Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other 13 (Patreon)

Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other

Chapter 13

-VB-

His name was Marco.

He was the lynchpin of his crew. The alpha. The strongest. The guy in charge. His chooms all liked him. His girls all loved him. He might not have the chiseled looks, glistening contours, or the rough and hard military style of high-spec cyberwares, but everything he had chipped in were all good shit that didn’t leave him green with envy when he looked at other chromes.

Maybe he wasn’t well off as the Night City edgerunners, but he’d like to think that he had a fair bit of chance if he ever went up against the average edgerunner.

“Wait, so you want us to check out what’s happening … over in the Sierras?” he asked incredulously.

The Arasaka rep - even if the bastard tried to hide it, it was impossible to not know after the first ten missions - nodded with her ever fake smile.

“Yes,” she replied. “As usual, you’ll be paid 100,000 eddies for completing the mission.”

Marco whistled. That was a lot of money for what was a simple reconnaissance mission.

Which, of course, meant that there had to be something fishy.

“100,000… that’s a lot of money, especially for a Raffen like myself,” Marco hummed. “But why would you offer a Raffen 100,000 when you can surely offer that to someone in Night City?” he asked. “100,000? You have a rough idea of what’s there. You know something.”

“I do,” Jennifer Lopez III - who the hell introduced themselves as “the Third”? - replied. She slid a chit over to him, and he quickly put it into his disposable tablet.

There were a few files there.

“A mining operation?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “And they do the refining, too. Whoever they are, they aren’t registered with the NUSA but NUSA doesn’t care since they don’t make too much of a fuss and sell cheaply to anyone.”

Which meant that Arasaka was either upset that one of their rivals were getting something cheaply or that they themselves were not getting their share of the deal. Even if it was happening in NUSA and not Night City. She obviously wanted him to go there and make a mess of the guys who might just be a harmless bunch.

It was shit like this that made people hate Arasaka.

But … 100,000 eddies was a lot of money. If he took it to NUSA, that’s something like $200,000. If all he had to do was take his crew out and just shoot some bullets, then there wouldn’t be much issue.

He liked what he was seeing.

“Sure. Hundred-k to scare some peeps up in the mountain boonies, yeah?”

“Of course.”

When the Arasaka bitch left, he walked out of the booth and into the bar where his crew was waiting.

“So we have a new job?” Angela, his sweetheart, asked with a grin. She might be missing a tooth, but that only added to her tomboy charm.

“Yup,” he replied as he sat down. “Fixer #2 wants us to go up to the mountains, in the Sierras, and shoot up some helpless idiots who didn’t offer to sell their stuff to some big corpo.”

“Hmm. That’s kinda far. Ain’t that like a full-day drive?” Jake, his second, asked with a gruff while hunched over and drinking his cheap can sake. The former NUSA sergeant was a reliable sort of guy who was in charge of their logistics. If he said it was a full day drive, then it was a full day drive.

“Yeah,” Marco said as he pulled out the tablet again. “We’re gonna have to go through old San Jose to ruins of Sacramento, and then to the entry point in some mountain town called Auburn.”

“That’s a long-ass road trip,” Tyler, the last member of his core crew, hummed. The short blonde was the sneaky sort of guy. “So you and Angie better have your own ride. I don’t want to listen to you fucking like rabbits while grunting and oinking like pigs.”

“Oi,” Angela glared at him.

“Especially you.”

He was also Angela’s little brother.

It was his perfect crew, though he also did have side chooms who’d come to join him once in a while.

“Well then, we’re agreed?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes.”

“Sure.”

“Cool, cool. We’re gonna get filthy rich-!”

---

Marco took a deep breath in. He let it out slowly.

“That bitch lied,” Angela grunted.

“No duh,” Tyler hissed as he looked through his pair of binoculars at the giant military compound filled to the brim with identically and heavily armored, armed, and alert soldiers. Sure, they didn’t have the standard military gear, but what he was seeing down was pretty much a military compound.

Yeah, they also had some kind of large furances, but they looked primitive. There was also not a single sign of a mine. A squad of their numbers always went out into the woods and then came back.

Which meant that the area was also being surveilled since they were sending out, because there was no way they would send out a squad of people to random paths each time for other reasons.

There was no mine, there was no real industrial refinery, and there was definitely no helpless idiots who spurned Arasaka.

This was a military operation being disguised as bandits, and there was no way he was going to attack them.

They had goddamn turrets covering every inch of that military compound!

