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Finally, after the Hellsent Hiatus, I'm getting back to my homage all things Cyberpunk. Please note I'm emulating everything about the genre here, including its criticisms: the shallowness, the sexism, right down to its inherent nihilism. Please rate accordingly. Credit to the Baetauri plot thread goes to Maxicheetah. Basil is copyright NautaCeta. All other meatbags copyright Eldyran. Barcode Disclaimer: | ||| ||| ||||||| ||| = Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball(tm) !!!

Moral Obsolescence and Motor Oil

Part IV - Of Wetwork and Wickerman

2007 by Eldyran

Every war has its sacrifices. Basil Sabian Raies knew this far better than most, as the genetically engineered hybrid skoon mercenary had seen many of his brothers in arms fall in various operations during the Venezuela / South American conflict and onward. Even shadow wars, with their discrete, precise covert operations, often took their share of highly trained operatives.

But the last person Basil expected to sacrifice in this new shadow war he now found himself in was his father.

In the deceptively calm atmosphere of a near empty steakhouse, Dr. Tyrell, the senior Atum Military Research executive in charge of Project SETH, looked up with bloodshot, drugged eyes over the rim of his thick bifocals. Basil halted, frozen in his tracks, the situation going from unsettling to deadly in less than a slotting millisecond. When the aged ocelot spoke, his words came out with in a thin wheeze, a slow tear falling from dilated, saucer like eyes.

The wide eyes of a fur about to die.

"Everything ... is disposable ... Mr. Raies. Even you ..."

For a moment, Basil hesitated, caught between the primal instinct to save his own creator, and his wartime honed sense of self preservation. The fraction of a second it took for his baseline morality to make its decision nearly cost the skunk / raccoon hybrid his life.

As the scientist bowed his head, saddened by the enviable, Basil spun and took off towards the closest window, flinging himself through the flimsy plane in a mosaic of shattered glass. Basil rolled to his hind feet after hitting the soft earth, silicon shards clinging to his fur, and raced off toward the parking lot. He got two steps before the steakhouse behind him exploded from within, the wood and brick structure disintegrating into a red white fireball that flared bright in the wispy gray fog of pre-dawn hours.

The fiery roar of the shock wave lifted Basil off his feet, and hurled the flaming, smoldering skoon a dozen meters into the windshield of a cobbled together buggy, now under fire from some assailant hiding in the hedge wall near the restaurant's edge. The force of the impact shattered the windshield, the hybrid's spine nearly snapping in half, and parts of his exposed, furless skin had blistered. Momentarily stunned on the hood, Basil almost failed to roll away from the sparks of submachine gun fire now bouncing off the spot welled steel plating on the buggy's passengers side.

"Drive! Drive!" Basil roared out through his agony to the buggy's driver, gobs of blood splattering out from his muzzle onto the hood. The driver, a rather shell shocked, stocky coyote in frayed military surplus poncho turned to him and stared out through the remains of his windshield, the chrome colored optics not even focusing.

"Move it Reese! Thats an ORDER, soldier!" Basil screamed, pulling his battered body through the front windshield in a waterfall of clinking glass shards, just as the hail of bullets sparked up on the hood. The Specialist's instincts kicked in, the bark of an order all that was needed to shake the haze of combat paralysis, and his metallic right paw cranked the ignition. The flame of a small jet turbine roared out the back end, before the methane propelled buggy squealed out of the parking lot.

As the vehicle weaved between bits of flaming debris, a stream of short controlled bursts followed just behind, ricocheting off the still wet asphalt. The muzzle flashes in the hedge wall ceased when the buggy pealed around a corner behind a concrete barrier, now long gone. After a few moments, a female skunk dressed in a form fitting matte black Kevlar bodysuit stepped out of the wall, a covert ops submachine hanging off her cybernetic shoulder by its strap. Rose watched the hulk of the steakhouse continue to burn, her own pink irises smoldering with the scowl of failure.

The sudden wail of an approaching firefighting ground transport jolted Rose out of her thoughts, and she walked through the hedge to a black sporty terradyne, still hovering just above the street. After she jumped in, she punched a number on the vidcom in the control panel, and an AMR communications specialist appeared. The ferret splicer said nothing as he sat stark naked in the reclining steel apparatus that suspended him. Various sensory leads and cybernetic implants had been inserted into various parts of his meat body, a Vitruvian meld of titanium and flesh.

"This is operative Rosa. Primary target nullified. Secondary and Tertiary targets still active. Request orbital surveillance on an unlicensed ground transport currently heading southwest on Burchan Ave. Track using AMR transponder located on secondary target's bike on vehicle's cargo rack. Vehicle chassis has been heavily modified, current occupants, two. Confirm orders."

The abomination reclining in his seat opened his muzzle, and the screech of analog binary spewed forth, translated in kanji at the bottom of her screen. Satisfied, a smug grin appeared across her thick, pink lipstick covered muzzle lips, before she mashed her hind foot on the accelerator and spun the high performance terradyne around. The three dimensional holo-tac now spinning about the dash in front of her relayed GPS coordinates of her quarry, and at 0500 hours, ground traffic along the elevated expressways was light.

The Skoon mercenary and the Yote veteran wouldn't have a chance of losing her for a second time.

Meanwhile, a dozen kilometers away, Kylson shot a concerned look into his cracked rear view mirrors, the oncoming rush of foggy, early morning air billowing his facial fur. Seeing no obvious pursuit, Kylson turned to his smoldering passenger, who still writhed and twitched in his bucket seating. Without saying anything, Basil scooped up some remnants of the broken windshield on the dash in front of him and pressed it to his burns, thin wisps of purple mana swirling between his furry digits. When the skoon's paw left, a fresh sheen of unbroken opaque silicon covered the blistering, furless flesh.

"What is that?" Kylson roared, having to yell over the screech of the wind now racing through the buggy's interior. "Don't tell me you can heal just like that!" Basil scooped up some more glass, and repeated on a spot near his chest, by the exposed vee neck of his black leather vest.

