2078: Highriders - Chapter 13

“So how are you feeling V?”

I looked rather incredulously at Dr. Njeri as she stood over me with a tablet in hand. 

My body was lying on a bed with more scanning equipment inside it than most labs could boast, jacked into a diagnostic computer that was giving every nanometer of the Gemini a thorough analysis against my baseline.

“Doc, given the scans you’re throwing at me, you probably know already.”

“I suppose I do, but there could always be something that these scans miss, nothing is perfect and for all that we’ve mapped machine biological interfaces, the inherent unique fractal nature of the latter means that we can never be certain. So yes, I’m asking the question,” she gave me a twinkling, knowing smile 

“Fine, I’m feeling… great. No headaches, no twitching, no pain, no touch or sensation lag, everything’s responsive. The Gemini feels… normal now.”

“Hmmm, good news,” she said thoughtfully. “However, I’m picking up some slight microscarring in the braincase interface, not that surprising given the Sandevistan usage I’m picking up in your system logs. It’s not an issue now, but it could become one. I’ll load a program to your nanites to fix it up.”

“Thanks, anything else?”

“Yes, we’ve done some simulations and it seems that the power cell we used may experience some fluctuations if you put it under extreme load, to the point that you may get temporary loss of non-critical systems.”

“We did all the math on this, doc. I should be able to overclock and have no fluctuations,” I grumbled with annoyance.

“True, but it seems we’re dealing with the difference between the theoretical and the practical here.” Njeri swiped on her tablet and turned it around to show me a live scan on the power cell in question. “We chose the best that Raven Microcyber had to offer for the model of Gemini that you chose. It should last ten years given the kinetic energy recapture and integrated photovoltaics in your skin, but it seems Raven cut their manufacturing margins on this one a little too fine. It tested well because we only put it through standard combat simulations and single system overclocks.”

“How long for a replacement?” I sighed with annoyance.

“Assuming we put the order through today, at least a week. Then a further few days for testing the new cell and adding your mods to it.”

I gave her a finger gun gesture as I transferred the eddies. “Do it.”

“Very well. Sending the order,” her eyes glowed. “What would you say if we tried to build our own powercell from scratch?”

We had already jailbreaked the Gemini very thoroughly to allow for my own mods to go in, but there was ever the chance that when swapping such a central part as my main power cell, that something would kick back in.

“I’ll begin research on it in the background,” I nodded.

“Excellent, I’ll do it as well, then we compare at some point. It’s a necessary step in any case towards building a 100% in-house Gemini in the future. Don’t want the corps to literally have leverage on us at such a fundamental level.” She turned around the tablet and made a few swipes on it. “All right, scans are done. Chassis and frame, nominal. Neural integration at 98%, acceptable. Brain nutrition and oxygenation, nominal with no projected critical deficiency. Cyberdeck, nominal. Memory storage and redundant engram backups, nominal. Sensory and cognitive systems, nominal. Neural co-processors, nominal. Sandevistan reflex booster… hmmm, might need its cooling replaced. I’m not liking these readings.”

“Seriously, doc? It’s not that bad.”

“Three degree variance on spec, not bad? No, V. You’ll leave that judgement to me, thank you very much. You overclock that Sandy in this state, you’re looking at thermal damage to your brain.”     

“Fine,” I mumbled.

“On your front, come on.”

I turned around, tucking in my breasts to a comfortable position, whilst triggering the panels all along my spine to open. The synthskin parted flawlessly and gave access to my entire spine.

Njeri walked over to her long racks of medical and cyberware supplies, before coming back with an injection gun loaded with the specific cooling fluid and an extractor to remove the old fluid.

“So, looked yourself in the mirror recently?” she asked casually, jabbing the extractor into my spine at the specific port.

I huffed with annoyance into the soft memory foam my face was lying on, as the inevitable psychological questions began.

“Yes, I did,” I answered flatly, just to get it over with.

“Your reflection feel like you?”

“Yes. No instance of dysmorphia so far.”

“Excellent,” she pulled away the extractor and stared at the small window showing the old fluid. “Hayi kodwa! More corpo crap. That’s it. We’re switching suppliers. This coolant should have lasted at least another two months, given the usage.” She chucked it away onto her tray with disgust before grabbing the injector and carefully prodding it in my spine. “Recall for me a specific memory from your past with as much detail as possible. You don’t have to actually tell me. Any fuzziness or gaps in it?”

My graduation from Arasaka private school. The look of pride from mom, dad’s warm hug, even as I spot the glint of personal ambition in his eyes. My acceptance into the even more exclusive Night University had also come through. The prospects of his own corpo career getting a boost from successfully raising me, which would go onto his profile.

My firing would’ve made a social dent in both their careers, though both had been transferred to the Amsterdam Arasaka branch in my last year of Night U. Dad would be pissed that all the eddies that had gone into me were seemingly ‘wasted’ for them now. My assault on Arasaka Tower, on the other hand, had more than likely made them both persona non grata. They wouldn’t be fired over it, but I could well imagine a few sideways ‘promotions’ had seen both their careers put into a figurative dead end. No more climbing the ladder for dear old mom and dad.

