CD & EA 1.10 - The Right Thing

That Writathon fever . . . here's another chapter. I hope you all are enjoying it!

Cheers,

-Plum

Juliet groaned, gasping for breath, her implants buzzing as they tried to compensate for the blast of the short-barreled revolver. Her arm was scraped from the slide into the gravel, and the ribs on her left side were burning, the pain rapidly ramping up as she became aware of it. “Fuck,” she grunted, letting go of the shotgun and slapping a hand onto her side. She almost screamed as she felt the hot, wet blood and her rib shivered with needle-sharp stabs of pain. “Ugh, she shot me right under my tit, Angel!”

“Judging by the minimal loss of blood pressure, I believe you were grazed, though perhaps the bullet impacted one of your ribs.” A groan from where Ghoul lay flat on her back forestalled Juliet’s reply, and she quickly snatched up the shotgun again. Grunting with the effort, she got her legs under herself and stood up, lurching forward with the AUI’s crosshairs trained on the downed woman.

Ghoul coughed wetly and tossed her revolver to the side, training her eyes on Juliet. She opened her mouth, but only another cough came out, chased by a gout of blood. “Gutshot,” she managed as Juliet approached, crouching and holding the gun's stock tight to her shoulder.

“Why’d you do it, Ghoul? Why didn’t you believe me, dammit?” she asked, her voice pleading, breathy, her adrenaline spike fading, leaving her feeling drained, shaky, and utterly shellshocked.

“I’m too . . .” she started coughing again, her pale blue eyes rolling back as red flecks of spittle coated her chromed teeth. “I’m too quick to trust.” Amazingly the woman let out a low, raspy, fluid-filled chuckle.

“Ghoul, for fucksake, are you going to die?”

“Yeah,” she coughed. “‘Less you’ve got a prime, ugh, a prime med plan.” She was talking about a high-end insurance plan with medivac services; Juliet didn’t have anything of the sort. She glanced around, her breaths speeding up as she began to think about having to watch Ghoul die. She saw Vikker’s van, then, and she hurried over to it. While they’d been loading the batts, she’d seen his trauma kit—a red box strapped to the side panel near the rear door. She yanked open the door, unstrapped the kit, and rushed over to Ghoul.

“Tell me what to do, Ghoul!”

“Uh, that’s my girl.” Ghoul groaned and rolled her head to look into the kit, then, after another wet cough, said, “Hit me with the coags and the tranq. The orange ampule and the green one with two plus signs. It’ll slow my metabolism. If you can drop me at a trauma center, I won’t forget this. I mean that in a good way, Juliet.”

“I’ll do better than that,” Juliet said, picking up the autoinjector and plugging in the first ampule. She shot it into Ghoul’s thigh, trying not to look at the mess of her abdomen. Then she yanked out the ampule, put in the other, and fired it into her other thigh. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t want to shoot both drugs into the same spot. She threw the injector back into the box, and then she saw, among the packed bandages in the top side of the kit, a package labeled “High-pressure Wound Pack.”

Juliet yanked the pack out of the kit and looked at the pictures on the back. They depicted, in stick figures, a person with an exposed wound and another person sprinkling the contents of the package into the wound. Juliet nodded and lifted Ghoul’s shirt, just now realizing that she’d lost consciousness. “The tranq,” she breathed, but then she almost vomited when she saw the wounds she’d inflicted. Ghoul’s pale stomach was ripped and pitted, with bits of her innards exposed like sleeping, pale-pink eels.

“Fuck, fuck,” she hissed, ripping the pack open and sprinkling the blue, transparent pellets into the wounds. Upon contact with the prodigious blood, the beads rapidly expanded and melded into each other, forming a solid, cold-to-the-touch barrier that seemed to cling to Ghoul’s flesh like a blue, gelid barrier that contracted as it finished settling. “Angel, will that keep her from bleeding out?”

“Perhaps, especially combined with the coagulant you administered.”

“We need to get that van started.” Juliet stood and looked around, hoping Angel would have some ideas.

“The first thing you need to do is turn off Vikker’s jammer. I believe it’s still in the van near the driver’s seat.”

