Tony Stark
“The clutch is acting up,” Stark complained with dissatisfaction, shifting gears a bit uncertainly due to a long lack of practice.
Honestly, it came as a shock to him that in Night City, or the world in general, one could still find cars operating on a manual transmission rather than an automatic.
No, he certainly knew that besides convenience, a manual is generally better than an automatic, at least in terms of autonomy, but he still didn’t expect to see such an anachronism in the modern world of consumerism.
After all, what difference does it make to modern people that a manual transmission can be started without jump-starting if the battery dies, that it is easier and cheaper to maintain, lasts longer, and generally consumes less fuel, if an automatic is more convenient?
But no, it turns out that local society hadn’t forgotten how to prioritize really important things, pushing their own comfort into the background.
“It’s nice to be wrong sometimes,” he thought, despite the grumbling.
“…” Eva said nothing, just looking at him with wide eyes, as if she had seen a ghost.
“So where are we going?” she decided to simply drop the topic of her partial failure in automotive knowledge, shaking her head—after removing her helmet and causing her imposing bosom to sway (since standard bras didn’t fit, and custom ones were expensive).
“The Bucky and Sons plant,” he replied, driving casually with one hand.
Stark clearly liked their new car, and he was even thinking about replacing his sports car—expensive and wildly pretentious, but generally not particularly useful—with this one, focusing on upgrading this baby.
Installing a new, more powerful engine, tinkering with the clutch and suspension, and it wouldn’t fly much worse, but it could accommodate a lot more equipment.
“A family business?
In Night City?” Barnes asked, surprised, since small entrepreneurs in the “City of Dreams” almost always either lost out in competition or were bought out by corporations, and if they didn’t want to…well, no one is insured against accidents.
“It was, seven years ago. But then Militech bought the enterprise, the appointed director purposefully bankrupted the company, pulled a couple of interesting solutions from it, lured clients to other branches, and now the 6th Street gang runs everything there.”
“The Sixes again?” Eva grimaced.
After yesterday, her allergy to pseudo-patriots had flared up sharply.
“Don’t worry,” Stark chuckled.
“The plant has been half-empty for a long time; now they mainly repair cars there and forge VIN numbers.”
“Cars again?”
“No, this time we’re interested in their printer. Rather, the station—the RK-22 machine tool from Militech. With this baby, you could print a small tank, just keep feeding it materials. We, of course, don’t need a tank, but a couple of these machines would be very welcome.”
Tony, remaining true to himself, even at the planning stage for improving his home filter, thought about further expansion.
After all, his main feature was adaptability and scaling technologies for various situations.
Stark had set his tasks even before arriving in Night City, having taken care of finding the necessary components in advance, and while the filter was an important part for basic existence in the city, it was far from the only one.
That is why, while designing, Stark built the core principle into his creation, where the main detail is one-of-a-kind, and everything else is just additional layers.
As long as the core is intact, restoring the apparatus is easy…on any scale.
Of course, he didn’t expect everything to spin up so quickly, and in general, it could wait a week, but since the opportunity had arisen, it was better to stock up now by acquiring the necessary equipment for his workshop.
And the RK-22 machine would contribute to this extremely well.
“Okay, you’re our mechanic,” Eva easily accepted the explanation, leaning back in the chair and pulling out her gun.
By the way, the one from yesterday, taken as a trophy from one of the 6th Street guards, which she still couldn’t stop admiring.
The road itself took forty minutes, as the object the pair needed was almost at the other end of the city, but fortunately, they arrived without traffic jams.
It’s not like Night City is a huge city—it’s medium-sized, even if its population surpasses other metropolises due to the mega-towers.
“And how are we going to take the object?” Eva asked, surveying the small factory (a concrete box thirty meters long and one story high) with an experienced eye.
As the leader of a Mox combat squad, she often had to storm scavenger dens, so she had a very rich experience with assaults, not to mention all the databases she had absorbed from information chips.
“Loudly,” Tony replied simply, driving further away from the gates to get a run-up.
“By the way. It’s better to put on your helmet,” he advised, calmly waiting for his companion to finally secure her thinking organ.
“What do you mean, ‘loudly’?” she asked only after gearing up.
“It means we’re ramming it,” Stark enlightened her…pressing the pedal to the floor.
“Should have buckled up!” a generally correct thought slipped through her pink-haired head…but it was quickly squeezed out by a wave of adrenaline.
“Ha-ha-ha!”
The impact wasn’t particularly strong; Stark hit the brake pedal the moment they broke through the segmented overhead door.
