2078: Highriders - Chapter 17

“Later, Hollow, there’s still a station to clean up.”

Johnny gave a long look at the horror of torn and amalgamated bodies, globules of crimson blood and chrome fluid floating outward from the mass. He shook his head and turned away, his vacsuit thrusters puffing as he pushed himself into the spoke.

“Matsui… Matsui… Kaori!” I shook her by the shoulder.

She had absolutely frozen in the aftermath of literally compressing an entire milspec black ops team with the weapon on her right arm. What it was or how it did it, could wait, though a fair guess would be she had somehow weaponized gravium in a compact enough package to walk around with.

She blinked, tearing her eyes away from the results of her weapon, her face looking like she wanted to bust her gut’s airlock. I could see she was hyperventilating from shock, but in the next second that stopped as her own biomon systems kicked in to ease and regulate the symptoms. Her eyes met mine through our helmet’s face shields and a grim determination shone there

“Gomenasai V,” she said softly. “I’ve killed before, but that…”

“Would freak anyone the fuck out, yeah. But we got shit to do now, follow me closely and only use that again when I tell you, okay?”

She nodded jerkily.

I grabbed hold of her shoulder and pushed us down the spoke, transferring the SMG to my left hand.

The abrupt death of so many of her team hadn’t seemed to phase Dunn at all.

She merely organized her remaining troops into defensive positions and continued pummeling at the station’s firewalls in cyberspace.

Her Pings also kept radiating outward, each one slightly different with altered and tweaked algorithms. That impressed the hell out of me, even if it was ultimately ineffective at finding me in cyberspace. Every change she made I could see coming and just as quickly adapt my defenses.

We emerged from the spoke and into the main habitable section of the station. Everything here was orientated for the non-existent centrifugal gravity, so we adjusted ourselves to match anyway, feet downward towards the outer hull.

The central corridor curved out of sight before us and our opposition was just through two more bulkheads ahead.

We pushed ourselves up against the ceiling, before puffs of thrusters gave us forward momentum.

Wrecked defense turrets were soon evident, as were torn open doors on both sides, marking the path that Dunn’s team had taken. Painstakingly clearing and securing each room.

Johnny held up a fist, grabbing hold of the ceiling and firing thrusters to stop.

‘Shrapnel spitters ahead.’ He warned.

‘I see it,’ I grumbled in annoyance, bringing Matsui and I to a stop behind him.

The active sensor emissions were obvious and if we disturbed them at all or tried to get a line of sight, we’d get a face full of hypersonic penetrator darts.

I turned to any nearby cams in cyberspace that could give an angle for a quickhack, only to be frustrated that all of them were physically offline, probably intentionally damaged. Dunn had made an invisible wall for us.

Johnny holstered his pistol and with smooth fluid movements, assembled his sniper rifle.

Well, that was one way to do it, I thought.

Using the active emissions as a guide, he triangulated, aiming straight through the curved ceiling at an angle.

The sniper visibly flared as its counter-thrusters fired off as it sent the AP projectile streaking through the vacuum.

It penetrated through the thin ceiling with no deviation and wrecked the shrapnel spitter mounted on the wall, continuing through two more partitions, before finally exiting out the station’s hull and into space.

Johnny had chosen an angle that would eventually bring the bullet into an impact just a few degrees off Luna’s northern pole in the middle of nowhere.

I gave him a pointed look.

“What? Better that than sending it off into some orbit that’s going to eventually wreck somebody’s day in a few hundred years.”

“Do try to keep the damage to a minimum,” Matsui instructed. “We’d like to restore life support to the vac zones without doing months of repair work. As it is, I’m going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep Mitsubishi from just scrapping the place.”

We advanced carefully down the corridor.

Dunn chose that moment to let her primary hacks go on autopilot, whilst turning her full attention on the bulkhead door we were approaching. 

She tried to send the ‘close’ signal to the motors, but found them blocked outright when they ran straight into my fragmentation hack.

I threw a Short Circuit in its wake, which she barely managed to shield by hastily throwing up a disposable firewall.

We traded hacks back and forth even as we crossed the bulkhead threshold.

“Show yourself!” Dunn screamed with frustration into cyberspace.

I still hadn’t let my avatar even manifest. From her perspective, she was just fighting against hacks that seemed to come from any direction she could perceive. That was the problem with fighting against someone with homefield advantage, as I was in effect the station’s own elite dweller in cyberspace, thanks to the codes Matsui had given me.