“Right,” Juliet said and hurried to the van. She opened the driver’s door, and there, on the center console, was Vikker’s cube-like data terminal. She snatched it up, but it wouldn’t wake up to her touch.

“Use Vikker’s thumb, Juliet.” Juliet didn’t reply; panting and stumbling, she hurried over to Vikker’s corpse. Her rib screamed each time she had to bend, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to be responsible for Ghoul’s death—the woman might not have believed her, might have tried to shoot her for killing her friends, but Ghoul hadn’t had anything to do with the double-cross. Juliet pressed Vikker’s cold, stiff thumb against the LCD side of the cube, and it beeped, displaying a complicated, graphical UI.

“The top right icon, Juliet. Touch it and disable the local net static generator.” Juliet did so, then Angel spoke again, “Now get your specs and get Vikker’s key fob. You’ll need to use his thumb on it, and then I’ll hijack the signal and rewrite the permissions on the van. Specs first, though— we need the wireless data jack.”

“Got it.” Juliet shuffled into the garage, pressing her hand against her leaking, aching rib, and scanned the table tops near where she’d been held. She saw her specs and hurried over to them. Once she had them on, she went back to Vikker and, too numb from the night’s horrors to be squeamish, dug through his pockets until she found the shiny black keyfob. She pressed his already erect thumb against the plastic, and almost immediately, the van’s lights flashed, and it chirped twice.

“Done, Juliet. The van will respond to you as though you’re the owner. You just need to press your thumb on the fob to finalize the transfer of permissions.”

“Seriously?” Juliet, suddenly queasy, wiped the fob on a tiny clean spot on her torn, bloody t-shirt and pressed her thumb into the smooth plastic. Again, the van’s lights flashed, and it beeped. Juliet grabbed the data cube and the shotgun, and she quickly ran to the van and set them into the passenger seat. Then she hurried over and, groaning with pain, scooped her hands under Ghoul’s armpits. She was glad there was enough of her left arm left to hook under as she dragged her to the side of the van.

The door slid open as she approached, and she grunted, “Thanks, Angel,” then, with a scream of effort and pain, she pulled the smaller but very dense woman up onto the floor in front of the second row of seats. She had to bend Ghoul’s knees so the door would slide shut, then she hurried to the driver’s seat, and before she buckled in, the engine hummed to life. It was nice, she reflected, having a PAI that was a self-starter.

As she started driving out of Vikker’s compound, happily noting the lack of lights on neighboring properties, she said, “Angel, two things: give me the fastest route to Doc Sack’s place, and get him on the line with me.”

“Calling,” Angel said, and Juliet saw an amber map appear in her vision with directions overlaid on her AUI. “He’s not answering.”

“Keep trying. Send him a text. Tell him he better fucking pick up.” She tried to hurry, but the road was dirt and gravel and narrow, clearly not maintained by the municipal services of Tucson. After ten minutes or so, though, they’d finished winding down out of the hills, and she got onto a paved road, then she stomped on the accelerator.

Suddenly a grainy image of Dr. Tsakanikas’s face appeared next to her map, and he looked at her blearily. “Juliet? What is it?”

“You fucked me, Doc.”

“What do you mean?” His voice rose with faux outrage, his accent growing thicker with each word.

“That asshole Vikker tried to ice me. I need medical attention, and so does Ghoul—she wasn’t in on it. She’s fucking hurt bad, though. Get your A-game on; I’ll be at your office in half an hour.”

“What? Juliet, you can’t come here! Are they chasing you?”

“No, they’re fucking dead. I’m coming to you, and if you don’t want this to get messier, you better be ready.”

“Juliet, I haven’t invested enough in you for this kind of heat. Don’t make me dissuade you more forcefully.”

“That’s how it is, Doc?” Juliet sighed, shaking her head, wiping a smear of sweaty blood from her eyebrow. “I have the haul from the heist with me. I’ll give you a third of the profits. That enough? We’re talking close to a hundred k.”

“Oh?” Suddenly his demeanor completely changed. “Of course, of course. Why didn’t you say so? I’m always happy to trade my services for a share of profits. I’ll prep my surgery suite, be sure to approach at a sedate pace, Juliet—you don’t want to alarm the corpo-sec that frequent my neighborhood.”

