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"Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
Jax moved like a blur of lethal geometry. He led with a heavy overhead swing of his Katana, the thermal edge shearing through the front hood of a Raffen pickup like it was parchment. Without breaking stride, he slammed his left fist into the driver's jaw with a sickening crunch, the impact force shattering the man's skull instantly. In a fluid, reverse-grip motion, he lunged with the Katana, the blade passing through the passenger seat and into the chest of the second rider.
Two hostiles neutralized in the heartbeat between two breaths.
Behind him, Pilar's scream tore through the crew comms. He had braked hard to avoid being pinned, but the Raffen truck behind him had anticipated the move, ramming his rear at eighty miles per hour. Pilar's car spun wildly, flipping once before coming to rest in a ditch off the main road. Pilar, covered in blood and minus his signature sunglasses, was already scrambling out of the shattered window.
"Whoosh—"
The desert wind was a physical weight at a hundred miles an hour. Maine was leaned half-way out of the passenger window of the lead car, while Dorio white-knuckled the steering wheel, keeping the vehicle steady through the sand-drifted turns.
Maine raised his right arm. The high-end Projectile Launch System—the hundred-thousand-euro masterpiece from Viktor—split open with a series of mechanical clicks. It flashed, whirred, and spat fire.
"Boom!"
A terrifying explosion erupted beneath a pursuing pickup, the force of the blast flipping the heavy vehicle into a series of fiery rolls.
"Grenade!"
Jackie's voice was a frantic warning. From a third pickup, a Raffen raider had lobbed a hand grenade toward their convoy. Jackie didn't panic. He squinted, his combat instincts taking over as he drew his Golden Big-Ass kinetic pistol.
Bang—
A single shot. The grenade detonated in mid-air, three meters short of the car. The shockwave rattled the windows and sent a cloud of grit over the roof where Jax was perched.
"Mano, I'm a goddamn genius!" Jackie roared, the adrenaline clearly hitting his system.
Inside the car, Lucy watched the mayhem with wide, disbelieving eyes. The entire engagement had lasted less than two minutes. Four armored Raffen vehicles, heavy machine guns, and a dozen raiders—and they were being systematically dismantled by a group she'd initially pegged as a fringe, ragtag crew.
"Surprised?"
Kiwi's voice sounded beside her. Lucy turned to see the netrunner calmly reloading her pistol, her eyes cold behind her mask.
"This... you guys are actually pros," Lucy admitted, her voice tight.
She looked out the window and saw Rebecca. The green-haired girl she'd dismissed as a child was charging a Raffen raider head-on, weaving through a hail of bullets with an agility that bordered on the supernatural.
"I thought the same thing at first," Kiwi said, leaning out the window to line up a shot. "But in this team? You don't have to worry about the person next to you. That's a luxury in this city."
Bang—
Kiwi's smart pistol pinged a lock. The bullet found the head of a Raffen raider crawling from the wreckage of the first truck. He twitched once and went still.
"Get that jinx out of the ditch!" Kiwi shouted over the comms. "Rebecca, Pilar, get in Maine's car! We have more signatures coming from the east. A lot of them!"
"The cargo!" Pilar wheezed, being dragged into Maine's car by Dorio.
"To hell with the cargo!" Maine snarled. "If we stay here, we're surrounded in the open. We move, now!"
Maine knew the score. With Sasha and Lucy, they had the best netrunning support in the district, and with Jax and Jackie, their raw combat power was tier-one. But even legends died when they were outnumbered ten-to-one by Raffen lunatics with area-of-effect explosives.
"Go! South! Now!"
The two remaining cars roared away from the site, the desert floor a blur of red dust.
"We can't head back to the city," Kiwi warned, her eyes glowing yellow as she monitored the local frequencies. "They've got the main checkpoint boxed in. They knew we were coming."
"How the hell did they know?" Maine barked.
"It wasn't Babos," Lucy said, her voice cutting through the noise. She had been busy cracking the neural interface of a dying raider. "The Raffen learned about the shipment from the team Babos sent out last time. They've been camping the route ever since."
"Fuck!" Maine slammed his hand against the dash, swerving the car south into the deep Badlands.
Twenty minutes later, the dust clouds behind them settled. They pulled into the skeletal remains of an abandoned gas station to regroup and check their wounds.
"Did we shake them?" Dorio asked, her hands still trembling slightly on the wheel.
"They didn't even try to follow," Kiwi noted, her brow furrowing. "They stopped at the wreckage. They were only after the boxes."
Jax, still on the roof of Jackie's car, looked down at the "ice coffin" lashed to the rack. His eyes were hard. 100,000 eddies for a crate of greens? In the Badlands, the Nomads grew this stuff to survive. It was valuable in the city, sure, but not "die-for-it" valuable for a clan like the Raffen Shiv.
Jax pulled out his knife and sliced through the lashing ropes.
"Jax? What are you doing?" Maine asked, stepping out of the car.
Jax didn't answer. He gripped the lid of the refrigerator and heaved. The seals hissed, and the lid swung open. Inside, it looked exactly like what Leon had promised: rows of lush, green vegetables.
Jax reached in and started throwing the produce onto the sand. He dug deep, past the celery and the spore olives, until his fingers hit something hard and cold.
He pulled the last layer of greens away, and the air in the gas station went silent.
"To hell with the vegetables!" Jax barked, a rare, bitter laugh escaping his throat.
Nestled at the bottom of the cooling unit, surrounded by ice and leaves, was a high-density corporate data-shard and a prototype bio-container bearing the unmistakable frost of Arasaka's medical division.
They weren't couriers. They were smugglers carrying a corporate secret that had just put a target on all of their backs.
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