Chapter Text
Red Queen’s Race was, according to Smeech, on the outskirts of the city. Streets turned empty and dark out this far, where neighborhoods gave way to factories and warehouses. There wasn’t even a steady population of grifters out this far, homeless or desperate. Those souls wandered further into Westbrook, ended up begging outside of Japantown or crossing into Heywood.
Anyone who did try to eke out a living there didn’t last long without running into the Animals.
A gang without true turf, the Animals were the natty equivalent of Maelstrom chromed-out ‘borgs. Huge, violent, brutal, and unforgiving, they prided themselves on physical power like the animals on ancient TV had; a gorilla’s raw strength, a cat’s lithe agility, and so on. They were a mix of vain puritans and fuckin’ psychos, from what Vi had learned. Any Animal she met was either too zonked out on juice to hear a word she said or so hyped up on ultra-testosterone that they started swinging as soon as she showed her face.
The gist of it was that Animals were big and liked to brawl; Vi, while fond of brawling herself, didn’t have the steady supply of equine growth hormone injections to keep up.
The address Smeech had provided led them to a warehouse. From the outside, it didn’t seem like much. But even without everything she knew now, seeing the hulking mass on the security guards roaming the perimeter would have raised every alarm she had. Only Animals had bodies pushed to the limit like that without the marking of chrome to back it up.
Caitlyn’s name flashed in the corner of her vision. The call connected. “Hey,” Caitlyn said softly. Her video feed was dark. She was likely still in her car. “Are you there yet?”
Vi nodded, creeping slowly toward the warehouse. “This is Animal turf.”
“Animal?” Caitlyn’s face scrunched in confusion. “I didn’t know another gang claimed turf in this area.”
Vi rolled her eyes. Claimed turf. Jesus Christ. “They haven’t. The Animals don’t really have a homeground, they go wherever they want. All you need to know is to stay the fuck away from them.”
“Where are you? I thought we were to meet on the corner of… oh, you’re already inside, aren’t you?”
“Might as well be,” Vi hissed under her breath. She crept closer to the warehouse, watching keenly for the guards and their routes. The one encased in security glass at the front didn’t seem to be moving, but a quick double-jump over the fence should get her within the front yard easily.
Caitlyn swore. “I thought we were doing this together.”
“And I thought you wanted to stay alive,” Vi retorted. “Listen, I’m all for female empowerment and shit, but you ain’t about to walk into Animals HQ and survive. Don’t care how many self-defense classes your daddy made you take.” She spotted her opening and looped around to the side, where a stack of boxes covered up a gap in the barbed wire. Climbing them led her to a graveyard of shipping containers, rusted and empty. The warehouse clearly hadn’t been operational in a long time.
She swore she could feel Caitlyn pouting across the line. “I’ll have you know I’m a black belt in multiple martial arts.”
Vi hopped to the ground. Mud squished beneath her boots. “I’m tellin’ you, Cupcake, jiu jitsu don’t do shit against these fuckers. Each of these Animals probably weighs heavier than the car you’re driving. You aren’t about to grapple with one and live to tell ‘bout it.”
“So I’ll bring my rifle,” Caitlyn protested.
“Stop tryin’ to get yourself killed, Kiramman.” Vi was getting tired of the back and forth. Her hands tapped against her legs restlessly, chrome humming beneath her skin. “A couple pot-shots from across the bridge will only make things worse.”
“A couple— I’ve spent the last two decades learning how to hit a target from a mile away,” Caitlyn said indignantly. “I’m an excellent shot.”
“Who gives a shit? Stay back and let me handle the violent part, okay?”
Caitlyn, finally, was silent. Vi could hear the rumble of an engine in the background. Reacclimating to the quiet, she began to ghost across the yard. Nestled between two containers was a gate with a keypad leading to the warehouse itself. Vi hopped it easily.
