Chapter Text
The NCPD could really put down a field command post in a jiffy if they felt like it, it seemed. The entire apparatus had fit in the back of a truck and been unpacked in the middle of the night, filling an empty parking lot with lots of generators, portable computers, and comms equipment. Badges in heavy gear stood at practically every corner.
Cranson didn't like it.
He also really didn't like being out of his armor during all of this. But Prometheus, custom build that it was, was a bitch to rebuild, and between losing two of its legs to a tank shell and the damage from the fighting beforehand, it was half-trashed. On its own, sure, the techies would've labored on it and it would've sucked but been fine eventually, just a pinch in the wallet.
Factor in most of the rest of the Table needing repairs or replacement parts at the same time, while they'd been going through a lot of their stock reviving the 'caldo haul, and Merlin's underground fab shop was stretched to the limit. CCPL and ultrastrong 'bones' didn't grow on trees and they could only make so much so fast, and they were burning through raw materials to do it.
Eh. Not the first time he'd been busted down to nudie work. Prometheus needed heavy firepower, and his magazines weren't bottomless. Unlike a lot of the others, he had the gear on hand for regular old merc work.
So here he was, standing behind old Hellhound himself, clad in a heavy flak vest and toting his favorite shotgun, and keeping an eye on things. Not like he expected to do much, but it was the principle of the thing, really. At least he'd make himself useful as an observer and optional meatshield.
He definitely didn't like sitting and waiting while, on a big old tac-map showing most of Westbrook and Watson, little icons showing the Round Table and their NCPD hangers-on advancing by groundcar, truck, and cargo AV on a score of locations.
They had thirty-two junkerknights for this op, just about all of the Round Table's fighting fit on the NCPD's side. The past couple weeks of fighting had seen a dozen previously independent junkers sign up and join - it was a sobering reminder that the Table hadn't, despite its power, counted the majority of armored killers in Night City - and they'd been brought into the ranks quickly. Their gear wasn't as good, by and large, but it was serviceable, and they were canny, tough, and capable. He was pretty sure almost as many had joined Mordred's end fighting alongside the 'tinos...which made about thirty or so there as well, counting the other independents they'd rounded up.
He was pretty sure that there were still more junkerknights running around the city under the thumbs of the gangs, divided up into penny packets or in the hands of pissant nothing street crews, but right now the Round Table was throwing most of its strength into one op. Thirty-two ACPA, thirty-two strike teams.
Only four of them he really gave a shit about.
Tumble was hitting an old chemical factory that was apparently a drug 'fac these days.
Jacob had an abandoned warehouse used for smuggling out near the city outskirts.
Ana had gotten the job of handling a netrunner coven affiliated with Claw blackmail ops.
And Troy had the unenviable dirty breach-and-clear work involved with a megabuilding floor in Japantown's H10. Nasty work - the entire megastructure was Claw turf, and he was aiming right at the heart of their offices.
He kept an eye on their specific little lights as Mauser prowled around the holo-table, occasionally muttering something into his headset. Teams moved into position, carefully timed.
"Wide band transmission," Mauser said at last. "To all units."
The man knew how to make a show, at least. How many cameras were on him right now? Hell, you could buy CCTV footage these days from any public cam.
"This is Commissioner Mauser to all badges," he said, the very picture of a tough-as-nails commander. Military more than police, by Cranson's estimate...but NCPD had always been more about guns than protecting and serving. "The Tyger Claws think they're more than gangster scum. They think they represent the law in what they wrongfully believe belongs to them. It's long past time we woke them up to reality. Good hunting, people. All teams - breach."
The tac-room was suddenly filled with splintering doors and gunfire as thirty-two teams simultaneously kicked in various doors.
----
Warehouses were always kinda hard to approach, if you wanted to avoid being spotted. Lots of open ground to allow loading and unloading, lots of cameras, and when they were abandoned hulks like this, absolutely crawling with guards.
This one was no exception. Drone recon showed at least two dozen Claws loitering around and the likelihood of many more inside, some of them with heavy chrome.
They had the armor to go in on foot. But that'd be a slog, and expected. Better to bypass all of that entirely.
