Work Text:
My old man once told me, “the gut knows before the head finds out.”
Or something like that. I haven’t seen him in years. I honestly might’ve just made it the fuck up.
But I’m getting off topic.
Because right now, the ol’ gut is telling me in no uncertain terms that I just made a monumental mistake. Not that that’s a particularly rare occurrence, mind you. Under normal circumstances I might even be offended at that assessment, given the fat stack of eddies I’m currently watching roll into my account. This time, though? I’m inclined to agree.
Because what the fuck even was that gig?
Faceless client? Check.
Suspiciously large upfront payment? Check.
Suspiciously easy job? Well, they wanted someone to break into a random Petrochem side-office up in Northside and slot a shard into the datacenter. The building didn’t even have any human guards, just some sensors and automated turrets. Translation: any gonk chipped with a trash-tier cyberdeck could do that with their eyes closed—so fucking, check, check, check.
So, I hear you asking, how did this miracle straight from the teat of Corpo-Jesus land in this dropout delinquent’s lap instead of the account of some merc whose name you’ve actually heard of? That bit probably had something to do with the client’s whole “who needs fixers anyway?” attitude.
And now I can practically hear you screaming RED FLAG through Cyberspace—and yeah, the fact that a job this juicy was left out to dry for even fifteen minutes is a red flag the size of fucking Arasaka tower. But it was also a lot of fucking eddies. Just the upfront would get me halfway to my next cyberdeck upgrade (or all the way to replacing my piece-of-shit Thorton with something that actually shifts out of third without blowing a cylinder).
Or actually paying off my debt to Frank.
Point is, beggars can’t be choosers. Trust me, I would know.
Long story short, I wired over my detes and headed to the dead drop, combat quickhacks loaded and pistol ready. Fuck it, two pistols, and half my stash of MaxDocs too, because there’s no way this doesn’t go ass-up six ways to Sunday.
You can imagine my surprise twenty-eight hours later, walking out of that musty Petrochem office without firing a single shot, a cool twenty-five thousand eddies lighting up the corner of my vision.
Because that just isn’t how this goes down. Because Chloe Price fucks around and finds out. Always. No exceptions.
Right now I’m hopping a fence, looking for a shortcut through the lower levels of the chemical plant. Gravel crunches beneath my boots, the grains painted into jagged shadows by the strobing red of safety lights. At this point, my gut is churning so hard I’m half convinced my hormone regulator stopped working again. Or I would be if I wasn’t already going on five months without one in the first place. Shit fucking sucks.
My beater of a ride awaits just a few streets over. Maybe I’ll finally be able to ditch it, now that I have the scratch.
But as the saying that my adoptive father figure may-or-may-not have stuck in my grey matter goes: the gut knows before the head finds out.
That’s why when the downwash from the AV thundering overhead almost flattens me into the ground, I’m not exactly surprised. It passes between the enormous chemical tanks looming overhead, too quickly for my optics to get a clean scan.
Not that I need them to. That stark-white MILITECH logo tells me everything I need to know.
I immediately plaster myself to the nearest support beam, trying my best to melt into the shadows. As if that would do a fucking thing against Militech thermal optics.
Militech. Not Petrochem.
Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with me at all?
The gut disagrees.
Another AV appears, much closer this time, its hover-jets pulsing a low, deafening growl as it crawls just above the web of pipes overhead, its floodlights sweeping the ground in a grid-search pattern. I curse under my breath, desperately scanning the industrial maze for a way out that doesn’t make me look like the guiltiest gonk alive.
But come the fuck on, Petrochem wouldn’t hire a fucking military corp to put down a single lowly netrunner. Right? That would be an insane waste of—
There’s a crackle of radio static from much, much closer than the AV.
“Spread out. She can’t have gone far.”
Heavy boots impact the ground from multiple directions as smaller searchlights start lighting up the night. I catch glimpses of helmets, visors, bulletproof vests.
And guns. Really big guns. One of which is turning in my direction.
If anyone with fuck-you amounts of scratch is reading this and looking to perform an act of charity: I’m accepting donations in the form of optical camouflage cyberware. Preferably before I get flatlined because I don’t have it.
On instinct, I initiate a Breach Protocol—as if my measly little pick is gonna do shit against Militech ICE. Still, I manage to reboot the guy’s Kiroshis before he turns me into a ketchup stain (with one whole RAM to spare!).
“Agh! Bravo-Three engaging hostile runner!”
Now the good news is, there’s really a lot of great hiding places in this tangle of concrete and rebar. The bad news, of course, is that I’m now running on fully ’ganic legs from what appears to be multiple Militech kill squads.
Gunshots sound from behind me, followed by the telltale whistle of smart-bullets. I dive under the nearest chemical tank, feeling their heat on the hair of my neck as I scramble to keep moving on all fours. Must not have gotten a solid lock, or I’d already be dead.
Won’t get that lucky twice.
I’m definitely panicking now. I taste copper as I force myself back to my feet, urging my legs to move. Not that I have any idea where I’m going. I’m half blind from the dark and the hair plastered to my face with sweat, but I can see the searchlights converging—three ahead, five behind, shafts of blinding white piercing through the gaps in the surrounding beams.
