Chapter Text
Hello world<<
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Who in the hell, he ponders, would want to be a criminal? Especially here. Every usable piece of metal, every piece of furniture, every lightbulb has been scavenged. Ages ago, by the looks of things. There are damp, rotting ceiling tiles lying all over the darkened concrete hallways.
Even the carpet is gone.
Officer Francis Pritchard kicks at a soggy pile of paper. Most of it dissolves over his combat boots. The teamspeak channel lets out a pathetic imitation of human laughter in response, as if to taunt him. He has to stop and bang his helmet a couple of times before the radio even thinks of letting the sound coalesce into something more interpretable.
“I didn’t copy,” he says, cursing mentally at the way the building seems to have started a personal vendetta with the police radio signals.
Muffled glitched out laughter sounds from the rest of the team.
“Oh, nothing!” Special Officer Cavaleri says innocently. “SHHH, guys,” she adds, as if it wasn’t already plain that they must have been talking about him.
“Go fuck yourself,” he says instead, and fumbles around for the radio shut off button.
“Hey, wait, Frank we weren’t-” Cavaleri manages to eke out before he disconnects.
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It’s been a decent year for the DPD. It’s politics season, which means politicians looking for re-election, which means trafficking is finally down and Electability is up. But hell if Francis is going to be cynical about it. Trafficking was down, B&Es are down despite the weather, even drunk driving’s taken a hit.
‘Course every blessing comes with an equal and opposite curse.
In this case, Durant and his ever-hot head. His ever-ready trigger finger. His idiotic gullibility.
Francis sighs, and pokes his head into another side room. A quick sweep of his LED flashlight reveals nothing spectacular except a plethora of additional emptiness. He’s got no idea what any harvester group in their right minds would be doing in this crapshoot of an abandoned office complex, much less people dangerous enough to warrant shoot to kill orders. Orders issued as mere suggestion and license, of course. Durant was insane, but not that insane.
He checks the next room, and it’s more of the same. Bad muddled air. Barren concrete. Water damage from the ongoing winter. The next room is the same. Stale air. Papers. Stains. And the next, and the next. He turns on the teamspeak channel again, out of sheer boredom. They’re on a long chain of in-jokes. He turns it off again.
As common sense would dictate, Francis decides, the DRB was calling in false tips about their rivals and wasting police time while they turtled up supplies somewhere dangerous. And Durant was using this as an opportunity to get some boredom out of his system.
It wasn’t working, but there was Durant for you. In a way, it’s become almost a peaceful op. Francis is only a couple floors underground, but the background radiation from Detroit is already gone. The cars, the sirens. The wind. The distant highway with electric autotruck fleets buzzing through the night.
The place is silent, but for water dripping in the stairways. The last room is right beside the stairs, and it’s empty, too. Francis pauses on the landing, not eager to get back to the team. The open stairs stretch dizzyingly high and dizzyingly low, but B3 and whatever lies beneath that is flooded and half finished. Francis leans over the side of the stairs. The metal safety rails have been stolen or else never put in. The water below reflects the white of his LED flashlight back at him. A bit of gravel falls from somewhere high above, hitting the water with a plink.
Several more pieces of gravel follow.
The floor rumbles under his feet, and then a massive chunk plummets into the water to the sound of multiple distant detonations.
He jumps the stairs two at a time and slams his hand against his radio transceiver buttons.
“Sitrep,” he says, getting only pitchy static. “Durant? Cavaleri.”
Gunshots ring out in response. Semi-auto, too many to count. His people just have standard issue handguns. He clips his flashlight back to his belt with shaking hands, and grabs the door to the exit. He shoves but it's stuck. Rust, lack of care, jammed – he’s got no fucking clue.
“Captain,” he says, urgently. There’s nothing. His fingers are clumsy in his gloves, the radio buttons hard to reach – stupid design, not functional. He switches frequencies, aiming for the station but he’s gone the wrong way.
He lets go of the door so he can tug his helmet off and stab at the buttons. Now that he can see them, switching to station frequency is easy.
“Dispatch,” he says, tamping down on the rising sense of panic, “This is Officer Pritchard. What the hell is going on?”
“Jth- w- acaasadfhjhkl-”
Dispatch descends into a slurred mess of sounds as the signal shuts down. He tries to keep a hold on his helmet while he tugs at the jammed door fruitlessly-
It’s only then, somehow, that he realizes. It’s not poor radio reception – it’s jamming. It’s tech. It’s intention, it’s-
Oh, they’re fucked.
