"Long time no see, Maine."
A deep male voice suddenly echoed inside Maine's head.
Who the hell—?
He didn't immediately recognize the voice, but that didn't stop a surge of anger from boiling up in him.
This wasn't the temporary shared comms channel used for one-time gigs—it was a secure line directly linked through custom comm chips, reserved for his own Edgerunner squad.
Anyone breaking into it now, at such a critical moment, meant one of two things: either someone had pulled them in deliberately—or a teammate had just been hacked.
"Who the fuck are you?!"
Crack!
Inside the armored SUV driven by the veteran Falco, Maine crushed an empty rocket tube in his hand, face twisting with fury.
And then—he froze.
The voice was oddly familiar. Something from long ago stirred in his memory.
A dusty recollection resurfaced—before the Metal Wars of 2069, during his service in the NUSA Special Operations Forces, he'd met someone during the South American Purge War. A man who'd fought by his side. A man who saw loyalty to the New United States as sacred. A man who later joined the Federal Intelligence Agency and once tried to recruit him.
"Reed."
Maine gritted his teeth. "You son of a bitch. Not only are you still alive—you're coming after me now?!"
He didn't even bother muting the shared info feed with Jackie—maybe he wanted him to hear it.
"It's me," came Solomon Reed's voice through the neural link. "Been what—seven, eight years, old friend?"
Along with the voice came visual telemetry—location, signal source, and the intrusion method.
Stone Ridge, about 1.5 kilometers from the crash site.
A small mountain hollow—tripod set up, camo net spread, signal dampeners deployed. A rusted Russian-made Kaukaz Bratsk U4020 truck sat there, converted for field ops.
Outside its open side door—
"Let me go! Bastard! I swear I'll blow your head off, you big dumb fuck—mmph! Mmmph!"
Rebecca lay face down, wrists bound tightly behind her back. The FIA agent, clad in old SovOil tactical gear, showed zero mercy. He pinned her to the ground, slapped duct tape across her mouth, then pressed a [Crusher] shotgun against the back of her head—so hard her nose nearly hit the dirt.
Inside the truck's cargo bay, however, was a completely different scene.
A full netrunning support station—two black chairs, servers glowing red, a tangle of cables, cooling fans, external radiators, even a portable ice machine and signal boosters. Monitors everywhere. Stimulants, suppressants, half-empty energy drinks littered the desk.
And in the center—stood Reed himself.
[Maine: If your people so much as scratch my teammate, I swear to God, Reed, I'll kill you!]
"For now, she's fine," Reed replied, voice low and even. "Listen, this isn't easy for me either. But you know how it is—I don't get to refuse missions. It's my duty. You're a soldier too—you understand."
He was speaking to Maine through the neural relay.
A secure transceiver cable was plugged into the port at the base of his skull.
As he spoke, Reed pulled it free, stepped outside, and shot a glance at his fellow FIA operatives controlling the site. His expression alone gave the order—keep it quiet, keep it contained.
On the other end of the relay, the FIA's technical officer monitored everything.
Under his uniform, he wore a black compression undersuit—same model as the two captured netrunner girls lying restrained in their chairs.
He tucked the transceiver device into his chest pocket, one hand gripping the blonde-haired hacker by the collar, the other forcibly jacking a cable into her neural port. He was already pulling data—frequencies, signal relays, channel intercepts—all while keeping an eye on the battlefield feed.
Faced with a shotgun to her head, Kiwi raised her hands in surrender.
"Tch…" Lucy did the same, reluctantly lifting hers.
After detaching the high-throughput data cable from the neural port at the back of her head, Lucy stepped off the netrunner chair. Clad in her expensive black compression suit, she followed the intruders' orders and quietly sat on a small stool nearby, her expression thoughtful as she studied the towering black man before her.
Who were these people? From the looks of it, their leader—this massive black man—knew Maine, and knew him well. Ex-comrades? Now enemies? Or was this some kind of double-cross?
Damn it, the job's gone to hell.
Their timing couldn't have been worse—right when she and Kiwi were in the middle of breaching the Prospector's control system. They'd also been hacking the Octant drones, the combat bots, and the vehicle defense network—all critical to suppressing Arasaka's security forces. Without their support, Maine, Dorio, Pilar, and the Nomads were in deep trouble.
Mr. Welles was probably losing his mind right about now.
Worst of all—Arasaka.
An internal betrayal was bad enough, but if the corpos got wind of this chaos and decided to clean house… they'd all be dead.
