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"Fuck, they've got some good ice…"
Judy's voice was a little strained. But then again, I'd had three netrunners on my team for a week now, and the three of them could break any ice a gang put up. I was confident in these girls. And even Kiwi, whom I had asked Panam and Judy to keep an eye on, had shown herself to be someone I could truly trust. And that made me happy.
"How much time do you need?"
"About twenty minutes to do everything quietly…"
"Get to work. I'm not rushing you yet… and, as usual, do a thorough job, because you won't have much time to fight netrunners later. You'll need to gather data and drain eddies from the thugs."
"Man…"
Kiwi's voice was a little muffled. She had been a little down for a few days now, but she had kept quiet about it.
"Mentor, will you tell me what's wrong?"
"No… nothing important…"
"Mentor, we have time anyway… so why not talk?"
"Different topic?"
"You suggest one… I said I would be interested in hearing it… if you're not interested, then suggest your own."
Ugh… "Fine…"
The girl's voice sounded defeated.
"…I just don't get it…"
I chose to stay silent and give Kiwi time to gather her thoughts, and I was also afraid of scaring her off. It's not that I needed her, at least not as much as I needed Lucy and Becca, whom I considered very attractive and might try to bring into my harem in the future. But I didn't see her as a stranger anymore, either. She was a good acquaintance… maybe a friend…
"…The jobs we get seem to be not that difficult… Faraday gave our crew jobs that were much, much harder! And we'd get about fifty, maybe seventy grand per person from those… and here, we're getting a hundred-plus per person, and that's in addition to the fixer's pay, which was on the same level as ours! How is that possible?!"
"Mentor, it's all disgustingly simple… you work loud. Too loud. As far as I know, there's no one in your crew who can do anything quietly. I'm not counting the netrunners; sending them into the field is a stupid idea in my opinion."
"Hey!"
Judy took offense at my words. But I ignored her.
"Because you work loud, despite having two netrunners, your time is very limited. And you also have to cover your crew, which is why you miss out on side eddies. And it's dangerous to pull something like that with Faraday; every job he gives out involves a corporate dispute…"
I shook my head, chewing on my homemade shawarma. The girls had the same thing in their lunch boxes, and all of it was made with natural ingredients, as always, when it came to the food I cooked. Or with very high-quality substitutes. The kind that would be used in expensive restaurants.
"I, on the other hand, work very quietly, which is why I get the same amount from a fixer for less noisy jobs as you guys got for louder and more difficult ones. And how much do you have to work to get that hundred-plus? And you can only work like that because I don't raise an alarm… if I make a mistake, like I did at the third location, then that's it… no bonus…"
"Well, that's true…"
Kiwi's image nodded.
"…and I realize that myself… but it's so unfair?! In a few days, I was able to set aside enough for a new deck! In the evening, I was able to get a check-up at Viktor's clinic and get my chrome synchronized, since it was starting to glitch a little. And I even paid off my debts! And that's despite the fact that I'm not even working in the major leagues…"
"Well, actually, our fixer is the major leagues… it's just that for some reason, people rate her below Rogue, Faraday, and other fixers who are just as loud and don't stick to their own districts, but hang out at the Afterlife. But if you consider that the major leagues, then I'll be quick to tell you that we also get jobs from fixers at the Afterlife. What's more, according to our schedule, we were supposed to work with one of them yesterday, but because of the long job, I had to turn it down, but I promised I would contact them after this one was finished and do two jobs instead of one."
"Wait, you work with fixers from the Afterlife?"
"Rarely…"
I nodded my head.
"And you turned down a job from them, for the sake of…"
"Yeah, as the crew leader, I refused the job."
"Psycho… Ghost, you're a fucking psycho…"
"This psycho has a reputation, and I'm not going to leave a job unfinished."
"Damn it… how much more could we have made if we had…"
"Nothing…"
"Huh?"
"As a rule, jobs from the 'major leagues'…"
I tried to convey with my voice how I felt about that name for jobs from Rogue and other fixers at the Afterlife, as well as jobs from Faraday.
