24 The anger of a gentle man

I flat-out ran, panting a bit as I zig-zagged through alleys and attempted to out-run the group of four men who were, undoubtedly, going to kill me forthwith. Glancing down at the gunshot wound in my abdomen, I grimaced and kept applying pressure on it with one hand.

The wound was life-threatening, but not immediately so. What was more immediately dangerous were the assailants, which was proven out by another quick burst of bullets firing and missing me to the left, pinging off a heavy-duty steel dumpster as I ducked out of reflex.

The men chasing me were a bit faster than me, and they were better at street parkour than I was, and I wasn't going to get away, but thankfully I didn't need to. I just needed to make it two more blocks.

"Don't run, bitch!" one of them yelled from behind me, which caused me to scrunch my face up in displeasure. I suppose it was kind of silly to criticise someone's word choices as they were attempting to murder me, but it seemed very unoriginal. I mean, I had been running for some time now, too.

Turning a corner, I put on the rest of the speed I had left and ran straight for a stereotypical kid's tree house. The dichotomy of the surroundings was stark; up until now, I had been running through a downtown area, but now it had shifted to a suburban one, almost with no warning.

As I started climbing the treehouse, luckily in cover by the trunk of the tree, I found what I was looking for. Nodding, I pointed one-handed at the approaching nar-do-wells. I commanded, mentally, 'Attack!' Instantly, a massive swarm of wasps emerged from a large hive on the side of the nearby house and quickly began swarming over and stinging the men chasing me, causing them to cry out in shock and allowing me to get into the main level of the treehouse without further being molested, or shot.

Taking stock of myself once in the treehouse, I frowned at my injury. I didn't really have much equipment with me, but I did have a pocket knife, though, so I cut some cloth around my midriff, turning my shirt into a halter-top to try to get some material to form a bandage. The wound was a through-and-through, and if I could stop it from bleeding, I could reach a hospital to get treated.

[You have killed LVL5 Minion]

[You have killed LVL6 Minion]

[You have killed LVL5 Minion]

Blinking, I glanced outside the tree house. I thought the wasps would have killed all of them, actually. Right as I was wondering where the last guy went, he suddenly made his presence known directly underneath the treehouse, still being swarmed by wasps. He threw something in a low, overhand parabola, causing it to bounce inside the tree house.

[You have killed LVL10 Mastermind]

However, then I identified the object he tossed inside. A fragmentation grenade. Fuck! There was a flash of light and loud noise.

[You have been killed!]

Growling, I found myself in a waiting area, where I would have to sit in time out before being respawned. At least the grenade killed me more or less instantly. I wasn't using a premium subscription package that would allow me to turn down the amount of pain my avatar experienced past a certain level, so, for example, getting shot earlier hurt quite a lot.

I also wondered how that ass managed to acquire explosives so early in the game. He didn't even really have a superpower yet; I didn't think. In World of Heroes, you could put off unlocking your superpower until you reached certain levels in exchange for better starting equipment. In this case, he likely got those three minion NPCs. As for those automatic weapons and grenades? He probably got them from his clan or guild, I guessed.

I hadn't joined the Trauma Team guild yet, mainly because I was interested to see what I could do alone. The superpower the game had chosen for me after playing through the tutorial would be what I would call a Master power, but the game classified me as a Controller.

I could control and direct any animals that were smaller than, say, a mouse. Unlike Ladybug's power, I wasn't limited to arthropods only, but realistically I was, as there weren't very many small animals that would be useful to me. Eventually, if my power got... well... more powerful, I would likely end up being able to summon insects regardless of where I was.

It was... a pretty good power, as could be determined from my killing of four heavily armed men with it. There was a heads-up display component that would tell me where things like insect hives were located, so I would always know where I could go for "resources." From what I knew about how the famous Ward's power worked, though, my version of the game was much inferior. Ladybug could give individual commands to millions of different insects, whereas I could give a number of predefined commands like Attack, Move, Defend, et cetera to a swarm as if it was a single entity. As my power levelled up, I would get more commands and could create subsets of my total swarm to issue those commands to, but right now, it was pretty much all or nothing.

There wasn't a lot one could do to compare a superpower in a video game with a real-life superpower, though. There was only so much the game could do to simulate it.

I was a little disappointed, actually. Typically, people with Kerenzikov implants usually got speedster-related powers, and I was actually looking forward to that. There wasn't anything the game could do to slow my perception of time, but they could prevent me from moving and running faster than they thought a regular person should. As such, Controller-based powers like mine were another commonly given superpower, as I did have a lot of time, comparatively, to issue commands and orders.

