from a side table and was already scrolling through it with a finger. Her face had turned pensive as she stared down at the wounded netrunner and she delivered an oh-come-on look towards the patient. "The doc told me already. Apparently, he was running some side scans while he was working on your arm. Found that your cyberdeck was riddled with so much Blackwall code that it was, to use his terminology, a virus-riddled shitstorm."
Her heart sinking, Fiona lay back upon the chair. "Oh," was all she got out.
"'Oh' is right. You've got so much foreign code in your deck that you should have flatlined in this chair already. And apparently, that's just the tip of the iceberg. McLeod found out something that… well, it's something that you need to know. And… it's not good."
Something echoed in her mind, cruel laughter, and her mind twisted. As if she knew what Rogue was going to say.
"What?" she asked anyway.
The fixer took a deep breath, concern lining her face. She consulted the tablet again, as if considering the words she was going to say before she would say them. "The frequency of the Blackwall runtimes that are currently going on in that brain of yours are so intensive that they're slowly burning away your synapses. Too much heat, you know? It's like you're… stuck, almost, in a constant deep-dive. Right now, you're somehow managing to take the immense heat and energy generated from your Blackwall linkage, but that's not going to last for long. Not at this rate. McLeod says that your chrome will fail if you don't bring the processor power down and get those Blackwall viruses out."
So, this was the toll on her body that the program had mentioned to her. The price for her freedom was to wind up dead on the street. But at least she would be spared the indignity of imprisonment or torture at Arasaka hands. Now, they would never have her.
Her vision lost all sharpness and she blinked several times to wipe away the myopia. She could scarcely describe how the viruses got installed, never mind if there was a process to remove them. It was difficult for her to hope. "How long do I have?" she croaked.
Rogue flipped through the ripperdoc's notes. "He could only give a projection based on the current rate of decay. But… no more than twelve hours. And that's if you don't overtax your cyberdeck by running anything at the same processor power as a quickhack."
"So. I'm going to die. Soon."
"At this rate… yes."
That was it, then. Fiona slowly went limp on the chair as she folded her hands across her stomach. She just stared at the ceiling, as though as this was a fine place to die, seeing as it was inevitable anyway. Another martyr will soon be upon you, Rogue. But don't bother naming a drink after me.
As she brooded in her addled mind, ghostly remnants of the pain still floating within reach, Rogue continued to narrate from the notes. "…obviously, the time limit can be elongated with certain treatments, but the extent of the damage in your head… that's not going to be easy to remove."
"It's not damage," Fiona said, looking away from Rogue. Perhaps the fixer did not know the extent of the truth, after all. "Not really."
"The report I have in my hand seems to differ."
Turning back over to face Rogue, Fiona stifled a sigh. A glaze of red hieroglyphics had just started to filter over her vision, turning her surroundings into a crimson maze. Rogue, in particular, looked like a bloody skeleton with the encrypted energy that encompassed her body in an imitation of a circulatory system.
"It doesn't tell you the whole story," Fiona whispered. Faces were like fog shapes in her mind's eye. People that treated her like a disposable piece of plastic. Michiko. Rzhevsky.
Ramses.
Rogue arched an eyebrow. "And that is?"
The netrunner's hands slowly gripped the armrests of the chair, further straining the worn leather.
Not responding right away, Fiona grumbled as she sat back up again and, before Rogue could react, she swung her legs off the side of the chair until her feet touched the floor. Her head immediately swam, there was a lurch in her gut, but at least those were sensations that let her know that she was still alive.
There was still time.
Hands at her shoulders, gripping firmly. "Hang on," Rogue urged, "you shouldn't be moving around just yet—"
But Fiona gave a wrench, freeing herself from Rogue's grip. "You said it yourself," she hissed. "I only have twelve hours of life yet. I'm not spending any of them sitting in a fucking chair."
"There are ways to mitigate flatlining. Ice baths, for example. It'll have to be near-permanent, but you need to cool down your body to prevent the heat damage in your brain otherwise you'll burn out."
Whirling, a red glare simmered at the corner of Fiona's eye. "I will never consider that as an option. I've already lost too many years to an ice bath. If that's the only way that I'll live, then… then there's nothing for it. I can only make the most of the time that I have left."
Rogue scraped a scuffed boot across the grimy ground in exasperation, hands on her hips. "You weren't listening to me at all when I was talking about blazes of glory, were you?"
Fiona had been staggering over to where a large tool bench had been located. Her HUD had already scanned the drawers and had located an item of interest. She bent towards the drawer in question, wrenched it open with a tortured squeal of rusted rails. Inside was a polished carbon-fiber half-mask with circular green speakers positioned midway up the jaw of the covering. She put it on and adjusted the straps until the fit was snug.
Standing back up, Fiona limped back over to Rogue. "The difference this time, is that I don't have a choice," she growled, the speakers flaring acid green with each syllable, giving her voice a mechanical edge.
"What exactly are you thinking?"
The exit out of here looked particularly enticing. Fiona was already shuffling towards it, her breath coming in quick bursts, Rogue not bothering to stop her. "I'm going to get even, that's what."
"Alone?"
Reaching the doorway, Fiona placed a hand upon the frame and bowed her head. "You can't talk me out of this, Rogue. I know what you're thinking."
A chuckle from behind as she heard Rogue's boots softly tread towards her. "Honey, if you really knew what I was thinking, you'd already be reconsidering your plan."
"Why?" she uttered a breathy and harsh laugh, letting the stifling room swallow up the sound. She partially turned around. "You think you have a better one?"
There was a hand on her shoulder, but unlike the last time when the grip had been strong with restraint in the intention, this time the hand gently rested upon her to be a reassuring presence.
"Wouldn't you at least like to hear the options at your disposal?"
"Options?"
Now it was Rogue's turn to laugh as she sidled around Fiona and walked into the darkness of the exit, slowly turning around and beckoning with a finger.