She found a set of rickety metal stairs leading up the side of the building. She paused to look out over the yard for a moment. It might be abandoned, but it was obviously occupied. No signs of current use, but Animals were treading circles into the dirt like vultures circling roadkill. Electricity buzzed in the air, powering something out of sight.
Caitlyn had sought her out on a gut feeling. This time, she would have to follow Vi’s.
Pressing her lips together, Vi climbed higher.
Wind cut through her leather jacket as she clambered onto the roof. There was a glass inlay across the center. Keeping low, she moved to its edge and knelt until she could make out detail on the floor of the warehouse. Clutter littered the floor without a discernible pattern, as if the workers had left in too much of a hurry to clean it up. Most of it was giant chunks of metal contorted into shapes that would only make sense to a gearhead. The space was divided into two floors, connected with a single set of rickety stairs. She stifled a chuckle at the mental image they conjured: a couple of men the size of rhinos tiptoeing up steps a quarter the length of their boots, grabbing for balance on a rusted handrail.
“Vi?”
The second floor was nothing more than a path lining the wall, connecting office space to storage and server rooms. If Vi were more technically proficient, she could probably find something of use in those server rooms. As it was, she would have better luck ripping the entire building apart to find what she was looking for.
“Give me a millisec to look around, Cupcake, shit.”
Caitlyn said something warningly in her ear, but Vi was already creeping around the corners of the skylight. Her probing fingers found the edge of a latch set into the roof and released it, popping open a narrow door leading down to the top level of the warehouse.
She slid through in a moment, closing the door above her softly before dropping onto the wire catwalk. From here, she could see every corner of the warehouse, as well as the hulking figures patrolling it. 8 or 9 of them, a brief headcount showed. Not enough to scare her back, as long as she stayed quiet.
She knew the Animals though. Stories of their bull-headed revenge were popular subjects 4 or 5 beers deep. It would be best to do this with as little collateral damage as possible.
“This place is crawlin’ with Animals, gotta move slow.” She watched a guard stroll beneath her, fingers tapping restlessly against the legs of his pants. Another pair passed each other on the floor below, flowing around boxes of unused car parts. A deep voice shouted something from a nearby room, muffled by a wall into an unintelligible collection of consonants.
“Are you sure you don’t need backup?” Caitlyn asked restlessly. “I can—”
“Stay outside, Kiramman,” Vi interrupted. Stalking along the narrow catwalk, she slowed above several tall metal shelving units. For a moment, she considered dropping onto them, climbing down them like a huge ladder until she reached the floor, but quickly cast aside the idea. Way too much junk on those shelves. Too easy to kick them off, cause a commotion.
“But you’re outnumbered—”
Vi rolled her eyes. Deciding on the part of the walkway nearest the stairs, she skimmed to the far side of the catwalk and lowered herself down. Her feet touched with hardly a sound. “I’m the merc here, kid. If one of us is gonna get outta here alive, it ain’t gonna be you.”
She could feel offense radiating across the call. Ignoring it, she turned to find the stairs she’d seen from the roof. Once she got to the ground floor, she could focus on wherever the hell the Animals were hiding an entire fucking nightclub down there.
“Look, I don’t— oh, shit.” Vi cut herself off, frozen a yard from the top of the stairs as a silhouette began to plod upwards. Someone must’ve deviated from their route below.
“Vi?” Caitlyn asked again. “What’s happening?”
Vi didn’t reply, casting her gaze around desperately as she backpedaled. The nearest door was a dozen feet behind her, and while Vi was fast, she couldn’t be that fast and quiet at the same time.
The figure had their head bent, examining something long and blunt in their hands. She had maybe three seconds before they looked up and this whole job went tits up.
“Vi!”
A million calculations buzzed through her mind, all ending the same way: Vi's head, separated from her shoulders. The only chance she had was to use push her chrome to its limit.
Gritting her teeth, Vi pooled bionic energy in her legs and jumped. She flew sideways, clearing the walkway railing with ease. Elation filled her chest for a fleeting moment before her trajectory inevitably turned downward. Between her feet, she could see the rapidly growing shoulders of a guard as they passed beneath. As soon as her head cleared the floor of the walkway, she angled her feet back toward the wall and jumped again.