Whatever. Hadn’t heard a peep from them both since their transfer to Europe ages ago. Didn’t even get an angry email after my firing, fuckers.

“No gaps,” I smirked.

“Any memories from Johnny that shouldn’t be there anymore or flashes of events you don’t remember living through?”

“No, the only things I remember are what we actually shared on purpose, such as when Maman Brigitte bridged us in cyberspace and the initial Relic startup.”  

“Focus problems? Struggling to plan ops or do your hacks?”

“No.”

“How’s your temper been? Any rage or impulsive moments that you can’t explain?”

“Temper’s normal. No random mood swings over nothing.” Which was the first hard symptom for cyberpsychosis.

“Do you feel connected to people around you, - friends, contacts - or do they seem distant, like you’re detached from them?”

I thought about Panam, Misty, Vic, Johnny, Rogue… will definitely need to call her at some point, see how the Afterlife financials are looking. “Definitely connected, doc.” 

“Any feelings of existential dread since the transfer? Are you questioning if you’re still human?”

“Njeri, I doubt the human label can really apply to me anymore. Yes, I still feel… attached to what we’d call the ‘human condition’, feelings, empathy and so on, but there’s so much more now. I have a sense for data and cyberspace that wasn’t there before this transition.”

She frowned, a glint of interest in her eyes as she lifted the injector. “Really? Oh, you can close yourself up. Do you mean as in a literal ‘extra’ perception that you’ve gained?”

A thought and my back plating pulled in and sealed up. I gave the order for the innate self-repair nanites in the synthskin to make things seamless again.

“Yes. As you could take clay into your hands and shape it, I can do that to data. As you would read through your eyes, gaining knowledge or facts, I look at cyberspace and parse data to a degree that a normal netrunner would probably burst a blood vessel-”

She raised a hand to pause me, “I get it, V. Well, it seems we are truly breaking ground here. It just hit me that the label of ‘Post-Human’ could definitely apply to you now.”

I referenced that instantly, digesting both fictional and philosophical literature on the subject. “You’re right.”

“You can sit up, synthskin is sealed.”

A streak of laziness hit as I was quite comfortable on the memory foam at the moment, but I had work to attend to.

“So all the other systems are good?”

“All nominal, I’m going to suggest that you find yourself a local joytoy. Post-Human or not, sexuality is still part of you and it will keep you from thinking yourself above us lowly augmented humans.”

“I’m not going to-”

She held up a hand, “You said it yourself, V.”

“All right, I’ll see, are we done?”

“Yes, go ahead and get dressed.”

I hopped off the scanning bed and began donning my first attempt to somewhat blend in with the Tycho City masses; a clingy graphene based one-piece jumpsuit in black with diagonal blue neon piping and the Samurai logo snarling on the back. It had many hidden pockets in convenient places that currently held the various pieces of my current iron, ready to be assembled for use. The moment I finished zipping up, various holo patches came alive on it; the most significant of which was three stylized stars with a comet trail framing it on my left chest - the symbol of Gakulu’s workgroup within the Starjacks.

Just like in Night City, it was the equivalent of wearing any gang symbology, only in my case it didn’t denote that I was part of them. An obvious Earther wearing a workgroup tat showed that I was either employed by them or a brand new lunar immigrant. It definitely would smooth over a lot of ruffled feathers and would see me able to generally move around in Tycho without getting approached by a random Starjack or Driftkin looking to cause trouble.

My Samurai jacket came next, magboots and finally the emergency vac collar, which itself was styled to match.

“I can almost imagine you as a highrider,” Njeri smiled, pocketing her tablet.

“When in Rome, see ya next week, doc,” I shrugged and walked into the corridors of the black clinic.

It was a much livelier place now that they weren’t exclusively busy with me. I passed rooms with corpo execs doing off-the-books installations, local gang members getting the latest cyberware and desperate civilians who had traded of themselves in some manner to afford the treatment.

I used the time walking to the exit elevator and the ride itself to check in with my spy daemons that were stalking Dr. Matsui.

Johnny was also currently doing the utterly hard work of a stakeout near the apartment, just to be physically nearby in the event of something going down.

The reports and data from the daemons came streaming in, which I reviewed as I left the warehouse and eventually merged into public portions of the city’s upper level.

Nothing.

No one sniffing around for data on Matsui, overtly at least.

The fallout of Militech’s failure was still percolating through the black ops division that had made the attempt and I could imagine that heads were gonna roll soon.

I would expect Arasaka to be next in line for a poaching attempt, but the double whammy I had given them in Lunar orbit and on the ground, meant that their Luna division was also reeling. Eventually someone in their Intel divisions would soon engage their skull sponge, when the fact that I was on Luna percolated down to them. On the one hand, they have a missing Kōmori-Class Trans-Lunar Shuttle, an equally missing black ops sabotage team, then they had the fact that I was coincidentally present on Luna within that timeline.

