Mistrunner 2 - Chapter 17 - Aftermath (Patreon)

I was always meant to be in charge. Even Jeremiah could see that. That’s why he gave me as much authority as he did. But it was a backhanded thing, and I eventually saw becoming his second-in-command as the insult it was.

Nora Lancaster

I couldn’t keep the smile from my face as I left Elysium behind. With Observation pushing my senses, I could hear the panic in the club building to a crescendo. The bodies had been discovered, and hopefully, the deaths would be pinned on Nora’s people. It wouldn’t be enough to ignite a war, but it was only the first step in my plan. If things went well, it wouldn’t be long before the Specters started to feel the pressure from the Garden’s other dominant tribes.

I barely noticed the promiscuity of Bourbon Street’s patrons and the sex workers who catered to them. Certainly, a few sights caught my eye, but it didn’t take much willpower to jerk my attention back to what was important. I’d gotten out of Elysiumunscathed and unnoticed, but I wasn’t so foolish as to let my guard down until I was safe in my own compound. To that end, I slowly made my way through the borough, careful not to go too quickly, lest I look out of place. I even stopped a few times to ogle some men and women who were putting on a show in one of the windows; after all, while I might have been unused to such sights, the woman whose identity I had taken was not. And there was only one reason people came to Bourbon Street.

Still, I didn’t linger for long, and eventually, I made my way to a more normal territory. However, I almost stumbled when I recognized one of the women dancing in a window. Heather looked as perfectly proportioned as ever, but having known her for years, it didn’t take me long to notice the slight bags beneath her eyes, the drugged expression on her face, or the mechanical way she twirled around the pole.

Gone was the warm, loving aura of the woman I knew. Instead, she was just like all the others. Sure, there were plenty of men and women who enjoyed sex work.  I knew that, even if I didn’t quite understand it. However, there were far more who’d had it forced upon them, either by circumstance or more nefarious means. Heather clearly belonged to that second group, judging by her demeanor.

Most of the men surrounding her window didn’t see it, but that was probably because they didn’t want to infect their good times with an admission of the real cost of getting their thrills. Some of the women looked a little more sympathetic, but that might’ve been my own biases making themselves known. After all, if they objected to what they were seeing, they wouldn’t have had their noses pressed to the glass. They wouldn’t have been scurrying to get inside the brothel to hire Heather for a few minutes of fun.

I was already disgusted by much of what I’d seen on Bourbon Street, but seeing someone I knew being so thoroughly degraded only made things worse. There was a part of me that wanted to march into the brothel and rescue her. The place was named Heaven and Hell, as evidenced by the sign flashing above the door; it depicted a naked woman with angel wings on one side and a similarly beautiful woman with demon horns on the other. But going by what I saw from Heather, there was nothing heavenly about the brothel.

As much as I wanted to do something, I stopped myself. I wasn’t some knight in shining armor, was I? And as far as I knew, she wasn’t a damsel in distress. Perhaps she wanted to be there, and my impression of her expression was completely fabricated by my own biased mind. But even as that thought flitted across my brain, I knew it wasn’t true. I knew Heather, and I could recognize that she’d been beaten down by the system. After all, that was what it had been designed to do.

I had no idea if she had a slave implant or if she had just been out of options after my uncle died, but it broke my heart to see her like that. Thankfully, her dance quickly ended, and she was replaced by another dead-eyed stripper – this one, male. With a shake of my head, I marked the location in my mind. I couldn’t help Heather right then, but I’d be back once things settled down.

Almost as if the world wanted to punctuate the thought, I noticed a few Cyberdogs rush through the crowd, and a moment later, gunshots rang through the night air. That was my cue to head out, and, thankfully, I now had an excuse to make haste. Gunfights weren’t exactly uncommon in the Garden – or the rest of Nova City, come to that – but it would take a real fool to stand around and spectate. So, Bourbon Street’s visitors wasted no time in surging toward the edges of the borough as they looked to escape the impending carnage.