Thank Christ for the soul who figured out a damn double jump.
What resulted was the most awkward landing of her life. She crashed to the ground on her shoulder, tried to roll to her feet and instead somersaulted until her back slammed into the wall. Pain rocketed through her arm and her head, but she bit her lip and immediately pushed up into a crouch, hidden away in a pocket of shadow.
She expected to see a pair of eyes pinned on her, a guard snarling or even laughing, but somehow—miraculously— no one had seen her. Steps slowed above her, and Vi looked up to see the shadow of the figure who had been climbing the stairs a second earlier. “Hey, did you hear something?” a deep, feminine voice called.
Vi braced, but only heard negative shouts in response. “Fuckin’ Jesus,” she murmured. Her shoulder felt tight and awkward, but not broken or dislocated.
Seemed every day was another reason to thank her ripperdoc for the work on her legs.
A high-pitched trill split the air, quiet and piercing. Adrenaline and panic shot through Vi like an arrow. Cameras. A dark lens was pointed directly at her from beneath the stairs, sticking out of the wall over a large door that led outside. A red light blinked at her.
“Shit!” Fueled by desperation, she launched forward again. The camera tracked her calmly. Another few seconds and its alarm would grow loud enough for everyone in the area to hear and come running.
Planting a foot beneath her, Vi channeled power through it and leaped upward. Her fist slammed directly through the camera’s placid lens. It shattered easily, but the sound of broken glass and her ungainly collision with the wall ricocheted through the silence.
“Told you I heard something!”
Vi slid down the wall and took off running, ignoring the glass protruding through the skin of her fingers. Heavy steps echoed around her like rolling thunder. She sprinted for the nearest cover outside, a pile of boxes thrown haphazardly into the grass. Sliding onto both knees, Vi dropped to the ground and pressed her hands into the dirt.
“Someone broke the fuckin’ camera!”
Her breathing was way too loud, haggard and hoarse. She swallowed through a dry throat, trying to keep her composure as two sets of footsteps pounded past her toward the doorway she had just slipped through.
Nearly a minute passed. Vi kept her nose pressed against blades of grass and focused on slowing her galloping pulse. After another minute without a bullet put between her eyes, Vi finally recognized the unsettled feeling skittering up her spine.
The voice over her holo had become strangely quiet.
“Kiramman?” she husked, hardly willing to lift her voice loud enough to be heard. The other end was quiet. Had she hung up on accident or something? “Kiramman,” she tried again, a little louder.
“Look fuckin’ harder!” shouted a deep, resounding voice. “They didn’t just fuckin’ vanish into thin air!” A chorus of responses echoed inside the warehouse, igniting Vi’s fight-or-flight response. We gotta leave. Now.
“Caitlyn, I’m callin’ it.” Vi peeked over the box’s edge and pressed her lips together. A woman stood nearby, half-hidden by the shadows of shipping containers. She shifted on both feet, head swiveling, but didn’t seem particularly inclined to leave her spot. 7 or 8 feet tall, Vi couldn’t tell; all she could see in the darkness was her size.
Hefted over her shoulder was a hammer at least four feet long. Its metal head was the size of Vi’s entire torso. Vi’s jaw dropped an inch. No human should be able to lift something like that, let alone hit a moving target. What kinda fuckin’ monster…
Movement caught Vi’s eye. She furrowed her eyebrows, shifted forward slightly. A shadow rippled a few dozen feet away, melting into the wall of containers with ease. Something rose in Vi’s chest, both foreboding and incredulous. Even as she opened her mouth, searching for something to say, the shape moved again. It gained laughable, infuriating shape.
It was Caitlyn’s tiny ass skulking across the yard in front of her.
Is she in a fuckin’ trench coat?
