Chapter 1: The Hunt
Sarea Hightower had a lead on a hideout in the hollows. It was a subterranean, ugly place full of ugly half-metal men, but that's the job sometimes. In the neon blue light of Old Chicago, Sarea watched the men pass. Each was lethally kitted: some with metal arms with two-ton actuators, retinal implants, the works. A lot of gear for some lowlife gang. Too much.
Sarea was a decker; had been since she learned to type. She was good, too. A decade of blackhat hacking led to a decade of spy work for the government. Sarea had hated the job but loved the work. She'd learned to fight there, gotten her own set of upgrades - way more than an underground decker could afford normally. Her small frame carried a lot of power: grappling hooks, a hidden blade, three network ports, a heads up display when she needed it. On her side was her deck: a portable computer with hardwire hooks for all kinds of machines.
She didn't look powerful, though, and that was by design. Sarea loved to be underestimated. She was 5'6, curvy in all the right places, with a short brown bob haircut. Everything on her was proportional: a model woman. She needed to look "perfect" for her work abroad, and her governmental modifications had guaranteed she did.
Sarea stepped gracefully along the edge of the buildings beneath the neon bright underbelly of the Upper City and leapt onto a fire escape. The holograms in the sky scrolled through advertisements: pleasure mods, discount firearms, tampons. An occasional hovercar cut across the neon sky. When the Upper City was built a hundred years ago, it cast what remained of Chicago in perpetual darkness. People find a way to survive though, and life thrived above and below. Above, in the light of the Sun, life was picaresque, but down here in the underbelly, people lived and died without ever seeing the blue sky above.
Sarea jumped across a small gap between old tenement buildings, following the men from above. The gang turned into the alley across from where Sarea perched. The hideout had to be nearby. She loped along the fire escape and leapt over the edge, sliding down the rails to ground level. When she strolled out onto the street, a kid in tattered clothing hawked his wares at her.
"Hey baby, I got disiac here, get you cummin' all night," he said.
"Fuck off, kid," Sarea replied.
Disiac. Aphrodisiac. The Pleasure Pill. It was an awful name for an awful drug. It was originally sold as a pill by big pharma. In that form, Sarea didn't mind it at all. It was prescribed to save marriages, that old institution. However, these drug dealers had made it much, much worse. Sold as an aerosol inhalant or, in the most extreme use cases, an injection, the drug stimulated men and women to states of arousal way beyond normal limits. Consent went out the window because everyone consented to everything on it. Sarea didn't have a problem with that. It was its other uses, its less savory uses, she hated.
Like the gang she was following tonight: Gods and Kings was a new dealer on the scene. They'd risen in power quickly. The strain of disiac they sold had burned through the undercity and left the local P.D. in a lurch. However, Sarea and her client suspected there was something more to G & K's operation. Sarea took the contract without hesitation and for lower than her normal rate. Anything having to do with the drug had to be stopped. Her client had asked for intel on manufacturing, which had led Sarea to this dingy alley in Pilsen.
Sarea kept her eyes on the group as it turned down another alley. She crept between dope fiends and piles of rubbish, her enhanced eyes tracking the six men through the foggy dimness. The men stopped in front of a dumpster in the middle of the alley and looked around. One of the men waved at a camera Sarea hadn't noticed.
Thanks, idiot
, she thought. Sarea stayed hidden behind some garbage and watched. A keypad appeared. The leader, a handsome asian man with spiky hair and more metal than flesh on his body, typed in a code. The dumpster split and the six disappeared inside.
Sarea activated her video scrambler implant and hurried as quietly as she could to the door. Just as it was closing completely, Sarea stuck a screwdriver into the keyplate cover to keep it open. From her deck, she uncoiled a small Cat-8 cord. She pried off the keypad and connected the cord to the internal port, then opened her screen. Green and blue interfacing logs scrolled rapidly across her terminal.. To her surprise, this keypad wasn't retail. Whoever this gang had working for them was good,
really
good. None of that added up, though. Sarea tried a few vectors of attack before one stuck. The keypad whirred in compliance and the hidden door opened silently, revealing a narrow stairwell down into neon blue light.. With one last look around, Sarea snuck down the stairs. The dumpster closed behind her.
#
Chapter 2: Deep Cover
When Bastien DuBois went into deep cover with undercity gang Gods and Kings, he didn't expect to be in brothels, yet here he was. He wasn't Bastian in the gang though. He'd been in deep cover so long he wasn't sure he'd even recognize his own name. Here, with G & K, he was Lucas Tate. His reputation preceded him: a slate of burglaries up and down the coast of Georgia, followed by gangland murders in Chicago. His rap sheet said he was a murderer for hire. Everything would check out if the gang dug into his background.
