Hawk left cover first, skin shimmering as she did. Cora wondered if there was an active component to her cybernetics as well. She knew she would be waiting for her face shield to reactivate before she forayed out. On a lark, she tried to ‘view’ Iain’s stats as he stayed in his cover, but came back with nothing but his cybernetics, a [Warsuite], and couldn’t even ‘zoom in’ on that for more detail.
YEAH THAT WAS A FREEBIE
GONNA HAVE TO GET MORE UPGRADES TO SNOOP ON FOLKS
What about the Oblate and Mike? Cora asked, hoping for a straight answer.
OH, THE OBLATES ARE TECHNICALLY CLASSED AS MONSTERS, ANYONE WITH SYSTEM ACCESS CAN SCAN THEM, AND MIKE WAS IN YOUR HOUSEHOLD
Right, so, straight answer about that but a ton more fucking questions.
LOOT FIRST! QUESTIONS LATER!
Cora sighed, but the air in front of her face shimmered, and to be honest she did want to check out their mystery assailants.
She followed Hawk out, to see the woman rifling through the pockets of the guy Cora had watched her gun tear to pieces. The big girl sighed in disappointment, then she pulled out a knife, and started doing an amateur autopsy.
“Whoa, what the fuck!” Cora cried, suppressing a gag at the way the body's intestines just sort of spilled out as Hawk split his stomach. “Why on earth?”
“On where?” Hawk asked, casually scooping the intestines out and rooting around in the guy’s chest for his heart and lungs.
“Whythefuckareyouscoopinghimlikeagoddamnavocado?!?!?!” Cora squealed, as, with a sickening rip, Hawk grinned, and yanked out the man’s heart.
“Hellll yeah,” She purred, plucking what looked like a metal bug off of one of the ventricles. She reached into a pocket, pulled out a little plastic container, and popped it in. “Yo!” She called, getting Iain and Kyra’s attention, “Just found an Adrenobyte in this asshole, these guys were at least a little chromed up!”
“Oh aye?” Iain asked, and immediately shifted his focus from searching pockets to butchery. Kyra did the same, though her face carried considerably more glee as she cut open the body before her.
Cora took some deep breaths.
Okay. Clearly they’re just trying to get the cyberware off these guys. Fucked up that its treated more or less the same way as dressing a deer in this world, but c’est la fuckin’ vie.
Cadey’s psycho mother-in-law had swallowed the key to the outside world in a last ditch effort to ensure the sacrifice took place, even if it was due to starvation. Cora still remembered the scene after the fight, forearm deep in pig blood and guts, respecting, but also resenting, the Director’s commitment to realism.
She rolled up the sleeves of her duster, and knelt next to Hawk as she was starting to flay the next body. She took a deep breath, got a lungful of stomach gasses, and threw up in the guy’s chest cavity.
“Jesus FUCK,” she gasped, “I’ve puked more today than I have since high school.”
“Uhhhh… well, fuck it,” Hawk said, starting to root around in the guy anyway. “Somehow, this is a whole lot grosser, but it’s a thing of inches, innit?”
“Oh, god, Hawk, no, c’mon, how valuable can that stuff be?” Cora asked, forcing herself to watch. She’d knelt down here to learn how to do this after all, it was her own damn fault she’d made a bad situation worse.
With another sickening ‘rip!’ Hawk’s fist came out holding the man’s heart. She looked it over, then scoffed, and tossed it behind her into the street. She went right back in as she kept turning over every inch of the corpse.
“You kidding?” Hawk asked, yanking out a set of lungs and giving them a once over. She threw them behind her as well, and fixed Cora with a gaze that said she really did think she was joking. She only held it for a moment though, before jabbing a thumb into the side of an eye-socket, and popping the organ out. “That Adrenobyte I pulled outta fuckstick over there will probably pull us at least a grand at the Market, if we don’t have any use for it ourselves. And that’s shit tech. My own cost around 100k, and just from what I know of yours I’d say at least 5 hundo thousand, could be way more, got no idea how much noble tech costs.”
Cora let out a low whistle. Coraline Casanova of Earth might not root through a corpse like a truffle hog for a thousand bucks, but she was the highest grossing movie star of all time. Linnea Light was a broke Slavemaster without any slaves, friends, or options. She’d truffle hog a corpse for way less.
