23 In flagrante delicto

Moving at my maximum speed, it only took about ten minutes to get the woman's old liver transplanted back in and her hepatic portal repaired. Then, after her condition was stabilised, I darted over to the Scav doctor, who had awoken and was hurling streams of invectives at me. Luckily Kiwi was already all over that, and she had installed a foreign data shard in his head that had locked down all outgoing wireless transmissions from any of his implants.

That was good; I hadn't thought of that. I made a mental note to remember it the next time I was in a similar situation. It wouldn't do if he was able to make a phone call to his friends or, worse, the police.

There was a surprising breadth of narcotics in their clinic, including my old favourite, ketamine, even if the total quantity was small. That was a drug I administered more than any other in my year of working on the ground ambulance. Honestly, I would have given it to almost every single patient I saw if I could have gotten away with it.

So, rather than listen to the man any further, I drew up a very large dose and dropped the man firmly into the K-hole. At high doses, the disassociative and anaesthetic properties of this drug really shined, blocking the neurotransmitter glutamate, which the brain required for... well, everything. Long story short, he shut the fuck up, and rapidly too.

"Ooh... lucky," I said, as I used some tools to carefully disconnect each of his arms. The interface points at his shoulders were generic, so there was no need to actually conduct any real surgery to remove them. I was sure I would find a number of others around here, plus that was one of the parts that needed to be somewhat customised to each person, too. They were the cheapest parts of a modern arm system, too. It probably wasn't uncommon to show up at a ripperdoc without them.

I sat his two Arasaka Mantis blades to the side and yelled, "You can call Mrs Okada now to send someone to take this guy away."

At that, Jean and Ruslan walked into the room. Jean glanced at him and then around and nodded, "Cool. That didn't take as long as I thought. Those two going to make it?"

"They should, but I plan to keep them out of it until we're pretty much ready to leave. Then we can just dump them at a hospital, probably. I still need to reinstall the rest of their chrome, too. I'd rather they didn't see us, plus if we called emergency services, that would strictly limit our time here," I told Jean.

Jean nodded slowly, and the other man spoke briefly on the phone before turning to us, "Alright, a car should be here in five minutes." Then he paused as he parsed what I had said while he was on the phone, "How long do you expect to stay here?"

"Well, however long it takes. Probably takes a few hours to go through all the dead Scavs and loot everything worth an ennie. We're still going to end up leaving a lot on the table here, but there's no helping it," I told him, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, "That's basically why Mrs Okada invited me for this job, wasn't it?"

Ruslan nodded, "Da, but we thought it would just be like fifteen minutes or so at the most. I'm honestly not sure why we thought that, thinking about it now..." He hummed and nodded, "Not a problem, I guess. We might have to just get Kiwi to set up some of our sticky cams outside, so we can see if we get any company while we fort up here."

The self-same Kiwi walked into the room, "Did I hear my name?"

"Da, here, let me tell you what our new plan is…." Ruslan told the blonde woman.

---xxxxxx---

I used one half of the clinic as an impromptu ICU, with mainly the woman donor recuperating. She was already looking a lot better, too. The man was already put back together, as I had quickly found the implants that were taken from him amidst the other haul of the Scavs.

I had done a quick investigation of both people, and neither appeared to be anyone particularly important just on the basis that they lacked Trauma Team memberships. That obviously didn't mean that they weren't important to all the people who loved and might miss them, though.

Before the pickup for the Scav doctor, I had scrounged around and found some benzos and dosed him with them, both to keep him docile for the ride wherever he was going and also because the particular chemical I chose had both a strong retrograde and anterograde amnesiac effects. The man probably wasn't long for this world, but just in case, I didn't want him to remember what I looked like. These were the same medications that were used for light sedation, for example, in dentistry and minor in-patient surgeries.

I was keeping the donor man insensate with the same cocktail of drugs, using one of the IV pumps that I was going to steal out of this place to slowly drip a number of drugs I dissolved into a bag of saline slowly into him. He'd be good for hours.