"Yeah, Chimpira, isn't it for you?" Basil flashed his driver a nasty look of annoyance, before checking over the medium pistols still tucked inside the harnesses of his vest. "SID 7.0 I am not, these are little more than field bandages." The skoon's purple eyes flickered over the Imod on his hip, the casing now scuffed and scorched in places. He lowered his voice slightly, addressing the AI still contained in the mass media device. "Max, you okay in there?"

"T-t-the next time you decide you want your s-t-t-teakehouse charred, you leave me behind at the Arcology, will ya?" the jabber jaw AI quipped though Basil's headphones. Basil just could imagine the plastic looking lion trying to smooth out the ripples in his rendered black suit and tie.

"You care to explain to me what in the fuck happened back there?" the coyote growled, using his left paw to sweep his poncho and lap free of glass. His right arm, cybernetic from the lower forearm down, still trembled on the steering wheel, which now started to stutter slightly in his alloyed grasp.

"What do you think just happened, chip head, someone forgot the pilot light?" Basil growled back "We were set up. Isn't that clear?"

"I thought you said your father would clear this mess up?" Kylson put both paws back on the steering wheel, trying to keep the shake of the steering column under control. His chrome colored optics store forward, trying to hide his annoyance.

"Yeah well, he's dead now." Basil shot back, trying to keep his grief under control. Luckily, rage was in abundant supply now. "What's with this heap?" The skoon grumbled, deferring the question. The coyote fumed a bit, before taking the next off ramp off the expressway.

"Who ever ambushed us back there was a professional, you getting that through your density enhanced cranium yet?"

The VSA war vet stopped at a set of intermittent lights, in a rather picturesque, crater filled section of the 'plex. The broken faces of countess condemned buildings had suddenly sprang up around them; fluorescent graffiti emblazoned across their fronts like urban camouflage. The uncompromising grime and reality of the true sprawl had taken over the faux glitter and sophistication of downtown Glow City. Basil and Kylson had roamed into the ferrocrete jungle, and were most certainly welcome there. A couple of hyped up jackers crept up to the buggy with aluminum baseball bats, before turning away in disgust.

They apparently weren't that desperate yet.

"Whoever hit us apparently saw I was riding on run flats, and took out our right side tires. I've got about thirty kilometers left before we start grinding rims," Kylson barked while waiting for the light to change. He watched a mugging on a nearby street corner with mild disinterest. "Don't worry. I know a place I can get them swapped out, someplace we can lay low for a bit."

Basil looked around, his purple irises constricting when they scanned the local war zone. He rode in silence for a while, watching a mixed gang of street felines patrol their turf with fully automatic assault rifles. Some punk kitten bounced a poorly inflated basket ball at one of the ganger's, who just grinned and threw it back.

Despite its inherent dangers, this neighborhood apparently had no shortage of upstanding role models.

After driving a short way past narrow side streets filled with the burned out husks of old, abandoned vehicles, Kylson turned the wheel and pulled up to a non-descript two story building, bringing the dim lights of the buggy to rest on a garage door. A short series of sequential honks somehow convinced the overhead door to pull up, squealing in rusty protest. As the coyote pulled into the spacious garage, Basil looked around to all the gutted auto body equipment lying about in various stages of misuse.

Out of one of the open doorways leading to the rest of the building, a warthog appeared out out of a stagnant haze of greasy metal dust. The relic lurched forth on a makeshift cane, a mass of white scar tissue running down the left side of his face, terminating in a broken tusk. The grinding mass of pitted steel comprising his right leg was one of the earlier prosthetic models straight out of Chiba's black markets from the early 2020's, back when the crude neural grafts were known to cause irreversible nerve damage, culminating in psychosis and death. Kylson turned off the rumbling engine and slid out of the buggy, now tilting slightly to the passenger side.

"Reese, vou pédik from a Venezuelan mud farm," the old pig snorted, "vhy you come here vith this ... this kolymága ... and drop it here?"

"You know how it goes, Dmitriy," the coyote said, resting his metallic forearm against the buddy's drivers side door frame. "Unforeseen circumstances. I need two 35-406 ISO run flats, and some time in your garage to fix my engine."

"Rasskazhí éto komú-nibúd' drugómu!" The warthog did his best impression of an about face, and lurched back toward the shadows. Basil stepped out of the buggy, and made his way around to watch more of this genuine heart to heart unfold. Smiling, the yote's optics constricted, and he leaned ever so non-nonchalantly against the door frame.

"Five hundred Euro's care? Shouldn't you?" The pig's shuffle can to an abrupt halt.

"Bah! That kapústa cant buy me a bljad' on this block," Dmitriy grumbled, "but one hundred twenty thousand yen might do ..."

"What? You take me for a fool Dmitriy?" Kylson barked back, "The tires alone aren't worth fifty thousand, together." The war veteran sucked in a bit of foul air tainted with soured gas fumes, baiting. There was a moment of silence as the pig rubbed the greasy stubble of his think skinned chin.

"Eighty thousand yen."

"Deal," Kylson nodded, and marginally satisfied, the warthog limped away, flinging curses under his breath. Just as he disappeared back inside the doorway, his bray echoed back to the two furs standing in his pit of a garage.

"I'll be back in four hours vor payment, vou little zhmot. I'd collect up front, but mézhdu námi, dévochkami, vou two vont be getting very far in the meantime ..."

Basil looked sideways at Kylson, who slumped forward slightly, his muzzle expressing all the repressed weariness of the past decade that his stock Cyberdyne optics could not. This momentary pause, lasting no more than a fleeting second, has enough to spur the impatient skoon.

"What now genius?" Basil barked, a volatile mixture of insistent pain and adrenaline still coursing through his veins like a crudely synthesized iso-octane additive. The coyote turned his head, the sinew of his tight neck creaking with the pent up tension, and narrowed is eyes, snarling.

"What do you think we are going to do Sato?" The canid growled out low, his right cybernetic arm jerking slightly without him realizing it. "The police are after us. We have a triple A military mega-corporation breathing down our throats, for reasons they only know. My shit is all busted up ..." Kylson snarled and slammed his titanium alloyed fist into a crudely welded piece of plate steel, leaving a dent in it with a resounding clang. "... so your ugly, chimera ass is going to shut up, sit down, and wait till I get this fixed."

