2078: Highriders - Chapter 8

Actually finding a place to stay in Tycho City long term was not easy.

Almost everything was geared to tourists who had two week or one-month visas to remain, whilst anyone corporate would be put up in their own designated residential buildings. Staying long term in tourist hotels was completely out of the question given the prices.

Johnny and I fell into a very rare category of being technically sponsored immigrants to Luna, granted under the aegis of Manager Gakulu. He had given us some suggestions for finding an apartment that wouldn’t break our banks and we eventually settled for a place on the fourth subfloor of the city.

Calling it a ‘floor’ was a bit of a misnomer, because it actually represented a hollowed out space under the surface of Tycho, that was stretched out for a few square kilometers. Titanic load bearing pillars that were made of a mix of hyper alloys and regolith cement or lunacrete supported the ‘roof’ above and upper levels.

Sublevel four or SL4 represented the space where the majority of highriders lived and worked in Tycho. It was a mini-cityscape under the lunar surface and featured buildings that looked both artisanal and practical, lit from overhead with huge compound holos on the ceiling that made a fake sky complete with clouds. It was as if each highrider architect was given full freedom on how each building could look, as long as it fulfilled its intended purpose. The result was a small sea of unique shapes that gave the skyline an organic feel that I couldn’t help but feel gave the place a spirit that Night City completely lacked.

Our new apartment building for example, had ten floors shaped not in a rectangle but a tapered cylinder and rose out of the ground with an exterior that looked completely made out of lunar glass, tinted with shifting hues of green that changed as you looked at it. Lights on the perimeter shining upward on the building added a scintillating sheen.

“Looks like a big green dick,” Johnny commented, giving me his typical smirk.

I rolled my eyes and we approached the entrance which had two visible exterior scanners that shone and played up and down over our bodies briefly.

The glass doors hissed open and we entered an entrance lobby that reminded me of my old Glen apartment building in general layout. A single long corridor, with vending machines on my right and a reception desk to the left, but ending with four elevator doors.

Two highriders in skinsuits were grumbling about one of the machines, slapping the front of the glass because a purchase had got stuck in the release mechanism. Johnny seemed especially amused at it. “More than a century since those were invented and you’d think we’d have solved that problem by now.”

The third highrider in the lobby, sitting behind the reception desk was a tall, wiry guy with light chocolate skin and had the clear signs of low grav adaptation - those who had actually been born on Luna and then needed both medical and cyberware intervention to develop properly - which you could see in the pronounced major joints of the arms and knees. He wore a sleek highrider jumpsuit paired with a battered leather jacket that was covered in holo-patches that I referenced in moments from cyberspace to be from obscure Luna punk bands. It was very weird actually being my own Agent..

“Sawubona,” he greeted us lazily with a wave. “V and Hollow, is it?”

The question was totally perfunctory as he had been behind the scanner outside.

“Sawubona, yes,” I returned.

“Kael Voss, but you can call me ‘Skyjack’,” he introduced himself, scratching his bald head in irritation, which had a glowing cyan neural uplink tattoo snaking across his scalp, with an elaborate design that showed him part of the Driftkin tribe. Those who actually descended from the first engineers, miners and techs who built the first permanent settlements in Tycho.

That didn’t give me much hope for a good relationship with our new landlord. If he stayed true to the Driftkin rep, at best, he’d merely tolerate us only because Gakulu practically ordered it. Driftkin didn’t like ‘Earthers’ and they especially didn’t like Earth corpos.  

Skyjack studied us for a few moments, his ‘ganic brown eyes narrowing before he kicked something out of view, “Stop being lazy and help.”

A battered, fist sized bot floated up into the air with small puffs of microthrusters, it was equipped with welders and scanners that flung out emissions like candy and I could tell it even had an Agent equivalent intelligence inside.

“Fine!” snapped the bot with a snarky reverb electric tone and hissed towards the vending machine.

“So, I have a vacancy on the ninth floor for you, best I have in the building.”

“And how much will that cost?” I asked, folding my arms. I was already in the building’s systems in cyberspace and was looking through the security cams. There was none inside the apartments themselves at first glance, but it took me just a few extra moments to find the spy cams inside the small living room of the only empty apartment of floor nine. Other apartments in the building also had spy cams, seemingly at random, but it wasn’t until I referenced the tenant register that the obvious pattern emerged.

I almost wanted to openly roll my eyes.

The human race. Doesn’t matter where you put us, the location might change, but our nature fights its way through. Every apartment which didn’t have Driftkin living inside, was bugged.

“Six thousand per month,” he said flatly.

“Five, which also buys my silence to your non-Driftkin neighbors. I’m sure the Starjacks would have a few things to say about your paranoia and little side-hustle.”

The Starjacks were a highrider workgroup tribe that was the ideological opposite - most of them traced their lineage back to those who worked in orbit on the stations around Earth and Luna, where the majority of the Starjacks remained, but premium space constraints on stations and necessity forced Starjacks into moving to Luna as well.

