"I should be the one asking that question! Maine, you're a total pig, you know that? Actually, calling you a pig is an insult to pigs—they're better than you!"
"Seriously, Maine—what are you even doing? I introduced you to El Capitán, got you the latest weapons and gear on an interest-free payment plan, and this is how you lead a team?"
"Tonight's operation was definitely not assigned by El Capitán, was it? You like being Faraday's lapdog so much? Is he your real daddy or something?
You can't function without him?"
"Leo, this isn't Maine's fault," Rebecca interjected, grabbing Leo's arm. "The data Faraday wanted us to steal—Sasha sent it to us almost immediately. According to the plan, she was supposed to leave Biotechnica's building before the security drones arrived, then regroup with us."
"But for reasons we still don't understand, she chose to stay behind. Leo, do you know why?"
Leo paused for a moment, then said quietly, "SECURICINE."
Everyone looked puzzled.
"What did you say?"
"SECURICINE. Sasha stayed because of that. She tried to send it to News54."
Their tech specialist, Pilar, scratched his head. "I've heard of it. Isn't that some painkiller made by Biotechnica? But what does that have to do with Sasha? Why would she risk her life over it?"
Dorio cast Leo a sidelong glance. "Could it be a family member of hers died because of that drug?"
Leo shook his head. "I don't know. She's still in surgery right now. We'll have to wait for her to wake up and explain."
With that, Leo shrugged off Rebecca and Dorio's attempts to hold him back and stepped up to Maine.
"Leo?" The three looked on warily.
Maine had been furious and resentful after Leo's punch, but now he understood why Leo was angry. As the team's leader, Maine had a responsibility to protect everyone. Hearing that he'd basically dragged Sasha into life-threatening danger had killed his indignation. If Leo wanted to hit him again, he'd take it.
But Leo didn't raise a fist anymore. Instead, he extended a hand. Maine blinked, and then let Leo help him to his feet. Leo tossed him a box of tissues.
"Wipe the blood off your nose."
Dorio and Rebecca exchanged confused looks. They'd just been at each other's throats, but now they seemed fine—maybe not a pleasant moment, but at least they were no longer fighting.
"So did Sasha manage to upload the data?" someone asked.
"She uploaded it…and didn't." Leo sighed. "We couldn't wait for the progress bar to finish. Things got too dangerous, so I yanked out her personal link. The upload was cut short. And I'm guessing Sasha didn't make a backup of the files."
Under the circumstances, he couldn't see any other way. Sasha would never have agreed to leave otherwise. She was a good kid—letting her die in there would have been a tragedy. Still, he intended to help her finish what she started. In a city like Night City, no one matched Rogue's reach in digging up intel.
What Sasha risked her life to obtain might be redundant anyway—Leo suspected Rogue probably had even more sensitive info than what Sasha had found in that corporate terminal. Like how, back in the day, even the President of the United States knew less about the Manhattan Project than Stalin halfway across the world.
"For now, let's leave Sasha's situation aside," Leo said. "She needs time to recover. But what about Faraday, Maine? How do you plan to handle him?"
Faraday set up the op without telling the crew everything. Specifically, he knew about the SECURICINE files and their potential exposure of Biotechnica, but withheld that info to keep the team focused on stealing the less-sensitive data he claimed was the objective.
Sasha, being more idealistic or simply curious, discovered the hidden SECURICINE logs and realized their value—something that should have been part of the mission brief. She chose to stay behind to send it out, risking her life, because Faraday never planned to leak that kind of info.
In fact, he may have wanted it buried, possibly because he was being paid under the table to ignore it and never spread that info, or he feared corporate blowback that could jeopardize his fixer status.
So in Leo's eyes, Faraday manipulated the crew, endangered Sasha, and withheld information that could have saved time, lives, and maybe spared Sasha from nearly bleeding out on a clinic table.
"Handle…Faraday?" Maine repeated blankly. The question sounded like it went far deeper than a mere shouting match. "Are you saying—?"
"Do you folks really think Night City needs so many fixers? Especially a backstabbing vermin like Faraday?"
"You're planning to kill Faraday?"
Mercs might cross corporate interests without a second thought, but they rarely made a point of openly killing fixers. Doing so could have huge repercussions. Leo's plan, however, was to quietly make Faraday disappear without leaving any trace.
…
Inside Tom's Diner, two men sat facing each other. One was Faraday himself—though a fixer, he always dressed like a corporate stooge. The other wore an Arasaka uniform without shame.
"You've disappointed us, Faraday," said the Arasaka employee. "We respected you as one of the city's top fixers, but you botched the simplest of tasks."
His words didn't echo through the diner; they spoke over a private comm channel. The Arasaka employee didn't even move his lips—his meaning resonated directly in Faraday's mind.
"And you call 'breaking into Biotechnica, stealing data, then leaving silently' the simplest of tasks?" Faraday retorted.
A mocking sneer coated the Arasaka man's mental tone. "What else? Did you think Arasaka was paying you top dollar just to track down someone's missing cat?"
To Arasaka, fixers and mercs across the city were little more than dogs sniffing for scraps. Even the so-called "living legends" were just meaner dogs, still dogs all the same.
Faraday could sense the man's scorn, but in Night City, scorn was a daily constant. What worried him more was losing this chance to curry favor with Arasaka.
"Just give me another shot. I promise I'll get you the data you want."
"This is your last chance, Faraday. Don't blow it."
The Arasaka man's eyes flashed blue for a moment, then dimmed. He stood and left Tom's Diner without a backward glance. Faraday grabbed his paper coffee cup but didn't drink. He slowly clenched it in his hand until the dark liquid spilled out onto the table, dripping over the edge.
A second later, his eyes glowed with digital light as he placed a call—to Maine, the man who had made him look so foolish.
"Why the hell didn't you pick up yesterday? Where were you?"
Being left in the lurch had humiliated him in front of Arasaka. Faraday's usual corporate-style outfit came from his mindset: in his opinion, latching onto a megacorp was the only real future in Night City.
To him, real cunning meant never sticking to one "tree." He served Militech while simultaneously flirting with Arasaka if it maximized profit.
Just a question of hedging his bets for the biggest gain.
Arasaka had promised that if he got hold of the secret data Biotechnica and Militech were developing together, they'd give him an "operative" position—an actual rank. It might not sound like much, but it was a major step up. It proved that if Faraday played his cards right, Arasaka might eventually groom him as a genuine insider or even an executive someday, far better than the "we'll see" hush money Militech had been tossing him for the past two or three years.
But last night, everything collapsed. Maine and his crew ghosted him.
Faraday was furious.
"Something…came up yesterday," Maine replied over the line. "But we've got what you wanted."
"Then bring it to me right now!"
"We can't—the car's totaled, and one of our teammates is badly injured. We're all holed up in a ripperdoc clinic. How about this: tonight, come meet us at this location, and we'll hand over the data."