Going through the deceased Scavs was pretty quick, and I had already acquired for myself two sets of high-quality polymer arteries. I was a little surprised at the quality of them, so I took the time to carefully remove them, which caused a couple of odd looks from the netrunner Kiwi, who was helping me secure the more perishable cybernetics in specially prepared cryogenic containers, which the Scavs had no shortage of. Those I would take too; they were always useful and generic enough that they'd slide right into my stock-keeping system, even if I wasn't really a Ripperdoc.

A little more than halfway through the stack of Scav corpses I was working on, Kiwi yelled from another room, "A car is pulling up. A POS Supron, it looks like." I glanced up and reached a brief stopping point, walking over to where I sat my submachine gun on a table. Supron's were really a terrible car, something akin to a van, but they were built using mostly recycled plastics, with an engine from a lawnmower. But for use by Scavs, it was not surprising as they did have a lot of room in the back.

Car and Driver magazine called them "marginally safer than putting your dick in a blender," which I couldn't believe could actually be printed, plus it actually made me chuckle. Things that were rated PG in Night City would be a hard R in Brockton Bay, at minimum.

"Two Scavs, pulling an unconscious woman out of the back of the van. Looks like this might be a drop-off point," Kiwi said as I walked into the front area, which looked like it might have been intended for offices and a waiting room if this was actually a working clinic. As it was, it was set up as a den or living room with televisions and extremely sketchy-looking BDs lying around. I did not want to experience what a Scav considered an entertaining brain dance.

I sat the submachine gun on the table and pulled out my Omaha, double-checking to make sure the charge was good to go on the electromagnetic weapon.

"Woah, those aren't even out on the market yet," Ruslan said admiringly, "How'd you manage to score one?"

I glanced at him and considered lying but decided not to. "Both my parents worked for Militech, and until recently, I was considered a corporate dependent. They have been selling this model internally for over a year as a kind of beta test. It should come up on the regular market next month, far as I know." I then flipped it around and handed it to him by the barrel, nodded my head at the door headed outside, "Want to?"

I didn't particularly want to kill anyone, even Scavs, and although I would if I had to, I had the feeling that the rest of the people here had a bit more flexible opinions on the subject. At the same time, I wasn't a child anymore that had unrealistic expectations about what exactly was going to happen to these two Scavs. He grinned and took it, and nodded, "Fuck yeah. Is there anything I need to know about it?"

I thought about that, "It takes between seventy and eighty milliseconds to recharge the capacitors for a follow-on shot. That's pretty quick, but if you just pulled the trigger as fast as you could, it would only fire every other shot, probably. But for aimed shots, it should just be point and shoot."

That was something that Militech said they would improve with follow-on models. One of the main advantages of these guns was there were no moving parts in the action when you fired, much like firearms that used caseless ammunition. The projectiles were aerodynamic steel darts which were then coated in a thin layer of copper for electrical resistance purposes. That was apparently necessary for the weapon to function, but I didn't really know how it worked. As such, it would, mechanically at least, permit a really high rate of fire if the capacitors could support it!

He nodded, and we all backed up a fair distance, and I grabbed my submachine gun just in case things went to shit.

The door was opened with a kick, and surprisingly, it wasn't a Russian voice; it sounded like a stereotypical surfer boy from California. Although there weren't that many surfers in her past life anymore, on account of fears of Leviathan, and there weren't that many in this world too, on account that most of the shallow waters were somewhat polluted, "Yo, Vasily... bruh... come help us with this bitch! We had to use one of the scramblers on her!"

The sound of the Omaha firing was quite unique. It didn't really sound like a firearm, except that there was a loud crack of the projectile immediately going supersonic before it collided with the surfer boy's forehead, penetrating and out the other side. It really did have excellent penetration. There were only three lanes at the shooting range that I could use it in, the rifle lanes, all the rest, and it would over-penetrate the backstops. He was carrying the "donor" in a princess-style carry, and I winced as she tumbled to the ground with him.

There was also a slight high-pitched whine as it charged the capacitors for a second shot, with the second Scav trying to pull out a gun before being shot three times in the chest in rapid succession. After the last enemy went down, Jean said, "Alright, let's drag them all inside. It wouldn't do for the cops to be called." The last was said with heavy humour.