In simplified terms, Starjacks had their heads in the void and saw Luna as a stepping stone to greater things in the system and humanity’s ascension to properly colonize Mars; they were generally more wealthy and didn’t scoff at anything Earth-made. Driftkin, on the other hand, called Luna home, utterly pragmatic, priding themselves on self-reliance and resourcefulness.

Skyjack didn’t blink or visibly panic as I held a figurative sword over his head. “Five-five, and that includes your life tax by the way. Think that the air you’re breathing comes from nothing?”

“Of course not,” I drawled. “5500 eddies per month? Deal.”

He lifted up a scanner tablet, which I placed my hand onto. “Payment upfront.”

It was the work of less than a moment to hijack the simple thing and give it a fake bio-imprint to register as a key. I gestured to him and transferred the money. A beeping inside his jacket showed that he also had an external Agent handling his monetary affairs, which my eyes scanned as a handheld mobile phone device.

“Welcome to Tycho Heights. Garbage days are Wednesdays. You have a five minute shower allowance per person and three toilet flushes per day for your apartment. Any questions?”

“None.”

“Good. You two find yourselves in need of anything, just call.” He tapped his jacket and a local Luna holocall number streamed to my digital perceptions, which I made sure to save.

“We’ll do that,” I nodded with my best diplomatic smile.

Johnny and I made our way down the hallway and he tapped the elevator controls.

‘Feel that?’ he said to me through cyberspace across our shared Relic protocol.

‘Yes, it’s almost like home, but more polite and with less guns. It seems we’ve walked right into a cold war between the Driftkin and Starjacks for control of Luna’s black markets. This building and neighborhood is on the front lines of it.’

A soft chime heralded the elevator’s arrival. We got in and I tapped the ninth floor button.

‘Figures that Gakulu would choose this place for our little home away from home, especially if he has a beef to pick with both tribes. We’re bound to get involved in their spats just from being here. It won’t be long until we’re even hired by either side once they do a little research on your rep.’

‘You really know how to brighten my day, Johnny.’

His only reply was to chuckle as the elevator stopped and we emerged on our floor.

We headed left down the circular corridor and walked past three doors before arriving at apartment 913.

The door automatically handshaked with our biometric keys and hissed softly open.

The space beyond was barely 400 square feet, open plan with only movable thin walls letting you have some choice about how much you wanted to devote to the kitchenette, living room or bedrooms. The only solid walls were the areas devoted to the shower and toilet. A holo TV hung from the ceiling in the living area, which was currently off and looked to be in barely working order.

The furnishings were there, but there was nothing to write home about.

“Your old pad in Megatower 10 was better than this,” Johnny scoffed. “Not exactly living in the stars are we?”

“It’ll do for the moment. We’ll spruce it up as time goes on.”

I did another scan to make sure I had spotted every spy cam, before throwing out a Short Circuit that turned every single one into a slag of useless plastics and molten circuits.

“Just how long do you think we’ll spend here in Tycho?”

I shook my head, “Johnny, you can come and go as you please. I’m the one who has to stay within quick travel distance to the only clinic and ripper in the fucking solar system that can look after my new body.”

He shook his head, “Not about to leave you alone on this airless rock, V.”

I stamped on the warm feeling in my heart that response gave. “It depends. Minimum, if all goes well, six months. I’m an object of strategic research for the highriders. That’s why there’s a spec ops team of theirs in the neighboring building that’s going to be keeping overwatch on us.”

I turned to look out the expansive floor to ceiling window with a marginally nice view of the subfloor and the building in question. There the nine-man team of highriders with unique high-end surveillance gear and weapons that looked built from the ground up by the Highrider Confed - easily the equal of the best ESA or Arasaka, with a few nifty tricks that might make them even better in some respects.

The leader of the team jerked like I had hit him with an quickhack as I had unnervingly met eyes with him. They had an invisible laser bouncing off the apartment’s window, which would let them hear everything we said.

“In the meantime, I’ll be giving Vik some homework as soon as I can arrange a secure transfer of the specs and data.”

It’ll be like a breath of fresh air to walk back into Vik’s ripper practice again as a client.

Johnny nodded in agreement and checked behind the doors of the two closed partitions, “Beds looks fine, though we may want to use some of our water allowance to give ‘em a scrub.”

We barely had luggage, with just a single bag that had one set of some spare clothes inside for each of us, that I dumped in a small closet set into the wall.

“So what about our contact for gear?” Johnny asked from the shower, briefly slapping some water on his face and even taking a drink. “Who is she?”

“Judging by the alias, definitely a runner, called Starbyte. Gakulu included a brief dossier, Earth-born, also from Night City, been working for him on Luna for over two years now.”

Johnny frowned, “That it?”

“It is a rather empty dossier,” I admitted. “I’ve been running a parallel search for Starbyte’s activities in lunar cyberspace. She definitely keeps a general low profile, though she has a few Arasaka and Militech data fort breaches to her name and both corps have her on a detain watchlist. She frequents a local runner club called the Eclipse Node and she’s fought in their arena.”

He walked out of the shower, “What’s her record?”