Five data randomizer daemons materialized from me and streaked towards Dunn’s position.

In appearance they were very disconcerting, taking shapes that could be familiar or outright eldritch to any human mind who perceived them.

Dunn visibly hesitated before bringing out what she’d probably consider a ‘big gun’.

Her own daemon charged forward with suicidal abandon straight towards mine.

What followed was a virtual explosion as countless worm replicants shot from Dunn’s daemon, hungrily devouring data and trying to make more of themselves.

Two of my daemons succumbed, merely becoming food for the horde, but a quick adjustment from me on the remaining three turned them effectively invisible to the virulent code.

They powered their way through, even as I wrenched system resources away from the worms, throwing deep clean daemons, defrags, deletions and outright format hacks of the affected server clusters. Making sure to save the data beforehand.

It was with great satisfaction that I saw Dunn’s avatar visibly back off against what she saw as the nuclear weaponry of cyberspace I was casually throwing around.

Sure, any netrunner could wield them, but from her point of view, I was literally salting the earth. Most ‘runners did not destroy the data they were generally there in the first place to protect.

In the meantime, she now had to contend with my randomizer daemons.

Her initial layer of junk data shields did absolutely nothing in impeding them, they ghosted through as if there was nothing there.

The first firewall she threw out, stopped them briefly before the wall itself flickered and collapsed under the daemon’s assault.

Each daemon was forcefully digging into the code and disrupting cohesion by scrambling the data they found into as many random variables as I could program into them.

Dunn’s avatar rapidly tried to make adjustments on a hack to counter my daemons.

She managed a hack just as the three of them approached her final line of defense, she froze for a second as they turned into multi-armed monstrosities with circular mouths and rows of endless sharp digital teeth that spun around a yawning void.

The psychological trickery worked and the first daemon managed to crash into her last layer of defense without interference which was a nasty Black ICE style firewall.

It destroyed itself in the process, leaving the way clear for the remaining two.

She desperately released her own hack, but it only snagged one.

The daemon suddenly began attacking itself, rapidly becoming an out-of-control ouroboros equivalent singularity that died and exploded into nonsense data that littered cyberspace.

I was impressed with that one and made a reminder in my datafortress to come up with a similar hack.

Dunn’s avatar tried a last ditch retreat out of cyberspace, but only found my daemon’s tentacles waiting.

A moment later it was all over as I felt the daemon’s payload of four Synapse Burnouts go to work.

“Dunn’s dead,” I told Matsui.

“Excellent! Now just the stragglers.”

“Slight problem though, it seems the primary hack that she was using to attack the station has detected her flatlining and is going for broke,” I grimaced as I pushed my instance in cyberspace hard.

It was a nasty multi-thread vectorized hack that straddled the line between a dumb program just carrying out its instructions and a full blown AI.

It exploded into 2,147,483,647 distinct hacks in a runaway replication event that threatened to gobble up the entirety of the station’s cyberspace.

Militech and the programmers who wrote the thing were sore losers and had programmed in this final ‘fuck you’. The consequences this would have on the research being done on the station would at least delay progress, as long as Mitsubishi utilized off-site backup protocols. That was at least until I saw the hacks trying to attack the firewalls that protected the station’s RTGs and heat radiation systems.

I planted myself in front of that firewall and released my own replication worm hack, targeting the Militech swarm.

The station’s lights began flickering.

Kaori twitched as her own systems also told her what was happening in cyberspace. “Fuck V, you’re going to burn out every computer on the station!”

“It’s either this or we get cooked in our own heat.”

We paused at the next bulkhead, finding it firmly shut.

Through the security cams I saw the remaining four Militech black ops were waiting, their own SMG rail weapons up and ready, with deployed superalloy shields as cover. 

I sent over the feeds to Johnny and he backed up, using the curve of the station to avoid the bulkhead and gain the angle he needed.

His sniper came up and he fired twice in rapid succession, whilst throwing a quickhack queue against the third and fourth operative.

Two skull sponges were thoroughly scrambled and splattered out, whilst the rest got Synapse Burnouts.

It eventually took me two meatspace minutes and 23 seconds to finally defeat the Militech ‘fuck you’ hack for good, leaving behind three completely fried server stacks, of which the station only had seven.

