CD & EA 1.29 - Garage Throw-down

Happy to hear your feedback! Was the fight clear enough?

-Plum

Just as she pulled the trigger, the man with his back to Juliet shifted, turning to face her, and the bulk of her needler rounds tore into his left pectoral, shoulder, and arm. The tiny needles slipped right through the fabric of his jacket and punched through his skin, deep into his bones, perforating muscles and lung tissue along the way. The scatter pattern was broader than would have been optimal, and though he was sorely wounded, he didn’t seem out of the fight. In fact, he didn’t seem even to notice he’d been shot.

Juliet had barely registered what her shot had done when she realized the man she’d shot was pointing his left fist at her, and Angel had highlighted, again with flashing red lines, a barrel protruding from his forearm. Her eyes widened, and she started to duck back, which saved her from the heavy lead slug that knocked a cubic foot of concrete out of the wall—her intended target, the man with the bulky black gun, had fired.

She backpedaled, keeping the concrete wall between herself and the two attackers, her mind spinning with the implications of what had just happened. She’d shot a man; worse, she hadn’t killed him. Now she had two very large, very armed thugs coming her way. Juliet jerked her head over her shoulder, suddenly worried there were more of them or that there was another way around where they could flank her. She didn’t see anyone, so she ran to the only cover that was close by—the red sedan parked behind her.

Juliet had just crouched behind the sedan’s driver’s side front wheel, peeking over the top of the hood for her pursuit, when the man with the gun, the one she hadn’t injured, poked his head around the corner. He had a visor on now, and he took a quick look and ducked back behind the wall. “Angel,” Juliet subvocalized, “can you do anything to, I don’t know, mess with his optics?”

“Most military grade optical headsets are hardened . . .”

Angel stopped speaking mid-sentence, uncharacteristically, and Juliet said, “What?”

“I have a connection! His optics are a cheap clone of the Thorn LTD Werewolf Eyes. They lack ICE protocols! Be ready, Juliet!”

Juliet worked to control her breathing, steadied her grip on the Taipan, and watched the corner, straining her low-end auditory implants for any clue about what the man—the men—would do. Five steady breaths later, the man’s arm came around the corner, holding a dark gray ball in his hand. The hand cocked at the elbow as if to throw, and then he cried out, and the ball fell to the concrete with a metallic clank.

“Take cover!” Angel cried, and Juliet ducked down behind the tire. A second later, an enormous *boom* rang out, though Angel had suppressed her audio, so Juliet felt the concussion in her chest more than she heard it. “I blinded him as he was about to throw that grenade. Push your advantage, Juliet!”

Juliet grunted and stood up, bolting around the back of the car. Angel had activated some kind of filter on her optics that turned everything gray except for the orange and green heat signatures of the concrete near the grenade’s explosion and the orange and yellow, man-shaped signature crawling away from her trailing bright yellow streaks that rapidly cooled to red and green—his blood.

Juliet almost froze up, almost asked Angel to switch back to normal vision so she could see if he would surrender, but then Angel highlighted, in blinking red lines, his large-barreled weapon, still clutched in his hand. “You fucking bitch!” he called out, and his gun barked, spewing a fountain of bright white-yellow heat, though it wasn’t toward Juliet. Was he still blind?

Juliet felt the concrete wall to her left, aware that the other man, the one she’d wounded earlier, was still out there. She took aim with her crosshairs, putting the center right at the crawling man’s gun-wielding elbow, and squeezed the trigger, subconsciously leaning into the shot and bracing herself for the recoil. The Taipan roared, and in her heat-sensing vision, it seemed like a streak of fire stretched out from its barrel to touch his arm, utterly erasing it in a smear of yellow and orange.

“Ah!” the man cried, rolling and writhing on the concrete, blood pumping in a crazy pattern as he flopped around. “You bitch, you fucking bitch!” he choked again, and Juliet moved back up to the corner, now pitted and broken with chunks of concrete lying around, and peered toward where she’d first spotted the bangers, where they’d dropped the woman.