"Never go into a job without considering all the angles, Fiona. Thought you would've learned that by now."
Fiona had wanted to ask Rogue where they were going, as the fixer had led her down several twisting tight corridors that seemed like they sprawled out underneath the entire city, labyrinthian. But she was more concentrated on getting her balance back and pushing her nausea down, both of which were steadily improving the more time went on. The walls still occasionally strobed with the faint ghosts of the Blackwall's creation, but she ignored them. As if she needed any reminders that she was going to die, anyway. All things died.
All humans did, to be fair.
She wondered if they were still in Afterlife. The hallways here were barren and coated with a thin layer of dust. The posters of one-hit wonder bands had disappeared from this part of the lair. The place was almost like a hospital—an extension of the morgue, probably. The doors here were locked and dead, a forgotten part of the city that might have been a place to be sometime in the past. But the glitz and glamor of the rich would always pave over the old and the worn, especially if it ever got in their way.
The door that finally terminated their crossing was a set of industrial doors on double hinges, the kind one would find at a kitchen. Rogue pushed both of the doors aside with a dramatic flourish, Fiona skirting in just behind the fixer.
They were now in what looked like was once a cafeteria, the styling several decades out of date.[2] The bar counter and one of the walls were draped in thick white plastic tarps. Around the room were spools of tube lighting, the cabling splintering off and crammed into one of two different meter siphoners that had been jammed into the gunked-up outlets. In the center, two circular tables and four black folding chairs made out of the cheapest metal possible.
Three of the four chairs were occupied.
Ryo stood up from where she had been sitting upon seeing Fiona and Rogue enter, Falco and Kross quickly following suit. Ryo crossed the room and quickly enveloped Fiona in a hug, the netrunner initially too startled to react, but managed to limply return the gesture, complete with an awkward pat on the back.
"I'm sorry, I should have got to you sooner," Ryo said after disengaging from the hug, but her hands still remained firmly locked on Fiona's shoulders. She looked her friend up and down and gently clutched Fiona's right wrist. "Had I known how badly you had been hurt…"
Something in the other merc's tone that Fiona recognized. "You were with Rogue in the van. You followed me to Arasaka Tower."
Ryo bobbed her head frantically. "It was just luck. I had a funny feeling when everyone got the military alert on their phones, indicating that a missile strike on Arasaka was imminent. Somehow, I knew you where there. I called Rogue, figured she wouldn't be one to miss Arasaka getting their ass handed to them, and we saw your beacon on the radar as you fell out of that tower. Couldn't save all of you, though. I'm sorry—"
"You saved most," Fiona reassured, lidding her eyes upward to convey a smile since her half-mask covered the rest. "And that's enough. Thank you."
"Yeah," Ryo's eyes could not be torn away from Fiona's new prosthesis. "Doc did a good job, huh?"
Fiona flexed her fingers in response after holding up her hand between them. "It works and it isn't an eyesore. That's enough for me."
"Oh yeah," Rogue leaned back in, a wedge of yellow paper perched between two fingers. "Doc McLeod left this for you. Some details about your arm. Power capabilities, serial numbers. Said you could do whatever you wanted with the info."
Fiona took the paper, opened it up from where it had been folded, scanned it twice, then pocketed it with a nod.
Kross was standing to the side, awkwardly trying not to show his relief at Fiona's appearance. The best he could muster was a taut expression of affection and brief gesture with his head. A year's worth of emotion from the ex-Maelstrom in the span of mere seconds. Fiona did not see much sense in grilling him over the break in character and supplied him with the same motion, along with a secret smirk with her eyes that only the two of them could witness.
Walking over from where he had been sitting, Falco gave Fiona's arm an affectionate pat. "Glad to see you're still with the living."
For now, she thought morosely.
"Same for you," she replied. "Though I thought you would've been halfway to Alaska by now."
"I still had some biz to take care of. People to cancel out of, that sort of thing. I didn't want my departure to make too many waves. Clearly," he playfully side-eyed Ryo, "I didn't leave fast enough."
Rogue drew up a chair, dragging it along the ground for a second, then gestured for everyone to sit. "Right, then. Now, everyone, Fiona here told me of her brilliant plan that she was going to carry out all by herself." Fiona opened her mouth to interject, rather miffed at the fixer's cutting tone, but stopped when Rogue winked at her and continued. "It's going to be our job to talk her out of it. Or…" she paused for effect, "…we have to help her think of a better one."
The netrunner did a double-take. Rogue had already conveyed her support for Fiona's goal, but hearing it said aloud was still a pleasant sort of shocking.
Everyone else seemed to latch onto Rogue's commanding tone and grabbed their chairs again. They all sat in different stages of alertness, clearly invested.
At this point, Fiona was the only one left standing, who felt like she had suddenly been thrust upon a dais and asked to give an hour-long sermon. Unconsciously, she smoothed at her shirt, which she now realized was an oversized band shirt that had clearly been used, due to the coffee stain on its front. Weirdly, she now tried to decipher just who the hell's clothes she was wearing at the moment. The doctor's?
A mystery for another time. Fiona reached out and grabbed a cheap-feeling chair for herself, but did not sit on it just yet, instead using it as a crutch to lean upon for support.
She bent her head, both hands clutching the headrest of the chair in front of her. Terrible natures and inclinations warred just beneath her skull, clamoring for attention. The whispers that told her of her true self. The chemical backlash to what she knew was the truth. All actions have equal and opposite reactions.
"Fiona?" Ryo asked, undoubtedly to fill the void in the conversation, dispel some of that awkward silence.
She raised herself up again and pushed away from the chair. She didn't need the support after all.
"Before I start," Fiona spread her hands, "I need to tell you all something. It… it has to do with me. Where I come from. What… what I am."