Lucy's eyes narrowed. She was already running scenarios, searching for a way out.
"Bullshit!"
Over the comms, Maine's furious voice erupted between the roar of engines and gunfire. "Don't give me that crap, Solomon Reed! Standing on your moral high ground just to justify your bullshit?"
"Just say it—you've had your eyes on me for a while. You want to use me! All that talk about 'protecting national interests,' executing so-called cleansing operations that are just mass slaughters in disguise? You call that patriotism? Arasaka, Militech, Washington—they're all the same fucking thing!"
Vroom.
Reed climbed into his vehicle, slammed the door, strapped in, and revved the engine. As the modified truck roared toward the crash site, he spoke calmly: "You're still a soldier, Maine. And a soldier's duty is loyalty."
"I'm retired!"
"Loyalty?" Maine spat. "We were getting bombed in bunkers, watching brothers melt under white phosphorus, while those bureaucratic bastards screamed about 'honor' and 'duty' from their offices! When I got out, I didn't get shit—not even a pension! Honor doesn't feed my crew. At least running merc jobs keeps us alive!"
Tires screeched—CRASH!
Maine's SUV spun into cover. Then came the explosion of a rocket detonation.
No more words were exchanged. Reed knew the moment had come. Whatever bond they'd once shared—it was over.
When he'd decided to use Maine, to manipulate his team, he'd already buried that friendship.
He didn't regret it.
This was the price. The homeland's interests came before friendship—before everything. Maine's crew would serve as the mantis to his cicada. They could win—but it had to be bloody.
Nothing more to say.
Reed's voice turned cold. "Maine, if you want your three teammates to survive this, finish the job. Abernathy's yours to deal with—but no heavy ordnance. No damage to the hovercar. Keep it intact. You know what happens otherwise."
What he feared most was that Maine, losing patience, would give in to greed for Arasaka's high-end hardware, abandon the plan, and simply carpet-bomb the site—ruining everything.
Beep.
Reed disconnected.
"Son of a bitch!"
Maine roared, slamming his fist into the rock wall beside him, shattering the stone.
Reed's tone reminded him of the late fixer, Faraday.
Fuck! You're all the same! Snakes and rats!
I might be working for Arasaka now—sold my soul to that old corpse Saburo—but you, Reed, you're no better. You sold yours to Washington's suits. Don't you dare act superior.
"Maine! What about my sister?!"
Pilar yanked the handbrake, his heavily armored custom ride skidding sideways to a stop beside Maine. He leapt out with twin short-barreled [Rostović DB-4 Palica] smart shotguns blazing.
Boom! Boom!
Two bursts—two Arasaka combat robots crumbled into scrap. A third, a low-flying drone, sparked and spiraled down in flames.
You got what you paid for. The Palica wasn't Arasaka, Kang Tao, or Tsunami quality—but it was a solid low-end smartgun. Cheap, replaceable, and perfect for broke mercs.
"Stable… for now," Maine said grimly.
He jabbed three syringes of immune suppressant into his arm, face cold as stone. Under Pilar's covering fire, he took a deep breath—and activated his [Sandevistan].
A [Crusher] shotgun in one hand, an [L-69 Zhuo] energy rifle in the other. His veins burned with combat enhancers as his body blurred.
...
All of this happened in the brief window before Arasaka reinforcements arrived.
The skirmish was small—but savage.
The Octant drone strafed the Nomad convoy, firing rockets and autocannon shells. The Nomads—those "dirt rats" of the badlands—fought back with teeth and steel, using sheer skill to dodge death. But without netrunner support, the Daemon virus interference failed, and their targeting uplinks were scrambled by ICE.
They could only aim manually.
And the unjammed drones were brutal—swift, deadly, overwhelming. Heavy drone warfare was never fair.
Blood mist sprayed high. Vehicles flipped, burned, and exploded.
Then—a contraband missile, fired by Jackie Welles himself, streaked through the sky and struck true.
The Octant drone exploded into a flaming wreck.
When Susan Abernathy and her bodyguards emerged from the crashed hovercar, they arrived just in time to see its fiery demise.
The blast wave stirred a rain of sand, dusting her suit in a fine beige coat. Shoved behind a rock by her guards, she crouched, brushing grit from her shoes, feeling heat radiate through the sand into her toes.
Then, looking up at the three exoskeleton-clad security officers nearby, she heard the first shouted warning:
"Careful—it's [Sandevistan]!"