CD & EA 1.23 - Ambush

Good morning,

Happy to hear your feedback in the comments!

Tomorrow will be a double day with Victor and CD&EA chapters coming your way.

-Plum

“What do we do?” Juliet asked Ghoul, the sounds of gunfire growing more frenetic in the distance.

“If we’re going to engage with corpo-grunts, we need to have a jammer. I’m guessing the two meatheads under fire aren’t the tech gurus of the team—that’s you.”

“I don’t have a jammer . . .”

“Juliet, I can use your wireless data jack to scramble outgoing signals in a small area, but we’d need to connect you to an external battery; the one in your implant isn’t sufficient for that kind of broadcasting.”

“Sec,” Juliet said as she considered Angel’s words. She looked at Ghoul, at her guns, and said, “Is that gun on your back an energy weapon? Does it have a battery?”

“Yeah, it’s a bolt-thrower—rail tech.”

“Lemme see it,” Juliet said, holding out a hand. Ghoul didn’t ask questions, just shrugged out of the weapon’s sling and handed it over to her. Juliet could see the magnets along the barrel now, though they were far more elegant than the ones on the electro-shotgun she’d taken from Vikker’s locker. Still, the weapon was heavy, and she had to strain to hold it steady with her left hand while she fed her data cable into the little port at the base of the LCD at the top of the stock.

“You see a target?” Ghoul asked, watching.

“No, I’m gonna hijack this gun’s batt to power up an improvised jammer using my wireless jack.”

“Seriously? Badass.” Ghoul nodded her approval while Juliet waited for Angel to confirm her plan was solid.

“This will work, Juliet. You’ll need to stay connected to the gun’s battery, and I’d advise you not to use it more than once or twice—we don’t want to drain the battery too much.”

“I’ll need to borrow this gun, I guess,” Juliet said. “Jammer’s good to go; what’s the plan?”

Ghoul nodded and shouldered her assault rifle, and Juliet found herself wanting to know more about the weapon—its ammunition, range, and other capabilities. “I’ve got good auditory implants, Jules. We’ll flank ‘em, but stay behind me, okay? You’re doing good, though; keep breathing like that, in and out, and focus on one objective at a time.”

Juliet nodded, and then Ghoul was off, crouching low and racing from the corner of the old box store, across a short alley, through a broken, crumbling brick wall, and up to the corner of a long abandoned home.

“Juliet, tell Ghoul that local comms will not work when I turn on the jammer. Our setup isn’t sophisticated enough to allow exceptions.”

When Juliet slid up behind Ghoul, leaning into the siding crumbling with dry rot, she tapped her shoulder and whispered, “Our comms will go out when I turn on the jammer.”

Ghoul held up her thumb and winked at her over her shoulder. Then she pointed to another boarded-up house across a street littered with old boxes, a rusted-out sedan, and a tipped-over, bent basketball hoop. She whispered through her glittering, pointy teeth, “Start jamming when we get behind that building. I messaged the other two operators your fixer told us about using the SOA system. Hopefully, they won’t shoot us. Follow my lead. Shoot anything that points a gun at you.”

Juliet nodded, and as they ran across the street, dodging around the old car and charging up the ancient driveway, she saw that Angel had supplied her with a new crosshair, ammo count, and battery percentage. The gun was full, with seventy-five rounds and a battery at ninety-eight percent. When they started around the side of the house, Angel said, “Activating the jammer.”

Alarmingly, Juliet’s forearm buzzed briefly, but then it passed, replaced by a steady warmth. She knew it was working because her net connection icon indicated that she was offline. Ghoul looked back at her and nodded, and then they were hustling through an overgrown side yard to the neighbor’s backyard, block wall. They kept low and close to the wall, brushing through dried-up tumbleweeds and under a mesquite tree's dry, scratchy limbs. All the while, the sounds of controlled gunfire bursts grew louder.

When they got to the corner, Ghoul stopped and carefully inched her barrel past the corner of the wall. She turned to Juliet, pointed at her eye, and held up one finger. Juliet nodded and waited. Angel said, “Juliet, keep panning around the yards of those houses and at their windows. I’ll see if I can detect anomalies with shadows and check for evidence of gunfire.”

