The successful prospects were led out of the pit by a different gate, opened up in the wall of the arena. It led directly into a metal staircase that carried the new recruits up and into the middle of the crowd. On their way into the pit, they had been separated from the Chosen by a grated ceiling and curls of razor wire, with the Chosen hurling insults down from above as they gambled on the bloodshed that was about to happen.
On the way out, there was no such divide. The stairs simply climbed up into the crowd itself and the same voices that had been hurling scorn now shouted in celebration at bets won, or mockingly commiserated bets lost. There was nothing separating the new and old members, and as they ascended the staircase arms reached over to slap them on the back, or held out half-drunk cans of beer to their personal favourites.
Bitch had clearly earned herself some admirers with her fight; when the first hand clapped her on the shoulder she noticeably flinched, before Tattletale told her to stay calm and she took the other gestures and congratulations with the impassiveness of steel.
Perched in the tightly-packed web of her personal area network, I saw Rachel’s synapses light up as low-level monitoring systems spun into life in the drones she kept stowed in the back of her van. They weren’t monitoring anything in particular – just the negligible power drain the monitoring systems were having on the drone’s battery – but that wasn’t the point.
In the warehouse, she glanced back for a moment and I caught a glimpse of the pit through a momentary gap in the crowd. There were Chosen down there – junior ones, judging from their relative lack of cyberware – dragging away the human detritus from the pit’s floor; moving the living off to one side and piling up the dead or near-dead in a heap, where a more chromed-up Chosen was salvaging their cyberware with a callous disregard for the dead flesh attached to the metal.
In the middle of the carnage, the monster stood as still as a statue, his beady mechanical eyes surveying the scene with a placid expression on his face. It was as if his stock of life had run dry when he was making the speech and all that was left was the machine.
On a whim, I opened up a window in the matrix and began trawling through image search algorithms, trying to match up his barely-human features to any past appearances. It didn’t take me long to find a myriad of different recordings amongst the false positives, showing Hookwolf at various points in his career.
In some he was fighting in a pit much like the one Bitch had just climbed out of, in others he was speaking to a crowd of Chosen, or leading the charge in violent street brawls filmed by nervous onlookers from the windows of their tenements. In all of them he was augmented, but still recognisably human, and his every move and expression was full of life; of anger, hate and the thrill of the fight.
I could never feel sorry for a monster like that, but I found the snapshot glance of him in the pit was lingering in my mind. I couldn’t help wondering what he’d given up to reach his current form. I wasn’t sure what would be worse; that he reached this point without realising, that it was forced on him by circumstance or that he willingly carved away at himself until only this remained.
Bitch was still hemmed in by the crowd, but the momentum was changing. Rather than the prospects and the members running into each other around the lip of the pit, the crowd had gradually shifted to move as one, spilling out across the expansive floor of the warehouse as I saw bars and kegs of beer being opened up through momentary gaps in the press.
Under Tattletale’s direction, Bitch made her way over to one of the stands and accepted a clear plastic cup of some nearly pitch-black beer from a Chosen girl with the skin on the side of her head above her ear cut away to reveal her deep grey subdermal armour, in what had to be the most extreme side shave I’d ever seen.
As she turned to work her way back through the crowd, I caught sight of Hookwolf making his way up a flight of stairs to what looked like an old supervisor’s office; a number of rooms hugging the corner of the ceiling, where they had a commanding view of the factory floor.
“Try and see if you can find Cricket,” Tattletale said. She didn’t offer an explanation and Bitch didn’t ask for one, but I could see the logic in the idea; taking the gang lieutenant up on her offer to the mechanics in the crowd would be a good way to get close to the leadership.
The crowd had properly dispersed, though there was still a large number gathered around the fighting pit. From the sound of the chatter, it seemed the dogfights would begin in a few minutes. The rest of the warehouse seemed to serve as more of a clubhouse than anything else – like a trideo biker gang hangout with graffiti daubed on the walls, worn pseudo-leather sofas torn half to shreds by jagged cyberware and random exercise equipment scattered about the place.