As I was about to respawn, I suddenly found myself back in the AV-4 with a klaxon sounding and a computer voice saying intently, "PLATINUM. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE."

Well, never mind. I guess I had to get to work. I was pretty familiar with all the user interfaces we used by now, and I had even been off third rider status for several weeks. It looked like we were responding to a trauma, which wasn't surprising. Most platinum calls were trauma-related. Generally speaking, if you had enough money for platinum-related coverage, you also had enough money for regular doctor's visits, including any recommended prophylactic procedures, so you never randomly got seriously ill.

A person could easily live to be over a hundred and fifty years old in this world, and honestly, I didn't know if there was really an upper limit on the age a geriatric patient could reach if no expense was spared. Saburo Arasaka was born before the First Atomic War, and he was still going strong, for example.

Mr Bandbox had finally recovered sufficiently to resume duties, although he had a brand new pair of cybernetic arms. Quite good models, I thought, and definitely combat-rated. The Corp wouldn't let him carry around the giant hand cannon I scavenged for him on company time, but he was very appreciative of having it, anyway. Honestly, I thought that maybe they were making a mistake there. There was a lot to be said for giant cannons, but the Corp had a real hard-on for SmartWeapons. Even the pistol I carried was a Kang Tao SmartPistol; I just lacked the interface cyberware to actually utilise it to its fullest extent.

He joined the clinician's tacnet briefly to give us an idea of what we were going up against. Unfortunately, it looked like it was Maelstrom, which wasn't great. They were one of the highest threat values we faced in Night City -- not only were they ridiculously dangerous, but they were actually very technically sophisticated. I supposed you had to be somewhat sophisticated if most of your members were more metal than flesh.

From the statistics I had looked through for the whole of Night City, I discovered that about half the time, we would get the client without Maelstrom doing anything, but the other times they generally fought at least a little bit. I didn't know why they made these choices, though.

The patient looked like he had been beaten up, quite a lot from the internal biomonitor's report. He was unconscious, with a concussion and likely a ruptured spleen. It wasn't a big deal, so long as we could medevac him pretty soon. But an issue was the location; it was the famous Maelstrom club Totentanz. It was unknown whether our client was a customer or some victim of one of the booster gangs dragged to the club.

"Going to Totentanz with just one team is fucked," Bandbox said over the common net, which I tended to agree with.

Mr Mercy sighed and said, "Another bird is coming along, or rather being scrambled, to help support us. Hopefully, it will be nothing, you know?" That still meant we were responding alone, though, at least at first.

That wasn't surprising when the pilots threw the aircraft off its perch and into a steep dive down towards the city. Maybe if this was a Gold client, we would wait, but there was no way the bosses would OK adding a delay to a Platinum call. That would increase the average response time this quarter, and that was the main selling point of our service.

Honestly, it was kind of stupid but entirely predictable. Almost universally, middle management in corporations wasn't the brightest of people. I thought that maybe that was intentional, but I didn't really know for sure.

"Weapons check. Client location is inside the club, but close to the entrance, so that is good, at least," Mr Mercy came on the net. I pulled out my pistol and did a quick function check on it before replacing it in the holster. I did a quick test of the electronic taser-type weapon we also carried, too. In a large crowd-type situation, it was standard procedure to zap anyone who came too near us, after all. I wasn't sure that was going to be a great idea in a booster gang club, but we would see.

The AV-4 barely spent more than thirty seconds on the ground. After we all hopped out, it lifted slowly into the air and loitered outside of easy gunshot range, doing lazy circles over the area. I guessed that the pilots felt that the aircraft wasn't safe to wait for us on the street in front of such a place.

"What the fuck do you think you're doing---UGHGHGHH..." A stupid-looking boostergang member, not even one of the 'Strom, approached us from my side and started yelling at us. I was always of the opinion that it was better to be scary than it was to be scared, so I casually pulled out the taser weapon and discharged it point-blank into the chest of this loud person, which caused him to shake and then slump to the ground.

"Nice, 'Breaker..." Mercy said, amusedly, over the tacnet. The crowd of people around us immediately thinned quite a bit, but I was glancing down at the man I shocked. I thought I might have accidentally stopped his heart or rather knocked him into a dangerous arrhythmia where a cardiac arrest was likely going to occur. However, we definitely weren't about to stop and treat that guy. I think the label "non-lethal" on these shock weapons we were issued was a bit of an optimistic intent rather than any kind of statement or guarantee.

