Edge City Chronicles 11

The Failsafe had, conveniently, provided me with precise directions to each location and not just their coordinates. My first stop would be another megabuilding where a group of Scavs had supposedly taken over two apartments on the fiftieth floor. The megabuildings were just too large and numerous to be properly patrolled, and that was even with the idea that the ECPD actually cared about most of what went on in the city. They seemed just as big of a gang as any other, though more well-funded and with a bit more authority, and they would get to a problem a year after it was reported unless it was urgent. It was pretty well understood that they underpaid on bounties, which is one reason why bounty calls got through right away and got such a prompt response. It wasn't a great situation, but it did leave open a few interesting possibilities, even if they weren't the most reliable options. Anybody that was easy to bribe was easy to bribe, meaning somebody else with even a slightly large bank account could come along and override or counter the initial bribe with very little effort.  

It was something to keep in mind, especially considering the word on the street was that the ECPD only really showed up to interfere with a Solo when they thought they could get something out of harassing them. I made sure I was fully ready before heading to the first location that Aces had provided me, an apartment in a megabuilding a couple blocks down from my own. The Scavs in that location had taken over two apartments and knocked out some of the walls between them, creating a larger area that they worked in with a large central room. They had blocked off the second entrance with a jamming mechanism, a door jammer that some security shops sold that could block off a typical front door that most apartments used from the inside.  

Aces' information was solid, and I spent only a minute observing the apartments from a small lounge down the hall before someone who was either a Scav, or doing a damned good cosplay of one, entered the unit. Just to be safe, I made a pass of the area, seeing there was no external security other than the locks to speak of, walking down the hall and moving in front of the Scav den slowly. I couldn't really hear much with my unenhanced ears, but the smell was what really did it, that faint lingering aroma of blood. And terror. 

I waited again, not as long this time, until a Scav exited the apartment, noting during this wait how nobody else was in the area. I couldn’t tell for sure if any of the other apartments were empty or not, but I suspected the Scavs had driven people at least off the floor if not even from the surrounding floors. There was no housing shortage in the city right now and, when some bad hombres moved in next door, it was often a lot easier to move to a new place than suffer the consequences. That was going to change right now, as I walked up behind the Scav that had just walked out of the apartment and started down the hallway. A quick grab and slice of a knife and that Scav wouldn't be bothering anybody ever again. The biggest thing was that I had managed to slip a wedge into the door before it closed, allowing me to enter the apartment after taking out the Scav. 

If I had still had doubts, they were all cleared up by seeing the two apartments with the walls knocked out between them and the grizzly operating room right in the entrance. Bastards were almost always too lazy to even drag their victims further into their apartments than the entrance. I cleaned up the two apartments rather easily, killing the five Scavs inside before they even knew what was happening. I dragged the sixth from outside into the apartments just to try to keep things a bit clean before I looted the place to the floor and left, sending a transmission to the ECPD as I left the building. I wasn't going to run back to Don or the other stores every time I had something to sell at this point, considering I had a decent number of creds in my account and wasn't desperate for money, so I dumped the loot at home and went on to the second target. 

Target two was a shitty old warehouse in the northern district, rather far from where Mercer operated but still within the same section of the city. It was an old lot, not that big, with a warehouse that probably wasn't even fifty thousand square feet in total. The Scavs didn't need all of that space, obviously, and used only a corner of the building. Given the room and resources to spread out however they wanted and do whatever they wanted they still…lived like pigs, to be honest, and I wasn't at all impressed. They had barely any defenses to speak of, no people patrolling or running guard duty other than one guy watching the door, and the place was a total sty. They had three rooms at the back of the building that were originally part of the offices that they used for most of their shit, plus they had a couple big storage containers that blocked off an area in front of those offices inside the warehouse where they did their cutting and hacking.  