It was entirely circumstantial, but they’d make the conclusion anyway.

I had to split more of my attention to cyberspace when I spotted the approach of the dramatic translucent avatar of Lucy.

“V? Oh thank goodness,” she breathed out a visible sight of relief and looked up at me in confusion. “Why the huge avatar?”

I had been about to ask her why she was the size of a classical pixie fairy, then looked at my own avatar data. Stupid subconscious took that Post-Human stuff and let it go to my head.

A few moments later I was shrunk down to match her size. “Sorry about that. What’s up?”

“I managed to spot one of your daemons stalking Kaori.” She placed her fists on her hips and glared at me. “Any particular reason you’re spying on her?”

“Huh, Gakulu didn’t tell you. Hollow and I flatlined a Militech poaching team that had its sights set on her. We were hired to watch out for her.”

“Fuck! Of course, yes, let’s keep the netrunner in the dark,” she groused, walking back and forth on an invisible platform, which did really interesting things to the chest of her avatar. “I worked so fucking hard to keep her off the radar and now its all down the toilet.”

“Hey, she’s still alive and where she wants to be. You don’t want to know about what happens when a poach goes bad.”

“I know enough,” she waved me off, looking thoughtful. “Might as well do it now. Come with me.”

I folded my arms, “Where are we going?”

“To speak to Kaori, she needs to know,” she declared flatly.

In meatspace, I spotted an ‘outdoor’ restaurant set on the edge of a botanical park in the current surface dome I was walking through. I found myself a seat at an open table and let my eyes purposefully glow, outwardly showing that I was busy.  

Lucy hopped off her platform and instantly shot off into the distance, disappearing into a nearby dataway.

I followed, keeping pace easily as we moved into a server briefly before taking a side route that went up.

We jumped public servers and dataways a few more times before we stopped at a server that was password protected and secured with a massive firewall bristling with nasty hacks, Black ICE and daemons, waiting to be released on anyone foolish enough to try their luck.

“Here take this,” she flung a clump of data at me that I stopped cold and isolated, subjecting it to deep level scans. “It’s just an ID authorization.”

I didn’t take her word for it and let my scans run their full course, before letting the data in.

The server opened and inside was just another dataway, which we both plunged into.

We went through another four similar protected gateway servers before finally reaching the destination that Lucy had in mind.

Inside was virtu environment of a high Luna orbit. Floating above it was a space station that was definitely not there in meatspace and looked like a scientist’s fantastic fever dream of what someone wished was possible.

It had to be over two hundred kilometers in height, a decahedral base set with sprawling towers that speared out from it with buildings of every shape imaginable. None of them looked micrometeor resistant or obeyed the inherent structural limitations of commonly used construction materials in space. The imagination of the designer had truly taken flight. Neon green and blue light flowed like veins through the entire structure, pulsing almost like a heartbeat. Thousands of small lights buzzed around the gigantic station in orderly patterns, as if each denizen had their own AV and was going to work or doing whatever they did in their daily lives.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” Lucy grinned as we floated through the void towards the station, our avatars now loosely governed by the server’s movement rules and programming.

“It’s certainly pretty,” I admitted. The design of this station was pure form over function, almost a repudiation of the neo-militaristic aesthetic. An entirely new expression of Neokitsch perhaps, but it had some entirely novel elements that I was struggling to put a name to.

“Kaori designed the entire place herself, a perfect virtu space for her to focus on her work, undisturbed.”

Lucy burst into spontaneous motion, streaking towards the station.

I could just instantiate myself anywhere, ignoring the server rules, but that would make me a poor guest.

Instead I manifested inertialess kinetic energy from my hands and feet, speeding myself up to hundreds of kilometers per second to both catch up and then keep pace with Lucy.

The gigantic station soon swallowed up my avatar’s perspective and within seconds we slowed down again to zoom through the forest of buildings on the station’s surface, dodging AVs that seemingly didn’t even have any thrusters to get where they were going.

I had to admit, it was a thrilling experience - flying through an exotic space station’s towers and traffic in only my avatar’s skin and a bikini. The server was detailed enough to give the sensations of speed and inertia, rendering the feeling of a mild heat from the distant sun - as if I was laying on a beach somewhere on Earth.

Lucy came to an abrupt stop at an organically shaped two kilometer tall building of pure crystalline glass that looked no different from any other in the immediate vicinity, before slowly hovering down to a landing platform that slowly extended outwards in response to her presence.

We both touched down on it and she gestured for me to follow.

She stopped in front of a flat expanse of crystal glass and placed her hand on it.

I felt the exchange of data and authorizations, before an entire door shaped rectangle of yellow light emerged from the glass. It was a datapath that led to a further hidden partition of the server.

Paranoid thy name is Kaori Matsui.   

We stepped through the hidden door and beyond I felt the server rules change again, now we were seemingly on the lunar surface, within a dome that fully encompassed the entire Tycho crater.