Juliet did as Angel asked, leaning close to Ghoul, resting one hand on the woman’s center back to let her know she was there, and then scanning out past the wall. A narrow band of overgrown, natural desert landscaping separated this house’s backyard from the walled and fenced yards of the next row of houses. Juliet could hear the bullets flying and even see debris thrown up here and there, but she couldn’t make out any of the shooters.

Ghoul held as still as a statue, and Juliet could tell the other woman was slowly panning her rifle’s sights over the strip of desert. After a moment, she turned and touched a finger to Juliet’s cheek, right under her right eye, and slowly moved the finger to point. Juliet followed the line of her finger, and then Angel highlighted, in red, a shadowy shape partially obscured by an overgrown oleander. Ghoul nodded to Juliet's gun and then mouthed, barely letting any air through her teeth, “Shoot when I shoot.”

Juliet swallowed a lump in her throat and then nodded, lifting the gun so Angel’s crosshairs lined up with the center of the highlighted person’s body. “Angel, are we sure that’s a bad guy?”

“If you zoom in, Juliet, you can see that he has a corpo logo on his sleeve,” Angel said. Juliet did as she said, annoyed that she’d forgotten to use her new optics. Her vision zoomed in when she concentrated on the shadowy, red-limned figure, and the shadows brightened. With her new vantage, she could clearly see puffs of superheated air erupting from the center of the oleander’s branches where the figure had a black, stubby rifle resting. Sure enough, a stylized V stood out on his left shoulder, and Juliet knew what it was—Vykertech.

“That’s the corpo from the dreamer’s rig, right?” she subvocalized.

“Yes, Juliet. It stands to reason they’re involved in this dreamer situation just as we’d suspected.”

“Well, it’s not proof, but good enough for me to squeeze this trigger,” Juliet said, squatting down, sitting on one foot, and resting the heavy barrel of Ghoul’s gun on her knee. She pulled the trigger halfway when she had the crosshair’s lined up. Almost instantly, a green light lit up next to her crosshairs, and she knew the gun was ready. She breathed in and out, ever so slowly, trying to keep steady, waiting for Ghoul to fire.

When it came, Juliet couldn’t help flinching. Ghoul’s gun wasn’t quiet, and she didn’t shoot once but several times, rapidly, inching forward with each shot. Juliet quickly recovered, and just as she got her crosshair reset, her target shifted to point his gun their way. She squeezed the trigger, and the bolt-thrower bucked and fired out its payload with an electric *zwap*. She’d been aiming at the center of her target, but in her zoomed-in, light-enhanced vision, she saw a dark spot appear in the target’s pale, unarmored throat, and a spray of blood erupted behind him, splashing over the dark green oleander leaves.

She turned to Ghoul and found the woman gone, charging to the trunk of a mesquite, firing round after round at a hedge near the wall of the deserted home across the way. Juliet didn’t know what else to do, so she hustled after her. Ghoul charged right through the crossfire zone and leaped over a pitted, yellowing barrel cactus. She fired three more times, held up her gun, and screamed, “Stop! They’re down!”

Suddenly the gunfire from off to Juliet’s left died down, and Ghoul turned to Juliet, “Check the ones we shot. Make sure their comms are down, then you can turn off the jammer so we can talk to our new friends.”

“Right,” Juliet said, and because she knew exactly where it was, she ran toward the corpse of the man she’d shot. “Angel, can you tell if Vykertech has drones or anything around?”

“Nothing that’s actively pinging us, Juliet. If we’re careful and disable any decks and data ports on the downed corpo-sec agents, they won’t know what’s happened here until they physically investigate.”

“Ghoul! Make sure none of them have any powered-up decks and pull all their PAIs!” Juliet could hear Ghoul shouting directives to someone else, who responded with a deep voice from quite a distance away. She thought about dialing in her implants and trying to get Angel to figure out what they were saying, but she got distracted as she approached the body of the man she’d shot.

He was splayed back against the springy branches of the oleander he’d been hiding behind, and one of his hands, pale and lifeless, still clung to the collar of his vest just below where Juliet’s bullet had entered his throat. He wore tactical goggles, and Juliet could see lights and messages flashing on their lenses. She bent to pull them off, sliding them over his short, brown hair and tugging the little data cable out of the port at the back of his neck.

