Edge City Chronicles 09

I made my way back through the noodle shop, stopping to order two bowls to go, which would keep well enough that they would still be warm even if I rode the subway back to the apartment. I rode said subway back to the apartment and saw an ECPD squad car at the edge of the building. Thinking on that, I checked whether I had anything from them and found a message waiting. Opening it and closing the two damn ads the police message popped up in my vision, I noted that I was being credited for the bounties, though it all added up to three hundred and fifty credits. A life really wasn't worth all that much in Edge City. 

I was already up five hundred credits (and one healing item) for the day, and I still needed to sell the couple headsets and handful of shitty guns I had pulled out of the Scav den. I wouldn't have to worry about rent for a while, but I thought it better to invest most of that in some upgrades; I still had weeks before I had to make a rent payment, and I wanted to be safe rather than sorry. I sat down and housed the two bowls of noodles before throwing the containers in the recycling bin and gathering up the guns in a large gym bag I found in the apartment. Not quite as convenient for carrying stuff as the backpack I had bought, but it was longer and able to hold the bigger guns without being too obvious what was inside. I hoofed it down to the gun store at Applewood, selling the guns to the grumpy gunsmith there for another hundred and twenty credits. That put up over six hundred credits, and I bought a couple more mags and a handful of small flashbangs from the gun shop. 

The flash grenades were interesting, as they were small, rather thin disks that could be stacked up in a pouch or pocket on a rig. They made quite a loud noise when thrown, accompanied by an extremely bright flash that was spread across a slightly broader range of the EM spectrum than just visible light. They would be effective against most regular cybernetic optics, but more advanced models would be able to filter out the effects. Same with advanced auditory or cochlear cybernetics; the noise could be filtered out, sometimes even preemptively if the person, or their cyberware, recognized the grenade as it was thrown. Still, they would work wonders against most basic thugs, whether that was gangers or Scavs, so they were worth the forty credits for the stack. I had also dropped ten credits on some ammo, as the magazines weren't much use empty, and thirty credits on a large, rather nice tactical rig. Plenty of pockets in that one and it fit over both my massive frame and the flack jacket Doc had given me. 

Leaving the gun shop, I returned to the apartment and dropped everything off, though I had my pistol and knife on me still. I never left the apartment without my weapons on me, and that was true now. I tossed the last of the crap I had to sell into my backpack and threw that on before heading out, trying to find a good place to sell the scrap. I talked with a couple people in the lower level of Applewood, but they weren't really interested. I wound up heading up to the netrunner-focused shop in the building, who informed me that the headsets were for viewing Brain Dances, or BDs, which were like full-immersion VR simulations. Also explained why the guys wearing them were so easy to kill, as most people would set the rigs to block any external input, or only receive input from their agent while they were under. Anyway, the tech crap was only worth forty creds, or so the salesperson claimed, but it was a lot more than I was making even running errands.  

After selling the tech crud, I finally got a minute to check the cred stick, finding it had seventy-five creds on it. Not a jackpot, but that was half a months rent for the current place I was in, so it was a lot better than nothing. I had enough to last for a while, especially considering just how cheap most food in the city turned out to be, and I returned to my apartment before stashing everything away. I left the creds on the stick, jamming it in a crack behind a wall in what used to be this body's mother's bedroom. Not the best hiding spot, but having a physical currency item or two would be nice and I wasn't expecting anybody to be tossing my apartment any time soon. Besides, as soon as I had a decent credit reserve, I was blowing this fucking popsicle stand and getting a nicer place in a nicer, much more secure building.  

This building was going to have to do for now and I finished cleaning up before taking a shower and getting some sleep. I was up early the next morning and got my gear on before heading down to Applewood and getting four large breakfast sandwiches. They used some kind of potato bread, which wasn't surprising, and I was pretty sure the sausage of the egg, sausage, and cheese sandwiches was some kind of plant-based substitute, considering it only vaguely tasted like sausage, but they were still fine. I stuck with water as a drink as I was quite suspicious of everything else in this city, and most of the building had massive water tanks on the roof that held fresh water and helped in filtering out some of the sediment. I paid a whopping five credits for the meal and finished it off in about record time before taking the metro out to see Mercer. 