“Kiramman, I swear to fuckin’ god—”
The bulky Animal reported something into her earpiece, then turned on her heel. She returned to her route, a pace that apparently followed a line directly to Caitlyn’s immediate location. Caitlyn, eyes so wide that Vi could swear she saw the whites of ‘em, changed direction and vanished behind cover.
“Kiramman!” Vi hissed. Her hand burned, both steaming hot and ice cold as fresh blood dripped into the dirt. Her path to the front gates was clear. Three seconds and she could be gone, crossing the bridge and delta’d the fuck away from Kiramman’s stupid fuckin’ coat and her stupid blue eyes.
She could hear the voices in her head now.
She’s a lost cause. Don’t be a fuckin’ dumbass. Jinx, dispassionate and self-assured.
You really fixin’ to risk yourself for a politic kid? Who are you, man? Claggor, loud and obnoxious as usual.
You’re a leader now, Vi. Vander. You gotta do what it takes to protect your people. Don’t get yourself killed for nothin’.
Fuck me. Fuck me sideways and spitroasted over a damn trashfire. That was her own voice, reacting to the scope of this, possibly the most insane, scop-for-brains decision in recent memory. Maybe in Night City history. Something so stupid, so inane, so ultra pointless, that Vi would have to spend a good long while staring at herself in the mirror and figuring out what the fuck set of unfortunate dominos had fallen in her traumatic past to knock over this one.
But before any self-reflection, Vi had to actually survive the damn thing.
She was on her feet before the decision fully registered. Gravel shifted underfoot, cool air filtering over the open wounds on her knuckles. She kept her shoulders low as she ghosted across the yard. Ahead, the Animal continued on her course. Kiramman’s cover, something the size of a motorcycle covered in a tarp, was directly in her path.
Vi cursed and straightened out of her crouch, abandoning all discretion for speed.
The Animal strolled right Caitlyn’s spot, head up, hands squeezing the shaft of her hammer. As if choreographed, she slowly stopped a foot past the bike to shift its weight on her shoulder.
Vi’s head went quiet. Rising panic muffled her ears as the hulking woman’s head swiveled to look around. Her eyes dropped to her feet. She flinched.
The next two seconds stretched like melted plastic.
The woman stared at the ground in disbelief, frozen for a fraction of a second. Her hammer began to lift off her shoulder even as her mouth twisted open to say something. Vi could imagine the horror on Caitlyn’s face, crouched in the dirt, hardly an ant in comparison to the woman before her.
Then the Animal caught on to Vi. Her eyes flashed up, wild with manic energy, like she had been waiting for this moment all night. Vi was already midair, flying with the momentum of a heat-seeking missile. She squeezed her shoulder blades together, rearing back with her fist cocked behind her head. At the same time, Vi felt chrome-enhanced bones buzzing beneath her skin, raging with unspent energy.
The Animal’s mouth opened into the beginning of a wide grin.
Her hammer was halfway through its arc when Vi’s fist made contact.
Time slingshotted forward, accelerated to twice its pace. The Animal’s head snapped back, blood arcing through the air. Vi’s forearm splashed through it on the followthrough. Bones in the woman’s face cracked, strong enough to resist the pulverizing force to some degree, resist being splintered into dozens of pieces like a normal skull might.
Unbalanced from the sheer force of the movement, feet flying behind her, Vi ducked her head and hoped to roll instead of crash. Ground rose up to meet her with a vengeance, but she skidded over it like a pebble off water. Halfway through a manageable somersault, both feet came around to land on the earth in time to catch her.
She finally skidded to a stop, fingertips dug deep into the dirt. At the same time, a sickening squelch filled the air.
Vi’s head shot up. “Caitlyn?”
Caitlyn was still crouched behind the bike, curled into a tight ball. Both hands were still up in the air, like she had been about to shove the woman away. They shook visibly.
Between them, the Animal lay utterly still. Vi swallowed dust. No matter how hard she hit, she knew one punch wouldn’t be enough to take out an Animal. Several long seconds passed. She watched for the woman to make a noise and climb to her feet. She expected laughter, cursing, something.