Juliet switched the goggles off and then let her eyes drift down to the man’s face. Blood had begun to dry around the corners of his mouth and over his chin, but his eyes were still open, still clear, and not glazed and cloudy in death like she imagined they might be. He’d been a handsome man with a strong jaw and brooding brow; Juliet wondered who might miss that face tonight. “This doesn’t feel good,” she hissed, gently turning the man’s head so she could get at his data port and dig her nail under his PAI chip.

She pulled the chip, and lacking anything better, she set it on a stone and smashed it with the butt of Ghoul’s rifle. “I don’t detect any further signals from this location,” Angel said.

“Right,” Juliet said, looking at her AUI to see that the gun’s battery was down to seventy-three percent. “Keep the jammer going ‘til we confirm the other bodies are offline.” As she stood up, she saw a data pad and extra magazines stuffed into the corpo-sec soldier’s belt, so she knelt and began to tug it off. “I’m taking his belt and gun,” Juliet said. It felt both dirty and right to her, and, like a vegan who’d decided to go all-in on a hamburger, Juliet decided she wasn’t going to leave good money lying in the desert.

She could hear Ghoul speaking in low tones to the other two operators not far away. Before she joined them, Juliet pulled off her backpack, rolled up the soldier’s heavy belt, and stuffed it inside, tossing his tactical goggles in as well. Juliet shrugged back into her pack, slung the soldier’s short-barreled assault rifle over one shoulder, and jogged to the others. They were standing over the first person Ghoul had killed, and Juliet felt lucky that the body was face-down and that she wouldn’t have to picture the woman when she tried to sleep that night.

“No signals are coming from this body, and the PAI has been removed,” Angel said, confirming what Juliet’s eyes already told her—she could see the tendrils trailing from the smashed chip lying in the dirt nearby.

“What about the third?” Juliet asked aloud, glancing at Ghoul and the other two. Both men wore black tactical gear, though one was tall and lanky with a pink ponytail, and the other was short and stocky and hid his head and most of his face under a tactical helmet and visor.

“We got it. All clear,” Ghoul said, holding up a thumb.

“I stripped my guy’s weapon,” Juliet said, jostling the rifle on her shoulder.

“Yeah, we did, too,” Ghoul said, pointing to extra rifles leaning against a creosote bush to her left.

“We sure everyone’s offline, then?” Juliet asked, eager, for some reason, to unplug the rifle and hand it back to Ghoul.

“I’m not detecting any signals in the jamming field,” Angel supplied.

“All right. Let’s move off toward the dreamer coords. I'll turn it off when we’ve put some distance between us and this mess.”

“Right, intros can wait,” the tall man with the colorful hair said, then he turned and started trotting off between two of the old, overgrown home lots. The stocky guy flashed a thumbs up and ran after him, and then Ghoul nodded to Juliet.

“I’ll keep the rear, hustle, Juliet. Good work!” Juliet nodded and started trotting after the stocky guy, noticing how he favored his right leg and had a constriction bandage wrapped around his thigh. That brought her attention to the rest of his gear, how he and the lanky guy would’ve been nearly indistinguishable from the corpo-sec if not for the bright yellow logo missing from their sleeves. Was that the big difference between her and Ghoul and those dead corpo-sec—that they wore a logo?

Juliet realized she was spiraling, gaslighting herself with emotions—she wasn’t the same as corpo-sec because she didn’t work for a corporation. She didn’t take money to come out to the desert and ensure immoral, mind-altering experiments weren’t interrupted. She hoped she’d never take a job like that, anyway. After a few minutes of jogging through the ancient, overgrown neighborhood, the two operators, Corbitt and Hot Mustard, presumably, stopped by a cracked, crumbled cement culvert that led down to a dry wash.

“Dreamer hive is supposed to be about a click down this wash, under an old series of bridges, and in a water treatment building next door.”

“All right,” Juliet said as Ghoul jogged up behind them. “Turning off the jammer. Secure your comms and make sure anything you picked up off those corpo-sec is turned off.” She waited a minute while they all double-checked the items they were carrying, then she subvocalized, “Turn it off, Angel.”

Again, her arm buzzed, and Juliet rubbed at the hot skin over her implant. Then she tugged the cable out of the rifle and let it retract into her port. She handed the gun to Ghoul, and the woman took it, slinging her other rifle over her shoulder. “Comms are open; my PAI will set up a channel and give you all a handshake,” Juliet said. Almost immediately, Angel set up icons on her AUI for each of her teammates and highlighted each of them with their handles floating over their heads.

