404: Doom Not Found

- 11 years before canon - 

"Tell me you didn't let him walk."

Mother Midnight's voice cut through the air, cold, level, and lethal. Not a question. A verdict waiting to be passed. Her presence made the corrugated walls of the container feel smaller, more oppressive.

Ruckus dabbed blood from his split lip, feigning a shrug. "He was scrawny. Pretty-boy type. Thought I'd mess with him a bit before finishing."

The silence after that landed like a chemical spill—hot, suffocating.

Jäger shifted on an overturned crate, long rifle balanced across his lap. His cyber-optics pulsed ember-orange beneath his hood. Then, in a voice like a knife edge:

"Kurwa mać."

Ruckus cocked his head. "What?"

Jäger stood, slow and precise, muttering in French now. "Tu aurais dû le couper depuis le début. Il n'est pas fiable. Pas propre."

Midnight's face didn't flinch, but her jaw tightened like a cable drawn taut.

Ruckus scoffed. "Sweet-talking now, huh?"

The faint hum of his internal translator chip clicked in, rendering the insult in a whisper of digital monotone.

"You don't need to understand," Jäger said, switching to English, "but you block my shot again, and I'll put one through you instead."

Ruckus rolled his eyes. "Didn't know the old man had a fan club."

"You didn't know anything," Midnight cut in. She stepped forward, movements sharp and measured. Her coat flared at her ankles, dark fabric reflecting the sickly fluorescent glow. "He escaped. You tanked rounds. You underestimated him."

"He got lucky—"

"No," she snapped. "You got comfortable."

Jäger's tone cooled, but his words didn't. "That ricochet? Hit you in the ear. The second shot would've killed you if it were for your head plate... That wasn't luck. You nearly died to a rookie."

Rookie? Midnight mused at the thought. 

She raised her hand and flicked a command across the holotable. A map of Northside shimmered into view, Victor's last trace pulsing red over the grid.

"Kid's got teeth," she murmured, "Any other rookie would've scrambled against you. Froze up when targeted and died as quickly from Jager's shot. He recovered too quickly for some two-bit. He showed more skill and grit than most solos. That's no rat with a wire. That's a wolf in sheep's clothing..."

Ruckus scowled, crossing his arms. "Yeah, and if your boyfriend here hadn't gotten twitchy, I'd have finished it."

Jäger growled something else in French and turned his back.

Midnight's mind was still glued to Victor.

She was attempting to reason through the situation.

Ruckus was reckless but not weak; in close-quarters combat, he could easily box his way out. But the situations didn't stop there. Victor had somehow ducked out of the way before Jäger shot. 

Either he knew they were coming, or the kid had a sixth sense. 

Supernatural. 

Her scans showed no identification for cybernetics from Victor, which led her to conclude the kid was either a demon in human flesh or an undercover operative carrying biomods. It was the only way to explain his movements. 

While her scanner couldn't be said to be on the level of corpo operatives, it didn't mean they weren't thorough. The Kid was naked in a sense, no operating system, no enhanced nervous system, no optics and no spinal ware. 

His skills, as well, were questionable. Martial arts were either earned through sweat and blood or corporate shards. 

The kids' moves were too organic and dynamic to be the latter. 

The skills she saw rivalled corporate executioners in application but lacked finesse. Such skills were only seen with quality weapons and cybernetics, not make-shift and homebrew gadgets.

Why would a solo of that calibre hide away in a piss poor workshop? Much less work with a local fixer who paid crumbs? 

She could give the kid props on the grit, but not the tactile perception he carried. 

Grit was something intrinsic; you had to be born with it, but tactile perception? You could only earn tactile perception through experience. 

It didn't make sense at all. 

But she returned back to the task; she couldn't afford failure. Eyes flicked across the map. "The briefcase?"

"Gone," Jäger said. "No uplink. No trace. Either it moved, or it's scrubbed."

"And Gina J?"

He frowned. "Off-grid. She's masking movement. Tight pattern. No repeats."

Midnight tapped again. A dossier flared open. Gina J's face stared up—Watson-based fixer. Minor logistics. Smuggler routes. Ties to local netrunners. No gang allegiance, but always near the heat.

"I caught a ghost ping from Little China. Tight encryption, masked route. Might be bait. Might be her."

"You want me to shake the trees?" Ruckus asked.

Midnight said nothing at first. Then she opened another file—traces of internal comms, red-flagged data logs flickering across the screen.

"She vouched for him," Midnight said. "Fast. Too fast. Now someone's probing our side of the network. Not CityWatch. Not corps."

Jäger's tone dropped. "Internal?"

"No," she said, her gaze cold. "Her."

A tense beat passed.

"She's dirty," Ruckus muttered.

"She's clever," Jäger corrected. "Now she's desperate."

Midnight turned from the table and locked eyes with Ruckus. "You shoot when I say. No freestyling. He wasn't yours to play with. This is precision work. Not a bar fight."

Jäger muttered again in French. "Tu choisis toujours mal."

Midnight answered in the same tongue, accent sharp. "Je choisis ceux que je peux contrôler."

Jäger didn't argue, but his expression said enough.

"Rearm," she ordered. "Soft kits. Recon loadouts. We're going silent next pass."

"And Gina?" Ruckus asked.

"She's already made her choice."

A new blip lit the table. A burner ID flashed—short-range burst, dancing across junk nodes. Untraceable... except for one echo.

Midnight's smile was thin. "Got them."

But it faded quickly. The trace collapsed before it could resolve. Gina had killed the line. All that remained was a smouldering ping from Victor—his comms going dark soon after. 