What I don’t see is the body in front of me. Naturally, I trip over it, narrowly avoiding breaking my wrists as I catch myself on the cement.
Then I spend a good five seconds just staring. Because even with the looming threat of my imminent demise, this situation still registers as fucking weird.
It’s a girl, that much is clear. Young—maybe around my age, though it’s hard to tell with the really chromed-up ones. This one still seems organic for the most part, though. Her hair is wet and matted, concealing her face except for a corner of her mouth, where blood trickles down to join a dark pool beneath her head. Oh, and she’s buck-ass nude.
And dead. Surely.
Instead of shrugging and continuing to run for my life like literally any sane person, I crawl over and try to feel for a pulse. The skin of her neck is clammy and cold, colder than should be possible even for a corpse.
That’s all I get before pale fingers with the strength of a hydraulic press latch onto my wrist. I yank with everything that I’ve got, but the girl doesn’t budge, despite looking all of ninety pounds soaking wet.
Her head jerks up, matted tresses slipping to the side to reveal an expression of pure terror. I realize then that the blood isn’t just coming from her mouth. It flows in slow rivulets from her nose and eyes—eyes with whites soaked black from the bleeding.
But none of that is what causes my heart to stop beating.
No, I must be fucking hallucinating from all the norepinephrine in my system, because what I’m seeing is impossible. Because I recognize that face. Because right here, right in front of me, naked and gushing blood out of every orifice, dumped under a random Northside chem silo, is a girl who I saw die five years ago.
“Max?” I whisper.
“C-Chloe?” she rasps.
And then she’s clinging to me, the warm dampness of her tears and blood seeping through my shirt, mixing with my sweat. She’s trembling, sobbing, and I’m tearing up too as I wrap my arms around her, because she’s so skinny and cold and god, is that metal poking out of her spine?
“Targets in sight, moving to subdue.”
Gravel crunches under boot-soles, then concrete, closer, louder. Spotlights train on us from every direction, and all I can see is blinding white. I try to shield Max’s body with mine.
Time to face it, there’s no way out of this one. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Chloe, you have to go,” Max mumbles into my chest.
I only cling tighter. “No. Never again.”
A rather empty promise, given that we’re both about to die. I tense, expecting about five hundred rounds of five-five-six to rip through my body in the next second or so.
Instead, one of the mercs shouts, painfully loud through the military-grade amplifiers in his helmet.
“STEP AWAY FROM THE SUBJECT.”
The subject, as in…
My blood runs cold. I pull back, trying to meet Max’s pitch-black eyes.
“Max, why—what are they talking about?”
“THE SUBJECT IS PROPERTY OF THE MILITECH CORPORATION. STEP AWAY NOW. YOU HAVE FIVE SECONDS TO COMPLY.”
Max turns her face up to meet my gaze. A blood-stained tear squeezes out of the corner of her eye.
“Chloe. Please go.”
“No.” I force a smile. “Max and Chloe forever, remember?”
Something shifts in her expression. It’s a subtle change, a slight slackening of the face, a dulling of the eyes, but in that instant I realize the person in my arms isn’t the little girl I remember. Not by a long shot.
“M’sorry,” she whispers.
It’s all the warning I get.
I don’t see it happen, but I hear the sound—an electric hum, a high-pitched droning, popping in and out in staccato bursts. It’s a sound that’s permanently burned into my amygdala, because it’s the sound of a netrunner’s worst nightmare.
It’s the sound of a Sandevistan.
My arms are empty.
The searchlights spin wildly.
“Subject is escaping containment!”
“Fuck it, shoot to kill, shoot to—”
One by one, the lights go dark. Muzzle-flashes of assault rifles illuminate the night in stop-motion. Occasionally, I see the silhouette of a girl, paler than humanly possible, arms peeled open to expose gleaming, meter-long blades.
But mostly, I see the aftermath.
There are no more words. There’s only the sickening crunch of tearing armour, the squelch of rending flesh, the sharp pitter-patter of blood spraying onto cement.
And the screams.
Eventually, those go silent, too, and only the dark is left.
A body slumps into my arms, limp and heavy and completely slick with blood and lubricant. The exposure on my optics adjusts step by step until I can start to make out grainy edges through the gloom, until I finally see the black nubs piercing through the skin of her back and the metallic traces running all the way down her wiry frame.
I laugh out loud. The sound echoes in the dead air.
Now that I’ve started, it’s hard to stop. Because this is completely fucking insane. Because Max—my childhood best friend who felt bad squashing cockroaches for fuck’s sake—just eviscerated eight elite Militech agents in about five seconds flat. And from where I’m standing, it didn’t look like it was even close to a fair fight.
The subject is property of the Militech Corporation.
I choke on my laughter. It sputters and dies.
Max still hasn’t moved.
“Max?” I give her a slight shake. “Max, c’mon.”
Nothing.
The gut begins to churn again.
Slowly, I turn to the dismembered bodies around me, bloodstained Militech logos gleaming under harsh red safety lights.
Slowly, I realize just how monumentally fucked I am.