Basil's eyes flared florescent with barely restrained rage, small tendrils of purple mana coursing around his hackles. He spun around without saying a word, going for his racing bike still loaded onto the back of the buggy's storage rack. Kylson snorted and started to dig about underneath some old cardboard boxes and oily rags in the corner of the body shop, look for some replacement run flats. By the time Basil had pulled his bike off the rack, placed a tracking beacon on the buggy, and brought his bike around to the overhead garage bay door, the mongrel had passed out from exhaustion in the comforting pile of rags and boxes. The skoon shrugged with mild indifference before taking off.

Even if his partner in misfortune had replaced the last bit of his flesh and fur for chrome, all machines broke down eventually.

But his gene spliced flesh would not fail. It had been tempered by decades of research, billions of Euro's worth of Atum shareholder investments, and countless combat operations. With a hard downward kick, the sleek but scuffed up racing bike underneath him rumbled to life with only a momentarily lag in its start. Basil gunned the engine, leaving a cloud of acrid blue smoke and trail of polymerized rubber behind him. As the former mercenary turned fugitive weaved through the already growing early morning ground traffic, the AI in his Imod quipped up.

"W-w-why did you even bother to p-p-place a tracking beacon on that trash heap?" Max said, shaking his mane within the theoretical confines of his digital existence. "We've got better things to do than hobo-sit."

"Because," the skoon replied back in a flat voice, drawing out his mono-piece shades from his vest pocket. "Reese knows more about the VSA conflict than he's letting on. Once we get our own answers, we'll come back and get his."

He weaved his bike around stalled traffic near a pothole in the middle of the an intersection. While the pothole contained the flaming wreck of a suburban SUV, few pedestrians stopped to gawk at this tert example of modern road rage. They would no doubt see another before the dim light of a smog obscured sun slipped away. An excited family of otters had turned from the smoldering wreckage to snap a picture of a pigeon crapping on a park bench. Since the NAS-Viral epidemic, few wild born, non-replicant birds now existed.

It would be the only live bird their children would ever see.

"Max," Basil said, pulling onto an rarely used highway leading no where fast, "I want you to jack into the Atum Arcology main frame and see whats going on. See if you can dig up any information about father's death. I want know what happened back there at the meet, and why."

Basil killed a few moments catching the early morning news vid-feed in his shades, seeing if there was any indication of what was going on. The growl of the high performance engine beneath him and drone of the bike tires on the highway lulled Basil's hyperbolic mind into an almost zen-like trance, the newscaster's feline rumble sharp in his earbuds.

"... five a.m. this morning the Renchu corporation announced the block of a hostile takeover bid on many of its power producing assets in the re-established Northwest Territories." The news anchor continued, the aging leopard squinting at the camera in front of him, "Renchu's Nuclear and Hydroelectric division stock value has been in sharp decline the past few financial quarters, ever since the containment incident at Davenport's micro-fusion facility number five just five years ago ..." Max suddenly dropped into frame, moping a fresh glean of pixelized sweat from his brow.

"You okay, Max?" Basil said as he swerved around a grime spattered semi-trailer billowing noxious fumes. He took an off ramp to another freeway, one that would take him on a slow loop around most of downtown's monolithic towers of steel and glass, which now glinted in the far distance with the weak yellow rays of an overcast, hazy morning.

"Sorry I couldn't dig up anything useful, c-c-chief, all external ports into the AMR mainframe have been locked down. The only way in is through the AMR primary communications satellite in geo-synchronous orbit, and its only accepting Blowfish-UV grade encryption algorithms now. AMR m-m-must be gearing up for some high level military action. I love the smell of steakhouse in the morning. Smells like ... hmmm ... c-c-cover up."

"Max, enough conjecture," Basil sighed, shaking his head. An aerodyne whizzed past in a low altitude fly by, and for a moment, the former mercenary tensed, before realizing it was an aerial ambulance heading for a local trauma center, its blue and red running lights blinking dimly in the thick blanket of rust colored haze that seemed to linger about Glow City. "Cross reference AMR's previous overt military movements to current levels of internal security. When was the last time they deployed their forces after said parameters?"

Basil's suspicions were confirmed almost instantaneously by the AI, though he wished he had been wrong.

"The last time AMR deployed in a like manner was fourteen hours before the outbreak of the Venezuela / South American conflict nine years ago, back when the core element of the AMR corporation was formerly known as Diamond Works."

"Just frackin superb. Max, I want you to pull up any information we have on Reese. Right now he's our only lead. Give me GPS directions to his public residence, if he even has one." Max dropped out of the news feed, and a projected 3D image of the best route appeared before Basil's vision. With a sharp clink, Basil down shifted and gunned the throttle, the bike's tailpipe blaring as he weaved between two ground transports, heading to the coyote's apartment.

Meanwhile a black sport terradyne a few rows back swerved out of its spot in line and matched acceleration.

On the long hours that it took Basil to get through the packed early afternoon traffic, the skoon tried not to think about his creators last words to him moments before he died. And while he knew that Mr. Yohanson, a Junior Atum Executive, had not been fond of Dr. Tyrell, it didn't make sense that the Dingo would try to eliminate both of them in the same night. For once, the skoon agreed with his AI compatriot, and darkly suspected that AMR was attempting to cover up something big.

But what?

Basil hadn't seen a lot of Glow City aside from short glimpses gleamed from his polarized window high inside the AMR arcology pyramid, but only after a couple of hours the run down and neglected buildings of the sprawl immediately outside downtown proper seemed to blur and congeal together. While most of these hovels were deserted, their previous occupants fleeing the residual fallout that still occasionally lingered within in Glow City's ferrocrete flesh, a few squatters watched Basil roll by from the safety of their rust covered fire escapes, roasting a mammoth rat or two on a makeshift spit for their noon lunch.

Rolling past the flashing apartment complex indicated in his shades, Basil looked around for a way to access the fourth floor from the outside. Aside from the occasional article of clothing hung outside an open window to dry, Basil didn't see any sign that the building was currently inhabited. The fire hazard's broken foundation had cracked and split in some places, causing parts of the structure to lean visibly. A few windows had been gutted out by a fire, most likely from before the dwelling's sprinkler system had finally gave up its last ghost of enfeebled spray.