There were Chosen pairing off in makeshift fighting tournaments, throwing each other onto the concrete floor without a care in the world as sparks flew from clashing cyberlimbs. The lieutenant who’d served as the announcer in the pit – with the tiger etched into his chest – was moving throughout the brawling pairs, correcting poor form and egging the fighters on.
Cricket was watching the fight from an old armchair, typing away at an AR keyboard as she made notes on the cyberdeck she’d linked up to her internal CPU. It was a closed loop – the laptop connected to her brain by a physical wire rather than through the matrix – but from the way she was looking at the fighters I presumed she was making notes on their performance.
As Bitch approached, another one of the prospects who’d claimed engineering experience beat her to it. At Tattletale’s suggestion, Bitch hung back, her enhanced senses picking up the conversation between the two. The prospect was a shaven-headed man in his mid-thirties, with a South Missouri State flag tattooed on his shoulder, just above the crest of some military unit.
With Bitch’s cybernetics, I could isolate and enhance the conversation between the two of them, filtering out the ambient din of the warehouse and amplifying their quiet dialogue. As was blatantly obvious from his tattoos, the ex-soldier was from the Confederation of American States – the UCAS’ estranged neighbour to the south – and he had spent two years in the CAS’ military as an electrical engineer stationed in Austin, on the border with Aztlan.
Cricket pushed further into his past, making him recount the series of screw ups that had led him from the Texan desert to the rainy shore of a whole other country. She also dug into what he didn’t tell her, rudimentary agents sniffing out his trail in the matrix and picking out past addictions and a hefty active warrant out in St Louis that had prompted him to flee across the border in the first place. To no great surprise, the victim of the murder was a dwarven college student.
I did some digging of my own; the victim was the son of a mid-level NeoNet manager with corporate citizenship of his own. Enough heat to get even Lone Star to pay attention.
“Do we have a good cover of our own?” Tattletale asked, listening to the same conversation. “I know I asked you to volunteer that you were in a gang; did I guess right?”
Bitch responded, succinctly.
“What about tech experience?” I asked, as Cricket waved the Confederate off. “Cyberware but not drones?”
“My thoughts exactly,” Lisa replied. “Drones don’t carry anything interesting, but people this chromed-up will have digital memories.”
Cricket locked eyes with Bitch and waved her over, still devoting half her attention to the sparring Chosen. Some of the new recruits had been dragged into the exercise and the gang lieutenant was moving through the crowd taking them through the basics of hand to hand combat. He hadn’t grabbed Bitch, and it was quickly evident why; these were the new recruits who’d survived more by luck or cunning than by skill, so they were getting a crash course in how to fight.
“So,” Cricket began, her voice droning from the speaker set in her throat as she bared her teeth in a grimacing smile. “What do they call you?”
“Bitch.”
The razorgirl’s eyes narrowed, her grimace tightening, but whatever she was looking for in Rachel’s cybernetic eyes, she didn’t find it.
“That so?” she asked. “Got a name, Bitch? A SIN?”
I flashed a message on Bitch’s HUD, trusting that she could read and respond a lot faster than listening.
“Rachel Lindt,” she said, shrugging her shoulders before rattling off the twelve digit number that defined her status as a person – at least in the eyes of civilisation. “CPS gave it to me.”
It’d give Cricket enough to sink her teeth into, but if Rachel had shown up in a system since becoming a Shadowrunner it might reveal her occupation, which would raise a red flag so large it could be seen from Zurich Orbital.
Sure enough, Bitch’s wireless node gave me just enough feedback to notice the pair of agents that set off into the Matrix, heading for some Chosen system off in the city somewhere. Which meant this wasn’t their headquarters, but we weren’t expecting it to be.
“Uh huh. And your gang. What was it?”
“Wolfpack,” Bitch answered without being prompted. “Pittsburgh outskirts.”
“What did they have you fixing?”
“Nothing,” Bitch answered. “They just needed another gun. After I left, I did my own cyberware.”
“Your own-” Cricket leant forward in her seat, the trainees entirely forgotten as she looked at Bitch with genuine interest for the first time in the conversation. “How did you manage that?”