But there was nothing.
“Vi…” Caitlyn whispered.
Vi heard it double, over the phone link and in person. She terminated the call and slowly lifted out of her crouch. She crept forward, muscles primed for a sudden move or breath. The iron stench of blood saturated the air. Vi twisted her nose reflexively, reached up to press against it with the back of one hand.
“Vi, I think…”
The hammer, Vi belatedly realized. As she approached the corpse, it coalesced into a picture, a story with three acts. Vi slammed into the woman, the woman hit the ground, and the hammer that was still held tight in both hands was yanked down with her. 1000 pounds of solid metal falling without interruption, landing squarely between the woman’s eyes.
“Jesus.”
Caitlyn moved. “That was…”
Vi jolted. She’d nearly forgotten Caitlyn was there. Fury relit in her chest. “Stupid?” She filled in. “Idiotic? Gonk-brained, suicidal, exactly what I fuckin’ told you not to do?”
Caitlyn’s face, open and frozen in shock, snapped into a scowl. She drew herself tall. “I’m not your pet to be ordered around.”
“Obviously.” Vi groaned, gestured violently. “Did you think I was fuckin’ lyin’ about the Animals, Kiramman? They’re brutal, they’re huge, they’re ‘roided the fuck out. I thought you were a sniper or some shit, why on God’s nightmare earth would you sneak in?”
“You were in danger!” Caitlyn protested. “Don’t pretend you were doing so well—”
“I had it under control.” Vi jammed the palms of her hands into her eyes. “Again, I am not precious cargo, I am the merc, this is my job that I am very good at. What part of that do you not understand?”
Caitlyn took too long to respond. Vi opened her eyes and saw her fixated on the blood forming rivulets down Vi’s forearm. “Under control,” Caitlyn said snidely. “I’m sure.”
Vi’s fists tightened of their own accord. “Kiramman,” she gritted out warning. “Shut the fuck up, and let’s fuckin’ delta.”
She took three steps before registering the cool absence at her side. Caitlyn watched her, unmoving. “I’m not leaving until I get what we came here for.”
Wild, Vi darted back to her and glanced around. “Shut up!” she hissed. “We failed, it’s over. Let’s go.”
“No.”
Vi wanted to punch her. “Don’t make me carry you out over one shoulder.”
“Touch me and I’ll scream so loud they’ll come kill us both.” Caitlyn looked down her nose at Vi, standing so close they were breathing the same air. “I need to know what happened here.”
If this is what growing up with parents did to a person’s head, Vi decided she was grateful for those twin empty graves in Heywood. “We don’t even know if anything did!” When Caitlyn didn’t move, Vi groaned and stepped away to run both hands through her hair. Stray strands caught on the slivers of glass still throbbing in her skin. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I didn’t know I was workin’ for someone with a death wish. We go back in there, we both get zeroed.”
Caitlyn sighed dramatically. “And here I thought you were Padre’s best.”
Vi narrowed her eyes. “You can’t keep holding that over me.”
Caitlyn leaned forward, eyes slanting dangerously. “Then get me inside Red Queen’s Race.”
The hammer on the ground beneath them slipped with a thud. Neither of them budged an inch. Vi forced herself to keep Caitlyn’s icy gaze, searching for some break in the facade. Something of the puffy, air-headed rich kid Vi knew was in there somewhere.
But beyond the slight shake of adrenaline, Caitlyn’s face was stone cold.
Vi’s eyebrow lifted slightly. Interesting. “Fine.” She jabbed a finger into Caitlyn’s shoulder, relishing in the easy way it pushed her back. “But you’re gonna stay the fuck behind me and listen to every damn word I say, got it?”
A tinge of satisfaction touched Caitlyn’s thin upper lip. “Whatever you say, Vi.”
She’s got the holier-than-thou attitude down, that’s for sure.