“I’m beginning to think this is bigger than just some rogue manager,” I said in the privacy of Bitch’s head, as the cyborg herself paused at the top of the truck’s stairs.
“The medical supplies, right?” Tattletale asked half-heartedly; she knew exactly what I was talking about. “It’s one thing to siphon off the outflow of one factory, but there were a lot of drugs in there. A lot of different drugs.”
If I was corporeal – and if she could see me – I’d have nodded. “They were all within the expiry date as well. Fresh from the factory. Barker had messages that called it a ‘network.’”
“Not quite,” I responded. “Barker looks to be just dumb muscle, but Biter is a point of contact between the Chosen and a middleman who arranged delivery of the supplies.”
“It could be a conspiracy within the company,” Tattletale mused. “I thought it was just routine embezzlement, but maybe it’s about supporting the Chosen specifically. A few well-placed racists get together over whisky and cigars one night and decide how best they can support the cause without actually risking their necks.”
“It’s possible. Medhall doesn’t have the best hiring practices,” I agreed, thinking back to any number of conversations I’d overheard mom having on the comm. “It’s the sort of environment where a conspiracy like that could flourish. Either way, if we want to find the kind of information our client is looking for we need to get close to Biter. This middleman sounds like exactly the sort of weak link he wants.”
My attention was drawn back to Bitch’s camera feed as Cricket clapped her on the shoulder.
“You did good back there. Quick, efficient work like that is just what we need right now. Go get yourself a drink and enjoy the rest of the evening; you’ve earned it. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about getting you properly embedded with our engineers.”
Bitch nodded as Cricket disappeared back into the crowd, moving with a purpose that was lacking in the revellers. It looked like being a gang lieutenant was a busy job, at least in a gang like this one.
A blade suddenly appeared in Bitch’s peripheral vision, but she didn’t so much as flinch as Barker stepped into view, snapping the retractable blade back into his arm before extending it again with an almost gunshot-like crack of released tension. Mercifully, he’d taken the time to put his black t-shirt and armoured vest back on.
“Fuckin’ awesome,” Barker murmured to himself before turning to Bitch. “When I slit someone open from throat to crotch with this baby, I’ll think of you. Meantime, though, come chill with the rest of us. Got plenty of drinks.”
“Do it,” Tattletale said, moments before Bitch said “sure.”
“F’real?” Barker asked, before his mutilated mouth stretched wide in a grin. “Well, fuckin’ A. I knew you were chill.”
Without so much as asking, he snapped the spur back into its housing and reached out with his metal arm. With my vision limited to Bitch’s eyes I couldn’t see where it went, but from the angle I guessed he’d put it on Bitch’s hip.
“Touch is a little dull,” he remarked. “Maybe you should have kept the skin on the fingers.”
“Brush him off,” Tattletale said, quickly. “It’s Biter we want.”
“Agreed to have a drink,” Bitch said as she reached down with her own cyberarm and firmly swatted Barker’s hand away with the clunk of metal on plastic. “Didn’t agree to fuck you.”
“Sure, sure,” Barker threw his hands in the air with a mocking grin. “No need to freak out about it. Not your type, I guess.”
Does she have a type? I couldn’t help but wonder.
The rest of Barker’s… squad, I supposed, were pretty much where we’d left them when Barker went in for his surgery, sprawled out on a number of syn-leather couches as they steadily worked their way through bottles of alcohol. Biter had pride of place, sitting on the right side of a wide black couch.
Barker immediately sat down next to his friend, leaving just enough space between the two that Bitch could maybe squeeze herself in there – but in case that wasn’t enough for her he patted his lap.
Instead, Bitch snatched up an unmarked plastic bottle of someone’s homebrew and – following Tattletale’s directions – perched herself on the arm of the couch next to Biter. Barker looked over at her and chuckled, before holding up his new arm and extending the blade.
“Check this piece out,” he said to the group, before turning to Bitch. “What’cha say it was again? Renraku C-something or other?”
“CSB Sixty-Seven A,” Bitch answered. “Look up the manual; you’ll need it for maintenance.”
