Burning.
Her skin. Her lungs.
Every part of her.
She was drowning in a sea of acid.
She was going to die. To be unmade. There was nothing she could do.
But even as she was stripped to the bone, she walked forwards.
Ahead of her was a simple thing.
A heart of steel.
Ana woke to the familiar taste of bile. She rose, bit back the familiar nausea, and padded over to the bathroom.
The cabinet and its familiar rows of pills and hypodermics greeted her. The routine was old, practiced, as she took her vitals, refilled the internal reservoirs in her chrome, and popped some painkillers.
They only took the edge off, but that was enough. It was all she needed to work, after all, and every ed spent on meds that were for comfort more than functionality was an ed farther from her goal.
Another day.
She rested her elbows against the rim of the sink, stared into the mirror.
She looked like shit. There was no sugarcoating that. It was a choice. Anything to improve her looks was pointless with what had happened to her - throwing away good money to put lipstick on the metaphorical pig.
More on the spider than the pig, to be honest. She had little appetite, these days.
She took a deep breath, closed her dark-circled eyes, and focused.
A couple of days of easy netrunning jobs that hadn't required her to climb into her suit had been all she'd gone for after that mess out in the desert. They'd split up after splitting their shares of the money - a cool twenty thousand eddies all told for her, after the Table got its cut. Everyone had gone back to their places. That was normal.
They'd kept in touch, afterwards, which wasn't. Even Jacob, who'd she'd embarrassed herself completely with, had been texting her. The group chat (secured five ways to the Blackwall and back, she'd made sure of it) was still buzzing even as she stepped away from the sink and did the minimal stretches she needed to keep herself at least slightly fit.
They made her muscles burn, but it was better than the alternative.
As she did, she thought.
…she needed better chrome. Not combat chrome, but netrunning chrome. She had a nest egg saved up, could take more jobs if she had to - or reach out to the others, she supposed.
Either way, though it'd mean dipping into her funds…she needed more. She'd been sloppy, and it'd gotten both Donny and Shiro killed. She needed better sensors, a better cyberdeck implant, more processing power. She could program everything she needed herself on the Net end. She just needed better hardware. Both for herself and for Zduhac.
She wasn't yet sure if they were all going to stick together. But if they were, she was going to pull her weight.
She could hear the rumble of thunder outside her window. There would be a storm coming soon.
She snapped a message to Troy. The gonk was alright, as far as melee-specialist Junkers went. Ana still thought you had to be some kind of crazy to fight at the range speedware users all favored, but he'd made it work.
BABA YAGA: Looking for eds. Need to upgrade my hardware. Got any leads?
HOPLITE: Heh, was just about to ask. Got a gig for two lined up - Wakako wants some heavy metal around for negotiations, heavier security than usual.
BABA YAGA: Wako's letting outsiders into Tyger Claw business?
HOPLITE: She values people who do their jobs and keep their mouths shut, Round Table's good for that and she wants something scarier than the average merc.
HOPLITE: We basically get paid a retainer to stand there and convince people to go elsewhere. Or to glare at Tyger Claws before they do something stupid to each other.
BABA YAGA: Our cut?
HOPLITE: No combat unless it really goes to shit, but five hundred apiece. If someone tries to crash the place, we get two grand apiece.
BABA YAGA: Flick me the deets.
She got dressed - nothing fancy, netrunning suit, boots, gloves, a light vest over the bunch. The damn thing was skintight but it wasn't like she had any curves to flaunt with it - it did its job of keeping her meat from overcooking and that was that.
She nuked a burrito for breakfast, brought the thing into the largest room in her apartment - the one where she kept Zduhac.
She hadn't taken much damage in the brawl, and the last couple day's of netrunning work had caught her up on those costs - she gnawed on the mess of reheated scop and fake veggies as she tinkered.
She kept a sizeable armory for hot-swaps and repairs, built up over the years - it came in handy for days like the desert brawl, and pretty much every Junkerknight who could afford to did something similar. So she'd swapped out guns and ammo for Zduhac's arm mounts - the auto-shotties were good for meat, but the miniguns she'd replaced them with had a better performance against chrome-heavy enemies. She wasn't gonna get caught off-guard by a fullborg anymore.