A 53 mile diameter transparent dome, layered in hexagonal pieces. Below it, lit by the distant sun, was… a slice of perfection. It was as if someone had taken a knife to some unspoiled part of Earth from the 19th Century and replicated it over 2200 square miles. A mild wind rustled over my avatar’s skin, the smell of plant life hit my nose, I heard the distant chirping of birds and even spotted a small flock flying from my right. The entire crater was coated in a rolling green landscape of natural grass, with a river snaking through from one end to the other.

Even the gravity was set to the comfortable 9.8 meters per second that humanity had evolved with.

It was a fantastic paradise imagined on the lunar surface, which anyone would get lost in but I saw beyond that surface layer into the data that was at its foundation. It was very well done and I could see the style of the program that was generating it.

“Very elegant,” I commented as we began walking, feeling the soft wet grass beneath my feet deforming before perfectly returning to its original shape and wetness behind me. “She even made use of BD elements to get the various feelings and general experience right.”

“That’s Kaori, ever the perfectionist,” Lucy laughed fondly. “I helped her source those elements and with a bit of the integration work of this simulspace.”

We walked through this verdant paradise, passing a mixture of pine, oak and a dozen other species that I couldn’t help but notice felt out of place for some reason. It wasn't until I did a quick historical data search that I realized the trees were an amalgamation of species that would’ve never naturally occurred in the way I was seeing them now.

It was as we were crossing the bridge over the merrily twinkling river that I spotted the focus of my current gig.

Dr. Kaori Matsui was floating a few feet above a small hill, her hands manipulating a large holo pane in front of her which was brimming with math and equations. Rather anachronistically she also had an ancient whiteboard floating next to the holopane, also fully scribbled with esoteric equations that went right over my head. In her right hand, she idly twirled an ink marker through her fingers as she stared into the agglomeration of math before her.

Her chosen avatar for the environment generally matched her appearance in the personnel dossier, with the only change being her muscle tone - given an obvious boost that most people did when making an idealized version of themselves for cyberspace.

As we approached closer, she held up a single finger, her blue optics remaining focused on the whiteboard in front of her, “One moment.”

She spoke her English with a notable Kyoto Japanese accent and her profile picture didn’t really do her justice. Pointed chin, full lips, prominent cheekbones and a cute nose that somehow gave me the irrational urge to just squeeze it between my fingers. Her skin had the usual perfection that most well-off corpos went to a cosmetic specialist for, but she had chosen to retain or create a single small mole under her left eye, which was also neatly framed by the visible line of cyberware around her eyes.

She abruptly scoffed and used her hand to wipe off a few elements from an equation on the whiteboard, before quickly filling them back in. She bit her lip as her eyes quickly surveyed the entire mathematical sequence. “Che, good enough, I suppose. Good morning, Lucy, I trust you have a good reason for inviting an edgerunner into my private server.”

“I do, Kaori,” Lucy nodded. “This is V, she-”

“I know of her keireki shōmei (bona fides),” Matsui interrupted. She giggled at seeing Lucy’s surprised expression. “My dear Lucy, I may be singularly focused on my work, but you’d have to be a techno-luddite to not know of the dreaded and amazing V… of course depending on who you ask.” She chucked the ink marker into the air, where it promptly vanished before turning to me and giving a formal Japanese bow of greeting that I reflexively returned to the appropriate level. “Pleasure to meet you, V. I see Arasaka still trains their staff appropriately at least.”

“Dr. Matsui.”

“As I was saying,” Lucy huffed with exasperation. “I brought her here because she stopped a poaching attempt on you.”

Matsui lost all traces of humor on her face and stared at Lucy with a singular intensity. “Who?”

“Militech.”

“Chikushō! Militech ga ore o neratteru da to?! (Damn it! Militech’s after me?!)”

“Yes.”

She folded her arms, her lab bodysuit shifting from a gray-white to a full black, before she turned her angry optics to me. “How were they going to do it?”

“You mind if I make use of your server?” I asked politely.

“Go ahead.”

With a gesture I brought forth my own analysis and detailed schematics of the pod, shaped the data to sync it with the local render protocols, before chucking it out to appear right next to me.

Matsui zipped closer immediately to intently examine it, before I could even begin to explain, pulling apart the rendering to examine the internal components. It didn’t even take her ten seconds to deduce, “They were going to stuff me in one of the Mass Drivers, weren’t they?”

“Correct,” I said with a nod, feeling rather impressed. “I’ve been hired to protect you from further attempts and there is credible intel that Mitsubishi has sprung a leak regarding your work.”

“Kuso, I told those gaki that my security was just waiting to be compromised,” she angrily slapped the hull of the virtual pod, before pulling out the guts of what I recognized as the grav compensator. She proceeded to pull that apart as well until all its components were hovering in front of her. “Hmmm, pretty good attempt at solving the problem, but just like every other approach, it won’t scale.” She gave a shooing gesture and the pod was rather contemptuously deleted. “So did that weasel Yui hire you or was it the highriders?”

It took a moment of crossreference search to realize she was referring to the local Mitsubishi branch chief on Luna. “The latter.”