“Local anaesthetic and a control rig linked to an Ares Dueller,” she answered.
“Shit, fair enough.” Cricket’s voicebox let out a harsh staticky noise – an attempt at a chuckle, I thought. “If you’re lying, you at least get points for the sheer fucking balls of it. Of course” – she stood up, dismissing the AR keyboard and tucking her cyberdeck into a pouch on her belt – “you understand I can’t just take your word for that.”
“I get it,” Bitch nodded.
Cricket looked around the warehouse floor, her eyes drifting over the crowd. I couldn’t see it through Bitch’s limited wireless presence, but I suspected that she was looking through the matrix as well. After a few seconds, she’d found who she was looking for and she strode through the crowds with a purposeful gait, men much taller and larger than her parting and looking at her with wary respect.
Her target was a small group of people sprawled out on a pair of tattered syn-leather sofas, splitting three bottles of vodka between six people as they passed around an inhaler of something. Bitch didn’t have an augmented nose, but from the blissed out expression on the young woman who’d taken it last, I figured it wasn’t medicinal.
There was a definite imbalance in the group dynamic, with four of the group being noticeably less augmented than the other two, who both sported artificial jaws fashioned into snarling maws. The larger of the pair looked to be over six feet tall, with bulging muscles and dull metal cyberarms that ended in spiked knuckles. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, but his torso was crossed by a leather harness that was laden with ammunition and grenade pouches, as well as decorative spikes of rusted scrap metal.
His companion was shorter – maybe five and a half feet – and his body was more wiry than muscular. His own artificial jaw had been almost callously sutured to his skin, with matte black ceramics poking through his flesh in a jumble of misshapen spiked teeth. His eyes, on the other hand, had been replaced by cameras recessed in the back of his dyed eye sockets which, in combination with the tattoos on his face, created the impression of a grinning, mutated skull. Compared to that grim visage his outfit was almost boring, with a simple black t-shirt, a pair of jeans and the kind of armour vest you could buy at JCPenney.
Before they were within earshot, however, Cricket abruptly grabbed Bitch by the arm and pulled her in close, staring into her optics with a dangerous intensity – the gritted snarl of her teeth back on full display.
“Wolfpack, Pittsburgh outskirts.”
“That’s right,” Bitch replied, staring right back into Cricket’s own eyes.
“Mixed-race gang,” Cricket drawled, and if the voicebox in her neck were capable of it I was sure she would have spat. “With a trog at the top.”
“Shit!” Tattletale exclaimed, but I barely heard her. Cricket’s agents must have found news feeds or arrest reports about Bitch’s old gang. It was a stupid mistake – one I should have seen coming – and I scrambled to fix it.
“Werewolf was a tusker,” Bitch said, reading off the words I’d put in her head no matter how dirty the slur made me feel. “He gave me my first chrome, stuck a monitoring system in my head and used me as cannon fodder. Werewolf’s also dead. I still have the footage of me ventilating his skull, if you want to see it.”
Once again, Cricket studied Bitch’s face, looking for any sign of deceit, but she might as well have been staring into a brick wall.
“Nah,” she said after a moment, breaking the silence. “I think I’m good. You’ve got the look of a born killer. Like I said, doesn’t matter what gang you ran with before. You leave that person in the pit.”
Tattletale let out a long sigh, and I noticed that she’d momentarily cut off her audio to Bitch.
“Sheesh, Taylor, I see what you meant. You’re sitting on one hell of an arsenal. Remind me to never get on your bad side, omae.”
Cricket had moved on as if the incident never happened, releasing her grip on Bitch’s arm as she made a beeline for the pair of Chosen.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
“Hey, Barker!” she shouted, and the one with the skull for a face looked up, his movements a little sluggish from whatever was in the inhaler he’d just taken.
“Oh hey, boss,” he drawled, holding out the inhaler in front of him. “Want a hit? It’s Bliss. Not med-grade, but still pretty wiz.”
Cricket just glared at him for a moment, as Barker almost seemed to physically wilt under the pressure, before she turned back to Bitch.