Her audience was stone-faced. They would've been formidable at a poker table. Though Fiona noted the slight uptick of Rogue's eyebrow, the fidget that Falco tried to hide, and the light increase in angle as Ryo leaned forward in her seat.
Nervousness crooked her own smile and she raised her hands before she put them back down, almost as if she had been caught dead in a cop spotlight, red-handed after a smash-and-grab. "There's really no easy way to say this, so I'll just say it." Her raised breathing drew natural pauses. "I'm not… from here. I mean, I'm trying to say that I'm not… human."
Confused looks all around. As if she had just spoken in a different language.
Fiona tried again. "I may look human, but I'm not. What you see before you is just a shell. A… a meat puppet. I never even knew this until last night. But this is the truth. The real me, the flesh driver… is a stranger in someone else's body. I couldn't tell you anything about my past because I never lived it. They weren't my memories to recall. I couldn't even tell you when I could start to form memories. I don't even have a mother or a father. My birth took place in the Blackwall, my real home."
Her next swallow felt like razor blades were slicing open her throat.
"I'm… an AI."
She braced herself for the uproar. In her mind, she was envisioning a reaction akin to either seething dissidents at a hate-filled rally would demonstrate, or the supreme back-blown awe like an audience who had witnessed a sudden twist at the film theater.
But nothing. Stone silence. A water droplet would have reverberated, clean and pure like an instrument.
Falco was the first to move. He folded his hands in front of him and leaned forward, studying Fiona with an unblinking gaze.
"You're sure?" was all he asked.
A fluttering laugh of meek shame warbled from Fiona's throat. "Afraid so," she said, her voice on the verge of cracking. She wished she had a cigarette. Something to clamp down on everything that she was feeling.
A hand came to Falco's face, stroking his chin while in thought. Mulling over the revelation. Everyone else seemed to be in deliberations of their own, their eyes no longer focused on Fiona as they turned this new knowledge over in their heads. Even Rogue seemed to be caught off guard, though she was doing her damnedest to try to appear like she was on an even keel, with mixed results.
Fiona looked at her audience in turn, feeling like she was observing them from a distance. She wanted to shout, scream, plead for them to say something. Anything. This was as torturous for her to share as it was for her to accept.
It seemed that everyone was content to let the silence reign absolute for eternity, until Falco stood from his chair. Slowly, he walked over to where the trembling Fiona was rooted to the spot, as if she had stepped in superglue. He was now in front of her, an expressionless look on his face, slowly searching her up and down, as if he was trying to figure out the seams where the person and the machine began and ended.
But finally, after Fiona started to hyperventilate in a rolling remorse that had originated in her gut and traveled up her throat like she was about to vomit, Falco then reached out and placed his hands upon her shoulders. Holding her still. His gloved hands feeling as if they produced an electric charge, paralyzing the netrunner's muscles.
"Do you think you're a danger to us?" he asked, his tone not accusatory, but gentle.
Emphatically, she shook her head. "I would never hurt you. Any of you."
A smile cracked just underneath Falco's thick mustache. "I know."
He then moved in and gave her a quick hug.
It didn't last very long and its purpose was not intimate, but reassuring. It was enough for whatever dark fantasies Fiona had conjured up had all burned away to ashes to be blown away into the ether of the brain she had hijacked. And when Falco finally stepped away, Fiona saw that the same acceptance was practically tattooed across the faces of everyone in attendance, none of them looking upon her with spite or disgust.
Nothing had changed for them.
Hardly daring to believe it, Fiona clutched at herself, as if she was about to rent her clothes. "How? How could you be so calm?! I just told you… that this… this… do you even know what I am?"
"Should it even matter?" Rogue crossed a leg. "Hell, if you want us to start insulting you, all you have to do is ask."
The statement was so inane that Fiona could not help but laugh, dislodging a few tears that had been perched at the corner of her eyes. "Believe me, I don't want that."
"So, you didn't know either?"
"Not until tonight, no."
"How is that even possible?" Kross tilted his head, the question coming from interest, not prejudice.
So, she explained everything, even though she was not sure if she could fully do her version of the events any justice. What Ackerman and Michiko had revealed to her up in Arasaka Tower. Her origin. The circumstances of her physical form. What creatures could come to life behind the veil of the Blackwall. She left nothing out. If she was to be judged, she wanted it to be with the truth, as best as she knew it, fully divulged. And to the credit of everyone within earshot, they were a very polite audience. They never interrupted her with dumb questions or called bullshit on anything she said. They just sat and listened.
By the time she was done, she had unknowingly built up a fine sweat that shone upon her brow. That nagging doubt that, even after all was said and done, they would still reject her.
But none of that happened. They all sat there, absorbing everything like a delicate aperitif. For this was an outcome, a situation in their lives that none of them would have ever considered happening to them, but now it was here, and their characters would be proven by how they would proceed in their next moments.
Rogue was the first to speak: "Nothing's changed, Fiona."
The AI—the netrunner—nearly reeled where she stood, on the brink of fainting. "After everything I just told you…?"
The fixer just smirked. Always with that expression that intimated that she already knew everyone's deepest and darkest secret. She stood from her seat and threw an arm around Fiona's shoulders, the most physical contact that Fiona had ever seen the woman demonstrate, let alone with her. "Honey, I've seen far stranger things in this city than you could ever hope to describe to me. You think you're the only one with something weird in your head? Here's a newsflash for you: get in line. This shit isn't the most pleasant of stuff to bear—I can't pretend to understand, but know that I empathize as much as I possibly can. And I think… that it's your actions that have proved to everyone here who you really are, not from what some corpo bitch sprung upon you. And if you think that shouldn't be the case, then maybe you aren't yet aware of what humans are capable of understanding, or for that matter, accepting."
Fiona could scarcely believe her ears. The cavalier-ness they all demonstrated. Everyone—Falco, Ryo, Kross—were all nodding in agreement to Rogue's words. It was just so… easy for them.
