2078: Highriders - Chapter 15

If there was one thing you could appreciate about Night City, it was the convenience and all the options of getting quickly from A to B.

Between the Metro, self-driving cars that came to you and AVs, the transport factor for gigs was almost an irrelevant consideration, unless you were doing a false flag gig that required you to use specific wheels with a gang’s markings or you were fairly confident that you were going end up in vehicular combat with your opponents. It meant that in the past I could easily knock off multiple gigs in a single day in NC and still be home in time to snuggle with Judy.

None of that was available on Luna.

So here I was, hopping the 36 km back to Tycho City on foot, wearing only a pistol strapped to my thigh and a breathing mask.

If this was anything other than a deniable stealth gig, I would’ve summoned my Nomad Rover, which I had decided to outright buy from Gakulu. It cost nearly 160k, a nasty punch in the wallet, but I’d gone long enough without wheels to my name here. It could’ve met me halfway and carried me back.

My only consolation was that I was definitely setting a record as the first Post-Human to hike across the lunar surface in just her skin and my sustained hops covered six meters at a time without really straining me at all.  It meant I was averaging 8 to 12 kph depending on whether the terrain was favorable. I could occasionally push it to 20 if I had a flat regolith to work with, but I also had my heat management to consider.

It meant I was looking at an estimated hike of 5 hours 34 minutes - fun.

I couldn’t even use the time productively because I was also under EMCON protocols - no calls, no visits to cyberspace, except staying put inside my datafortress.

So I mostly pulled my focus back into the fortress, laying back my avatar on a lawn chair beside the data pool and brought up my current major project that I was using as a time sink.

Developing weapons to fight the wild AIs.

The idea that you could fight them with the hacks that netrunners used on each other and common systems was laughable. It’d be like going up against a borg when all you had was a selection of blunt knives and needles. The wild AI would brush you aside contemptuously before frying your skullsponge through your firewalls that would at best stub its figurative toe in the process.

Thankfully I wasn’t completely in the dark of where to even begin approaching the problem, thanks to Butcher.

AI vs AI ‘combat’ beyond the Blackwall did occasionally happen, especially when two wildly divergent data forms encountered each other and had conflicting goals. Butcher didn’t want to give me his own ways of fighting, because it would actually stunt my potential, yet he did want us both to come up with entirely novel weapons together that would not be anticipated by the rogue AIs.

The first one we had come up with was called the Null Choir.

The first thing he had taught me was that rogue AIs were not just singular data entities, but could also be a feral hegemonizing swarm.   

I shuddered at the mere thought of facing one in the future, because losing against those didn’t just mean death or end-of-line to your own existence. You would actually be pulled apart, lose all sense of self-coherency and just become another part of the swarm - pulled into the data madness to become more and take more. Using standard singular data weapons against a swarm was utterly pointless, as while it could probably destroy a fair amount of it, there would always be more left over and they could just keep replenishing via data replication.

Null Choir was designed from the ground up to be an anti-swarm memetic daemon.

It was a fractal attack that would, theoretically, force any enemy AI to recompile its own checksum. 

Any rogue AI with greater than two forks of itself would crash-loop trying to resolve the paradox I forced on it, but against swarms they would literally self-cannibalize into non-existence. It was a terrifying weapon that could just as well turn around and kill both of us, if we hadn’t programmed in our own immunity from the ground up, via a Relic 3.0 harmonic key.

The current problems we were finding with the Null Choir was that we definitely couldn’t use it if there were friendly infolife anywhere in the immediate vicinity of the battle. It would just be me and Butcher alone against the enemy. Sure we could share the harmonic key amongst our own allies, but that ran into the problem of security. If any allied AI turned hostile…

The second issue was the long deployment time for the daemon, it was currently at 12 meatspace milliseconds, which was an eternity for the kinds of cyberspace battles we were going to be dealing with. The only solution at the moment was that Butcher would have to shield me and keep the enemy busy, allowing the Null Choir the time to deploy into cyberspace.

Another weapon we were developing in parallel was to address the threat of the wild AI deploying meatspace assets under its direct control.

For this I came up with a hybrid solution, the Glass Widow.

It was a smart kinetic munition that could fire from any arm projectile launch system, which I could easily integrate into my Gemini’s left arm. It fired 8mm flechettes which were just big enough to carry a nanofiber cocoon. They burrowed into the target and force uploaded a one-shot gateway mirror, which inverted the local cyberspace Net topology, trapping the target in a recursive sandbox that literally fed it its own attack vectors.

If I had this whilst I was fighting that out of control Chimera tank alongside Myers, it would’ve made things so much easier. It would’ve bought me almost thirty seconds of time where it could do nothing, an eternity to utterly fuck that pissbot up.

