I tipped him sideways out of the seat and onto the floor. His body convulsed as I sat on the newly vacated seat and laid my rifle before me, reaching up and drawing the shotgun, and adding that to the table as well.

As soon as I’d attacked him, the others had leapt to their feet and jerked their weapons out. Now they were staring from the body to me, then back again, armed, ready, and totally confused.

“Lilith!” I bellowed. “For fuck’s sake, get your ass out here.”

“You’re very confident,” a new voice said, sounding both husky and annoyed, as she moved out of one of the small white buildings that ringed the fanciful plaza.

“Best way to be.” I smiled, even though she couldn’t see it through my helmet. “After all, I hold most of the cards here, and creeping in and out like an assassin? Not my style.”

“You hold no cards,” she said grimly, sitting down at a table two over from me, and gesturing to her people to sit again. The massive chrome-armed bodyguard stood behind her and glared at me.

“Really?” I asked conversationally. “Seems we’re at an impasse.”

“Standoff,” she corrected. “You’re armed. We’re armed. Nobody needs to die, though. You walked right in like you own the place, so tell me why.”

“I wanted to meet you,” I said honestly.

“Now you’ve met me.” She nodded, then shrugged, smiling widely. “So tell me why, and why I should let you leave here alive.”

“First, because you can’t stop me leaving.” I ignored most of the people there. “But as to why? I wanted to know who you were, and why someone wants you dead.”

“Because Lucky wants my turf,” she said. “He thinks he’s got a disposable soldier to take me down, APS no less, but it’s bullshit.”

“What makes you think that?” I settled back, ignoring the creak of the old chair under me.

“What, that it was Lucky, or that it’s bullshit?”

“Both.”

“You think I don’t have my people in his gang?” She snorted. “I knew you were coming for me before you did, Kabutt.”

“And the bullshit?”

“No real APS operative would have come here. Not in a million years. You’d be up in corpo-town, choking on a cock, living it up. So you’re not an elite soldier, just an arrogant fuck stain that thinks he can walk in and out of here. So come on, what makes you different?” She sneered.

“Two things.” I nodded. “But we’ll get to those in a minute. Tell me, why you? Why’s Lucky after you specifically?”

“I’m the boss. This is my floor, and Lucky knows I’ll be taking his soon. My people already control the chemists here, and these useless fucks pay for my protection, or they have ‘accidents.’”

“Okay, standard low-level gang shit.” I shrugged. “Nothing special then. But why you? I mean, the job wasn’t to kill your gang, but you, specifically.”

“He thinks if he takes me down, he can move in and my people will accept him,” she guessed. “Fuck knows, really.”

“And Maribeth,” one of the idiots around the group said.

I pointed my left hand at him.

“Maribeth?” I said. “Tell me about that.”

“Fuck off.” He swallowed hard as everyone stared at him. “What? I thought maybe it’s—”

“Come on then, Lilith. Let’s not leave me hanging.” I had my right hand on the stock of the shotgun, and I turned it to point at her, smiling as I did so. “I’m asking so nicely as well.”

The big fucker with the chrome arms growled, his voice a synthesized snarl, and I cocked my head to one side in question.

“Why should I care what you ask?” She smiled. “My people have you covered. One signal, and your spine is fried. I’ll have all the time I want to play with you then.”

“Two reasons. First, though…a dead man’s switch. You shoot me, I fire. Ah-ah!” I growled as she started to stand. “You stay right fucking there. You move again, and I fire.”

“So you get one shot off. That’s it,” she snapped. “You die as soon as you fire, and your chance of taking me out? What, fifty-fifty? Most likely, I end up with a new mod. Shit happens.”

“That’s how we get to the second point,” I said. “My shotgun is an automatic, and it’s loaded with Devil’s Asshole rounds. I unload this thing? Nobody on this floor walks away.”

There was a pause of several seconds as she clearly assessed the threat, then the shotgun’s magazine.

“Twenty shots,” I confirmed. “Want to think about the chances of anything surviving that? I could entirely miss you, and the heat alone will render you down to a smear of melted fats.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“You willing to risk it all on that guess?” I asked. “You think me marching up here and just sitting down suggests I’m a stable man?”

“So what do you want?” she asked after a brief pause for thought where most of her people changed their point of aim. Locking onto my shotgun now.

“Maribeth.”

“She was a whore lower down the tower. I bought her, brought her up here.” She shrugged. “She didn’t want to be a whore after a few months, thought she could quit, and she’d not paid off my investment yet, so I sold her for parts.”

“Parts?” I asked coldly.

“To a carver,” she confirmed. “What? You think corpo scum all look so young and healthy by magic? Most corpos spend half the year recovering from surgery. I sell them stripped primo ‘parts,’ and they’ve got no idea their new lips have been hammered more than an anvil.”

“And Lucky?”

“He’s no white knight in search of love, if that’s what you’re asking.” She snorted. “He had a buyer for her as well, so don’t go thinking he’s a hero trying to free her.”