“Glad to see you finally swapped out one of your noodle arms for something actually useful,” Biter said, his own sculpted chest muscles rising and falling as he chuckled.
He held out his left arm, turning his metal hand over as he compared it to Barker’s. Judging by what Cricket had said, I guessed he’d bought his own cyberware; it was robust, but the movement of his fingers was visibly less flexible than Barker’s high-end corpsec model. He grunted, seemingly satisfied, and turned to look up at Bitch.
“I guess you’re a cyberdoc?”
“First time doing someone other than myself,” Bitch spoke the words Tattletale put in her mouth, shaking her head. “Turned out okay.”
“Self-taught? That takes some skill, and a lot of motivation.” This close, I could see that the teeth behind his artificial jaw had been filed down into points, which only made me more surprised at how well spoken he was in comparison to his partner.
“So,” he continued, “what brought you to us?”
“Barker invited me over,” Bitch answered, taking a sip of beer even as I spun up the toxin filters in her liver. “Not been in the city long. Don’t know anyone else here.”
Biter chuckled, leaning back in his seat and reaching up to clasp his hands behind his head.
“Odd jobs, right? Moving from place to place, taking work in dive bars for petty dealers. Maybe you get lucky and run into some desperate suit with more money than survival instinct, or you get a steady job that lasts until someone else geeks your employer.”
“Same old story,” Bitch nodded, unprompted, before Tattletale told her to push further. “That your story, too?”
“Me and Barker go back a few years. I kind of fell into merc work, met him on the way down. We drifted here and there, but after a while you either die alone or sign on with something bigger. Just the way it is.”
“People need a cause to fight for. It’s in our blood,” one of their crew, a woman with steel teeth and a vibrant red mohawk, said. “Mercs fight for nobody but the next paycheck, but we’re part of a brotherhood now.”
“Yeah,” Biter nodded, half-heartedly. “That too. The Chosen are disciplined. Got a lot of ex-military in this room. Helps keep everyone from falling into the fucking infighting you get in the gangs we used to work for.”
“Those are Saeder-Krupp, under the plates, right?” Bitch said, nodding to Biter’s cyberarms even as she flashed a message up on her HUD.
The multiple optics of Bitch’s eyes weren’t just for show. Each camera served some specific purpose, and one was linked into a target recognition package, with a rangefinder, manhunting algorithm and a link to the machine gun in her right arm – in fact, going by the ID code, the optic had actually begun life as a scope for an automated turret.
That software was working to outline a single target in red, on the far side of the room, but I couldn’t see anything to distinguish him from the other Chosen. He wasn’t acting suspiciously – watching an impromptu fighting circuit that had broken out near the bar – and while he had enough chrome that he’d probably been with the Chosen for a few years, he clearly wasn’t high up in the gang.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Garcia’s old friend,” I murmured, realisation dawning. “The one who made it into the Chosen. Shit.”
Sure enough, as I magnified Bitch’s feed I could see obvious distortions on Garcia’s arm, captured in a resolution that was more perfect than organic eyes. Someone had evidently cut him free, but he’d evidently chosen not to waste money on cosmetic repairs.
“Do you think he’ll recognise you?” Tattletale asked.
Bitch answered. She couldn’t convey tone in text, but she seemed surprisingly calm as she simultaneously put on the appearance of an attentive listener as Biter explained the specs of his cyberware.
“Well, it’ll be easier if we get Biter alone anyway,” Tattletale mused, glibly. “Bug, he has another port on his neck, same as Barker. Think you can work with that?”
“Of course I can,” I answered. “But he’s not going to let Bitch just stick it in there.”
“You wanna bet?” Tattletale drawled.
“Hey,” Biter spoke up, and I just about jumped out of my skin. “You doing okay? Looking a little twitchy.”
“Let me take this,” Tattletale said, moments before putting words in Bitch’s mouth.
“Sorry, chummer,” she began. “Still a little wired from the fight.”
“Blood and oil still pumping, right?” Biter asked, a grin on his face. “Nothing like a brawl to get you firing on all cylinders, and that was a hell of a fight. Kind of wish they’d done that for my initiation.”