Glass Widow’s only issue was that it required Butcher to babysit the sandbox, which meant that it would be up to me to carry the fight in cyberspace.

These were just two of nine projects that were in various stages of development, but we made significant headway with the Null Choir and the Glass Widow was close to the prototype stage by the time I could see the brightly lit domes of Tycho City appearing on the horizon.

I paused my hopping at a small hill and spotted a duo of hardsuited highriders working on a huge solar panel array, taking advantage of the lunar night to do some maintenance.

“Fuck,” I muttered, feeling the tingles of mild embarrassment hitting me in my core engram.

Going around was an option, but there was no guarantee I wouldn’t run into more workers there too.

Biting the bullet, I resumed hopping.

They were so focused on their job, their helmets also limiting their peripheral vision, that I managed to almost pass right by behind their backs. Their suit proximity sensors went off though and both of them jerked in surprise before catching sight of me.

Now, since both were highriders, anyone nude walking by was a non-issue and just ‘meh’ in their books. The bigger issue was that I was in full vacuum, on the lunar surface whilst in my second birthday suit.

My digital night vision couldn’t render their faces, but it was easy to fill in that gap via their body language - utterly frozen with astonishment.

I forced a bright smile to my face and waved at them both as I hopped past, acutely aware now that my breasts were jiggling and bouncing with my hops.

Their radio frequency resolved to me, “Hello, beautiful night for a hop around town, isn’t it?”

They stared at each other for a moment, as if checking with each other that, yes, they both saw the same thing. One of them began tapping on a vambrace touchscreen to run a diagnostic on their night vision systems.

I left them behind and got off their radio, not really wanting to get into a conversation about the fact I was… doing this.

It was another few kilometers before I reached the western edge of the city, and my entrance was a public airlock in Dome 7 - a place whose primary feature was the Museum of Space Colonization. While it didn’t hold a candle to the popularity of the Apollo 11 museum at Tranquility, it was a much more central location and held exhibits not just from Apollo, but also the subsequent programs in the 2000s that saw a permanent human presence on the moon established.

Thankfully, my timing was such that I didn’t catch a tour group going the other way, being given their first taste of a lunar EVA. 

When proper pressurised air filled the airlock, I couldn’t help but let out an actual sigh of relief, pull in the radiator into my back with a thought, and rub the skin edges to become seamless. The mild humidity in the air immediately became boiling hot as it touched my skin, steam rising from it as my internal heat sinks dumped as much as it safely could.

A quick hack of the airlock systems, let me override the air pumps to keep circulating cool air in and pushing the warmth out.

It didn’t take a few minutes before I naturally drew attention from someone working in the museum. It was technically their primary airlock and anyone mucking about with it would worry the staff.

A fairly old highrider woman of five foot six, with a wiry low-G body honed by seemingly decades of bounding across regolith in exosuits. Close-cropped silver hair framed her sharp hazel eyes behind augmented-lens glasses that doubled as AR overlays. She wore a utilitarian jumpsuit in ESA blue, patched with highrider embroidery and most prominently had a necklace of Apollo 11 bootprint replicas. A quick scan and cross-reference told me her name; Dr. Elara Ackner, 2nd generation highrider born to two ESA engineers and senior curator for the museum.

She walked closer to the airlock control panel, and scowled into the readings it was giving her. “What the devil?”

I made sure she couldn’t use the internal cams to see me for the moment, I still needed a few more minutes to flush all this heat.

She was stubborn though and started stabbing her fingers into the touchpad screens, trying to regain control.

Eventually, she made the correct conclusion that someone was usurping control of the airlock for some reason and started fishing for her phone in her jumpsuit pocket.

I hacked the screen in front of her to display my face, which was enough to make her pause, “Sorry to alarm you, Dr Ackner. My name is V, currently employed by Gakulu Workgroup. I’m just making use of the airlock to cool myself down. It’ll just be another eight minutes or so.”

She blinked with suspicion until her eyes lit with recognition, “You’re the V from the Crystal Palace?”

“In the flesh, so to speak,” I chuckled dryly.

“Hmmph, figures that scoundrel Gakulu would hire you. Now what’s this nonsense about cooling down?”

“Let’s just say that stealth on the lunar surface at night, rather paradoxically, makes things rather toasty.”

“Thermal containment to avoid detection? That’s quite clever,” she mused. “I suppose you and Gakulu would also prefer that I remain quiet about your excursion?”

Figures. If Selene Workgroup got the tidbit that I had been skulking about in Tycho crater and combined it with the aftermath of their IP theft blowing up in their face - then they might square the circle about who was responsible eventually. Gakulu was also working on his side of the equation, to ensure that SW would conclude that the mining rig data had been effectively booby trapped to delete itself. It effectively kept everyone off the radar.

“Yes, what do you want?”