As we started moving, I carefully aimed the toe of my boot and struck the guy's sternum somewhat hard. That caused him to gasp and start breathing again, which caused me to smile beneath my helmet. Although it looked like I had just kicked a man while he was down, in actuality, I had performed a carefully calibrated precordial thump, which was an ancient medical procedure and would sometimes snap a person out of a dangerous arrhythmia in a way that was similar to using a defibrillator, if much less reliable.

After that, I carefully dialled back the electronic weapon to about medium and replaced it in the holster on the opposite side of my pistol. We were met by one of the 'Stromers, a woman with the tell-tale glowing red optical replacement, who was standing over our client inside the club, not too far away from a dance floor that looked more like an unorganised floor of violence. It looked like our client was attacked by two other guys armed with baseball bats, one of which our client turned into sashimi with a pair of mantis blades.

The woman Stromer says, her voice digitally post-processed, "You can take him just as soon as you provide an equal amount of entertainment..."

"No, we will just be taking him..." Mercy said, and he and Bandbox lifted up their small carbines.

That caused the Strom woman to snort, "Well, that would definitely be entertaining..." However, while Dr Anno started to kneel down to look at the patient, something made me glance over to the mosh pit just in time to see one of the revellers pull the pin on a grenade and start to throw it in a high arc towards us.

I zoomed in on it instantly. It didn't look like a fragmentation grenade which made me feel better; it had the cylindrical look of a smoke grenade, a flashbang or possibly a concussion grenade. I figured it was the latter, so, moving at my maximum speed, I grabbed the baseball bat off the floor and repositioned myself. I had time to do one practice swing before I set myself up and teed off the grenade, knocking it back towards where it came from.

Thinking it was a concussion grenade, I knocked it high into the air so as to minimise the possible damage to the people dancing. However... I was wrong in my identification of the munition, and behind my featureless mask, my mouth opened in shock as the grenade exploded several metres over the location of the guy who threw it at us.

Rather than a concussion grenade, it was clearly some kind of pyrotechnic device. The filters in my helmet quickly polarised, saving me from a bright flash and white smoke, which rained down on ten or so people who immediately started shrieking in pain and terror, including the guy who threw the grenade at us in the first place. My aim with the bat was good, although I hadn't ever been that great with sports, and the man who threw the grenade originally seemed to be getting the worst of it.

The band playing started a new set immediately and somehow managed to sync the beat with the screams of the people who were on various stages of on fire, and everyone started going crazy like it was the best thing they had seen in their lives. I couldn't understand what the fuck was going on.

This madness caused the Strom woman to laugh, a short snort of a laugh and yell, "Fucking preem, Trauma! Whiskey Pete! I gotta go and turn the ventilation system on overdrive before more people asphyxiate to death! Take your fucking suit!"

I glanced between Mercy and Bandbox, and we all just sort of shrugged. I tossed the baseball bat back on the floor and knelt down, setting up the gurney. I shared a glance with Dr Anno, and we both nodded, just putting the patient on the gurney without actually treating him at all. It would be best to get him out of this place first, then treat him, we both agreed without having to say anything.

---xxxxxx---

I frowned at the result of my chemical experimentations. In order to prevent anyone from deducing the chemical synthesis of the antibiotic, I started about four steps before the actual synthesis, and I was creating precursors to precursors using the most common and available chemicals.

Most chemical precursors you could buy online, and they'd ship them right to your door. You could do this even if you wanted to produce illegal drugs -- it was still illegal, but nobody seemed to care. It was only things like Glitter and Black Lace where the police seemed at all interested in stopping it, and those drugs seemed carefully calibrated to be as addictive and harmful as possible, and these highly complicated synthetic drugs were as much as a trade secret as the stimulant I made tic-tacs out of months ago.

My superpower did not help me a lot with chemistry, but it did help a little, so long as I kept in mind that everything I was making was intended for human consumption, eventually. However, the yield on the precursor I was making right now wasn't very good, but there was little I could do about it. I didn't really need to make this an economical process; all I needed was to demonstrate the feasibility of the synthesis. I wasn't even recording these preliminary steps, as I would just record the actual synthesis -- I intended to sell this to a Corporation, after all. They didn't need to know how to do the boring steps I had to do to hide what I was doing -- they could buy chemical precursors weighted in tons if they wanted to, and nobody would care.