“Barker, this is Bitch. She’s a new recruit.”
“No shit?” Barker asked, his featureless optics swivelling slightly in the back of his eye sockets as his attention shifted, looking Bitch up and down. “Gonna stick her in our crew?” – the man beside him shifted in his seat, doing interesting things to the taut musculature of his bare chest. “Biter, Barker and his Bitch in heat. Bet a razorgirl like you is just dying for a real cyberpsycho to take her for a ride.”
He leered at Bitch, as he dug his hand into his groin in some sort of scratch or a lewd gesture.
“Bitch is gonna cut that arm off,” Cricket spoke, her tone deadpan. She let the fear sink into Biter’s expression for a few moments, as the target of his lust just stood there, weathering his disgusting stare with all the emotion of a machine. Rachel might have hidden herself away in her own head, but in a lot of ways she was still a stronger person than me.
“She says she’s a ripperdoc,” Cricket elaborated when it looked like Barker was about to say something else. “So she’s gonna prove it. On you.”
“Hold on a second-” Barker managed to stammer out. “You sure this is safe?”
Beside him, Biter chuckled, the larger man’s chest rising and falling as he looked over Bitch.
“Since when do you give a shit about safe, huh? Remember when you gave yourself sepsis putting those fucking teeth in?”
“If she fucks up we’ll bring in a medic,” Cricket said, folding her arms in front of her chest as she glared down at Barker. “Stop being such a pussy and come on.”
Barker grumbled, but stood up.
“Good fucking luck!” Biter said, holding up a tin of beer as he saluted his… friend? Partner? Colleague? I wasn’t sure.
I had a lot of expectations for the Chosen’s operating theatre, but it met none of them. Cricket led Rachel to an old military truck in the corner of the warehouse, surrounded by enough boxes and crates that it was clear it had been there for a long time and with a set of steps leading up into the back. There was a generator next to the truck, pumping power in through neatly-ordered cables with covers where they ran over the warehouse floor.
A ramp stretched down from the door at the back of the truck; a cross-hatched tread plate that would provide grip even when the surface was slick with blood and more than wide enough to comfortably fit four people carrying a stretcher.
Inside, the forest green of the military truck gave way to sterile white walls, while the metal floor of the space had clearly been cleaned recently, with clinical white lights running along the length of the roof. Bitch followed Cricket up the ramp, then stepped aside to let Barker up behind her before she turned and pulled the doors of the truck shut.
The sudden absence of noise was almost startling; the pounding din of the back alley powernoize mix cut off completely by the heavy metal doors. For a moment I wondered if Bitch was about to ambush the two Chosen, but instead she cast her gaze over the equipment that filled the room – to my untrained eye, the operating table, glass vials of drugs and shelves of high-spec secure cases seemed brand new.
It was only when Tattletale brought her attention to the quizzical look Cricket gave her that Bitch offered an explanation.
“Don’t want to get distracted.”
“This all looks very professional,” I remarked in the relative privacy of Rachel’s head.
“Yeah,” Tattletale replied. “It’s weird for a gang, which means you should ask about it.”
“This is clean,” Bitch remarked, as her gaze passed over a rack of vials full of some clear glass liquid. I captured a snapshot of the image and pulled it up in my peripheral, magnifying the labels on the vials. A quick search in the matrix revealed that they were medical grade sedatives, and the logo on the label was Medhall. They were even still within their expiry date.
“New, too,” Bitch continued, having clearly noticed the same thing I had without needing to look it up first.
“We take our cyberware seriously,” Cricket said in response – a blatant non-explanation. “You put your life on the line every time you go under the knife. It’s worth spending extra on.
“Besides,” she continued as she browsed the shelves at the far end of the truck, “we encourage people to buy their own chrome – prove they’re willing to improve themselves – but when they do something really impressive we like to reward them with some real top of the line tech.”
“Ask what Barker did,” Tattletale said. “Don’t ask him, ask Cricket.”
“And him?” Rachel asked, gesturing at Barker with his thumb as Cricket picked up a nondescript grey case from one of the higher shelves. “What earned this?”