“Show me how, on the next guy,” she asked, steeling her heart as Hawk put thumbs into both (now empty) eye sockets, and yanked, cracking the skull like a coconut.
Hawk grinned at her, seemingly both because she carefully pulled a delicate silver neural net off this guy’s brain, and also because the noblewoman was going to get her hands dirty.
She wiggled the bloody net at her like a prize fish. “Allll gonna be worth it, I promise. Let’s get you butcherin’.”
A minute later, Cora was knelt before a body opened up like a treasure chest. That part had been easy, emotionally speaking. Sure, it was tough to pull a knife through a ribcage, but the guy was dead, had tried to kill her, and didn’t spurt overmuch. She had needed Hawk’s help to wrench the ribcage open. While Linnea had kept in shape, it didn’t seem like she’d done much resistance training.
It probably said more than Cora would like about her mental state, and her attraction to Hawk, that when the big woman’s hands had covered her own to help her pull, her heart had sped up more than it had during the actual gun battle.
“Allllright,” Hawk said, laying one of those hands, notably still dripping gore, comfortingly between Cora’s shoulder blades. “Now you gotta scoop ‘im. Ain’t gonna find any tech in the guts, least not reusable. Shame, honestly, the weight loss tech on some fatter nobles costs a pretty penny, but you can’t put it in someone else after pulling it out.”
Oddly, Cora found it comforting that Hawk’s violent past had not been confined to her own socioeconomic strata.
Drawing on Cadey, she held her breath, and yanked at the tangle of intestines. They were way heavier than she expected. Regardless of effort, she just made a messy pile of flesh rope in front of her, unable to rip them out as easily as Hawk had.
“S’okay,” Hawk chuckled, deceptively deft fingers flipping a gleaming blade up in front of Cora’s face, then catching it by the blade, extending the handle towards her. “Can’t all be muscle mommies, can we?”
Cora took the knife, and Hawk grabbed her wrist, guiding it to the connection points at either end of the intestines. Two quick cuts, and they were out.
“Good work Miss Mistress,” Hawk cooed, with a hint of laughter, making Cora wonder if she had a praise kink. “Now, you know what a heart feels like?”
Cora didn’t. A few seconds later, she did. Like the intestines, she couldn’t just rip it out, but the small bump of metal she felt on it told her it’d be worth making things work.
She ran the knife around its perimeter, and eventually pulled the organ out. She plucked off the Adrenobyte, presenting it to Hawk like a grinning child showing a parent a particularly interesting bug.
“Hell yeah,” Hawk cooed, gently taking the tech from her fingers and placing it in one of those little containers. She wiggled that container at Cora. “These here are Microsomes. Good for keeping salvaged bio-tech stable. Not sure why your place had a stash of em, but glad they did. Gave a few to the folks who looked like they knew what they were doin’ afore we left.”
Cora thought about everything she knew about her dear departed Linnaeus, and found she could think of a few reasons the bastard might need to get valuable tech out of a worthless body.
“I didn’t seem like I knew what I was doing?” Cora asked with a smirk, pushing down the dark musings.
Hawk laughed, clapping her on the shoulder. Like before, she stayed perfectly steady.
Thanks, Cadey.
“Not so much that,” Hawk explained, “as much as I wasn’t sure we weren’t just takin’ you someplace more convenient to kill you. Still, that woulda been the time to do it, and Kyra and Iain failed to get my attention if they gave the signal, so looks like you live, for now.”
Right, I’m queen bitch, and I took away any immediate reason these dangerous people, with every reason to hate me, had not to kill me. Genius.
They even have a fucking signal prepared for it.
Still, she didn’t regret that for an instant. Cora might not deserve to die for Linnea’s crimes, but Linnea definitely did. Not these people’s fault if they couldn’t believe the impossible. Couldn’t believe that Cora really wasn’t her.
“Awwww, don’t be lookin’ like that Miss Mistress,” Hawk, laughed grabbing Cora’s head and pulling her to her plate carrier-covered chest, ruffling her hair with the cleaner of her hands. “You already made it longer than I thought you would! Eeeeevery second you live now is a lucky one. Who knows, keep it up long enough, a girl might just get attached.”
Cora wrestled her head free to scowl up at Hawk, who winked right back down at her.
If she keeps smiling like that I really am going to need new goddamn panties.