I sat my gun down again and dragged both the surfer boy and the donor lady inside while Jean grabbed the other one. Ruslan grinned at me and pointed to the first Scav with the Omaha and said, "You know, Madison, sometimes your countrymen are kind of dicks."

"Yeah, yeah... I get it; you don't have to rub it in, you know," I told him, face blushing red. Besides, it was absolutely true.

That caused him to laugh, really laugh, for a good ten seconds before he flipped the pistol around in his hand and handed it back to me, "That's pretty sweet. Normally I'd say it has the problem of over-penetrating, but I'd say it would be a good sidearm in this kind of business. Never know who has dermal armour or armoured prosthesis and shit."

I separated the donor from the dead Scav, and Ruslan glanced down at her, "Looks like a suit." I nodded; she was dressing fairly well. I pulled an interface cable from around my neck from the firewall I was still wearing and plugged it into her interface socket, "Let's see who she is."

First, immediately, I was greeted with my Zetatech system springing into high gear and quarantining a piece of malicious code that had tried to bridge between us through my firewall appliance. That was interesting. What was also interesting was she had quite a few pieces of cybernetics, including a networked internal biomonitor that was trying, but failing, to send a signal out to... ah, she was a subscriber. Although I didn't have any Trauma Team implants, I did have a bunch of their software. I ran it in a sandboxed virtual environment, just like the software from NC Med Ambulance, but it was helpfully popping up, for my perusal, this woman's file.

"Eleanor McKinney, NC18291866, Night Corp employee of eleven years, Trauma Team Gold," I said out loud, disconnecting the connection.

"Fuck mon! Why wasn't Trauma sweeping in on these gonks? Are they fucking on the way here?" Jean exclaimed, looking out the window for any potential sweeping that might be happening right now.

As her eyes scrolled through text rapidly, Kiwi said, "They never got the alert. These gonks weren't as stupid as they looked; there was something in her system blocking it. I guess this 'scrambler' that guy mentioned before Rus shot him."

I nodded and enlightened them, "Yes, there was a virus in her system when I connected; it got through my firewall even, but it was stopped by my ICE," I turned her around and saw a data shard in her shard port. Considering her system read-out said the shard-port was empty, I was guessing that was the culprit and managed to hide from her diagnostics like many malevolent pieces of software could, "This shard, I think."

"Oh, thank god," Jean said, and everyone looked a lot more relaxed except me. It was Corporate Policy that if I encountered a subscriber in distress on my off-time that I was to offer reasonable assistance. I wasn't expected to solo a 'Strom death squad or anything, but I definitely was expected to eject a shard from her head.

I sighed, "Guys, you know how Mrs Okada said I was just as good as a Trauma Team Med Techie?" I got nods from the boys and a confused nod from Kiwi, "Well... she was being cute and literal." There was a slowly gaining look of horror on Kiwi's face, but nothing on the other two except confusion now.

I figured that Kiwi would have already looked me up on similar sites that I looked her up on, but there was a lag on any of those gumshoe sites. In fact, it was part of their way to upsell you on the next available service tier, like you were buying a value meal. The cheapest level on my site was on a lag of months. It was very possible that my employment hadn't been updated yet on her dossier of me if she used a similar site or perhaps the same one.

"My day job is as a med techie for Trauma Team," I tell them, finally spelling it out.

"Ohhh.. shit... well, what does this mean?" asked Ruslan while Jean just got wide-eyed.

I shrugged, "Nothing. There isn't anything against company policy moonlighting like this, so long as I don't use company property or reputation to do so." I paused, "However, I am expected to provide 'reasonable assistance' to subscribers in distress if I happen to come across them."

"Oh, I gotcha. So what's your plan, then?" Jean asked.

I slung my SMG across my back and picked up the lady in my arms easily, "I'll just walk a block away, pull the shard and call her in. One of our teams will show up, and I'll hand her off and come back here, and we can finish up and make like a tree."

Kiwi groaned, "Make like a tree... god, Madison, that is awful; I don't think anyone's used that one in a hundred years. I had to net-search it just to understand what you were talking about."

