Edge City Chronicles 15 (Patreon)

“Can we help you?” asked the man nearest me, a guy who gave off a real slick, corpo vibe, including his well-tailored three piece suit.

"Working for Mercer,” I said immediately, holding up a hand to show I meant no harm. “Supposed to be delivering a package to this address.”

The group all turned and looked at each other for a brief moment before the corpo turned back to me. “That may be…difficult.”

I sighed before saying, “Alright, hit me with it.”

The corpo waved the others back to what they were doing before walking over to me and extending a hand. “Sam Johnson, point of contact for Mercy’s Angels.”

“Thomas Trentmoore,” I replied, shaking his hand.

“We got a call about two hours ago,” Sam started explaining. “Certain people buy insurance packages in case anything happens to them. Something similar to Trauma Team, if you understand how that works?”

“I know about Trauma Team,” I replied with a nod. "I take it they didn’t get anything?”

“Exactly right,” replied Sam as two of the team members, both women, at least to outward appearance, entered a room I was guessing was a bedroom. “Trauma Team is…fine, for the most part, but there’s a reason people buy insurance packages with companies like ours. We got an alert that Evangeline went missing, but scouring the location she disappeared yielded nothing. It looks like she got in a car or was grabbed and tossed in a truck. We came here to see if we could pick up any clues.”

“Not sure I can be of any help,” I said with a shrug. “Though, I do have to get this package to her.”

Sam gave me a strange look at that, but only for a moment before he shrugged and said, “I can appreciate the work ethic, but we’ve got a job to do here.”

“Look, Mercer told me to get this delivered, even if I had to crawl through half the sewers to find the client,” I said, holding up a hand to stop Sam’s protest. “I’m big, but I’m fast and know my way around the proper end of a gun. I’ll help you out, no charge to you, as long as we can find her fast.”

Sam glanced at the other person in the room, a massive man who clearly wasn’t the corpo type, and got a nod after a moment. The other two women returned after that and there was some kind of silent conference between them all for a moment before Sam turned back to me with a nod.

“Alright, kid, you’re with us,” he said. “We’ve got a location, though it might just be a lead, or even a dead end.”

“Not like Mercer’s gonna give me another job without me completing the first one,” I said, with a shrug.

“Come on,” Sam said, leading the way out of the building.

Their group had a large SUV, and they didn’t blink an eye as I loaded in the back with their big bruiser. The rear of the SUV had a set of double doors that folded out and led into the trunk area, but that area had a set of bench seats in it that faced each other. The SUV was pretty big, but their team’s bruiser and I were not small men, and we each took up an entire bench seat and filled the rear area of the vehicle. The two women sat in the center area in bucket seats, and Sam took over driving duties, which made a certain sense.

“New to this, kid?” one of the women asked over their shoulder.

“Done a couple jobs and had some decent training,” I grunted in reply. “Already met a Failsafe, too.”

“Shit,” the big man across from me commented, shaking his head.

“Living through that’s already preem,” said the woman, shaking her head as she turned back around.

The rest of the drive passed in silence, other than the noises of traffic, the honking and shouting that was often present in any city. It wasn’t quite so bad in Edge City, but that’s because the city was still pretty underpopulated; there were only certain times of day when the roads were even close to full, and a lot of people without the means simply took the ample public transit options instead. The place was a riot of color, even without much of the noise; neon signs of every description, flashing lights, men and women in bright clothes, with strangely colored hair, cyberpunks with bright chrome implants and flashing lights across their body. There was always something to see, and the sights only ever got stranger and more interesting.

That wasn’t even mentioning the smells; the city was a crazy blend of scents, of the smell of roasting meat and tofu and vegetables, of old oils and burnt fluids, of old tar and fresh cement. Everywhere one went, it was all kind of smells, from the amazing to the downright noxious, and even the filters of the SUV didn’t do much to block it out. I could smell the various scents of the oils most of all, from the cooking oils that everywhere used to the oils of the machines, from vehicles to personal chrome. Edge City, if nothing else, was a city of oils, and the smell and taste and feel of oil tended to linger. It was not a thing that was for everyone, certainly, and outsiders to town often complained about the grime, though they were really talking about the oil.