Juliet flicked her fingers to end the call and said, “Asshole.” She glanced over her shoulder, between the seats at Ghoul’s listless form, and said, “Angel, can you tell if she’s alive.”

“No, she severed her PAI’s connection to the team channel. I’m not getting a response from it when I send communication requests. It’s possible that she set it to privacy mode or that it won’t respond without her permission—it didn’t seem particularly clever when we were connected earlier.”

“Are you throwing shade at her PAI?” Juliet shook her head, trying to imagine what Angel would think of Tig.

Angel didn’t answer her question, perhaps understanding that it wasn’t a serious one. Instead, she said, “Juliet, now that you have the specs on, I’m able to connect wirelessly to the electro-shotgun. I’ll be able to display ammo counts, charge status, and more accurate firing trajectories on your AUI.”

“That’s cool. I guess I better bring it along into the doc’s office. I really didn’t get a trustworthy vibe from him.”

“You can try, though his security doesn’t seem likely to allow you in with it. I don’t recommend you start any more firefights tonight, Juliet. You need medical care. A more elegant solution for leverage would be to set the van up with a deadman’s switch. If someone were to attempt to enter it or harm you, you could have the batteries ignite the hydrogen cell.”

“Holy shit, Angel. You’re fucking devious. You can do that?”

“Certainly—the function was already in place; I believe Vikker designed it that way.”

“Oh, so, this wasn’t your evil plan; you just stole it from that dead creep?” Juliet slowed the van as she began to pass by other cars—she didn’t think a traffic stop would be great just then. “Anyway, that’s a good idea. It should keep the doc honest, at least.”

Her AUI said she was only seventeen minutes from the doc’s office, so Juliet settled into Sunday driver mode, carefully matching the speed limit and making sure not to roll through any stops. When she got to the doc’s street, she did a slow drive-by, and Angel assured her she didn’t detect any signs of an ambush. Juliet stopped the van and slowly backed into the doc’s driveway, but before she could get out, she saw Tsakanikas’s muscle, Gary, approaching the van.

He tapped on the glass of the passenger window, and Juliet rolled it down. “Doc says he doesn’t want you parking in the drive.”

“Tough shit, Gary,” as the van’s sliding rear door started to open, she added, “Help me carry her in; we don’t have time to screw around.” Juliet killed the engine and got out, to Gary’s annoyed grunt. “Angel,” she subvocalized, “windows up, doors locked, and deadman on, all right?”

“Understood.”

“Jesus, what happened to her?” Gary asked, leaning in to hoist Ghoul off the floor of the van.

“Careful, you meathead!” Juliet said, still coming around from the rear of the van.

“I got her. Get the door.” He nodded toward the door, still slightly ajar from when he’d exited.

“Tell doc that if he jam’s my net access, the van will explode. There’re enough batts in the back to wipe out the whole block.” Juliet said as she pushed the door open.

“You fucking serious?” Juliet thought she detected a hint of admiration in the muscle’s voice. “All right, I told him. Hey, kid, don’t blow me up, please.” He chuckled slightly, following her through the door. Juliet didn’t slow down in the waiting room, she walked to the next door and stood by it, staring at the camera in the corner until it buzzed, and then she held the door open for Gary and Ghoul, cradled in his arms.

Dr. Tsakanikas met them in the next room, dressed in green surgical scrubs, and he frowned at Juliet, “I’ve disabled my jammer, but I need you to promise there will be no recording while you’re here. I won’t work otherwise.”

“All right, no problem.” Juliet shrugged.

“I’m trusting you, Juliet. Let’s not let anger or other emotions ruin a good partnership.” He reached out a hand as though to shake with her, and Juliet sighed. She let go of her side, where she’d been pressing her hand, trying to keep her ribs from moving while she breathed, and she slapped her bloody, filthy hand into his palm.

“Deal.”

To her surprise, the doc wasn’t bothered by the blood. He squeezed her hand, then looked at her bloody shirt and said, “Were you also shot?”

“Grazed, but it cracked a rib. At least.”