I followed the flow of the crowd, using my high Constitution and the enhanced proprioception that had come with [Acrobatics]to keep from being bowled over. Eventually, I reached one of the side streets that led away from the area. I ducked out of the main flow of pedestrians and, after sliding behind a dumpster, activated Stealth. Only then did I let myself relax.

I hadn’t escaped – not exactly – but I had confidence in my abilities. With Stealthactive, I didn’t think I’d be discovered by some random mook. Of course, I was well aware that the ability wasn’t infallible. It had failed before, and I knew it would fail again. However, if it came down to a fight, I had plenty of tools at my disposal.

After taking a few deep breaths, I followed the side street until I was well and truly out of Bourbon Street. A few scattered pedestrians passed me by, but they were easy enough to avoid, and I quickly found my way into the parking structure of a megabuilding, where I summoned my disguised Cutter and set off back to my headquarters in Algiers. Along the way, I saw a few fights between the blue-armed Specters and groups of Cyberdogs, which told me that news of what had happened in Elysiumhad already begun to spread. Still, a few fights weren’t the war I wanted to start, so I knew I had plenty of work cut out for me. Even so, it was gratifying to see such quick results, even if I knew the tension would die down in a few days.

It took me almost an hour to reach Algiers, mostly because the streets were clogged with traffic. A few of them were even closed altogether as some of the fights that had broken out had drawn the attention of the Enforcers. Their response was as ruthless as it was effective.

The worst of it was when a group of Enforcers – at least a dozen of them – had subdued a much larger group of Cyberdogs and Specters, disarming and taking them prisoner. However, instead of imprisoning them, the Enforcers had lined them all up and executed them. When I passed them by, the Enforcers were laughing and chatting like it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

Of course, I knew they acted that way because, for them, it was just another Friday night. It would have been so easy to just end them all, right then and there. They didn’t even know I was there, much less how much firepower I could bring to bear. I could pull out the BMAP and just go to work. I had yet to really use it at full-power; instead, I’d been limited to practice ammunition. But if what Gala had claimed was true, I could’ve wiped them from the face of the city with no more than a few shots.

Or, if I wanted to savor it, I could have used the Pulsar, my sniper rifle. Even Ferdinand II was on the table. The only strategy I wouldn’t be comfortable using was to just attack them in melee, but even that might’ve been fine, considering the protection provided by my subdermal Sheath and my M11 Infiltration suit. I hadn’t put my defenses to the test, but I felt pretty confident that they would see me through.

With a little focus, I pushed those ideas out of my mind. It wasn’t time to go all-out. Besides, that platoon of Enforcers was only the tip of the iceberg. In minutes, they could have ten times as many fighters on the ground, and I wasn’t so naïve that I thought such a response wouldn’t include a few real elites. I wasn’t ready for that.

So, I kept going, ignoring the carnage all around me. However, I was a little distressed when I saw that the ramp down into Algiers was blocked off by a barricade of Enforcers. The barricade itself consisted of four personnel carriers stretching from end to end across the highway, meant to funnel any traffic into a small gap.

Each of the Enforcers were well-armed with assault rifles and their standard-issue, black-and-white body armor. One of the women wore a pair of green goggles that I knew were meant to see through abilities and skills like my Stealth or Mimic. And while I was fairly confident in Mimic’s strength, I wasn’t willing to put that to the test. For all I knew, that was alien tech on par with my weaponry, and I would have been stupid to chance it.

Shaking my head, I guided the hover bike around a corner and made my way to the second ramp, but I was unsurprised to discover that a similar barricade had been put into place. The third and final ramp was no different, which put me in a tight spot. As far as I could tell, I had three options.

First, I could go in, guns blazing, and force my way through. That had the added bonus of letting me kill quite a few Enforcers. More, it would be a black mark on the public’s perception of their absolute authority. Enough of those, and people would stop listening when the Enforcers gave them orders. After all, as Jeremiah always said, strength was about perception. And that adage was even more true for the Enforcers, whose numbers were propped up by unremarkable Tier-2 and -3 fighters. Only the elites could boast more power, but those couldn’t be everywhere all at once.

