Cyberpunk: I'm Not a Scavenger - Chapter 33: Trouble by the Truckload (Bonus Chapter) (Patreon)

Night City's weather was as awful as ever. Thick pollution blotted out the moon, and a dirty gray haze hung in the air.

Two in the morning was when people felt sleepiest. Even someone with an iron will would struggle to stay awake, never mind a pack of Maelstrom lunatics.

Two guards slumped against a wall in the corner, drooling onto the ground. The only one still remotely conscious was a junkie high out of his mind, and even he twitched every few seconds.

Under cover of the haze, Maine and Jackie crept toward the stronghold and lay low in the shadows, waiting for the netrunners to make their move.

Inside an abandoned house not far from the Maelstrom base stood two temperature-controlled tubs, both packed with ice.

Lucy and Sasha stripped off their clothes and lowered themselves into the freezing water. They peeled back the Velcro coverings on the backs of their heads, revealing large, concealed ports. Once they attached thick cables to the ports, both women slipped into a deep dive.

Kiwi sat smoking in a chair nearby. Her part in the operation hadn't begun yet.

Deep diving allowed a person's consciousness to enter Cyberspace directly, where netrunners could make full use of their abilities. The strongest among them could seemingly bend that world to their will, performing feats that looked like magic.

AIs were even more terrifying in Cyberspace, like natural disasters or monstrous beasts. Only the very finest netrunners could challenge them. Those exceptional few were often known as Dragon Hunters.

Lucy and Sasha hadn't reached anything like that level, of course. But with the processing power of the Merrimac's onboard server behind them, they were still formidable.

In Cyberspace, Maelstrom's ICE took the form of a towering crimson wall, glowing with menace.

Lucy placed her palm against its surface. As she began cracking it, streams of blue light spread across the wall, softening and peeling away the sections they touched.

Sasha's avatar looked even more like a catgirl here. She sprang nimbly over the wall and went straight for the automated sentries behind it.

Working together, they tore through Maelstrom's outer layer of ICE in a matter of seconds.

Meanwhile, on the stronghold's second floor, the female netrunner assigned to the hacking room was tangled up with Sergei Temennon, one of Maelstrom's officers. Neither expected anyone to strike at that particular moment.

She wasn't even in a deep dive, but she was still connected to the local network. The first wave of the cyberattack hit her with devastating force.

What the hell?! Am I really that good?!

Sergei was staring at her corpse in utter bewilderment when the door to the hacking room was kicked open.

Another netrunner stationed at the base had arrived.

He was a middle-aged man in his forties. Years of hard-won experience had made him exceptionally cautious. The moment he detected the attack, he'd severed his network connection, escaping the initial impact, then rushed straight here.

Panting heavily, he didn't spare either of them a glance. He shoved the dead woman out of the netrunning chair and sat down without caring about the stains she'd left behind.

He immediately entered a deep dive. Drawing on the local server's enormous computing power, he rapidly rebuilt a defensive line and just managed to halt Lucy and Sasha's advance.

But there was a cost. Without proper network commands, the automatic turrets and mines could no longer function at full effectiveness.

Sergei had finally realized something was wrong too. Before he could give an order, an enormous crash erupted outside the window.

At the very moment Lucy and Sasha launched their attack, Maine and Jackie went into action. They dispatched the three nearest guards with close-quarters attacks, without firing a single shot.

“Maine, we're almost there!”

Dorio's voice came through the comms, accompanied by Rebecca's delighted shouting.

“Woo! Step on it! Faster!”

A rumbling noise grew louder in the darkness, shaking the ground as it approached. Fortunately there were no residential neighborhoods close to the docks, or nobody would have been getting any sleep.

The source of the racket was a heavy cargo truck loaded with construction debris, barreling ahead at full speed. It was a thirty-year-old relic barely fit for the scrapyard, but as long as Sir Isaac Newton's laws still applied, a vehicle like this would remain one of the most destructive weapons an ordinary person could get their hands on.

The enormous truck smashed straight through the fence. The thin sheet metal might as well have been paper, and the bodies on the ground were flattened into something practically two-dimensional.

I thought those were speed bumps.jpg

With nobody at the wheel, the truck tore through the base. Even the landmines couldn't flip it over. Their explosions did shred its tires, however, and the vehicle finally lost its balance and toppled onto its side.

If they'd filled it with explosives, they could have flattened the entire dock in one strike.

But an attack like that might have affected corporate stock prices. Then MaxTac wouldn't have been the only people hunting them down. After all, everyone knew you didn't have to bother with humanitarian concerns when dealing with terrorists.

Rebecca and the others followed the truck's path into the stronghold in their modified vehicle, using the wreck as cover while they laid down suppressive fire.

Some Maelstrom members were wrenched from their dreams only to catch a stray bullet before they were even fully awake.

Still, these were Maelstrom's elites, and they reacted quickly. Every last one of the maniacs had modified himself beyond reason. On average, they had at least three eyes apiece.

Countless crimson cybernetic eyes lit up the darkness. Metal structures jutted from their bodies, some still smeared with blood.

“Boys, kill every last one of these fuckers!”

Sergei leaped down from the second floor and roared. His shout brought out the beasts in his men, who surged forward howling.

Two lunatics with augmented legs and Sandevistans led the charge. Moving fast enough to leave afterimages, they bounded across the cargo containers and closed the distance to Maine's group in a few bursts of speed.

Maine and the others could barely respond in time.

“Eat my big grenades!”

Rebecca was having the time of her life. She pulled several grenades Pantheon had given her out of her pockets and hurled them all at once.

They landed directly in the two speedsters' path. Just as the men reached them, the grenades deployed, projecting countless spinning laser beams that slashed through everything around them.

Neither of the two had bothered with subdermal armor, or even a bulletproof vest. The lasers carved them into irregular chunks of meat that scattered over the ground.

What a waste of their military-grade cyberware, though.

The battle was nowhere near over. Maelstrom still held an overwhelming advantage in numbers, and under Sergei's direction, the gang regained its organization. Their concentrated gunfire wove a deadly net across the battlefield.

“Maine! My armor's gone! We need to switch positions!”

Pilar screamed from behind cover, holding his M251S Ajax above his head and dumping a magazine toward the enemy. His bulletproof vest was in shreds, barely more than a thin outer layer now.

Rebecca didn't give a damn about any of that. Once she was in a fight, not even Maine could keep her in line.

The tiny gunwoman popped up from somewhere unexpected and opened up with a pistol in each hand, pouring bullets into enemies whose flanks were exposed.

“Die! Die! Die, you bastards!”

One or two unlucky thugs dropped dead in her ambush. But plenty of Maelstrom's fighters had subdermal armor. Unless she caught them at close range or got lucky and struck a vital spot, putting them down with a single shot was difficult.

Worse, the gang knew the terrain. Using the shipping containers scattered across the dock as cover, they began closing in step by step.

Things were looking bad.