"She's severing links. Fast." Midnight's voice held no surprise. Just calculation.

Ruckus shrugged. "We flatline the kid before chasing her?"

Midnight's reply was ice. "Forget the courier. He's not our concern anymore."

She didn't look at him when she said it. Ruckus leaned back, still pressing a cold pack to his ear, teeth grit.

Jäger leaned over the map again. A paused still of Gina hovered in front of him.

"She moved the case," he said. "Through at least five dead drops. Maybe six. She was two steps ahead before we even hit Northside."

"She's not small-time," Midnight said. "But she's not touching the case. She made that clear."

Ruckus bristled. "Why not crack it ourselves after getting? Find out why everyone's so jumpy?"

Midnight gave him a look.

One look.

That was enough.

Elsewhere, a certain Fixer was stressed, her hair seemingly falling out from exhaustion and stress. 

The briefcase sat on the metal table like it carried its own gravity.

It wasn't glowing. It wasn't humming. It didn't pulse or buzz or throw off net-static like a horror tale whispered by burned-out netrunners.

But it still felt radioactive.

Gina could feel it in her spine. In the way her instincts, honed razor-sharp over a decade of surviving Night City deals, screamed every time she looked at it.

She hadn't slept in over twenty hours. Her eyes burned. Her back ached from leaning over the deck.

Decryption tools ran in loops.

Packet analysers spat out the same nothing data. No breadcrumbs. No source tags. Just dead corporate logistics.

Shipment manifests. Internal routing codes. The kind of sterile garbage corpos wrapped their secrets in, like smothering a body in red tape before dumping it in a canal.

No names. No context. No scandal.

And yet people were dying over it.

She ran a hand down her face and whispered to herself, "What the hell is this?"

A burner shard blinked beside her—no uplink, completely dark. Air-gapped and paranoid. And still she hadn't dared plug it in since the alley.

The case had been locked to Victor's wrist when he came through.

She'd thought it was a soft job—quiet courier work, minimal trail. A handshake favour. A message sent by proxy, wrapped in steel and obscurity.

She hadn't counted on what followed Or who.

The burner phone buzzed—narrowband channel, short pulse, bounced through dummy nodes. Same frequency. Same voice.

Gina answered. "You're getting impatient."

The voice on the other end was smooth and male. Not friendly. Not angry either. Just measured.

"You're late."

"You got your case. That was the job."

"No," he replied. "The job was delivery. Not delay."

"I've had people trying to flatline me. Excuse the inconvenience."

"You were paid for discretion. Not improvisation."

She stood and started pacing the length of the safehouse. A cramped box above a shuttered noodle stall in Japantown. "Then next time you hire someone, try not sending an execution squad five minutes behind them."

"You brought them on yourself."

Her fingers curled. "I didn't send anyone after Victor."

A pause.

Then, casually: "He's alive?"

She froze mid-step.

The silence hung just long enough to sting before she caught herself. "He was. Last I saw, he bolted east. Might've flatlined since."

The voice didn't rise. Didn't twitch. Just stayed cool. "You'll complete the delivery. Drop point's unchanged."

"And my payment?"

"On confirmation."

She sighed through her teeth. "Fine."

"Twenty-four hours, Gina. Don't make us come looking."

The line cut.

She held the phone in her hand a moment longer, staring at it like it might offer a different ending if she just waited. But nothing came. Just cold silence and the hum of distant city noise filtering through the walls.

She set it down and stared at the briefcase again.

One day. 

She could do that. Make the drop. Then vanish, disappear into the undercity or slide out into the Badlands if it came to that. She had caches. Contacts. Layers of backups and favours owed. She wasn't some street punk playing fixer.

But this job—it reeked.

She didn't know who was really behind the call. Not anymore. It had the feel of a corpo operation, sure. But not one cleanly sanctioned. No teams wore badges. No signatures pinged the net. It felt splintered. Like someone with power was working off the books. Or worse, like rival divisions were at war and using Gina as a disposable pawn.

Sabotage. Blackmail. A leak. Maybe all of the above.

And in the middle of it all?

A briefcase full of bland logistics. Buried secrets disguised as boring data. If it was blackmail, the payload was obfuscated so well that even she couldn't sniff it out without risk.

She reached for a cigarette, lit it with shaky fingers, and exhaled toward the cracked ceiling fan.

Victor's face drifted back into memory. The moment in the alley, after he'd crawled out of the wreckage and stared at her like she'd put the knife in his side herself.

You sold me out.

She hadn't meant to.

She hadn't known it would go down like that.

But that was the game. You didn't always know when the ground gave out beneath your feet. Sometimes you were already falling before you realised you'd been standing on glass.

She moved toward the corner of the room. Her go-bag waited there. Weapons. Eddies. A burner shard. Contacts etched into a flex-screen and wrapped in mylar.

Everything she needed to vanish.

And yet she paused.

Back at the table, she ran her hand over the surface of the case. Smooth. Untouched. Locked tighter than any local ripper's brain vault.

Whatever this thing was, it had become a curse passed from one dead man to the next.

First, the courier. Then the ambush crew. Then Victor. Then Bubbles.

She could still hear his voice—calm... naturally, so.

Yet, its smooth cadence had the opposite effect; it felt like a soulless construct talking back - a demon. 

"When I find you, we won't be allies."

She'd laughed at the time. Not because it was funny. But because it hurt worse than she expected.

Victor was supposed to be a rookie, a greenhorn with no grip under the handle. Someone you used and forgot.

But he wasn't dead.

And he wasn't forgetting.