The No-Tell Motel's flickering neon sign buzzed like a dying insect, its fractured light bleeding onto the rain-slicked pavement. Blanca stood beneath it, her silhouette sharp against the sickly yellow glow, her posture rigid as a combat drone on standby. The air reeked of burnt synth-coffee and ozone, the aftermath of a nearby trash fire smoldering in an alley.
"You're here."
Her voice was a blade—cold, precise, stripped of anything resembling warmth. Carl recognized the tone. Militech field ops trained their agents to speak like that: every syllable a calculated strike.
"I'm here."
He resisted the urge to smirk. The script felt ripped from a low-budget braindance noir—"You shouldn't have come," "But I had to," blah blah. But Blanca wasn't the type for theatrics. Her black tactical jacket hugged her frame like a second skin, the ghost of a Militech eagle logo barely visible under the collar, its edges frayed where someone had ripped off the insignia. Deniable ops, Carl guessed. Classic corpo playbook.
Up close, he cataloged her details: olive skin warmed by Mediterranean ancestry, cropped black hair that screamed "efficiency over vanity," and eyes like polished onyx—no implants, no mods. Just pure, unblinking focus. A jagged scar split her left eyebrow, pale against her tan. Knife fight? Shrapnel? Either way, it hadn't softened her glare.
Behind her, joytoys in holographic lingerie loitered under corroded awnings, their augmented eyes flicking between Carl's merc rig and Blanca's corpo-poised tension. One of them, a redhead with subdermal glitter swirling across her collarbones, took a tentative step forward. Blanca's head snapped toward her, a predator sensing movement, and the girl froze mid-stride before retreating into the shadows.
"Call me Blanca," she said abruptly, as if the name were a bullet she'd been holding between her teeth. "Use it. Nothing else."
Blanca. Spanish for "white." The irony wasn't lost on him. This woman was all shadow and steel—a walking contradiction in Night City's neon-choked chaos.
"Your job's simple." She folded her arms, fingers drumming a silent rhythm against her bicep. "Protect me. Eyes sharp, mouth shut. Whatever you hear tonight—" Her voice dropped, colder than a cryo-frozen round. "Forget it. Got it?"
Carl nodded, keeping his face neutral. No need to channel Jackie's motor-mouth energy here. Blanca didn't want banter—she wanted a weapon with legs.
Her heel tapped a staccato beat against the pavement. "When negotiations go south—" She paused, lips twisting around the word "when" like it tasted of battery acid. "—and they will—I'll signal by brushing my hair. Put a bullet in whoever's across the table. Then cover my exit. Ten hostiles. Five thousand eddies. Clear?"
"Clear."
Carl's mental checklist snapped into place: Ten gonks. Shoot-on-sight trigger. Escort mission. Payday secured. He didn't ask why a Militech field operative needed a solo merc for back-alley dealings. Didn't care if this was black ops, a blackmail payoff, or a personal vendetta wrapped in corpo steel. In Night City, secrets were just bullets waiting to be chambered.
A low growl cut through the hum of distant traffic. A black Villefort Cortes V5000 slid to the curb, its matte finish swallowing the neon like a black hole. The car's retrofitted engine purred with a menace that set Carl's teeth on edge. The rear door hissed open, revealing cracked synth-leather seats stained with old blood and reeking of antiseptic.
Blanca's breath hitched—subtle, but Carl's combat optics caught the fractional rise of her shoulders.
Nervous, huh?
He followed her inside, the door sealing with a thunk that echoed like a coffin lid. The interior stank of gun oil and stale cig smoke, undercut by the sharp tang of fear. Carl's knee bumped against a rusted metal case bolted to the floor—grenades? Organ cooler?—as the car lurched forward.
The driver turned, his head rotating 180 degrees with a whine of servos. Eight crimson cyberoptics glowed in a face stripped of flesh, replaced by scarred metal plating that gleamed like a half-skulled chrome cadaver. His voice crackled through a vox-modulator, equal parts static and malice:
"Seatbelts on, kids. Scenic route through hell."
Carl stifled a groan.
Maelstrom.
Of course it was Maelstrom. The chrome-plated zealots were like a bad stim habit—no matter how many you flatlined, they kept crawling out of the gutters. Last month, he'd cleared a nest of them holed up in a Watson chop shop. They'd welded a scavenged Basilisk mech to the ceiling like some fucked-up chandelier.
The Cortes swerved into the industrial district, tires screeching over potholes. Through the tinted windows, skeletal warehouses loomed like gravestones, their walls tattooed with Maelstrom's spiral-eye insignia. Rusted machinery littered the streets—gutted drones, skeletal forklifts, the occasional corpse stripped of anything valuable.
Blanca's knuckles whitened around a datashard, its edges digging into her palm. Whatever she was trading, it had to be hotter than a thermal katana. Corporate blueprints? Zero-day ICEbreakers? A prototype Militech smartgun schematic?
Carl's fingers brushed the sleek polymer grip of the JKE-X2 Kenshin at his hip, its electromagnetic coils humming faintly as they charged. The smart-targeting interface flickered in his peripheral vision—a crimson reticle hungry for Maelstrom chrome. He'd pried the pistol off a dead corpo hitman in Kabukicho last week, and its gyro-stabilized barrel already felt like an extension of his arm. Compared to the Lexington's kick, the Kenshin's ferromagnetic slugs punched through armor like it was wet cardboard.
The driver's vox-modulator spat a laugh as they skidded to a halt outside a gutted factory. "End of the line. Try not to die before the fun starts."
Carl stepped out, the acrid tang of burnt CHOOH2 stinging his nostrils. Somewhere inside, a power saw whined to life.
Blanca adjusted her jacket, her hand brushing the Malorian holster strapped to her thigh. "Stay close. And remember—wait for the signal."
Carl thumbed the Kenshin's safety off, the weapon's targeting laser painting a tiny red dot on the factory's rusted door. Five thousand eddies bought a lot of charged ferromagnetic slugs.
And in Maelstrom territory? The Kenshin's overclocked coils would turn their chrome-plated skulls into modern art.