“Not enough of a fight for you?”
“I made it work,” Biter’s chest tightened as he shrugged his shoulders. “There was this go-gang out on the ass end of the North End, liked to run up and down the I95 playing chicken with the traffic. Their boss was a real giant of an ork, six and a half feet tall and chromed to the tusks.”
“Bitch, lean in a bit,” Tattletale hurriedly muttered before continuing to feed her lines.
“So how’d you get him?”
“Her, actually,” Biter grinned. “But with the chrome she was packing, it’s not like that made a difference. I could’ve ambushed her, but that’d be too easy. Fighting her on the interstate wasn’t going to work either; no way I could take out a whole gang on their home turf.”
“You gonna get to the point or just leave me on edge?” Bitch asked.
“I slipped some kid a credstick to follow her home, then knocked down her front door while she was stuffing her face with some cheap pizza. It was a fucking great fight – got thrown out of a third floor window at one point – but only because I made it great.”
He shook his head, looking around to take in his squad. Surprisingly, they seemed content to talk amongst themselves, leaving Bitch and Biter to each other. Even Barker had stopped glancing over at Bitch’s chest every now and then – not that he could see much with the armoured vest she was wearing.
“Every Chosen fights – Hookwolf wouldn’t have it any other way – but a lot of them got through the initiation by jumping ‘targets of opportunity.’ Not in my squad. We don’t just fight ‘cos we have to, we fight because we love to. Everyone here picked their targets because they wanted to prove their strength of body as well as conviction, just like you did when you took on that prissy gym rat in the pit.”
“Oh, you saw that?” Bitch asked, leaning in and grinning slightly as Tattletale instructed her to.
“Couldn’t take my eyes off you from that moment on,” he smiled. “Lot of the guys in there, I’m not sure of. But you? You were born to fight and kill, and fuck anyone who gets in your way.”
Bitch polished off the last of the homebrewed beer, even as her cybernetics worked overtime to make sure it wouldn’t affect her too much.
Not that it matters, I supposed, so long as she’s lucid enough to repeat Tattletale’s words.
Bitch turned the empty plastic bottle over in her hand, before tossing it aside.
“Does the job, I guess, but it’s nothing special. Never been one for beer anyway; takes too long.” She turned her head, deliberately, and looked across the room at the Chosen’s makeshift bar. “They got anything stronger?”
“Vodka, unless someone boosted something fancier. I’ll buy you some, split the bottle? Call it a treat from an old timer to the new kid on the block.”
“We both know it isn’t that,” Bitch said, as I realised that she wasn’t just repeating Tattletale’s words, but her tone as well. For her part, Tattletale had changed her tone to sound more like Bitch would if she was saying this of her own volition. “Fuck all’s gonna happen if you don’t take risks.”
To put herself – her voice – in someone else’s hands like that… it wasn’t something I could ever picture myself doing.
Biter chuckled, reaching back to rest his right arm on the back of the couch, which had the entirely intentional effect of giving Bitch a full view of his chest.
“Fine. I’ve got no interest in women who aren’t at least as dangerous as me. You qualify. Wanna get a drink?”
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
Instead of answering, Tattletale instructed Bitch to just stand up. As she did, Barker – who had clearly been listening even as he chatted with the other members of the squad – suddenly burst into laughter and clapped Biter on the shoulder, shouting “go get her, tiger,” as Biter stood up.
As the pair made their way over to the bar, they crossed beneath one of the speakers that was practically shaking itself apart under some powernoize beat, making conversation impossible.
“Hey, Bug,” Tattletale began, taking advantage of the moment, “how much chrome does Bitch have?”
“Assuming you aren’t asking about her limbs?” I answered, even as I dug through Bitch’s software. “Well, there’s…” I saw something that stopped me dead in my tracks. “Holy shit, there’s drone software in here!”
“Mean she’s a meat puppet?” Tattletale asked, sounding genuinely shocked for the first time since I’d met her.