“Let’s go,” he said, turning and opening the next door, then he led them, like the conductor of a mad circus, through short hallways into a twelve by twelve, stainless steel room with high, brilliant white lights. He motioned to the surgical bed at the center of the room, a fancy, plasteel thing with half a dozen long, delicate robotic arms protruding from its sides. “Juliet, go through that door and wait. You can watch the surgery from there.” Tsakanikas pointed to a stainless steel, automated door on the other side of the table.

“All right. Got any painkillers, doc? Nothing that will knock me out unless you wanna go boom.”

Tsakanikas frowned at her but said, “Gary will bring you something.” Juliet watched while Gary laid Ghoul onto the table, then she walked over to the door, which opened with a *whoosh*. A narrow waiting room, the third she’d seen in the doc’s building so far, waited for her. Against the far wall were four white leather and chrome chairs, and to her right was a stand with a coffee machine. As she walked over to get some coffee, Juliet saw a long viewscreen on the wall that adjoined the surgery room, and it was already displaying the activities taking place therein.

Juliet punched the button for a large coffee with cream and waited while the machine printed a cup and filled it with steaming fluid. It was just finishing when the door *whooshed* open again, and Gary came toward her with a bottle of water and a little paper cup. “This should help,” he said, holding them out to her. Juliet saw three little yellow pills in the cup.

“This won’t mess me up?”

“Nah, straight pain management.” Juliet reached into the cup and took out one of the little pills. It was indented with “GZ14.”

“What’s this, Angel?” she subvocalized.

“That is the pharmaceutical standard notation for generic zenthropheline, one point four milligrams.” Juliet knew what zenthropheline was; she’d seen commercials. It was supposed to be great for people suffering pain from migraines to phantom limb syndrome.

“Good enough,” she said and tossed the pills, swallowing the water. Then she took her coffee and sat down. Gary was watching her this whole time, and he moved to sit next to her.

“I didn’t think you had this kinda edge when you came in here the other day,” he said.

“Yesterday.”

“Huh?”

“It was yesterday. Seems like a year ago, huh?”

“Shit, I guess so.” He took a long, deep inhalation through his nose, sat back, and crossed one ankle over a knee. “So, had a bad run, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You could fucking say that.” She didn’t feel like elaborating, but Gary opened his mouth to ask another question. At least, she thought that’s what he was going to do, but he got interrupted by the door opening and the doctor coming through.

“I can save her, but she’s going to need a couple feet of synthetic intestine, a new spleen, and nerve repair to her spine. She also needs that arm fixed up. Based on what parts I use, we’re talking anywhere from seventeen to seventy-eight k.”

“Well,” Juliet said, thinking things over. “What’s the difference in price?”

“If I use a donor's spleen, it’s cheaper, but she’ll be stuck taking meds to fend off autoimmune issues her whole life. If I use a synth-organ, they’re engineered to clone the DNA of the host, just like synth-skin. Twenty k more, though. Then there’s the arm—a cheap prosthetic that works—twelve hundred. Something like Gary’s got? More like fifteen k. Similar story for the spinal repair.”

“Don’t skimp on the internal shit. Give her a middle-of-the-road new arm. She can always upgrade if she wants.” Juliet sat back and closed her eyes, rubbing at her head. She could feel the meds kicking in, and the pain was fading from her ribs, but now she felt like she was sort of floating, almost buzzing, though it was a different kind of buzz. She still had her wits about her, as far as she could tell.

“Got it,” Tsakanikas said, and then Juliet heard the door as he left.

“Wanna talk about it?” Gary asked after a few minutes, and Juliet flinched, having forgotten the big man was there.

She opened her eyes and regarded him, then said, “You ever meet Vikker?”

“Nah. I know the doc sent a couple people his way, though. He never fucked up like this, though. What did he do?”

“I guess he got paranoid and greedy. He thought I was a corpo plant or something and that my tech was worth more than my life. Asshole.” Juliet knew she’d probably be crying right now, reliving the memories of her harrowing experience, but the zenthropheline was making her feel strange, sort of detached. “Those drugs do more than block pain,” she said, narrowing her eyes at Gary.

