Juliet had known the location for Vicky’s operation ever since the day she and Hines had questioned Ernie and “Bullethead,” the big creep who’d slapped Bennet around and threatened Aya with a gun. As she parked her bike, a half mile from the blinking dot on her mini-map, she had Angel call Hines. He was quick to pick up, though his eyes looked a little bleary, and his surroundings were dark. Stifling a yawn, he asked, “Lucky? Something happen?”
“Not yet, but I wanted to ask if there’s any chance I could get a contract to pick up Vicky and her cronies. I know it’s kind of spur of the moment, but . . .”
“Yeah, sure. Done. When I showed up to work this afternoon, I was promoted to acting lieutenant. Not a big deal, considering I was one of two sergeants still in the precinct who hadn’t ‘disappeared,’ and I had eight years of seniority on the other one. Anyway, I have authorization to offer bounty contracts, and there ain’t anybody around here to stop me.” He yawned again, blinking his eyes and peering at something. “Eleven? Shit, I’ve only been sleeping an hour! I was hoping it was morning. Give me twenty minutes to send over the contract, and then I’ll call the watch sergeant to let her know you might be calling.”
“Um, sure, I’ll wait for the contract. What kind of help can I expect from LCS?”
“Not a lot on short notice. I was going to put together a task force to start cleaning up operations like Vicky’s now that some of the dirt got scooped out of the department. If you want to wait, I can get some uniforms over your way. Hold on.” He cleared his throat and peered closely into the camera. “You aren’t tackling Vicky on your own, are you? She’s got a damn sizeable crew.”
“At midnight on a Monday? How many do you figure will be in the warehouse?”
“Oh, I’ve no damn idea! For all I know, she could have twenty guys working on a batch of stolen cars.”
Juliet snorted, shrugging. “So, send me the contract, and I’ll call LCS when I have things in hand.”
“Ah, dammit, you couldn’t wait ‘til morning? I’m never gonna get to sleep now.” Hines grunted as he shifted to the side of his bed. A light came on, and Juliet saw he was wearing a stained, frayed, white tank top. He yawned, scratched at his stubbly chin, and said, “I’ll do the contract. Only hitch is getting the judge to sign off. Shouldn’t be a problem; I know one who lets his PAI handle this stuff late at night. When I’m done, I’ll get ahold of the department and make sure some help is ready to come in when you call.” He grunted, grumbling, “Then I’m going back to sleep.”
“Thanks, Hines.” Juliet smiled sweetly, hamming it up for him. “I knew I could count on you.” When he returned her smile, albeit more sour than sweet, she closed the call window and got off her bike, removing her helmet. After stowing it on its cradle, she dug around in her seat compartment, pulling out a fistful of shrink-cords and stuffing them into her back pocket.
Stretching her neck, inhaling the cool but chemically-tinged air, Juliet started strolling down the dark, deserted street, keeping to the shadows of the big, boxy warehouse buildings. Most of them had security fences blocking off their front parking lots. Most also had cameras and floodlights, so it was only really dark between the regularly spaced access gates. Still, Juliet found it easy to keep to the shadows by meandering to either side of the street as she walked, avoiding the gates and their cameras.
It wasn’t that she thought she could be invisible; it was more that she didn’t want to catch anyone’s eye by being conspicuous. She’d tied her hair back in a ponytail, keeping it out of her eyes, and, with her fingers brushing the grip of her revolver, she carefully scanned ahead with her high-end optics. According to her mini-map, she had to turn at the four-way stop sign ahead, and then Vicky’s warehouse would be about a hundred meters to the right.
The warehouse on the corner had a fenced yard, so Juliet walked along that barrier up to the intersection and peered around to the right. There weren’t many lights on outside Vicky’s warehouse, but there was one amber floodlight on a post beside the open gateway. She could see headlights in the yard, moving as a van drove to the far end of the building and then turned right, leaving her line of sight. Low conversation and movement drew her eyes back to the gate, where she saw three figures lingering, leaning against the fence, chatting in the glow of the floodlight.