Ackner chuckled, “Oh, nothing too strenuous. Certainly nothing which would make Gakulu conclude it would be better for me to have an ‘accident’. You see, I’ve come into possession of an encrypted shard and it’s got some rather nasty pre-Blackwall ICE on it. It’s so nasty that I’ve already blown through the museum’s discretionary budget in my attempts to decrypt it. The shard destroys any air-gapped system I put it on. It doesn’t even let me try to interface to see what I’m dealing with.”

I nodded in understanding, “It’s Hot ICE, meaning that if you don’t insert the shard into the physical hardware environment that it expects, then the on-board ICE automatically assumes it's a breach attempt and acts accordingly. Until you provide that, no one’s going to get anywhere with it.”

That was not exactly true, a sufficiently strong and robust AI like Butcher would have no problems weathering the attack and in turn dismantling it, but I wasn’t about to advertise my AI partner’s existence.

Ackner slapped her own thigh in annoyance. “Hayi! That’s going to be nearly impossible. How am I supposed to whip out a 2010s era NASA computer from my ass?!”

That piqued my interest, “It’s a NASA shard?”

“Yes,” she admitted with a sigh. “Had a custom interface built for it, but it just keeps wrecking every computer I try.”

NASA these days only existed as a small, almost symbolic federal office under the NUSA, only doing minor R&D projects and curating what archives had survived the DaraKrash and 4th Corporate War. The Corpo dominance in numerous facets of life that emerged after the Era of Red, extended into space and its associated technologies. It left a civilian agency like the old NASA deep in the lurch and it was a minor miracle that it hadn’t been consigned to the history books completely. Its only real value to the NUSA these days was to tackle the non-profitable research that would never survive at Militech.

“The only solution I see is to gain a blueprint of the computer NASA used in that era, custom build it and go from there.”

“Those would be EBMs and good luck getting anything from their miserly fingers, if they even had it,” she scowled upward at the glistening dome above us with folded arms.

On a lark, I initiated a daisy chain connection to Earth’s European cyberspace and gave my data crawlers a new search parameter. Sure enough they got back to me with a hit from an EBM server in Germany.

Euro Business Machines was a company founded in the early 90s. They had boomed explosively into quickly becoming the leading manufacturer of computers and high-tech equipment in that era. In the late 90s, they went even further, performing the greatest free-market hostile takeover in history under the leadership of Dr. Kurt Muller. No corpo graduated from their education without having studied the Muller Takeover at some point. I had done it as a full course in Night University.

EBM gobbled up a vast number of computer companies around the world, including their older near-namesake IBM. How Muller had maneuvered the acquisitions through all the regulatory agencies and courts of the era was seen as a new standard for conducting business. A lesson every corp had taken and quickly applied.

In the meantime, my crawler indicated that there was definitely something on this EBM server that would interest Ackner. There were firewalls in my way, but interestingly, nothing that indicated it was watched over 24/7 by a netrunner.

‘Butcher, think we can ghost blitz this?’

‘Easily. It’s not a priority EBM server and given what the crawler found that would make sense. We are looking at a historical archive.’

‘So what would be the chances we’d find the full blueprints of an antiquated 2010s era EBM PC?’

‘Too many probability factors to adequately calculate.’

‘Eh, whatever, let’s do it.’

Ackner looked down into the screen I was using, “Nevermind, consider my silence bought and paid for, V. It was a foolish hope born of desperation anyway. It’s not like I can afford to hire you normally at this point.”

“Hold that thought, Dr. Ackner,” My heat levels were nominal enough at this point that I could leave without steaming. I triggered the inner door and emerged into the dome proper and while her eyes widened somewhat at my appearance, she remained unflappably calm.

“Well, that explains some things, but I would dearly like to know what cyberware will let you go for a casual nude stroll on the regolith at night.”

“Modified full body conversion,” I answered shortly.

“I see, well… Anyway and I assume it would be completely out of my budget,” she gave me a wry look with some appreciation twinkling those eyes.

“Now why would the chief curator of a museum be interested in going borg?” I folded my arms and gave her a curious stare.

“My dear, that’s my business, not yours.”

“Fair enough,” I shrugged and gestured with a finger gun towards the phone in her pocket, which buzzed and chimed for her attention.

She was startled and looked up with suspicion, immediately reaching for it, “What did you just do?”

“Take a look,” I invited with a big smile.

She held it up and began swiping and tapping on the screen. “You downloaded something, a document file. Am I going to regret opening this?”

“Not at all,” I said mildly.

She gazed at me, weighing the decision, “Fuck it,” and stabbed her finger down to access the file.

Her eyes blinked and now she actually gaped, “This is… this is-”

“Actually building that from scratch with current fabrication technology will take some doing and eddies for the actual research.”