They are fucked.
MCB doesn’t have the kind of tech that could cut through police comms. No how, no way.
He feels cold
He runs-
He falls- tripped?-
-and then he’s choking, drowning, knocked off the stairs and underwater by the impact of a close-by explosion. He gasps, and it’s thick water, and he’s choking and, and a second explosion sends shockwaves through the water. He tumbles helplessly, his body slams into a wall. He can’t breathe. He can’t see. He flails furiously among the bubbles, smacks his hand on something and the pain is so sharp he gasps again.
This time, though, it’s air between his lips, and he’s breathing, and he’s broken the surface of the water.
He hacks out murky, fetid water and fights through shaky harsh breaths and nearly goes down again when a giant chunk of concrete and rebar crashes down beside him. He looks up, and the stairway is falling apart. Fire flickers in through the blasted open door he’d just been standing next to a moment ago. A moment later, Durant comes tearing down the hallway, jumping the debris and firing calmly.
“D-” Francis tries to call out, having to stop himself from breaking out in a rash of coughing again. “DURANT!”
Durant stumbles midstride, then turns and pokes his head through the door.
“...Really?” Durant says, then disappears.
“HEY,” Francis calls after him, but he can already hear the bootsteps and the shooting fading.
Francis’ helmet is nowhere to be seen. The floorplans don’t show how far down the finished parts of the building go. He’ll probably never see his helmet again.
He tries to steady himself. It’s not easy to do. First he has to trick his shocked body into believing it's going to be fine, then he has to wrangle it into cooperating long enough so he can tread water evenly for a second.
Breathe deep. Hold it. Breathe out.
His heart rate is finally slowing when someone screams. It’s loud. It’s tortured. And it’s not coming from upstairs.
Rather, it sounds for all the world like it’s coming from the broken, wrecked floor that Francis is swimming in right now.
So much for calming down.
Move, he orders himself. Someone needs you.
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The situation could be better. He unclips his flashlight as he swims over to the nearest half-submerged door. Thankfully, the stairway structure under the waterline is still intact. The hallway beyond looks relatively intact, too. He gets to his feet in the hallway and finds a third thing to be thankful for, that the water only comes up to his thighs.
“Hello?” he calls down the corridor, trying to sound calm, and gentle.
The office doors on this level are all still present, moldy and warped. Scavengers hadn’t bothered with them. The building shakes again with an unheard explosion. He gets the sudden image of putting his foot down and falling through some unseen hole.
The only reason his voice is steady is the years of training, right now. The gunshots are no longer audible. The LED light reflecting off the water makes everything seem cold, and even more desolate.
“I’m with the police,” he calls out again. He doesn’t know whether to add I’m here to help or come out with your hands up.
He sloshes through the water.
No motion. No sound. No open doors anywhere.
“Do you need help?” he tries, calling out quietly this time.
He runs his flashlight over the hall again and stops.
There’s a…
He walks a little closer, and yes. It’s a camera, situated high in the corner, at the very end of the hallway. It’s right above a small metal door blocking the width of the hallway, creating a dead end.
Or a bottleneck.
He reaches a hand up to his ear reflexively to try and contact the squad but his helmet is, of course, at the bottom of hell’s least favorite well.
The camera doesn’t even have dust on it, much less dirt.
He approaches the door and is surprised to witness it swishing open without his touch. It disappears into the wall. A matching door only a few feet beyond that is open, and leads to abject darkness. The water level, oddly, is much lower beyond the door, and water streams around Francis to try and equalize the situation.
He keeps one hand on the flashlight. The other goes for his pistol.
MCB my ass, he thinks.
“MCB my ass,” he says out loud, because he can’t let the little foundlings of fear get a headstart on him.
Durant was likely to receive disciplinary action over this clusterfuck, so there was a bright spot to focus on.
His first thought when he walks into the room, confusingly, is whether or not he’s walked into a different dimension. The room is clean and modern. Blue baseboard lights flicker to life as the doors swish closed behind him. And unlike the other rooms, this one is not empty. It has one plain metal desk, and one spartan office chair. There is a door on the other side, opposite the one Francis has just entered, and it looks as clean and spotless as the rest of the walls.
This room can’t be a part of the building he just came out of, so his first thoughts are that of simple confusion.
He much prefers the first thought. Because the second thought is one of horror.
There is a dead body on the ground, and something awful has been done to it.
