Despite the lead-up and emphasis on sending all the information to the 6th Street lower members, the moment was pretty underwhelming. After all, it was just after midnight when we finally sent it through, so a large fraction of its recipients were asleep. That actually worked in our favor, as we got to watch the smaller group of members who received it much more closely than we would have been able to if the entire organization had reacted to it at the same time.
It also meant that it had a chance to spread properly before any of the higher-ups could figure out what was going on and make any dumb moves trying to stop it.
Of the people who saw it soon after the release, there were a variety of reactions, but they could really be boiled down to just a few general types. A good portion didn't believe it, brushing it off as a scam or an attempt by us to misinform them. I was hoping a good chunk of that group would change their minds eventually, as they met and talked with other people. A smaller number of people saw it and, out of loyalty or for other reasons, agreed with their leaders. Most hated how I was basically telling them what they should do, and still more thought that their gang was worth dying for for some reason, despite their bosses seemingly happy to spend their lives.
The leftovers reacted more or less as I wanted, deciding that their lives were worth more than their bosses' refusal to change their ways. They started following the directions sent out with the message, telling them to delete and block their leaders on their phones, to throw out anything dangerous related to their gangs, including drugs, even drawing X's over their gang-affiliated tattoos.
The number of people who followed the directions and separated themselves from their former gang was small, but every one of them was someone we did not have to kill. We wouldn't forget about them, of course, every single one of them went on a constant surveillance list that Mary was keeping, but they would get a chance to start again and change for the better.
Within twenty minutes, Mary had gotten the message across her entire collected contact list, sending emails, text messages, voicemails, and all sorts of delivery methods to do so. We watched the gang's reactions for a few hours before I finally headed off to bed, my curiosity satisfied.
The following day was a mix of checking in with Mary and Murtaugh to see how their work was progressing, and working on the technology for our soon-to-be-started hospital. With Samwise now fully dedicated to his work in space, building and redesigning fell mostly to me, which was fine, as it was fun to build things I knew would be used to help people.
My first project was the ambulances we planned to use, which I made by combining Halo emergency medical vehicles with various bits of flying tech from other settings. The result was a flying box armored and armed to keep it from being picked off by opportunistic assholes, yet able to fly through a hurricane without jostling the patient inside. It could carry three paramedics and four patients at once, though they likely wouldn't be staffed that much. I was also going to make a larger version for emergency response to large-scale problems like mass-casualty events, but that was for later.
I continued working on tools and equipment, sending the finished designs to Vik and Gloria for review. Obviously, everything I was making needed to be rated for hospital use, and getting the opinions of the people who would be using the tech was the best way to do that.
When people started being officially hired at the hospital, they could look at and even try most of them out as well.
Eventually, the day started winding down, and most of the crew moved to the security room to watch Mary and Murtaugh prepare for midnight and the removal of the last real gang in Night City. The AI duo had already been surveilling the leaders and their subordinates, watching them prepare for a fight they believed they could win.
It took all of two minutes to realize something was up.
"They are way too well armed," Kaytlyn pointed out.
"Some of them are pretty chromed out too," Jackie added. "6th street has always been pretty metal heavy, but that's a lot of new chrome."
"They have a sponsor," I said, most people nodding in agreement. "Mary?"
"I noticed the shift, but I can't track it," she explained, not sounding very happy about it. "They received money, cyberware, and guns, but it's all from unconnected sources. It may point towards Militech, but I have no way to prove it because no records go much deeper than just recognizing the new gear."
"Militech is a safe bet," Kaytlyn said with a frown. "Their connection to 6th Street is an open secret. No one can really prove it, because they don't pass it through normal channels, but they don't hide it either. I'm betting the reason you say Militech is because most of the materials donations are Militech brand?"
"...That is correct."
"Yeah, that's not new, though this level of support is," She said with a frown. "That's a lot of hardware."
"Militech doesn't really think 6th Street will beat us, do they?" I asked, looking towards Kaytlyn, then Sable. "They aren't dumb enough for that, right?"