I carefully used a small amount of suction to extract all of the organic layer of the chemical process I had just finished, then shifted beakers and drained the rest into a beaker for disposal. In this process, the aqueous layer was just waste, and I could dispose of it however was convenient.

As I was cleaning the glassware, I got an alert on my OS; it was an e-mail to my work account. I rolled my eyes when I read it. It turned out that the guy who I had shocked had made a complaint of "excessive brutality" to corporate in my interaction with him. The big bad booster ganger was making a complaint; it was kind of ridiculous on its very face.

I was very tempted to spend a few hundred eddies on hiring some kids to place flyers up around his neighbourhood, "apologising" and thanking him for cooperating with the investigation. That would have likely got him killed, as while Trauma Team wasn't exactly like the cops, nobody in boostergangs particularly liked cooperating with any Corp, even Trauma. Except... I couldn't tell where he lived. He didn't look like any of the poser gangs and wasn't an Animal or a member of the Tyger Claws or similar Asian gangs, so he was just a nameless mook that could have lived anywhere. The three minion NPCs that chased me in World of Heroes had more personality than this guy did.

Reading the e-mail sent me giggling, and I sat down for a moment. The complaint wasn't a big deal and would have been ignored, except that I told the person asking me about it that I thought that the guy might have had a pre-existing cardiac problem, as our taser seemed to cause him to enter into an unstable arrhythmia. My kick, therefore, wasn't excessive brutality but a carefully calibrated cardiology treatment!

That was true, too! I was really convinced that he would have likely died if I didn't do anything.

As such, the complaint was closed, and the man was billed for one hour of "cardiology treatment," and it was recommended that he inform his primary care physician so that screening tests could be conducted. I would be very surprised if that man ever had seen a doctor in his life, except perhaps when he was arrested, so that was just adding insult to injury, and I was all for it! Asshole!

Complaints weren't really a thing the Corp cared too much about, but it still annoyed me. The last time I heard about someone actually getting in trouble was when they accidentally dropped a napalm canister on the LZ, killing both the gang members and the client. And even then, it was just treated as a verbal counselling session -- the sort of "Tsk, tsk" don't do that again, if you can help it, sort of thing.

My phone rang as I was finishing up, and I was about to ignore it until I saw that it was Mrs Okada calling me. I picked up and said, "Hello?"

"Miss Hebert. I have a gig for you if you're interested. A client wants an escort around Japantown, which concludes with seeing a Ripperdoc. You're paid partially for protection for a couple of hours, but mainly to ensure the client doesn't get ripped off at one of the Jig-jig street doctors," Mrs Okada said, not wasting any time.

I got the rest of the particulars. The pay was only about five hundred Eurodollars, but that was still quite a good amount of money for just a few hours of work, so I agreed to the proposal. I didn't feel in danger anywhere in Japantown these days, although that wasn't to say I wasn't actually in danger, just that the danger level was something I had grown accustomed to.

I spent several minutes getting dressed in my "don't mess with me" outfit and left my apartment. I had agreed to meet the client at the NCART station in my building, and we'd drop down to the street level from there. After he saw his fill of the seedy underbelly of Japantown, I would take him to one of the Ripperdocs that I knew didn't really screw their patients over. I had something of a relationship with a few of them, just from selling them stock that I would refurbish from what Gloria brought to me. She mostly did most of the selling herself these days, though.

I sat around the NCART station and called the number Wakako sent me, getting an answer after a couple of rings. "You the merc? I am on the next train; I should be there in about five minutes."

"That's fine. I'm next to the Buck-A-Slice, right after you leave the terminal," I told the man. He looked and sounded like a suit, so I would reciprocate with some manner of professionalism. In Night City, that basically meant not using slang or profanity in every third word.

I hung around, just eyeing people, for six minutes or so until a man walked in from the terminal. His face matched the deets that Mrs Okada sent me, so I walked over to him, "Mr Smith?" I asked him, almost certain that wasn't his actual name.

That caused him to smirk, and he nodded. I offered to shake his hand, which he looked a little askance at but reciprocated the gesture, and I casually left a sticky-tracker on the sleeve of his jacket, testing it for both position and audio for a moment. They were pretty cheap, only a couple of Eurodollars at most electronic stores, but very few people actually were prepared for them to be used, which I found rather odd. I had an app that would report to me any unknown and periodic radio source that was collocated on my body. Although it was only a side part of my job to protect him, I figured it would be best if he couldn't get away from me.

"So, what is your plan for the day, sir?" I asked him professionally. This caused him to blink and look at me up and down, as if noticing me for the first time.