I was a big guy, but even I was able to fit in one of the windows after doing a bit of scouting, popping into one of the three rooms where nobody was present. It was the only window they hadn't blocked off and was in a bunkroom, so likely somebody wanted some fresh air when they slept and boy, I could not blame them. The place fucking stank, and I thought it was a service to the world to clear out the pigs, killing them all with only half a mag from the new rifle. It wasn't the best gun I had ever used, but it wasn't that large and packed some serious punch with a good feel for such a rifle. It was also more than accurate enough at close range, and I swept the whole area with it in just under two minutes, taking no time at all to dial in my aim with the gun. I took my usual pictures of the dead Scavs to claim the bounties and cleaned the place of loot, finding a whole fistful of credit sticks and little else. I had a surmise that this group had just sold or moved a large lot of chrome and had taken their entire payment in hard cred sticks, which was good for me. If these bastards had any creds in their accounts, the ECPD would confiscate that, so any hard sticks I could nab would be creds winding up in my pockets.  

I took the armload of guns and the fistful of cred sticks home before heading out to the third spot. It was early night now, but I was thankful for my chrome eyes; they weren't as good as NVGs, for sure, but they still let me get a pretty clear picture of what was happening even in rather low light conditions. I couldn't operate in absolute pitch black with them, or even extremely low light conditions, but it was enough in a city absolutely filled with lights that I could get the job done. It was a still a bit weird to ride the train across the city to a job, but the third location was at the far southern edge of the city, right on the edge of where the southern suburbs started in an old office building. This was one of the big damn problems with having an underpopulated city with a bunch of violent bastards running around; the rats had all kinds of nests to burrow into.  

The old office building was only three stories, not really surprising given its location, and the Scavs had set up on the third floor. This group was a bit better than the last several I had taken out, as they had not only a defense at the stairs, but the had disabled the elevator and boarded the windows up. That would have all been great, and I could see that stopping someone on their level, but this was very, very far from my first rodeo. I wasn't some kind of breach specialist in my last life, not by any means, but I had hit enough places, including a number of years of back-and-forth urban warfare between two countries, that I was far from some fresh-faced beginner when it came to assaulting a random building. One of the things that a lot of sloppy operations, especially small splinter groups, tended to forget was that a person could pry open elevator doors. Even better, depending on the elevator design, they could either be overridden or slid open in maintenance mode without making all that much noise. While they had barricaded the stairs, which meant they were also blocking off if someone snuck onto the roof and into the roof entrance, they didn't have anything set up at the elevator. 

I slid the doors open on the third floor and stepped out with my rifle held ready and focused on the stairs. I wanted to make sure the exits were all cleared and I didn't have people behind me. There was only one poor slob at the top of the stairs, and I popped him to start the fight before systematically clearing the rest of the floor. There were a lot more of the bastards here than the other locations, and I even took a hit to the shoulder, stopped by the armor, before I had cleared them out. The place was the opposite of the last location, which was annoying, though I comforted myself with the thought of the creds I'd get from selling all the chrome. That, and the fact that if Don bought it all, he would be using it to help people who really needed the chrome. It wouldn't do anything to bring back the people the Scavs had outright murdered to get this pile of cybernetics, but it helped to know that it would be making a positive difference.  

I wound up having to take several stinking bags from the place besides three crates to hold just all the chrome. I didn't even take any of the guns as they were all absolute scop, just Tech 1 dogshit that hadn't ever been cleaned or maintained and would likely sell for ten or fifteen credits each. At this point, it just wasn't worth my time to haul that kind of stuff out, not when I could grab more chrome, which at very least had a moderate chance of being something highly valuable. I could tell at a glance none of the equipment was worth anything, but I just wasn't well enough versed in chrome to be able to sort through it in situ and figure out what was good and not. Besides, even the least valuable pieces of chrome would equal or slightly outpace the best of their dogshit guns and other little bits; none of them had any armor to speak of, which was great for me going in, but meant less value and less pickings for me going out. 