“What? Zens? Eh, only if you’ve got feelings. Guys like me, we don’t notice that shit,” he chuckled.

That struck a chord in Juliet, even through the “zens,” and she laughed. “Well, you didn’t lie about the pain. I’m not feeling any!”

“Yeah, people get hooked on that shit, so don’t take it if the doc offers to send you home with some. Trust me.” He reached out, gave her shoulder a nudge with his big plastic fist, and said, “Not all operators are like that. It looks like that one in there musta done something to earn your help, huh?”

“Her? She shot me!” Juliet laughed, but then she continued, “I mean, it was after I killed her partners. She didn’t know what they did to me—they knew she’d stop them.”

“Ahh,” Gary nodded like it all made perfect sense. “Sometimes you just gotta do the right thing, eh? Let me give you a tip—make sure the doc pays off your contract. You’re owed for that, regardless of you coming here with that van full of loot.”

“Shit! I didn’t think of that. I will. Thanks, Gary,” Juliet said, nodding and smiling at him. She took a minute to regard the big, bald man. Wondering at his choice of obvious cyberware—his arms were only part of it. He also had protruding optical units that had entirely replaced his normal human eyes. They looked to be made of black metal, and the lenses glowed red. His throat, too, was artificial, and she wondered at the injury that had required him to get the metal and plastic grafted to the front of his neck.

As if he knew what she was thinking, Gary said, “Intimidation is my job. These help a lot in that department,” he gestured briefly to his arms and face and shrugged. Juliet nodded, and they sat in silence for a couple of minutes, both watching the vidscreen showing the doctor at work, cleaning and prepping Ghoul for surgery. Then Gary said, “So, you got a vid of you offing those backstabbers?”

“They had a jammer, I don’t . . .” Juliet started to say, but then Angel interrupted.

“I recorded the entire incident.”

“Fuck! Seriously, Angel? I could have shown it to Ghoul!” Gary looked at her sideways, wry amusement on his lips as he figured out she was yelling at her PAI.

“Their jammer did not hinder recording the way Dr. Tsakanikas’s does. It only blocked access to wireless networks. I’m sorry, Juliet, I’m trying, but I don’t always think like a person. I should have thought of offering Ghoul your evidence.”

“Dammit. Well, yeah, it looks like I do have a recording.” Juliet sighed and kicked her heels up and down on the smooth, white, engineered flooring.

“Mind if I take a look? I’m always interested in seeing how people perform in firefights. Helps me hone my own skills.” Gary’s question sounded innocent enough, but something about it gave her pause.

“Angel, can you edit out any of my interactions with you?” she subvocalized.

“I can, but it will not be seamless.”

“Not right now, Gary. I’ll probably show it to Ghoul, but I think I’d rather people didn’t watch me in that kind of . . . fucked up situation. Maybe I’ll change my mind sometime.”

“Yeah, I get that.” Gary nodded, sat back, and folded his big arms over his prodigious chest.

Juliet tried to watch the surgery as Dr. Tsakanikas and his robotic arms worked on Ghoul, but she found herself getting very creeped out by how the automatic knives and sprays doused, sliced, pulled, and manipulated her skin. Something he’d done made it so Ghoul hardly bled while he worked, and it was too weird to see how he dug around through her flesh, pulling out still-attached, clean, and bloodless organs that looked like rubber or plastic.

It felt very surreal, and Juliet found she kept forgetting he was working on a human being, lying there on that table, and she forced herself to stop watching. Maybe it was the zens, but Juliet just couldn’t take it. She closed her eyes and leaned back against the white-tiled wall, and, as she began to doze, she subvocalized, “Angel, pay attention through my auditory implants. Don’t let them do anything funny if I doze off.”

She must have done just that because the *whoosh* of the automatic door woke her with a start, and she glared around, pleased to see that Gary was also leaning back against the wall, sound asleep and snoring. Dr. Tsakanikas stood before her, his smock bloodied but his hands clean, and he smiled, “That went very well. Shall we talk about your situation? You need some rib repairs, yes? More than that, it seems you have the means to pay for a few implant upgrades. Care to hear about the options I’ve got on hand?”