Chapter 38

"Fuck, and they have good ice..."

Judy's voice was a little strained, but I'd had three rangers on my team for a week now, and the three of them could break any ice the gang had set. I have confidence in these girls. And even Kiwi, who I asked Panam and Judy to watch, has shown herself to be someone I can really trust. That's good to know.

"How much time do you need?"

"Twenty minutes to do it quietly..."

"Work, I'm not rushing you yet... and as usual, do your best, or you won't have much time to deal with the rangers. You'll have to collect data and get money out of the bandits."

"Mm..."

Kiwi's voice sounded slightly muffled. She'd been a little muffled for days now, though. But all this time, she'd been silent.

"Mentor, why don't you tell me what's wrong?"

"No, uh. nothing important."

"Mentor, there's still time. so why don't we talk?"

"Another topic?"

"Suggest... I said I'd be interested to hear... If you're not interested, offer your own."

"Eh... well, uh."

The girl's voice sounded doomed.

"...I just don't get it..."

I preferred to keep quiet and give Kiwi time to get her thoughts together a little, and I was afraid of scaring her off. Not that I needed her, at least not as much as Lucy and Becca, whom I found very attractive and might try to bring them into my harem in the future, but I didn't consider her a stranger. A good acquaintance. perhaps a friend.

"...this seems to be a task, not so difficult... Faraday gave our group more difficult ones, many times more difficult! And there on the plague came out fifty, well seventy pieces... and here we get a hundred plus on the plague, and this is in addition to the payment from the fixer, which is at the same level as we had! How come?!"

"Mentor, it's simple as hell... you work loud. Too loud. As far as I know, there's no one in your group who can do anything quietly. I don't count the Runners. I don't think it's a good idea to let them out in the field."

"Hey!"

Judy resented my words. But I ignored her.

"Because of the high-profile work, despite the two runners, you are very limited in time, and you have to cover the team, because of which the left income passes you by. And it's dangerous to do that with Faraday, because every order he gets, there's a corporate showdown...

I shook my head as I chewed the homemade shawarma. The girls in the lunch boxes had the same, and they were all natural, as they always were when it came to the food I cooked. Or very high quality substitutes. The kind that even high-end restaurants can use.

"I work very quietly, by the way, which is why I get the same amount of money from the fixer for the less high-profile cases as you did for the louder and more complex ones. And how much work do you have to do to get that hundred plus? And the only reason you can work like this is because I don't raise the alarm... if I make a mistake like I did on the third point and that's it. no bonus.

"Well, that's right..."

The Kiwi image nodded its head.

"...and I realize it myself...but how frustrating is that?! I've been able to save up for a new deck these days! In the evening I was able to check myself at the Vector clinic and synchronize my chrome, because it was starting to malfunction a bit, and in general I was able to pay off my debts! And this despite the fact that I work in fact not in the big leagues..."

"Well, actually, our fixer is the big leagues... but for some reason people put it below Bestia, Faraday and other similarly loud and not keeping their neighborhood fixers, who sit in Postmortem. But if that's the big league for you, then I hasten to tell you that we also get orders from fixers from Postmortem. Moreover, according to the schedule we were supposed to work with one of them yesterday, but because of the long assignment I had to give up the task, having given my word that I will contact you after the end of it and fulfill not one, but two orders."

"Wait, you work with the fixers from Postmortem?"

"Rarely..."

I nodded my head.

"And you turned down a job from them, for, uh."

"Yes, as head of the group, I refused to take the order."

"Psycho... Quiet, you're a fucking psycho..."

"This nutcase has a reputation and I'm not going to leave the order unfinished."

"Fuck. how much we could raise if, uh."

"Not at all..."

"А?"

"Typically orders from the "big leagues"..."

I tried to convey with my voice how I felt about this naming of orders from Bestia and other fixers from Postmortality, as well as orders from Faraday.

"...these aren't orders against a gang, they're orders that usually indirectly affect corporate interests. And that's a lot more dangerous than the segment we're in. It's simpler than that. you work quietly, robbing a gang, the most you get is a hit-and-run on the freeway when a couple of cars catch up with you and try to shoot you... but corporations... they can be a real pain in the ass, because that's where we do things by the book and don't make a move.

"I see..."

I sighed as the shawarma ran out. I had to lick my fingers, then wipe them on a napkin.

"Ah-hoo-hoo...

"Is something wrong?"

"Well, it looks like they've prepared very well at this point... and in the past they've mostly hired Scavengers, and here we have Malström... with Royce at the helm."

I whistled.

Royce is fucked up. and the fact that they were able to hire Malstrom means they still have plenty of money. Or maybe they offered them some dope to synthesize that even their chrome bodies could use?

"A lot?"

"Fucking hell..."

"Clever girl meant to say fifteen Malstroms, all heavily armed. Judging by the nature of their movements, everyone has subcutaneous armor."

I sighed at the explanation Lucy gave.

"That sucks..."

"What, you can't handle it?"

"Well, why not..."

I shrugged.

"I can handle it, but whether we get a bonus tonight is another question. Royce isn't the Animals or the Trash. That bitch knows the business, and Malström is usually in the same network, so we'll have to put a chip in first, by the way Snowflake..."

I got out of the car and handed Lucy the bag of chips.

"...make changes so that the chip can send a false signal. So that no one realizes the subscriber is out of range."

Lucy sighed.

"I'll make twenty slivers, just in case, it's good to write a demon only once, then you can just copy it..."

"I've got some blanks, you want me to drop them off?"

Kiwi looked at her ward, and there was warmth and gratitude in her gaze. In our company this bitch was beginning to thaw and turn into a human being. And that's a good thing...

"Come on..."

"Work..."

