Trace had left Deckard’s braincase with Ko when he first accepted this job. The brain had shown no signs of waking just yet but was still going through the nutrient mix at an increased rate. It was fast enough that Trace hadn’t felt comfortable leaving the braincase alone while on a job of unknown length.

Thankfully, Ko had been willing to keep an eye on him… it. Pronouns could be confusing at times.

Remembering Deckard, had him staring up at the night sky as he walked along. It was enough to make him wonder which of the many satellites he was seeing carried the metal goddess Meredith. Did any of them? It had been so long since she had launched herself into space that no one knew for sure where she actually was.

All anyone did know; was that she was still there, controlling everything from above.

Walking faster, he lowered his eyes and pulled up the map. Only a couple of miles more to go.

***

At the moment, Trace was camped out as close to the buildings as he was willing to get, of the first target gang. They were calling themselves the Pinetree-Wolves. It was a stupid name. Doubly so, since there weren’t even any wolves in this part of Colorado. Coyotes, foxes, wild dogs, and other animals sure, but not wolves. They had never migrated down.

He had managed to get a couple of hours of rest after dragging himself into town in the wee hours of the night.

Now he was just watching how they operated while taking care of his equipment. The scout rifle was currently spread across the table next to him in pieces. The receiver, or frame of the rifle was what had been damaged. More specifically, it was the lower part that held the magazine, which is why he had noticed it the night before.

The magazine itself was more or less a complete write off at that point. He could still feed cartridges into the rifle from the top and fire them one at a time. However, if the damage went beyond what he had seen, then that was a good way to completely ruin the gun and possibly hurt himself. Which is why he had taken it a part.

The scout rifle still had a scope and a suppressor on it. Both of which made it a valuable gun for this job if he wanted to be silent and shoot from a distance. His eyes were incredibly helpful in telling him when something was within measured specs, and when they weren’t. It required a bit of focus and playing around with a few settings, but he had gotten it to work, eventually. Of course, that assumed he knew what the original specifications were.

In this case, he didn’t, but he was making an educated guess based on the unbent sections that were around it. With that information, he was confident that he could fix it back at the apartment as long as he took it slow. There were a few other damaged components as well, however, nothing that would keep him from firing it if he was careful.

Trace put it back together and refocused his attention on the Pinetree-Wolves.

As he watched them go about their activities, he wondered why someone had put a job on these idiots. They were calling themselves a gang, but from watching them, it almost felt like they were neighborhood bullies. They shook down the few locals, but that was it.

From his vantage point, he couldn’t see into their buildings well enough for more information. So, he could only assume they were doing something more drastic out here. Making drugs, or at least running it for someone else, possibly working in the arms trade for some easy money.

Operating out of a scarpo town meant fewer eyes on your operation, at least till you reached the walls of the city.

No matter what, after making his way out here, he refused to believe that this was about some new gang wanting to butt in on some turf. No, his new bet was that these two gangs were working together on something. Whether it was drugs, weapons, or something else, he didn’t care, but someone obviously did.

And they wanted both gangs weakened for their own purposes.

As an Edger, the morality of the jobs he accepted was often in question. All you could do was select jobs that you felt the best about with the information you had on hand.

You couldn’t worry about what happened after the job, that was outside your purview. All you could do was decide whether the job itself was one that you could live with having completed. Which in this case, the answer was yes. No matter what, weakening a couple of gangs was always a good thing.

After studying the gang for several hours and seeing a near-constant stream of people going in and out of the building, he saw a delivery truck coming down the road. There was no need for him to even guess where that particular vehicle was headed.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Running down the stairs, he reached the second floor in time to run across the entryway and make a short jump onto the rear roof portion of the truck. Laying down flat, he kept his eyes open for any watchers from above. He hadn’t spotted any earlier, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Inside the loading area of the building, he was finally able to see what it was this gang dealt in. It was all unimpressive weaponry, from the looks of it. Basic crap without any sort of mods. It was the sort of cobbled-together crap that was similar to his old gun.

These weapons were all extremely cheap to buy, and also really unreliable. How much money were they even making in selling these?

Pushing the matter from his mind for the moment, Trace jumped up and grabbed hold of a ceiling joist. Silently, he made his way deeper into the building, the dark mottled colors of his clothes helping him stay hidden. If anyone looked up, they might see the slight gleam of light reflected off the barrel of his scout rifle or the assault rifle, but that was it.