Which was why he and Lancer were crammed into a cargo AV from the impound lot, following right behind a MaxTac Manticore.
Mauser's speech ended. The door at the back of the AV dropped open.
Jacob jumped.
The ghost of a laugh flickered through Lancer's systems as they fell, the Manticore AV swooping down on the loading lot and disgorging a half-dozen MaxTac officers.
His speedware kicked in as Lancer's hooved feet broke through the glass. Shards tumbled in slow-motion rain, and gunfire boomed from the lot outside. He fell through, bracing himself for the impact even as he noted fresh targets. Three gangoons without speedware, one moving but not at full speed. His shoulder-mount grenade launcher began to thump the moment he cleared the roof - by the time Lancer's hooved feet smashed craters into the concrete, all four were red smears and scattered meat.
Can't dodge massed explosives with that trashy street chrome.
The world snapped back into motion again, and doors leading towards the warehouse's offices banged open as gangoons began running out. Props to them, they didn't break and run when they saw him standing there, instead opening fire.
Jacob hefted his fifty-cal in one hand, and replied in kin, while outside the Manticore's cannons thundered.
----
"Turret front!"
"On it," Ana said, sending Zduhac stomping forwards.
Storming a netrunner den was harder than it'd used to be, at least according to the old-timers. Neuroport tech had changed the game from 'turrets, mines, and traps around an immobile target' to 'if they can see you and you don't have the ICE to stop them they can kill you'. And netrunners these days knew that and maximized camera coverage accordingly.
Which was why she'd drawn this assignment. Zduhac's rig wasn't as hefty as a proper den's servers, but it was chunky enough to provide the coverage needed for the riot-cop team with her to do their jobs.
That included catching real bullets as well as virtual ones. She had the armor and the guns for it.
Fifty-cal rounds from the roof-mounted security turret hammered against her plate. She let Zduhac's autoshotguns tear the turret from its mount with a barrage of slugs as in the Net she sliced a half-dozen desperately striking pieces of code to bits. Behind her, the badges cleared rooms with flash-bangs and shotguns. Runners that had tried to sit in their chairs and do Net-work, they weren't much of a threat once you shoved a compliance chip into their neuroport.
Ana's own opinion was that they'd have been better off shooting them all, but whatever. The badges had insisted on grabbing a bunch of the runners alive, and never mind the gangoons getting flatlined.
A pair of them came round the corner right as she thought that. Zduhac's fire turned them to colored rain.
"Clear!"
"Clear!"
"Clear!"
"Rooms clear! Form up on the junker!" the badge-in-charge, whose name she hadn't bothered to learn, shouted.
Zduhac went stomping forwards, metal feet cracking the cheap tile. The riot cops followed in her suit's wake.
She shut down another attempt to breach everyone's ICE - weaker this time, not enough processing power behind it with two of the den taken out - and sent a few retaliatory worms into an unguarded system. Quickhack work, but it served to alleviate the pressure.
They rounded the corner - another turret, another pile of scrap. Map of the building put the biggest server cluster below them, accessible through the stairwell at the end of the hall.
So far the intel had been solid, and it matched how netrunner dens worked anyway. Runners up in the 'regular' rooms, big hot machinery down below where an eye could be kept on it, minimal guards because the runners did their own security for the most part.
"Oi, badge," she asked. "You care about the servers being intact?"
"The more that are, the more we can get off them as evidence. But our lives matter more," the badge-in-charge responded.
"Fine by me." No gangoons came charging out, no more turrets. Maybe they'd gone through most of the building's stock of cannon fodder. She doubted it. "Runners are likely upstairs."
The badge nodded. "Castle! Rook! Shields up and EMP nades ready, you and Kent are clearing the top floors. Rest of you, with me and the junker. Server cluster's our job."
Let's rock and roll. Just like old times, out on the job on her own.
---
The world was debased beyond measure, choked in sin. There was no saving it, not any more.
The Inquisitors had long since fallen. There had been too many enemies, too many aligned in seeing them destroyed. Witness the new age that had arisen since - an age where almost everyone was shackled from near-infancy to blasphemous metal. Where it wound its way into their eyes and ears.
And yet, he endured.
