Back to Night City, at last.

  “Fuck me, I’ve been huffing maxdocs all fucking day trying to get rid of this hepta-hangover!” Pilar groused from the back of the Chevillon Emperor. Rebecca groaned.

  “Quit moaning, you lanky bitch. At least you got tech visors to take the edge off the fucking sun.”

  “You should both quit whining,” Dorio growled. “Nobody told you not to drink any water, Rebecca. I’m surprised you’re still alive.”

  “Who the fuck drinks water?”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t even fucking drink anything but beer.”

  “Light beer hydrates you!” Rebecca said. “I saw it on a commercial! And I’m not dead, so obviously, it’s true.”

  Pilar snorted. “The final boss of consumerism right here: the pint-sized dipshit who lucked into millions and is gonna need a synth-liver before she hits the age of twelve.”

  “Keep talking, welfare king. I’m your meal-ticket and you fucking know it.”

  “Ain’t ever a moment of peace with y’all,” Falco chuckled from the driver’s seat. “To tell the truth, if I could tint this windshield even darker while bein’ able to drive, I would have.”

  Maine, who sat in the passenger’s seat, thought the windshield was already too dark to look out of. But at least it kept the fucking sun out of his eyes. What’d Pilar call it? A hepta-hangover. He’d needed three entire maxdocs and then a six-pack of beer to get over the worst of it. Needless to say, he wasn’t in good shape at all.

  Hopefully, a good old firefight would wake him right up. And there would be a firefight.

  He received a message from D.

  ‘Get to Reyes as quickly as possible.’

  They were already well within Santo, on their way to wherever that fucker hung out. But from the wording of the message, it was clear that this party was about to happen at any moment. Fucking Arasaka.

  He gave the fixer a ring on his agent. He picked up quick.

  Maine: Oh captain, my captain.

  El Capitan: The big borg master blaster himself. Tell me, how is the state of Maine?

  Maine smirked. Another nickel to throw on the pile.

  Maine: Real fucking funny, haircut. Like I ain’t ever heard that one before. But… can’t complain. Good. You?

  El Capitan: Interesting times. Can’t complain, myself.

  Maine: Listen. Throw me your co-ords real quick.

  El Capitan: You looking for a job?

  Maine smirked. He already had one—keeping the dumbass alive.

  Maine: Something like that.

  El Capitan: Sure. See you soon.

  He received a text which he then immediately forwarded to Falco. “There’s our heading,” he said to the driver, who had yet to retire or give one of those ‘Irish goodbyes’ that Kiwi, that flakey bitch, had pulled. Maine hadn’t asked Falco to join in on the op: he just had. That right there was real loyalty.

  The smooth-talking Texan was way too good for this city. Maine would miss him once he left.

  “On it,” Falco said.

  “Double-time, or we’ll be late for the shindig.” He turned around to address the people at the back. “Last call on the MaxDocs. It’s gonna be loud in there, so you better be on top of your game.” As he said that, he actually reached into his jacket pocket to retrieve another inhaler, chasing away the last of the hepta-hangover migraines he had nursed.

  That old bat Donna had really done a number on him, with all the partying. He was gonna have fun taking it out on all the kids once Hell Week rolled up. He was gonna whip those over-eager brats with chipped-in attitudes to shape until he stopped feeling like a demon was taking a jackhammer to his skull with every second that passed.

  “Two minutes out,” Falco said. “Lock and load, partners.” He upped the transparency on the windshield’s tint, allowing the light in. Then, he sped up, hopping up the freeway, snaking past the traffic like he’d practiced it a million times before. He was like a wraith on the road: untouchable. Inevitable.

  Maine heard an explosion once they had gotten close. Only a handful of seconds later, Falco had pulled out of the freeway and into the street where the explosion had occurred. He saw an upturned truck, and a bleeding fixer, head lying on the curb. An Animal gangoon sauntered after him, grinning like the cat that had caught the canary.

  Until Rebecca blew his entire head off.

  Good timing. A second more, and they’d be selling T-shirts with Reyes’ face on it all over Rancho.

  After they collected the fucker, Falco swerved hard, tires screaming as the Chevillon Emperor fishtailed through the narrow Santo backstreets.

  “Uh-oh,” Dorio muttered.