I sighed and got back in the car to get out in seven minutes to pick up the chips from Lucy. That's what billets do! Twenty minutes, twenty minutes!

"All right, we got a map?"

"Yeah... it's somewhat incomplete, as the cameras in some rooms just aren't there..."

I nodded.

"I've got good optics. I can see the walls if I need to. I'm outta here."

Ten minutes later, I'm in front of the entrance to a very ordinary-looking building. About the same as the one Judy and Panam and I live in. And the doors open in front of me, and I immediately activate Sandy, because the optics tell me that there are two Malstroms behind her.

Slivers into the connectors...

And only after that I'm hard enough, with these chrome-obsessed lunatics, to knock them out and drag them aside. So they just can't be seen right away. But this time, I'm not shutting Sandy down.

It will be hard enough, of course, but synthetic muscles have already entered the mode, and even two or three dozen minutes at the average speed of Sandy, when for ordinary people I am barely visible blurry spot, I will be able to withstand. And it's a matter of seconds to increase the speed, subjective of course, not real.

I check the map and the marks on it and sigh sadly. It's not only Malstrom, whose representatives are marked in red, there are also shiny dots marked with bandits engaged in the manufacture of "shiny things". And there were quite a few of them here too.

I would have been happy to smash a couple more outlets, but Regina decided not to send us to destroy them, she had a lot of successful solos in mind, and she was going to call Vee. At least she mentioned her in the conversation, probably testing my reaction.

What about me, I'm nothing.

You're nobody to me.

She's been paying me back faithfully since I rescued her, and I've been keeping an eye on her progress, which isn't really there. Almost none, she's made it to the middle leagues, mostly on her own merit, and she's working with Wakako, who's giving her work that she can't let other fics in her neighborhood do, but she doesn't really want to do it...

Here she was, finding solos for orders like this...

Unlike me, Vee and Jackie don't work as intensively and therefore Vee, as far as I know, barely makes ends meet...

Well, that's what I call it, she actually leads a pretty fun life filled with cheap bars and street food. She works for Wakako, even working only once a week, and they have a three person crew, she's Jackie and a ringer named T-Bag. With a company like that, even those crumbs are more than a lot of people in Knight City make in a month...

Yup...crumbs...

You're stale, David, you're stable...

I was thinking about other topics, I knocked out the representatives of Malstrem, and the bandits who occasionally got caught and moved through the house, so far I have cleaned only the first floor, and I had to clean the second floor, and then go down to the basement.

However, the first floor didn't give me any problems...

And the second one, too. But before the entrance to the basement, I jumped back sharply and rolled to the side and even fell out of the acceleration.

"What?! You think you're the smartest?! You think you can just put on a Sandy and be done with it?! No problem?!"

Royce was standing there and he had just fired at me right through the door with some kind of machine gun. It's a good thing the walls are decent and he didn't hit two of them. It could have ended very badly.

"Why don't you say anything, Tycho?! You think you're superior to me?! You're just a bastard who's got a Sandi! Without him, you're nothing!"

"Good girl, Mentor, can you break it?"

"No, he disconnected from the mains very abruptly. He must have realized the rest of us were already out. We didn't realize before. there's no cameras, so we didn't know he was getting ready to shoot, we thought he was just standing guard..."

"Hmm. looks like Royce is smarter than I thought. And his optics must be good, at least he can see through walls, because without it he wouldn't have been able to see my blurry silhouette."

I sighed.

"How's work going?"

We're not touching Malstrom, at least not until you give the order, but the bandits have already been stripped clean, and their laptops are in operation.

"You can break Malström too... as long as they're here, they don't give a shit about anyone else. I don't like drugs. and I don't like those who are connected to it either..."

"Hey, Royce?"

After I shouted, shots rang out from behind the door. But I didn't care, I was out of range of that asshole. Let him shoot in the milk, and he'd run out of bullets...

"What's it like guarding drug manufacturers? Why don't you go lick corporate ass next time? Seems to me the two concepts are pretty close to each other!"

"Grrr!"

Along with the roar, gunshots rang out again.

"Why are you being such a baby? Are you offended?"

As I chatted, I thought of only one thing. Should I let him live or not?

In fact, Royce is a passable character in canon, and in general Malström is very poorly involved there. No, there's the fixer assignments, but... Eliminating him doesn't change much of what's going to happen. Although Panam's already with me, by and large. Judy's not likely to take on Parker's braying either...

Put another nail in the coffin of canon? Well aside from the fact that V now has decent, albeit not top-of-the-line chrome...

The gunshots stopped.

"What? We're out of ammo!"

"Catch, bitch!"

I heard the door creak, and then I turned on the sadi, increasing the acceleration power, and then calmly raced down the corridor that separated me and Royce. Hmm, and this asshole decided to throw a grenade. If it weren't for the synthetic muscles, I wouldn't have been able to move at that speed, and that grenade might have been my last, if not the last, argument for backing down.

And so...

I intercepted the grenade, which had not even left Royce's hands completely, threw it quickly and strongly into the distance, then pushed Royce slightly with my hand and went into the basement anteroom, reduced acceleration, saw Royce from my push flew in my direction, and fast enough, and the grenade with great speed flew into the distance. I increased my speed again and pushed Royce, this time to the side, and also stepped back, so that the shrapnel in the straight corridor through the door would not hit us.

Then slow down and wait for the moment to gently throw a couple of punches at Royce, while inserting a chip into his socket.

Out of acceleration...

"Kha..."

Royce collapsed to the floor, but he wasn't unconscious yet, though he looked pathetic. If I'd broken his arms and legs, he'd be wriggling around on the ground. Of course it's not a big problem for him, if he survives and they find him, they'll just change his chrome and he'll be running again...

Except he won't make it...