He sold his skills for profit in the service of sinner's causes, waiting for death. Yet it eluded him. More than two decades of combat, and yet despite the increasingly powerful replacements the poor fools gained, none could defeat him. He had...endured.
In truth, he should have killed himself long ago. But suicide was a mortal sin, and for all his other, lesser ones, he had no wish to meet his maker before his time. That the cause he had fought for was dead and gone meant little. That he had no hope of reviving it - no hope of ever returning people to the righteous path - only slightly more. The Buddhists and the conspiracy theorists were the only ones that understood these days, and that was an unhappy fact.
His armor was ready. His sword was sharp. He waited, sitting cross-legged, as distant gunfire echoed down the hallways.
The NCPD had arrived. The Tyger Claws were fighting, even now. He had been instructed to defend this place, but how he chose to do so was up to him, and that included letting the gangsters perish if he felt like it. Their masters never cared for the common hoodlum. If the Tyger Claws could fend them off alone, that was all well and good - he was only to intercede if needed.
Judging from the way the gunfire was drawing steadily closer, that eventuality was soon to become a certainty. Oh, well. The NCPD would perish in the fight, and he would feel nothing. Still, it was almost a shame to engage the other party in the fight. He had found he had little to hate with the Round Table and those like them. While not completely free of the taint of cybernetics, they were often as close as one could feasibly be without being a holy man of some description.
It was a low bar to clear, but at least it existed.
Still, any of them he faced would perish. That was what he was being paid to do, after all, and it was only almost a shame.
There was a distant explosion. Dust drifted from the ceiling.
He rose unhurriedly from his crouch. His armor waited. It was a massive thing, once built for construction, in an age where one did not simply assume everyone gave the corporations and the data-trawlers direct access to their nervous system. It had taken a long, long time to acclimate it to his movements. There had been no shortcuts like the Round Table took.
But that was the way of this benighted world. That which took training and skill was discarded for the easy route, the quick route, and never mind what parts of themselves they had ripped out to do it.
He let the frame close around him. The darkness lasted but a moment before the displays flickered on again, showing a world shorn of shadows. His frame's eyes had taken a great deal of skill to build, but they would pierce any darkness. Automated injectors hooked themselves to ports in his skinsuit. The entire frame vibrated around him, almost - power barely contained.
He picked up his sword - seven feet of orbit-forged metal - and began to walk. Each step resounded on the concrete hallways.
Perhaps they would kill him. Perhaps not. It did not matter.
The last Inquisitor would purge the wicked until his flesh failed him. That would have to be penance enough for living this long.
---
The world was full of funny little coincidences.
Like how this entire complex was actually the same one she had been planning to go after with Kennedy and Barnes, what seemed like years ago. Apparently the warehouse had been the tip of the iceberg - either 6th Street's intel had been bad, or the Claws had started ramping up production enough to need to use more of the old complex in the weeks since the outright warfare had started up.
She was betting on the first. 6th Street hadn't exactly impressed her with their efforts in that department.
Her assigned MaxTac minders - Melissa Rory's SPAR Gamma - moved with her, quick and easy and smooth as butter. In the plant itself, even with most of the dangerous chemicals long since carted off, nobody wanted to shoot something that might spread toxic bullshit across half a city block. Sure, she was safe inside Roadie's shell, and the MaxTac bunch either had respirators or toxin-filtering chrome, but some of this stuff was corrosive, and the potential collateral was a bit too hefty for her liking.
Too hefty, in fact, for her to bring her auto-shotgun - the giant-scale buckshot was too much of a threat. Even fifty cal had an overpenetration problem. So she'd dropped down to piddly seven-point-six-two, dragging the old 'Lewisten' out of the back of the closet. The bulky MG looked like something a Lewis gun sired on a Sten SMG, hence the name, and like a SMG, her suit could fire it one-handed at full-auto. Unfortunately that really just meant she was hitting hardened targets with a whole lot of diddly, but nothing for it - if she didn't want to make the news again, she had to make do with the shoulder-railgun and her hammer for those.
Fast targets, she left to MaxTac.
