Chapter 1: Chomon

  There he was, Dimitiris Georgiou, in his hand-tailored Italian formal wear, pressed clean and perfectly starched with only the subtlest hint of the reinforced synthweave fibers that protected him from the stray bullet or intentional knife to the back. A suave, ladies' man from the Greek state of Europe known for his roguish good looks, impeccably sleek style, and of course, his familial connection to the largest Mediterranean shipping company he assisted with managing. He had it all, that is until about a minute ago. Now, he just sort of lay there all awkwardly like, a vivid explosion of red spattered out from the back of his cranium, painting the floor. Unfortunately for him, it was not very “suave” to wear protective gear on one's head and Hemingway wasn’t one to miss. 

“I thought we had agreed upon the garrote?”, I heard Feysong project over the direct link of our connected EMS. The disapproval in her voice was almost masked by a tone of indifference. 

Hemingway just shrugged, in his nearly identically suave business suit, slowly wiping the surfaces around him with a black polish rag, removing the residue from the silenced pistol he held in the other hand. 

Feysong was still lying on the bed, her naked body only barely covered by the thin silk sheets of Dimitris’ penthouse bed. Every curvature of her gene-tailored body was made to accentuate the female figure. Even her face was perfectly delicate yet lush, with purple iris’, elven ears, and wavy hair of shimmering color falling past her bare shoulders. That alone was enough to entice Dimitris to bed with her but I knew she also had mutated her pheromones to have powerful sway over the human mind, just in case. She was truly a femme fatale fashioned after the founder of Weeping Gomorrah, the perfect fleshwork artist. Anyway, Dimitris had fallen for her fast, forgetting that the fullest rose often had the sharpest thorns. 

 

Feysong gently shook her head with disapproval at the nonchalant Hemingway and turned her head toward the mahogany desk to the right of the bed, most likely real wood, an absurdly expensive piece of furniture. 

“Did you miss his EMS?”, she projected again, clearly directed to Hemingway. This gave him pause and he lifted his head ever slightly so that the eyes behind the perfectly black shades might have seen Feysong. His response was only a disapproving shake of the head and the slightest of smiles. Of course, he had missed the EMS, wet workers like Hemingway were perfectionists and Hemingway was nearly a legend amongst Eidolon. 

“Yeah, I still have an EMS signal. memory drive is still intact.”, came Tengu-5’s projection from somewhere in Submersion space where she had been disarming the various security systems that should have alarmed Dimitris to the assassin behind him or to the violent ruckus I had created in the hotel lobby as I had, not so subtly, dismantled on-sight security. Subtlety was Hemingway’s and Feysong’s thing, I was always more direct. 

“There is a data pad on the desk. Shall we take a look?”, Feysong asked, but not so much as a question but as a statement about what she was about to do. 

“Not the job.”, said Hemingway with indifference but we all knew it meant he disapproved. Hemingway rarely used words, so when he did, it hit a little differently. Feysong of course, didn’t much care and stood from the bed, letting the silk sheets fall from her naked form as she walked to the pad. 

“Tengu, dear, can you open it for me?”, she asked. 

“Yeah, alright.”

I pulled up the timer in the Overlay, I had set it when I first threw the detector in the hotel lobby. We had a minute-thirty left before I suspected backup security or law enforcement arrived at the mess I had created. 

“Tengu, I got a minute-thirty on my clock. Any chatter from law enforcement?”, I asked, wanting to confirm.

“Hold on… Yeah, lots of noise from local law enforcement. They are definitely on their way. You’re in Fey.”

Feysong extended the Overlay from the newly available data pad. Itineraries, shipping logs, syncsim smut nothing surprising for an elite dickhead like Dimitris. 

I walked over to the lounger where Feysong’s clothes had been draped and gathered them up. 

“Think you can read while you dress Fey?” I said as I handed her the wad of clothing. She glanced at me in that teasing, flirtatious way, as she liked to do. But I wasn’t much to look at, far beyond rough around the edges. I don’t think she could really help those looks, came with the fleshwork territory and I knew it was her just showing her appreciation. 

