I forced myself to my feet, legs moving like I’d shit myself. The goddamn spinal work made me slow as I adjusted on the fly, left arm dragging. But something that’d been missing since the flight roared up from deep inside.
Mugging…me?
Who the utter fuck did he think he was?
I forced myself to move faster. The grey hair vanished under a tattered blue baseball cap, as he crossed the last lane of four ahead of me, dodging into the streaming crowd that rolled left and right, even as I furiously started out into the traffic.
Normally, I’d have dodged easily. Hell, “normally,” I’d have kicked his ass when he tried to rob me and moved on with my life. But as it was? Cars and bikes, as well as automated transports and cabs, screamed and honked at me. Warnings blared on the sidewalk advertisements, telling me that I was committing a felony, and to cross at approved places only.
They’d not triggered for that grey-haired old fuck—he’d been fast enough. But for me? The fines were already knocking on my Keystone.
I ignored them, locking onto him and ordering my RI to track the fucker.
It might be hamstrung by the kit it was operating in, it might be running on bare-bones and no longer have access to mil-spec data, but this? This was something it could do all day.
Target Acquired
The rising thrum of adrenaline banished the last of the confusion as I hurried across the last lanes. All that other shit could wait as I dodged into the streaming mass of people, not one of them bothering to look up from their own lives. None of them seemed to notice the squeal of brakes and honk of horns starting and then stopping again.
With the RI tracking that bastard, and me being unable to up and catch him, as slow as I was—I was walking as though that lump of shit I’d felt earlier was liquefying and dripping now—I used the time to fix my screwed-up Aug-World settings.
The vast majority of Aug-World I couldn’t deal with right then, not willing to let the reality around me be brushed and polished until I wandered in a corporate dream. The distant stares everyone I passed made it clear that they were using it all the time.
For some, it was something they couldn’t live without now; the literal shit on the streets, the bums, the goblins, and the dead, all of those inconvenient little details that the corpos wanted rid of? All of them were gone in an instant if you let the Keystone and Aug-World do it.
You’d be walking through a calm and virtual paradise, if that was your thing, or along a cliff with the sea crashing nearby. You could pick any reality you wanted, change the people around you into demons, angels, make them all fucking naked—with certain unofficial mods, you could even scan them all as they approached and get simulated “99 percent accurate” images—and more.
Aug-World was a fucking cesspit designed to do one of two things: force you to be a good little corpo drone, or strip you of anything it could if you wouldn’t conform.
The slight advantage it had, and that I was grimly activating and shutting down all the pop-up shite from, was the overlay.
It was literally the bare-bones augmentation of reality all around us, adding in street identities, making things like crossings, emergency incoming vehicles, and my own weapons and personal details visible again to me, while blocking any attempts at changing reality and hiding stuff.
When I’d woken in the clinic, that’d been another reason I’d been so confused, I realized now; when they’d installed the new kit, it’d wiped my old settings. I’d kept the recordings, so I didn’t really care, but the clinic must have been operating a dampening field of some kind, so when I left it? Boom.
That was also what that fuck ahead of me must have been waiting for, meaning this probably wasn’t an opportunist; he probably hit the place several times a day.
I pushed through the current of people, swimming upstream against the majority of corpo drones. I drew ever closer through the mass of people, unable to make much headway on him, but slowly and surely getting control of my limbs again, until after twenty minutes, I was down to a dozen meters from him.
I took the right turn at the end of the block, hesitating. The fucker had vanished. The RI plotted possible escape vectors, plastering them across my vision.
Three flashed green, and I made my choice. He could have made the second and third locations, but it’d have required a sudden sprint, but here? A narrow cut between buildings to my right, a chain-link fence was flapping free at the bottom, as well as scuffs on the ground—all clear indications someone had recently struggled through.
I hurried over to it. Packing crates had been layered across the entrance to obstruct the view, and I grunted, getting a familiar itch between my shoulder blades. I was being watched.
I grinned savagely and grabbed the chain-link, hauling it up as I ducked down, dragging my knife free of my right ankle as I did, flipping the blade up and concealing it along the inside of my wrist.
Standing on the far side, I strode forward, weaving between packaging crates and piled crap. I passed plastic sheeting that ran from one side of the narrow alley to the other, noting barrels complete with basic filtration pumps to clean the water that sat at the end of them.
I ducked under another low sheet and straightened, suddenly surrounded by boxes that faced inward, their interiors shadowed, hiding who knew what.
Only down an alley off a side street, and already I was in a little camp, one of the millions of homeless shanties that filled the city.
I was also out of reach of the city net. A blocker activated as my RI flashed up a warning signal in the corner of my vision, and low chuckles and laughter rose around me. Clearly it was intended to prevent me calling for help…and seeing the way this was set up? Yeah, I felt entirely fucking vindicated about what I was intending to do here.