He reached the end of the path in the ceiling and held for a moment to conduct an S&R scan. There was no telling how many members were outside his range, from what he was detecting the current building he was in, did not have the bulk of the gang in it. A fact that he was very grateful for.

While he felt no particular compunction against killing them, he didn’t particularly want to be swarmed, either. Quiet and invisible was the name of the game.

Trace waited until no one was nearby to jump from the ceiling joist to the nearby stairs leading up.

With the suppressed CD-10 in hand, he crept up the stairs. Thanks to his scans, he knew where the nearby people and cameras were. Despite having that information, he soon came across a wrinkle he hadn’t been expecting, traps.

At first glance, they were inelegant laser-tripped mines and bombs. Which, to be fair, is more or less exactly what they were. The elegance came from the sophisticated handshake protocol all of them possessed. If anyone from the gang came within a certain range of them, the traps would automatically deactivate so they could pass.

It allowed the gang to trap nearly every hallway Trace would have taken. A few of them were placed in areas that he would have been able to skirt around using other methods. Most, however, were placed along the sole path.

At least that is what he thought at first. It turned out that the gang had forgotten about the ducting. Slipping into the first room he came across; he spotted the grating that ran along the floor. A moment later, he was crawling along a dusty ductwork system, completely ignoring the traps.

He followed it all the way to what he thought was the office. Peeking through the grate slats, he saw three people sitting around a desk, talking. The man closest to him, the one who seemed in charge, was holding an ink-sheet that he was taking notes on. The other two appeared to be his lieutenants in the gang or other form of sub-leaders. They were also sporting a fair bit of cyberware and very little synth skin anywhere to be seen.

They weren’t fully auged-out, or anything. They weren’t anywhere close to that level of cyberware integration. From what he could see, they had both swapped out their legs and arms in full. That meant they had also at least partially replaced their skeletons and internal organs with reinforced parts to support the changes.

Trace frowned, as he listened to them talk business. Those sorts of upgrades weren’t cheap. They weren’t the sort of hardware gang members that were peddling bottom-of-the-barrel weapons should be able to afford.

Regardless, he wasn’t going to attack the room with all of them in there. That would be a quick way to die.

Eventually, the meeting ended, and the two across from the leader got up to leave.

Trace ran a couple of S&R scans to make sure they had actually left before making his move. The aiming sights on the CD-10 were linked to his eyes, giving him a targeting reticle of where the bullet was expected to go. Carefully, he placed the suppressed barrel near the grate slats, aimed at the back of the man’s chair, and pulled the trigger.

With quiet bursts of air, he walked his aim up the back of the chair, ending with a shot in the man’s skull. He had initially been worried that the chair might have been bulletproof, but the explosive release of stuffing quickly set his mind at ease.

Sure, putting five bullets into one man might be a little extreme, normally. After seeing how many augments the other two had been sporting, he wasn’t willing to take any chances.

Trace wanted this job to go off as easily as it possibly could, and if that meant putting a few extra holes in the leader, then so be it.

The grate had been partially shredded and came off easily enough.

Without delay, he began gathering up everything that was on top of the desk. It was only when he took a moment to turn and look at the leader that he felt his blood run cold.

He was definitely dead, but it was also more appropriate to call the body an android instead of anything that had once been human.

Barely holding back the urge to curse, he began taking photos of everything. He wanted to know what Stick-Point had gotten him involved in. This was supposed to be a relatively easy job, not one with gangs that could afford androids!

It felt like he was having some weird luck with jobs lately.

‘What the hosing-shizz is this?’ He sent off to Stick-Point along with a few pictures.

With that out of the way, he went back to collecting everything he could find. The appearance of the android certainly threw his plans into a shredder. How was he supposed to collect information from a computer that the android hadn’t been using? All of that information existed on the other end, where the person who had undoubtedly been controlling the android was.

A person who was probably already in the process of telling everyone his precious android had sprung a few leaks.

How was he going to escape this situation? He couldn’t use the vents; they would be expecting that.

Trace glanced at the window. They were a few floors up, much too high for him to jump. There was a small lip that he could hang onto that ran around the entire building. It would be tough with all the extra weight he was carrying, but he might be able to make it to another window.

Whether he could do it without being seen was another matter.

Either way, he was out of time and choices.

Trace dove toward the window and the ledge, hoping for all that he was worth his fingers would hold.