She scoffed, “Figures, I am very close to showing Mitsubishi to the nearest proverbial airlock and giving them a shove.”

“Kaori, you still need them,” Lucy said carefully.

Matsui huffed and glared upward, looking beyond the rendered dome and the void beyond, with the blue, white and brown marble of Earth in the distance. “I know. Now what measures are you taking for my safety, V?”

“Between myself and Lucy, you’re ironclad in cyberspace. Any netrunner tries their luck near you and I’ll fry their skullsponge. In meatspace, my partner, Hollow, already has your apartment under surveillance and ready to respond to your front door in less than a minute. However, the best security is being proactive. I'm coding out probes and crawlers to deploy to Earth’s cyberspace for any of the other major players who would have an interest in poaching you. I’ll be deploying them within the hour. My gut feeling is we should be expecting something from Kang Tao.”

“Hmmm, what of Arasaka?”

“Their Luna division has already had a few run-ins with me,” I smirked.

“Given your history, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” Matsui chuckled.

“However, one thing I never do is underestimate my former employer, so you can rest assured I’ll not be turning a blind eye to them.”

Lucy twitched suddenly and slashed her hand through the air in front of her. A flashing red holo flatscreen rendered in front of her face and raw data scrolled down. “Shit.”

I had to pretend not to see and understand instantly what message was being sent to Lucy through one of her own crawlers.

“I know that look,” Matsui drawled. “What’s wrong now?”

“Isotope shipment from the Serenitatis facility just went dark,” Lucy scowled, her hands practically blurring on a keyboard that materialized before her. “Activating secondary and tertiary trackers. Secondary is down as well. Tertiary responding, hah! Couldn’t get them all, fuckers. Looks like a local driftkin tribe is the culprit.”

“Please, tell me it’s not Eclipse?” I asked plaintively, already seeing the writing on the wall.

“No, it’s the Dustwalkers,” Lucy rolled her eyes with annoyance. “The closest Night City analogy I can give to them is like a hybrid between Scavs and the Valentinos, but replace Catholicism with Mawu worship.”

Mawu was the Great Mother or goddess of the moon of the Dahomey tribe in Africa and when they were carried into LEO to become contract labor, the religion came with. It initially seemed to die out in the face of both Islam and Christianity being the majority religions among what became the highriders, but Mawu clung on stubbornly and evolved further among the hardships experienced by its adherents. It saw a marked resurgence when lunar colonization began and it was now to the point where roughly 30% of Luna residents practiced Mawu worship in some form or other.  

“All right, so not exactly folks that even other highriders really like.”

“Precisely, because they’re fundamentalists who see everyone who is not Dustwalker as merely an exploitable resource and they’re rabid anti-corpos. Eclipse you can still deal with, but Dustwalker will shoot first and then begin harvesting you down to your blood, chrome and meat.”

“Cannibals?”

“Essentially,” she nodded with visible disgust.

Eww, on the bright side I can finally cut loose on these assholes, I thought. “So you want me to get the shipment back for you?”

Lucy and Matsui looked at each other for a moment. “You’re offering?”

“Sure, at a nice discount even. You need a constant supply of gravium-7 isotope for your research, don’t you, Dr. Matsui?”

“We have a reserve on hand in Tycho, so the loss of this shipment isn’t catastrophic.” She tapped the side of her nose in thought in a reflexive gesture that was painfully cute. “Yet it does represent millions in losses that I’m sure Mitsubishi will not be happy about. When they’re not happy it tends to spill over into my work and they might trim the operating and research budgets. In this case, even a fee that an edgerunner of your caliber might charge is a minor consideration. Very well, I’ll hire you personally to retrieve the shipment.”

Ah, the ka-ching of eddies flowing and biz.

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“You sure about this V?”

I gave Johnny an incredulous look and resumed packing. “Yes, between you and Lucy, you’ll be able to handle anything that comes your way with regards to protection for Dr. Matsui. In meatspace, Lucy is a beast with those monowires of hers and similarly in the netrunning department.”

“I’ve been looking into these Dustwalkers, V. I mean… I know what you’re capable of, but these guys…” he trailed off, wincing. “They make Raffen look civilized in comparison.”

“Which is why I’m doing Luna a huge favor in culling the herd a bit.”

He dropped himself on a nearby chair in our shared apartment, looking somewhat disgruntled at being left behind for this gig. “What’s this gravium shit anyway?”

“Seriously?” I gave him an incredulous look. “I know science isn’t exactly your forte, but didn’t you even absorb some skill chips or knowledge primers whilst you were with Alt?”

“Was too busy helping with Alt’s shit in cyberspace, can’t tell you much until I get the green light from her.” He waved me off and grabbed a half-drunk can of beer from a nearby stand, chugging it down.

“Fine, Gravium-7 is a synthetic transuranic element, sitting at number 121. They discovered minor amounts of it in the surface lunar regolith, formed by cosmic ray bombardment in the 2050s. It wasn’t until the sixties that they managed the process of creating it synthetically, but it’s still most economical to do it away from Earth’s magnetosphere. It has a half-life of a few months, but requires stabilization to remain useful. Long story short, as I see your eyes clouding over, you give it sufficient power and it resonates, releasing exotic particles such as quark-gluon plasma, which is used in the grav compensators that came out seven years ago.”