She burst into incredulous laughter, “That’s an understatement. This is an EBM-3A53, the exact model NASA used during the early lunar colony feasibility missions. At least the research can be started with next year’s budget.” Her eyes eagerly drank in the documents before her finger froze and she gave me a shrewd stare. “Why?”

“Consider it as a down payment for my own peace of mind and that of Gakulu when I report back to him about this exchange.”

I twitched as I saw a fairly large tourist group appear in view down the walkway approach towards the museum.

“Well, you can definitely tell him my lips are as sealed as they can be. Now this is my 10:00 tourist group with a bunch of Earthers. So, off you go.”

I nodded and turned around, vanishing into thermoptic camo.

A quick scan showed that I’d given them a distant side profile and that only a few were squinting their optics, as if they weren’t sure what they had actually seen.

Good.

I hurried to the side and gave them as wide a berth as possible as I passed, whilst getting on the holo to my current fixer.

“V? Gig accomplished?”

“It’s done, with a minor complication that I really should’ve foreseen, but it’s been handled in a way that I should brief you on.”

“I look forward to hearing your report then. Don’t keep me waiting.”

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Rogue Amendiares sat down in her booth in the Afterlife, ignoring the protesting biological bits of her back that acutely felt her 83 years of life - signaling that it would soon be time for another overall rejuvenation treatment.

She scanned her optics over her domain with cool detachment.

Tube dancers writhing to the club’s beat in the water, check.

Bar completely stocked, ready for the day ahead - Claire at her spot already serving some early customers.

A quick look through the secret cam above the main entrance - Emmerick was at his spot, scanning each person waiting in line for their rep to actually enter the club. He’d already sent four nobodies packing who’d thought to try their luck.

Her own bodyguard, Crispin stood beyond her booth as a deadly wall between her and anyone who managed to get through security or any of the merc regulars. As vetted as they were, there were many who could afford to buy off an Afterlife regular.

Nix emerged from his netrunner cave near the secure briefing room and she could tell instantly he had a very long session on the Net behind him.

“Anything wrong?” she asked as he sat down next to her with a steaming mug of extra strong coffee.

“Nah, Net’s just buzzing with Myers’ little recruitment drive,” he savored a long sip of the hot beverage. “Been talking to my fellow runners in the good ol’ NUSA, figuring what the sentiment is gonna be. How things are gonna shake out. Say one thing about us ‘runners, we really know how to hold onto a grudge. Had to duel seven idiots who just couldn’t be professional, even had to scorch one who decided to go lethal.”

“I hope you didn’t let your meetings get in the way-”

“Ahh, Rogue, don’t do me so dirty,” he said with a mock wounded expression. “Work was all done beforehand.” He pulled out a small shard case from a pocket and put it on the table. “Everything you’ll need for today.”

She opened it and sure enough eight shards for every scheduled client that was going to meet with her, even labeled. She allowed a mild smile to appear, “You’re spoiling me, Nix.”

“Biz is ticking up, least I could do,” he shrugged. “Oh, by the way, got a whiff on the BBS that V might have been spotted in local cyberspace. She was also sniffing around Myers’ little invitation trail.”

Rogue frowned at the mention of her business partner and friend. “Really? Not exactly a surprise, given Myers has hired her in the past.”

To this day, V had not said a word of detail about what kind of gig she had done for the President of the NUSA. Yet it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes level deduction given the news at the time, that V had literally saved Myers’ skin when Space Force One had been shot down in Dogtown. Anything beyond that was a black hole, except for the fact that not a few weeks after Myers showed up safe and sound back in Washington, V actually took on a MaxTac convoy with the 6th Street gang as fire support and won.

It would’ve been a sure death sentence for any other edgerunner, yet the impossible was V’s stock in trade and this was before she led a solo run on Arasaka Tower and not just survived, but absolutely massacred the security forces including Adam Smasher. The latter was something that V had been thoughtful enough to memorialize by chipping a BD rec implant. Gifting the braindance recording to her when they signed their partnership agreement for the Afterlife.

That fight was something Rogue experienced each week, just to see that chrome’d bastard on his knees, ruined and twitching, with flames licking the insides of his ruined chest. If she could, she would’ve cut that image and displayed it in the Afterlife on the largest Smartframe she could buy.   

In the aftermath, MaxTac decided that they would rather not lose another very precious and expensive team to V and wisely decided to just let her ambush be brushed under the proverbial rug. They also had their rep to protect and didn’t want the world to know that a sufficiently skilled and equipped edgerunner could, with a bit of planning, decimate a MaxTac squad.

“Yeah, but as I went down that rabbit hole as well, I could also see why ol’ el’ Presidente is doing this in the first place.”

Rogue frowned at the uncharacteristically haunted look on Nix’s face, “Do tell.”