Worse, this was potentially only one of several compounds. There was never just one military outpost by itself. There were at least one more bunker, one more lookout, and always one more straggler. Well, at least according to Jake, and his friend was the military guy.

“We … should get out of here. This job’s a bust,” Marco whispered and began to crawl backward from the slope of the cliff that they had used to spy on Arasaka’s targets.

But then he paused.

Because he saw a group of five bushes moving among the underbrushes.

No.

Camouflages.

“Oh shit,” he muttered. “They already know we’re here!”

That made the others look around in alarm, and they s-.

“There’s five to our left!” Jake hissed as he brought up his .31 HMG.

“A squad at the bottom of the cliff!” Angela hissed.

They were surrounded?

“Move!” he hissed, and they all ran for it toward their rides. As he rushed down the side of the hill they had climbed with his friends right behind him, Marco put a finger on his neck, bringing up the network. “Erin! Start the rides! Get them ready for us!”

“{Wu-? Wut’zzup, boss?}”

“AMBUSH!”

“{... Oh shat. A-Aye, I’ll start them up!}”

They hit the bottom of the hill and ran for it without even thinking about cover. There wasn’t a need anyway with how thick the untouched forests of the Sierras were.

“{U-Uh, boss?}”

“What?!”

Finally, they burst through the last obstacle of dense vegetation and into the clearing they stopped at and froze when they saw at least four dozen gunmen waiting for them with at least five RPGs surrounding his minions and rides. They looked like shitty homemade RPGs that not even the Raffen would use, but five RPGs would still kill them all, never mind the rest of the guns currently not pointed at them but still pointing in their general direction.

“Oh shit,” Angela muttered.

Tyler shook between them, and Marco pushed him behind him and Angela, and noticed Jake pushing Tyler behind him.

He didn’t see any chrome on these guys…

But he noticed something else.

As one, none of them had chrome. More than that, his Image Enhancement upgraded Kiroshi “The Oracle” cyberoptics immediately compiled the images of all of the strange gunmen even as more of them walked out of the underbrushes.

All of them had the same left forearm scar.

All of them.

Mass-produced soldier clones.

“... What the fuck did we just walk into,” he muttered.

Then one of the gunmen walked up to them from his left, and Marco immediately turned to face him. His hands were on his guns but his trigger finger was off the trigger, his barrel pointed down, and taking as non-hostile of a stance as he could.

“Who hired you?” the gunman demanded.

Marco looked down at the archaic AK-74 -.

… Was that a shovel handle buttstock?

He looked around. Nope, there were now six dozen of these guys. He and all of his chooms would die under the sheer hailstorm of bullets, nevermind the rockets.

“Some bitch named Jennifer Lopez the Third.”

“... And who does she work for?”

“I… don’t know. For sure,” he said, adding the last phrase quickly. “I think it’s Arasaka after all of the missions I’ve been sent on to attack their rivals.”

The gunman tilted his head.

Then a pair of gunmen in the background put their guns away and brought out some fancy tech. Oh yeah, this hobo bandit getup was a lie if that fancy blue and white sleek tech was any indication. They set the thing down and then backed away.

Marco and his crew stiffened when they saw energy barrier rise up and then -.

“Holy shit, that’s a portal,” Tyler muttered.

“Portals aren’t real, Ty,” Angela muttered back even as she stared wide-eyed at the scene of an urban city on the other side.

“You and your crew have two choices,” the initial gunman who approached Marco spoke, and instantly got all of their attention. “Die here like dogs … or walk through the portal to a world where no one knows you and where you can’t contact Arasaka.”

Against seventy- eighty cloned soldiers, there wasn’t much of a choice was there?

“Fine,” Marco hissed before starting to walk. Soon after, his girl and Tyler followed. Jake followed after them, and the rest of his gang followed once his core crew followed him through.

What he found on the other side of that portal was a whole new world with fantasy movie shits like superheroes and supervillains.

But it was an adventure that certainly beat being buried in the mountains up in the bumfuck Sierras.

-VB-

Gloria stared up at the six foot something man who had contacted her through fringe members of Marco’s Crew (defunct).

“Umm, so you want to buy some of the scavenged chrome from me, right?” she asked him.

The imposing man - there was something off about him - nodded. “Yes, we’d like that,” he replied.

‘We? Is he in a member of a gang?’ Gloria thought. “Well, Marco up and disappeared, so I have a flush of chrome that I haven’t been able to sell.”

“We’ll take them all.”

“... All?”

“All.”

“Okay…”

Well, she found a strange one.

-VB-

A/N: guess who's next in line?