“Neat trick,” she subvocalized, noting that the tall guy was Hot Mustard and the stocky, helmeted guy was Corbitt.

“Thanks for saving our asses,” Corbitt said so softly that Angel had to augment his voice in Juliet’s implants.

“Yeah, they had us flanked pretty good. Nasty surprise to walk into.” Hot Mustard’s voice was high with a southern twang, and when Juliet heard it, combined with his goofy handle, she almost laughed, almost forgot about the three dead people they’d left lying in the dirt. “Sending the pin for the dreamer den. We going in hot? Temo said you all might have another idea?”

Ghoul looked at Juliet, and Juliet nodded and spoke, “Yeah. I don’t wanna kill any of ‘em. We want the full bonus, right? I think I’ve worked out a solution that’ll get ‘em all to chill—you know, like normal dreamers.”

“Fuck, seriously?” Corbitt held out a fist, again speaking almost subvocally but coming through fine in Juliet’s implants. She nodded and touched his knuckles with hers.

Ghoul moved so she was right in front of the other two operators and said, “We gotta find their deck—whatever they were running their program on. Juliet has reason to believe they were all sharing the same system. Once we have it, she can work her magic. Clear? Non-lethal up to that point, so put away your guns and get out your brass knuckles or whatever you’ve got. Dreamers shouldn’t be geared for war, anyway,” she paused, looked at Juliet, and said, “Right?”

“Yeah, that’s right. When they went nuts, the last nest of dreamers mostly tried to claw and bite us. A few had knives or clubs, but I think they just grabbed what was at hand.”

“Right,” Corbitt said, slinging his rifle and yanking a black, twelve-inch rod off his belt. He shook it violently, and it expanded to three feet in length, sparking with electricity briefly. Hot Mustard didn’t sling his gun, but he pulled the magazine, racked out the chambered round, caught it in the air, and slipped it into a pocket. Then he tucked the magazine into his belt and pulled out a different one, bright red instead of black. He slammed it into his gun, racked the bolt, and nodded.

“Riot rounds—pack an electroshock charge,” he said to Juliet’s puzzled expression, then he pulled a long, black cylinder off his belt and began to screw it onto the gun’s muzzle. “Suppressor,” he grunted.

“Just don’t blow anyone’s eyes out,” Ghoul said. “We have intel that says these people aren’t acting nuts on purpose.”

“Roger,” Hot Mustard said and started stepping toward their objective. Everyone followed along, Ghoul keeping the rear.

As they walked, Ghoul asked, “Guys, where’d those corpo-sec come from? They get dropped in on you, or were they on-site?” Juliet assumed she subvocalized because she couldn’t hear her voice, but it came through her implant clearly.

“Oh, they were here,” Hot Mustard’s voice said in Juliet’s ear. “We think they caught our chatter, just surrounded us, and started shooting. No warning, no nothing.”

“Fuck those guys then,” Ghoul’s voice said.

“My sentiments exactly,” Corbitt’s gruff voice said, and Juliet detected a slower, less twangy southern drawl than Hot Mustard’s.

They jogged down the slope of the dry wash into the sand and piles of debris. Heaps of refuse, from broken furniture to bags of dumped trash to piles of dried-out tumbleweeds, made it easy for the four of them to dart toward their objective while still maintaining a semblance of cover.

After ten minutes or so, Juliet could see the vast, eight-lane overpass in the distance, and looking at her map, she saw the road above was labeled as Business Loop 49. She zoomed out a little to find that it was a fairly major artery that almost exclusively fed areas of the ABZ. “That’s a lot of waste. Think of all the people that used to live out here,” she subvocalized and was a little mortified when Angel passed it into the team channel.

“Oh yeah,” Hot Mustard twanged. “That thing’s falling apart all over the ABZ—scav city.”

“Well, do we think the deck is under that overpass, or is it in the water treatment plant?” Ghoul asked, her name lighting up in Juliet’s AUI.

“Angel, can you pick anything up on my wireless jack?”

“I was about to say, Juliet—there’s a strong signal coming from near the underpass, but it’s below street level. I think there are tunnels, perhaps connecting the water treatment plant to this storm runoff system.”

“Well, team,” Juliet said, “Looks like we might be going underground.”