“I can answer that,” Barker spoke up, suddenly there as he leant against the operating table, about a foot and a half from Bitch’s face.
“You’ve probably seen the riots on the news,” he drawled. “The pawns beating down on all those self-righteous policlub types who think waving flags and signs is ever going to change anything, while the other side gets the kid gloves treatment.”
Cricket’s jaw tightened ever so slightly, but Barker couldn’t see her.
“Well we went in there to level the playing field, rep the species. That sort of thing. Tear gas flying everywhere, Knight Errant trying everything they could to stop us but knowing we had cameras ready in case they started shooting into the crowd. I hit this big fucking tusker in their shield wall, got close enough to slit his throat. It made a gap in the wall, broke their line.”
“We killed eight trained riot officers in a single night,” Cricket interrupted, setting the case down on the table. “At the cost of only two of our own. One of them was a Lieutenant, and four of them weren’t human.”
She set her hands on either side of the case, flicking open the clasps with her thumbs. There was a logo in the centre of the case, showing white text inside a patterned and glossy red circle. Renraku.
“Hookwolf used to like talking about ancient warrior civilisations. He said that in the Roman Legions, the first soldier over the wall was given a golden crown, sculpted to look like battlements. Gold’s too soft for us, and a crown is just a symbol. We give steel.”
She lifted up the lid of the case. There, nestled in its own carefully-cut mould of packing foam, was a human arm that ended past the shoulder with a series of complicated-looking ports and seams, all protected from the air by hard plastic caps and cellophane sheaths.
“Of course,” Cricket observed as she pulled a knife out of her belt, holding it out to Bitch hilt first, “you’re going to have to remove the packaging.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant until Rachel took the knife and immediately began slicing into the synthskin covering on the cybernetic limb, moving with the precision of an expert butcher as she parted it along almost invisible seams and slipped the knife underneath the arm to separate the connection points attaching it to the rigid material below.
It was more than a little disturbing, but I knew there was worse to come. Besides, the synthskin was the wrong colour for Barker.
Despite what Cricket said, the arm wasn’t steel. Instead it was mostly made from a matte black material, with a few pieces of exposed metal around the joints and seams. Carefully, Rachel gripped the arm with her own cybernetic hands and removed it from the foam, leaving the empty sheath of synthskin in the depression.
“Renraku CSB-Sixty-Seven-A,” she observed as she looked it over. “A security-grade cyberarm marketed to close protection details.”
Barker let out a long, low whistle as he leant over, for once looking somewhere other than at Bitch.
“Standard reinforced tendons,” Rachel continued, “ceramic armour plates…” she pushed her metal thumb against a patch of metal underneath the arm and a long rectangular shape snapped out from below the forearm – almost the same length as the forearm it was housed in – “and a type-H Renraku weapons port.”
She moved her left arm back to the case, her hand hovering over the foam before she dug her fingers into a seemingly nondescript part of the packaging, which flipped up to reveal two long, vaguely-rectangular weapons. One was obviously a blade, with a sharpened underside that ended in a point. I could see how it would extend out past the cyberarm’s hand, on the opposite side to the thumb. The other weapon was boxier, but ended in two metal prongs about two centimetres long.
“Well damn,” Barker remarked. “Might as well leave the taser in the box, though.”
“You can fit the blade after the operation,” Bitch replied matter-of-factly. “It clips into the port. Now,” – she slammed the lid of the case shut, quickly buckling one of the clasps and moving the case off the operating table – “take off your shirt and lie down.”
As Barker did as Bitch asked – taking off his tight black t-shirt far slower than was necessary – she handed Cricket’s knife back to her before turning to look over the walls of drugs and surgical tools.
“Local or general?” she asked the air as her hands drifted over a few racks of anaesthetic chemicals in vials and pressurised canisters.
“Or none,” Tattletale muttered to me and me alone.
“Local’s fine,” Cricket answered as Rachel placed a pair of glass vials on a stainless steel side table. Another case joined it a moment later, this one smaller and with a Medhall logo on the front of it.