He coughed, "Well, primarily, I have this piece of cybernetics I need to get installed. I don't want a record of it being installed for various reasons. But I figured I'd combine the trip with sightseeing, maybe see some of the sights or some of the joytoys of Jig-Jig street. Okada recommended you based on your experience as a Med Techie, so I wouldn't get screwed over at one of the rippers here."

I nodded slightly. "Well, the best dolls are actually in this building, at Clouds, but I am taking it as you wanting something a little more... authentic?" I was pretty sure what he wanted was to visit somewhere that was safe, but had the feeling that it might not be safe. An adventure, in other words.

"Precisely! Do you know any places like that?" he asked excitedly.

Internally, I sighed, "Of course. There are a few places not too far away, either." Internally, I had already sent Mr Jin a text message. Apparently, this was a pretty common request, such that Mr Jin wanted to know if I wanted the extra service like a pretend-mugging that I would have to "save" the man from. I declined that upsell but took his recommendation for a couple of places that Mr Smith could divert a couple of hours in sin.

Before reaching the brothel, I took him around a number of sights on Jig-Jig street, but when he asked if there was anything I would recommend as far as food, I just shook my head firmly. There were a number of good sit-down restaurants, actually, but as far as street food went, Jig-Jig street was best to avoid.

I made sure to turn off the audio tap on his sleeve after he selected one of the call girls, as I didn't have any desire to hear any of their tryst, and instead just waited at the bar at the brothel.

"How about you, then?" asked an older man, someone that could easily have been as old as Danny, bringing me out of my reverie as I was sipping my Real Clean Water™.

I frowned at him and said, "I am not a prostitute, sir." I mean, I was dressed as a merc, and sure there were some places where roleplaying was encouraged, this being one of those locations, but you had to arrange that ahead of time. Certainly, none of the working girls or boys were dressed anything like me, plus I wasn't really very attractive in the first place.

I was concerned that this might turn into a scene, but the man was apologetic and slightly embarrassed, quickly departing with a blushing face. I supposed it was a little embarrassing to assume that someone, even if they were sitting alone at a brothel, was a prostitute. I tried to put myself in his shoes and would have been absolutely mortified, not just slightly embarrassed.

Thankfully, I didn't have to wait too much longer. My client returned, much more tousled, from the depths of the brothel and looking like he quite enjoyed the experience. He found me and said, "That was great! I think I've seen enough, though, if we could head towards the Ripper now."

I nodded and led him outside and down two more blocks before stopping at one of the best Ripperdocs on Jig-Jig street. The clinic accepted walk-ins, as well, and I introduced him to the doctor.

"Would you like me to stick around while he performs the surgery?" I asked him but got quickly dismissed as it turned out the client and the doctor hit it off pretty well, and the client didn't see any real need for me to stay around. He said he'd get a cab back to his place after he was done here.

I didn't even get to find out what implant he was having installed, except that it was inside a briefcase the client had been carrying. Oh well, I suppose it didn't matter.

"Very well, I am marking this gig as concluded. Have a good day," I told him and sent a similar text message to Mrs Okada. Humming to myself, I stepped out of the clinic and turned left down a fairly well-lit street and the quickest way to return back to my apartment.

However, after about ten metres into the small street, I stop humming and frown. The street is too quiet. It's too well-lit and too quiet. There should be other people around here. It wasn't a busy street, but it wasn't a totally quiet street either.

An instinct causes me to turn around and pull out my pistol as I see a slight flickering distortion, 'Thermoptic camouflage?!' I tried to bring the pistol around to bare at the ghost that was closing in on me fast, but it was moving as fast as I was, maybe faster and right before I started to squeeze the trigger as I lined up a shot, I took a strong hit to my solar plexus, doubling over. The ghost used this opportunity to quickly and efficiently disarm the pistol out of my hand, causing it to clatter on the ground.

Hand-to-hand fighting is not my strong suit. I had learned how to throw a punch just from being around in the gym in my building on a daily basis, but it seemed like I was being worked over by an artist. I jumped backwards, hoping to create some space while simultaneously triggering my monowire to pop out. Growling, I scythed a loop of the deadly wire at my assailant, moving quicker than most people could see but he, she, it casually dodged out of the way, looking as if they had just taken a casual step back when I knew dodging me like that was a lot harder than that looked.

I darted out with the wire three more times, once causing the invisible person to look like they were actually dodging me, but at least I was keeping them at somewhat of an intermediate distance.