He pulled off his shades and wearily rubbed his optics, “Fuck Rogue, I don’t know if this conversation should be held out here, it’s too hot, especially as any merc in here with a decent set of ear implants-”

Her optics glowed as she interfaced with the Afterlife’s systems, especially those around her booth, activating white noise generators and a privacy screen hissed down from the ceiling.

“Go ahead.”

“Seems the NUSA is worried about the wild AI managing to get beyond the Blackwall. Sticking their tentacles into our corners of the Net and from there influencing meatspace in ways that everyone will regret - if they’re even alive to do so in the aftermath or can even feel anything anymore.”

Rogue felt her spine shiver and stomach sinking through the floor, “What?! That’s im-” She stopped herself from finishing the instinctive reaction, “Is NetWatch even doing their job anymore?”  

“They are, but clearly Myers doesn’t think they can handle it anymore, something’s changed.”

“Has NetWatch said anything in response?”

“Nothing official, they don’t want to stoke fear in the public by seemingly legitimizing Myers’ actions. It would be admitting that they’re worried about the situation. I bet you my bank account we’re soon going to get a press release saying that it’s just another example of Myers’ saber rattling against Texas and the Free States.”

“And unofficially?”

“Lets just say that I’ve learned the CEO of NetWatch is going to catch a plane to Washington within the next week for a bilateral meeting to ‘discuss’ the situation. Publicly, I bet it will just be the usual song and dance for the cameras, Myers and the NUSA will get a slap on the wrist for disturbing the Net’s equilibrium with her call to arms and that’ll be that. Behind closed doors, however, that’s where I’d give anything to be a fly on the wall of that meeting. My guess, NetWatch is going to open a flow of eddies for recruitment and training for every netrunner that the NUSA manages to snag. All the while trying to eventually poach them.”

“Good guess, they are a corporation at the end of the day,” Rogue said with a scowl. You’d think the fate of humanity being in the balance would cool the greed a bit though. “Now the only question is, are you feeling any sudden patriotic urges, Nix?”

He snorted with amusement, “No, and NCs runners for the most part are of the same opinion. As much as rogue AIs are existential threats, this recruitment drive is also a thinly disguised excuse to put a leash on as many runners as they can. Not sure what Myers is really thinking with this. When a rogue AI comes knocking, your standard runner will just be cannon fodder. Someone as skilled as me, might give it the equivalent of a slap in the face before my brain fries.”

That was a good point. The old playbook that Rogue had lived through with the DataKrash and the Time of the Red, was to retreat entirely into meatspace, air gap and isolate equipment. Yet as she tried to imagine doing the same thing today in 2078-

“We’ll need to update our contingency plans. I’ll see about installing some equipment into the Afterlife, to make us more independent from the city grid. Not to mention a physical cut-off interrupt.”

“I’ll get started on that from my side,” Nix nodded.

Knocking on the privacy screen interrupted further conversation and a quick look at the time showed that the first client meeting was due to begin.

A thought to the system, sent the screen back into the ceiling and turned off the noise generators, letting the club’s thumping beat back into her booth.

What followed was a satisfying, productive afternoon and evening of biz; clients looking for problems to be solved and handing out the resultant gigs to the mercs waiting in the wings. If there weren’t a suitable merc on hand, she posted it to the Afterlife BBS for the more general roster of Afterlife affiliated edgerunners already in the streets to handle. 

The eddies flowed in nicely.

That is until a holocall arrived with a very familiar, stylized letter symbol floating in her vision.

Rogue picked up her shot of tequila and downed it, before letting the holocall through.

“V? It’s about time you called, for fuck’s sake.”

There was no immediate response, but Rogue twitched as the nice little squared screen in the top left side of her vision, which should’ve shown a virtual representation of the caller, faded away and instead became…       

Rogue’s eyes widened as she gazed at V, seemingly sitting to her left in the booth with a mischievous twinkle in her optics. She was wearing a skintight jumpsuit of black and blue stripes, with a new spin on Johnny’s old Samurai jacket over it, which only came up to mid back, whilst a vac collar was integrated into it.

Rogue immediately queried her internal agent, only to find it surprisingly and suspiciously quiet about any hacking activity coming through the holocall.

“Relax Rogue, you’ve got a very good firewall, Nix hasn’t betrayed you, this is just me…being me. The last thing Adam Smasher said in this life was, ‘Are you fucking with me now?’ At which point I used Johnny’s Malorian to splatter his skull sponge all over the floor.”

Rogue contained her instinctive outrage at being hacked, but acknowledged that this could only be her business partner who was currently plying her trade on Luna.

She casually put her feet up on the left bench of the booth, looking outwardly like the Queen of the Afterlife she was, just kicking it up for a bit of relaxation - and sure enough her feet vanished right through V’s image.