“Oh, well, consider me caught up then,” Johnny smiled in that infuriating way of his. “So the very valuable miracle stuff gets hijacked by a driftkin tribe, just to resell or do they have another agenda?”

“Perhaps both, you don’t survive on Luna’s surface by being a gonk with tech. With a healthy supply of gravium you could use it for many applications, both peaceful and military.” I zipped up and donned my backpack. “Now, don’t get too lazy with this stakeout, Johnny.”

“Relax V, Lucy’s here to keep me on the straight and narrow. Now off you go and don’t get killed.”

I gave him a casual wave and left the apartment.

My destination was the OA spaceport, where a cargo shuttle bound for Mare Serenitatis was waiting for me to hitch a ride on.

It was only as I was strapping myself into a rickety jump seat in the shuttle, surrounded by cargo boxes that I was hit with the realization that strapping myself into a rocket was now… normal? Just another Tuesday?

“Engine ignition,” announced the highrider manning the controls a dozen feet ‘above’ me.

I was pushed back into my seat with 3Gs of acceleration, the shuttle rumbled and roared as it leaped away from Luna’s gravity.

The burn was over in less than twenty seconds, after which the spheroid shuttle settled into the sub-orbital coast phase.

Serenitatis was in the north-east sector of the lunar maps and was just too far from Tycho to make a rover practical, especially when time was a factor in getting this shipment back. Eventually the Dustwalkers would find the last remaining tracker, at which point things would get much harder.

I mostly retreated into cyberspace for the fifty minute flight, reviewing the movements of that tracker.

Lucy had it set to ping-only mode with a microburst of signal every twenty minutes, which was why it had remained undiscovered so far.

The Dustwalkers had intercepted the shipment as it was headed south from the Serenitatis refinery towards the aptly named Tranquility Base, where the equatorial spaceport there allowed for much more fuel efficient conventional transfers to destinations all over Earth-Luna space. They had thus far been making their way steadily east towards Mare Fecunditatis.

With a virtual Luna in front of me, I began collating everything Gakulu and Mitsubishi had on the area. Recon observation satellite passes were of limited help, because the Dustwalkers knew the timing of those sats just like everyone else. However, it was known that the tribe had a network of mobile habitats and rovers, parking them in dormant lava tubes and craters to remain unobserved.

The tribe itself was formed in the early 2060s on Luna’s southern highlands from a splinter group of lunar miners abandoned by the ESA after a failed helium-3 extraction project and at this point was estimated to have roughly 130 members. That was a general guess from the Highrider Confed at least, since the Dustwalkers were content to remain firmly outside the bounds of civilization. That generally meant only a quarter of that number would be actual fighters, whilst the rest would be techs and other non-combatants. 

I traced their possible routes heading east based on the tracker data, then simulated various possible intercept points heading from the Serenitatis Refinery with a rover. The speed of the hijacked shipment, which was on a rover train, was naturally slower, plus the need to hide from orbiting satellites was another factor in my favor.

After the math and algorithms were done, I was left with four possible routes to take and nothing to really distinguish them from each other besides intercept time deviations of mere seconds.

“Eeny miny moe,” I grumbled, tapping each route. “Southernmost route will have to do.”

I retreated from cyberspace and snuggled back into my chair, setting my body into a thirty minute nap.

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Lunar night was halfway through its cycle, which didn’t allow me to properly see the Serenitatis facility except through my optics’ IR NVG mode. It was a collection of nine partially sunk domes, covered with lunacrete for micrometeor protection, with a dozen hectares of space in a single level below the surface.

I was met at the landing pad by the local highrider chief.

“V? Pleasure to meet, name’s Zane Korvak, welcome to Serenitatis.” He was lanky in the way all highriders were, with a rugged vac suit and I could make out a bearded face within the helmet.

“Thank you, is that my ride?” I pointed at the waiting nearby rover.

“Sure is, not the latest Nomad, but she’ll get you where you’re going.”

“RALF, get yourself loaded up,” I instructed the robot dog at my side.

He barked over my frequency in acknowledgment and sent regolith dust spraying as he ran with speed towards the rover.

“You seriously programmed it like that?” Korvak chuckled incredulously.

“It’s fun,” I shrugged, beginning to hop towards the vehicle. “Thanks for the rover, I’ll try not to get it shot up.”

“That’d be appreciated.”

I settled into the rover, pushing outwards in cyberspace to interface with its systems. It was a larger five seater and had definitely seen many more miles than the previous one I had used. Korvak’s people had at least done all the checklists and consumables refilling, so with that out of the way I powered everything up and slowly stepped on the accelerator.

The rover lurched forward before settling into its blistering speed of 22 kph.

I referenced the hijacked rover train’s current position and speed - 12 kph.