I wasn't one to be stupidly self-confident. I wasn't a shounen protagonist that would allow myself to be beaten down by an enemy just to get stronger. That wasn't how the world worked. I triggered my Trauma Team subscription internally using my operating system and internal biomonitor to call in a rescue alert.

A soft, kind female voice in my head said, "Greetings, Taylor. If you are conscious, please assume---KSSSSSTT." What the fuck? I was being jammed and broad spectrum. Phone and data were out now, too. Trauma had gotten the call and might know where I was, but maybe not precisely. It kind of depended. But what was sure was they weren't getting any more telemetry, and if this ninja motherfucker knocked me out or cut my head off, he, she, or it could drag me off somewhere they couldn't find me.

'Alright, fuck this,' I thought and turned around and started to run away, directly away from the threat, but skidded to a halt when I saw about a half-dozen armed and armoured men blocking the street. At least these fucks I could see, at least. Their weapons looked a bit odd until I finally catalogued them all as non or less-lethal weapons. So they were trying to incapacitate me. That didn't really bode well, but these were a lot higher class than Scavs, so at least that wasn't what was waiting for me if they got me.

That made some things easier. It was a lot harder to subdue a person alive when they were able, willing and capable of killing you. I started moving again, at my fastest speed, dodging some sort of net shot out of a rifle-looking object and a taser, lashing out and taking the arm clean off one of the men ahead of me. While using my monowire in a series of dangerous one-handed whipping attacks, I grabbed the anaesthetic grenade off my hip and awkwardly pulled the pin and tossed it directly in front of me, clouds of smoke-like gas billowing out of it shortly thereafter as I stood directly in the centre of the expanding gas cloud.

The gas was opaque and a sort of maroon colour and was hiding my presence; although I felt it somewhat start to affect me, I didn't move out of its radius. This was specifically designed to be less effective on my own biology, and it would take at least two minutes of constant exposure to actually incapacitate me, while I could see, barely, all the men surrounding me start to drop after no more than ten seconds.

I reeled back my monowire into my arm and decided my best bet was just to run straight out, past the group of downed moons. The ninja behind me, hopefully, was prevented from entering the gas cloud, but I honestly didn't know what kind of loud-out Mr Invisible had. Maybe he had a full respirator. It was standard equipment on most corporate extraction teams. Was that what this was? I couldn't see how it could be; I had been keeping a very low profile.

I started running straight out, but no more than a second after I cleared the cloud, something slammed on me from above, knocking me down and skidding me face-down on the street for a half metre. I caught a glimpse of the fucking ninja on my back, visible now like he was fucking Super Mario, and I was a Koopa Troopa before he casually touched the back of my head, discharging some sort of electricity attack directly into my skull.

After that, there was just blackness.

---xxxxxx---

I woke up in a comfortable chair, although the aches and soreness told me I wasn't actually unconscious that long. I had a bit of a headache, which wasn't surprising, and I immediately checked any kind of connectivity but couldn't get anything. Surely they couldn't still be running a broad-spectrum jammer in the middle of Night City? That would get noticed.

However, when my eyes started working better after going through a safe-mode reboot cycle, I realised I was sitting in a chair in the middle of a fairly clean-looking room, inside a cage. A cage constructed of wire mesh. A faraday cage, then. The cage was surrounded by the now-awake group of men in armour and weapons, although one of them was sans an arm and looking surly about it. This was, at least, a professional enough organisation that injured mooks received prompt first aid, at least.

Directly in front of me, sitting in a plain metal chair, was that fucking ninja. He wasn't wearing a helmet now, and looked average and personable, a middle-aged blonde man. I wanted to decapitate him. He must have realised what I thought because a British voice calmly said, "I would advise against that, Miss Hebert." I didn't have one of those bracelets on my arm to stop me from yanking out my monowire, but he was very close to me, and honestly, I thought my chances were nil, so I just sighed and stopped myself. Even if I intended to attack, it was better to wait until chance gave me a better opportunity instead of doing it when he was ready and waiting for it.

Who the hell has British accents these days, anyway? I growled, "Who are you, and what do you want?" Although I wasn't really in the best position to make demands, it wasn't really in me to accept my captivity without being a bitch about it.

"Just for you to answer a few questions. You notice that I am being quite civil with you; that is because either you will be dead soon or not, and there is no reason to be uncouth about these matters. Do you know what this machine is?" the excessively polite ninja asked, indicating a table with a briefcase. It was one of those metal-style industrial briefcases, the kind you expect the President's nuclear button to be carried in. It was open to reveal a complicated-looking electronic device.