"Alright, try to make it quick, though," Ruslan said as I nodded and walked out the door.

As the door was closing, I heard Ruslan asking Kiwi what I had meant by my tree quip, and her replying, "Make like a tree and leave."

That caused both the men to groan and me to frown. It wasn't that bad, was it?

I made a vid call to my immediate boss, which was Dr Anno, and he picked up, "Hey, what's up Taylor?"

"Not a whole lot..." I lied, "... except one thing led to another, and I may have stopped a couple of dumb Scavs after they kidnapped this woman. She's a suit, and they mentioned using something called a scrambler on her. I checked her OS, and she's a subscriber, Gold, and has some kind of virus preventing her system from sending out the distress signal."

There was silence for a moment before he came back, amused, "One thing led to another? What the fuck do you do for fun on your days off? I take it you have the lady. What's her status? I'm working an extra shift on Alpha today. I'm triggering a Gold alert internally now, we'll respond. Give me her deets, too."

I kept walking and glanced around and nodded, heading towards a basketball court that had a few youths playing ball. Not really a game; just taking random shots. "Nothing really; I usually read a couple of books, maybe have a hot bath, you know. Normal girl stuff. And she has a concussion and a very minor brain bleed, but according to her biomonitor, it has already stopped. I bet they coshed her in the head. There's a pretty hot virus on her OS, my systems stopped it, but I have a pretty sophisticated set of countermeasures. It went straight through a standard firewall. She is Eleanor McKiney, NC18291866."

"Interesting to all. Especially this virus, do you think that is what hijacked her biom? It must be pretty new if it didn't set off the heuristics on a firewall, although who knows with a store-bought model. Corporate will be pretty interested; we have had a number of clients just disappear lately. Are the Scavs able to be questioned?"

"Uh... not unless you're a necromancer," I said embarrassedly. "And yes, I think so. They slotted a shard in her data port; I'm going to pull it now and see if that gets her transmitting again. I'll put the shard in her pocket, in any case, and you can give it to the Intel boys."

Four boys stopped playing to glance at me as I showed up; the youngest one said, "Woah, chica! Did you flatline that suit?!"

I shifted Eleanor's body to reach around so I could push the ejection button next to her data shard, yanking it free. I didn't really know if that worked, though, since I wasn't connected to her anymore. I tried my best to glare at the boys and said, "No, I did not! And you boys better 'delta'. Trauma's coming."

One of the other boys, the oldest, scoffed, "She talks like a suit herself! Suit-on-suit violence! Oh, the humanity!" What a little shit! He was Hispanic and built like a brick shithouse. If you didn't look at his face could easily pass for nineteen or older, but I figured he was younger than me.

"We got her transmitting now; we're already pulling off the pad. You're pretty close, in Haywood, so expect us in ninety or less," came back Anno.

"Roger, and shut up, you little shits!" I stupidly tried talking to both Dr Anno and the boys at the same time.

"Uh, pardon?" Anno replied, causing me to blush furiously.

"Not you, sir. There's a number of street boys at the LZ," I replied, which caused all four of the street boys to start laughing at me.

Dr Anno chuckled himself and affected the exaggerated accent of a 1920s prohibition mobster. We had been watching old gangster movies the other day, "You wants me to ventilate 'em, boss?! They'll be sleeping with the fishes."

"No, I don't think that will be necessary. I'll just make them an offer they can't refuse," I said formally.

"Oh, shit. I think she flatlined all the Scavs at that den," the youngest-looking boy said, "Maybe she's a merc, and we shouldn't fuck with her." Well, what a smart kid.

I sighed, muted the call and said, "If you guys leave now, you can pick through what we leave behind in a couple of hours. Just leave the medical equipment alone. But I've seen your faces, now, and if anyone but more witless Scavs show up... I will know who sold us out, Mr Welles." I said, using the real identity of the oldest of the boys I had gotten from NCPD searches of their faces, staring him right in the eyes.