“It’s done,” I said with a nod. I didn’t really get ‘tired’ anymore, but fighting that hack left me feeling like a stretched out wet towel right down to my base code.

“Yatta…! Yatta yo V!” Kaori exclaimed - breathless, triumphant and I suddenly found myself being hugged around the neck enthusiastically by a very relieved scientist, who had nearly watched her life work get stolen or even destroyed. “Kuso kurae! Maiyāzu no inu-domo ga tsuki no sora de tayutau shitai ni naru nante, saikō no fināre jan! Ahahahaha!! Kore de jūryoku wa watashi no mono da!” (“Eat shit! Myers’ dogs drifting as corpses in the lunar sky — what a perfect finale! Ahahahaha! Gravity is mine now!”)

“I’m… happy that you’re happy,” I said rather awkwardly, grinning at her infectious bubbliness.

“Eeep! Sorry,” she pulled away as if burned.

“No harm done, let’s just get busy with the clean-up and giving your scientists the good news.”

8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888 

Cleaning up the dead in zero-G was another first of my existence beyond Earth’s atmosphere that I could really have done without.

It wasn’t something I had really bothered with much either back in NC, since the NCPD had a dedicated clean-up division. They generally swept in after reported gang fights or citizens calling in any dead body. Rotting corpses were bad news for the general health of the city and it was the one thing every corp could generally agree on - no one wanted a plague burning through the workforce of Night City.

Johnny dealt with the main mass of bodies we had floated together in the station core, whilst I hovered behind each body he pushed with a large gravium based ‘hoover’ that Kaori had given me. It pulled in the leaking fluids with a low level gravitational attraction that it projected five feet in front of the main emitter. The entire thing looked like a three foot long bulky vacuum cleaner, with a fat cylindrical barrel made out of a dizzying array of composites and alloys. It was not mass produced and looked like it was made in somebody's backyard workshop.

Soon enough we had the bodies stripped of armor, vac suits, weapons, tactical harnesses and any other potential valuables floating to one side. The bodies and parts themselves were before the main core airlock and next to it a large floating sphere of mixed blood, cyber fluid and other ‘biologicals’. 

Just looking at it made me thankful I didn’t have my original stomach anymore and any base code impulses to ‘throw up’, could be easily overridden. Johnny had managed to do the same but it was a close thing. Throwing up in a vac suit’s helmet was not a fun time for anyone.

Kaori had wisely not involved herself with the clean up beyond giving me the gravity vacuum.

“V? Hollow?”

I turned away from the ghastly sight we had created and regarded a tall, gaunt man enclosed in a white vac suit. He had a severe angular face of Japanese descent with permanent stress lines around natural dark brown eyes but had distinct cyan lines in the pupils from an AR retinal imager.

“That’s us,” I confirmed.

He stepped forward jerkily in his mag boots, before shaking our hands briefly and afterwards giving a bow.

“Thank you for saving us,” he said with clipped English that barely had any accent at all. “I’m Doctor Hiroshi Takagi, lead gravitational systems scientist and station chief of Kasai-9.”

“Just doing our gig, Dr. Takagi.”

“Yes, but you must understand. Militech Orbital Strike Command is a blade that has been hovering over our heads for a long time. As secret as they are, we knew of them. I had thought we were prepared, that we could defend ourselves, but it was not enough. They should not have been able to dock, but those boarding pods of theirs obviated most of our outer security systems.”

“They came well prepared, doctor. There’s only so much that you can do on the defensive, especially when you’re out here, so far from potential reinforcement.”

“Which is also why I didn’t just come here for pleasantries. You’ve been in the station’s cyberspace and I watched your battle-”

“Sorry, about that, by the way.”

He waved me off, “Hardware can be replaced, I’ve already ordered everything we’d need to get the station repaired from HQ. No, what I want to know is did you happen to see any indication that we might… have a potential traitor or informant among the station staff?”

“It was not something I really paid attention to, Doctor. I’ll start a background search.”

‘Butcher, can you please handle that?’

‘Certainly… Checking station com logs. There’s a lot of encrypted data, but Mitsubishi keeps very good local EMCON protocols in place. That should let me narrow down any irregular or unauthorized comms.’

‘How is the systems’ cyberspace in that Wraith SSTO you’re partially sitting in?’

‘State of the art, for human designed systems.’

‘Think you can repurpose it for a new ride?’