  “What?” Maine shouted.

  “Choom suddenly popped a cork! He’s bleeding like a stuck pig!” Dorio roared.

  “Shit!” Pilar shouted. “His biomon might have gotten fucked up in the crash! He needs surgery, stat!”

  “Hold him down! He bleeds out before we hit the tarmac, I’m throwin’ all y’all outta the damn car!”

  Seconds later they were on the onramp headed away into the freeway. David shot him a text.

  D: Get Reyes to this extraction point. His AV pilot is coming to extract him. Then get the fuck out yourself, clear any smoke on you.

  Maine: Got it.

  Then Falco muttered an “Uh-oh.”

  “What?” He turned around and saw the source of the Texan’s distress. Bogeys on their six, and these didn’t look like just any gangoon trucks. They were black, unmarked, and the windows were tinted. Almost a dozen of ‘em.

  Corp operators? In broad fuckin’ daylight.

  Dorio had her hands pressed hard against Reyes’ wound. Maine didn’t like how quick the crimson soaking through gauze and tactical cloth alike. “Need a MaxDoc, now!”

  Rebecca tossed her a cartridge. “Got one! One MaxDoc right—shit!” A bullet pinged off the rear windshield, spiderwebbing the glass. “We’re being fucking pinned, Maine!”

  “Just fucking start shooting them!” Maine roared back, firing out the side window with his Satara. The blast shredded a black truck’s front grill, but it kept coming. Shit. Corpo trucks, of course they were armored.

  Falco took a hard, hard left. “Hold on! shortcut!”

  They smashed through a chain-link fence, blasting through a tight alleyway. But the black trucks weren’t phased: they just switched to a tight, single file formation and kept coming. No gangoons in the fucking world drove like that, what the hell was this?

  “We’ve got fucking pros on our six, Falco!” Maine roared. “Get us to that evac point!”

  Falco grinned humorlessly. “They’re gonna eat my dust, sugar.”

  They made it to the freeway, and then Falco floored it, ignoring all the civvie traffic. The Emperor roared across the bridge. Rebecca leaned out the window, firing wild with a grenade launcher, laughing like a madwoman. “Come on, bitches! You want a piece of us? Eat lead!”

  Her grenade launcher nailed one of the pursuing trucks right under the front tires: it flipped over, rolling into a spin before exploding into a fireball.

  Pilar howled, slapping the roof. “That’s my baby sister! That’s my girl!”

  “Focus!” Dorio snarled. “We’re two klicks from the pad! Falco, you see the AV?”

  “Look out the window! I’ve got eyeballs on it!

  Maine took a quick look. Yes, Reyes’ AV evac was coming, high in the sky and descending. “Coming up fast!” Falco barked out. “Once that bird’s up, we’re home free.”

  Falco floored it all over again, and they were headed right for the evac point. The AV was descending. “About goddamn time!” Rebecca yelled.

  Maine’s relief was short-lived. “Wait, what the—”

  One of the black trucks behind them suddenly accelerated, riding over the median. The roof hatch blew open.

  A giant rose from the black truck’s roof. Some giant blue-bearded fuck, at least eight, maybe nine feet tall, wearing all kinds of armor, all tinted some shade or another of blue.

  In his hands, braced against his hip, was a weapon that should not have been in human hands—it looked like he’d ripped it straight off a fucking Basilisk tank. A black thing of matte steel, with cooling coils glowing cerulean and its own magnetic rail assembly. It might have been even longer than the blue guy was tall.

  Pilar’s jaw dropped. “What the fuck is that thing?!”

  The blue-bearded giant planted his feet, swiveled to the side away from them, no doubt secured in place by magnets while his truck swerved beneath. He wasn’t aiming at them, what was he even doing—

  A deafening explosion later, Maine’s heart sank.

  A blue-white beam lanced through Reyes’ incoming AV transport like a laser. The AV lurched in the sky, then exploded into pieces, right there in midair. The railgun must have struck its fuselage dead-on. And that AV had still been over a klick away. Holy fuck.

  “Holy shit!” Rebecca screamed. “He just deleted a fuckin’ AV!”

  “Drive!” Dorio shouted. “Falco, drive!”