“No, no, her brain’s in here, but there’s other stuff as well. A chip in her spine linked to her limbs, and pacemakers on her heart and lungs. Must be so her body can keep running on its own software when she’s directly controlling a drone. Keep fighting, even; the pilot program is for an anthropomorphic gun platform.”
It was such a warped sense of priorities that I honestly felt a little sick thinking about it. I’d be the first to admit that I wasn’t necessarily fond of my body, but I’d prioritise it over a sprite any day and I couldn’t imagine handing control of it over to one.
“That’s…” Tattletale began – it seemed even her composure had limits. “Okay, I can work with that.” She switched audio channels so that Rachel could hear her again. “Bitch, I need more control. I can’t tell you how to move and what to say at the same time. Give me control of your cybernetics, watch my movements and make your face match. Bug will pick up any cues you miss.”
In spite of everything, I was expecting Bitch to protest, or at least hesitate. Instead a pathway opened up in her network and I hurriedly patched Tattletale’s simsense wreath into the chip’s interface lattice.
Bitch twitched slightly as Tattletale took control, but that was the only visual tell and I doubted Biter noticed anything. Immediately, though, Tattletale changed up the playbook and moved Bitch closer to Biter, taking the opportunity offered by a tightly-packed crowd between them and the bar.
“This has got to be the weirdest thing I’ve ever done,” Tattletale mused on the private channel. “So I just have to get Biter alone and get the wire in Bitch’s arm into his neck, right?”
“Right,” I said, “but like I said, no way he’ll just let you do that.”
“And like I said, you wanna bet?” Tattletale drawled as she reached the bar, turning Bitch around and leaning against it as she alternated between looking at Biter and out over the crowd.
I realised what she was doing a moment later, as Bitch’s optics picked out a figure outlined in red. With her back to the crowd, she wouldn’t be able to keep track of Dante Kaur, make sure he wasn’t in any position to see Bitch. And he was a lot closer here than he had been before.
When Biter reappeared in Bitch’s vision with a glass bottle of vodka in his hand, Tattletale told Bitch to smile slightly and manoeuvred her body to Biter’s left, keeping his statuesque body in-between Bitch’s slighter form and any stray glances Kaur might send her way.
Tattletale moved closer, resting a metal hand on Biter’s back as she instructed Bitch to tilt her head up and speak into his ear – which, given the pounding din of the music, probably sounded like a whisper to him.
“It’s a little loud down here. Know somewhere quieter?”
Biter simply bared his pointed teeth and led Bitch to a staircase set against the wall of the warehouse; one I’d seen Hookwolf take when he left the warehouse floor. Biter ignored the offices, though out of the corner of Bitch’s eye I managed to catch a glimpse of the titanic metal cyborg sitting on a steel bench, staring dead-eyed at data only he could see.
At the end of the row of offices, there was a near-vertical metal staircase leading up to a sloped hatch in the roof of the warehouse. It was locked, but the lock gave way after Biter put a six digit code into the keypad and the hatch opened without so much as a squeak of rust.
He gestured for Bitch to head up first and I saw why as soon as Tattletale pulled Bitch’s body up through the hatch. The roof of the warehouse was ever so slightly higher than the immediate buildings around it, looking out across the immense expanse of the trainyard; a massive field of railway sidings, unloading cranes and stacks of cargo containers awaiting a berth at the docks, three and a half kilometres long and one wide, ending almost at the waterfront.
Even at this hour it teemed with activity, as trains snaked their way into the sidings, each almost three kilometres of multicoloured cargo containers, some resplendent in a riot of different colours and logos while others were monochrome and branded with the symbols of single megacorps. The containers were collected from the cars by automated cranes that matched up to anchor points on the top corners of the units, depositing them on access roads that ran along the length of the sidings, where they were collected by manned vehicles that delivered them to the staging areas, each driven by a single metahuman working to an exacting, ever-changing plan driven by the same sort of grid-link system that regulated traffic in the city itself.
The most distant sidings were fenced off from the rest and patrolled by security guards and hovering drones, the containers a deep blue colour with a stylised Greek helmet on the side, with armoured cars at the front and rear of the train bristling with stowed turrets and drones locked securely into armoured racks.