They moved up carefully, dividing up fire sectors, synced up to her suit's tac-comp. Tyger Claws got in their way. The chromers got a railgun shot to the head or chest from MaxTac, the street-meat got perforated by her MG. Opposition lasted only as long as it took to squeeze a trigger, and gunfire served as punctuation. Some of MaxTac took hits - nothing that could get through layered armor and subdermal plating. She took her own - nothing did more than scratch her paint.
They had already pushed through the bulk of the plant when Lieutenant Rory called a halt, just before the back end of the plant - a set of double doors set in a wall that divided the entire building. Windows had been sealed, same with all the entrances save that one. She was pretty sure it'd led to either a more secure section of the plant, or the offices and break rooms, but that was just a guess.
"Check your ammo and your knives," the LT said, reloading the Omaha pistol she carried. "This part looks reinforced. Dollars to donuts they've got the heaviest security and the stuff they don't want anyone knowing about behind those doors."
She checked her own MG's magazine. About half left, about a hundred rounds. Good enough.
"Ready?"
Affirm-clicks all around on the tac-net.
"Let's go."
Tumble kicked in the doors. They didn't shatter like plastic when she did - heavy metal, though the locks hadn't stopped her. Her Sandevistan clicked on - she had time to take in the atrium, a big, wide-open space filled with tarp-covered bundles and a barricade of furniture near the back end. Said barricade had a half-dozen Tyger Claws, who opened fire pretty quickly. She answered in kind - two of Rory's squad leapt forward to engage the big Claws who had speedware, while she slowly walked her fire over the ones in cover, bullets punching through the plastic and sheet-metal furniture and sending blood spraying. The LT herself took on a tall, spindly guy with a monokatana, who lasted about two seconds before she buried her mantis blades in his gut and pulled him apart like a bag of chips. Achilles shots put metal spikes through anyone still upright.
The last body hit the ground as her speedware timed out. Nothing more came to replace it.
"Offices next," Melissa said, as the team formed up on Tumble. "Move it."
She didn't get more than two steps forward before the lights went out.
And then back on, as just about every tarp went flying and dozens of multi-optic'd strommers emerged from their hiding places. Tch. IR-baffling fabric. Neat trick.
MaxTac raised their guns, but didn't fire. Not when a couple of strommers were hefting fifty cals, and others already had their cyberweapons out and waiting. They could've opened fire...why weren't they?
"Well, shit," a familiar grating voice said. "Didn't think you'd end up on this one, Real." Dum-Dum strode out from the crowd, unarmed but at ease. "Only reason my boys haven't cut you apart."
"Comms are jammed," Rory reported tersely.
"Course they are. We're not stupid, badge."
Tumble ran through the events of the past couple days, then sighed and lowered her gun. "This whole thing was a big trap, wasn't it?" Which was surprising. Mauser wasn't stupid, and he'd have run that Claw defector through every test he could have. And you could take a guy's brain apart, practically, with some of the latest neuralware tools.
"Got it in one. Bosses want you guys taken off the board. Now, you're MaxTac, I don't expect that to be easy...but I've got my own solution to that. Faust?"
A spindly shape slid through the horde of strommers. Tall, thin, with a quartet of what looked like heavy-duty servo arms bolted to its spine, barely an inch of flesh could be seen beneath the chrome. It stopped at the edge of the crowd, staring at nothing in particular, its servo-arms twitching.
"You brought a cyberpsycho to fight the pyscho squad," Rory said flatly.
"Hey, you work with what you've got," Dum-Dum said with a chuckle. "That being said...Real, I like you. This ain't personal - it's just business. And you get that, I bet. So, want to join the winning side? Badges ain't gonna be able to come after you after tonight's done. The Claws lined up a hell of a lot of mercs and fall guys to take down your bunch."
"You're telling me all the strike teams are in this kind of trap?" Tumble asked slowly.
"Yup."
Yeah, that wasn't a choice at all. Not when her lance was out there.
She pulled her hammer off the back of her suit, let the head slam into the floor, sending cracks spiderwebbing across the concrete. "No deal."
"Fuck it. Fuck 'em up!" Dum-Dum shouted.
"Fire!" Rory roared.
Tumble hurled herself at the psycho with the servo-arms as the room erupted into gunfire.