“That’s fine,” I said after a few seconds. “I guess I just wanted to be sure of who I was working with.” I sent the message to the sixth observer who I’d been toying with for a while, figuring it was time to find out what the hell was going on.

“And now?” she purred, sitting forward. “You know, you’ve got some balls, boy. Why don’t you tell Lucky to fuck right off and—”

Lilith’s head exploded as a hypersonic round passed straight through it, hitting her in the right temple and exiting midway on the far side with a loud crack.

With blood and brains spraying in all directions, I pulled the trigger on the shotgun, then ducked to the side. My fléchette’s round shredded most of the bodyguard’s upper torso, as I rolled out of sight.

The shock of a hidden sniper distracted them enough that they were slow to fire on me, and I hit the ground behind the low wall with only two actual hits. Five more were absorbed by my armor as it solidified.

I hissed in pain. Both fucking shots had hit me in the left leg, calf, and the thick muscle at the back of my upper leg, passing between two armor plates.

Sod’s fucking Law.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

I yanked the handgun free and fired three shots blindly over the top of the wall, keeping them interested, then swapped the handgun to my left hand and pulled out a medikit.

I bit down on the covering on one end, yanking it off and spitting it out, before priming and stabbing it into my lower thigh.

The nanites weren’t enough to fully regenerate the wounds, not a single small medikit and certainly not two wounds. But they were enough to break the bullets down, or push them out, and slow the bleeding at least.

With that done, I pointed the handgun over the top and fired off a few more rounds, as I dragged the shotgun closer, and decided the next step.

Was this really what you came here to do?

The response to my message came through despite the usual blocks in combat, because, for now at least, she was registered as part of my team, and I grinned manically.

I came to check things out, but seeing you were here anyway? I’m improvising.

There was a brief pause as the wall I was sheltering behind was hammered over and over with bullets, and I sighed, waiting.

Should have known you saw me. So, what’s the plan? That wall won’t hold much longer, you know.

I winced as plaster exploded nearby, and I was covered in a dusting of white.

Give me a distraction and damn well help then!

There was a brief pause before the answer came back.

Fine. You owe me half the bounty. Deal?

I sighed, then grinned as a thought occurred to me.

Half of the bounty I get for this single job.

I got a single goddamn smiling face as my response, then the heavy crack, crack of a high-powered sniper rifle filled the air. I rolled to my feet, shotgun in my right hand, handgun in the left.

I fired the handgun first—three shots at a wall on the far side as people dove out of sight—then I dumped it, switching to both hands on the shotty and firing a single solid slug into the nearest wall of the little “house.”

The solid metal slug tore through the wall, barely slowing. A man dove out, hands over his head as I pumped the shotgun, firing and taking him in the side, sending him flying.

I flicked it to full auto, and fired: three slugs, then a second fléchette round, the first having done so well that…I glanced from the figures running and diving out of my way, looking for the bodyguard’s body.

Gone.

Fuck!

I was hit from the side at almost the same time that I saw the fucker was gone, my shotgun torn from my grip and two ribs on the right side cracking even through my armoring.

The suit hardened, cushioning the blow, but it still fucking hurt. I hit a second low wall. It caught me behind my left leg, on the far side of the knee, and sent me tipping over it to fall onto my head.

I rolled, training raising to the fore, and I twisted. A blur resolved into a boot as it slapped down next to my face. I grabbed it, left-handed, and clamped down with maximum pressure, even as I reached for my blade with my right hand.

I didn’t get it.

My left hand squeezed and squeezed, and I heard the sound of metal under pressure, slowly buckling. But the right hook that took me in the face sent the world spinning as first my already damaged helmet, and then my jaw, broke.

Next thing I knew, I was being dragged upward. One hand gripped me by the front of my armor, left hand drawing back and punching me in the gut.

I coughed and wheezed. The motion and the sheer force, not to mention my own cough, sent my broken jaw into paroxysms of agony, the world full of bright lights and spinning.

“CEASE FIRE!” the idiot holding me screamed out at my ally, shaking me. “Cease fire or I kill him!” he roared, using me as a living shield.

There was a brief pause as he waited for a response, and I made the most of it, clapping both hands over his ears as hard as I could, bursting his eardrums and making him drop me. He screeched, then threw himself sideways as a sniper round hammered through the air where he’d stood. I coughed, groaning in pain.

My second medikit was out…and was grabbed and dragged sideways. The medikit dropped from my hands as the asshole I was fighting lunged atop me, scrabbling for it as well.

I saw him properly for the first time, and fuck me sideways with a double-ended dildo, he looked like shit.

It was the bodyguard, and for a second we were face-to-face as we both struggled to get the medikit.

My fléchettes round had done a number on him, but what I’d not realized was the sheer fucking level of work he’d had.

He was well on the way to full cyborg status. The fléchettes—which were essentially several dozen carbon-steel darts packed close together—had shredded his chest and head. But fuck.