The oldest boy was already in the system, with a couple of small crimes, as well as a notation that he was a suspected member of the Valentinos. Not bad for probably a fifteen or sixteen-year-old, I supposed. But he'd have to try harder if he wanted to beat the precociousness of this sixteen-year-old.

"Was that a threat?" he asked, surprisingly calm and looking rather dangerous suddenly.

I blinked at him, actually slightly intimidated, even knowing that I could probably easily take him and his friends if I just sat the lady down. I grinned as best as I could. "Just a reminder of basic physics. Isaac Newton, you know? For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

That caused him to grin and rub his neck, "Aw, shit. I never did too well in school, lady. But sure, but you better make sure there are a few things worth it for us in there." That switch from dangerous to folksy was pretty cool, I had to admit. And he didn't have to worry about that. Even if we looted everything, we didn't have enough room in their van to load everything. There would be a number of guns and other things that would be worth looting that we would just not take. And I wouldn't drive their Supron if my life depended on it. The tiny MaiMai was safer. Sure, you would get crushed like a can in an accident, but the Supron tended to spontaneously combust for no reason at all and was made out of semi-flammable recycled hydrocarbon-derived products. And the engine was made partially out of cheap magnesium, so it went up like thermite or white phosphorous.

"Sure, plus there's a Supron FS3 in the parking lot. I'll leave the key shard in the driver's seat, just for you. But it used to belong to some Scavs, just so you know," I told him as Alpha's AV-4 swooped in from the sky in a cacophony of noise.

One of the quiet ones up till now yelled, "Shit, she wasn't fucking around. That's Trauma! Let's jet, Jackie!" And with that, the four of them ran off. I shoved the shard that was still in my hands into one of the lady's pockets, and she was already starting to stir into semi-lucidity in my arms. I wondered if there was anything on that shard to keep her unconscious, too?

As the AV sat down, the team hopped out, and I waved awkwardly, one-handed. Then, one of the security guys yelled, "Yo, 'breaker!" I didn't recognise his voice, but I had gotten pretty popular with the security guys after saving Bandbox.

I sighed. Well, at least the shortening of the nickname was better than it all together. Heartbreaker was a weird villain; he was reasonably well known in Canada and the northern part of the United States, like where I had lived, but I almost thought the PRT downplayed him since he more or less kept to himself. There wasn't much they could do to stop him without endangering many innocent people.

After living in Night City for a while, I got the feeling that they probably did that for threats they had no good way to deal with. It still didn't explain why they tolerated the Slaughterhouse Nine, though.

"You want to set up the gurney, or should I just set her inside?" I asked them, and Dr Anno said, "May as well just set her in. I forget that you've got strength mods."

I nodded and sat the woman on the biobed inside the AV-4 and then said, "Alright, I know you're on the clock..." response time and time to the hospital was one of the primary KPIs for a team, "...so I'll see you in a couple of days."

One of the security guys saluted me with his carbine, and they all jumped back into the AV before lifting off and darting off to the north. I unslung my submachine gun and jogged back to the Scav den. Although probably things wouldn't happen, it was true that I had brought attention to this area and possibly compromised the operation by calling my compatriots to rescue Ms McKinney, so I would work fast, triage any interesting cyberware left and yank it all out.

I told the shits we'd leave in two hours, but since one of them was a suspected Valentino, I planned to be done in less than one.

---xxxxxx---

Wakako asked the leader of a small-time team who she had asked to evaluate the Hebert girl. The job was real, and the girl's competencies aligned well with the particulars. Still, she didn't get to be this old in this industry by not being a belt and suspender's sort of woman. "So, any complaints?"

"Not really. She did save two Scav donors on-premises, which theoretically cut into our profit margins as she put their implants back in, and then we had to drive them to the hospital after we were done, but..." he shrugged and said, "Honestly, it felt kind of good to feel totally good about a job, for once. We didn't miss out on too much money anyway, and she made the job simple and easy, too."

Wakako raised an eyebrow and asked, "Put their implants back in?"

"Yeah, she said it was no big deal, as they came out of them in the first place, right?" he said and shrugged.

Wakako was silent for a moment. She was almost certain that wasn't how it worked. She made a note of that. "How did she assist with the actual gig? I was under the impression she wasn't to be involved in the actual combat."