I found him at his usual table, and he gave me a critical eye as I sat down before saying, "Got some new gear? I see you aren't havin' trouble with finding work." 

"Scavs," I said with a shrug. "Found a small room of them in my building after watching a suspicious truck that pulled into the parking garage. Not some big payday, but I made about five hundred creds between the bounties and the couple guns they had." 

"What about the chrome?" Mercer interrupted to ask. 

"Sold it to a ripper on the edge of Little China that was friends with my parents," I explained. 

"Oh, ya know Don? Makes things easier," he said. 

"Didn't know Don was well known, but yeah, he's my ripper. Was only slightly more than would fit in one packing crate and it was all low-Tech stuff; was barely worth over a hundred credits," I scoffed. 

"Well, you ain't playing in the big leagues yet," Mercer said, shaking his head before thumping down a box in front of me. "Need this delivered." 

I picked it up, noting that it was pretty heavy considering it was only about fourteen inches to a side, stashing it in my backpack before asking, "Do I even wanna know?" 

"I help a lot of people find chrome, kid," he grunted. "You ain't runnin' weird drugs or anything like that. Ya gotta do a lot more for me before I give ya anything real valuable. That box has the last of a set of custom ribs for a full ribcage replacement the client wants. Same as usual; box only goes into their hands or it comes back here." 

"I got it, I got it," I said, standing and nodding to both the old man and Voronov before heading back to the metro.  

The delivery wasn't all that special, as I found the client at the address provided. I made sure to video and snap pictures of the handoff and wrote a small report on the way back, as I had the previous times. Mercer just frowned and grumbled at me before handing me a second package to deliver, sending me on my way as other couriers or solos showed up to take work from the man. I headed back to the subway and took the train far south, to the edge of the southern suburbs, heading to a small block of apartments to make the delivery. The lady I handed the second box to was rather nervous on seeing me, though I couldn't really blame her; having a seven feet tall solo with body armor and guns strapped on showing up at one's door could be a nerve-wracking experience.  

After handing the box off and documenting it, I walked down to the street, ready to head back when I noticed something very familiar. A short box truck with two men in the cab pulling into the garage of the large building across the street. Not an unusual sight in the city, except the building was mostly residential and the men in the truck had some kind of masks or face filters jamming their appearance. Sighing, I tightened the straps of my backpack before darting across the street, heading down the traffic ramp before slipping over to the stairs. The door needed a keycard or auth code to enter, but someone had left the stairs propped open, so I bypassed that requirement by carefully opening and closing the door. I moved downward, finding the place only had two levels of parking in the basement. Same as my building, the truck stopped in a back corner on the lowest floor, an area with broken cameras, and the two men hopped out of the truck. I watched them pull something that looked suspiciously like a body curled up in heavy bag, the two clearly struggling with the weight as they made their way into the opposite stairwell.  

I quickly slipped out and moved across the garage, arriving at their door and slipping my pistol out of the holster. I checked the door quickly before sliding into the stairwell and silently padding downstairs. Luckily, these slobs weren't being at all cautious, and I could hear them banging away further down, which didn't pose well for the person I assumed they were carrying. I followed them down and through the door on the fifth level, watching them walk down the hall and around the first corner. Moving up behind them, I was glad I was taking a cautious approach, as there wasn't a regular hallway after the corner. The Scavs had knocked out parts of the walls of the hall and two doors to make a large open area with a makeshift barricade blocking the hall off from the stairs. There were several doors further down the hall, and one door further in from the two rooms that they had opened up, but there was a large area that they had essentially made both a security checkpoint and their living room. This was going to be a little more difficult than the last time, but I wasn't that worried. 