  “Already on it!” Falco slammed the pedal, tires squealing as more bullets rained down on them. Maine and Rebecca both shot out at the trucks through their side windows.

  Behind them, the giant was already reloading, sliding in a new power cell the size of a car battery with a visible outpouring of steam. He grinned through his blue beard, staring right at him.

  Pilar was half-laughing, half-panicking. “That gun, holy fuck! Jesus Christ, that gun! I need to get my hands on that thing!”

  Rebecca’s expression was pure, manic longing. “No. No, it’s mine. That’s going to be my new baby, you hear me? MINE!”

  “Both of you shut the fuck up!” Maine barked, shoving another mag into his Satara. “We’re not dying to some blue fuck with a railgun!”

  Maine: Need a new evac point. Right now.

  David: Sending you coords.

  Falco threw the Emperor into an off-ramp, hard.

  “Falco, where the fuck are you going?” Dorio demanded.

  “Someplace that big bastard can’t shoot straight!” Falco barked. “Hold Reyes tight—we’re getting him to the docks instead!”

  Rebecca was still cackling, screaming as she shot out the window. “If we don’t kill them all and get that gun I’m going to kill you all! And then myself!”

  “Girl,” Falco muttered, his one ‘ganic hand white on the wheel in a death-grip. He threw the Chevillon into another tight turn. “You need therapy.”

  “I need that gun!”

  Falco pulled the Emperor up an on-ramp to the freeway, high enough up in the air that they could easily make out the ports.

  Then, another black truck’s roof hatch opened, and he saw a guy push out a fucking T40 Uragan. Swarm Rocket launcher. What the fuck, he’d only heard of those before when he’d been in NUSA spec-ops: those were mil-spec siege artillery weapons, no edgerunner on the planet should have one.

  The operator, a beefy man with a red walrus mustache in a tech-suit, with holes for eyes, aimed the heavy artillery at the Emperor.

  No, the fuck, you do not.

  Maine activated his Sandevistan, opening the passenger door to the Emperor, crawling up to the roof, where he sat and aimed his arm at the operator, bracing the forearm on one knee. The Projectile Launch System was glacial in its activation while he was under the effects of the Sandevistan.

  Too glacial to open right before the rocket launched.

  It fired just as it did, travelling unerringly towards the huge explosive projectile, which hadn’t yet started dispersing into the hundred or so micro-missiles he knew it would have.

  They collided mid-air, bathing the convoy of trucks in smoke. Must’ve prevented the main detonation, otherwise the intercept would’ve been a lot flashier. He called Dorio, deactivating the Sandy as he did.

  Maine: Pass the shotties! Drop my shit on the asphalt.

  Dorio: You better haul ass after us.

  A woman after my own heart, Maine grinned. A moment later, he saw her drop not only his modified L-69 Zhuo containing explosive rounds, and a Satara. He activated his Sandevistan to safely get off the car and grab the weapons while they were mid-air.

  In midair, in his Sandy’s slowed time, he aimed the weapons. For the Satara, he charged. For the Zhuo, he engaged his Smart Link cyberware, linking it with his optics and marking each of his targets.

  One second.

  Two.

  He fired.

  Eight explosive smart-pellets made their way to each of the windshields approaching him. Two for the cars in the back, and the remaining four for the one that contained the asshole with the overpowered rocket launcher.

  The windshields exploded.

  And just in case that hadn’t accomplished jack, he fired the Satara.

  The truck bled white synth-blood from the wounds he had opened on it. That red eye-less freak was definitely dead now.

  The trucks each came to a drifting stop, one of them overturning. Now, they were close enough that his mil-spec eyes could easily scan the unfriendlies, marking them with red outlines that he could make out even past obstructions. The upturned car still had one gonk inside, trying his best to get out. As for the others—

  Three survivors kicked the doors opened, and Maine shot his smart-shotgun once more.

  It sparked, and the trigger jammed. Fuck! Weapon Glitch. Thing might as well be fucking useless, now. He paid preem edds for this thing, too.

  He assumed the Satara was useless as well, so he threw the smart-shotgun, and hefted the Satara, by the barrel, intent on using it as a highly expensive baseball bat. The smart-shotgun struck the face of one of the operators, wearing a skin-tight tech-suit lined with green circuitry patterns. On his face was a tech visor that in which lines of code rained down. Fucking Netrunner.