"No, it's much more likely that it's a test," Sable said, Kaytlyn nodding in agreement. "Every time we fight, we leak a certain amount of information, meaning people learn just a bit more about us. Now we know that's useless since we are holding back, so if we start running into things we can't beat, we can just unlock a few things, and suddenly they can't compete. But they don't know that, so every fight we get into, they think they are learning weaknesses. So, how do they figure out how to beat us?"
"By giving us bigger, more difficult targets," I said with a frown. "Well… I'm glad we've kept so many cards up our sleeves. Though I can't say I like the idea that they are learning from this, even if it's not the whole picture."
"If they are attempting to push us, to reveal our hand, even if they don't know how much we are holding back, then we shouldn't show them anything new," Mary pointed out. "Instead of rising to the challenge, why don't we just apply more force?"
"Just send more Spartans?" I asked, the AI projection nodding in agreement. "Fine, dial back the Spartans and double up on the forces, just enough that no new information is given."
"It will take fifteen minutes to adjust deployment," Murtaugh chimed in. "Well within the remaining time frame."
Mary and Murtaugh buckled down, shifting the Spartans around to increase the number of soldiers per raid, ensuring each group had enough extra hands to overwhelm their targets, even accounting for their increased weapon deployment.
As the clock continued to tick closer to midnight, the 6th Street gang pulled together, all hands on deck, setting up defenses and preparing for the attack. They knew we were coming, so they surrounded their leadership with more and more gangsters, hoping to protect themselves. Unfortunately for them, none of them stood a chance.
"Do we have a final count on everyone pulling away from the gang?" I asked at around eleven fifty.
"Ten percent," She revealed. "Two percentage points higher than I predicted."
"Not enough to make a sizable dent, but plenty enough to warrant the warning in the first place," I said with a frown. "Any of the leadership trying to make a run for it?"
"Two have left their normal locations and are hiding in what they think are unconnected safe houses," Mary explained. "We already have Spartans in place."
"Good. I don't want any of the leadership making it through this. They have doomed their gang to violent deaths, so they will reap what they sow."
The last few minutes passed slowly, but when the time hit midnight, the operation began. Not with a bang, which was what the gang expected, but with a silent drop. 6th Street had seen us tear through several gang forces now, so they expected a frontal assault. To minimize the size of their largest gatherings, stealth Spartans dropped onto rooftops. They silently eliminated as many people as they could before their full volume brothers dropped as well, punching into the hearts of their strongholds.
Within a minute, most of the leadership was dead, and the remaining forces were forced to fight against an enemy coming from the last places they expected, behind their defensive lines. Between the leading stealth strike, the increased units, and around ten percent of their forces not showing up, disabling 6th Street took only a fraction of the time it took to take down the Tyger Claws.
Within just over an hour, their territory was quiet, with Spartans patrolling the streets, some on Warthogs and others on foot, keeping an eye open for any lingering threats or presenting new ones.
"You guys are getting good at this," I said, standing behind Murtaugh as I observed his work. "Maybe I should just let you take care of Dog Town now. You clearly know what you're doing."
"If you would like, I could start doing research," Mary suggested. "Poke around, see if we can't start identifying caches and other information."
"...Sure, information like that is well worth the time," I said with a nod. "Make it a low priority, though. No reason to go chasing after enemies when we can approach them more easily on our own time."
"Will do, Jackson."
I nodded before heading out of the security hub, Sable joining me as we headed back. We were still staying in Cassie's apartment, but with our sleeping quarters on Avalon almost complete, we would likely be moving in sometime within the next few days. Thankfully, everyone had already agreed to move as well, along with Vik, Rebecca, and Misty, though the latter was already more or less living in the vault.
We settled in to sleep and woke up relatively late the following morning. After checking with Mary to confirm that everything had gone well after we left for the night, a good chunk of our team headed down to the biolab, where Frank was preparing to deliver the next group of canines. Another pair of golden retrievers, biological siblings to Laika, a girl and a boy. Cassie was beside herself in excitement, especially since we had already broken the news that she and David would be in charge of watching and taking care of all of the dogs.