Judgment. It was time to make the world a better place.
“Shoulda let it go…” The grey-haired old fuck sneered, stepping out from behind a box ahead of me, as others moved out into plain sight.
“You stole my shit,” I said coldly.
“You corpo types steal from us every day,” another snapped to my left.
I glanced at him.
“Are you fucking blind?” I snarled. “Army; APS operator, discharged on medical fucking grounds, this morning.”
“Shame that…” The greybeard shrugged. “Nice gun, though…This’ll get a good price.” He pulled my handgun out and hefted it, his scruffy fingers curling around the grip and a finger resting on the trigger.
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“You’re not man enough to touch a gun like that.” I shook my head, well aware that two others had slunk out from the boxes behind me and were closing on me.
“You think it takes a man to hold a gun?” an unfamiliar voice asked angrily, as a woman limped out of the darkness to my right, straightening as she ducked out from under some sheeting. The rusty chrome of her skull plate reflected cracked lights from a neon light overhead.
She lifted a rifle—not a bad one, either—and aimed it at my stomach.
“If it takes a man to handle that, no wonder a woman’s got the biggest one here…” She grinned, and I snorted.
“Sister, I’ve fought with women who’d snap any of you fuckers like toothpicks. I said he’s not man enough to touch my gun.”
“Oh?” Greybeard chortled. “Why’s that then?”
“Because.” I smiled. “It’s gene-locked.”
I focused on the gun and sent a command to my RI. It was a simple one, but oh so effective: Terminate.
His eyes flared open in horror, looking to the gun, even as the woman shrieked to him to drop it.
It was too late.
It was way too late for that.
“Judgment!” I growled.
Two hundred fifty amps of electricity released from the twin electrodes embedded in the grip and nestled against his palm, killing the fucker almost instantly. I was already moving, as his friends stared at him in horror and his greasy hair burst into flames.
I’d sensed as much as I heard the pair “sneaking” up behind me, or trying to, and rather than wait for them, I simply stepped back, flicking the blade I’d concealed along the inside of my wrist into an overhand grip, the point down, and stabbed it into the stomach of the figure on the right.
The one on the left?
Well, I didn’t trust the left arm yet, not really, and certainly not to stop anything like a weapon, but what it could do?
It could grip, and crush.
I swung it down, aiming for center mass, and unfortunately for the guy on my left, he was taller than average. A lot taller.
My robotic hand caught on his crotch; the fingers closed like a vise, crushing the metal components of the filthy button-up fly…and the flesh concealed behind it.
I dragged the one on my right around in front of me, using the blade as a handle, then left it buried in their stomach, grabbing Lefty’s gun as he dropped it, squealing like a stuck pig.
The woman opened fire. The rifle got off three rounds before she stopped, having realized she had shot my knife victim in the back. She hesitated, holding her fire, and I didn’t.
Snaking my hand around the figure that was even now slumping in death, stabbed in the gut and shot in the back three times, I opened fire, missing twice, but taking her in the chest with the third and fourth slugs.
She staggered, then snarled, opening fire again, and this time I moved, twisting Dickless around to drive him backward before me, forcing her to shoot him, even as the remaining two people on the far side of “Mr. Crispy” finally started to move.
I hit her again, seeing the sparking of an embedded chestplate, and adjusted aim, hitting her in the right thigh before the gun clicked empty. I rushed forward, half carrying the fucker by his crushed dick, as she unloaded into his back.
One of Crispy’s friends opened fire. A single slug hit my metallic left shoulder and jarred me, but did fuck all else. I threw my victim at the riflewoman, taking them both down before I leapt on her.
The only reason I was still alive was the narrow confines of the alley, and the fact these assholes were clearly used to mugging idiots and innocents, for all that they were rarer than virgins in a whorehouse.
My metal arm was slow, but what it lacked in speed, maneuverability, and, well, fucking everything, it made up for it in being a mass of fucking steel with a vise grip.
I grabbed her rifle barrel with my right hand and yanked it aside, slapping my left over her face and ordering the fingers to close.
I saw the look of panic, the horror in her eyes, and she released the rifle and reached up to grip the fingers.
She was strong, surprisingly so, considering that she was evidently living in a slum. But what she wasn’t, was smart.
The reason the army trained people the way they did, over and over, constantly repeating actions, was to instill muscle memory, so that when something happened, you didn’t respond the “natural” way.
The “natural” reaction to my hand, a hand that might be able to crush bone closing over your face, was to try to stop it. To grab the fingers, to stop them from crushing your skull.
It wasn’t the logical thing, though.
If you used logic, then fingers that can crush the bone of your skull aren’t going to be stopped by your own flesh-and-blood fingers, but that didn’t mean that you wouldn’t try.