All three wore typical banger attire—synthetic leather and polymer jackets, bulky, metallic prosthetics, gear and implants with too many LEDs, and, of course, oversized, intimidating weapons. She was about to inspect their gear and try to hear their conversation when Angel said, “Your contract just came through.” A blinking icon appeared on her AUI, and Juliet stepped back around the corner to look at it:
Posting #
L2942c
Requested Role:
Investigative, Apprehension
Rep Level:
D-S+
Job Description:
LCS Official Contract: The LCS department requests the investigation of illegal, stolen goods dismantling and distribution activities at 17 Commercial Row in Luna City Industrial Dome I5B. This contract serves as a warrant for investigating the above-listed property, approved by LC Corporate Magistrate Roger Voight, #82555. Any resistance is grounds for arrest, and standard rules of force escalation are approved.
Compensation:
45,000 Sol-bits, payable on completion, with a bonus comprised of outstanding bounties.
Scavenge Rights:
Yes
Location:
Luna City
Date:
August 6, 2108
She was distracted by the contract and might have missed the sound of approaching footsteps, but Angel noticed them and closed the window. “Someone’s coming!” Juliet stuffed her hands in her pockets and slumped her shoulders. Pacing away from the fence into the road, she walked in a slow circle while talking softly.
“Yeah. I sent you a pin. Can’t believe the jerk left me here.”
“Ah,” Angel said. “I see what you’re doing.”
“Yep. Hurry, please. This place is creepy!” Juliet put a little whine in her voice as she turned back toward the corner, looking for the source of the footsteps. She saw him right away—one of the men who’d been standing near Vicky’s gate. He was tall, with a bright orange mohawk, a surgically attached pair of military-grade optic lenses where his eyes should be, and, drawing most of Juliet’s attention, a bulky plasteel and stainless arm with a forearm-mounted shotgun barrel. He wore cutoff jeans, exposing metallic, piston-driven legs, and a long, black polymer duster Juliet knew could likely resist most small-arms fire.
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“You lost, sugar?” he asked, his tone strangely sweet coming from a man with jagged metallic shark’s teeth.
“I have a ride coming.” Juliet stepped back, easily portraying nervousness because the guy was plenty intimidating. As she retreated, he stepped forward, and she subvocalized, “Charge up the EMP.” One of the selling points of her new “Tightbeam 9” data jack was its ability to use its transmission antennae to send a focused EMP burst. It only took a few seconds to charge up the capacitors before it would be ready to fire.
“Really? Kind of a strange place to be waiting for a ride. Why don’t you come with me, and we can make sure you get where you need to go?”
“His optics look shielded, Juliet. I hope his PAI isn’t also mil-spec.” Angel sounded nervous, but Juliet wasn’t too worried. He was banger muscle, and they always went for showy, powerful augmentation before they started worrying about high-end data ports and hardened PAI chips. She might be wrong, of course, but she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.
Taking another step back, shaking her head slowly, she asked, “Um, can’t I just sit here on the curb and wait? I got in a fight with my ex, and he dumped me here.”
“Well, you don’t look helpless, do you? That’s quite a little cannon on your hip there. Is that a sword, too?” He was smiling as he spoke, but then his mouth closed, his lips turned down, and he focused those weird black lenses on Juliet’s gun. “Wait a minute . . .”
Juliet lifted her left arm, pointing her wrist at his head, and said, “Now, Angel.” She didn’t have to say anything; Angel knew what she was doing. A soft hiss of static and a tiny flicker of her optics were the only clues that she’d just fired the EMP. Well, her only clue other than the banger slapping his hands to his head and stumbling backward. Juliet’s strategic backward movement had taken them several meters away from the corner of the fence, but she figured if anyone was looking hard enough, they could probably still see what was happening. With that in mind, she acted fast.
“Ugh, what the fuck?” the banger grunted, lowering his chromed arm and waving it in front of him. He was pumping the limb in and out, and she wondered if he was trying to figure out how to fire his built-in gun without his AUI in place. Was there a way? She didn’t want to find out—quick as an adder, she stepped around the lanky man, snaked her powerful right arm around his neck, and pressed her knee into the small of his back, pulling hard while cranking his head forward with her left arm, squeezing off the supply of blood to his brain. He thrashed violently for a few seconds, but Juliet had been in plenty of grappling sessions with larger partners; her arm was up to the task.