‘V, are you seriously considering we essentially steal and hijack the latest and best SSTO that Militech and the NUSA fields?’

‘Yes, I’m somewhat sick and tired of having to bum rides around Luna. Not to mention, I’d like to have some relatively big guns in space.’

‘How will you manage its maintenance? Not to mention, where are you going to park it?’

‘Highriders and Gakulu’s Starjacks, in exchange for them having access to its tech and further details can be worked out. We can also make adjustments and additions to the hull so it won’t look like a Militech AV99 to an outside observer.’

‘Very well, I’ll begin a full system sweep and analysis. You’ll also need to go over every inch manually to find any gapped, redundant security. Oh, and it seems there was indeed an informant on board.’

Back in meatspace, Takagi nodded. “Thank you, I’ll authorize a 5k bonus on your already agreed fee-”

I raised a hand to interrupt him, “Done, your informant was Dr. Tahara Yuudai.”

Takagi blinked, his mouth askew with mild astonishment. “Uh, what?”

I nodded, the data was clear, as was his covert communications, which was rather ingeniously hidden through the station’s phased array radar. Encoding it in a basic navigation-proximity emission that eventually bounced off a Militech satellite in low earth orbit. A trick which I made a mental note to appropriate. “Militech has his family currently in a covert safe house in Osaka. Unfortunately, rescuing them is rather pointless because Dr. Yuudai was one of the first scientists that Dunn killed in her assault on the station. Which makes me somewhat glad I flatlined her.”

He shook his head, “So quickly you know this? V, if I didn’t know better-”

I found the public data IP port of his Agent, compiled everything relevant and sent it through with a finger gun gesture.

His AR eyes flashed visibly and he quickly began reading.

Johnny was now steadily going through all the Militech gear, sorting any loot we would want for ourselves.

“Uh, V?!” called Kaori over the radio link, from beyond the main bulkhead door to the airlock room.

I had barely taken a step in that direction before white body bags were being tossed in.

With a light chuckle at her reticence to even set foot inside the core airlock room, I began catching the bags. That the station even had a supply made some sense as they’d want to be able to handle any deaths on board with minimal fuss.

I began the process of zipping up the underwear-clad bodies in the bags and was halfway through when Takagi’s eyes dimmed to a natural level.

“I see. I’d like to know just how you managed to do it so quickly, but I’ve realized that I won’t really get an actual answer. Netrunners don’t like to reveal their tricks after all. I’ll forward it to Mitsubishi through a back channel I have. We’ll launch a raid to secure Yuudai’s family.”

“That’s… unexpected,” I said carefully, zipping up another body with a wince after pushing in some extremities that didn’t want to stay put.

“We are not Araska,” he snapped.

“Never said you were.”

He took a deep breath, “Militech will regret the day they decided to attack this station and kidnap Yuudai’s family. We might be lacking in martial strength in Luna space but Earth and especially Japan is a different story.”

“Just please don’t start the 5th Corpo War, what garbage disposal system do you have in place, by the way?”

He eyed the bodies and liquid waste sphere without flinching. “We have a supply of ten disposable solid fuel rocket tugs, two should have enough dV to send this sunward. The liquid waste we can transfer to a spare exterior waste tank that we can detach.”

I felt him choose that moment to send the main payment for the entire gig, including his own bonus.

I bowed in the proper Japanese manner for appropriate thanks. “Oh and Doctor Takagi, you wouldn’t have any scientists on board who would be interested in having a look at the latest Militech SSTO, by any chance?”

888888888888888888888888888888888888888

As it turned out, there was.

Four of them jumped at the opportunity and it was immediately apparent from their conversations that their specialties were in aerospace, which gave a fair indication of what applications Mitsubishi were exploring with the gravium core we had been contracted to save.

Johnny and I were roped in with a token amount of eddies by the three surviving engineers on board to help restore airtight integrity to the station. We mostly did the heavy lifting and then the welding when we proved we were more than capable.

The biggest problem was the damage the boarding pods had done and we ended up using most of the spare hull plates that were on board to fix that. 

The various bullet holes were much easier to patch, but making sure we got all of them was the biggest pain in the ass. Just when we thought we had gotten them all, the engineer with the LIDAR scanner would continue to find more.

Seven hours of near constant EVA, with scanning, patching and welding passed, during which I was treated to the orbital view of the Lunar sunrise over Tycho City.