Under the layer of clothing and skin was a layer of subdermal armoring. What looked to be tens of thousands of tiny scales, laid overlapping, had been exposed on his chest and neck, with a cranial cover on his head. It was a solid-looking skull coating that, again, went under the skin and over the bone.

Right now, he looked like a half-stripped skeleton. Both eyes were cybernetic, and the front of his head was a tattered mess of torn flesh and muscle, occasional darts embedded here and there.

That my cupped hands had worked at all on his was a relief, and as I frantically kept from screaming, my face flexing as muscles moved and bones failed to brace them, I realized why it’d worked.

It was a covering.

I could see the white of bone around his eyes, the edges of the armoring, and I saw the desperation in his fixation on the medikit, rather than killing me, which he probably could have done with those arms if he’d kept trying.

At first, I’d thought cyborg, replacing all his human bits as he could afford them.

Some with a high enough score could do it and not go mad, provided they were careful and did it gradually.

I was wrong, though.

He’d gone for the arms, that was clear, and the eyes. But the way he moved? The way he hissed and frantically grappled for the medikit?

It was just the armoring beyond that, I was betting.

I let go of the kit, wrapping my left arm around his neck and dragging him closer against every instinct and going for the knife again. He went for the medikit, grabbing it and desperately dragging the rubberized plug off the end, to expose the injector.

He flipped it around, trying to get it back over his shoulder, and I did the same. His desperation had exposed the weakness, as my knife flared to life.

His armoring was on the front only.

He couldn’t stab himself with the injector anywhere on the front, as they’d just pour over the armor and try to integrate into it, instead of fixing the flesh, so he had to get them into an unarmored area.

Before the injector could stab in, though, my blade did, sinking into the back of his spine, right between the shoulder blades, tearing deep and severing the spinal cord.

At the sudden look of panic on his face, I dragged the blade upward, carving deeper and doing catastrophic damage. His arm holding the injector sagged.

I grabbed it, twisting and stabbing it into the side of my neck, whimpering, as much as I’d never admit it, with the pain as it triggered.

We stared at each other from a distance of a few inches. His eyes flared, the lenses twitching and zooming, before relaxing in death, the light deep within them fading.

His body sagged atop me, making me groan even more as his weight settled. The fucker must have had bones replaced, he was so goddamn heavy!

I dumped the medikit. My head sagged back, the shattered helmet clanging against the stone behind my head, and more parts fracturing off.

It might have taken the blow before it’d been so fucked up, but the condition my helmet was in when I walked into this fight, it was half hanging off now, broken beyond belief.

I reached up, wincing, pulled it free and tossed it aside. Then, coughing and spitting something out—hoping it wasn’t a goddamn tooth—I forced the dead bodyguard off me.

I grabbed my shotty and pumped it, getting a notification the chambered round was a bolo. I stood, squinting around at the madness.

There were a dozen dead gangers, Lilith was slumped half on and half off the table she’d been leaning on for our conversation, and the formerly white buildings were covered in bright arterial splashes. People were screaming, running and hiding; alarms were going off and a loudspeaker blared the same message that was being pushed out to all Keystones in range.

Illegal Activity Detected: ACE have been requested. Do not attempt to leave the area. All visual systems are recording, and idents have been registered.

As usual, everyone absolutely fucking ignored it. There wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance that anyone was staying here. And that the idents had been recorded? Good luck with that. One of the first things that anyone with a Keystone did as soon as they could afford it was get the fucker hacked.

Mine spoofed a secondary ident for a corpo scumbag when it was pinged by a recorder whenever I was doing something that was even slightly dodgy.

It meant that the ACE, who everyone knew were notorious cowards and thieves, had the choice of attempting to arrest and question a corpo suit, when they damn well knew that’d end badly for them, or just ignore my ident on whatever shitty list they ended up with.

That it was a common way of doing business these days? It meant that the only chance the ACE had was if there were actual visual recording and decent scanners live, as everyone else would have been doing exactly the same.

Add in that the corpos didn’t give a shit and actively dissuaded anyone from solving this little loophole? It meant that they could do what they wanted and then deny it, so fuck no.

So yeah, scanners and recording devices…considering it was a territory actively being ruled over by a gang? Uh…no.

That left witnesses, and anyone who came somewhere like this knew what happened to witnesses who helped ACE.

I snorted at the mere thought, then groaned at the pain in my face, before grabbing the remains of my helmet, dumping it into my bag and roughly searching the bodyguard.

I ripped the blade free of his spine as the crunch of boots on broken plaster and glass rang out, and Reign moved in closer as I started cutting.

“What now?” she asked me, and I nodded to the bodies.

“We’ve got about two minutes. After that, we might actually be inside ACE’s net, if they bother to come. Unlikely but hey, strip the fuckers for anything valuable—guns, gear, weapons. And grab her head.”

“Her head?” She sighed. “Really?”

“It’s proof.” The pain of speaking as the nanites fixed my jaw made tears blur my vision. “Just do it, Reign. We need to get out of here.”