"Is it lifestyles of the r-r-rich and famous? NO!" Max joked through Basil's earpieces as the skoon pulled the racing bike into a heavily littered side alley, discarded, broken bags of molding trash rolling underneath its wheels. "Its lifestyles of the p-p-poor and pathetic!" Basil rolled his eyes as he got off the bike, laid it down, and threw some dented trash cans over it.

The absolute finest in back alley camouflage.

The genetically engineered raccoon in Basil grinned at the fire escape ladder dangling several meters off the ground and he haunched down, the augmented myosin in his hind legs bunching. With a slight grunt, Basil leapt up the story height it took for his paws to grasp the corroded bottom wrung of the ladder, the toned ropes of his should muscles straining against his leather vest.

Although the internal hemorrhages from earlier this morning had yet to mend, making him grunt with pain and exertion, the skoon's short muzzle gritted anyway, undeterred. Within moments, the athletic hybrid hauled himself up the ladder using sheer upper body strength alone. As Basil crept up the creaking stairwell with cautious steps, he drew out his X-22 medium pistol from his vest, no telling if the coyote's place had already been comprised.

When he reached the fourth floor, Basil threw his back to the crumbling brick wall, his grasp on the molded grip tightening with anticipation. The hybrid's paw trembled slightly with pre-engagement jitters as he slid off the monoshades and fished them back down into his vest. He flung open the fire escape door with a grating creak and peeked inside, just enough to get a tactical assessment of the hallway within, before pulling back against the outside wall. Basil exhaled slowly into a slight breeze from the midday convection, whipping the once stagnant scent of filth through the narrow perch ways of the urban jungle canopy.

As the breeze ruffled plastic bags of garbage several stories beneath him, rippling his already mussed black and white fur, Basil sprang into the dark hallway. His back slid down the grime spattered walls as he went, both paws ready on the firearm, presenting as narrow as a target profile as possible should an assailant fire from any number of dark recesses that the squalor of this apartment complex presented.

Apartment 414 wasn't any different than of the other doors around, but there was a greasy, bloody stain on the floor near it. Basil sniffed for sign of a untimely struggle, but the same scents that greeted him at Reese's former squad leader's place seeped into his keen nostrils.

The yote, Reese. The wolf who reeked of rancid dock water and crime. The tiger who ...

She was beautiful, her fur orange and black, her huge, muscled body rippling with matching orange flame. His paws, now so slight and feminine, and more like a skunk's, ran up her taught stomach to cup one of the tiger's soft, feline breasts. Basil / the skunk touched her lips to the tiger's own, a deep purr of feline arousal rumbling from her huge chest.

Basil shook his head clear of the waking dream, the same he had experienced at the bungalow apartment. It felt like he had been standing in front of the door to Reese's apartment for some time, but he wasn't sure. He glanced at the chronometer on his wrist, and found that several hours had passed.

He didn't know who the tiger was, or why she had left a message for him before everything had gone to hell. The only thing Basil knew for certain was that he had hours at most to figure out why the corporation that gave him life wanted him dead, before the local taxidermist would start pulling her head fur out. He sniffed again, but the greasy stain turned out to be from a waste of a prairie dog, long dead now.

The only scent missing from the scene was Rose's. Basil still couldn't understand why the high class corporate call skunk had been at the scene of Reese's squad leader's murder, now almost 24 hours ago.

Basil tried the door and found it locked. With a slight grunt of annoyance, the hybrid re-holstered his pistol and drew out his combat knife from its sheath on his black vinyl pants, the glass blade twinkling in what sallow yellow light the hallway afforded. The blade gave off a sudden, sharp purple iridescence, before Basil shoved the mana reinforced blade deep into the door lock, then up the door's edge, catching the deadbolt.

Without hesitation, the lean hybrid spun away from the wall and savagely kicked in the flimsy door, leaping inside while re-drawing his pistol. Basil ducked and rolled to the right, popping up behind the dubious cover of a few soy milk crates, the sights of the X-22 making a quick sweep of the darkened two room efficiency. Although the Procyon's low light vision banished most of the shadowy uncertainty lurking about the small apartment, Basil's right finger tightened down on the trigger in tightly contained anticipation.

The apartment was empty.

His sights still trained on the adjoining room, Basil's left paw ran up the dingy wall next to him and found the light switch. A flicker of light blinked above him for a moment, before the well lived in filth of Reese's apartment loomed before him in all its destitute glory.

A rancid pile of soiled clothing festered in one corner, its stench only adding to the stale scent of empty soy beer cans and molding take out boxes littering the floor. A rotten fold out rested against one pealing wall, one of the few pieces of actual furniture in the room. Aside from the bare essentials of modern electronics, an old trid set, vidcom, and their ilk, the room was otherwise sparse. A moment after the single bank of sporadic florescent lighting blinked on above, an electronic female voice chimed in an empty, synthesized cheer.

"The Department of Davenport Public Works is pleased to announce that since 0500, power conservation protocol has been lifted for this section of city grid 978. The Department of Public Works apologizes for any inconvenience."

Basil moved around the edge of the living room, his sights still trained on the doorway to the bathroom. As his hind paws touched down against the cool tile of the kitchenette, he made a quick sweep around the doorway. For an antagonizing moment, he almost fired at the multi-limbed dark figure leaning motionless just inside the shower stall, before he leaned back onto the edge of the kitchen sink and took a deep sigh.

Weak rays of reddish sunlight from the setting sun outside filtered through the only small window in the apartment, glinting off the anthropomorphic machine leaning inert in the shower. Now confident that the apartment was clear, Basil stepped back to the front door and noticed that the deadbolt had not been previously engaged, and therefore, had remained intact.

He closed the door and threw the deadbolt, before returning to the bathroom and inspecting the unusual automaton further. Examining the six limbed monstrosity, the skoon leered into the skeletal grin of its titanium skull, the optics devoid of any signs of artificial life. Although Basil could only guess at the alloyed golem's purpose, the rigid pneumatic device jutting outward from its hip joints did afford some clue.