It was a nice coincidence that the Molniya polar orbit just so happened to carry us over the crater by a few hundred miles.

“All right everyone,” Takagi’s voice crackled over the radio. “We’re going to try for repress. Repair crew, stand by to patch any holes we might have missed.” 

I pulled myself closer to the torus outer hull via my tether and engaged mag boots to stand on it. Letting the station become my horizon.

My helmet engaged its polarization with a mental command and I turned in the direction of the sun.

The utter darkness, only kept at bay by the station’s lighting, was suddenly overwhelmed. One moment the sky was pure black velvet, the next, the sun’s limb crested over the lunar horizon and the flood of light turned everything blindingly bright around me. The lunar surface below me flashed from darkness to a brilliant, metallic silver-white as the low angle sunlight struck. Every crater rim, ridge and boulder casted a pitch-black shadow hundreds of kilometers long - it was so dark it looked like vanta black ink spilled on glowing snow. From my position in orbit, the illuminated crescent of the moon expanded, a blade of pure light cutting across the surface.

The hull plate under my mag boots jumped from -170 degree C straight to 100 C over the next few minutes. Outgassed volatiles that had condensed on the station’s hull sublimated instantly, forming brief, glittering clouds of ice crystals that drifted away like diamond dust. I felt the station’s superstructure begin to creak and ping through my boots.

Every weld and antenna on Kasai-9 threw razor-edged shadows across the hull plating. Nearby, the large Mitsubishi red and white logo blazed like blood on snow.

The Earth itself was low on the horizon.

The sun rising on one side, Earth on the opposite slipping into darkness - the terminator racing across its clouds and continents in real time. City lights flickering on as if someone was sprinkling glowing embers over the planet.

In my ears, I heard only the faint sounds of breathing and the vac suit fans.

Experiencing the cosmic event of beauty and violence with only a thin barrier for protection, I was staggered into an awestruck trance, taking it all in.

The sheer raw majesty of that light.

It was utterly indifferent to creatures like us, that were travelling through it, fighting amongst ourselves over our small ideas and greed.

Even the wild AIs, so absorbed in their madness and mania for their perfection and goals, would be nothing without the energy of creation coming from the sun.

At that moment, I entertained the crazy notion of just stripping out of my vac suit and going for a walk on the station hull.  

It could be practically done, but there were exterior engineering cams and I really didn’t feel like giving the scientists a free show.

Takagi’s voice brought me out of my musings, “Pressure is holding at 101.3 kPa, O2 at 21%. Repair crew, do one final scan of your sections and you can return.”

I swept my gaze over the hull in view, throwing out active scans - no outgassing visible.

Then turning to my left I began a steady walk, keeping my gaze downward and zig-zagging across the surface of the outer torus.

Finally, I was satisfied and keyed the radio, “This is V, sections 23 alpha through 33 beta show integrity. On my way to core airlock.”

“Roger V, thank you. I hope you enjoyed the view.”

“It was certainly memorable, Takagi-san. Anything interesting about our guests’ ride?”

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to pull my engineers forcefully from it, but this is best spoken about in person.”

888888888888888888888888888888   

Takagi’s office was a small stuffy space in the anti-spinward southern section of the torus.

A foldout desk from the wall, with a keyboard terminal and a large transparent screen faced his chair. Surrounding it was a lifetime of souvenirs and various knickknacks attached to the walls that showed him as a long time spacer. The pictures in the smart frames always showed him on Luna, Kasai-9 or one of the O’Neill Lagrange stations. Seemingly nothing tied him back to Earth.

Hiroshi Takagi was 52 years old, more than three decades of which had been spent in the void of space. He could probably make the journey back to Earth with extensive and very expensive medical intervention, but everything I saw and scanned about him told me that he had fully adopted space as his home and the place where he would eventually die.

His entire right arm was openly cybernetic, made of titanium-carbon composites with integrated micro-tool manipulators and holo-projectors. A pristine white and red Mitsubishi branded lab coat covered a black mechanical pressure vac suit that he always walked around with, whilst his silver-black hair was tied back into a short pony tail.

Matsui was there as well, mag boots locked and relaxing in the zero G.

With Johnny and I walking in, things were a bit crowded.

“So what did you find?” I asked curiously, letting my own boots lock into place.