Muffled moans of pleasure came through the walls, and the sweet smell of Disiac mixed with the smell of sex. Consensual sex? Lucas didn't know. He'd joined Gods and Kings only a month ago, and the more senior members kept most of the gang's internal affairs from him. This was his first real gig. The gang had come to this neon den of iniquity for a package of Disiac, ostensibly for Lucas to use. He still had one final rite of initiation to undertake, but Sten, his capo, had only said Lucas would have to bind someone to him. When Lucas asked what that meant, Sten and the gang just laughed at him. Lucas sighed in the hallway and kept walking.
It was clear to anyone who saw him that Lucas had a soft side. He was terrifying, to be sure. 6'4, huling with muscle, long black hair that he kept in an ornate bun, piercing blue eyes. But he was soft, people just sensed it. Lucas had grown up a serf of a corporate man in the suburbs, and he had never entirely escaped his past. Lucas was huge and terrifying because his corpo owner had wanted him that way, and he hated the way he looked. He had been modded to be a scrubber: he went ahead of his owner and looked for traps, poison, or enemies. His taste had been improved, his physical sensations heightened to an almost unbearable sensitivity, and his body engineered to be a killing machine.
But Lucas never killed.
He'd only kill when he got his hands on the bastard who'd done this to him. Dominic Westerson. Lucas said his name when he woke up every day. It drove him to join the marines, then the D.E.A. It drove him into deep cover, always on the man's tail. Westerson had defected from his corp and began engineering disiac for gangs in this area. Lucas was close now, and he'd put up with anything - even these fuckin' rapists - to get to him.
Obviously, fitting in with the gang hadn't been easy. Lucas figured they'd be gangbangers from the undercity, but they weren't. Each member was from a well-to-do family, politicians' sons and the like. They wore their wealth, and violence came easy to them. Lucas still didn't understand why these rich kids had joined a gang. During his trial period, the others hazed him, calling Lucas gentle giant, pussy, all sorts of bullshit. They wouldn't let him forget he hadn't been fully initiated, whatever that meant.
The group walked down the neon hallway, jeering at each other with each new moan they heard. The leader, Sten, knocked twice on a metal door at the end. Average height and handsome, Sten was a natural leader, even if he was evil and unpredictable. After a moment, the door opened a crack, and Sten mumbled something into it. It slammed closed, and locks clanged inside, then it opened completely.
A small man with glasses beckoned Sten inside. Sten turned to the gang with a smirk, "I'm sure you can find something to do while you wait."
The men laughed, and the door closed. One of the guys, the gang called him Log for some reason Lucas didn't know, said, "Fellas, we've earned it."
Log opened the first door to the right and went into another neon-lit hallway. The group followed. At the end there was a door, and when Log opened it, Lucas understood what he meant. It was a long room with massage tables and beds. The massage tables had wooden walls fixed to one end with a hole for a woman's hips and feet. A few women were naked and strapped across them, their hips stuffed through and exposed. Some civvies were on the beds on the other side of the room, each pounding a woman or a man. Everyone was clearly drugged. Their eyes were heavy with it, the lids half closed.
The door guard nodded the gang by. Log didn't wait at all. He walked over to one of the girls strapped to a massage table. She was petite, small, perky tits and a round ass with a soft cock. Log unfastened his pants, and Lucas realized why he was called Log. His cock was massive. Next to the massage table was a lube dispenser. Log slathered it on his beast, grabbed the woman's penis and balls and sunk his shaft deep in her ass. She moaned in a mix of pain and pleasure.
The rest of the men found a hole to fuck too. Except for Lucas. He knew everyone was the correct age - the gang had a strict policy against pedo bullshit, but disiac users didn't give a shit about consent. Lucas leaned against the wall and studied the ceiling. It didn't take long for Log to notice.
"Look at our soyboy over there, can't even get it up!" He shouted between pumps. The men, even the civvies, laughed.
"Fuck off Log, you freak of nature," Lucas replied. The men laughed again, Log too. Lucas left the room. He needed some air.
He walked the neon halls and tried to ignore the sounds of fucking, the wet splats, the moans, the dull bass of the music. As he was about to leave, he noticed a side door hanging open. He narrowed his eyes and gently pushed it open. It was a manufacturing room, clearly, with an elaborate set of beakers, tubes, and plastic barrels containing gallons and gallons of disiac. A technician laid on the floor unconscious. A small woman was crouched at the computer across the room, a cord from a deck on her side connected to it. She looked up when the door opened. She was stunning. A short bob cut of brown hair, narrow waist and wider hips. Thick-rimmed, wide glasses covered bright blue eyes.