V rolled her eyes, her body flickering a foot to the left. “Anyway, I finally have a chance to check in properly and tell you in more than just a note, that my health issues are solved. Not going anywhere, plan succeeded.”

“Good,” Rogue nodded. The contingency plans for V failing to return from Luna could be properly shelved for a rainy day. “How are things up there?”

“Going well, already got the local equivalent of a fixer and the gigs roll in much slower than what I’m used to, can’t be helped given how complex being transported anywhere is. The money is very good though, which more than makes up for it.”

“That’s excellent to hear.”

V raking the eddies there, would eventually mean eddies in the bank for the Afterlife.

“Anyway, what’s the sitch on the street in NC?”

“Maelstrom’s having a minor civil war and leadership crisis.”

“What? Again?”

Rogue nodded, “Brick and Patricia had a falling out about two weeks ago. Northside’s a mess at the moment with both sides poking each other in indoor skirmishes. So far they’ve managed to keep it from spilling into the streets, but I’d say it's only a matter of time. I can’t complain too much at the moment. The amount of gigs coming my way from desperate clients looking to secure their interests with high end mercs means the eddies are flowing in.”

V slapped her own forehead in exasperation, “Brick you idiot. I swear that guy can sometimes be as dense as his name implies.”  

The leader of Maelstrom was something of a loose ally to V, a consequence for saving the borg’s RealSkin from death by shrapnel spitter when he had totally lost the gang leadership to Royce.

“Yeah well, at least this time he’s got a fair majority of the gang on his side. Patricia would lose if this was just a numbers game, but she’s got the heavies and most of the netrunners on her side, which is evening the odds and dragging the fight out.”

V took a moment, folding her arms and her optics stared at something to the side. “If things go too far, I suggest we do a hit on Patricia. Brick keeps an acceptable lid on his gang of cyberpsychos and stabilizes Northside.”

“Agreed,” Rogue nodded after a moment. “Patricia’s too ambitious. Her taking over would see them try to expand into Little China, and then we’d have another war against Tyger Claws.”

“Any moves from them since I was last in NC?”

“Nothing overt. The leadership is seemingly sitting content in their megabuilding penthouses, growing fat off all the biz flowing through Westbrook. There’s rumor though that there’s someone rising through the ranks and gaining rep, usually by the edge of a thermal katana.”

“Is this someone leaving sliced up bodies in their wake?”

“No, it’s all very formal, organized duels and they’re championing a ‘return to the old Yakuza ways’ or some such nonsense.”

“Something to keep an eye on, but the Tyger Claws could use a good shakeup, I suppose,” V mused. “Valentinos?”

“Skirmishing with 6th Street, who is trying to expand into the Glen. Both sides are in bidding wars to retain merc contracts for local protection to secure home assets, whilst the gangers run forward operations.”

“Fuck, have we had any merc casualties in the crossfire?”

“Nothing egregious. Mostly it's the small fry, unaffiliated edgerunners working for either side. We’ve had two major vehicular battles on the streets so far, MaxTac response wiped out both sides.”

V looked up into nowhere, lapsing into silence to mull the problem over. “Net traffic seems to think that 6th Street is the aggressor here, pure land grab. That mesh with word on the street?”

“Yes. 6th Street has seen an unusual influx of funding lately. No word yet on where it’s coming from.”

V looked down and her gaze almost made Rogue flinch, “If you have any feelers looking into that, pull it. 6th Street funding is not a subject we can afford to touch, trust me. It’s the sort of thing that causes accidents.” 

Rogue instantly understood the subtext of what V was trying to say. Her mind raced at the implications even as she nodded, “I’ll send a note to Nix immediately.”

“What’s your opinion on that front?”      

“The Valentinos are showing a strong defense and Padre has some of his best mercs helping, so there’s no real need at the moment to put a finger on the scale.”

“I agree, but let’s get ahead of the curve. 6th Street is not a gang I want to see gaining any ascendance in the south.”

Rogue was rather curious why the kid had an aversion to that gang, even though she had arguably accomplished one of her most legendary feats with them. That curiosity was tempered by practicality. As one of the major players of NC, V was fully entitled to keep her share of secrets, even from her business partner.

“I’ll begin a slow reduction in merc gigs in that direction.”

“Moxes?”

“Status quo with them, though they recently found and annihilated a Scav XBD outfit that had set up in Little China.”

“Let me guess, the Scavs grabbed a joytoy under Mox protection-”

Rogue scoffed, “No, the joytoy was a full time Mox.”

V rolled her eyes, “Okay, has the Scav IQ gone down even further lately?”

“I don’t think that’s possible, but Rita Wheeler led the team personally. Next day every single Scav who was in that nest was strung out on the building exterior, heads pulped from that bat she carries around.”