"You guys…" she breathed, on the verge of tears. Look at that, everyone, the voice in her head mocked. The AI's crying.
"Ah, save it, I'm going to get misty-eyed myself if you keep this up," Rogue said as she disengaged from Fiona with a solid thump on the back, shaking away Fiona's tears and causing the netrunner to stagger. But Fiona straightened back up again, eyes rimmed red but now dry, a hoarse sniffle emitting from her nose. Rogue briefly turned back with a knowing look, for her calculated moves were as tender of affection as the fixer was capable of delving out, which was to say, not much, but any deviations from the norm were to be considered a rarity with Rogue. "Anyway, we've got bigger problems at hand," she now addressed the group. "Right now, Fiona's cyberware is…"
Rogue must have felt Fiona's sudden panic behind her, for her imminent death was something that she had deliberately kept from the rest of the group. No sense in getting them all worked up for what was destined to happen.
"…malfunctioning," Rogue finished diplomatically while Fiona breathed in relief just past her shoulder. "She's still in a bad shape and she's got a score to settle. Now, she tried to convince me that she can solve her little problem on her own. Since I'm the sort of person who generally likes to prove others wrong, I'm liable to disagree with her. Is anyone else of a like mind?"
The chorus of murmured approvals merely bolstered Rogue's point, who flipped some stray bits of hair from her eyes in victory. Fiona knew that she was going to have to convey her gratitude for keeping her diminishing mortality a secret at some point.
"So," Rogue said as she grabbed for a nearby chair again, now fully appraising Fiona as she sat down, "since you have no choice in the matter, Fiona, you might as well share who it is on your shit-list that you want to have flatlined."
Fiona also reached for a chair so that she could descend and take the weight off her tortured legs. "You all need to realize that… I'm going to be descending into hell. Who I'm trying to kill—who I want to kill—there's never going to be another contract like it. If you don't want any part of it… now's the time to say it."
A flick of American steel as Kross' lighter touched a cigarette perched on his lips. There was a clacking noise as the ex-Maelstrom pocketed the lighter. "Getting older over here. So spill."
On their heads, be it, Fiona mentally sighed.
"I'm going to kill Michiko Arasaka."
The fact that no one spoke for several seconds afterward was something that Fiona wished she had not been cynical enough to predict. But it had come true, nonetheless. Someone then whistled lowly, trying to parse all of this out.
"Kill one of the clan?" Falco shifted in his seat. "'Risky' doesn't even begin to cover it."
"See," Fiona waved a hand, "this is why I don't want to get you involved at all. I can't promise any of you will come back from this. It's a suicide mission."
"One that you're hoping to survive?" the wheelman raised an eyebrow.
No.
"Yes," Fiona lied.
Falco stroked at his chin, suspicious.
Rogue came to Fiona's rescue by diverting the attention over towards her. "Fiona's situation was enabled by the machinations of Michiko Arasaka," she told the group. "The corp is on its last legs after losing Mikoshi last year, along with the deaths of Saburo and Hanako Arasaka. If Michiko gets flatlined… then her faction will become absorbed by Yorinobu's. Arasaka will abandon Night City once Yorinobu consolidates power in totality. Plus, the deaths of three separate Arasaka family members will make living in Night City a hard sell for the rest of the clan. They'll leave. And while there may be a vacuum for another corp to step into, all of what was accomplished will be a boost of morale to the city. People will soon realize what the street is able to accomplish by beating a corp. And who knows? The next corp to arrive in Night City—or any of the ones already here—may think twice about dealing with the Metro."
To her annoyance, Fiona realized that she had not considered the political aspects of what she was planning to do. The Emperor of Arasaka, Saburo, had passed away under suspicious circumstances sometime last year. In his place, the prodigal son, Yorinobu, had stepped up to command the corp through a military coup, overthrowing the factions that were still loyal to the ghost of his father, so that he could begin dismantling the company from within as a final insult against the man that had brought him into the world and had subsequently hated him. The more Arasaka members that were whittled away, the less chance of there being any opposition to Yorinobu's reign.
"First things first," Rogue continued. "We need to find out where Michiko is currently hiding. Now, the tower was just drilled by a missile and is due to collapse in the next couple of hours. Structural integrity has apparently gone to shit, who could have guessed? So, obviously, she isn't there."
An icy cramp twisted in Fiona's stomach. Dread. "You think she's gone all the way to Japan? Back to Arasaka HQ?"
"That's unlikely," Ryo said, her eyes flashing as she was in the process of whipping through the superhighways of the Net. "Satellite imaging hasn't registered any long-range aircraft departing across the Pacific in the last several hours, probably because Night City airspace was made restricted after the missile strike. Flights from the airports are all grounded and no one is allowed to enter or exit the current class B airspace at the moment."
"How about short-range aircraft? I did see her take off in a chopper."
"VOR beacons in the surrounding area haven't picked up on any aircraft on their borders. Plus, something that low to the ground just makes it all the easier to shoot down. Too much risk. No, Michiko is still somewhere near the city, would be my bet. And you know I'm a betting woman."
Kross spun his lighter on the table with a practiced flick of the wrist. "No chance she took a ship out of the port?"
"Nah," Falco shook his head as he opined. "An Arasaka would not risk a mode of transport that takes more than two weeks to get from one location to the other. And if she's not using a submarine, satellites will pick her up, clear as day. Can't exactly traverse the Pacific on the surface without being detected these days. Megacorp battleships that are warring in those seas would just love the excuse to blow up a ship with an Arasaka member on it. Anything that gives them more territory or influence, they will not hesitate to accomplish."
Fiona's feet were fidgeting again. She stood back up, feeling like she had wasps in her brain. "So, she's not in the air, or on the sea. If she's still in the city, she'll have to go to a location that she thinks is impregnable. Another Arasaka complex, perhaps."