In her enhanced vision, everything was gray, backlit by the ambient light, which made it easy to see the deep red, fading to blue droplets that led away into the garage and around the corner. The other man and the doctor were gone. Juliet glanced back at the other figure to see that it had stopped writhing and was lying still. It still glowed orange in her vision, but the outer edges were cooling into the red.

She caught herself thinking of the banger as a “figure” and wondered if Angel had switched her vision for more than one reason—it was easier not to think of them as people when they were just glowing, people-shaped images. “Is he dead?” she subvocalized.

“Not yet, Juliet. It seems he had some trauma nanites. His severed limbs have stopped bleeding, and he’s breathing shallowly but steadily. I believe he’s in an induced coma, perhaps to preserve brain function.”

“All right, keep my vision like this; I’m going to track this blood trail.” Juliet hurried over to the corner where the droplets faded from her view, holding her pistol in front of her. When she got to the corner, she led with the gun, standing close to the concrete.

“Juliet, you should . . .” Angel started to say, but then something heavy and hard smashed into her right wrist. Juliet yelped in pain and surprise and stumbled back as the Taipan skittered over the concrete. She hadn’t even realized she’d dropped it.

“Fuck,” Juliet said, falling back and rubbing her throbbing wrist. She tried to form a fist, and sharp needles of pain shot through it, and she quickly splayed out her fingers.

“Quickly!” Angel screamed, “Pull your knife!” Angel highlighted the yellow and orange figure that came around the corner in bright neon red, spurring Juliet to action. She darted sideways, noticing how the figure pointed its left arm at her with a blinking, highlighted barrel in her AUI. At the same time, she reached up with her left hand, grabbed her vibroblade handle, and jerked it out, thankful for its grippy rubberized handle.

“Dumb way to clear a corner,” the man coughed, lurching sideways to track her with the barrel on his arm. “Never heard of slicing the pie?” For some reason, he wasn’t shooting, and Juliet kept circling, trying to make it hard for him to aim at her, but with every step, he just tracked her with his arm, leaning against the concrete wall with his other shoulder.

“Well? Are you going to blast me or what?” Juliet asked, trying to think of a way to get out of his line of sight without turning her back.

“Make you a deal,” he coughed, and Juliet saw the bright yellow droplets spatter on the gray concrete.

“Angel, normal vision,” she subvocalized. Suddenly the bright grays of the world darkened to more somber, shadowy grays illuminated by the occasional flickering dome light. Smoke and dust still hung in the air from the earlier grenade, and Juliet saw that the man who’d probably broken her wrist was barely clinging to life. He was drooling blood, his right arm hung limp at his side, freely drizzling more blood into an ever-growing puddle at his feet.

“If I blast you, I’m dead a few minutes later. Promise me you’ll have the doc stabilize me, and I’ll let you do your thing.” He coughed another gout of foamy blood and added, “Fuck! Why’d you have to hit me with a goddamn needler?”

“Angel, is he bluffing? Is that cannon in his arm a real weapon?”

“I believe so, Juliet. The barrel is identical to the brochure images of the Polk & Chang Hailstorm subdermal shotgun. It comes standard with a five-round magazine and would be quite dangerous to you at this range.”

“All right, put the cannon down and show me the doc,” Juliet said.

“She’s around the corner. Next to that white pickup; I think it’s hers,” he grunted, lowered his gun-arm, and slid down to the concrete floor, leaning his back against the wall. Juliet sheathed her knife and scooped up her Taipan in her left hand, feeling reasonably sure she’d drop the gun if she tried to fire it with that hand, but figuring the banger didn’t need to know that.

Keeping him in her peripheral vision, Juliet walked in a wide circle around the corner, ensuring no more surprises waited for her, and when she saw the white truck just a few parking spaces away, she jogged toward it. The doctor’s bound form was lying on the concrete near the rear-left tire, and Juliet hurried over to her.