It smelled like the ass end of a coyote.

"Makes you w-w-wonder why he's such hard ass," Max chimed in, "or if our yote just likes taking it hard up the ass." Basil grinned, but said nothing more, until he started to piece together why Specialist Reese took Lance Corporal Micheal Peer's death so hard. His grin ceased.

After a few moments of solemn inspection, Basil folded up the deviant machination and dragged it back into the kitchenette's utility closest, plugging in the recharging socket as an afterthought. For a while, he poked about the apartment's diverse clutter, underneath old stacks of mildew encrusted, decade old firearm magazines, an ancient paperback of Mona Lisa Overdrive, but found nothing useful. He even rifled through the utility closet and kitchen drawers, but only came across a jumble of mismatched mechanic's tools. He opened the rusted fridge and peered inside, before drawing out an unusual find: a bottle of 2012 Merlot. Basil peered at it, his curious Procyon paws feeling over the etched glass, the label from a unknown vineyard called Saint Valis.

After pulling a conspicuously clean wineglass from the moldy rack within the fridge, Basil dragged the steel chair from the kitchen, its metal feet giving up a shrill sheik as they scrapped the grungy tiled floor. He dropped it in the center of the hardwood floored living area, before slumping down sidesaddle on the hard seat. The hybrid sat in silence for a few long minutes, listening to the rumble of distant areodynes rattle the shaky foundations of Reese's apartment complex.

As dusk descended upon Davenport's cancer, the radiated neon life within Glow City slipped free of its quiescence, one high contrast green phosphor at a time.

In the ensuing eternity of null thought, Basil looked down to the wine glass near his lips to find it empty save for a few lingering drops near the stem. A wandering searchlight outside brightened the now dark living room and momentarily glistened off the wine glass like an omnipresent sentinel. The skoon blinked, never remembering when the bottle near his hind feet had gone half empty, and more surprised to find a slight liquid buzz coursing through his veins. Although his exasperated metabolism should have broken down the simple fermented organic ethanol to something less toxic in mere minutes, he could not deny the wine creating a fuzzy feeling in his head, nor the memory ...

... of when the mystery tiger had taken her to an early evening twilight picnic by the bay. The female skunk giggled softy at her lover when the large, stripped feline unveiled the home made sandwiches and the bottle of 2012 Merlot twinkling in the soft florescent glow of passing fishing trollers. It was good to see her out of uniform, under a more youthful, Davenport starry night sky. Despite the squawk of the nearby scanner, tuned to the police band in case the tiger was called in on emergency duty, the setting was romantic, the atmosphere, serene. Looking into each others eyes, lost for an eternity, the tiger and the skunk smiled at each other, before the electronic triple thrum of the vid com....

... broke Basil from his waking dream. Another insistent thrum, and the skoon shook his head, disoriented, before getting up from the chair to answer it. As Basil neared the communication device on the wall, the navigational lights of passing aerodynes cast long, running shadows alongside him. With a simple touch of a button, Basil picked up the video call.

The orange and black muzzle of a female tiger grinned back at him with a knowing smile, distorted somewhat with a fish eye view. Her swirling cobalt blue eyes captivated Basil, and he stood there agape, unable to speak.

"Tiger, tiger," she rumbled seductively, her voice a rich alto, "Burning bright ..." Her bright orange fur suddenly rippled, magikal fire erupting around her.

"Who ... are you ..." Basil stammered, lost in the powerful gaze of someone eerily familiar, her name, Deja Vu.

"Her memories are your memories. Just as Peer's are. Find Reese in his, and you will find the answers you seek."

The vidcom image blinked out just as suddenly as it had appeared, and Basil's brow furled. He rested his furry forehead against the pealing, dingy paint of the wall, unable to sort out the sudden vertigo that coursed through him.

Peers. Reese.

How did he know the coyote's former squad leader? Basil thought back to when he had first met the stocky, stubborn yote, when he had shoved his titanium paw up in his face, brandishing a 9mm. The itch of another memory filament snaked its way through his spastic synapses.

It wasn't the first time he had seen that cyberarm, a stock OCP C-12RA.

Basil's brown furrowed even more, and he thumped his head repeatedly on the cracked drywall, trying to beat the memory out of his so called density enhanced cranium. The only figment he could make out was that a pair of raccoon paws had snatched the cybernetic prosthesis for a better look, right after a paperback had been flung at him ...

Basil's purple irises widened, and he turned back to the beat up paperback sitting on a soy milk crate. He sundered over to the ratty book and flipped the pages in his paws, till a old photograph sprung up between the yellowing, brittle pages. With a trembling paw, the hybrid brought the creased picture up to his purple eyes, not believing what he was seeing. It was the same picture Reese and him had found the holo-vid disk in, the one that Mr. Yohanson had asked him to retrieve. The key to this mysterious shadow war Basil now found himself in.

The picture was of Reese and Peers after they had got back from deployment to VSA, at some military base back here in the Re-established Northwest Territories. Medals of Valor adorned their military dress, but while Peers draped his arm around Reese's shoulders, grinning into the camera, the stocky, muscular coyote gave a blank, emotionless expression, the camera flash bouncing off the cold, chrome colored optics sitting in Kylson's eye sockets. But this picture, taken at a slightly different angle, clearly showed someone else Basil instantly recognized.

A younger looking ocelot, named Finneous Tyrell, shook paws with other returning members of the 23rd Steel Lynx mechanized infantry.

A heavily decorated black panther with a single red tactical optic stood next to him in full military dress, although Basil didn't know exactly who he was. Basil's breaths deepened, sweat starting to break out across his feathered head fur and brow. He dragged the steel chair across the floor in front of Reese's old trid set, before pulling out the holo-vid disk labeled 'Simulation and Simulacra'.

"Max, I want you to access father's personnel record. I want to know where he received his doctorate at, and who funded his thesis." Basil spoke, flipping over the disk in his paws, examining it with beady, distrustful eyes. A second later the AI spoke.

"He received it at Fort Rekall, under a grant from the New C-c-canadian Coalition military."