She clicked her tongue as she checked the modification she'd made to the primary processing unit, clearing space for a potential upgrade. That was going to be expensive, and delay her funding efforts quite a bit - but definitely worth it.
Checks done, she powered her partner on. The suit unfolded, and she stepped into it, reaching back and plugging the interface cable into the base of her neck.
The immaterial presence of the cyberform she'd built to pilot her creation expressed interest as the armor folded back up and it stood.
Soon, she promised.
It smiled invisibly - a dog's grin, eager for doing what it'd been trained to do - and opened the garage doors.
The Round Table kept apartments - apartments that were a bit more heavy-duty than the average Night City construction. Cargo elevators, concrete floors, heavy soundproofing. All to allow for the Junkerknights that made up its ranks to keep their suits right next to where they slept, rather than on the ground floor. She didn't even want to think about how much money that must have cost - apparently the place had been built in the early sixties, when times had been better for the organization. Either way, it gave her a place to store her shit and she could park Zduhac without anyone complaining about the floors getting scuffed, so it worked.
They rode the cargo elevator down.
Hey, ho, back to the grind. The second she could, she was stepping into the Net.
Nothing hurt there.
Flynn had never liked the rain. It always ruined his fun. Back when he was a kid, just starting out - taking joyrides in loadlifters, being underfoot, setting shit on fire for the hell of it - the rain had burned. Nowadays it was better, not that the medias would ever tell you that - you didn't have to run screaming and in need of a transplant if you got caught in a cloudburst. Still wasn't safe to drink unless you had a chrome liver, but that was a different problem.
But yeah, the rain had always ruined his fun. Nothing burned, explosives failed to go off, you got stuck indoors…it just wasn't worth it to go outside. Bad days happened alongside the rain.
So he wasn't too surprised when the Militech bitch had called him up for a meeting. Not too surprised at all.
He hadn't brought Prometheus. Wrong fucking play to do so - corpo bitches always wanted to feel like they were on top, got pissy if they couldn't, and besides, his baby was the opposite of subtle. He was still toting a short-barreled Palica shotgun and had a smartpistol on his hip, because he wasn't a complete fucking gonk.
"Cranson," the blonde bitch said calmly, leaning against the armored truck, her goons arrayed around her.
"Stout," he growled.
"I've heard you've been making waves. Your little fraternity is showing a surprising amount of coordination." Her expression was still frozen in a mask of disdain. "Congratulations. You might actually be of some use one day."
"The fuck do you want?"
The goons started to raise their guns - Stout waved them down. "Don't be fucking morons," she said flatly, before turning her glare back on Flynn. "What I want is that Arasaka convoy wrecked and everything in it stolen. You have three days before it arrives."
"And you expect me to pull this off? It screams 'trap'."
"I expect you and that little circle of cast-off washouts and rejects to pull their weight, yes. Trap or not."
Flynn narrowed his eyes. Something wasn't right. She was pushing hard, sure, but corpos didn't get all demanding usually. There were always more takers for a job. If hitting that convoy was all that important, she'd just need to have some rocket launchers fall off the back of a truck and hand them out to huscle that could use them. In fact, she hadn't pushed nearly this hard, just dangled the job itself in front of him. What had changed since a few days…ago…
Oh.
He smiled. "You're up shit creek, aren't you?" he asked.
Meredith Stout's eyes narrowed. "Excuse you?"
"That Martinez kid. He flatlined a whole battalion of your corp's finest. And here you are, demanding I do something that you didn't actually need me to handle a few days ago. You don't have any forces on hand right now, do you? And I've bet you've promised your bosses that that convoy is already zeroed. What? Did some gonkfuck with high hopes of yanking some Arasaka experimental tech take your boys to their deaths?" He cackled. "So now you need me, or someone like me, to clean up your mess in a way Militech won't know about, cuz we're the only ones with the firepower on hand to deal with the problem headed your way. Oh, that is rich."