As a soldier, though, and one trained to fight against heavily modded and often armored opponents, I responded differently.
I yanked the rifle up and around, training it on her friends and firing two quick, three-round bursts, killing one and making the other dive for cover, before ramming the rifle against her sternum and firing again.
She’d clearly had some reinforcing done, significant subdermal armoring, but she’d either had it done a long time ago and it’d degraded, or it’d been damaged already, because the second close-range round penetrated, as did the third. I angled it up and fired again. The shots ricocheted around inside the armored cavity, making damn sure she was down.
I released her face—the hand wasn’t powerful enough to crush bone, after all, but I bet it’d damn well come close, and it’d hurt—and I shook that hand, splattering her with blood, before staggering slightly as I twisted wrong.
Fucking back!
I snarled, then went hunting, finding the last of them dragging himself across the ground. A trail of blood that led to him was a nice surprise, considering I’d thought I’d missed.
“Please…” He whimpered, and I paused, looking down at him. He was bleeding heavily from the right thigh, probably an artery nicked, judging from the amount of blood, and I nodded, crouching down next to him, rifle pointed at him, and making damn sure I could see his hands.
“Sure,” I agreed, sending him a “knock.”
He blinked, then hissed in understanding, glaring at me.
“Hey, you fuckers mugged and were planning on killing me. Pay up.”
“I’m broke…” he started, and as I shrugged and started to stand up, he went on. “Fuck’s sake! You think we’d be here if we had creds!”
“I think you’ve been robbing assholes for kicks and shit, so you’ve either got creds stashed, or you’ve got a stash of gear you ripped. Hand them over, or I leave you here. How long you think you’ll last? If you can close the wound? Maybe you’ll survive. Thing is, though, you’d have to let go of it first, find something to seal it…You let go? You’ve got maybe thirty seconds.”
“Kit…” he hissed through gritted teeth, nodding to a pile of discarded plastic packaging and sheets.
I staggered over, cursing the spinal mod, and kicked it aside, seeing a grate in the wall hidden behind it all. I smiled at him, before crouching to the right-hand side of it and reaching in with my metal arm. I grabbed the cover and yanked it sideways, hearing his scream as he tried to move out of the way, while I kept the steel on my side pressed tight against the wall.
I was totally unsurprised when a blast went off. A braced shotgun firing a mass of buckshot tore the packing crates apart to the left, barely missing him as he rolled aside. My maniacal smile mushroomed at the growing fury and fear on his face.
Reaching inside, I found a handful of things: a medikit—small and blatantly stolen from some corpo’s purse, from the classy design—a handful of credit-chips, and three boxes of ammo—two were rifle, one was for a handgun, and not my caliber…of course.
That didn’t matter at this point, though.
I straightened, taking them all, and grabbed my bag from the floor next to Mr. Crispy. I took my handgun, and its holster, shrugging into it, before securing the gun.
“Must be getting old,” I muttered. “Going out with a gun I couldn’t reach.” I quickly searched Crispy, finding nothing of any real value beyond an old-style lighter, and I took that, flicking it and seeing that it did, in fact, still work.
“Hey!” the guy cried, and I looked over at him in question. “Help!” He practically wept, his face grey, half laid in a puddle of blood and piss.
“You want help?” I saw the desperate nod he gave me, and I smiled, standing up, and walked over to him, holding the medikit where he could see it. I knocked on his Keystone again. “Credits. You know what this is worth.”
There was a second of us staring at each other; I got a link, and twenty-six credits slid from him to me.
“Thanks.”
Then I shot him in the face.
The fucking asshole had tried to rob me, tried to kill me, and he’d tried to get me with a trap—what the hell did he think I was going to do after all that?
He was guilty and fucking deserved to pay the price.
Idiot.
I searched him roughly, finding nothing of interest, and moved to his friends, gathering up the guns as I went. Most of them were crap. There were two more credit-chips, which I quickly drained, pressing their thumbs against the back and moving from corpse to corpse until they activated.
Once that was done, I was a grand total of seventy-eight credits richer, including the asshole who’d so kindly transferred his personal stash to me.
Two hundred and ten credits to my name.
What a fortune indeed.
I searched around a little more, conscious of the gunfire drawing attention, but also conscious that the little gang wouldn’t have been acting the way they were if they thought there would be a visit from the enforcers.
I found nothing else of any real value, and remembering at the last minute about the shotgun in the stash, I pulled that out, stuffing it, three handguns, and the rifle into my shoulder bag, the grips and stock of the rifle and shotgun sticking out.
After wiping the blood from my hand and upending a bottle of what smelled like clear grain whisky over my left arm to clean it, I gathered up my bag and headed back out into the city.
Just another cold-ass murderous psychopath in a city full of them.