Come to think of it, almost all of the equipment here is from Medhall, I realised with a start. Maybe their contact is getting them more than just Dopadrine?
Inside the case was an auto-injector, little more than a blocky main body and a pistol grip. Bitch clicked one of the vials into the back of the tool, and as she looked back at Barker – now lying flat on his back – I noticed a small metal implant port on the side of his skull, just behind his right ear.
“He’s got a neural port,” I said to Bitch. “I need you to get access; I might be able to dig something out of his files.”
“Do you have a biomonitor?” Bitch asked, looking down at Barker.
“Yeah?” he replied, a little less cocksure now that he was on the operating table.
Without so much as asking for permission, Bitch unspooled the cable she kept reeled in her left arm – a hardware interface I’d seen her using when she was working on her drones – and slotted it into Barker’s port just before he turned his head to shoot Cricket a questioning look.
“Might want to explain what you just did,” Tattletale spoke up. “Soothe their nerves.”
“Safety precaution,” Bitch said to Cricket. “Without my biomonitor I’d have been working blind when I did my chrome, and hardwiring is more reliable.”
“Fair enough,” Cricket nodded, though she still looked a little suspicious. More to the point, the faint view of the Matrix I could see through Bitch’s wireless connection was enough to know that Cricket had let herself into Barker’s neural network. Either she’d set the network up, or the Chosen required their members to share permissions with the leadership.
A moment later, Barker answered the prompt in his head and allowed the unverified device to interface with his software, which appeared before me as a tethered line in Bitch’s own Personal Area Network. Barker’s PAN was much smaller than her own, but then he wasn’t a Rigger. The biomonitor was already open – they came without firewalls as standard so that they could be accessed by medical personnel – and I could see a steady stream of information about Barker’s body, from his heart rate to the integrity of the connections between his cyberware and his nervous system.
But the real prize was the fact that his commlink was integrated into his neuralware. It was a common enough feature for people who had even the smallest brain-chips, negating the risk of leaving it behind and removing the minor annoyance of carrying the thing around. It was also undoubtedly encrypted, and I didn’t even try to access it myself in case even making the attempt would flag an alert.
I also didn’t want to do anything reckless when I could see Cricket’s mark on the network, watching Bitch’s activity for any hint that she was looking anywhere other than at the biomonitor. Bitch, in turn, was keeping her activities strictly legitimate. After all, she knew I was in here with her, while Cricket didn’t.
In meatspace, Bitch pressed the end of the injector against Barker’s shoulder, and I heard the sharp hiss of compressed air as she pulled the trigger. Biter’s arm went rigid, then limp as the anaesthetic took effect, leaving a trio of red marks on his arm from where the injection had inflamed his flesh.
I spun together a sprite, a woodlouse crawling out of the palm of my hand before I sent it scurrying down the connecting wire and into Barker’s head. As I’d hoped, Cricket didn’t flag the connection – it was too far from what she was expecting to see – and the woodlouse began slowly eating away at Barker’s comm.
“You organlegging?” Bitch asked suddenly, as she paused just before fitting a new vial into the injector.
“No,” Cricket shook her head. “Biowaste bin’s by the door.” She chuckled, a disconcerting sound that came from her throat rather than her voicebox. “Arm’s too stringy to sell, anyway.”
Bitch simply clicked the vial into the injector and gave Barker another dose. She’d aimed lower this time, just below his shoulder, and the skin in a wide area around the infection point immediately began to redden.
As she grabbed a large knife from a specialised sheath designed to contain its monofilament edge, I turned my attention to the Matrix before I saw her lopping off the arm. My sprite was still working away at the comm, but Cricket had apparently gotten bored or curious and had abandoned watching Bitch’s activity in favour of directly probing her PAN.
Her efforts were fumbling and cautious, relying more on stock security agents than her own skills as a hacker, and she was limiting herself to the kind of soft probes that would only be detected by the best firewalls, rather than more overt brute force attacks. I was beginning to get the impression that Cricket was less of a Decker than a software engineer; someone who was an expert at managing and setting up networks, but was far less confident with the sort of on-the-fly improvisation that was needed to hack foreign systems.