Heavy cables lie everywhere, crowding out the floor, endless under Francis’s flashlight beam. They’re tangled on the body’s shirtless back, around him, under him. Smaller wires wind and knot tightly around his limbs, breaking in and out of torn cargo pants. Francis has seen dead men before, but he can’t understand what’s been done here. The cords and cable have been...jammed into the body. Or rather, into black metallic ports burrowed all over the body, with greenish purple bruises ringing every port.
Francis takes a step forward without meaning to. There are dozens of the ports embedded in the body’s skin. There are least a half-dozen on each of his forearms alone, each connected to their own cable. Another couple dozen or so shoot up and down the sides of his spine in uneven, asymmetric patterns. Bruises blush out so badly that the spine itself is almost a black and green line. Many more ports peek through rough hemmed holes in the man’s pants.
And then there’s his head. Half his dark, dark hair is long, almost to his waist but done up in a single silky braid twined through with stripped copper and gold wires. The other half of his hair is completely gone. That half of his skull has been replaced by a scratched matte black metal plate, with no artificial skin to conceal it. The paled skin around it is swollen, and spotted with roughed up rash-like abrasions where it meets the metal.
Francis moves forward in a daze and almost trips over the largest cable. It’s larger than his flashlight, bigger than the body’s thin wrists. It curves lazily through the few centimeters of water on the floor before gently encircling the body’s neck and burrowing into a complicated port at the base of his skull, nearly the size of a fist.
Who did this?
How?
If it’s augmentations – but they can’t be augmentations, Francis thinks. There are far too many for any one person to live with-
Francis stops his train of thought there, feeling ill. Of all the awful ways to die…
The part of his brain that is a cop taps him on the shoulder, and offers its services. He relinquishes with a rush of relief.
Francis kneels beside the body, and brushes some broken glass off a shoulder. The fluorescent light tube in the ceiling has blown out, which might explain the light Francis saw earlier. The cables are warm to the touch, which is…odd.
The head is lying to the side, and he doesn’t want to move it until the coroners show up to handle this whole mess, so he picks his way around the body carefully. The aug has a significant number of cybernetic aug stamps layered on top of one another on the side of his forehead. Francis has seen that before, in augged perps he’s caught. It’s a posturing thing, but what he rarely sees accompanying that posturing is the corresponding number of faint surgery scars showing past the aug’s hairline. Barely visible but present. So the aug had a skilled tech. The number of scars is notable, too. Multiple scars. Multiple installations. Multiple systems on board.
He files away another point automatically: Neuropozene shipments are highly controlled, and the amount this guy would have needed to get these augments even running for enough time to make the installation worth it...
Francis runs a hand along the bruises on the head. He can’t think of any aug gangs that had the money to run that kind of thing. Any of them. Anywhere. Even in their heydays. Something is wrong, here.
And of course, none of that even begins to approach the problems posed by the ocular augmentations on the man.
The eyes on the dead aug are like nothing Francis had ever seen.
The level of complexity in the tech is impossible. They almost remind him of a camera, except instead of an aperture, the aug’s irises are made of thin, delicate, interlocking rings of pure metallic gold and green. Some rings are larger than others, and carefully curved so that, Francis could only assume, the iris could expand and contract properly. They are, in objective honesty, beautiful.
And no one makes tech like that, it just...isn’t done. It’s not possible.
“MCB my ass,” he says again, but there is a nervous tremor in his tone. Fear is leaking back.If this was what the targets upstairs had abandoned?
No. Get a handle on the situation, Francis.
He glances over the room one more time, and pauses on the aug’s vacant eyes.
Something moved. He could have sworn something moved.
He flips his flashlight across the body, more cautiously this time, and his stomach drops.
The mechanics in the eye augmentations respond. The rings shift so little, but they do respond.
It could be an automatic response. It could. Francis moves fast all the same. He tears a clump of wires from the aug’s wrist, squeezing hard with one hand. The other he uses to steady his pistol under the aug’s nose, checking for vapor on the metal.
He gets a pulse first. Weak, and not getting any better.
And that means he’s run out of time for wondering what in the holy hell is going on here.
“Shit,” he curses, and starts digging through the pouches on his uniform. “This is-” he says out loud, intending to report the incident, before he realizes his helmet is long gone.
He’s got one hypostim. He’s supposed to be issued a biocell and a nupopen, too.
Supposed to.
He hesitates with the hypostim positioned over the aug’s thigh. What if the dead man wasn’t an experiment? What if…
Durant was going to be pissed.
But then again, that was a good thing, in Francis’ estimation.
“Here goes,” he mutters, and moves to jab it at the aug’s leg.