“A good thing you asked my engineers to look over the Wraith. It had no less than two air-gapped burst transmitters and a self-destruct system. We can be very grateful that Militech OSC standard operation procedures keep their ships in full EMCON for at least thirty hours. That gives more than enough time to manage things,” Takagi said with a dangerous smirk.

“Please convey my thanks to them,” I nodded with some relief.

“Are you sure about this, V? Militech spies on Luna will surely see you coming to land in Tycho with that thing.”

“I won’t be landing it in TC, Takagi-san. I’ve sent word to Gakulu already.”

“Ah, then I won’t pry further and I trust you’re prepared for the consequences. Now then, to get to business. Matsui has indicated that your payment included a selection of one of the portable systems we’re developing here on Kasai-9. While I don’t personally agree with her being so cavalier,” he gave her a glaring side-eye, which she squirmed under, “with our work. It was nevertheless part of your agreement and I personally see the value of cultivating you to continue working with us. If, Kami forbid, we were to have another emergency like this, it is comforting to know that you will be nearby and available for business.”

“Is Mitsubishi not bringing up some reinforcements from Earth for your operations on and around Luna? It’s clear Militech is trying to muscle in with all these hostile moves on your gravium research.”

Takagi scowled, thumping his fist on the desk. “They are, but it’ll take months of training and prep work before we even see the vanguard. The President and Board are also having long arguments about the potential for escalation in tensions it would represent. As a company we have long been seen to be distant from the corporate wars of the past. We have defended ourselves and our holdings, yes, but never gone on the offensive with military power. Our operations in lunar space have always depended on the current status-quo and staying ‘under the radar’ as the saying goes. Now, with Militech ascendant, the balance of power on Earth is shifting and we are feeling the ripples in the pond. They want our gravium research and the breakthroughs we are making. What you saw Matsui demonstrate was just a taste of the potential it has.”

“I can imagine it well enough. The gravium-7 core you have on this station is the single largest concentration of the substance that’s been refined as far as I’m aware. If you can push the general technology of grav compensation further, you can have extreme endurance space travel at higher velocities, which will open the outer solar system beyond Mars to manned exploration and exploitation. That will make asteroid mining viable. We’re talking about a revolution in economies of scale in one of mankind’s most ancient practices. Some of those asteroids contain more valuable ore than has been mined since the Bronze Ages.”

Takagi’s eyebrows raised in surprise, “Such a perspective in someone of your profession is rare, V. Most edgerunners only care about their next chrome or paycheck, I’m glad you’re of a different breed. Now, here’s what we can offer you.”

He tapped his keyboard and the screen came alive with a half dozen images of human manakins mounted with a variety of gravium based systems.

Two of which caught my eye immediately. One was a gravium integration of leg cyberware, which would not only make the internal propellant last twice as long, but also resulted in potentially tripling leap heights and distance, even on Earth.

The second was Matsui’s grav gun, which was formally called a Mitsubishi-Kasai Grav-Pulse Carbine Mk. II.

It revealed that it wasn’t just a compact gun, but actually needed the user to have further supporting systems that were generally integrated into the vac suit. It needed its own dedicated power, which was a fusion cell that dumped 2.4 kW into a gravium core of 0.8 grams that itself was suspended in a magnetic bottle.

That a fusion cell was even possible blew my mind and that by itself would already revolutionize portable power systems.

The user also needed subdermal grav sensors, so the grav carbine could gain the necessary precision to achieve the various firing modes.

Kaori had only used the Singularity mode against the Militech black ops, but there was also the Disrupt mode - which exposed a target to a straight forward impact force of 4-6 Gs, knocking them back and was advertised as the primary non-lethal mode. The third program was another ostensibly non-lethal mode called ‘Levitate’, which could lift 150kg mass to 10 - 15 meters within an Earth gravity well. On Luna that went up considerably by a factor of three.

It was a no-brainer.

“This,” I tapped the grav-carbine.

Kaori rolled her eyes with a giggle, “Obviously. Of course, the merc would want to helplessly suspend her opponents or crush them with gravity.”

Takagi nodded, “The Grav Carbine is currently designed to work with a Mitsubishi vac suit, so there will be some inevitable integration issues with that highrider vac suit of yours, but not insurmountable. The support cyberware is minimally invasive-”

I held up a hand, “No problems there, Takagi-san.”

“Good, I’ll have everything boxed up and delivered to the Wraith. My engineers tell me it will be ready to fly in three hours. Best we get it out of here as quickly as possible, if we want my plan to succeed.”