 

No, I was nothing special, and far from what you would call handsome. A Kurd from Greater Persia, stout and harry, a tangle of thick muscle and rough chiseled features, like the mountains of my homeland. I had been Peshmerga in a past life, where I learned the lessons of warfare and loss, and where I was gifted my first cybernetics after an ordinance took both my legs. Now I was pushing on the 60% legal limit of cybernetic body modification, you can’t dodge every bullet or grenade and in my line of work, there are a lot of both. But it is all good, like the Eidolons of the House of the Gorgon like to say, “Cybernetics and mutation are the right of every Eidolon, their natural evolution.”, or some shit like that, I never was much for deep thinking. I stick to what I know, the battlefield. 

“Well, shit! Local law enforcement just put two-and-two together and figured out Dimitris was here. They just called in TJ.”, warned Tengu.

“That’s not good. Time to move team!.” I projected as I instinctively deployed my shotgun from my right arm cybernetic and moved back into the hotel hallway. 

Feysong gave pause from her reading and quickly began to dress herself while Hemingway finished up his overlay message above the dead body of Dimitris. It said, “Remember, we can still get to you. Don’t forget.”, a message from our client to Dimitris who would, within a few hours, have his EMS memory drive installed into a new body, an empty vessel that only the ultra-wealthy could afford. He would be back to being the same old privileged asshole that he was but with a new appreciation for the scumbags he was clearly in bed with.

Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the sound of sirens as no doubt several Talos Judicial assault craft were cruising for the hotel. TJ was nothing you wanted to deal with, even as Eidolons. TJ was the whole law wrapped up into one brutally efficient and elite combat unit, government Eidolons, and the one tool they possessed that still gave them a place in the crowded game of corporations, houses, and syndicates. No one wanted to mess with TJ and many a cocky Eidolon team had met their end at the hands of the elite tactical unit. 

“35 seconds!”, I projected back through the EMS to my team. We needed to move quickly. 

“Tengu, elevators offline?”, I asked. 

“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure a frog or two just dove into my pond. Going to need to surface soon. Won’t take them long to get the elevators back up and functional.”. 

I grimaced as I stuck my head back into the penthouse. Feysongd was dressed in her revealing cocktail dress pulling the data pad’s information onto a microdrive.  Hemingway brushed past me making his way to the window port at the end of the hall. 

“Fey, times up. We got to zip.”, I said as I also moved to the window port, pulling the utility launcher from the strap on my back. Hemingway had already begun cutting the reinforced carboncrystal glass with a high-powered micro-laser deployed from a discrete cybernetic compartment in his middle finger. I loaded the grappling hook into the launcher and adjusted the sights as Hemingway removed the glass panel. 

“Alright, I’m coming up. See you in the Real.”, said Tengu-5 as she ended transmission and started to surface from Submersion space. 

Feywild slipped out from the penthouse and made her way down the hall towards us. Ten seconds until TJ was rolling up to the base of the hotel and storming the lobby. They would be at our level within a minute. No doubt, there was a hover vehicle breach team pulling up to the North side of the twenty-eighth floor now, ready to swoop into the penthouse. I squeezed the trigger and sent the grappling hook onto the top of the neighboring Touvan building some 30ft behind the hotel. A residential building we had scouted and prepared as an escape route for the job beforehand. 

Hemingway was the first to glide down the cable to the rooftop and without missing a beat made his way to unlock the service entrance on the roof. Feysong made it to the window.

“You’re next, Fey.”, I said as the glide machining returned up the cable. With a smile and a wink, she grabbed hold and was whisked away to the neighboring rooftop. The penthouse glass wall shattered somewhere behind me and I could hear the heavy armored footsteps of Talos Judicial entering the building in a hurry. 

“Damn.”, I whispered to myself, as I rapidly pulled out a smoke grenade and sent it tumbling down toward the penthouse doorway. Soon I was blind as smoke plumed throughout the hallway and penthouse. The sound of ballistic thuds and exploding fragments of the wall could be heard to my left as Talos Judicial opened fire on it, searching me out with bullets. My left leg shuddered from three impacts, armor plating exploding apart. I dropped to that knee as I waited for the glide machining to return. Pivoting I sent two rapid shotgun blasts back through the hallway wall into the penthouse. An act of desperation, I knew it wouldn't deter them. 