Well, this was a far cry from some of the many car chases I’d done in Night City. I was half-tempted to ring up ol’ Muamar ‘El Capitán’ and stream a feed to him, just to see his reaction. I settled for just recording it and seeing how I felt later about sending it to him in an email.

A few adjustments on the radio receiver and I had Moonshot Rebel Radio streaming into my ears.

“Two hours, twenty three minutes to go, wheeee.”

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I was within minutes of the rover train now, passing on the other side of a sloping hill of regolith when the first signs of Dustwalkers reached me in the form of a hovering drone that was playing Tail End Charlie.

Its automated combat subroutines immediately went hot and sent lead my way.

My reflexes let me turn the rover just enough for the shot drill through the forward glass to my left, where the railgun round finally exited the rear cabin, burying itself in the regolith behind me.

My Domination hack blasted through the drone’s firewalls like they weren’t even there. The Dustwalker runner who had programmed this drone was rather lazy, still using the original Militech soft as a basis and only doing marginal tweaks to remove inefficiencies.

With my new drone under control, I had it turn around and streak towards the rover train at its max speed.

Six flatbed cargo rovers made up the train, 9 dustwalker drones hovering overhead, with thirteen dustwalkers in their patchwork, jury rigged combat vac suits either seated on the cargo, hanging off side of the rovers or seated inside the cabins to drive the train. Two of their own armed rovers escorted the front and rear of the convoy.

With my own drone as a vector, I overclocked my cyberdeck and threw out Weapon Malfunctions that fell on them like rain.

Chaos erupted as railguns sparked then detonated.

Four dustwalkers died immediately as their suits breached and in some cases belched a brief flame as the high oxygen mixture inside ignited.

Other railguns merely sparked from my hack, their non-standard design and mods saving their owners life, but became utterly useless to them.

I opened fire with my drone’s railgun, targeting the closest enemy drones.

Three were ripped to shreds before the combat routines governing the others made the correct determination of an enemy hack and retaliated.

By throwing it through a complex set of evasives I managed to make it last to kill two more enemy drones before it was bracketed and destroyed by the others.

But not before jumping my Domination hack into the dustwalker rover.

Its cameras and sensors became my eyes and my code rushed into its limited cyberspace like a flash flood. 

I braked abruptly, sending the two panicking dustwalkers on the side of the rover flying off it at four meters per second.

On Earth, it wouldn’t have been so bad.

On Luna, with regolith acting like razor sharp sandpaper at that speed, it was catastrophic.

Their feet hit first, sending an explosive plume of regolith forward, but grinding away at their vac suits until it tore them straight off their feet. The escaping high pressure oxygen from their legs acted like two mini-thrusters and sent them soaring upward.

I put them both out of their misery with two center mass shots from the mounted railgun, which sent their bodies on an entirely different trajectory, leaving an explosive trail of misted flash frozen blood.

Next I dealt with the driver of my commandeered rover.

Its interior had been pressurized and he had no helmet on, forgetting to don it even as he tried to futilely wrestle back control of the rover.

I relaxed the hydraulics of the door to his right, weakening the seals - physics did the rest.

The escaping air pressure was just enough to pick him up and send him tumbling out the side as I gunned the throttle to 25 kph.

His emergency vac collar inflated over his head as he landed in the regolith, sending a small plume outward from his rather painful landing. It did nothing to stop his head from turning into a flash frozen mangled ruin of crystalline red, under the force of the railgun round I sent his way.

I turned the rover left to avoid the rear of the train as I caught up with it.

The last elements of my surprise ran out and the surviving dustwalkers focused on their own rover and began sending pistol shots from secondary railguns they had dug out from their packs. I also became aware of their own netrunner as she started throwing hacks my way in the small island of cyberspace we had going here.

Neither of us bothered with avatars, simply sending our respective hacks and daemons to crash into each other.

Derezz attacks blunted against junk data shields. I wiped out her replication viruses before they could try and overwhelm the rover’s limited computer systems. She also threw her own versions of System Collapse my way, which I let Butcher eat up with a contemptuous ease.

In meatspace, my railgun rounds blasted two dustwalkers off their rides, their bodies crashing onto the regolith and ripping the vac suits open.

My rover’s wheels thumped multiple times as the bodies went under the tyres, barely rocking the cabin thanks to the extremely good suspension.

The three remaining drones opened fire, stitching lines of holes straight through the empty cabin.

“Stupid,” I muttered from the safety of my actual rover a few miles away.

I engaged my Sandy and swiveled the turret, firing rapidly three times with rapid shifts of the mount.

The drones turned to composite metallic debris raining onto the regolith around us.

“Butcher, think we have enough bandwidth here?”

His only response was to brute force a connection to an orbiting ESA satellite.

“Thank you.”

I prefaced the attack with four queued Malfunctions just to keep my opponent on the defensive before unleashing the Blackwall Gateway.

And not the cookie cutter Gateway I had started with, which had a minor element that could spread to more targets as Butcher went to work. 