“And what plan is that?”

888888888888888888888888888888888888

Six hours remained in our window of opportunity.

We waited until the station was in the highest part of the Molniya orbit. Here it would be out of sight from the majority of observation satellites. At least one Militech’s own sats would definitely have been repositioned in support of the operation, but its range would still mean that even with the best spy optics, Kasai-9 was a vaguely circular blur of reflected light. Both SSTOs, with their non-reflective stealth coatings, were essentially invisible at the same range.

The Kuma would remain at the station, all its fuel transferred over to the Wraith to top up its tanks, life support was replenished and more importantly, the Kuma’s spoof transponder had been transferred as well.

“Not exactly comfortable is it,” Matsui complained from her co-pilot seat.

I plugged in the neural interface, “No, but unless you want to be submerged in shock fluid, we’re just going to have to make do.”

The seats were really just placeholders, until both pilots were practically cocooned into cylinders which would fill with oxygenated fluid, protecting them from the max rated 11G burns the Wraith was capable of. The on board grav manifolds weren’t as good as those on the Kuma, but they did a good enough job to reduce effective Gs felt to a mere 8, which was further ameliorated with the shock cocoons.

‘Ready Butcher?’

‘Always V, the Wraith is mine. Just sit back and let me do the flying.’

I nodded and brought up an image of the small miracle the Kasai-9 staff had built in just under ten hours. It was essentially a decoy, made out of a single repurposed engine, taken from the Kuma, given enough reaction mass to fly back to Earth and plunge suicidally into the atmosphere. Its payload was the burst transmitters, a few hull panels taken from the Wraith’s dorsal section, along with an assortment of enough electronic junk to give just enough mass for the ruse to work.

I keyed up the laser link to the station, “V to Kasai, we’re ready here.”

“Stand by, decoy ignition in three… two… one…”

The engine lit off with a brief flash, giving just enough impetus for it to begin its long journey back home. One of the burst transmitters, came to life just a moment later, sending back a painstakingly reverse engineered code to Militech OSC - mission successful, going dark.

“The ruse isn’t going to hold for long,” Matsui declared with worry.

“It’ll last,” I said, watching the decoy become smaller and smaller. “Just long enough for Mitsubishi’s president to meet with Harford and Myers, shove the very detailed dossier of Colonel Dunn’s team under their noses and to please explain why they attacked Kasai-9. At the same time, a Mitsubishi strike team supported by a few vetted edgerunners that I recommended, will extract the Yudaai family from their captivity.”

Matsui wrung her hands nervously, “Isn’t that going to just…”

“Their hand has been firmly caught in the cookie jar, thanks to the evidence we have. Militech doesn’t want the existence of their OSC branch to be publicly broadcasted. They’re not unassailable as yet, Kaori.”

“Kasai to V, your departure window opens in half a minute and on behalf of everyone here, again, thank you,” said Takagi.

“Anytime, Takagi-san.”

Soon after, the Wraith departed the station using only cold gas maneuvering thrusters, gently and stealthily increasing separation and lowering its orbit.

Only after more than two orbits around Luna, with Kasai-9 now barely a speck of light amongst the night, did Butcher fire the main engines.

He kept the thrust at just below 9%, feathering the rocket engines in a way to steadily adjust our orbit further whilst keeping our emission profile within tolerances.

‘You’re a natural,’ I joked.

‘It’s just math and engineering, V. At this point, you should be able to do this as well.’

I waved him off and just took in the view as Luna grew larger and larger. Our descent vector trimmed until our projected course showed a landing point 183 km north-west of Tycho.

Any map you could look at of the area would show you nothing but a long ridge line emerging out of a crater 31 km wide, the deeper parts of which hadn’t seen direct sunlight for untold eons, not since the original asteroid impact that had created it. It didn’t even have a dedicated name besides a catalog designation - Auxiliary Crater TK-Alpha-117.

For the next few hours whilst we coasted steadily downward, I was mostly kept busy with Johnny as we both shared the load of managing the active radar cancellation and other stealth systems.

Our approach course had also been purposely designed to neatly slot into a hack that the Starjacks had placed within Tycho aerospace control, keeping us off the screens of any potentially unfriendly eyes who had backdoor taps into the system.