His resistance culminated in a last-ditch effort to throw her off with his oversized cyber arm. Reaching over his shoulder, he grabbed ahold of Juliet’s jacket collar and jerked his arm as hard as he could. It might have worked; he could probably lift half a ton with that arm, but Juliet’s jacket gave up the ghost, ripping to shreds as the big man pulled a big square of material away and then collapsed to his knees. Juliet growled, squeezing tight, waiting for him to slump into submission. It took another three or four seconds, but the fight was out of him, and Juliet rode him down, her knees in his back, as he fell to the pavement on his face.
She didn’t waste any time, pulling out her new data jack and plugging it into his thick plastic data port. “Watchdog,” she grunted.
Angel’s voice was soothingly calm as she replied, “Installing.”
Juliet heaved for breath, looking at the corner, trying to peer through the layers of chain-link fencing to see if anyone was coming. She didn’t see anything, but she knew the guys her victim had been on duty with must be wondering what he’d gotten up to.
Had they seen her at the corner? Had he reported it in? Were they just assuming he was wandering around, doing his patrol? She couldn’t wait long to find out. While Angel did her thing with the man’s PAI, Juliet pulled a shrink-cord out of her pocket and hooked his human wrist to one of the pistons on his cybernetic arm behind his back. It probably wasn’t necessary, not with Angel’s watchdog controlling his PAI when it rebooted, but she wanted to be sure.
“I can access their network through his PAI; the EMP took it offline, so installing the watchdog as it rebooted was easy.”
Juliet smiled. “How much access? Can you control the cameras?”
“Not control, but view. I’ll send Fido in, though, and I'm sure he’ll get us full control in a few minutes.”
“Oof!” Suddenly, the big man jerked awake, straining his back and grunting. “The hell’s going on?”
“I’ve disabled his implants. He’s in the dark.”
“What about his ears?” Juliet hissed, still kneeling on him, trying to keep him from rolling over.
“They’re natural!”
“Listen, dummy!” Juliet slapped the shaved part of his head beside his mohawk. “Quit jerking around, or I’m going to zap you.”
“Get off me!” He arched his back, and Juliet hopped off, swearing.
“Do it, Angel!” Angel didn’t reply, but the banger suddenly collapsed, twitching, his mouth hanging open, saliva drizzling onto the pavement. Juliet grunted, furiously yanking her arms out of the sleeves of her ruined jacket. “My favorite jacket, jerk!” She checked the pockets, made sure they were empty, and then threw the coat across the street into a narrow alley between two warehouses.
Still scowling, almost irrationally irritated, she brushed her palms off on her jeans, eyeing the street corner. Angel said, “I’m in the camera network. The other two gate guards are both smoking and chatting. They don’t seem concerned about this man.”
“Really? Huh.” Juliet wasn’t all that surprised. This was a chop shop that had enjoyed protection from LCS; they’d probably grown relatively lax when it came to security. “Let me know when you can mess with the cameras, you know, put ‘em on a loop or something.”
“I will, but in the meantime, I can probably call one of the other guards here using Eightball’s PAI.”
Juliet grinned. “Eightball?” She looked down at the guy’s orange mohawk, wondering where he’d gotten the name. “Maybe his optics?” She shrugged, then grabbed him by the ankles and started dragging him across the road into the alley where she’d thrown her jacket. Once she was into the shadows and Eightball was tucked against the side of the building, she squatted down and aimed her wrist at the alley entrance, checking her line of sight. “Okay, Angel, charge up the Tightbeam, then lure one over.” The bio-battery for the data jack would recharge over time, but, according to Ladia, she could get a few EMP pulses out of it before having to wait.
“What should I say to them?”
“Um,” Juliet frowned, looking down at the insensate banger. “I don’t know. Something like, ‘I was taking a leak and saw a bit-locker chip in the gutter. Help me fish it out.’” Juliet chuckled at the silliness of the idea.
It might have been silly, but it worked. “One of them is coming,” Angel reported. “His name is Rabies.”
“Oh, brother,” Juliet sighed, shaking her head. “Wonder how he earned that one.”
Rabies turned out to be a lot slimmer and less geared out than Eightball when it came to weapons, but he had auditory and ocular implants, so her EMP sent him to the pavement, wailing in dismay. Juliet leaped on him, choked him into submission, and then installed a watchdog, all in just a handful of seconds. She was sweating and panting by the time she’d bound him and left him lying beside Eightball, which made her wish she’d taken the time to swing by the hangar and, at the very least, pick up her needler. Of course, she had the injectors in her left hand, but only three applications, and she already had one target in mind for them.