I frowned at it and then identified it with a little bit of dread. "A trainable brain image scanner." In the popular vernacular, they were just called mind readers, but it wasn't actually how they worked. Still... they were not too far off, either and were the standard in very high-end interrogation technology, although it generally would take quite some time to get a baseline neural map for someone -- after you did, you could run word associations against them. You didn't even need them to answer your questions verbally.

The devices were originally invented decades and decades ago, before the first neural interfaces, to give people that were paralysed an effective interface to computers, but these days they were only used for this niche application of separating people from their secrets.

Supposedly, some high-end espionage cyberware could defeat these devices, but it wasn't like I fucking had any of that.

"Yes, precisely," he said as he pulled out a cap that was covered in electrodes from the device and casually extended it and his hand, offering it to me. "If you don't mind, Miss Hebert."

His hand was quite close to me now. This was what was called a chance. After installing my after-market fingernails, I had to make a number of changes to them. I had to install a mechanism that hid the bioactive pads inside my fingernail, covered by a little mechanism that I could trigger in my operating system. Otherwise, I would tend to paralyse about half the patients I saw at work.

Regular nitrile gloves may as well have been tissue paper. The nails weren't sharp, but they were still made out of metal and would go straight through such gloves. Then if I had to touch a patient or control their bleeding, I would paralyse them. That wouldn't be good; I probably would get in trouble for that.

Now though? I triggered the mechanism, which exposed the bioactive pads and reached out to take the cap from his hand, and at the same time, jabbed one of my nails directly into his exposed palm, getting a startled look from him... and that was it.

"Was that... cyanide or something?" he asked, casually, after a moment of nothing happening.

I frowned at him, glancing between his hand and face and using all the clues to realise that the man in front of me was borged more than a half-dozen Maelstrom gangers. In fact, I was pretty sure I was staring at a Gemini full-body replacement now, based on how it felt pushing my nail through the top layer of skin on his palm and the carefully generic and symmetrical facial features. Switching my modified Kiroshi's through a number of scan modes made me much more confident. Infrared was wrong for a person, and now that I had noticed it, the way he breathed wasn't one hundred per cent congruent with human biology; it was just a gesture that he was doing, I thought.

Sighing, I said, "A paralytic." There were times when you didn't have much more you could do, although it grated on me something fierce. It made me wish I had one of those giant cannons in my arms or something I could escalate to from what I actually had, something that would be a danger to this guy or similar guys if I met them in the future. The man had more or less threatened to kill me, and although I was still trying one more avenue of escape, it was one that required a fair bit more time to implement, if it would work at all.

I coughed and said, "I guess I'll just put this on then." That caused Mr Ninja to nod genially at me. I placed the cap on my head, moving my hair out of the way in places so that the electrodes could actually have contact with my scalp. I didn't want them to just shave my head like a sheep because then things would have become personal, and I would have to kill them all. As it stood, there was still a chance that that wouldn't be necessary.

"Alright, turn on the jammer while we open the door. Wouldn't want the princess here to get a transmission out. Trauma Team was looking for her for ten minutes before they left," one of the men outside the cage said, and the ninja man nodded. I did notice a jammer start-up, and it was collocated on the ninja's body, probably an implant of some sort, while the cage door opened, and one of the other men walked inside, dragging a similar metal chair which he sat next to the metal briefcase.

The ninja glanced at the new man and asked, "Status?"

"Connection is okay, but the neural map is marginal. We'll have to run a few known-unknown-known associations to firm it up," the second man, clearly a techie of some sort, replied. Wait. Who the fuck had a neural map of me? Nobody, not even Militech, as far as I could had a neural map of Alt-Taylor, to say nothing of her.

Maybe this was a neural map of Alt-Taylor? If so, it would explain why the match was marginal. But when was it taken, and by whom? I didn't have any memories of taking any machine-monitored neural, psychological profile test.

"Marginal, hn?" Asked the British ninja rhetorically, I assume, since the techie didn't reply. He then nodded and said, "Proceed, then."

The techie nodded and tapped a few keys on the machine in the briefcase, carefully turning the device on the table so the screen was concealed from my gaze. Finally he nodded and said, "Alright, association generated." He then looked at me and said a series of words, "Taylor. Daniel. Annette. Orange. Feline. Queen Victoria." Only the first three seemed to have anything to do with me, but he must have said words for about ten minutes, before he finished, "Alright, we're good to go now."