  The smart-shotgun caved the man’s face in, killing him in an instant. And then there were two. Plus the one guy, still trying to crawl out of the wreckage.

  Then the big blue fuck came into his sights, and Maine focused on him alone.

  Game’s on.

  000

  I watched, through the Net feed, as Raduga and his buddies kept a mile away from an autoshop near interstate 9, smack dab in the badlands. A fleet of Quadra ‘Reavers’ were making their way there. To hear the big spider-fuck tell it, the nomads they had contacted had wanted nothing to do with the operation, on account of the fact that there was an ecosystem in the Badlands that couldn’t be manipulated with just edds.

  So instead, they killed every last Wraith they had tried to make friends with, stuffed them inside their little cars, and filled those cars with explosives.

  I forced myself to watch as the Reavers collided against the autoshop. Forced myself to watch through the camera feeds of the Reavers as they took out the posted guards by running them over. The moment some of them retaliated and tried firing rounds through the windows, the cars exploded.

  Dakota Smith wasn’t down, but she was visible from a drone feed, as she was trying to escape on a Quadra of her own.

  The Reavers lagging behind the first volley of suicide-bombers immediately swung around the autoshop and followed her into the badlands. They sandwiched her and—

  Raduga didn’t confirm the kill right off the bat. No, he was far too careful to do something so stupid.

  Instead, he waited for the smoke to clear before giving me the confirmation.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Lucy squeezed my hand comfortingly. We were watching everything on monitors, her swivel chair pressed up against mine while I witnessed every demise. Padre. Dexter DeShawn. Now Dakota.

  “Could have done more for her,” I admitted plainly. “Could have done more for all of them.”

  Just saving Reyes because of our personal connection wasn’t enough. It…

  “It wasn’t possible,” Lucy said. “You gotta think about yourself, too. Think about yourself and how you can survive, so you can continue the mission. You can’t just stop to rescue every starfish.”

  I raised an eyebrow at her. What did she mean by that?

  “It’s a parable,” she said. “Guy spends his time on the beach during every low-tide. He walks up and down, finding beached starfish out baking in the sun, and throws them back into the sea. He just keeps doing this. Some kid asks him: what’s the point? What difference are you making? The guy picks up a starfish, holds it to the kid, and says ‘I made a difference to this one’. It’s… fucking stupid.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s stupid.” Maybe I wasn’t getting her point, but somehow, I couldn’t help but take comfort in the little story.

  I had made a difference to Wakako. To Reyes. Rogue, Regina Jones, Dinovic—sure, I had no idea if he, in particular, was worth saving, but I had done what I could and made a difference.

  Even if it didn’t feel like enough, to those few, it was.

  I looked at the terminal and commanded it to show me some news. There were already reports about a sudden surge of violence in a lot of different areas, but no connections were being made between them. After all, except for the fact that it was all happening at the same time, it involved way too many actors for them to be able to pin the blame on anyone: beyond the obvious suspects, the corps.

  I didn’t know if it was the fact that I was just smarter, or that I was working backwards from a conclusion I already had, but it seemed so abundantly obvious to me. Anything that required the injection of vast sums of cash could only carry a single signature.

  Either way, it didn’t matter. We had our proof. I sent everything I had nabbed as D through the Net, to Rogue.

  As I did, I watched her as she made a good showing of eluding fucking Raduga of all people.

  The spider-limbed fuck was chasing her down dank alleyways on eight feet. She had made the executive decision to ditch all her huscle and kite the man into an ambush.

  I was… more than curious to see how this would play out.

  “What if she dies?” Lucy asked.

  At the moment, I was feeling rather uncharitable when it came to the prospect of this woman’s life or death. Letting her die would be stupid. Still, not suiting up and keeping overwatch to ensure that she didn’t shit the bed against this cyberpsycho murder-spider-person was also a little stupid.

  But…

  Nanny materialized in front of us, and sat on the desk. Due to a holo-projector that we had installed in the Netrunner room, Lucy could also see her. [Unfortunately for her,] she tilted her head towards the monitor, where we were treated to our very own little horror-core music video that was only missing the actual music. [My trusty meat-steed did make me a promise to ease down on the meat action. I’m afraid she’s on her own.]