Angel displayed a row of icons on her AUI labeled Criminal Cam 1 through Criminal Cam 8. “I’m ready with the cameras. Shall I create a loop showing all three guards on duty?”
“Yes. I’m about to deal with number three. How many, um, employees are you counting on the feeds?”
“Twelve that I’ve identified as unique. However, I’m sure the cameras don’t cover some areas.”
“Twelve, huh? Sheesh. I probably should’ve gotten more equipment and maybe planned this out better.” Despite her admitted ill-preparedness, Juliet left the alley and walked back across the street, determined to see things through.
Rounding the corner, her gait was calm and measured as she approached the gate to the illicit chop shop. The last guard was leaning against the fencepost on the far side of the still-open gate. Angel highlighted the high-end, assault-style rifle on a sling hanging by his side, and Juliet frowned. So far, the gate guards, at least, had been a lot more equipped than she’d expected from some warehouse-robbing bangers. “Is that a smart gun?”
“Yes. Rome Armaments, model 1140. It has course-correcting, seven-millimeter projectiles capable of adjusting their trajectory mid-flight—minute adjustments, but they’re remarkably effective against moving targets. He has a forty-six-round magazine, and the gun is capable of automatic, burst, or semi-automatic operation.”
“Noted,” Juliet whispered, exhaling softly as she saw the guard look up and take note of her.
“Yo! Who are you?” He lifted his gun, holding it ready, but, surprisingly, with the barrel trained on the ground between them.
Juliet kept walking, smiling, tucking her fingers into her front pockets, and shrugging in a flirty sort of way. “Oh, hey. I’m Eightball’s cousin. He told me to meet him here.”
“Huh?” The guard looked past her to the corner. “Didn’t you see him down there?”
Juliet glanced over her shoulder and then back to him, lifting one of her perfect, glossy nails to her lower lip. “Are you teasing me? He wasn’t back there.” She still had one hand in her pocket, and she sort of swayed left to right, smiling as demurely as she could. The whole thing felt so ridiculous, she almost laughed, but she used that humor, smiling into her absurd flirtation as she stepped even closer, within arm’s length of the banger guard.
“I swear, he just went over that way. I think he was in an alley, just-argh!” The one exclamation was all he got out as Juliet’s left hand darted out and tapped him on the neck. Angel had cranked her speed augmentation to the max and fired the neuro-toxin injection with flawless timing. The guard fell, limp and barely breathing at Juliet’s feet. Still moving with lightning speed, Juliet pulled her data cable out and nimbly jammed it into his data port. While Angel worked to subdue his PAI, she examined the warehouse yard, slowly panning left to right, letting Angel run her various scans.
She knew Angel had control of the cameras, but she was worried the van she’d seen earlier would leave again or some other bangers would come out to the gate. So far, there wasn’t any sign of movement. Juliet saw pallets, flatbed trailers, and some garbage bins inside the fence, so as soon as Angel gave her the go-ahead, she started dragging the third guard over to one of the flatbeds with a half-meter sidewall. With a grunt and an extra strong heave from her cybernetic arm, she hoisted him up over the sidewall and left him there, insensate. Before leaving, though, she lifted out his smart gun.
“Can you hack this thing to work for me?” Juliet asked, squatting behind the trailer, scanning the weapon for a data port.
“If you plug into that port,” Angel said, highlighting the tiny slot on the bottom of the stock.
“I mean, my goal wasn’t to come in here and kill everyone, but if things get bad, I won’t mind having another gun.”
“I can work on it while you move. The doors on the east end of the building open into a hallway, which is currently unoccupied. Go now while it’s clear.”
Juliet nodded and started jogging across the yard, aiming for the highlighted doors. As she moved, Angel updated her mini-map with the warehouse layout, complete with red dots for all the criminals she’d picked up on the internal cameras. Juliet felt a little daunted seeing all those dots, but she was the one who’d decided to do this job on the spur of the moment—she’d have to deal with the consequences. Gritting her teeth in a fierce grin, two parts excited and one part nervous, she slipped through the doors and into Vicky’s criminal operation.