Basil dropped the disk into the trid set's media slot, and when the key encryption password prompted, he tapped the screen with 'R-E-K-A-L-L". For a tense moment, the sweat on Basil's brow deepened, for if his assumption was wrong, the military encryption protocol would erase the sensitive AMR research data contained within as a precautionary security measure.

The screen beeped, and displayed the simple message 'Access Granted'.

The covert operative gave a slow exhale of relief, but was surprised to find a single photo file on the otherwise empty disk. With a quick tap of a claw, Peer's split bungalow living room appeared before him, the raccoon leaning back into his couch, wearing relaxed civilian clothes, soy beer in one paw. Sitting next to him was the same somber black panther, also dressed down, but unlike most cybereyes, his infra-red tactical implant bore into the frame with a grim undercurrent of pure malice. Dr. Tyrell sat slightly off frame behind the couch, involved with some work at Peer's personal data terminal. The digital readout in the lower right corner read: 2031-01-12, a little over five years ago.

Odd.

Basil leaned back and tried to piece together what was so crucial about this seemingly innocent get together. He looked about the rest of the three dimensional picture, searching for any hint of a clue. The door to the bathroom down the short hallway behind the three furs was ajar, and a slight amount of distortion appeared in that portion, as if filled with smoke or fog. Basil hooked up his Imod to the trid set, so that his AI companion could also access what he was seeing.

"Max, what do you make of this?" Basil said, staring thoughtfully at the screen.

"I-i-isn't it obvious?" the lion replied, shrugging, "They are plotting a global s-s-cale conspiracy over a few brewskies." The skoon shook his head.

"Real helpful Max." Basil sighed, then leaned forward. "Map grid. Enlarge section 13 to 14." The screen overlaid with criss crossing horizontal and vertical florescent green lines, and a cursor trailed across to the grid to section 13 in a short series of sequential beeps. The sections rescanned and filled the screen with a few quick clicks of a synthesized camera shutter. Basil ran a pawtip over the fuzzy image, something peering out of the slight haze.

"Enhance and pull back." Click click click. The skoon's short muzzle whiskers twitched at the sharpened image, clearly showing a rounded bathroom mirror obscured by shower steam. "Filter distortion." The image re-rezzed, minus the steam, and the backs of the three furs reflected in the mirror. This perspective, however, showed who took the picture.

"Enlarge 26 to 32." Beep. Beep. Beep. Click click click. "Stop." Basil's purple irises burned with fiery recognition. "Center and capture." A familiar black and white skunk with a shock of pink head fur and matching irises grinned to the three in front of her, the smile relaxed and sincere. Taken with the various bits of tale-tale chrome spread out throughout her meat body, there could be no doubt as to her identity.

"Rose ..." Max whispered, confused, "But what is she doing t-t-there?"

"Whatever the reason, looks like everybody is pretty chum with each other." Basil noted, but then shook his head. "But who is taking the shower? Pull back." Click click click. "Pan 45 degrees right." Click click. "Stop. Go back." Click. The skoon narrowed his eyes at the slender, dark outline of another skunk bent over slightly, the fluffy tail obscuring most of the frame.

"Pull back to 31 and enhance." The cursor beeped across the screen, and the image re-rezzed. The supple outline of a nude female appeared, her pert 'b' cup breasts hanging with gravity's gentle tug as she toweled off a wet leg. Aside from slight morphic differences, and the obvious lack of 'ware, this female skunk with purple tinted highlights could have passed for Rose's twin sister. Upon closer examination of the paws that gently dried herself off, Basil instantly recognized them as the ones he had possessed in his odd waking dreams.

But who was she?

"Give me a hard copy of that." Basil said offhandedly, and the trid set spat out a photo of the mysterious skunk. "Max, I want you to access your AMR personnel files and see if she is listed."

"Already ahead of you c-c-chief. Zero matches in my memory banks exist for such a record. Perhaps she isn't AMR?"

The hybrid chewed his cheek, but didn't have any good counter to back his assumptions. A series of sudden, insistent knocks at the front door startled the skoon and broke him out of his thoughts. On instinct, Basil's paw pulled out a pistol, his keen ears listening to any commotion out in the hallway. After another series of frantic knocks, the fugitive merc leapt up out of the chair, and pulled up against the wall next to the door's hinges. When no SWAT team burst in, SMG's blazing, Basil took a deep breath and chanced a peek through the eyehole.

Rose hunkered just outside the doorway, her skimpy pink lace affections torn in several places. Mascara streaked tears ran down the soft fur of her cheeks, the left one puffy and swollen. The skunk's lungs hitched with panic and parts of her chrome had been scuffed up, as if she'd seen a fight. A large neon pink handbag hung around her shoulders, the bulky contents within unknown.

"Basil! Please! You got to help me!" Rose exclaimed. Basil's eyes narrowed, somewhat suspicious, but he unbolted the door anyway. If Rose had been involved in the AMR plot to eliminate him at some point, it certainly didn't look like she was in on it anymore. Basil opened the door and leaned out, sweeping the sights of the handgun in both directions of the hallway, and seeing no conspirators, pulled the startled mephitis into the apartment. He threw the deadbolt and turned around, a concerned paw examining Rose's pink lips, the lower one now split.

"Rose, who did this to you?"

"AMR security. Two hours ago. They ... they ..." The skunk broke down into sobs, one of her furry breasts almost falling out of their torn, lacy holsters as her ample chest heaved. Basil led her to the fold out and sat her down on the dry rotten upholstery, putting away his weapon and doing his empathic best to clam her down.

"Rose ... look at me," Basil said, smoothing out the mussed fur of Rose's cheek, "calm down and tell me what happened." Rose sucked in a lungful of air, trying to steady her nerves.

"Hours after you left your condo, AMR security burst in, saying that you had gone rouge. They confiscated what they could, dragged me to an interrogation cell. T-t-they wanted to know where you were. I ... didn't know ..."