"She wasn't, not really, although she was watching the back door and did shoot one Scav and bashed the other over the head when they were running out the back door. But she gave us this anaesthetic gas grenade and said it was expiring soon anyway, so it might as well be used. Kiwi tossed it in the ventilation system, and almost everyone was falling unconscious by the time we kicked the door in," he said and gave a thumbs up. "Easy money!"

Wakako hummed in thought. There was no telling the number of things that she might have received from her father, so that wasn't really unusual. She was more concerned about anything left behind by her mother.

She shrugged and made a couple of mental notes and then dismissed the man, "Alright. Thank you for coming in. I may pair her with your team if there are suitable gigs in the future."

---xxxxxx---

With everything we had looted, we had easily cleared over fifteen thousand Eurodollars for a single evening's work. I ended up buying a number of things from the pot, so I only got about ten thousand, but that was still more than I made in six weeks at my day job. It was clear why people did this sort of thing.

I sighed as I thought about spending over half of the money I did collect on various specialised equipment and tools purchased from over a half dozen companies directly on the net. I had already built a number of beakers, round-bottom flasks and distillation setups in a Tinker fugue a while ago, but this was additional computer analysis equipment and automation equipment used in chemistry. I was probably putting my name on some kind of list by buying it all, but none of it was really too out there.

Right now, though, I was waking up from another fugue as I had an idea for a special bioactive compound, which it looked like I built and incorporated into an implant that I installed on my fingers while I was out.

I could tell my fingernails weren't normal, as they were just slightly longer, much thicker, made of some kind of metal and painted pink, a bright colour that I hated, especially because this shade of pink was Emma's favourite colour.

I frowned and tried to recall what exactly I had built. I hope I hadn't peeled off my fingernails to build home-grown scratchers. I didn't like those types of implants; they were really quite dangerous and hazardous to be around.

I carefully tested the sharpness of the fingers on a few things and sighed in relief when no matter how I slid them across test surfaces, they didn't cut anything to ribbons. Scratchers were made from specially produced glassy-metallic compounds, sharper than razors but only in one specific direction. You generally had to slide them sideways to cut with them.

Still, they were quite sturdy. I took a medical sonic imager from my bench and used them to get an internal image of my fingers, finding the nails were carefully fused to the distal phalanges. That was interesting. They were made of some kind of metal, too, and although they weren't designed to be sharp, I could clearly scratch someone very easily, I supposed.

Kind of an odd thing to do to myself in a fugue, though, when I was thinking about a bioactive compound that would respond to haemoglobin. Then I turned my hand around, peered at the underside of the nails, and was enlightened.

I had been thinking about a compound that would react with haemoglobin to produce a synthetic analogue of succinylcholine. That was a paralytic that was often used in emergency medicine as a prelude to intubating someone. However, originally, it was derived from curare which had been used for hundreds of years to treat the darts of indigenous South American tribesmen for hunting and for warfare.

I had thought to use it for the same reason, as a coating for a dart or perhaps a knife. Since the compound I was thinking of would create the chemical on exposure to haemoglobin, it was not only reasonably safe and inert until blood touched it but long-lasting.

It was also one of the chemicals that would be neutralised by my artificial liver. Not because the liver would filter it out, because it would paralyse me far too quickly to be metabolised, but because it would release a counteracting agent, which would prevent the effect on my central nervous system from propagating. The liver contained a limited amount of compounds like this; for example, it also contained naloxone in the event I was ever the victim of an enormous opiate overdose.

That was good; otherwise, I might have accidentally paralysed myself if I scratched a damn itch too vigorously. As it stood, I might still need to remove them if I ever got a boyfriend and made it past second base. I mean... some of the romance books I had read indicated that sometimes the girl might scratch the boy's back... you know... in her... fervour. It would really kill the romance if I found someone I liked and then accidentally paralysed him, including their diaphragm, in flagrante delicto.