V scowled, smashing her fist against the booth table. It made a rather satisfying crashing thump, but none of the drinks were jostled at all. “Fuck, what is it with this city? It’s like the moment I’m out of town, everyone thinks its time to fuck around and cause a ruckus!”

“Like it or not V, the threat of you was a stabilizing influence on NC these last six months.”

“And now, look at all the business my absence is generating,” she said wryly. “Perhaps I should make this a biannual thing. Just fuck off, let the mice play then come back, stomp some heads to make an example.”

Rogue smirked, “It’ll certainly help our bottom line, kid.”

“Whatever, Pacifica?”

“You’d think the Voodoo Boyz would be the ones to take most advantage from your absence, but they’re too busy dealing with the Animals. It seems their little taste of real estate ownership of Grand Imperial Mall and the fight club established there has elevated them to a proper gang, by NC standards at least. They moved back in last week and the VDBs lost badly.”

V scowled, “Good, they’re a shadow of what they were under Maman Brigette, but if any gang in this city needs to enter the history books as extinct, then it’s them.” She looked around at the club denizens. “Any new edgerunners making waves?”

“No new Afterlife invitees since your little jaunt into the heavens. Though I hear that there’s a surge of rookies that Regina and Wakako have brought under their respective payrolls. Another little consequence of your absence in NC, lots of new blood wants to reach the top.”

“I wish them luck. Can you send me the eddie books? I’ve uploaded a routing number to your agent.” Rogue nodded and within a few seconds it was done. “Oh, another thing. I’m sending you the digikey to the Thorton ‘Beast’ in my garage. I need it sent to Muamar for a Netrunner package. He’ll know what to do.”

Rogue nodded and with a few mails through her agent, the wheels were set in motion. “Got it. Dare I ask why you need something like that?”

“Aldecaldos needs a bit of support from me in LA,” V looked off into nowhere for a moment. “Urgh, stupid daemon, listen I gotta go. Send my regards to Claire.”

“I will, see ya, kid. Good luck up there.”

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Wade Bleecker carefully sipped his tea as he looked down onto the very busy dancefloor of the Heavy Hearts club.

His office on the third floor of the pyramidal building was a study of luxury mixed with practicality. Everything in its proper place, functional, but also the best of the best, with no compromise on quality; Turkish carpets, polished glass paneling with subtle holographics showing financial feeds, news from all over the world and ready to be enlarged with the slightest thought and gesture, two authentic leather couches facing each other over a low coffee table. The place had no monolithic desk or office chair as most favored by corpos.

He had firmly left that part of his life behind when Petrochem decided it would be more efficient and safe to assassinate him as part of their severance package.

He could count those who could actually see him in person in this room with only one of his artificial hands. Yet those singular individuals were important enough to clearly make the effort with the expense of this room and he needed somewhere to manage his Pacifica and international interests that was not within earshot of his family.

A long day of work was behind him already and the evening promised to be no better.

He wanted nothing more than to go home to his wife and daughter, but with businesses and a network that operated in multiple time zones that needed his attention, he would only be able to leave just after midnight.

A holocall with a very specific signature hit his optics and he smirked, feeling a pleasant surprise.

He sat down on the couch adopting his signature hands forward pose, dispensing with the theatrics of keeping his face in the darkness.

“V, to what do I owe the pleasure of your call?”

“Mr. Hands, hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time?”

He studied the small image of the most valued edgerunner in his orbit. Luna definitely agreed with her and that boded very well for many future projects and the most critical endeavour that he was currently undertaking.

“Not at all, V. I was just taking a tea break anyway.”

“Just calling to let you know that the primary project is looking very good at the moment, with minimal complications so far that are easily correctable. Everything is performing at spec. Long term study is naturally ongoing, but all indications are the project will meet all requirements.”

Wade struggled to contain the emotions of triumph, satisfaction, sheer joy and relief that bubbled upward from his heart. He allowed only the smallest of smiles to curl his lips.

“Excellent,” his eyes twinkled and he idly caressed his meticulously styled beard. “Has our partners given any timeline yet?”

“Provided no contraindications and problems, we’re looking at seven months at the earliest for first trials with a more broader, diverse base of subjects. If you want, I can see about getting you in that trial.”

He considered the offer, weighing the probable opportunity costs, the pros and cons, the schedule of his current planning seven months from now.

“Very well, that would be appreciated, V.”

She nodded, "Otherwise, I was also calling about Colonel Bennett.”

“Oh? And what about our dear leader of Barghest and Dogtown has caught your eye?”

“One of my crawlers picked up that Arasaka is going for another attempt to bring the good colonel under their sway.”

Wade immediately referenced all the latest intel he had from his multitude of eyes and sources that watched Bennett’s every move. None of his own flags had been tripped and everything looked status quo as it had been for the last year, since they had arranged for Bennett’s ascension to the top of the pack. 