"Rose," Basil said, running his paw down the skunk's back, easing her handbag off her slim shoulders,where it fell off the rotten fold out with a hard thump on the hardwood floor, "Did they tell you why I went rogue?" Rose closed her pink eyes and shook her head, more tears threatening to spill down her black and white furred cheeks. Basil thought for a minute, then asked, "Rose, how did you know where to find me?" She opened her eyes, the pink iris's quivering slightly.

"I hacked into Davenport's civilian traffic monitoring system, and traced all of da traffic violations corresponding with your bike's AMR transponder." Basil gritted his fangs together and squinted in frustration. He had forgotten to turn it off in all the commotion this morning. He started to get up, but Rose grabbed his arm, the grip unusually strong for what he had come to known from the corporate call girl.

"Wait! Where are ya going?" Rose gasped, suddenly frightened. Basil looked down at her, and sat back down.

"Its not safe here Rose," the skoon shook his head, suddenly conscious about the searchlight roaming about in the Stygian urban night outside the apartment complex, "If you found me so easily, then AMR security already knows where I am." Rose gave sudden squeak of vulnerable fear.

"Basil, please ... don't leave me behind! I don't know who else to turn to!"

Basil wanted to say something, anything to get the skunk and himself back on the move, evading the all pervasive eye of his parent corporation, but gave a muffled bark of surprise when Rose muzzle lips ground into his own. The skunk's paws pushed against his chest, the insistent pawtips working inside his leather vest with skill and deftness. Basil's mind swam with the soft contact of the seemingly innocent kiss, the way her muzzle lips forced his apart, her tongue slipping in to dance about his muzzle, teasing.

"Rose ... " Basil gasped, breaking the kiss for a moment. "We don't have time ..." As her paws pressed him down into the old cushions, she looked down into his eyes with a desire that could not be ignored.

"Five minutes ... thats all I ask for ...." Without waiting for a response, her nimble fingers tore open the buttons holding his leather vest, and within moments her muzzle rooted around in his musky chest fur. As her tongue sought the hard nub of his right nipple with reckless abandon, her weight pressing down into him, Basil's mind fogged over, the succubus's ministrations lulling him into a deadly false sense of erotic security.

As Basil's vinyl pants started to grow tight, a fact the aggressive skunk did not miss. Rose's muzzle lips worked their way down his stomach fur, her paws already working their skulduggery against his belt and zipper. Basil's own paws roamed over her back for a moment, then entranced by the siren's call, unsnapped Rose's upper hosiery.

Rose murred with delight as she worked out of the torn, provocative garment, shedding it as easily and as naturally as a snake shedding its skin. Dropping it to the floor, her muzzle resumed its relentless attack on his pants, till her pink lips found the tip of his stiffening sex.

With a muffled slurp Rose's muzzle lips encircled his cockhead, her paws pulling down his tight pants for greater access, and Basil threw his head back in a soft groan of pleasure. As her soft enveloping muzzle descended on his now stiff length, the slick confines causing Basil's hind feet to kick slightly, one of the skoon's paws roamed about to freely cup one of Rose's fleshy endowments. Now it was the skunk's turn to gasp in delight, the vibrations coursing through Basil in intimate fashion. Rose's head bobbed on his length for several minutes, the soft rhythmic slurp mingling with Basil's hard pants in the otherwise quiet squalor of Reese's apartment.

The call girl was skilled, no doubt, and within minutes she had her mark grasping her head fur, bucking endlessly up into her soft throat, surgically engineered to eliminate any and all pharyngeal reflex. Moments later, the hybrid emptied a potent volley of his thick cream into her eagerly awaiting stomach. Rose's throat closed down around his jerking member, swallowing what her prey had offered in salty sacrifice to the Wickerman.

But Basil's meliorated endurance could not be sated so easily.

Rose slipped off the skoon's slick, black sex, still dripping cum out of its slit, and climbed up atop Basil, straddling just above his hips. The hybrid, his purple iris's ablaze with an ethereal need, pulled aside her lacy stockings, near the apex of her thighs. Her dripping sex uncovered, Rose slid down upon Basil's slick tip, the shaft slipping up into her needy flesh.

The puffy heat of her depths were beyond compare of all creation; both earthy and fabricated.

Together they forged a primal unison, untouched by neither chrome nor chip, their hips and bodies thrusting together in sensual rhythm. As her furry mounds undulated before him, Basil took one pink nipple into his muzzle, tasting her. Their intimate pairing rough, their moans undeniably vocal, they fought against the encroachment of all things artificial.

But perhaps they both were decades too late.

Basil, his genetic code engineered to the point of nihilistic perfection, could not have the purity of his DNA diluted with that of natural born, un-spliced sequences. As a failsafe against unwanted mutt hybrids, the heads of Project SETH had seen to it that their creations were guaranteed sterile. Incidentally, it was also another form of control. While each Genetically Engineered Hybrid knew their genetic legacy could not be carried on outside of steel wombs, they did not know, however, that their genetic telomeres had been artificiality shortened in vitro.

The average life span of any GEH was less than five years from point of Incept Date.

Rose, however, was an entirely different story. Having spent her early adulthood in the seedier side of Yakuaza service in the 2020's, she had chosen to forgo her womb in lieu of climbing up the nebulous ladder of organized prostitution. Despite some well placed judicial deaths among her more influential clients, some wetwork did go wrong, attesting to the various bits of cybernetic augmentations and replacements that coursed through her well used flesh.

She had given up her ability to procreate to live a life of leisure, and when her Oyabun had offered his most favored assassin to work along her sister with the syndicate's premier partner, AMR, any thoughts of she had of settling down and raising a family were forever banished. Still, despite having learned on the unforgiving streets, her skills tested in sporadic, violent bursts of duty and honor, her failures were not tolerated with any less impunity than others.

Rose's most recent failure was apparent for those who knew its tale tale mark.

But nothing if not resourceful, Rose turned this mark of shame in a clever device for delivering a dose of neuro-toxin to her intended victims. As she rode Basil hard and fast, her breasts bouncing furiously before the rapt skoon, the steel claw of her metallic left pinky ran just underneath the skoon's jawline, scratching along side the jugular.