Despite what the process was called, birthing the infant canines was not nearly as messy as the natural process, and within twenty minutes, we had the puppies in a protective space inside our apartment, since Laika was staying with David. We were exposing them to each other as much as possible, but Laika was growing like a weed and was firmly still in their excitable puppy phase, so leaving them together unattended wasn't safe until the new pups had a chance to do some growing.
It wasn't until around noon that our real day finally started, most of the morning spent playing with the puppies, listening to Cassie gush, and watching David pretend he wasn't excited about being made responsible for something important. I expected him to start asking Frank and me for cyberware options for the dogs the second they were big enough, though I couldn't exactly blame him, as Jackie and I were the ones who had the idea in the first place.
When we finally left the pups behind, Sable and I had a meeting with Gustavo, though it was over a video feed rather than in person. The transition from criminal gang to a more legitimate working group was going well, and we discussed some of the jobs they would take on, in addition to their neighborhood watch programs. I expected to him to be excited about the death of 6th Street, and while he was, there was also a hint of bitterness.
For some reason, I hadn't put together the fact that his girlfriend's dad was a high-level leader in 6th Street, meaning he was definitely now dead. Martha, who was still far too out of it to notice her guards had shifted from 6th Street to Valentinos, had no idea what had happened. Thankfully, he didn't blame us for it and was just worried about how she would react when she was finally aware enough to understand.
Once we had both been brought up to speed on what our new associates were doing, Sable headed off to her work, while I went on a tour of two off-world building projects: the Avalon vault and our production world.
My general plan for space development was to create two distinct public planetary settlements. One would be on garden worlds, where people lived, and businesses that did not hurt the environment would be built. The other would be on barely livable worlds, and those would be turned into factory worlds. People would live in the garden worlds, and those working factory jobs would travel to the factory world via teleporter. Work conditions would be carefully monitored, but because the factory worlds were already dead, what we released into the atmosphere or dumped into landfills wouldn't be a concern.
Our production world was something different, something reserved for our personal use only. Completely automated and stuffed to the gills with the most advanced production methods I could get my hands on, those worlds would be for massive-scale production, for things not available for sale, and for emergency use. I had selected a production world around the same time we had found Avalon, so it had been under construction for a while. On top of that, looks really weren't a concern either, so Noah had created something as efficient as possible.
Rather than teleporting to the surface and walking around, I teleported to an observation tower, which was built in the center of one of the five facilities.
To call it a small production city would be pretty accurate.
Road after road after road of warehouses, ranging from the size of an office building to the size of our large production cavern. Everything was connected by massive, multi-laned shipping lines, which housed maglev trains that ranged from normal passenger-sized to trains that could ship a large house without breaking a sweat. Along the outskirts were shipyards, ranging from a few hundred meters to around a thousand, as well as intake stations that accepted huge amounts of material in the form of dirt torn from the ground in a progressively expanding ring. That dirt and stone was then converted into water, which was pumped through the massive facility to be processed into whatever we needed using protomatter generators.
Only around half of the facility was functional, and it was already working full tilt to finish the project. According to Noah, it would likely take another two weeks before each of the five facilities spread around the planet was completed. It would then take another four weeks for each facility to build another facility nearly fifty miles away.
That meant in six weeks, we would have ten city-sized production centers.
In ten, we would have twenty.
In fourteen, we would have forty.
In eighteen, we would have eighty.
Of course, that was assuming I didn't stop production so we could incorporate new developments, or I "discovered" something that completely nullified the entire project. Just a single setting with a more advanced version of nanotech, or a more refined version of matter projection, and a good chunk of the massive city-sized production facilities would be rendered useless.
"Von Neumann would feel validated," I muttered to myself, looking out over the concrete jungle. "And probably horrified."
In truth, the concept of the production planet only existed for use in global-scale emergencies, or worse. This level of production was overkill, unless I needed to rehouse an entire planet's worth of people or build a fleet from the ground up in just a few days. In all likelihood, once this planet was done scaling up, I would likely use it to make a half dozen other production planets, before turning them all off, save for one or two facilities.
I didn't need this level of production day to day, especially since it was basically standard procedure now that every new facility we built would include a level of production equivalent to our cavern, meaning it could sustain a considerable output on its own.