However, that strategy would also mean me stepping out of the shadows. Killing a few people here and there wasn’t enough to gain even a modicum of attention in Nova City, but breaking through an Enforcer barricade? That would be different, and it wouldn’t take long for them to start hunting me.

At that moment, my greatest strength was anonymity. Even if the Enforcers knew I existed, there was no reason for them to suspect that I was in the city. And showing them otherwise was a good way to get killed.

Or captured.

I didn’t want either, so I moved on to the second option. I could just try to sneak through, relying on Mimic to keep my true identity hidden. I was still wearing the face of Azalea, the woman I’d killed for the Elysium VIP pendant, and I could easily change that by stealing someone else’s identity. But what if the ability was insufficient? Then, I’d be back to option one, though with the added detriment of revealing one of my secrets.

That pushed me to the third option. Laying low for a couple of days. As much as I didn’t want to do that, I was beginning to think that I didn’t have much in the way of a choice. So, I turned the bike around and retreated further into the Garden.

But I was distressed to find that things had just gotten worse. The Garden had broken out into a hundred small battles, each more vicious than the last. How close to boiling over had the tensions in the area really been, if my actions had sparked such a reaction? There was no way that I was completely responsible; something else was obviously at play.

I pushed past those questions and, as I traversed the district, I did my best to avoid the various battles. It wasn’t easy, and it was slow going, but that allowed me to formulate a plan. So, I quickly made my way back to one of my old haunts on the edge of the district and soon descended beneath the surface of the city. Before long, I found myself in the familiar confines of the old, abandoned cistern I’d used as my temporary home before my Awakening.

I was unsurprised to find that it was little different from when I’d left. The sparse furniture I’d lugged down into the cistern was mostly rotted away by the dense humidity, but it was otherwise unchanged. Even the power coupling I’d used to gain access to the cybernet was still there, though I didn’t dare use it.

After all, I knew just how easy it was to track someone like that. No – it was better if I limited my contact with Nova City’s cybernet as much as possible.

I did chance a simple message to Patrick, though. It didn’t contain any sensitive information, but I wanted to let him know that I was okay. With that done, I settled down to wait things out.

For three days, I remained in that cistern. Periodically, I’d head topside to investigate things, but the Enforcer presence only grew more pronounced – until, on the fourth day, they were just gone. Likely, they’d accomplished their goals and gone back to wherever they were headquartered. If I had to guess, the whole thing was just an excuse to show the Nova City citizens who was really in charge, but I there was no way I could know for sure. It was just as likely that the wrong person had been slumming on Bourbon Street, and they’d gotten killed. If it was one of the aristocrats from King’s Row – or worse, someone deemed important by the city’s ruling council – such a response from the Enforcers would make sense.

Not that it mattered to me, of course. Eventually, they’d all get theirs. I was just getting started, and by the time I was finished, none of that power structure would remain. But for now, I had to keep low.

Once I emerged from the cistern, I decided to chance a little surveillance. It’d been a while since I looked in on Nora, and I was eager to see what kind of response my actions had provoked. So, I soon found my way to her megabuilding. I had no intention of heading up to the penthouse, but I didn’t really have to, either. Instead, my goal was a certain security terminal in the waste processing system below the building. I knew from experience that nobody who didn’t need to went down there, so I would have plenty of opportunity to Mistwalk into the terminal’s system and use it to surveil Nora’s penthouse.

There were safeguards in place that were meant to stop such an intrusion, but they wouldn’t be difficult to overcome for a true {Mistrunner} like me.

And as it turned out, the so-called security measures were even easier to bypass than I had expected. Likely, when my uncle had had them installed, he’d never envisioned a situation where he’d be targeted by someone like me. And even if he had been, he wasn’t exactly the sort of guy who flew under the radar. If someone knew his plans and used that information to attack him, he’d just overcome the odds with sheer strength. It was the prerogative of a man who’d been at the top for so long that he had forgotten the value of subtlety.