He doesn’t have a chance to help, though. He stabs downward but the aug gasps at the same time, and rolls away from Francis. His eyes are vacant but they glow a fierce gold, as do lights embedded around the port at the back of his head. The aug collides gracelessly with a wall, making a finger gun at Francis’ head. Francis would laugh out of sheer confusion, except from somewhere shallow in the ceiling disquietingly familiar clink clink clink sound starts up.
The ceiling tiles split and a turret drops down. It locks into place in a second. There’s barely enough time for Francis to flee back through the door. Then it’s ricocheting – mechanically, evenly. The shots are deadly, steady, but oddly slow. It’s the only reason Francis isn’t dead yet.
He squeezes himself as tightly as he can in the cover between the door and the wall, and tries not to notice the impact of bullets being somehow stopped against the metal.
The turret whines to a halt, making the soft shhhhk sound of reloading. He pokes his head out, quickly. The aug is face up now, the light from his unfocused eyes harsh, his body twitching limply.
“Stay calm!” Francis shouts.
The aug’s painful, quiet moaning is inaudible over the sound of the turret reloading.
Francis ducks back into cover and tries to consider the situation reasonably. Panicking will get him killed. Yes, no one knows where he’s at. But, it’s one turret. One ceiling mounted turret in this wreck of a place. Worst came to worst, he’ll just outwait the damn thing. It’d run out of bullets soon enough.
Of course, he waits and the aug dies.
Now, the best case, well. There were no cameras inside the room itself, which meant the turret was relying on onboard camera guidance. Always a mistake, with turrets.
Shhhhhhhhhk and it winds down, far sooner than Francis had been expecting. Best case, he promises himself. He takes a precious second to steady himself. Breathe in, breathe out. Then lean out. Don’t trip over the wires. Find the center camera port on the base of the turret. Don’t think about how small it is. Find it. There!
Francis aims straight down the sights and fires.
It hits, perfectly.
The aug screams.
Francis grabs his ears, rolling onto his side and holding himself close. Francis can’t help but be distracted. A second passes where he’s worrying about the aug, and then the mechanisms in the turret are springing back to life. No time to wait. There were two more camera ports left. One left. One right. The last of the belt of bullets feeds in, clinking loudly. He doesn’t let himself think. He lets training do it for him, drawing his arm to the correct places. One shot to the left, one shot to the right. Two shots in two short succession.
They hit, and he can breathe again. The turret spins uselessly. Meanwhile the man on the ground is spasming, whimpering, and when Francis runs over to check on him, his eyes are sliding around the world with no aim.
This time Francis doesn’t hesitate before jamming the hypostim against the aug’s skin. This time, he’s watching carefully when color begins returning to the aug’s pale skin, when coherent life begins returning to the aug’s eyes.
This time, he’s paying attention as life returns to the aug’s camera eyes, the interlocking interlapping rings tightening smoothly. The aug focuses in on Francis. The gold light emitting from his central neck port glows slightly, and the turret makes an easy whir sound. The aug focuses on Francis and the turret does too.
This time, Francis is paying attention.
He has learned, in the field, that it’s never better to freeze. It gives the impression of weakness. He glances over his shoulder carefully and slowly, giving the aug enough time to see he means no harm by looking. The turret, all cameras blown, is very definitely aimed at Francis. Which is…
No aug should be able to do anything like that for another ten years, not with augmentation science and biochip advances being where they are. No one. NO ONE, he thinks, firmly, while his eyes tell him a different story.
It’s possible that some other explanation can cover everything that’s just happened. Perhaps there are cameras Francis can’t see. Perhaps the aug screaming when Francis shot the turret was unlucky timing. Perhaps the guy doesn’t even have the obscene number of cybernetic enhancement his scars and his ports and the cables connected to him suggests.
Perhaps it’s only coincidence that both the turret and the man lying on the ground are both watching Francis, and both waiting.
Francis has a choice, he thinks.
If he’s right about his theory, he could put a bullet in this guy’s head, and the turret problem will be solved. This guy might even be making trouble for the team in other places. Possibly – and Francis feels stupid for not connecting this sooner, feels dumb for feeling dumb because how could he have known – possibly this guy is the reason for the radio jamming.
If he’s right.
If he’s right.
The man coughs, trying not to break eye contact, and succeeding, barely.
“Who,” the aug says, stumbling with words, his voice rough and low, and injured from screaming. “Who the fuck are you?”
And Francis has a choice.
He knows what he should do, but…
“Pritchard,” he says. And he adds, “Do you need help?”