We had a lot more than oil to worry about at our destination, an old concrete building on the northern edge of city center, right inside the warehouse district. It looked like it had once been some kind of water treatment plant, or maybe it had been some kind of power facility, though there weren’t any kind of obvious power cables running in and out of the place above ground. We pulled up at an old gate, just part of a pretty standard chain-link fence, propped up and looking as if it had rusted into that position.

“They down here?” the big man across from me asked before we got out.

“Looks like it,” the woman that I was guessing was their netrunner replied.

“Shit,” the big man swore again.

“Problem?” I asked.

“Haven’t been down there?” he asked me as the others got out.

“Not much. Just below my own apartment, or my old one. Moved to a nicer place after I finally had some creds,” I said.

“I feel that,” he said, grunting as he kicked the SUV rear doors open and levered himself out. “The tunnels below the city are a fucking nightmare. They’re a webwork of old sewage systems, which were then expanded by smuggling operations, and then were further mashed up by the military building fallout shelters and bunkers down there. The whole place is a massive rat’s nest of intersecting tunnel, old hideouts, and even stranger crap.”

“Lovely,” I said after following the big man out. He took a position in front of the group and I attached to his left flank position, the man grunting in acknowledgment.

“We’re in luck,” their netrunner said then. “We don’t have far to go.”

“Good,” grunted the big guy, and we moved forward into the building, the large set of double doors swallowing us up without a sound.

It was some kind of old water plant or chemical treatment plant, and the whole place was concrete across the inside as well. It was a little depressing, especially considering they hadn’t bothered to paint anything except a few small signs on walls to highlight where to go, but then again, it was not supposed to be a vacation holiday getaway. There were no signs of any recent occupancy, but there were a few signs that people had moved through a set path in the last few weeks, with some areas where the dirt and dust was scuffed up in a narrow channel, indicating people had walked back and forth along a specific line numerous times recently.

The building was empty, which was pretty easy to determine, and we moved up to a stairwell that was locked with a cheap lock. I made a hand signal at the big guy, not sure he would pick it up, but he understood and responded in the negative. The netrunner girlie slid forward then and examined the lock for a moment before slotting in a small chit, something like a USB drive but much thinner than the ones I was used to, what I think they called shards here, and then fiddled with the pad for a moment. After about ten seconds, it blinked blue before blinking green and letting the door pop open, the big guy catching it and moving it slowly, trying to make sure it didn’t creak.

At a gesture, I moved forward first, my lousy optics scanning the stairwell. One of the others grabbed the door and the big guy moved through, leap-frogging me and positioning on the first landing. The two of us led the way down while the other three followed behind, with Sam keeping to the very rear. Something about the slick, polished corpo told me he wasn’t much of a down-and-dirty fighter, or much of a fighter at all, and it would be best if he was just out of the scrum entirely, a sentiment he seemed to share.

We went down three floors, which was a pretty obvious place to go, as we were still able to follow the traces that whoever had been moving through here was using. I would have said Scavs, but they weren’t exactly behaving quite like typical, including that there weren’t a bunch of them lounging around nor were there any vehicles outside. Scavs didn’t exactly have the greatest operational security, and by that I meant they had none, but whoever was down here wasn’t being quite as obvious about it. Still, they had left plenty of tracks, and the defenses so far had been non-existent; sure, there was something to be said for laying low and not standing out, but there weren’t even any cameras down here.

The netrunner performed the same actions at the door further down the stairwell, with the same results, which, given how competent Sam’s team appeared, wasn’t all that surprising. We weren’t at the bottom of the stairs, not by a long shot, but this is where the disturbances in the dirt and marks of shoes scuffing the ground led. Unless it was a red herring of some kind, whoever we were after was in here, that is, if it was even the right people. Even with the competency of Sam’s group, we were chasing some unknown kidnappers to some unknown place for unknown reasons, so it was just a bit of a crap shoot overall.