I also knew these were Scavs when I saw the parts of bodies and the one corpse that had been mostly hacked apart but was still recognizable for what it was. I would like to have a little more intel apart from that they were Scavs and that there were at least five of them, from what I had observed, but I figured these chumps wouldn't know what hit them. I thumbed the safety off the pistol, thinking it would be time to invest in a long gun after this, and slid my knife out of the sheath as I slipped around the corner and moved through a shadow. I wasn't sure if I would be able to really sneak up on them, particularly if they had some kind of sensors or advanced tech focused on the hallway, but I figured I could at least close the gap even slightly before being detected. 

My fears proved largely unfounded, or rather, the Scavs were just immensely sloppy. They had a small turret, something that would have given me trouble, but wouldn't do much against more serious armor or chrome, but the thing was slaved to a security station and couldn't act on its own. That security station was occupied by a Scav who, upon seeing the others bringing some bodies in, naively assumed the halls were clear and had sunk into a BD while the others started to get to work. I took only a couple seconds to end his life, sinking a knife into his ribs while clamping his jaw shut. Most people didn't know, but slitting someone's throat could produce a messy gurgling sound, whereas a knife into the ribs that pierced the heart would cause the person to lock up in shock, often making little to no noise. Having his jaw clamped shut prevented even a hiss of air, and I moved on when I was sure the blow had pierced his heart and ended his life.  

I was rather lucky, getting another quick kill in, even lowering the body to the floor in the corner before my luck ran out. The third Scav in the open area saw me and I was too far away to get my knife in him before he made a sound. I decided I could still retain the element of surprise slightly by going loud at that point and drilled a round right in between his eyes. Even in the dim lighting, my optics were good enough I had a rather clear picture of the area and I was an ace marksman in my last life. This big body I was in, after having adjusted to it, made things even easier, as drawing a bead and holding a smaller gun like a pistol steady were supremely easy. The Scav's head snapped back, the light leaving his eyes as he tumbled into a rack of tools, causing quite a clatter, though it was only beneficial. The gunshot would have alerted everyone anyway; the tool rack making so much noise only further served to sow confusion and cover my movements.  

I kicked open one of the doors, the one where I had seen them take the most recent victim, hoping that I could save them, seeing with relief that they hadn't been cut open yet. The room had two Scavs in, one scrambling for a pistol while the other had a big knife in his hand, something appropriate for butchering people. I snapped off a shot at the Scav reaching for the gun, making sure to keep my round count accurate; all the nine-mil pistols in the city seemed to use twelve round magazines as their standard, so I was down to ten bullets in the current mag. The knife-wielder had charged at me, but he was insanely sloppy, his footwork all wrong and his motions with the knife way, way too wide and wasteful. I easily slid his first sloppy swing, planting my knife in his neck, much to his shock, before tearing the blade out sideways. So far, none of these gonks had any chrome other than their neural links and optics, so killing them with regular stabs and shots was rather easy.  

Both of them were out of the picture, which made five, but I was assuming, with how I had found half a dozen packed into the two rooms in my building, that this place would be holding a lot more. As soon as I was positive both the ones in the…well, calling it an operation room seemed a bit in poor taste, but that's what it was, so I thought of it as the operation room and moved on when I had confirmed the kills. There was another room beyond the operation room that was a small sitting room with a TV on the wall that was playing some random ads that had two Scavs in. These guys were now prepared and both shot at me with handguns, though they weren't very good shots. I was a bit more afraid to dodge, considering I was more likely to dodge into their fire than out of it, and I was clearly much faster and more skilled than them. I whipped the pistol back and forth, firing out four shots, taking both in an arm before plugging one into each of their chests.  