Doctor Murphy was conscious and trying to worm her way away from the truck, her back arching with the effort, and her eyes trained on a bank of elevators some hundred yards away at the far corner of the garage. “Easy,” Juliet said as she jogged up. “I’m here to help.”

She set her pistol down on the ground, reached up to yank her knife out again, and very carefully cut the plastic shrink-cords on the doctor’s feet and wrists. She barely had to touch the plastic with the vibroblade, and it snipped through the material. The doctor watched her with wide eyes, her gag making conversation impossible. She held very still, though, and Juliet figured it made sense a doctor would know to keep calm around a vibroblade.

The gag on the doctor’s face was held into place by more shrink-cords, and Juliet could see they were painfully tight. “Hold still!” she admonished as she very carefully touched the vibroblade to the plastic over the wadded cloth in the doctor’s mouth, so it didn’t slip through into her skin.

Juliet quickly backed up as the bands severed and sprang away from the doctor’s mouth. She slid the knife into her sheath and picked up her pistol while the Doctor pulled a prodigious length of white cloth and a blinking poker-chip-sized device out of her mouth. “God, were they trying to choke you?”

“Fucking idiots! I could have asphyxiated!” the woman spat, rubbing at her wrists as she struggled into a sitting position, then she smashed the little blinking device against the concrete. “Are they dead?”

“Not yet, I don’t think.”

“I’ll fix that,” the woman said, turning to pull herself up with the help of the running board along the side of the truck.

“Wait,” Juliet said. “One of them let me help you in exchange for us not letting him die. I hit him with a needler round—I think his lung is in bad shape.”

“Oh?” Again she grunted and groaned, pulling herself to her feet. Juliet hadn’t helped her because she didn’t want to let go of her gun, but she backed up a step as the doctor pulled open her truck door and fished around inside the back seat. She came out with a bulky shotgun in her hands. “I didn’t make any fucking deals.”

“Woah! He had me in his sights and let me live. I can’t let you execute him.” Juliet didn’t point her gun at the woman, but she held it at a forty-five-degree angle, ready to lift it further if she had to.

“Oh, Jesus,” the woman spat, then tossed the gun back into her truck and locked it. “Just a minute. I called my synth when I smashed that jammer, and he should be here in a minute. I guess I owe you something, huh? What’s your name?”

“I’m Juliet. We had an appointment.” Juliet liked something about the woman—her gruff demeanor reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t put her finger on who. She had salt and pepper brown hair, a permanent scowl, and several obvious body augmentations, including one arm that was longer than the other with an extra joint halfway between her elbow and wrist. Making the arm even stranger, more uncanny, her hand had seven long, slender fingers.

“Oh! Juliet! I was looking forward to our meeting—sounded like you wanted to talk some high-end augmentations! Sounded like a nice change from adding chrome to bangers so they can kill each other more efficiently.” As she finished speaking, a chime sounded from the corner of the garage, and the elevator door slid open. A man exited the elevator and ran directly toward them. He wore green doctor’s scrubs, and his skin was pale blue and shiny—a synth.

“Oh, dear! Doctor Murphy!” he cried in a high, reverberating voice, clearly coming from a speaker with poor depth range.

“Hush, Trojan; a lot of help you were!” The doctor said, stepping away from her truck and gesturing toward the slumped figure against the wall nearby. “Check if they’re still alive. If they’re dead, put them in the incinerator; if they’re alive, bring them to surgery room A.”

“Yes, Doctor,” Trojan said, bowing low and rushing over to the banger with the cannon-arm. Juliet watched him with interest, wondering what sort of arrangement he had with the doctor. Was he a free individual, a high-functioning AI? Was he a low-tier AI that worked as a semi-slave?

“Come with me, Juliet. I was just getting to work when those assholes jumped me. Old business, that—don’t let it bother you.” The doctor waved Juliet along and started toward the elevators. “Least I can do is fix your wrist, but don’t worry—you’ve got a standing discount with me after those heroics.”

