The scorched badlands under the midday sun.
Yellow sand. Blistering winds. Gobi terrain.
Explosions flashed in the distance. Smoke billowed thick from the wreckage of a downed aerial vehicle. The air reeked of burnt circuitry and that sickly, metallic scent—half blood, half charred flesh.
Amid the stuttering rhythm of gunfire—bang!—a sound rang out unlike bullets hitting dirt, rock, or metal.
A man's head snapped backward. His shattered visor splattered red, brain matter and nerve tissue spraying from his crushed skull. His body hit the ground hard, still gripping the trigger. Bullets sprayed wildly until the magazine ran dry.
"Nice shot, Panam, chica."
From a relatively safe distance outside the direct firefight zone, Jackie Welles observed the crash site through a high-power tactical scope. Seeing Panam blow a man's head open from nearly eight hundred meters away, he couldn't help but whistle in admiration.
Truth be told, the man was itching to join in. But both V and Panam had yelled at him to stay put—and Maine had backed them up. After all, Jackie was technically a middleman. Or as V had said—"barely counts as one of the suit-wearing types."
Panam and Maine were right: according to street rules, no middleman should be leading the charge.
And besides, stray bullets don't care who you are. This job—an assassination of a corporate executive—was a deathtrap waiting to happen. If Jackie, the go-between, caught a bullet, would the clients still pay up? Never overestimate a corpo's sense of honor.
They needed Jackie, not his corpse.
"Shut up, Jackie. Don't jinx it. It's not champagne time yet."
Fiery as ever, Panam worked the bolt—clack. A brass 12.7mm casing popped free from the ejection port of her SPT32-Grad [Overwatch] and fell into the sand with a hiss of heat.
"I just hope Scorpion, Mitch, everyone—and Maine's crew—can finish the job clean and end this damn gig already."
Through her scope, Panam scanned the crash site perimeter, eyes sharp, searching for the next target.
Blood comes with violence. Violence brings death. And this was a corpo hit—nothing clean about it.
She knew merc work was a gamble: you kill for eddies, and others kill you for the same. Fair enough. But humans aren't machines. When the bodies in the sand are your friends, principles get blurry fast.
Panam was no different.
She'd split the advance payment Jackie gave her among her Nomad friends, warning them about the risks. Everyone had agreed—risk shared, reward shared. She was ready for losses. But seeing people die right in front of her still made her chest tighten, rage boiling beneath the surface.
"Fucking corpo dogs!"
Why can't we ever get out of this clean?!
She pulled the trigger again.
Boom! The rifle barked.
...
Vroom! The roar of an engine cut through the desert. Oversized off-road tires chewed up dead Joshua trees and cacti along the way.
"Four bodyguards, one standard ten-man security unit, five combat bots—and that last one's the VIP target?"
A heavily modified Thorton Mackinaw rumbled toward the thickest column of smoke. Behind the wheel was the Nomad, Mitch, expertly handling Panam's beloved ride while keeping comms open on the squad channel.
Pinned at the top of the feed was an image and spec sheet of the downed Arasaka hovercar:
[Model: Zetatech – Prospector]
Vehicle Class: Multi-purpose armored hover transport.
Crew Capacity: 20.
Defense Systems: Self-guided rocket pods / Auto turrets / Combat drone external module ×4.
Power Status: Backup control panel active.
...
[Kiwi (Netrunner): Updating every thirty seconds. The target's security team has lost three members. Four vehicle-mounted attack drones have overloaded. Of the two escorting Octant drones, one is down. Four unmanned transports—two disabled... correction, one of the five combat robots onboard the Prospector has been destroyed.]
[Lucy (Netrunner): The Daemon virus is uploaded. Infiltrating the enemy netrunner's terminal. Sharing coordinates.]
[Dorio: Copy that.]
[Maine: Four and a half minutes left—move it! Don't hoard the good stuff you just got—old ammo out, new ammo in! Falco, floor it!]
The distance to the target was less than a hundred meters. Mitch glanced at the IFF tags on his cyberoptics HUD and couldn't help but think—having good netrunners backing you up really was a blessing.
With netrunners, you fight smarter. Without them, you fight blind. If the enemy doesn't have ICE defenses, it's practically a cheat code.
Too bad Nomads were poor. They valued education, sure—they kept old American rural traditions alive, literacy and learning way above the average Night City dropout level—but netrunning was never their specialty. Most clans didn't even have a proper netrunner, aside from those tied to major nations.