  “Is that what you call him? Meat-steed?” Lucy asked, wrinkling her brows in disgust. “That your idea of humor?”

  [Eeyup. You wouldn’t understand, meat-mare.]

  “Don’t fucking go there,” Lucy said.

  Rogue had moves. She was… a lot faster than I had initially pegged her for. And not just faster.

  She jumped up to a dumpster, hopped and reached a fire-escape ladder, climbed the entire length of four meters in a fraction of a second before jumping off the grated metal floor to an overhead window ledge. She hopped off it, up to a window ledge on the opposite building, one floor up, and repeated the process several times. She disappeared over the ledge by the time Raduga rolled up. He scaled the walls vertically—

  [Or what? You’ll quickhack me? I’ll quickhack you. You’re way more quickhackable, anyway. Didn’t we help design your ICE?]

  “I’ll dunk your meat-steed in water until you short-circ.”

  Goddammit. Why wouldn’t they get along? Or maybe they were. I could sense some satisfaction from Nanny, and Lucy looked more amused than actually angry.

  I sent Rogue a message. ‘What exactly is your plan, here? You know they got drones following you.’

  ‘Nix is working on them.’

  ‘And the psycho rainbow-spider gonk?’

  I received a message from Raduga.

  ‘Stubborn fucking bitch! I’ll kill her! Fucking slippery, but she’s not fast enough for me.’

  Suddenly, the cameras went dark. I patched the feed through to Raduga’s optics instead. He growled and sent messages to his friends, asking them what the fuck was happening.

  The Shershen drones following Rogue had been taken offline.

  Raduga’s optics had lost track of Rogue’s red outline as well. And when he reached the roof of the building, he had lost her entirely.

  “It’s getting good now,” I said. Lucy looked back to the screen, and Nanny hopped off the desk to watch the scene unfold.

  “The bitch is gone! I need eyes!” Raduga screamed.

  [Like he doesn’t already have enough,] Nanny snorted, throwing a picture of the ugly fuck up on the screen.

  “Christ,” Lucy muttered. “He could have been the leader of the Maelstrom with a mug like that.”

  [I’m more interested in his leg implants, and the fact that he hasn’t cracked yet. He’s truly a generational talent for being able to tolerate all that.]

  Yeah. It was a real shame that it didn’t matter, in the end.

  After all, he had come to Night City. Whether or not this foreigner fuck flatlined Rogue right now… this city would be his grave, one way or another. I’d make sure of it. Why? Because Night City was mine. Fucked up trashheap that it was, it was my trashheap, and no matter how many skulls had to be stacked, I’d make that message sink in. To everyone, before long.

  Raduga paced around the rooftop, looking around in the growing dark of the evening, and finding nothing. Even while borrowing his senses through the link he had allowed me, I couldn’t sense shit. He was chasing phantoms.

  It was only a matter of time, really, before he decided…

  ‘She’s gone.’

  If she was, then I really had to lower my estimation of Rogue. I was excited to see her—

  Raduga staggered forward, and fell on his stomach. Dead? No, the feed was still online. ‘Pizdiet,’ he wheezed as he tried to push himself up. He wobbled, unbalanced, and looked down at his legs. Two of them were curled up and looked useless. He whirled around to try and find the shooter.

  Rogue kept out of his expansive field of view with ease, ducking under it. Another gunshot. This one clipped one leg right in the joint, making it useless.

  Raduga ripped out his guns and started blasting indiscriminately. What the fuck is this gonk doing? He was shooting tech weapons into regular concrete. He could kill someone.

  ‘Hurry it up, Rogue. This asshole should be dead, already.’

  ‘Who said anything about killing this guy?’

  No way.

  Rogue nailed the fucker right in both his hands with a single bullet, ripping through his wrists and rendering his hands useless. He threw the guns away and roared. Finally, Rogue allowed the big cyborg to see her. By that time, however, half his legs were non-operational, he was bleeding from a gaping wound in his chest that had taken out his upper thoracic spine. It was a wonder he was even able to control his limbs. Maybe he was reaching out to them through a redundancy.

  She walked up to him, an orange vial in her hand. No, an injector. “No!” Raduga roared. “Back!” He waved his arms ineffectually at her.