My sincere hope was that, eventually, maybe in the next twenty or so years, probably considerably more, I would be able to transition humanity to a post-scarcity society, or some level of the concept, but we were not anywhere near that point. When we got there, production planets would supply humans with whatever they needed to live and enjoy life. Until then, they would lie dormant until I needed a fleet of hundreds of starships produced in just a week or two.
Or rebuild the Gemini Towers in a weekend.
After a while of watching the maglev transports buzzing past, back and forth, I headed back to Earth. I contacted Noah and told him to double down on the protections against rampant building, which I had him put together after I thought he and Samwise had accidentally started an endless city scenario oh so long ago, when they were working on the Earth vaults.
Once I returned home, I spent some time touring the new factories around Rocky Ridge. It was just a quick visit, since I had already seen the first factories and the new ones were basically the same. Noah had just given them his stamp of approval, and Sable was already starting to move people in, already hired and partially trained.
Ground was already being broken for the next batch of factories, along with new apartments and supporting buildings in the campground.
When I was done touring and meeting, I finally settled in for a night of designing and working on our various projects, making steady progress in streamlining and adapting our tech together into a solid foundation.
For the next two days, all the way until the morning of the ninth day in my "break" cycle, that was more or less what I did. We had meetings with various groups, project check-ins, and other small things, but for the most part, I was in my workshop.
On the ninth day, the whole team moved into our new apartments, a thankfully painless process since we didn't need to move over furniture, just personal items, and even that was sped along with various teams of MRVNs.
Unlike the previous iterations, the rooms in the new vaults were much more normal, practically indistinguishable from those in a typical apartment. No more strange bedroom front halls or weirdly organized floor planning. Most of the rooms on our floors were similar, with small adjustments, things like a much bigger kitchen and dining room for Jackie, and a shooting range in Rebecca's.
This vault was also considerably smaller, mostly designed to house our homes, a new courtyard nearly identical to the old one, and a much smaller mall area. There were a few extra dorm floors, but the plan was to eventually build a city on the surface, not underground.
Walking around the Avalon vault, you wouldn't even be able to tell it was a separate structure, since the teleporters were moved over for the most part, meaning we were now bouncing between Avalon and Earth constantly.
I honestly would have likely not even bothered with the whole process, except for how much it bothered Noah that we were living in the poorly designed apartments. At the time he was making the first vault, he was still pretty young, and he thought he could redesign the concept of a home into something better by mixing it up and maximizing what people wanted. He knew better now, hence the much better second attempt, and was in the process of refurbishing the other vault, slowly but surely, to fix it.
The second half of the day was spent meeting with Drake to discuss the final plans for her coup. This was a big deal, as taking and replacing the NCPD was the last real step we needed to claim the city. Yes, the corporations would need to be dealt with, but that would likely be better done from a position of power. They were used to being in control, so removing that control would allow us to cut them out without the options to squirm away, hidden by corruption.
Deputy Commissioner Drake arrived via teleport at around three pm, appearing in the meeting hall. Sable and I made our way through Rocky Ridge and met her there, shaking hands with the slightly older woman upon arrival.
"Well done taking down 6th Street," she said, sitting down on a couch perpendicular to mine. "I assume that the Valentinos surrendered?"
"They wouldn't call it that, but yes," I responded with a smile. "We have already started the conversion process, destroying several stores of drugs, as well as reorganizing their neighborhood watch and protection schemes into a more legitimate form. Around fifteen percent of their people have left, but we are due to start several construction projects, and they will likely be hiring more people to get them done."
"Out of everything we have discussed, and everything I've heard, the fact that you have stuck by your word to replace your robotic workforce with actual people is perhaps the greatest proof your claims to want to help are honest," she admitted, shaking her head. "I know it must cost you millions."
"More than that, I insist on paying actual reasonable amounts of money," I assured her. "You've seen what I can do. Money doesn't mean anything to me."
"I suppose it wouldn't," she agreed, her serious face cracking for just a moment to smile.
"So, what have you got for me?" I asked, leaning back in my chair.