 

Then came the soft thudding roll and high-pitched whir of a plasma grenade down the hall, the round sphere stopping as it met my knee. “Well, fuck.”, I audibly said as the impulse fiber of my cybernetic spine coursed with reactive electricity, I flung myself blindly out the window. I could feel the heat of the roiling energy explosive behind me, shredding the armored vest off my back. My cybernetic hand found the cable and began to glide down it with a hissing steel-on-steel scream but that was short-lived. Firstly, the glide machining made contact with my hand suddenly as it worked its way back to the window and me to the rooftop. Secondly, there was no more window, just a gaping cavity wreathed in energy fire and the falling tattered end of the zip-line tether. I would have likely been able to Tarzan into the side of the Touvan building if not for the glide machining that broke my grip and sent me plummeting the twenty-eight stories to the street below. 

 

Now my legs are both fully cybernetic, thanks to that lovely landmine from my Peshmerga days, and I have lift pistons installed for situations just like this. I had my skeleton structure replaced with Durasteel bones and an internal cybernetic torso chassis installed. My spine and right arm, are also fully cybernetic and reinforced. All that, and it still fucking hurt when I landed on that pavement feet first. Like a human ballistic missile, I caved in the street below and crashed into the subway tunnel running several concrete feet beneath. My organic flesh screamed as it crushed against the firm cybernetic alloys. Blood splattered out my mouth as I felt a couple of different things tear and pop inside. And I was pretty sure that my compromised left leg cybernetic had given out on impact. Somewhere in my dazed stupor, I could hear Feysong’s voice over the EMS. 

“Christ! Choman just fell!.”

“No fucking time, get down now.”, came Hemingway’s voice, with a rare tinge of emotion and urgency. 

“Shit!”, exclaimed Feysong as she no doubt made her way into the Touvan building. 

I lay there in the darkness of the tunnel, the sound of rain pattering outside. No, wait, that was bullets, from somewhere twenty-eight stories above Talos Judicial was raining down machine gun fire to where I had landed. Guess, they really wanted to make sure I was dead. I guess I couldn’t be too surprised, they were used to fighting Eidolons and knew that with the right augmentations, an Eidolon could survive a fall like that. Mother fuckers. My left arm felt the impact of a bullet but the pain didn’t register, I guess the rest of my body was too busy screaming at me to feel much of anything from the bullet. 

 

I pushed onto my side, elevating my broken body with my cybernetic right arm. The left leg was destroyed and the crumbled husk of its form precariously clinging to the blown lift-piston in the thigh. That was going to make the escape a little more difficult. Another tiny crater formed next to my head from a bullet from far above. I suppose it would be a good idea to start moving again. Slowly I began dragging myself down the hov-rails pausing to cough up more blood, likely internal bleeding. 

“Choman, you out there? Choman, come in!”. I could hear Tengu-5 signaling the EMS but my head hurt too much to respond. 

“Choman, where are you at? Cho, you need to resp…”, the signal cut off from Feysong. I could hear the concern in her voice, that was sweet. Likely, TJ frogs had locked down EMS signaling completely in this zone. That would be the last I would hear from my crew until I made it back to the House… If I made it back to the House. 

 

At the rate I was moving, TJ would be on me soon, I needed to stand and somehow move on the dud leg. I groped around the pockets of my jacket, with my back propped against the concrete tunnel wall. Fumbled around until I found the high-potency dose of Tranq and swiftly injected it into my side. It would do shit-all for the internal bleeding and external organic damage but it quickly killed all the pain. I would be more clumsy and sluggish on the Downer but that hardly mattered now, I needed to run on a fucked cybernetic leg and this was going to be the only way. 

 

Next, I dumped my 2 frag grenades and the incendiary, didn’t want TJ frogs hacking in and remote detonating them in my pockets via Omni-N. With a grunt, I stood, a deep sharp pain, somewhere in the core of me could be felt but it was manageable, and now I run. 