I sent the info to the cops as I left and hoofed it to the subway, heading back up to my apartment and dropping off the pile of chrome. I went down and got some food at one of a couple of places that was open twenty-four hours nearby before quickly repacking my mags and heading out to location four. This one was in a little house out on the line between the hoity-toity Eastern District where the rich folks lived in the hills and the southern suburb district. The place was one story and was probably about twenty-five hundred square feet, so not a shack, for sure, but not some kind of mega mansion or anything. The Scavs had 'reinforced' the fence with trash and junk piled around the edge of the yard and had a security camera watching both the front and back of the house. This one might be tricky, but I figured a time-honored tactic would work just as well here, so I opened by breaking into the front yard and throwing several flashbangs through windows and doors where I could. It didn't get everybody, obviously, but it did cause quite a bit of mayhem inside.  

The door was only loosely reinforced, as the Scavs had to actually use it to get in and out, and I hit it like a runaway truck crashing down a mountainside. The wood and metal bent at the impact right before the hinges gave way, blowing the door off the frame. I rolled into the main room at the front of the house, which was already a large area thanks to the house being one of those open-concept type places. I came out of the roll firing, seeing Scavs stumbling all over each other as they had first had to deal with a flashbang through an unarmored gap in one of the windows and now had the front door slammed off the hinges. Nobody in the main room lived through the first five seconds, and I then did a fast, standard sweep-and-clear to get the rest of the house secured. It took longer than I thought, especially since I came out of the last room to find two Scavs doing what they likely thought was sneaking just slipping in the front door. Apparently, I had hit the house just before some of them had come back in a van with a fresh 'delivery' to be worked on. Well, two more bozos dead and one civvy rescued, though I would let the ECPD handle that shit.  

I quickly went through the place, understanding I had made a lot of noise in a suburb, where other where likely to come investigate, and likely more than just a concerned neighbor. The suburbs to the south of the city were the territory of the Metal Hounds, a gang that went super hard into chrome. Fortunately, they only required being chromed up to join but never forced it on anyone as I heard some gangs sometimes did. Unfortunately, they were one of the strongest gangs in the city, though they were still outclassed by the corpos and the ECPD's special task force, Epsilon Group. Still, they were a definite cut above the rest of the trash on the streets, including the Wild Kittens or whoever the fuck the apartment penisheads in my building had tried to intimidate with. That group, the Hell Cats, not the penisheads, ran the district in which I lived and had a pretty big street presence, but a lot of their members had minimal chrome or biomods.  

Anyway, I was clearing the place fast, which is how I came close to missing a small case, not any bigger than something someone would use to carry a handful of files in, in one of the two bedrooms. The case was tucked behind some junk in a corner under a bed, and it was only my instincts and my desire to be thorough so I didn't have Aces riding my back that led me to catch it. A damn good thing it was, too, as this was just what Aces was looking for, as I popped it open in the main room to find seven padded indentions inside, five of which contained vials. That stopped me for all of ten seconds before I made a decision, grabbing vial number five and slipping it into my vest before resealing the case and grabbing the rest of the loot. The place was similar to the second location, as they had basically nothing there except their trash and a fistful of cred sticks, which I would have to check later. I took the case and the cred sticks, grabbing an old shotgun and a beat-up bolt action rifle before I was out the door. I checked the poor slob in the van to make sure they were alive, finding a chip in the slot in their neck which I popped out and crushed before I split, sending a call to the ECPD at the same time I was sure the person's chrome was sending a call to Trauma Team.  

Now, I just had to get the shit back to Aces without him figuring out I had nabbed one of the vials. The only reason I decided on such a harebrained scheme was that he had been very emphatic when he said there were four vials in the case he was looking for. I don't know what was in the vials, but if it was valuable enough that Dao Heavy Machinery was sending a Failsafe after it, it was valuable enough to make me some serious cred. Oh, and I was going to hit Scav den five before contacting Aces. Hey, he had given me five sites and said he'd pay me two grand for each. Why stop at four? 

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