Still, Mitch's hands didn't slow.
Vrrrmmm—
He slammed the pedal. The modified Thorton Mackinaw "Warhorse" roared forward, skidding through bursts of gunfire as he swerved hard to avoid incoming Arasaka Special Operations fire. Boom! A grenade exploded nearby, kicking up a storm of sand and rock that hammered the armored hull. Bullets sparked off the plating like fireworks.
Beep-beep.
The vehicle's weapon system linked directly into Mitch's neural port. With Lucy feeding him real-time targeting data, he didn't even need to aim. A crude version of BLOS (beyond-line-of-sight) targeting. The vehicle's turret spat fire—Rat-tat-tat!—and the rocket launcher dumped half its payload in seconds.
He'd already burned through two-thirds of his rockets.
[Scorpion: Mitch, you planning to live long enough to tell Panam you emptied her ammo?]
[Mitch: Jealous much? I paid for it.]
Mitch's optics flickered with data streams as he glanced in the rearview mirror.
Behind him, a rally of dust plumes. Seven or eight off-road vehicles followed close—mostly heavily modded Colby Wolves. The lead car? Scorpion's.
[Scorpion: Paid, huh? You mean giving Panam your precious SPT32-Grad?]
[Mitch: Better she use it than let it collect dust.]
Panam, being unaugmented, couldn't link directly into the comms network. She needed her phone for contact and couldn't control the mounted weapons while driving—so before the ambush, Mitch had handed her his favorite rifle. Without implants, she was safer from Arasaka netrunner tracing and could focus purely on sniping and setting EMP charges.
The banter helped ease the tension. Meanwhile, Scorpion's own turret—a smaller-caliber machine gun with a jury-rigged [T40 Cyclone] rocket launcher—joined in the fray. Two red IFF boxes hiding behind Gobi rocks vanished in twin fireballs.
[Mitch: Two down. Not sure if bots or security…]
Before he could finish—crack!
A tungsten round streaked through the air, charged with static. It pierced the armored windshield of a Thorton Colby clean through.
A mist of blood burst. The vehicle swerved, rolled, and smashed into the desert rocks, scattering mangled bodies.
"Shit! That's a Tsunami Nekomata!"
Before Mitch or Scorpion could even call out their fallen comrade's name, Arasaka's counterattack hit full force.
RPGs and grenades—then a fixed turret brought online from the wrecked hovercar. Forget the Colby—even Mitch's armored Mackinaw was getting shredded. Sparks sprayed from torn piping, forcing him into a sharp drift and evasive roll worthy of a stunt driver just to stay alive.
That's when he noticed—Maine's side had gone strangely quiet.
The last remaining Octant drone had broken free of the hack and was pushing toward them. One of the Arasaka transports had been blown from the sky by Maine's missile barrage—but another had landed, deploying armed bots and drones.
Panam saw it through her scope and lost it.
She grabbed her PDA and unleashed a storm of curses.
"Fuck! Maine! Where's your damn fire support?! What happened to your netrunners?! Shit! Don't you dare screw this up now—Jackie! Answer me, you bastard!"
Jackie flinched. As the bridge between V, Maine, and Panam, he wasn't just watching—he was managing comms, firing support missiles, and coordinating intel.
His cyber-eyes flickered orange as he hefted a camo-wrapped single-use missile launcher, glancing at Panam's furious face. "Maine's side… I think they hit something weird. He just shouted someone's name—'Reed'—sounded pissed."
Jackie had no idea who this Reed was—but he decided to message V about it.
...
At the same time, across the dust-swept Gobi wasteland—
Roughly 1.5 kilometers from the crash site, beneath a multi-layered camouflage net blending perfectly with the terrain, a figure in desert camo with no insignia sat atop a used missile tube.
V ended her encrypted call with her superior—Jenkins.
"Damn it… 'Try not to destroy the hovercar,' he says. 'Don't risk damaging the gift meant for Michiko, or the board will launch an internal purge.' And then—'Make sure Abernathy dies before reinforcements arrive'—what the hell kind of impossible checklist is that?!"
V sighed, exasperated. Classic Jenkins—wanting everything, risking nothing.
Fine. Orders were orders. Rank crushed dissent.
If she had no other choice, she'd blow up the entire hovercar.
As she refocused her scope on the crash site, ready to remind Jackie to confirm Abernathy's death personally, her comm pinged.
"Huh? Maine's gone silent? Fire support's dropped off—"
"What? Wait, did you say… Reed?"