"…are not jobs against some gang. They're jobs that usually indirectly involve corporate interests. And it's much more dangerous to get greedy there than in the segment we operate in. It's all simple here… you work quietly, you rob a gang, and the worst you get is a car chase on the highway where a couple of cars catch up to you and try to flatline you… but the corpos… they can really mess up your life. So we act strictly according to the job description and don't take any liberties."
"Got it…"
I sighed as I finished my shawarma. I had to lick my fingers before I wiped them on a napkin.
"Fucking hell…"
"Is something wrong?"
"Well, it looks like they prepared very well for us at this location… and in the past, they mostly hired Scavs, but here, we have Maelstrom… and Royce is at the head of it."
I whistled.
Royce was bad news… and the fact that they were able to hire Maelstrom meant that they still had enough eddies. Or maybe they had offered them some kind of drug to synthesize that would affect even their chromed-out bodies?
"How many?"
"A shit-ton…"
"Smarty-Pants means fifteen Maelstromers, all well-armed. Judging by the way they move, all of them have subcutaneous armor."
I sighed at the explanation that Lucy gave.
"This sucks…"
"What, can't you handle it?"
"Why not…"
I shrugged.
"I can handle it, but whether we'll get a bonus today is another question. Royce isn't an Animal or a Scav. That bastard knows what he's doing, and Maelstrom is usually on the same network, so first, I'll have to put a shard in there. By the way, Snowflake…"
I got out of the car and handed Lucy a bag of shards.
"…make a change so that the shard can send a fake signal. So that no one will know that the user is out of network range."
Lucy sighed.
"I'll make twenty shards, just in case. It's good that I only have to write the daemon once; after that, I can just copy it…"
"I have some pre-made ones. You want me to send them?"
Kiwi looked at her protégé, and there was warmth and appreciation in her eyes. It seemed that in our company, this bitch was starting to thaw and turn back into a person. And that was a good thing…
"Go ahead…"
"Get to work…"
I sighed and got back in the car. Seven minutes later, I got out again to take the shards from Lucy. See what preparation can do! Instead of twenty minutes, twenty minutes!
"Alright, did you make a map?"
"Yeah… it's a little incomplete since there are no cameras in some of the rooms…"
I nodded.
"Well, I have good optics. I can see through walls if I need to. I'm going in…"
Ten minutes later, I was standing in front of a very ordinary-looking building. It was pretty much the same as the one Judy and Panam and I lived in. The doors opened in front of me, and I immediately activated my Sandevistan because my optics told me that two Maelstromers were standing right behind them.
Shards in the ports…
And only after that did I knock them out, and I did it pretty roughly, because with these chrome-obsessed psychos, there was no other way. I dragged them to the side so they couldn't be spotted right away. But this time, I didn't turn off my Sandevistan.
This was going to be tough, of course, but my synthetic muscles were already in a good mode. I could handle two or three dozen minutes at medium Sandevistan speed, where I would be a barely visible blur to normal people. What's more, increasing my speed would only take a couple of seconds, of course, subjective seconds, not real ones.
I checked the map and the markers on it and sighed sadly. It wasn't just Maelstrom here. Their members were marked in red. There were also some thugs marked with shiny dots who were involved in making the 'glitter.' And there were quite a few of them here.
I would have been happy to hit a couple of their sales points, too, but Regina decided not to send us to destroy them. She had plenty of other less-successful solos for that. She was even planning to call V, it seemed. At least, she mentioned her in a conversation, probably checking my reaction.
And what about me? I didn't care…
V was nothing to me…
Since the moment I saved her, she had been dutifully paying off her debt to me. I had been following her progress, but there wasn't really any. Well, almost none. She had made it to the middle leagues, but mostly because of her past achievements. She was working for Wakako, who would give her jobs that couldn't be passed on to other fixers in her district but that she didn't really want to do herself…
So she found a solo for those jobs…
But unlike me, V and Jackie weren't working as hard, and so, as far as I knew, V was barely making ends meet…
Man… scraps…
You're spoiled, David. You're spoiled…
While I was thinking about other things, I was knocking out Maelstromers and thugs who occasionally got in my way and was moving through the building. I had only cleared the first floor so far, and I still had to clear the second one and then go down to the basement.