The chemical produced by these small bioactive pads would tend to stop even the muscles a person used to breathe at high doses, so they would require rather prompt medical assistance or a counter agent, which I figured I would start carrying in a small EpiPen-like dispenser. That would be so embarrassing.

Oh, who was I kidding? It wasn't like I would likely find anyone that wanted to date me any time soon anyway. Or ever.

Why were they pink, though? I sighed but then noticed a new application on my system and discovered that I had actually used SmartPaint in their construction, and I could change them to whatever colour I wanted, just like my monowire had.

I frowned. I didn't really like the idea of nail polish in the first place, but transparent really wasn't an option. Finally, I decided on a dark red colour.

Things had been going pretty well since that day a few weeks ago. Trauma Team's intelligence department did have a couple of questions for me, but they made it clear that they didn't really care what I was doing in my off time. I told them the truth, although I didn't tell them any of the identities of either the Fixer or the Ruslan's group. I just told them that somebody hired me to go in after they cleared it out to remove any valuable implants from the dead Scavs and that two more had arrived while I was working, hauling our client with them.

Apparently, the virus on the data shard wasn't one they had seen before. I wasn't that surprised; such things were always a game of cat and mouse.

In any event, the Intel people thanked me and left and suggested I pick up extra shifts on the Debt Reclamation Team. That I wasn't interested in. It was one thing to take implants out of dead Scavs and criminals, but I wasn't about to steal someone's arm just because they couldn't afford the payments on our services after we saved their life.

Still, the kudos for saving a client while I was off work did come with half a day of paid time off, although I had to schedule it sixty days in advance. I figured I'd save it for after I accumulated a day and a half of vacation time and then take them all together so I'd have over a week off in one long period of days off.

Suddenly, there was a squawk and banging from my apartment. I blinked, and stood up and ran into my private area to see Mr Pegpig facing off against a small raptor inside my apartment. His wife was cowering in the corner next to my refrigerator. I had left the window open so he could come and go as he pleased. A small falcon? Maybe a kite? I wasn't a bird watcher, but it was still well over twice his size either way!

I went to intercede, this predator would eat poor Mr Pegpig in two bites, but the plucky pigeon leapt at the big obligate carnivore, wings flapping and tackled it in a squawk. The raptor's birdy-little face showed astonishment before it leapt up and flew out of my open window. It even glanced back at us, mid-glide, and I could have sworn I saw it shaking its little birdy head.

Mr Pegpig hopped up to the counter with a raptor's feather in his beak and seemed to move his wings as if he was dusting the dirt off his shoulder.

Was he always this buff? I grabbed him at super speed, causing him to drop his battle trophy and squawk in dismay.

"Oh, shush," I told him and carried him off to the front, where all of my tools and equipment were. Maybe I should cut back on the diet of programmed nanomeds for the pigeons? At the very least, I needed to check him over to make sure he wasn't going to die or something.

A half-hour later, I released the bird and discovered a few things. Firstly, it was a female. You would have thought I would have already known that by now, but honestly, you didn't really need to look under a bird's skirt to design and install a primitive prosthesis for its little leg. The second thing I learned was Mrs Pegpig was quite healthy.

I grabbed her husband, which I thought was her wife, and did a similar exam on him. I refused to call this one Mr Pegpig, though, so I was now just calling him Consort.

One thing Wakako Okada told me that was one hundred per cent true. I wouldn't be able to reach my goals of self-funding my trip through medical school through solely my paycheck at Trauma Team alone.

With all of the chemistry equipment I had been buying and making lately, though, I could push forward with my plan to sell my intellectual property to a biotech firm. I could probably use Mrs Okada to approach them, and they would just assume I had stolen the research data from one of their competitors.

Having a good working arrangement with a team of edgerunners would help that as well, as I'd definitely need protection even if Mrs Okada could arrange a sale.

Very dangerous, in a lot of ways, but I still thought the risk was lesser than doing one hundred jobs like the Scav den job.

Sometimes I wondered why I was going through such hoops, as I didn't really expect to learn much in four years of medical school and one or two of residency. Perhaps it was pride; I wanted the name Hebert to mean something if someone heard it.

I knew I could change the world, and hopefully, it would be for the better.