“Oh, thanks, Doctor Murphy,” Juliet said.

“Just call me Murph, all right?”

“Okay,” Juliet said, walking alongside the woman, matching her long strides, impressed that she seemed to have wholly brushed off her traumatic experience. As they walked, Juliet subvocalized, “Angel, can you tell what kind of synth that man is? I’ve never met a smart one like the ones people say fly ships and work in finance or medical fields.”

“I could message him—he has an open communication port, but if his functionality is near the legally permissible higher-end, he might take offense.”

“Would you take offense?” Juliet asked. She’d often wondered if Angel broke the AI limitations and if that was why WBD wanted her back so badly. If they were found to be making unrestricted AIs or even just stretching the legal restrictions, they’d suffer backlash and sanctions that would no doubt be crippling.

“I . . . am not a synth, Juliet. I wouldn’t be offended in the slightest. The higher-functioning synths have personality algorithms that function autonomously—they can’t control their feelings or responses to perceived slights.”

“All right, forget it for now. I’m just curious about them. Don’t you think it’s wrong?” Juliet asked, still subvocalizing, as she watched Trojan stride past them, hauling the two men, one over each shoulder. They each had to weigh more than two hundred pounds.

The synth looked at Doctor Murphy as he strode past them and said, “I’ll use the freight elevator. They’re both alive, but the one with the perforated lung will expire soon.”

“I’ll see to him in a minute. Hook them up to tables one and three.” The doctor looked at Juliet and winked, “I’ll get a price for returning them alive. Hank Smith-Hatathli is going to pay dearly for this little disaster.”

As the synth strode away with his load, the actuators in his legs whining with the strain, Juliet lifted her wrist and cradled it to her chest. It was purple, swollen, and hurt like hell at even the slightest jostling. “Who’s that? Their boss?”

“Right. He’s the head of the Phoenix chapter of the Rattlers. Any chance those guys will be able to ID you?”

“No. Even if they scanned me, which I don’t think they had a chance to do, I’m spoofing my ID, scrambling my image in video too.” Juliet tapped at her temple, indicating her optical implants.

“Clever girl. More and more interesting,” the doctor said as she pushed the elevator button. “So, remind me—you’re looking for auditory implants? What else? Something interesting like a heart enhancement or . . .”

“Medical nanites and a synth-organ to house and maintain the swarm.” Juliet had heard of such things but had never known anyone who could afford them, though she knew there were varying grades, thanks to her discussion with Angel. She hoped she could afford at least a trauma pack like the one that had saved the banger whose arm she’d blown off.

“Well, that goes without saying—I guess we could give you a one-off injection of nanites, but if you want something that’ll last and save you, again and again, you’ll want the implant. What kinda budget are we talking about?” Murphy had punched number eleven on the elevator keypad, and they were quickly rising.

“Let’s talk options before I spell out my budget, hmm?” Juliet said, frowning as she gently probed her swollen wrist.

“Sure. I’ve got options, and as I said, I owe you. You’re not going to find a better deal unless you know another doc whose life you saved.” Murphy reached out and put a hand on Juliet’s shoulder. “I mean it—I was running on adrenaline out there, but I should have slowed down enough to thank you properly. You could have bugged out when you saw what was going down, but you didn’t. That’s not something I’ll forget.”

“You’re welcome, doctor. I was tempted to follow them or report what I saw, but then I heard them talk about taking you into some kind of back room of a bar where, according to their banter, some other guy had been chopped up or something.”

“Oh?” Murphy raised a thick, gray-brown eyebrow and scratched at her chin with a long finger at the end of her crazy, double-elbowed arm. She looked Juliet up and down and grinned, “I might have to do more than extort old Hank. You’re an operator, right? Might have some work for you down the road. Now come on,” she said as the bell rang and the doors opened, “I’ll open up my brochure for you to look through while I stop that banger from dying.”