The cargo from those trains was brought to a roadway on the far end of the trainyard, where they were carried along the length of the river by automated trailers before they crossed the river and passed through the curtain wall of Brockton Bay’s corporate castle.
Ares Macrotechnology’s enclave dominated the view, reducing the trainyard to insignificance in the face of its sheer scale. Immense warehouses and office buildings fronted the enclave, but they were all in turn dwarfed by the pyramidal structure of the main arcology. A kilometre wide at its base, it stretched upwards for two hundred floors as a sloped hexagon, surrounded on all sides by smaller trapezoidal buildings that followed the angle of its ascent.
Bitch’s gaze was drawn there, but my attention inevitably passed the pyramid I saw every day from the balcony of my parents’ apartment, down past the descending buildings and cranes to the Ares waterfront, where the curtain wall gave way to vast docking facilities more sophisticated than anything else in the city.
A ship was pulling out of the docks, four hundred metres long and covered from bow to stern with containers all bearing the familiar branding of Ares Arms. A swarm of two dozen drones circled it, each the size of insects from this distance, and a warship from the enclave’s corporate naval station sat protectively off the starboard bow, between the cargo liner and the city. It would escort the ship out to sea, where it would be met in international waters by whatever Ares naval assets had been assigned to escort its cargo of munitions off to their intended destination.
“Hell of a view, isn’t it?” Biter asked, his hand coming into view as he slung his arm over Bitch’s shoulder. “All that that steel, all that iron, fitting together in complete harmony. From train to truck to yard to port, and from there to who knows where.”
He chucked, shifting his arm and stepping out in front of Rachel, stretching his hand to point off into the Bay.
“Or there’s the sea. If you’re the romantic type.”
“I think you know this isn’t romance,” Bitch said, as Tattletale snatched the bottle from Biter’s other hand and unscrewed the top. She took a swig as she walked Bitch’s body over to the edge of the rooftop, sitting down with Bitch’s legs dangling off the edge – seemingly without a care in the world. “Don’t make it more than it should be.”
“I know,” Biter said as he sat down beside her, taking a swig. “People like us, it’s just a recipe for disaster. Too wired, too full of the fight. You don’t end up in a gang like this if you’re focusing on anything other than what really matters to you.”
“The cause?” Bitch asked, as Tattletale directed her to push and the bottle made its way back to her.
“I get the feeling you’re here for the chrome,” Biter observed, his tone casual. “Not the cause.”
I froze in place, processes halting in shock.
Tattletale wouldn’t know how to work Bitch’s cybergun, but maybe I can override the system if she points it at him…
“Cards on the table?” Tattletale said through Bitch’s voice. Somehow, impossibly, Bitch managed to keep her tone perfectly level even as she sat on the edge of a four storey drop. “I think you’re here for the same thing.”
Biter simply chuckled, his cybernetic hand moving up to play with his jutting metal jaw.
“You’re wrong about that, but not completely wrong. I’m here for the killing. I’m here because I only feel alive when I’m fighting for my life, and in the Chosen I can kill whenever the fuck I want.”
“Does it bother you?” Tattletale asked. “The cause?”
“Look at that fucking thing,” Barker said, sweeping an arm out to take in the immense arcology looming over them both. “How many people you think live in there? And in the city? The fucking world? How many people died of a heart attack in the last five minutes? How many were eaten by ghouls, shot by gangers, starved to death? What the hell does it matter that I only kill trogs or pixies or halfers now? It’s a drop in the ocean.”
He turned back to Bitch, a serious expression in his eyes.
“Just don’t let yourself think you’re better than them. We’re all killers, all in the same boat. Doesn’t matter whether you buy into their cause or not because you’re helping it all the same. Might even come ‘round to their way of thinking; I know Barker has.”
“Heavy stuff,” Tattletale said, telling Bitch to grin before taking another swig. “Not exactly what we came here for, though, is it? So, got to ask, what’s your poison? What gets your mind off all that shit? ‘Cause I am still pumped, and this vodka” – she swirled the half-empty bottle in her hand – “still isn’t cutting it.”