"Or," Rogue raised a finger, head bowed in thought, "she still plans to escape Night City."
"How?" Fiona turned. "We've already covered every mode of transportation Michiko has access to."
Rogue was smiling as if the act was meaningless. "There is one mode still available to her."
The fixer then initiated a low-latency link across their decks and Fiona accepted the request with a slight haptic feedback. A map then popped in front of the netrunner's eyes, layering sprawling tubes that nestled amidst the fungal grid of the city. The branches spat far from the reaches of the megalopolis and the confines of land, one conduit traveling all the way past Hawaii and onto the sprawl of Chiba City and Tokyo just beyond, a continent away.
"This…" Fiona zoomed in on the wireframe map, "…this is…"
"Superconducting levrails," Rogue said. "Arasaka came into ownership of a whole network of these high-speed rail lines during the Time of the Red after repurposing the old Maglev technology used by the USACE. Never for public use, just corpo. They refitted previously existing city infrastructure and made their own highway for themselves."
Fiona traced the line that ran directly from Night City to Tokyo. "Look at that. She has a clear route out of the country."
"Ordinarily, that would be true. But Arasaka Tower was the location of the last levrail station before hitting the Pacific. With the tower destroyed, there's bound to be a blockage between the rest of the city and the line to Japan. Of course, she could always go in the opposite direction, but that's a long fucking time to be stuck in a train. She'll wait until the way forward is excavated—no doubt they have crews waiting on standby already. Once that's complete, she'll be out of here."
Rubbing at her eyes, Fiona could already feel the soft burn just behind her aorta. Dreaming, or was the Blackwall eager to claim its victim?
The netrunner slowly glanced to Rogue, the sharp lighting from the spools at the ground projecting a glass-like glare in her eyes. Everything else about her was composed, her tears having run dry long ago. She heard the dry crank of ventilation in the depths of the basement, a flicker of shadows in the deep corners like black flame.
"Do you know where the other Night City stations are?" Fiona asked.
There was a dagger to her heart when Rogue shook her head after pondering for a moment. "No."
That was it, then. All her hopes had been dashed. That was the extent of her imagination—there would be no other recourse. No revenge for what had been done to her.
But Rogue stood from the seat, as did everyone else as they took their cues from the fixer. A finality had infiltrated Rogue's body language and she seemed to become steel, prepared to weather against a hurricane if need be.
"But…" she added, causing Fiona to raise her head up eagerly, "that doesn't mean we can't find it."
From a subtle gesture from Rogue, or perhaps no gesture at all, everyone got up from where they had been sitting. They all gravitated towards a series of duffel bags that had been laid against the wall. The sounds of the bags unzipping—the group withdrew Kevlar vests, tactical goggles, and guns. Lots and lots of guns.
Pistols. Sniper rifles. Shotguns. ARs. All cleaned and lubricated as if they had been stolen out of a gun store yesterday. Ryo grabbed a fistful and set them on the flimsy plastic table, beginning to load a .45 handgun that she selected for herself.
Rogue was also retrieving a bag of her own from the corner. "The Arasaka rail system has several stations in the city. We don't know where they are for certain—all their entrances are hidden—but if we monitor Arasaka communications and hack their patrol patterns, we just might find out where Michiko is currently holed up." From within the bag that she now dragged forward, she tossed Fiona a trench coat, a plated vest, along with some pants. So much better than the flimsy medical clothes and stained T-shirt that she now wore. She immediately took off the shirt—the netrunner was not wearing anything underneath. Rogue raised an eyebrow, seeing everything, but Fiona was past caring as she reached for a synthetic fiber shirt that was sweat-resistant and tugged it over her head.
Ryo tossed Fiona a shotgun after she was fully dressed. She caught the weapon, partially racked the slide back to check if a shell was already loaded, which it was. She looped the weapon over her shoulder.
Once she laced up her boots, Rogue was back in front of her, holding out a sidearm that looked like it was made of a yellow plastic.
Fiona immediately made a face. "A smart pistol?" How many times had Ramses warned her about those?
Nodding like she had just been found guilty of murder, Rogue then shrugged. "Yeah, I know. There's a bias against these. Don't use it if you don't want. Put it in that ankle holster in your boot—if you never reach for it, it's not like I'll care. But, you might as well jump into this thing armed to the teeth. Bristling with weapons—a porcupine."
After some trepidation, Fiona took the offered pistol and slotted it into the leather pouch upon her leg. "I'm ditching this thing as soon as I find a better option."
"A less shit option?"
"Well… yes."
"Honey," Rogue raised her hands, "you do whatever you want with it. To be completely honest, I got a whole crateful of them back at Afterlife when some gonk klepped the wrong shipment. Now I got these smart pistols crawling out of my ass. I'm just peddling as much of them off my person as often as I can. Use it, don't use it, you're doing me a favor nonetheless."
Up a trio of twisting staircases, Fiona felt the burst of smog-churned air as she finally emerged from the underground. She had to hold a hand to her eyes as the thin glare of sunlight splintered down the thin alleyway, nearly striking the pavement at ground level. Above, fifteen stories separated by only a few meters of air. Snarling the passage through the crevasse were rusted air conditioners, clotheslines with crusted fabrics, creaking fire escapes.
Rogue's van was hugging the side of the alley, the door already open. Ryo and Falco clambered inside, with Falco taking the passenger seat. Rogue stood by the driver's door and Kross was scanning the far end of the alleyway, his mangled face always on alert.
"Not quite how you imagined your morning starting?" Rogue quipped to Fiona as the netrunner moved past, an arm outstretched to grip the lip of the ceiling so that she could haul herself in.
The hairs on the back of Fiona's neck suddenly stood on end. Straightening in response to a neural charge. She stopped.
A funny feeling. A low subharmonic picked up in the faintest registers of her hearing. Skin prickling with adrenaline. She looked up.[3]
Sharp chopping noise. Rotors against the wind. Getting louder.