I quickly moved through the room, noting the one with the SMG had got a hit on me, but the flak jacket from Don had easily stopped the round. I double-tapped both Scavs just to make sure, reloading now that the mag was under half. There were no other doors in the room and I didn't want to be trapped, so I quickly moved back into the operation room before pausing at the door I had kicked open. Little bastard thought he was being clever.  

I posted up against the door frame and tossed a flashbang into the large main room, the grenade set for a two second fuse. The little disk clattered in the middle of the floor for a second, the Scav that had been slinking along the wall just outside the door to the operation room swearing as he thought it was a shrapnel or HE grenade. He swore a lot more a second later when the grenade detonated and flashed his optics and cochlear implants, meaning he didn't see or hear his death as I swung the corner and put a round through his temple. The man didn't have any chrome in his head other than the standard implants and was dead before he hit the ground. A nine-mil was low enough caliber and velocity that it sometimes had trouble punching out the other side of a person's skull, especially when fired from a pistol with a lower powder pack in the cartridge. The bullet would bounce in the person's skull one or more time, shredding their brain into old oatmeal. Not pleasant.  

That accounted for eight, three more than I had observed in the initial phase, though it was both of the truck drivers in the operation room. I moved into the other room with a still solid door, ducking as a shotgun blast almost took me out. I fired four rounds out into the room, making the three Scavs in the large sleeping room scramble to find cover. That gave me enough time to line up on the shotgun Scav and take him out without losing my head. The other two had smaller guns that I wasn't as worried about and I easily outshot the both of them. I stepped in and swept the room, finding nobody else inside and no other doors further in. I reloaded and moved back into the central area before going to the last door in the hallway, opening the door from the side and tossing a flashbang in at the same time. There was a lot of cursing from inside, so my thoughts about the bastards being packed in like rats were correct. I leaned around the doorframe and popped off three shots, hitting two of them and just missing the third who had instinctively tumbled to the side as soon as he heard shots going off.  

There were five them in the room, and I slid around the door and dove to the side, moving behind cover before coming up on one of the remaining three and taking him out with a stab. That left two, and one of them tried to half-blindly scramble behind a bed, putting him right in front of me, where he met an unfortunate end. The report of the pistol alerted the last of them, and he opened up with his SMG trying to hose the area where I was, but I had moved after the shot. I felt a ricochet hit my shoulder, but the jacket very easily absorbed the round without letting it through. I would have a couple bruises, but I wasn't even cut anywhere. I slid around a bed and lined up on the SMG-user as he finished emptying his mag, frantically trying to change it out with shaking hands. I didn't feel bad for the bastard and lined up on him before calmly pulling the trigger and sending him on his way. I sheathed my knife but walked over and picked up the shotgun, finding it had sling attachments but no sling. I set it to the side on one of the beds while I scanned the area, seeing the place was a real mess. There wasn't anywhere else to go, so unless another Scav showed up, I was basically free to clean the place up. 

I shouldn't have really thought that, as the door to the room, which had shut in the chaos, exploded inward. I rolled over the bed, grabbing the shotgun and chambering a round before twisting and aligning the gun on the new entrant. Luckily, I held my finger, or it could have been rather bad, as the person standing in the doorway was very clearly not a Scav. It was a slightly tall man, though he was still a decent bit shorter than me, wearing a set of armor that I would bet an arm and a leg cost as much as this whole damned city. His eyes had irises so dark there was practically no separation from his pupils and his short-cropped hair was so black it seemed to drink in the light.  

"Not a Scav?" he asked in a bored voice as he scanned the area. 

"Solo," I answered, thumbing the safety and putting the shotgun back on the bed. 

"Figured," he said, looking around. "Didn't happen to find a case in here, did ya? Got four vials of a red liquid in it?" 

"Just finished the killing part, so haven't checked, but I didn't see any cases," I replied carefully. "Mind telling me who you are, by the way." 

"I work for Dao Heavy Machinery," he answered. "Most people refer to us as Failsafes." 

"Well…shit," I muttered. 

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