“Never been one for stimulants,” Biter said. “Can’t focus on the fight if you’re off your tits on novacoke. But a hit of zen helps keep things moving when the going’s slow and the next fight’s too far away for the comedown to matter.”
“Psychedelics?” Tattletale said, leaning in as Bitch pulled her lips back in a smile. “We’ve got similar tastes, ‘cept all my drugs are digital.”
She reached up and tapped two metal fingers against Bitch’s skull, her eyes only centimetres from Biter’s own.
“Don’t have to pay a dealer for files in your head.” She leaned in, Bitch’s voice dropping to a whisper as Tattletale wrapped her arms around Biter’s shoulders. “Don’t have to worry about the pounding in your skull, your heart going at a million miles a minute, when you can just switch it all off and drift away.”
Biter shuffled back, away from the edge, one arm wrapped around Bitch’s waist to pull her with him even as the other undid the straps of her body armour.
“Want to know what it feels like?” Tattletale asked as she moved her hand up to caress the back of Biter’s head. I unlocked Bitch’s datalink, letting the cable poke out of her palm ever so slightly. “You ever linked minds with someone while you do it? Feel what they feel, see through their eyes? I see some beautiful things running this software on one mind. Makes me wonder what two will see.”
“Do it,” Biter said, nodding, as he lay flat on his back, pulling Bitch down with him.
Tattletale twisted Bitch’s fingers to pull the wire out of its housing, brushing the skin beneath Biter’s ear until she hit metal and pushed the datajack into his slot, Biter’s firewalls yielding without effort as he gave way.
He jerked up, spasming as I flooded his software with everything I had; sprites and raw resonance spikes pouring into his network. Wasps stung their venom into his neural link, using the man-machine interface of his cyberware to flood his mind with poison even as I buried it all beneath a flood of junk data. Idly, I sent a dragonfly off into the ether and plugged the psychedelic executable it returned with straight into Biter’s mind, giving him the trip he wanted even if it was the recorded data of someone else’s journey rather than the real thing. It’d keep him occupied while we worked, and he’d wake up in an hour with the memory of a trip but no details, hopefully assuming that Bitch left him to come down and left the Chosen because she got cold feet during their deep conversation.
Simultaneously, my woodlouse was eating away at his files, leveraging the extensive permissions he’d given Bitch into access into even the most encrypted files. It wasn’t enough to get me all the way there, but it was a start. A crowbar in a vulnerable seam I could use to pry open all his secrets.
“I have control,” I said, two point six seconds after Tattletale stuck in the datajack. “He’s unconscious, immobilised and tripping balls. The files will take a little while; don’t eject until I give you the all clear.”
“Phew,” Tattletale sighed, before she started laughing – more than a little maniacally. “Now that’s how it’s done! It’s been ages since I could really cut loose like that, and I didn’t even need spells to do it!”
She sat Bitch down beside Biter, leaning back against his chest as she looked up at the sky.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Uh, how do I… log out, I guess?”
“I’ve got it,” I said, diverting my attention for a fraction of a second as I separated Tattletale’s digital presence from Bitch’s chip. She wasn’t unable to log out, but I guess I shouldn’t have expected her to find the right mental switch when she’d never used a simsense rig before.
This time, there was a visible tell as Bitch took back control of her body; she immediately sat up and knelt beside Biter’s head, checking the datajack was firmly seated in its housing. Satisfied, she triggered the mental switch that would lock it in place, and reached over to grab her armour. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on the hatch up to the rooftop, but it was dead quiet.
I turned my attention back to digital space, as my woodlouse managed to eat through the last firewall around Biter’s internal commlink. Sure enough, Biter was a much more significant player than Barker. He had more than a few messages with Cricket and Stormtiger, as well as a few gang sergeants on the same level as him. More importantly, every week he received a text from a single contact, outlining a place and a time to meet.
He wasn’t just given the bare essentials, either; he had a healthy working relationship with the contact – as healthy as gangs got, at least – and the two regularly kept each other aware of delays, issues, spikes in demand or shortfalls in supply.