"Our first action is to engage with Commissioner Fawlter. The plan is to go to his home on a Friday evening," she explained. "He consistently takes Saturday mornings to engage in personal activities, leaving us with a significant window to interrogate him, then leave to use the knowledge we have gained, before anyone knows what we have done."
"What kind of info are you looking for?" I asked with a frown. "Surely Netrunners would be more efficient."
"For most information, yes," she agreed. "We planned to ask for your assistance to hack into his personal networks. But we need to be sure he isn't keeping anything off the books."
"Like what?"
"Blackmail, hidden assets, preset backlash," she listed. "Jerry is a Corpo, he knows how to handle coups. Unfortunately for him, with your backing, I was able to convince a friend in Trauma Team to blank his feed…."
"So when you interrogate him, they don't hear his vitals going crazy," I finished. "How did you manage that?"
"Another corpo he clashed with in the past," She explained. "Wasn't willing to help for fear of backlash. But if we are flipping the board…"
"Something so small won't even be a blip," Sable finished. "Well played. We will help hack into his network, and we can piggyback to make sure his signals stay quiet. When…”
I missed Sable's question as a red flashing warning came into my vision, an important message sent by Mary. I activated it, and Mary connected to me directly.
"Murtaugh is picking up some fast air traffic, Jackson," She explained. "A quartet of ATF-37B Thunderhawks broke off their normal patrol route five minutes ago. They just reoriented themselves our way. ETA one minute thirty seconds."
I stood instinctively, turning to face the exterior, looking out over Rocky Ridge.
"Have the Spartans guiding people off the streets," I ordered out loud, catching Deputy Commissioner Drake and Sable off guard. "Pull them into maintenance tunnels if you have to."
"Transferring orders."
I could see below us that hundreds of Spartans, who had been casually patrolling the town, suddenly shifted and began guiding people off the streets, sending them into nearby buildings. We had invested a lot of good materials in our buildings, and they could withstand a lot of abuse.
"Mary, which direction?"
"East."
I frowned, opening my mouth to complain, only for her to beat me to it and designate a direction with a Nav point. I quickly moved around the edges of the circular building until my view was significantly better.
"Jackson, what's going on?" Sable asked, both she and Drake following after me.
"We have incoming aircraft," I explained. "Mary and Murtaugh have been watching them for a bit, they just angled themselves at us."
"What kind?" Drake asked, eyebrow raised
"Thunderhawks."
"We should not be in a building like this," Drake stated, already looking for an exit. "We should be underground."
"We are perfectly safe," I assured her. "We would know if they were carrying radiologicals, and that's about all I'm worried about."
The older police officer frowned but, surprisingly, stuck around, despite being sure that hanging out in the meeting hall was a bad idea.
"Forty-five seconds," Mary warned, a countdown appearing in the corner of my vision, spinning down. "Spartans report sixty percent evacuation..."
Seconds spun past, slowing down as my breathing calmed, and I continued to watch the horizon. I recognized the feeling from when I fought as a level four doppelganger, Spartan time speeding me up enough that the rest of the world seemed to slow.
Suddenly, right on time, my eyes locked onto a streak of distant movement.
"Deploy countermeasures."
Buried in the foundation of every building in Rocky Ridge, powerful fusion reactors kicked on, pumping incredible amounts of energy into massive hidden capacitor systems. These capacitors connected to dozens of sensors and UNSC-style shield projectors. While undetectable when not active, they could deflect and absorb astounding levels of energy. Of course, there was no way I would leave the defenses of my town to passive shielding.
The moment I gave the order, three dozen bursts of sand exploded around the Eastern side of the town. When the sand and dust settled, they revealed weapons platforms ranging from large missile pods to air defense mag cannons. There were even some laser cannons lining the inner layers, and all of them swung to aim at the incoming aircraft.
"Ten seconds," Mary reported. "They have fired live weapons. Eight missiles incoming."
"Clear the skies, Mary."
The distant flares of light that were the missiles were immediately outshone by a barrage of laserfire, our turrets picking them off at range in barely a second. After that, the mag AA opened fire in a roaring tear that filled the sky with projectiles and explosions. Barely a second later, four balls of fire detonated as we eliminated the aircraft.
"Skies cleared, Jackson."