  Rogue slipped easily past his waving arms and jabbed the injector into his neck.

  Then another.

  And then one more.

  Raduga’s feed cut off an instant later.

  We sat in silence, staring at the screen for several long seconds, until Nanny finally broke the silence. [I mean, she better be this good after all that talk. My only regret is that it went all too easy for her.]

  V contacted me for an update.

  I called him.

  David: I lost visuals on Raduga.

  V: You fuckin’ what?

  David: He might be dead.

  V: You’re fucking kidding me. What the fuck do you mean, David? What the fuck do you mean?

  David: Ah, I’m sorry. I should have jerked him off harder a few hours ago, maybe he’d have performed better.

  V: Just send me the fucking clips.

  I was already on the case.

  V: And what do we even have to show for it? Still no updates on anyone else but Ibarra, DeShawn and Dakota?

  David: None at all.

  V: We seriously fucking overestimated our ability to sniff these fuckers out and deal with biz.

  David: Hey, what can you expect? This is Night City.

  As I sent V the files, I threw him a bone.

  David: I’m about to become a big-shot for QianT. If you’re ever in need of a job after this fiasco, just hit me up.

  V: You cheeky fuck.

  I actually wanted him to take the offer.

  David: I’m serious. You don’t deserve to get shit on for this plan failing when it wasn’t even yours in the first place.

  And being the honorable guy that he was, he was more likely to take the blame from Arthur Jenkins than to share it with me. He owed me that much at least, for charming the Tsviets into working for us. For all the good that had done him in the end.

  V: All this is just a game to you, isn’t it? Fail, and it’s alright. Just try again.

  David: It’s called a job-life balance, V. Don’t give them more than the hours you’re clocking in. It’s bad for your health.

  I finished sending him all the relevant files.

  David: But if you’re in actual danger or something—

  V: I wouldn’t go running to you.

  David: I’d go out on a limb for you.

  V: …Why?

  I blinked at the air.

  [Yeah. Why?] Nanny sassed me.

  David: You’re nice. Not many people in this line of work that are nice. Why wouldn’t I help you if I could spare the effort?

  V: Don’t go making promises you can’t keep, kid. Your heart’s in the right place, but… you’re not ready for this kind of smoke. I doubt something overly dramatic will actually sprout from this pile of shit, anyway.

  You never knew.

  David: Alright. I’ll keep keeping you updated on our favorite color-themed mercenary group. Talk to you later, V.

  V: You too, kid.

  Kid this, kid that. Well, it did pay to be underestimated. It was just rather grating to keep hearing that word used when describing me. I doubted many kids had ever reached the heights that I had.

  But, the age of eighteen was still far too many months away, and even then, some old fossilized fuck would still call me ‘kid’ just to feel better about how many years they had wasted doing nothing while that foot in the grave kept getting closer.

  [He’s real sour about being called a kid, by the way,] Nanny revealed to Lucy, who only smirked at her.

  “Oh really? That’s cute.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, hoping beyond hope that this wasn’t happening. That I wouldn’t just be getting bullied all my life.

  Well, a kid would fall to their level. I’d shake it off.

  As Nanny narrated my thoughts to Lucy, proving that they were in fact hitting it off in how absolutely bitchy they were, I gave Maine a call.

  D: Talk to me.

  000

  Maine: Not. Good time.

  Maine could hear sirens in the distance. Fucking sirens. And these edgerunners just refused to go down.

  He was dealing with the last surviving merc, using his Satara as a club. The other red one had managed to get off a shot with his T40 Uragan roughly one second after eating a bullet to the eye: dead instantly, but the missile swarm had still gone off and pummeled an entire residential block of wherever the fuck they were. He could hear screaming in the distance, wailing. Everything was burning, as far as his eyes could see.

  The big blue edgerunner, roaring obscenities in Russian, punched for Maine. Maine knew better than to block, and rolled out of the way just in time before the Russian’s cyberarm punched deep into a civvie car’s front hood behind him. Then the merc tore out the engine block and threw it right at Maine as a weapon.

  Fucking hell, Maine thought, as he ducked under the hundred pound projectile of steel. Wasn’t every day that he was outmatched like this in a physical contest. It was all he could do to hold on.

  D: Patch me through your eyes. I’ll quickhack ‘em.