Made more for decoration, from thin aluminum, the massive jeep simply didn’t notice them, nor did it notice the bandit standing behind them dressed in cowboy gear, who was first pressed into the hood and then into the wall, from which he slid down, leaving a bloody trail behind him.
“Forward!” Tony commanded, jumping out of the driver’s seat and taking out a nearby “Sixth” with his first shot.
In general, one might get the impression that Stark had absolutely no experience in military command and combat operations, but that is not the case.
Still, no matter how much Stark played the role of a frivolous playboy and drunkard, his genius brain and sense of responsibility often forced him to perform work he disliked.
He could boil internally, puff up with indignation, and hiss at those around him, but he would do his job.
For example, when joining the Avengers, he read and remembered all the paperwork describing small-group tactics that Fury highly recommended…and which turned out to be completely useless, simply because of the extremely high individuality of the Avengers’ members.
However, time passed, the squad grew, he got combat drones, and experience was inevitably gained, fully processed by a mind inclined toward analysis.
Yes, in everything concerning defense, Stark was a complete profane, practically a total zero, but combat operations where he acted as the attacker were so familiar to him that he could outshine some retired special forces soldier.
Having the support of an intelligent AI and a mod, bred for work in the Net, who easily fetched him a blueprint of the building and its inhabitants, down to their medical bills, a full-fledged combat operation requiring a squad of five people with good armament… turned into an easy walk for Stark, which he could have pulled off alone without problems.
Purely on experience and the element of surprise.
With Eva’s support, though…clearing the room of fifteen experienced and well-armed militants took only three minutes, without a single wound.
Just a couple of bruises, but that’s a trifle.
“That was…powerful,” Eva assessed.
Being the same kind of street samurai, albeit in a higher league, Barnes appreciated the ease with which they dealt with the members of a gang where very many participants were veterans of corporate wars or wars of unification.
“I somehow didn’t notice last time, but you are damn good,” the Mox shared her opinion, looking at Stark from a new angle with pleasant surprise.
She thought that Tony was just a cool mechanic forced to risk his neck for eddies; this, although a rarity, is encountered regularly.
After all, if you have brains and the necessary implants, you can be a total profane at shooting, but with smart weapons, those are the problems of the people around you, not yours.
“It’s just that usually, I’m the attacker, not the defender. Otherwise, I…get a little lost,” he honestly admitted.
“Oh, I see,” Eva nodded solemnly.
After all, her gang suffers most of its losses precisely when defending an object, not during a sweep, so the topic is close to her.
“But still, fifteen corpses of ‘sixes’ is cool,” Eva smiled contentedly.
“But it was too fast,” and now there was a sad sigh.
“Got lucky,” Tony honestly admitted.
In general, the killed bandits couldn’t do anything to them, except for giving them some bruises, as they were armed exclusively with light weapons, which their suits protected against perfectly.
Yes, they risked getting bruises or cracked bones, but exclusively due to their own stupidity, and otherwise…the enemy was not only stunned but also positioned extremely fortunately for the attackers, and there Stark’s reaction and Eva’s reflexes did their job, allowing only three 6th Street fighters to reach cover.
Of course, they all had implants to one degree or another, but with their weapons, even subcutaneous armor of dubious strength played little role, and everything else…simply didn’t come into play due to the premature demise of the owner.
“Alright, let’s loot and take what we came for.”
“We’re always glad to do that,” the Mox cheered up again, because reselling guns sometimes brought her a small fortune.
She, of course, kept some things for herself, and some went to the girls from her squad, but in general, every corpse of a gang militant is a nice bonus.
This, by the way, explains why the bandits and mercenaries of Night City are so rabid; by some miracle, a tradition of combat trophies has formed here.
A cult of “what is taken in battle is sacred” literally reigns here, and no one can claim someone else’s trophy, not even a gang boss.
Which is why usually cowardly marginals and soloists who value their lives are quite willing to risk their necks when meeting a real threat, simply because even a single gun can cost as much as another car.
“Trophies aren’t very good,” Eva sadly concluded.
“The guys sitting here, even if they were experienced, weren’t particularly combative. They somehow saved part of their implants from the army and went to the gang for a sweet spot. Still, this is primarily a factory converted into a workshop, and they need mechanics more than fighters here. And such, as a rule, fought as equipment operators, not just cannon fodder, and they had corresponding implants.”
“So we took out valuable specialists from the ‘sixes’?”
“Good,” Eva nodded contentedly.