Was he burning his bridges? Eh, probably. But this bitch had annoyed the shit outta him already. The veins pulsing in her temples as she visibly reined in her temper were worth it.
"You want an incentive, then," the bitch ground out. She held out a hand, and one of the goons slapped a tablet into it, which she shoved into his hands.
He unlocked it, and read what was on it.
He glared at the bitch. "This had better not be a joke."
"I'm not as stupid as you seem to think I am. The data's accurate. You want the rest, you kill that convoy."
She turned her back on him, climbed back into her armored van, her goons following in her wake, and drove off.
Fuck.
Now he needed to talk to Tumble.
Tumble had just intended to duck in from the rain for a drink and a bite to eat - her account was sitting pretty at the moment, and she didn't strictly need to take any new jobs - but a quiet nod from the barman and a gesture towards the back stairs put an end to that.
When the man who owned the Round Table wanted a word, you went.
The stairwell was standard NC urban, concrete and steel - the door to Winston's rooms stood out by being either actual fucking hardwood or a decent imitation of it, the dark varnish clashing horribly with the unpainted walls to either side.
She wiped her feet on the mat before entering. She hadn't - well, no she had been raised in a barn, or at least born in one. The Fields family hadn't exactly been the better-off class of nomad even among the Snake Nation's clans. Either way, she'd be polite, and not track mud and oil into the very nice carpets.
She opened the door, and stepped into a place that was two centuries old. The wood-paneled walls, the bookcases lined with leather-bound volumes, the ancient-looking furniture, the ankle-deep, luxuriously plush carpeting…the old fogey even had a fake fireplace set up in this office. She knew the rest of his apartments were set up the same way. The boss had his foibles, and a fondness for styles so retro they were outright medieval was one of them.
The man himself wasn't at his desk - itself a monster of varnished wood with as few concessions made to modernity as possible, only a single monitor set off to the side, the keyboard presumably hidden in a drawer somewhere. Instead, he was standing at the window, his back to her, leaning on his cane and holding a glass of scotch in his other hand. Dark blue pinstriped suit, really?
She waited until he'd raised the glass to his lips before she said anything.
"Your sense of style's still shit, old man," she deadpanned.
Winston nearly choked on his scotch, before finally chuckling and turning to face her. Man looked like everyone's favorite grandpa - lined face, ruddy cheeks, a white beard and short curly hair.
"Perhaps not to everyone's tastes, but it is my own, Ms. Real," he said with a smile, blue eyes sparkling. "My apologies, I did not hear you come in. Lost in thought. Care for a drink?"
She shook her head. "Maybe later."
"Ah, well. Come, sit, sit. We have much to talk about." He sagged into the high-backed leather chair as she sat in the far simpler, but still really preem comfortable, armchair facing his desk.
Winston raised his glass to her. "I've been hearing much about your performance. You're the talk of the Table at the moment."
She snorted. "Half the people I had died. And that's supposedly something impressive?"
Winston's smile vanished, and he set the glass down. "You were hit by an enemy with military-grade firepower, rallied everyone despite never having truly commanded them in a fight, drove off the fools who thought they'd caught you off-guard, hunted them down, made inroads with the Aldecaldo family, and then crushed them utterly despite their advantages and the fact they dropped twice your number in speedware-abusing borgs. With most of your casualties being from the first ambush before you even took command. Yes, Ms. Real, I do consider that impressive."
Winston leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers, watching her carefully. The grandpa act was gone - now it was the King of the Round Table sitting across from her, judging her carefully.
"Sixteen years you've been with our fraternity," Winston Arthur Scott said levelly. "And I had no idea of your potential. I must beg your forgiveness - if I'd known…" He shook his head. "Oh, it hardly matters. But you must have an idea of how hard it is to establish authority over your circle. You're a fractious bunch - even keeping you from each other's throats is a burden. But in a single day, you unite everyone under your command and take them to victory. That is talent, my dear, and it grieves me to see it squandered."
Tumble leaned back in her own chair, biting back the first few dozen instinctive responses that came to mind, trying to wrestle out something useful.