When Luna became a horizon stretching as far as the unaided eye could see around the Wraith, the SSTO flipped over, pointing its engine bells towards the rapidly approaching crater that was about to swallow it whole.

The engines pushed out 3Gs of deceleration, countering the increasing speed and pull of Luna’s gravity over time.

The SSTO slipped into the dark embrace of Crater Alpha-117 at just under 5 m/s.

Butcher reoriented the craft belly down as our descent through the darkness continued, pumping out minimal LIDAR emissions and thrusters to keep us from crashing into the crater wall.

With our craft attitude stabilized he increased our speed to 20 m/s, eating up the next mile of descent faster before he brought us to a relative stop and turned on our landing lights.

Before us was the mouth of a roughly circular cave 260 feet in width, the exit of an old lava tube.

Quick thruster puffs pushed us inside at a crawl.

Our landing lights were soon drowned out by numerous flood lights switching on around us, revealing a series of nine lunacrete landing pads, painstakingly created out of the cave floor.

Four of them were occupied with spheroid rocket ships and a very familiar Arasaka SSTO.

The Wraith extended its landing struts, rapid puffs from forward and dorsal thrusters bringing it down for a landing that barely registered on the shock absorbers.

“Time to go,” I said lightly, hiding the slight nerves I felt.

All three of us donned our helmets and did final post-flight checks before going through the Wraith’s small ventral airlock.

Waiting for us outside were four armed highriders, their vac helmets completely polarized to hide their faces and no markings on their suits to indicate which workgroup they belonged to.

The leader’s voice came through the point to point laser link his own Agent established with us.

“V, Hollow, Dr. Matsui,” said the digitally scrambled male voice. “Welcome to Facility 117. Before we proceed, some ground rules. No scanning in any part of the spectrum. No active emissions. You follow me precisely with no deviation or else my team will subdue you non-lethally at first. Continue struggling or any hostile hacking emission and we shoot to kill.”

“Understood.”

He turned around and led the way to the right side of the massive lava tube, with the rest of his team falling in behind us.

Tucked in behind the crook of rock was a thick outer airlock door that was cunningly camouflaged to fit right into the terrain. It also opened upward in a gullwing design, leaving no marks of its passage on the floor.

The airlock inside was the typical modular industrial design that could fit in anywhere in Tycho City without anyone blinking an eye.

Beyond was a pressurized circular tunnel that bored straight forward before snaking left, and after fifty feet we were confronted with an elevator door.

The lift had no readily visible manual controls and I could feel the wireless commands emanating from our escort team towards it. 

We sunk the equivalent fourteen floors down before the doors opened again.

A long corridor greeted us, exposed piping and ventilation hissing all along it, with staggered doors leading off on either side.

Leaning patiently against the closest door, was Gakulu with a satisfied smile on his face.

“V, Hollow,” he greeted with open arms. “You just keep managing to make my days better lately. First Arasaka, now you dump the latest and best Militech SSTO into my lap. Some of my workgroup has already begun a petition to adopt you into the family!”

“Isn’t that a bit premature?” I asked carefully, remembering the time spent and blood that had been spilled before the Aldecaldos had truly welcomed me into their fold.

“That’s what I said,” he shrugged, folding his hands behind his back. “Some of us can be prone to getting too excited when it comes to examining new tech and they see you as the ticket to more. Dr. Matsui.” He greeted her with a perfect bow. “Feel free to remove your helmets. We haven’t had a depress accident here for decades.”

“So this is your workgroup’s facility?” I asked, carefully sampling the air through my nose. It was slightly below standard atmospheric pressure and carried the hint of rust from the piping and moisture in the air.

“It’s one of our clandestine research branches we maintain on Luna,” he gave me a wry smile. “You three are the first non-highrider visitors, who have ever set foot in it.”

“Are we going to leave this place alive?” Johnny asked, giving Gakulu a lazy stare.

“A valid concern, Hollow, if I was in your shoes,” he acknowledged. “But we wouldn’t have let you in here if we intended to be such poor hosts. Now let’s head to my office and we can discuss what comes next. We are after all, about to take a 350 million eddie dive into Militech’s secrets.”

888888888888888888888888888888888

A/N: V caught the GTA bug from Muamar 'El' Capitan' Reyes and has had precious little opportunity to indulge on Luna. Sure an SSTO is somewhat more than just a set of wheels, but there was just no way she's going to pass on that :-)

Have a great weekend chooms and stay awesome!