*****

I can’t say I can really recall too well how I found myself employed as an Eidolon of one of the major seven. I sort of just fell into it, in the sort of way that one stumbles and falls through life. It never goes to plan, not that I ever really had a plan to begin with. When I was a Peshmerga, it was simpler. I was a soldier, I followed orders and the enemy was clear. Red Saffron was who we operated against, nearly constantly. No matter how hard we tried to dismantle the narco syndicate it never took, it was too large, too entrenched in everything. Its reach was global, grafting in the African, Asian, and South American drug syndicates it became a narco megacorp, a demon in the pit. I lost a lot of fellow soldiers to the Red Saffron, and family too, and eventually the light bulb came on and I realized it was a fight that could never be won. 

 

Several years later, I found myself a Ronin, working the streets of Istanbul. Didn’t take long until a minor House brought me in. That house got integrated into a mid-size one a year later. It was a year or two after that, on some small-time repo work that I bumped in Tengu-5. I needed to track down an asshole gang boss by the name of Keftar. He was Tea Timers, a European gang with close ties to Red Saffron so I didn’t mind ripping the overdue cybernetics from his body. I didn’t realize then that there was a larger story unfolding, as there always is. The House of Weeping Gomorrah had been hired to hit a Syndicate contact set to randevu with Keftar. Not sure exactly what happened but somewhere along the line something got missed and Tengu-5’s partner had been dropped by a Red Saffron assassin. She was exposed and soon to be found out, held up in a utility closet when I found her. Just a spit of a girl, an Asian netdiver trying to hide from them until she could break. I’m not sure why but I dropped my job and helped her escape, it was a brutal escape, lost my right arm helping her get out. But we did and she put in a good word with the House. 

 

I came in around about the same time as Feysong. She of course out-shined me and rose like a rocket within the House, she embodied the House’s foundation and did so with perfection. Rumor had it that even Madonna Oriente took notice and tutored Feysong, an honor most Eidolons would never receive. Regardless, For a long while it was Feysong, Tengu-5, Rift, and me and we made a pretty great team. Good enough to make a name for ourselves in the house and to get the honor of working alongside the likes of Hemingway. It was around that time that the contracts got a whole lot harder, damn harder. Now we counted it a great run if we didn’t have to deal with TJ breathing down our necks. 

 

This job, obviously, got a bit messy at the end but I knew that the rest had gotten out clean and that somewhere in the endless black labyrinth of subway hov-rail there was a damn station I could make my way back home from. 

 

An hour later I was near the edge of a boarding platform, still lurking in the shadows. The Tranq was tapering and hot molten lightning coursed through my pelvis and gut. I could no longer tell if the blurred vision and cognitive fog were from the drug or blood loss, probably both, but I was aware enough to notice that six to seven law enforcement officers patrolled the boarding platform. I guess I should have expected as much. Lucky for me, all the subway’s Overlay was blaring brightly the delayed and canceled signage, something about a caved-in tunnel near the Touvan terminus. 

 

I had thought about reaching out to Tengu-5 via EMS but it was still too risky, with a corpo celebrity like Dimitris getting snuffed frogs would be scouring Omni-N for miles. I glanced from the shadows around the platform until I found my key, there near the edge sat a homeless burnout, subway rat. I waited for the police to be distracted, questioning some punks who had come strolling down and then whistled for the empty-eyed stranger. His face was gaunt and eyes sunken but he turned to look at me. With a painful motion, I held up my hand in the sign of the rat and waited for his response. At first, he was motionless but then as if a switch had been flung he came to life and he went to work making a horrendous ruckus and drawing the police and every other eye to his demented performance. I knew this would cost me and the Derilict Throne always came to collect, but it was far preferable to another encounter with Talos Judicial and wouldn’t have been the first time owing the Derelict Throne, they were reasonable in their own way and a good friend to have for situations like these. 

 

I hoisted myself onto the platform and with as much speed and stealth as I could muster made my way to the stairs. Near the end of his performance, as police worked to restrain him he managed to wrestle one of their guns and blasted the breaker, the lights shut off and I quickly made my way up to the city streets of Istanbul. I was out and free, now the long walk to the House. I made my way through alleyways for a block or two before I collapsed. Everything spinning and fuzzy, distorted and faint. My mind was racing, my heart like thunder shuddering in my chest, and strange voices bouncing around in my head. Some of them were like mine and others phantoms, people I once knew, still knew, it was all fucked. Then darkness.