Fiona had to force herself to take a breath. The alleyway was now strobing with redlined code, the Babel-esque transcriptions pouring down the sides of the buildings like a raging torrent. Flickering like flames, as if in a dream. She didn't need a translator to know that the code meant DANGER, DANGER.
Rogue noticed it too, and her pistol was out as she scanned what little sliver of the sky the alleyway afforded her. Only her head rotated as she stood in place, as if the slightest scrape of boot against gravel would be akin to setting off a siren, marking their location for everyone in the city.
"Something's wrong…" Fiona said, eyes scrambling in their sockets.
A click as Rogue thumbed the hammer of her pistol back. "Yeah. It's just… off."
The sound of helicopters grew louder and louder. A roar through the thin canyon. But no sirens, which was interesting. The entire city seemed to be dead, if not sleeping, but there was still that diesel grind, that low simmering sound of vehicles moving upon the side streets and highways, trapped in the eternal snarl of traffic as the city refused to rest.
"Get in," Rogue told Fiona, grabbing for the handle of her door. "Right now."
"Okay…" Fiona whispered, about to duck into the vehicle ahead of Kross, when she saw the ex-Maelstrom's expression suddenly shift as he rotated in her direction.
The tiny red dot that had suddenly appeared on Fiona's chest warbled slightly, as if timid of the world around it. It moved to a heartbeat, thudding upward with every other second.
A heartbeat that did not belong to Fiona.
"Fiona…" Kross gaped.
The netrunner turned to face him.
The chrome-encrusted mercenary dove forward, his arms pushing her back several feet. "Get d—!"
There was the crack of a rifle, and suddenly Fiona felt something warm splatter her face. She fell to the ground with a startled cry after tripping over her own feet as a result of Kross' push, the concrete cutting up her palms. Nearby, she also heard Kross hit the deck next to her.
Her ears rung. Something in her vision flashed red. Red like blood. It felt like her veins were now pulsing pure adrenaline. She raised herself up, reaching out a hand toward Kross.
One look and she knew he was dead. Kross was lying facedown on the rubberstreaked ground, most of his head missing. A wide spread of blood leaked from the opening like a fallen cauldron, a shocking gush that had already begun to thin. She could not stop staring at the wound. Glints of metal and carbon fiber had been embedded in the interior of his skull, glimmering like specks of gold upon dirtied beach sand. His optics had been twisted away, the furnace light within finally extinguished.
She glanced up just in time to see, at the far end of the alley, a six-wheeled Militech Hellhound swerve around the corner and barrel forward, the extreme width of the armor-plated vehicle scraping sparks and gouges along the sides of the building as it pushed its way towards the van, its nose-mounted machineguns already opening fire.
Twin plumes carved up the alleyway in quick geysers, separating Fiona from Rogue's van. Kross' blood splashed on the ground from the bullets striking the pool.
The fixer had jumped inside the van already. The door was closed, the window up, but she still yelled Fiona's name.
Rolling to get away from the barrage, away from Rogue's vehicle, Fiona hunkered down behind a green dumpster. She heard the Hellhound coming and knew she wouldn't make it in time.
Make a break for the van and everyone dies.
I'm the one they want. Not them.
Waving her arm frantically towards the van, Fiona howled, "Go!" Not bothering to wait for a response from Rogue—because of course she would not have listened to her—Fiona quickly scrambled back to her feet and ran, bullets plowing at the wall behind her as she hurried, the narrow street getting chewed up all around her as if the world was disintegrating in her wake.
There was a side passage just up ahead to her left. She wheeled around the corner, hearing Rogue's van start behind her and head on down the alley. She did not hear it slow down at all, but that just made Fiona glad. The rest of them would live to fight another day.
A chainlink fence barred the way within the even thinner footpath. Fiona quickly scrambled atop it, the warble of an 800-horsepower engine pouring on behind her. She heard the slow of the cams and the creak of strong and armored doors opening. Fiona jumped down from the fence just as the shooting started up again. Powerful rounds ripped through the passageway, dislodging towers of boxes and striking sheet metal garbage cans next to her. The netrunner unslung her rifle from her back, running with the long weapon in a one-handed grip, but did not dare look back. She just ran.
More gunfire skipped across the ground and into the small concrete stairway that she now climbed. She aimed her rifle behind her, her sights dancing all over the place. Everything was going too fast for her to see what she was aiming at. She fired a burst anyway, in the hopes that it would buy her some time.
It worked. There was a break in the opposing fire. Fiona sprinted for the end of the passage and soon, she was thrust into chaos. Cartwright Street. Rush hour. Elevated highway on strong gray columns above, partially eclipsing the wide boulevard. Heat-seared palms limply swaying in the early morning heat, while pedestrians in their shiny plastic clothes walked the streets, uncaring to the sounds of gunfire that had erupted nearby.
Still clutching her rifle, Fiona made for the street and vaulted over a burnt orange guardrail. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper. She could just skirt between the vehicles without a thought as to being run over. Some drivers honked at her as she slipped between the gaps in the cars, but her brain was already overclocking to the point where she could not give a shit about the annoyance she was causing for the commuters.
Get to a tram station. Underground. Somewhere they can't find you. She would hunker down, or slip underneath whatever net was being cast for her. Arasaka would not get her today.
The sounds of crashing vehicles, long and brutal, caused Fiona to whip her head to the eastbound potion of the street. The Hellhound was back, speeding up the wrong side of the road, hopping the curb and taking out the guardrails between the sidewalk and the pavement. The side of the massive vehicle caught a small car and smashed its hood in, whiting the glass before it exploded out upon the sidewalk, and threw it on its side. Pedestrians on the sidewalk had to dive out of the way, the Hellhound heedless to their presence. One elderly man was struck on the hip by the vehicle's bumper at high speed, was spun around so fast his cap flew off, and smashed his head on the ground as he fell, killing him instantly with an explosive splash of blood. Someone screamed.