Whatever the case, I’d soon infiltrated the system and used my access to take control of the cameras in Nora’s penthouse. As the camera feeds were routed to my HUD, I felt a surge of anger; there Nora was, sitting on what had once been my couch. More, there were a few men and women I recognized sitting across from her.

First was Wash, an Operator who specialized in thievery. He was a short, barrel-chested man who was rumored to be one of the best burglars in the city. I’d never gotten to know him well because my uncle had only met with him on special occasions.

Second was Echo.  She was more familiar to me because she had helped Jeremiah with the logistical side of running the tribe. He’d often said that without her, he could never have done anything. Tall and thin, with jet black hair, she wasn’t a combatant. Still, her sharp mind and top-notch organizational skills made her a threat.

Finally, there was Ansleigh, a brutish woman who eschewed Nora’s bioenhancements in favor of a slew of cybernetics. If she wasn’t on the verge of reaching the Singularity, I didn’t know who was, and her body was covered in matte black mechanical parts. I knew she wasn’t quite as dangerous as Nora – not in a physical confrontation at least, but she didn’t lag too far behind.

That they were all there told me that the conspiracy to betray Jeremiah had been more widespread than I’d originally thought. It wasn’t unexpected, though. I knew that Nora couldn’t have taken control of the Specters without significant support from the people my uncle had once depended on so heavily.

I focused on the feed and listened to the audio. At first, there was nothing of real interest, but that was how most reconnaissance went. Hours of boredom for a kernel of relevant information. I didn’t mind, though. I was used to it. And sequestered in one of the most avoided places in the building, I didn’t think I had much chance of discovery. Besides, I had Stealth active; if anyone did decide to come by, I was well-hidden.

Eventually, Nora broached the subject I’d been waiting for when she asked, “Do we know exactly what happened in Elysium yet?”

Echo shook her head. “Brock and Purnell maintained the same story,” she said. “One moment, they were sitting in the private room, and the next, the two representatives of the Cyberdogs were dead.”

“What do you think happened?” asked Nora.

“Those idiots probably thought they could get over on us,” growled Ansleigh, slapping one metal fist into a similarly metallic palm. “I told you we were losing control, but you said everything was fine. Let me whip ‘em into shape, and I guarantee we’ll be –”

“I disagree,” Echo butted in. “It is far more likely we were set up.”

“By some mystery person,” was Ansleigh’s dismissive response. “And how did they get away without anyone noticing, huh? More importantly, why would someone just leave the case? Do you know how much those chips were worth?”

“That’s not the question we should be asking right now,” interjected Wash. “What we need to know is what we’re going to do now. The Cyberdogs are on the verge of declaring outright war.”

“We can take them,” Nora muttered.

“And? What about their allies?” asked Wash. “They’re on good terms with half the other tribes in the Garden.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Nora said. “I’ve got a meeting with Damien in a few days. We’ll work it out. He doesn’t want war any more than we do.”

“Bad for business,” Echo said.

But Ansleigh shrugged her mechanical shoulders. “War sounds like a bit of fun to me,” she said, but no one favored her with a response.

After that, they moved on to other matters. I kept listening until the end of the meeting, but I’d gotten what I needed. Nora and the Specters were on the back foot. My initial reaction was to simply sabotage her meeting with Damien, who was the leader of the Cyberdogs, but that was too straightforward to work the way I wanted it to.  Still, it was nice to know that things were going according to plan.

Once the meeting broke up, I left the megabuilding’s sub-level and headed back to Algiers. Thankfully, the barricades that had guarded the ramps were gone, and my way was clear.

Or that’s what I thought until pain exploded in my shoulder. I almost lost control of my bike as I skidded across the street and collided with the barrier meant to keep people from sliding off the side, but I barely kept it on track. With my shoulder on fire, I glanced to my rear only to see a pair of Operators bearing down on me.

I had no idea who they were, and nothing I saw gave me a hint as to their identities. One thing was clear, though – they weren’t there to take me prisoner.