  Shit.

  Maine: You can fuckin’ do that?

  D: Yeah—got this runner chair and everything. Just don’t resist while I’m pushing myself into your neural net, try to ignore the fact that I could stop your heart entirely at will or way, way worse, and I’ll sort ‘em out.

  He was making a real good case for himself, wasn’t he? He blocked another hammer smash from the giant, angry blue fuck shouting obscenities to him in Russian. His neural link was already starting to burn a hole through the back of his neck from all his Sandy usage, so he really was only left with the option of being a cyber-medium for D’s net-witchcraft.

  Maine: Hit that motherfucker hard.

  He felt the intrusion through his net, and did his best to ‘not resist’, which was to toggle his safeties off one by one, and then waited.

  Just as the giant asshole lifted his hammer up, his arms caught fire. He screamed.

  Maine didn’t give him time to so much as panic. He exploited that opening and smashed the stock of the Satara into his skull so hard that the fucking thing shattered. And the skull dented inwards, becoming concave.

  Between the rapidly spreading fire, and his dented dome, he took shaky steps back, but was otherwise just a dead man walking—

  His surroundings, dark from the sun that had already set during the fight, lit up red as blood. Floodlights had caught him. ‘Caution – stay away’ were writ large on the asphalt in block letters, in several languages.

  He looked up and saw them.

  A fucking Zetatech AV, painted black, from which a row of gunmen armed with precision rifles stood behind the wide opening. They each wore tech visors with six green eyes each.

  Fuck.

  D: MAXTAC

  Jesus!

  Maine: I have eyes, D!

  D: Ohhh, this is gonna fucking hurt.

  Shit. Maine prepared himself.

  D: For me.

  Maine felt something pass through his systems, something big and dark and ugly. A fucking weird, terrifying feeling, like a shark ten miles long had just brushed him in the depths of the sea, skin to skin, considering if it should eat him up in one gulp or not… and didn’t. Just kept swimming on by, into the darkness.

  And then the MaxTac AV above, a long Zetatech Surveyor, suddenly began to spin wildly before crashing into the evacuated freeway, erupting in a ball of fire.

  The fuck did the kid just do?

  D: I think I broke something.

  Maine: Just something?

  He scanned the wreckage for survivors, and saw two MaxTac officers stumble out from the fire, long guns in hand. Shit. And all he had were glorified paper-weights now only vaguely shaped like guns from all the fighting.

  D: Actually, I mean my skull. Ah. Yes. I did. Fuck. I’m sorry, Maine. I can’t help you anymore.

  Maine hadn’t expected him to. Instead, he looked around for a—

  There. A Militech M-179 Achilles Tech rifle, lying on the ground. Must have fallen off the Surveyor while it did its death-spin after D had tagged it.

  He ran towards it in a dive, picked it up, rolled and aimed the gun an instant later, charging it up as he did.

  Felt like he was back in the NUSA Spec-Ops once more.

  But the Psycho Squad operators weren’t a part of the most heavily militarized company of cyborgs in the city for their pretty green tech-visors. They were on the ball, too, aiming right at him.

  He had one’s head in his line of vision, and fired.

  He fired before that one could.

  But not before his friend took his shot, perforating clean through Maine’s chest.

  D: Fuck! No, fuck!

  Ah. The kid was still in his fucking head.

  Almost forgot over the din of battle as he lined up his shot again at the remaining MaxTac officer, who belatedly tried to jump over the partition of the highway to take cover, all the while as he charged the weapon with one hand, long-pressing the trigger.

  He had intended on taking cover while Maine charged up.

  He hadn’t predicted that Maine would be able to focus through the shock of being tagged. Hadn’t predicted that he would easily follow the man as he ran across the road.

  Hadn’t predicted that he would fire up his Sandy one more time.

  Maine released his shot.

  The bullet blew out the back of the MaxTac officer’s skull, killing him in an instant while mid-jump. A passing car chewed him up under its tires, and then swerved wildly, almost losing control, but regaining it on the last second.

  Out from the thick smoke of the burning Surveyor, another car appeared. Thankfully, not a fucking Hellhound or some other car, but the old familiar Falco-mobile.