A sudden numbness seeped into Basil's neck, the coldness funneled down into his multi-chambered heart, and then raced to his extremities. He had just enough time to widen his eyes, the shock of recognition dawning on his drug hazed, tortoise like mind.

Smiling, Rose shuddered against the hard, toned body now neutralized underneath her, her orgasm blooming through her like a budding flower. She slithered off the gurgling hybrid, gloating, before sauntering naked to her handbag, and drawing out a heavy autopistol.

"Ya know this never gets old?" Rose smirked, inspecting the fully automatic firearm in her feminine paw, "I can never get over how naive your batch is. Its da dumps that you're the last." Basil fell off the couch, slobbering all over himself just to try to get up off the floor. And yet something in his veins burned like fire against the bitter cold that attempted to seep into, shorten his already short wick.

Something in the Wine.

"I'd love to explain just why I have to kill ya, Basil" Rose said, leveling the pistol at his head, "But Mista Y. has direct orders to tie up any loose ends before AMR rolls out da red carpet for them Baetauri." For a moment, it looked bleak for the ambushed skoon, until Max's image popped up on the old trid set at the last possible instant, sporting a bandoleer and pulse rifle.

"Get away from him you ... Bitch!" With an explosion of splintered wood, the titanium golem burst into the kitchen, its blazing red irises constricting when it saw its foe. With a flourish of pneumatics, the machination lurched towards Rose with a mechanized hiss, receiving Max's telemetry from a small radio receiver inside its chassis. Rose backed up and leveled the sights of the autopistol at the thing's torso, squeezing the trigger in well trained, short controlled bursts.

Sparks flew off the leering titanium skeletal grin as it's four arms, whirling in the air like blenders, closed on the skunk. Rose rolled to one side and let loose another volley of gunfire, the gunshots deafening in the tomb like apartment complex, and this time one of the smaller limbs blew off in a shower of sparks, the acrid scent of burning circuitry filling the room. Undaunted, the infernal monstrosity turned and lumbered toward her again in a concerted whine of servos.

"It doesn't feel pain, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are yiffed!" The AI lion roared out, and Rose fell backwards over some floor clutter as the machine pursued. Basil meanwhile, the effects of the neuro-toxin being nullified by whatever was in the wine, had pulled his pants up and crawled over to snag the Imod and photo from near the trid set.

Just as the deadly contraption descended upon her, Rose thrust the barrel of gun near the neck servo, and blew the thing's sensor housing clean off with the last of her clip. As Rose rolled to her feet, she turned to Basil, who had found his vest and pulled out twin machine pistols, training them on her.

"Basilisk-Thirty-Six-Foxtrot!" Rose screeched out suddenly, and Basil's fingers froze on their triggers. When the GEH didn't start screaming in agony and expire messily from Protocol 9732, Rose pink iris's widened in panic, and her paw tips fumbled to eject her smoking, empty clip.

Basil's eyes narrowed, and before her clip could even hit the floor, Rose's body danced and twitched as a hail of high velocity lead ruined her already lackluster evening. Basil's grip on the thumping, jittering firearms never faltered, maintaining a tight of spread pattern as possible considering the recoil involved. Miniature explosions of gore splattered the kitchen tile behind the skunk as the hail of gunfire took his would be assassin apart piece by piece.

When Basil finally eased up on the triggers, a waste of something vaguely organic with hunks of metal flopped back into the kitchen, twitching in a spreading pool of viscous crimson. Basil didn't have time to savor this slight triumph, as his keen ears heard military boots tromping in the hallway outside. He swung his aim over to the doorway just as a swarm of black armored, featureless masked AMR soldiers burst through the flimsy wooden entrance.

The salvo of gunfire cut down the first three, their bodies pitching backward with spastic zeal, the rest ducking back behind the thin drywall for visual cover. The merc criss-crossed lines of fire, spreading the rest of his ammo through the walls until his clips ran dry. He dropped the pistols and bounded over the gory mess in the kitchen, flinging himself through the small window just as the remaining soldiers swung back through the doorway and returned fire. Bullets ripped into the wooden frame, missing the acrobatic hybrid by scant centimeters.

Had Basil been in peek condition, a four story plunge would have been mere child's play, but his sabotaged reflexes compromised, his sudden accelerated descent turned far more perilous. It took all of his concentration to grab at the clothes lines that whizzed by him, redirecting his downwards momentum, and he twirled lazily, antagonizing slow. His hind feet finally met met the side of the building across the alley way, and with a kick, he somersaulted himself back across the dark expanse. His head connected with the wrong end of the fire escape with a dull thong, and senseless, he fell limp into the huge heap of garbage bags two stories below.

The sudden jar of the otherwise graceless landing snapped Basil to his senses, and he rooted around for his concealed bike, listening to his perusers kick open the steel fire escape door four stories above him. He leapt on his bike, kick starting it in the process, and gunned out of the back ally as automatic fire ricocheted off the ferrocrete around him. His lungs burned, his flesh seared in spots where ricocheting lead had grazed him, his fur still missing in spots from the explosion earlier this morning, but at least he was alive.

Which was more than he could say for his father.

Peers. Tyrell. And now Rose. Who else would be be sacrificed in AMR's new shadow war? More importantly, what was so important in that picture that AMR was willing to sacrifice scores of NCC soldiers and AMR operatives to cover up? Basil rode off into the humid night, and while switching off his bike's transponder, flipped on the tracking beacon he had placed on Reese's jalopy. On the way to Glow City's dilapidated dockside, the overcast night sky, which threatened another acidic downpour, parted, if just for a moment.

As the planet Mars twinkled in the cold expanse above him, the hybrid mercenary thought back to the covert inter-sol operation involving the Mennonite liberation of Mars colony only two months ago, and wondered if it was somehow connected to this sudden turn of Wetwork and Wickerman ...

~ Fin Part IV ~

What exactly is Project SETH? Who are the Baetauri, and are the inter-Sol reports from Mars Colony related to AMR's military build up? Who or what is attempting a hostile takeover of Renchu's fusion reactors, hearkening back to the petroleum scare of 2026, and the VSA conflict exactly a decade ago? The razor edge between meat or machine shatters in part V: Total Dallaireian Overhaul