“Got a name, of sorts,” I said. “Alabaster. No context from the messages as to who he is, but maybe I can dig something up on his comm number.”
My messenger sprites were exactly that; messengers. While they resembled dragonflies to me, in practical terms they worked along exactly the same lines as any other message between commlinks.
In order to send a message to a number, it had to know where that number was. So when I sent my messenger sprite out, it simply pinged off the underlying network with a false ID and followed the trail down to the other line. There was a tense moment when nothing happened, before I received a signal as ‘Alabaster’ picked up his comm.
“Who is this?”
His voice was a little gruff, but unaugmented. The dragonfly cut the connection a moment later, doubtless leaving Alabaster to wonder when he was going to start getting the spam phone calls now that some scammers knew there was a real person attached to the number.
The dragonfly returned, landing on my outstretched palm, and relayed the location data to me. A quick check with the local municipal records revealed that he wasn’t staying in a Medhall owned building like I was expecting, but at a shelter run by a local policlub that did charitable work on the side. The policlub was called America As One, which told me everything I needed to know about them.
“Alright, I’ve got him. No real name yet, but I know where he lays his head at night. Just need to scrub my presence from Biter’s head.”
“Fantastic work, Bug,” Tattletale said, and I was very glad digital cheeks couldn’t blush. “Now I guess we clear out. A shame, really. All this effort putting Bitch into the Chosen and we can’t even get any more secrets out of it.”
“Our client’s asking for information,” I said, as I began pulling back from Biter’s network, painstakingly going over every inch of his mind to wipe the marks my violent intrusion had left. “If he wanted infiltration, he should have paid more.”
“Hah!” Tattletale exclaimed. “What a fine Shadowrunner I’ve made of you.”
With my presence erased, I told Bitch to eject the datalink and looped Grue into the conversation.
“We’ve got what we need,” I said. “Making our way out now. Bitch, any ideas? You could go back through the warehouse?”
“I’ll climb down,” she said, jogging across the rooftop before calmly rolling herself off the edge, grabbing onto a steel strut that ran up the height of the building and shimmying down it with the faint squeal of metal on metal.
“Alright then,” I said. “Grue, pickup on the east side of the building.”
Our exit from the warehouse was almost anticlimactic in comparison to just how harrowing getting in there had been – and I wasn’t even there in person. Grue pulled up silently in Bitch’s van and Regent already had the door open for her. We left just as silently, as Bitch took back control of the vehicle and Tattletale shut down her simsense wreath.
I left the matrix just in time to see her lifting the wreath off her head, setting it aside as she rubbed her temples.
“A bad trip?” I joked.
“Might as well be,” she moaned. “Feel like my third eye just got hit by a flashbang.”
“So, what did we get?” Grue asked, leaning back over the front seat to look at us. Tattletale just waved at me – her headache must’ve been serious if she was willing to miss a chance to show off how smart she is.
“It’s not just the dopadrine,” I began. “They get regular shipments of a whole host of medical-grade drugs as well; their chop shop is better stocked than any surgery I’ve ever seen. The shipments come in fortnightly, and the middleman between the Chosen and the source in Medhall is a guy who goes by Alabaster. He doesn’t work for Medhall, though. Or at least not directly; he lives in a shelter run by a policlub. America As One.”
I paused, my eyes focusing on the matrix for a moment.
“From the look of things, they fund a free clinic for the homeless. The human homeless,” I clarified, looking at the pictures on their website. “My guess is that’s where the drugs are filtered from. Someone in Medhall donates to the charity, the charity donates to the Chosen. All we have to do is go there, find Alabaster and dig up something for our boss to sink his teeth into.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Grue nodded. “Bitch, take us back to the loft. I’m sure we’ll all think better when the sun’s up.”
As Bitch navigated her way through the streets, I couldn’t help but think back to everything that had happened, everything that Hookwolf and Biter had said to her. In the end, I just couldn’t let my concerns go.
I chuckled, my lips curling up in a faint smile.