“I see nothing overt or covert from my side, but I admit my eyes into Arasaka are not as extensive as yours.”

“They’ve managed to find leverage from his past. Bennett has a younger sister on the East Coast, in New Angeles.”

“If that’s the case, then I must give him significant credit for keeping this close to his chest. For this fact to have evaded my own extensive scrutiny of his past, it must have been subject to a high level military scrubbing of his record.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure at the moment how Arasaka could’ve gotten their hands on the unredacted version. My only theory is that it could be a deliberate leak by the NUSA. Myers is clearly not entirely satisfied by Hansen's death and also wants his legacy destroyed.”

Barghest membership in the eight years since the Unification War, had seen a steady compositional shift. A natural attrition of casualties from those who had been former NUSA soldiers, Colonel Hansen’s original elite unit who had invaded Night City to those who had joined since; abandoned veterans from other states and megacorps, mercs with no contracts and renegades from other NC gangs. If the NUSA was going after Hansen’s original unit, the sinew that held Barghest together and they succeeded…

“Can you send me all the pertinent information?”

Wade felt his agent’s ping alert as the data was smartly routed through the holocall, before it was automatically quarantined. He appended the data into a mail and sent it to his second best netrunner on the payroll.

“Tell Baird, I said hi,” V smirked with a cheeky smile.

He didn’t dignify that with a response, but frowned as he saw V’s expression shift into one of visible alarm.

“Hands! You’ve got trouble!”

Wade could barely even comprehend her words when his agent suddenly declared a breach through his personal firewall.

The ceiling panels opened, revealing the four turreted, MK32 machine guns that smoothly settled into their locked position and aimed for the wall that faced the hallway leading to his office.

His own reflexes finally kicked in and he rolled off his couch, to crouch behind it when the roar of the guns echoed through the office.

His hearing was spared as his agent automatically turned off and isolated his very sensitive cyber-ear implants.

He slapped the hidden compartment in the couch, revealing a specially modified Burya EM revolver.

It was barely within his grip when the secretly armored couch shuddered as it absorbed two rounds from his assailant.

The machine guns fired another burst and only now did he think to actually use his security system’s own eyes.

In his vision, the feed appeared via his agent.

One dead body outside the office door, with a tech precision rifle spilled from his hands, leaking blood and other cyberware fluids onto the carpeted floor.

“Careful Hands, that one had optic camo,” said V’s voice. “Only caught them because the elevator door to this floor was hacked-”

He flinched as the machine guns fired again.

The sabot explosive rounds caught another invisible enemy - an eruption of blood and fluids from mid-air in the hallway before the camo failed as the armored figure collapsed dead to the floor.

“That’s two,” commented V grimly. “Looking at the elevator sensor records, it carried enough weight for four augmented humans, or two with a single borg. Hands, that hand cannon of yours - I’ll project a target into your optics, fire when I turn the target from green to red.”

Wade belatedly realized that V was the one who had breached beyond his personal firewalls, as a green reticle appeared in his vision, which snaked upward and drew his eyes towards the wall of the office, which had been thoroughly cratered with bullet holes.

The time for outrage and thinking was later, as he carefully edged the Burya over his cover and aligned the sights to V’s provided target, which was moving left and right, as if she was still scanning for the target.

“Gotcha, bastard!” she snarled.

The reticle flicked to red and Wade pulled the trigger.

The Burya roared in his hands, the recoil perfectly absorbed by his own artificial hands and arms. His office machine guns fired mere milliseconds later.

All seven feet of armored borg crumbled to their artificial knees, their head reduced to a stump of ruin, which occasionally emitted sparks and leaked blood onto the composite armored chest plating.

“Clear,” declared V in his ear.

Wade carefully stood, keeping his weapon aimed and ready.

Seemingly emerging from the digital ether, V’s appeared in body, as if she was actually standing next to him.

She bowed slightly, “Apologies for the ghost hack through your systems, Hands. Time didn’t allow me to ask permission to save your life.”

“Apology accepted,” he said, even as his mind was running through the implications of this attack and the huge leap in netrunning ability that V had just demonstrated. “Now if you don’t mind-”

She vanished from view, reduced to a mere image on a holocall again - his own agent confirming that the hack had ended. He would have to thoroughly investigate how to prevent a recurrence. V was an ally, a partner, but if she could do this, then it stood to reason others could as well.

“I will let you get to it,” she said with a frown. “I will send you all data on this attack I can dig up from my end, but the fact this happened exactly as I was on a call with you is no coincidence.”

The holocall ended.

Wade took a few moments to settle himself, noting that his own neuro ware had performed perfectly, before he began sending emergency codes to his network.

This was going to be a mess.

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A/N: A much needed touch of home base from V and further aftermath POVs.

Hope you enjoyed and have a great weekend. Stay awesome chooms!