  Dorio hovered over his head, shouting. Pilar was shooting like a lunatic, assault rifle in each hand at the big blue fuck, who was somehow still alive, but fleeing, throwing himself bodily off the freeway and into the depths below. Rebecca was dragging something big and black into the car, something three or four times as big as she was.

  Then, the next moment, he was inside the car. He looked down at his chest. Damn, that was a lot of blood. Red blood. Maybe he should just take the plunge into synth-blood if he lost too much. God knew his circulatory system could use a boost. He was still operating on fleshware where it mattered, which was fucking… stupid…

  But he… promised…

  000

  V watched the back of Arthur’s’ chair as he faced the windows to the darkening night and the city that lit up and only seemed to come alive in response to the gloom.

  He waited patiently as his boss came to terms with the reality of the situation. The worst-case scenario, in which the Task Force had made a half-assed attempt at quelling the movement before it could come to fruition.

  And in doing so, leaving enough of them alive to band together more strongly than ever before. If they weren’t determined to hit back before, they would be, now.

  “How?” Arthur asked.

  “I’ve reviewed all the footage that the Tsviets surrendered to us,” V said. It wasn’t all that much. The mercs would have preferred to keep Raduga’s defeat under wraps if they could, but David had been actively watching him and recording everything. As for the other crap, their other defeats, against Reyes, Dinovic, Wakako. Fuckin’ Nada. Real operators my ass. “They were outmatched. Couldn’t handle the heat.”

  Arthur’s voice was strained. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, fished one out and lit it up. “They’ve been… all over the fucking globe,” Arthur growled, his voice almost strained, and on the verge of cracking. “Asia, Europe, South America. All the shitholes worth mentioning, they’ve been there, raised hell, and gotten out smelling like fucking roses. And this is what happens to them after one fucking mission in Night fucking City.”

  V rarely bought into the hype surrounding the City, that it was somehow just bound to always be worse than other places. Or that its tough conditions bred the hardest motherfuckers out there. Adam Smasher was famously a New Yorker, and all the other high-tier Arasaka operators came straight from Japan. It was said the Angels, the most elite of all edgerunning crews, were recruited from all over Earth and space - not that even CoIntel knew for sure. That group was as secretive as they came.

  But at times like these, it was hard not to believe that this place was just… uniquely fucked up.

  Arthur had learned, the hard way, why no one just up and tried to solve the City’s crime problem. The crime problem was far more likely to just… solve you, instead.

  Actually tackling the problem would require a sacrifice of capital that far exceeded the controlled-burn doctrine that the City’s leadership currently employed: strategically ceding parts of the city to the gangs and the criminal element, while maintaining order where it mattered.

  “Take care of it,” Arthur said.

  V had… no fucking idea what that meant. “Who?”

  “The Tsviets. They’re weak. Kill them. Bury this shit under the fucking rug. Use the company card. I don’t care who you pay.”

  “Right,” V said. “Well. The company will get to save some edds on that front, because the Tsviets are already dead.”

  Arthur swirled his chair to face V. “What do you mean?”

  “D’s boys,” V snorted. Half the edgerunners of the Afterlife, most likely. “It didn’t take fifteen minutes for them to rain holy hellfire directly on the Tsviet’s hideout in the ports. Took out a chunk of bratva soldiers while they were at it. That damn crusade of theirs chased the Russians out of town. The ones who aren’t dead are gone.”

  “So they know,” Arthur growled. “They traced everything back to our edgerunning crew.”

  “We don’t know if they know,” V said carefully. “All we know is that they did manage to identify the Tsviets. But we don’t know that they know that we hired them.”

  Arthur closed his eyes and bared his teeth in utter disappointment. Then he schooled his expression. “Just… fuck off.”

  Truthfully, V would have preferred it if Arthur had yelled at him, but this was somehow even more concerning. What the hell was he planning?

  Moreover, should he take David’s offer to join up with fucking QianT more seriously? That was… fucking stupid. He’d rather not escape the pirates by hopping on a leaky boat.

  No. He wasn’t going to do something as stupid as go quietly, especially after all he had sacrificed to reach this point.

  He’d sooner join up with Abernathy than let himself get dragged down like that. As he exited the room, he shook his head. Stupid thoughts from a desperate mind.

  He needed a drink. Or ten.

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