There was no comparison between her and someone like Bakuda – who was able to manage both with brutal efficiency – but I was sure that came at some other opportunity cost. It was clear Cricket wasn’t a full-time Decker, instead she split her time between cyberspace and meatspace. The Chosen seemed like the kind of gang where even their medics were expected to fight.
The anaesthetic and congealer had already caused Barker’s biomonitor to start screaming into space, flagging up status report after status report that Bitch reviewed and dismissed with methodical efficiency, but when she cut through his arm in a single chop those alarm systems went into overdrive.
If Barker had a medical plan, the monitor would have already sent out a signal to the provider of his choice and an ambulance would have already been on-route. For that matter, if Bitch was a legitimate medical practitioner she’d have known how to switch off the alarms in favour of a specific surgical diagnostic mode.
But the constant barrage of signals – annoying as they were – did have a fringe benefit; they were loud enough that Cricket actually withdrew back from Barker’s PAN, leaving just an agent to monitor Bitch. Which let my woodlouse finish its work in peace, finally cracking open Barker’s commlink.
As Bitch flensed back the flesh past Barker’s shoulder – something I saw on the biomonitor alone because I’d minimised the camera feed, and I noticed Tattletale had done the same – I dug into Barker’s messages with equally invasive enthusiasm. Unsurprisingly, most of his messages seemed to have only been sent to people who were already in the Chosen, and even in the gang he seemed pretty isolated – there were a lot of contacts he’d only messaged once or twice for a specific issue, a lot of which had gone unanswered.
By far the most common contact was Biter, and it seemed they had known each other long before signing on with the Chosen, working together as a pair of freelance mercenaries before drifting into Brockton Bay, where the merc game got too dangerous for them so they went looking for protection in the form of a gang.
It looked like the decision hadn’t been an easy one, but I wasn’t interested in the trials and tribulations of a pair of asshole stormtroopers. Instead I focused on the more recent messages, finding a very interesting conversation from the day after Andrew Garcia was arrested.
»Change of plan. Handovers been delayed by two days. New location, too. Middleman hasnt passed it on yet«
- Biter (19:52:13/24-2-2070)
»how the fuk come?«
- Barker (19:59:21/24-2-2070)
»Havent you been watching the news?«
- Biter (19:59:21/24-2-2070)
»what the fukin riots?«
- Barker (20:01:38/24-2-2070)
»Yes the fucking riots. Middleman was cagey but word is the guy they nabbed was part of the network«
- Biter (20:02:09/24-2-2070)
»Company guys are running scared in case this isnt just some dead elf catching up with the guy. Theyve got runners checking KEs files in case theyre onto the network«
- Biter (20:02:46/24-2-2070)
»You hearing me?«
- Biter (20:03:52/24-2-2070)
»yeah so fukin what? none of our business what they want to do«
- Barker (20:05:03/24-2-2070)
»long as the wolf gets his stuff in the end«
- Barker (20:05:12/24-2-2070)
»Where the fuck are you anyway? Its all hands tonight«
- Biter (20:05:39/24-2-2070)
»whorehouse. be there in ten«
- Barker (20:07:23/24-2-2070)
I closed the messages, feeling a sense of satisfaction resonating through my ethereal form – the thrill of a hunter closing in for a kill. In meatspace, Bitch had finished fusing the cybernetic arm to Barker’s nervous and circulatory system, and had just injected an agent that would counteract the anaesthetic. Barker’s face clenched up in pain as his nervous system adjusted to the new input, but it passed quickly. The black ceramic fingers of his new arm twitched a few times before curling into a fist as he sat up.
Bitch simply disconnected from his biomonitor, the cable spooling back into her arm as my connection to Barker was cut. Across the table, Cricket looked on approvingly as Barker rolled his shoulder, testing the flexibility of his new joint.
“We’re not there yet,” I said in the private yet crowded confines of Rachel’s head. “But we’re close. I know who we’re looking for now.”