The Hellhound screeched to a halt, just meters away, CrystalDome windshield sparkling, a mirror sheen. Enough time for Fiona to spot the insignia on the side of the massive truck. Not Arasaka.
The sliding doors to the Hellhound opened and, from within, three heavily armed and armored troopers jumped out. They were outfitted in full tactical armor that was ridged and looked like carbon fiber. Their helmets, wreathed with forest-green lens, looked like the same type of headgear that spacemen wore, with only their mouths and chins visible. They carried an assortment of custom-made weaponry from Militech and Midnight Arms, all of them aimed squarely at her.
"Oh, shit," Fiona said, right as the MaxTac commandos opened up on her.
She ducked just in time, the bullets overhead smashing through car windows and striking pedestrians on the other side of the street, who fell, screaming, or made no attempt to arrest their falls, already dead. Keeping low, she crouch-walked westward, the commandos spraying the congested lanes with their fire. She did not dare poke her head up, for she would be zeroed in faster than she could blink.
The street had become madness. Drivers had chosen to abandon their cars and were sprinting up and down the clotted streets. People were screaming, crying, trying to dive for cover. The commandos were indiscriminate and opened fire on anything that moved, dispassionately muscling their chattering machineguns and autoshotguns across wide cones of fire, ripping holes through passerby and knocking innocent people flat on the ground, their severed limbs flopping away in sprays of gore. They moved in sequence, each one taking a row between cars, some of them spraying the engine blocks of the vehicles with automatic fire and a dazzling show of sparks, denying Fiona the chance at transportation.
The MaxTac commandos calmly reloaded after expending their rounds as they slowly headed up in formation. They moved like cyborgs, every foot placement calculated, their heads on a jerking swivel, their bodies flowing as if well-oiled. They were the NCPD's best of the best, the deadliest division, and the one that got the best equipment and training.
MaxTac had been formed for one specific purpose: flatline cyberpsychos.
And now their target was Fiona.
Glancing at her assault rifle, Fiona felt cold sweat trickle down her back. Arasaka had paid the NCPD off by getting them to send MaxTac her way. Was there nowhere that she could go that was safe?
For that matter, did she even have enough firepower to get out of this alive?
She hugged the side of a tractor-trailer, the engine still running in the cab, a ragged roar of exhaust. Her optics shifted wavelengths, but there were still too many bodies running around—blobs of energy in her vision—to pinpoint the commandos in the melee. She sat still, peering closely through walls and vehicles, looking for the individuals who weren't running.
And… there. In the middle of the road.
Leaning out from cover, Fiona shouldered her rifle and fired. She was on target—the first round drilled the closest commando in the heart, the armor-piercing round penetrating his bodysuit. He grunted as he was pushed back a step and Fiona's pulse soared, but her hope quickly died as he, amazingly, honed back in on her, a grimace upon the little bit of his exposed face as if he had been merely punched. Buckshot from a pistol-grip Crusher SSG sprayed Fiona's position, deforming the edge of the trailer just inches from Fiona's head, tearing a portion of it out in a ragged bite.
She kept retreating, blood running cold. It just didn't make any sense. She had hit that commando dead-on. There was no way he could have survived such a shot.
Unless…
Daring to take a pause, she took cover behind a low-slung saloon and focused her optics on the commando she had fired upon. A diagnostic popped up on the right side of her vision. A list of all the cyberware the commando had installed. Tons of blackware that Fiona had never heard of. Some of it looked like items that she knew were illegal. But MaxTac had the funds, and the influence, to wield it all, no expense spared.
And… near the bottom of the list… there. A decentralized heart upgrade. The commando's heart had been completely replaced with synthetic implants that dispersed the chambers, arteries, and veins to separate areas within his torso. Shots that would normally kill a human were not going to kill these chromed-up soldiers right away. She was going to have to rethink all her tactics. MaxTac was not going to play fair with her.
Glumly, Fiona realized that she was probably not going to win this fight.
She switched her high-powered rifle to auto and spun around from behind a pickup, firing at the commandos. The rifle jumped in her hands, spraying all over the place. Windshields shattered and pockmarks ripped at the aluminum hoods. All the MaxTac troopers calmly took cover, heads bobbing down to disappear into the sea of cars as if they had dropped prone in a field of tall grass. Her modulated ears then picked up the heightened scuff of shoes on concrete. Blurs in her vision towards the left of her. Motion faster than the human eye could pick up, but her eyes were not human nor did they belong to one.
The blur suddenly angled towards Fiona. The color of volcanic sand. Spiteful emerald glint searing within the streak. Inhuman reflexes.
Sandevistan, Fiona's cataloguing mind brought forward. Pumps a shitload of hormones into a body's nervous system, giving them souped-up reflexes for a few moments. Makes the user think that time itself had stopped for them. A trooper with that installed could clear an entire room, chop them to bits, and be out before anyone could blink.
The only thing that could stop a Sandevistan? Someone whose optics could view in 1200 frames per second.
Fiona had dropped her rifle and raised her shotgun in the time that the MaxTac Mantis officer closed the gap, jagged blades bursting out from all angles upon their body, their limbs folding away to reveal the intricate folding of metal lurking beneath the faux-epidermis. Was anything left of that soldier's real body anymore? But Fiona was faster, her shotgun already roaring, and the Mantis' head seemed to cave in for a brief moment in the madness of slow-time before it was obliterated in a gory splash. The headless body, still driven by the laws of physics, bounced past Fiona as if they had been suddenly flipped from a speeding motorcycle, and impacted hard upon the wall on the other side of the street, splaying out blood in a perverse outline.
She had to remember to breathe in with a gasp. One down.
And there were bound to be more.