Butcher appeared like an apocalypse in cyberspace and from my perspective in meatspace I could see the digital blood red malicious tentacles of my AI companion erupting from the remaining dustwalkers. Their bodies contorting and twitching as he went to work through their neural sockets.

I heard my netrunner opponent’s brief scream before it was distorted by the digitizing process and disappeared with finality. I hurriedly took control of the lead dustwalker rover and twisted its fly-by-wire controls, before it could become an obstacle to the train.

Another jump and I was now in command of the lead rover and all the slaved vehicles.

Break slowly, I weaved the data command into every rover’s computer.

The entire train began slowing down over the next thirteen seconds.

I pulled the majority of my focus back to my own body and after a few minutes of driving to avoid a few boulders and craters, caught up with the stalled train and parked twenty meters away from it.

“RALF, do a sweep to the right.”

The robot dog emerged from the rover and sped off with a burst of rapid speed, leaving regolith flying in his wake.

I sat back, using my commandeered rovers to scan not just the train, but also turning my attention outwards to the horizon. At this point we were on the borders of Mare Fecunditatis and it was entirely possible that the dustwalker’s mobile base was nearby. If so, they had overwatch and possibly even snipers that already had distant eyes on this approaching convoy.

Given the terrain around me, the only place they could probably set themselves up would be to the north east. I would put a spotter on the expanse of a tall hill, near… that crater edge. A sufficiently powerful sniper could cross that distance with no problems and remain nice and lethal.

I moved into the rear left seat of my own rover and with a single data command, I had all the rovers switch off their active IR elements, turning their NVG to passive mode.

Anyone also using passive NVG scans and sensors to look at us would be robbed of resolution, turning a crisp digital picture into a blurred pixilated mess.

The fist sized hole that appeared in the front crystal glass of my rover, which instantly made another hole in the rear, missing completely, had me smirking with amusement. The passing of the round in the complete silence of a vacuum was rather disconcerting, but something I was getting used to.

I reversed the rover quickly behind the train, moving behind its cover, even as I ran a trajectory calculation and whether the guns of the dustwalker rovers had the performance I wanted.

The result was… just barely.

I assumed control of both turrets and sent a fusillade of retaliatory railgun shots arcing up into the void and even walked the fire along the likely predicated path of the sniper’s retreat.

“Butcher, does that ESA satellite have any look-down imaging?”

“Officially, it’s a communications satellite, but it does have an undisclosed radar reconnaissance system on board.”

“Hack it and see if my fire is having any effect.”

The radar data that he got to me within a mere four seconds told the story.

A human sized reflection jumping up out of the lunar regolith, probably using a similar camouflage as the Eclipse.

I watched the sharp radar returns of my railgun rounds, landing short then long, to the side and finally an intersection-

The human sized radar return disappeared.

I stopped firing.

My digital hands grabbed hold of the radar system and its data. Butcher had already done most of the work, but I wrote a program further to enhance the resolution being returned, inputting an interferometric algorithm.

It found the small rover of the now deceased sniper - a two seater that was open to space, not that much different than what the original Apollo rovers were.

“What are the chances that the sniper had a spotter?”

“Greater than 87%,” came the flat answer.

That supported my gut instinct and after a few calculations, the railgun turrets shifted, angled their barrels even higher and sent two dozen rounds silently into the void, minutely adjusting with every shot.

It was likely overkill, but I wasn’t just shooting at the rover. The firing pattern would cause a time on target effect, causing all the rounds to land at once in a square centering around the rover.

I watched dispassionately a few seconds later as the rover was turned to confetti debris as the rounds impacted and disturbed a large amount of regolith. The energy transfer was so great, even my passive NVGs picked up the sharp cloud of energetic regolith that had been thrown up. The lunar gravity would eventually pull most of it back, but there would be some micro particles that had been given enough energy for escape velocity.

“Did I just effectively do the first lunar artillery strike?” I asked somewhat incredulously as the thought struck.

“By an edgerunner, certainly. However, the caliber of the railguns would need to be larger, but that is a matter of semantics.” Butcher declared with a hint of dryness in his tone. “The chances of another corporate black operation having performed something similar is difficult to estimate with any degree of confidence.”

“I’ll take it,” I said with satisfaction, but quickly lost my smile. “Now comes the boring part. Getting all this shit to Tranquility at 15 kph.”

“Perhaps use the time to call Rogue. The ESA satellite is at our full disposal for the moment.”

“They’ll figure eventually that someone spoofed it. No, let it go, Butcher. I’ll just have to deal.”

“Very well.”

“RALF, get back in here. We have to go.” The robot dog actually gave me a very realistic whining tone in response along with the data request that he wanted to remain outside along the convoy. I hated that it so effectively wormed its way into my… heart? Did I even qualify for saying that anymore?

“Fine, but make sure you don't run your own power down too much. No telling what trouble we may run into on the way.”

Happy barking was the only response as I marshalled the entire convoy into a single programmable entity and put my hands on the digital controls to begin the long journey.

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A/N: Bound to be some teething problems with a custom modded Gemini.

Enjoy the weekend and stay awesome chooms.