The first floor didn't give me any problems…
And neither did the second. But when I was at the entrance to the basement, I sharply jumped back. I rolled to the side and even fell out of acceleration.
"What?! You think you're so smart?! You think you installed a Sandevistan and that's it?! No problems?!"
Royce was standing there, and he had just opened fire on me through the door with some kind of automatic weapon. It was a good thing the walls here were solid and that he couldn't penetrate two of them. Otherwise, things could have ended very badly.
"Why are you so quiet, Ghost?! You think you're better than me?! You're just a bastard who installed a Sandevistan! Without it, you're nothing!"
"Smarty-Pants, Mentor, can you hack him?"
"No, he just suddenly disconnected from the main network. He must have realized that everyone else was already down. We didn't think about it before… there were no cameras there, so we didn't know he was getting ready to shoot. We just thought he was standing there, keeping watch…"
"Hmm… it looks like Royce was smarter than I thought he was. And he must have some good optics too, at least he can see through walls, because otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to spot my blurry silhouette."
I sighed.
"How's the job going?"
"We're not touching Maelstrom yet, at least not until you give the order. But we've already stripped the thugs, and their laptops are being worked on."
"You can hack Maelstrom, too… since they're here, these particular ones don't give a shit about the others. And I hate drugs… and I hate the people who are involved in them."
"Hey, Royce?"
After I yelled that, shots rang out from behind the door again. But what did I care? I was out of the reach of that asshole. Let him shoot into the air; maybe he'll run out of bullets…
"What's it like guarding drug manufacturers? Maybe next time you'll go lick a corpo's ass? In my opinion, the two are pretty much the same thing!"
Grrrr!
Along with a growl, more shots rang out.
"What, are you acting like a baby? Are you hurt?"
While I was talking, I was thinking about only one thing. To leave him alive or not?
Royce was a minor character in the canon anyway, and Maelstrom didn't really have a big part in it either. No, there were jobs from fixers, of course, but… By taking him out, I wouldn't change much about what was supposed to happen. Although, on second thought, Panam was already with me… Judy probably wouldn't take the braindance from Parker…
One more nail in the coffin of the canon? Well, besides the fact that V now had some decent, if not top-of-the-line, chrome…
The shots stopped.
"What? Did you run out of bullets?"
"Catch, you son of a bitch!"
I heard a light creak from the door, after which I turned on my Sandevistan, increasing the acceleration, and I calmly sped down the corridor that separated me and Royce. Hmm, that idiot had decided to throw a grenade. Man, if it weren't for my synthetic muscles, I definitely wouldn't have been able to move that fast, and that grenade would have been, if not the last thing I ever saw, then a very good reason for me to retreat.
But as it was…
I caught the grenade before it even left Royce's hand, quickly and forcefully threw it far away, and then gently pushed Royce with my hand and went into the antechamber of the basement. I slowed down, saw Royce fly in my direction from my push, and he was moving pretty fast. The grenade, in turn, flew away at a high speed. I increased my speed again and pushed Royce, this time to the side, and also moved away so that the fragments from the explosion that would pass through the corridor and the door wouldn't hit us.
After that, I slowed down and, after waiting for the right moment, landed a couple of careful punches on Royce, and at the same time, I put a shard into his port.
I came out of acceleration…
Ugh…
Royce collapsed to the floor, but he hadn't lost consciousness yet, although he looked pretty pathetic. I could have broken his arms and legs, too. Now he could only writhe on the ground. Of course, that wasn't a big problem for him. If he survived and they found him, they would just replace his chrome, and he would be back to running around again…
But he wasn't going to survive…
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