"What do you want, sir?" won out.
"I'm not your boss, Ms. Real. I operate this business and it's less legal associated endeavors, and let you and those like you have a safe haven and resources in exchange for a cut. Please don't call me sir."
"Alright. Sir."
Winston smiled again - less genial, but more real this time. "Suit yourself, Ms. Real. What I want…as I said, I see potential. In you, and in your new lance-mates." He opened a drawer, pulled out a cigar, cut and lit it. "The Round Table…well, you have been with us long enough. You know our circumstances."
Tumble nodded, slowly.
When she'd joined, the Round Table had counted at least a hundred Junkerknights. Now they had…thirty-four, after the events of the last few days. A few spare suits were waiting for one or two of the apprentices to get used to piloting, and about forty or fifty more hangers-on who were good Solos when the bullets started flying, but still…
"Resources dwindle. Corporate and ganger contacts alike lose faith in us. People die. And what happened fourteen years ago…" Winston's knuckles went white around the head of his cane as he let out a breath. "It has been all I can do, since that terrible day, to keep the wolves at bay and keep what we've built from collapsing. And here you are. Someone who has the reputation and now the demonstrated skill to ensure that perhaps the single most fractious and pigheaded group in the entirety of Night City sits up and listens."
Tumble narrowed her eyes. "You want an enforcer."
"No. I could get that from anyone. I want champions," Winston said coldly. "A counterweight, to the people in this fraternity that would see us fall from grace."
She folded her arms. "You mean Mordred. You should have revoked the little shit's membership years ago, sir."
"Family should not kill family," Winston replied. "My son and I have never seen eye to eye since that day. But he would take this organization from my hands and reduce it to nothing more than another street gang. A group of hoodlums with far too much power to be ignored…at which point the hammer would come down, and we would lose everything." He took a deep breath. "I cannot allow that to happen. And I will not kill the boy. Not when another possibility exists."
Tumble gave him a considering look. "What does this entail?"
"Rally your lance. Demonstrate success. Show the wolves that there's more to be gained from working in packs than hunting alone." He shrugged. "Quite a few are ex-military, like you, Ms. Fields."
Tumble froze.
Her Sandevistan kicked in, the world slowing down around her, almost freezing in place.
Winston smiled at her, and waved his cigar genially, completely unaffected. A high-end Kereznikov, then.
She shut her Sandevistan off again. "That," she said coldly, "is not my name."
"It was. And it's the one listed upon your documents for your medical discharge from Kinetic Action Limited, a Militech subsidiary, seventeen years ago. And before you ask: I know this, because it is my job to know these things. The same reason I know that young Ms. Slavica suffers from a rare degenerative condition caused by Petrochem's abominable approaches to environmental safety. That she and young Mr. Williams went to the same creche school when they were younger. And that Flynn Cranson has been operating as a spy for Militech for the past three years." He took a drag from his cigar. "I have to know these things, because the people the Round Table deals in can level city blocks if sufficiently motivated, and that requires leverage." He let out a breath. "We all have our secrets and our shames, Ms. Real, and those are the only weapons I can wield, these days. I'm sorry if I frightened you."
She took a deep breath. Let it out. "You want me to lead people again."
"I do."
"What else?"
Winston's smile was a cold, cold thing. "Merlin will be instructed to waive any operating or upgrade costs going forward. I want your lance well-equipped, ready to fight, and serving as an example to the rest. And in service to that…"
He opened a drawer in his desk, withdrew a shard. "Mr. Cranson has just been approached by a Militech agent. I'm not quite certain what she's offered him to secure his cooperation, and it frankly does not matter. He will try to convince you to take part in an attack against an Arasaka convoy containing a great deal of inactive ACPA. Arasaka Standard K mediumweight suits. I want you to take your lance out for that job, steal those suits, and turn them over to the Round Table as a whole. The details and information I have personally managed to verify are on this shard."
Winston Arthur Scott exhaled smoke, a lich's grin on his aged face. "As I said. Demonstrate success."