Picking up her rifle from where she had dropped it, Fiona shouldered her shotgun again and headed down the road, trying to put some distance between her and the remaining commandos. She could now hear sirens split the morning—red and blues twinkling as cop cars shot past side streets, trying to setup a perimeter. A news chopper had joined the melee, skirting between the buildings at the hands of a skilled pilot, no doubt already having trained the lens of its camera upon her like a rifle scope. Annoyed, she lifted her pistol and shot two rounds towards the chopper, but it stayed put where it was in the sky, heedless to her attacks.
At this point in the road, there had been a pileup of multiple vehicles, trucks having flattened cars into pancakes, the engine blocks either smoking or on fire. Some of the cars had been smashed into crazy angles. She had to climb over one of the vehicles, the driver inside having been cut in half when his car had been forced into the center divider of the road, shunting the dashboard straight through his waist.
Gunshots continued to crackle past her, MaxTac being unrelentless. There was a sharp zip and Fiona saw a hole suddenly appear an inch from where her hand had briefly been plastered against the roof of the car she was clambering upon. A round headed straight down. That didn't come from surface-level.
She looked up. There was a red spark dancing midway up one of the skyscrapers.
Sniper.
Was it the same one who killed Kross? There was no way to be sure. She was not sure how the sniper had managed to miss her so badly, either. She had been out in the open and there was no wind, a perfect angle. She was still trying to parse out that fact when she saw the muzzle flash too late in her zoomed-in view, knowing that the weapon was locked onto her head.
Another zip. Another ring of rending metal. This time, a round had impacted the engine block of an upturned van that was perched on the trunk of the car she was atop. Either the MaxTac sniper was a terrible shot or…
A smart weapon. The rounds were being knocked off course from her dermal implant. She nearly uttered a grateful thank you to Ramses, who had insisted on the implant's installation, but bit her tongue. That bastard would not get any more credit from her. In response, she lifted up her rifle, steadied her aim, and fired two rounds, then two more towards the building. Off in the distance, she saw the skyscraper's window white out, then fall to the ground like sheets of snow. The sniper's Ashura rifle followed the glass out into the open, the sniper's arm dangling just off the edge of the floor, motionless.
The streets ahead were like a still from a BD on pause, clotted for blocks and blocks.[4] But off in the distance, in the shimmering heat of the morning, modified Hellhound and Behemoth trucks were barging their way in, battering rams affixed to the front shunting aside cars as if they were made of tin foil, flipping them in the air several feet. And behind the MaxTac line was a legion's worth of blaring NCPD patrol cars, the caterwauling of their sirens excruciatingly loud, even from so far away.
Too many for her to take on. And the commandos behind her were closing the gap, sandwiching her between the two MaxTac fronts. Her weapons left her hands as she sagged against an overturned eighteen-wheeler in despair, momentarily in a redoubt that was invisible to the troopers barging her way. But it would be no use. In a matter of minutes, they would be on top of her position. They would open fire without question or hesitation.
It was over.
She clutched at her temples, ears ringing from the crackle of weapons all around her. The percussive tings as bullets struck the cars down the seam of the concrete and glass canyon. Something far away exploded, she could see the reflection of a fireball perched in its magnificence upon the opposite building. Her eyes tracked the rolling smoke and flame. Beautiful.
A calmness came over her. The certainty of death approached. Sound seemed to disintegrate for Fiona, turning into a sea of static, babbling in a language untranslatable, fragments of radio communiques and the hiss of data.
This was what you wanted, wasn't it? a voice that was not hers resounded within her head. You discount your own capabilities.
Fire, magma fire, riddled up from her heart, up her throat, and cradled her brain. Her fists clenched and her nails cut into her palm, welling up blood in her left hand.
Then her hands flew open as if spring-loaded. To her, she could imagine her palms cradling a fire that did not burn, whose tendrils snapped and lashed in a strobing digital dance. That same fire soon slithered into the skin and metal, traveling up veins and hydraulics, warming her body from within and outlining the careful branching of the arteries and bones.
The netrunner raised her head and stood, her eyes bleeding that same fire. Through smoke and headlights, she whirled around, head first, her body following, hair whipping in a burnt arc behind her. Mouth locked in a fearsome shout. Retinas obscured by the deadly light.
The MaxTac commandos—the ones pursuing her from the start—rounded the corner, weapons primed.
But her hand had already been raised, parallel to the ground, sparks dancing from her fingertips.
Their gazes met, the reflection of a city crumbling within the fire of Fiona's eyes. A terrible rage steeled her jaw, clenched her teeth to the point of cracking, and stilled the beat of her heart as she, finally, knew what to do.
I'm going to kill them all.
A/N: This chapter had actually ballooned so much in length that I decided that, for readability's sake, it had to be split into two chapters. So, that adds one more to the overall chapter count, but I think this will help the story overall.
Playlist:
[1] McLeod / New Arm
"Helmet On"
Hans Zimmer, Jasha Klebe, and Martin Tillman
Rush (Complete Motion Picture Soundtrack)
[2] Group Therapy
"Desert Suite"
Brad Fiedel
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
[3] The Battle of Little China – Pt. I (Alley / Kross' Death / Streetwar)
"C.L.U."
Daft Punk
Tron: Legacy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
[4] The Battle of Little China – Pt. II (Kill Them All)
"Fireball"
Daniel Pemberton
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (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. DECEASED.
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. DECEASED.
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.
Bill Ackerman: NetWatch director. The individual responsible for Project DAMBUSTER, Ackerman's goal is to find a way to restore the area beyond the Blackwall at any cost. DECEASED.
Dan Renzer: Ackerman's right-hand man. Once a member of the NCPD, Renzer was forced to flee to NetWatch after the NCPD attempted to have him killed by not going along with the corruption of the organization. Now at the mercy of the corporation, Renzer will do anything Ackerman tells him to do. DECEASED.