The big guy moved into a hallway and posted up, then I folded in around him and moved down to the first point of cover after the stairwell. The girls came in behind me, moving up to my back before the big guy then shifted forward. He and I then leap-frogged down the hall with the girls just behind us and Sam hanging further back, ostensibly guarding the rear but more like to scramble back to the stairs when the lead started flying. I was fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to be at the head when we came to the first area that wasn’t a hallway with a few random planters and features, the hall opening into a large room with some old machinery in the middle. There were some kind of goons hanging about in here, none of them displaying much awareness of our presences, and I stopped at the edge of the room and signaled back to the others.

Big guy got my message loud and clear and moved up next to me, crouching by me in the doorway, which wasn’t properly lit, lucky break for us. He gestured several times and I got the gist of it pretty easily; take them down, and be fast and quiet. I gave him an affirmative and gestured left, to which he nodded and then counted down from five on his fingers, clasping his hand on one before sliding out into the room and opening up. I moved at almost the exact same instant, just very slightly behind him, the bark of my rifle lighting up the room and echoing off the walls. I was pretty sure, after a few seconds of firing, that the big guy had some kind of combat augments for accuracy, considering he was using a very heavy rifle but was drilling head shots and heart shots without seeming to try.

We nearly wiped the entire room before they even started responding, and I dodged the couple shots that came back by being mobile and darting around an old rack of tools. The last few fell, but that was just the warm-up, as two guys in heavy gear ran in as we mowed the last of the first goons down and opened up on us. This was trickier and the thing really saving our bacon was the heavy machinery in the center of the room, which gave us enough cover to not get knocked right away. These jagoffs had some kind of hard armor shells on that absorbed quite a lot punishment before breaking, but their joints seemed rather weak. Even still, it took two elbow shots, a near miracle even given all my experience and skills, to put the left arm of the guy opposite me out of commission. Still, small things like that could turn the tide, and turn it they did, enough for myself and the two girls, shooting from the hall, to pin him down and eventually punch him full of holes. The big guy, meanwhile, had taken care of the other one, though he’d taken a few hits himself, signaling that he was fine afterwards.

I thought that that might have been it, but then a new opponent ran into the room and opened fire with a pistol that barked like a angry mastiff and punched holes in the concrete. I was left scrambling for cover, taking shots that she easily dodged, sometimes without looking. It didn’t take long for me to realize she had some kind of speedware, likely not a Sandy, as she was moving in quick little bursts and jerks but not accelerating to an extreme degree at once. It was enough to make her practically immune to bullets, but she might not have been a true expert with it, as the big guy managed to shoot her gun out of her hand. Maybe the software doing the calculations didn’t consider the shot dangerous, seeing as it would have missed her hand and body, and she wasn’t experienced enough to move herself to dodge.

I had thought we had advantage with that, but then some kind of crazy, glowing wires popped out of her arms, wires that sliced through the old machinery as if it were made of warm butter and the wires were heated knives. It sliced through big guy’s gun and damaged one of his arms with ease, but that arm was fully chrome, so it didn’t present as too serious of an injury. I knew we were in a bad spot, so I stood and moved towards her, firing precise shots to try to disrupt her rhythm as I went.

Drawing her attention had not been a great idea, and she lashed out at me, which could have been very bad. I did the one thing she hadn’t expected and tossed my rifle into the wires as they sliced towards my chest, surprising everyone in the room. Well, everyone apart from me; that had been a calculated move, considering I still had two pistols and several knives on me. As soon as the gun was out of my hands, before it even entangled her wires, I had drawn a pistol and assumed a braced firing position, left hand with a knife in it in reverse grip and bent across my chest, right hand holding the pistol over top the left forearm and aimed at the woman. I rushed her then, firing precise shots while she took a second to get her wires disentangled and wind them back into her forearms.

A moment was all I needed, however, considering my long stride and how strong I now was, I exploded across the distance between us in just a few heartbeats, firing the whole time. The woman tried to retrieve her wires and then whip them at me, but she had gotten herself out of position while dodging my pistol shots and hadn’t had enough time to reset before I was on her. She tried to juke me, but I shot to one side and then threw the pistol to the other before slamming into her at full speed, the knife meeting a brief moment of resistance before punching through just below her jaw and up into her head. I continued on, planting my shoulder in the center of her chest and carrying her back into the wall with a heavy slam, seeing the light had already left her eyes by that point.