"Thank you," the polite ninja thanked the techie, before turning to me., "Who is your father? Who is your mother?" Those were weird questions.

"Are you Taylor Hebert?" He continued.

However, he was interrupted by the techie, "Ambiguous, complex response, rephrase."

"Was your name at your birth Taylor Hebert?" The ninja asked, which caused the techie to nod slowly.

He then proceeded to ask me a long series of questions about my life, which wasn't what I was expecting at all. After that, he started doing word associations, and while he was doing them, glancing from the screen on the machine to my face, I had finished with my plan, "Family. Mother. Relations. Chelsea. Westminster. Secret. Replacement. Taylor. Covert. Genuine. Taylor. Fake. Biosculpt. Bay. The Bay. Ocean. Monster. Monsters. Ocean. Ferries. Ocean. Graveyard. Dock. Dockworkers."

I didn't like the direction these word associations were going, and it was a good thing that I had begun carefully tossing behind me the small reprogramming tracking devices. They were very small. Small enough to fit through the grill on the faraday cage if I was lucky, and I had been tossing about a dozen for the past two dozen words. They were programmed to, as soon as they got a connection to the net, spam an internal Trauma Team net address with my name and location using an onboard GPS system. It had taken me so long to reprogram them, flash them over the air, and do as much testing as I could do without it being obvious what I was doing. I didn't know if they would work, but I thought it might be a good idea.

"Medicine. Cybernetics. Virus. Virology. Flu virus. Mouse virus. Genetics. Wealth factor. Self-improvement Pharmacology. Tuition. Intellectual property. Genius," he continued, glancing between the screen and my face, "Goals. Annette. Daniel. Astor. Mother. Father..."

As he was going through a number of words, someone from outside yelled, "Trauma Team is on the way! Their AV is landing on the roof right fucking now! I thought the transmitter couldn't make it through this fucking cage!"

The polite British ninja blinked once and then said, "Alright. We're done here, then. Please secure that device, and follow me. Evacuate downstairs, everyone."

The techie quickly closed the briefcase and stood up as I tensed all of my muscles, ready to fight for my life for at least a few seconds, deciding to risk it and popping my monowire out of my wrist and getting a firm, "Stop," from the ninja-borg, who was pointing a rather large pistol at my head.

I didn't even see him fucking pull it out. He was at least as fast as me, and I thought he was probably a bit faster. I needed to do something to fix that. My eyes were fixed on his shoulders, so I could see with my peripheral vision if he started to squeeze the trigger. There wasn't a lot of room to dodge in this little cage, but I wasn't about to be shot like a dog without putting up a fight.

However, rather than shoot me, though, he just placed his body between the techie and me and backed out of the cage, slamming the door shut when he was clear. He tipped an imaginary hat at me and said, "Miss Hebert." And then he turned around and hurried the techie out of the room we were in, closing the door behind him.

Just... what the fuck? About half a minute later, the door was kicked off its hinges as a Trauma Team rescue team busted through the door. It was Charlie team, from the patches on their shoulders, and they each carefully cleared the room with their weapons out, me sighing and saying, "I don't think there's anyone left here."

It took them a moment to find the door to the cage, but after they opened it, they asked me, confusedly, "Just what the fuck happened, 'Breaker?"

"I don't fucking know, and I don't like it," I said, completely truthfully and completely sullenly.

---xxxxxx---

"Thank you for your and your team's assistance. This bonus is both for the successful completion of the mission and as well as an additional sum to replace your man's arm," the polite blonde-haired man told the leader of the small team of mercenaries.

The leader of the mercenaries nodded, "Was nova, like always. We'll wait a couple of weeks before seeking that medical care, just in case."

The one-armed man growled, "That fucking bitch..."

However, before he said a single word more, the blonde-haired man's arm shot out like a striking snake, grabbing the one-arm man by the throat and easily lifting him into the air, causing him to gurgle. The polite man said, "You will keep a civil tongue in your head about her. Yes?"

When there was no obvious response, he continued, "I did not hear you."

The man being held up in the air nodded rapidly and said something that might have been similar to "Yes" and was dropped back down. His compatriots were giving him the stink-eye, but the blonde man didn't seem to mind after that, nodding one last time at the group's leader before walking casually out of the alley where they were meeting, carrying a metallic silver briefcase.

Stepping into a waiting cab, he inspected the computer-generated avatar of the driver for a moment before making a decision and saying genially, "Night City international airport, private terminal, please."