“And do they happen to have bounties from the cops on them?”
“I don’t know, maybe, but I wouldn’t do it if I were you.”
“Well, yeah, the cops will sell info about me in an instant,” Eva stated with regret.
Night City has a generally good and society-beneficial bounty system for bandits.
It was assigned and paid out in real-time; you just had to send a photo with the corpse and biometric data of the killed, and you would receive a reward from the police and a plus to the reputation of a cool fighter.
The only trouble is that, being a thoroughly corrupt organization, the Night City police willingly shared data about such bounty hunters.
And if large gangs can ignore a couple or three corpses in their ranks, simply because the fuss won’t cover the expenses, then an individual professionally exterminating them will sooner or later find themselves in the role of a hunted victim.
Tony and Eva, however, didn’t shoot street trash, which any gang can grab more of from the streets at any moment, but valuable, smart specialists, which is why they could start hunting them immediately.
And they didn’t need such happiness; they hadn’t recovered from the past one yet.
“Stop,” Eva stopped, looking at the very machine tool Tony needed.
“And how are we going to drag it to the car!? It’s huge!”
“We’ll take it apart,” he shrugged, reaching for a set of screwdrivers and wrenches.
“Anyway, we shouldn’t expect new guests for the next couple of hours.”
Looking ahead, they fiddled for those very couple of hours, dismantling the equipment they needed like ants and shoving it into their transport piece by piece…which they then had to refill again, playing Tetris in real life, as the car turned out to be spacious but clearly not intended for transporting industrial equipment, which the RK-22 station-machine belonged to.
Then…then there was a trip to an unremarkable garage-storage facility where they unloaded all this loot, and four more addresses.
Tony needed: a VR-71K-03 analyzer from Biotechnica, a portable army carrier KK-4, three mobile smelting furnaces of the ARM-98 model manufactured in the fifties of this century to convert them into one medium-scale one, a supply of inertial gel, and a number of chemicals.
The task was difficult, tedious, and required driving all over the city, but in the end, Stark acquired the necessary components not just for modifying the water filter, but also for upgrading his 3D printer, which after all the modifications promised to move into the class of quite industrial ones, albeit in the small-to-medium ranks, where printing anything larger than a passenger car in volume is not provided.
But even so, it turned out well, and after a couple of modifications and some help from the Omnissiah, Stark will be able to convert his property into a full-fledged industrial class, when one can print a super-heavy tank in a couple of days, albeit with a wild consumption of the mechanism’s resources.
Eva Barnes, meanwhile, was in deep culture shock.
How to put it…during her career as a fighter in the shadows of Night City, she had a decent amount of blood on her hands.
Debtors, spies, a couple of traitors, and a whole host of scavengers, but even so, her personal graveyard barely numbered two dozen people.
Yes, if you add to this those who died by her order and/or were killed by her people, this figure jumps sharply closer to a hundred, but even so, for her, the number of corpses that Stark produced in just a day was something beyond the pale.
Ninety-eight.
A number that is actually scary because you could quite fill a twenty-meter pool with them.
Stark, on the other hand, made these corpses in batches simply because he wanted to save money.
He didn’t see individuals or at least people in the killed, just parasites on the body of society, which one way or another would have to be gotten rid of, not now, then in the future.
In any case, even if he wanted to flee from Earth, since without full power over Night City, he simply couldn’t pull off the Mars colonization project.
So, the death of a bunch of social pests didn’t touch him, and all strivings of conscience were suppressed by cold logic.
Eva, however, wasn’t horrified by such a scale, but simply in culture shock.
A child of her time and environment, for her, the violent death of a person was something close and normal.
When she first killed, she didn’t worry, didn’t reflect on the fact that she had taken another’s life, didn’t even wonder how easy it turned out to be, because she already knew all that fragility of human life.
She felt nothing about this, just a little shame for stupid actions in the process, and that’s it.
Eva was in shock because of the scale of the action orchestrated by Tony, its thoughtfulness, and the reckless impudence (or bravery) with which it all happened.
The power contained in one man appeared before her eyes, which had destroyed in a day a number of gang militants equal to almost half of the Moxes, while not receiving a single wound and achieving his goals.
The resulting demonstration of power, which Stark, accustomed to solving problems of a global scale, didn’t even think about, was so graphic that Eva made a decision for herself to break her back, but to convince her boss to accept this reckless guy into their gang, even if they all had to lie under him as a crowd.
Because if anything in Night City was truly sacred, it was power.
And Stark showed power more than graphically.