“So far, 21 wins and 1 loss. She’s good and it’d be interesting to have a match with her,” I said with an eager smirk. I’d watched a few of Starbyte’s runner duels in my parallel instance and the masked runner definitely had that rare natural talent for net cruising that somehow made me feel a kinship with the woman, just from the way she coded and fought. 

“Business first, V. Fun later.”

I waved him off, “I’ve already sent her a text about a meet and received a reply. We have a few hours to kill before heading off.”

“In that case, I think I’ll wander the neighborhood to get a feel of the place.”

“Just don’t start a tribal war, Johnny. Driftkin and Starjacks are just the overarching tribes to a deeper web of workgroups that make up this society. Tread lightly.”

“I’ll be a good boy, swear it,” he smirked.

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Our meeting with Starbyte was on the surface floor of Tycho City.

The place was a restaurant-pub called Regolith Bites, a tourist spot that tried a little too hard to capture an aesthetic that you were in a diner on a highway of the old USA, given a modern lunar twist. Each table had an almost artistic wear and tear to it, surrounded by bright red couches set in booths lining one wall. Each table had its own individual mini-network that asked permission to functionally hack your optics to display augmented reality menus. The smart windows of the place gave a wonderful view of the lunar landscape, giving the impression that you could step out the door and your feet would meet the lunar soil.

Actual holo menus hovered above the bar that stretched the length of the restaurant on the left. Pretty waitresses tended to patrons, wearing outfits with flaring pink skirts and aprons that could come from the 1960s and slammed you with a figurative anachronistic bat over the head.

“Hello, welcome to Regolith Bites, how can I help you today?” asked a blonde blue-eyed waitress with perfect skin and even a little hat perched atop her styled long hair with the restaurant’s name embroidered on it.

“We’re just here to meet someone at booth seven, might order something depending on how it goes,” I said politely, wincing internally at the bright smile and chipper attitude. A passive scan and glance through cyberspace told the story - every waitress had doll chips that let them give perfect performances and radiate that innocent charisma. There would be no chasing customers away just because a waitress was having an off day in this restaurant.

“Oh, okay. Just call any of us over if you want to order something.” She practically skipped off to attend to her other customers in another booth.

Johnny gave me a dark look as both of us were clearly going down memory lane of Evelyn Parker and Clouds. The doll who had been the joining cog and set practically everything in motion for the Konpeki Plaza heist. Neither of us had a good opinion on doll cyberware and if we could snap our fingers and cause the stuff to vanish from the universe, we wouldn’t hesitate.

We walked down the aisle and at booth seven at the very rear of the place, with her back to the wall, was seated a tall young woman. She wore a black Arasaka style netrunner suit with the logos ripped off and a cropped white jacket. Her neck length smart hair was shifted into black roots that smoothly transitioned to pure white at the tips, whilst her optics constantly shifted in a rainbow of colors. Her features spoke of a mixed Asian and Euro ancestry.

In cyberspace, she definitely had an active presence, even as she sat there drinking a synthshake. I immediately pegged it as the current gen Deep Net dive processor and her avatar was a lithe humanoid with translucent skin wearing only cybernetic patterns along her arms, and a strapped netdeck to her thigh. No fun bits were rendered except the mounds of her breasts and her hair was spread out as if she was in a constant ethereal wind.

Just by looking at her and the code and programs dripping from those fingers, I knew she was as skilled as her public runner duels indicated, if not more so. I didn’t doubt that she was holding back in them to give her a private edge for when it really mattered.

My eyes widened as Starbyte in a seeming automatic reflex began digging at the stealth cloaks that I had covered both Johnny and I with. His current avatar mirrored his IRL form, whilst I was still in my favorite sling bikini. The cloaks kept our unique presence hidden in cyberspace from most netrunners who happen to pass through or look our way. Our contact definitely didn’t fall into that category.

She stopped digging quickly though and in meatspace immediately lifted her palms towards us, “Sorry, sorry. Force of habit. Please have a seat,” she gestured to the other side of the booth in invitation.

We did so and it was as I was parsing her voice and doing a few more database queries that the actual identity of our contact hit me.

“You’re Starbyte?” Johnny asked in his most roguish, charismatic Rockerboy manner.

Whether it worked on her was up for debate as she just quirked an eyebrow and a corner of her mouth in a half-smile, “Correct, or as V here just figured out, Lucyna Kushinada, but please, call me Lucy. It’s… a pleasure to meet you both.”

‘Why do I get the feeling that there’s huge baggage with that last statement?’ Johnny said to me.

I threw him the appropriate file from Rogue’s Afterlife database and funnily enough one of my own.

‘Oh… oh!’ he said in realization as he digested the files.

Lucy had been one of the netrunners for Maine’s Crew, a small edgerunner outfit that had been around a few years before Konpeki and who’s file had also crossed my desk whilst I was with Arasaka Counter-Intel. Mainly because she had been offing any Arasaka netrunner who got too close to one David Martinez in cyberspace.

This had naturally not pleased Arasaka and it hadn’t been long before unofficial help was sought to deal with the problem. Mainly consisting of other mercs who had been bought to lure Lucy into a trap. Martinez himself had become a Solo of note because of his proficiency with the then experimental Apogee Sandevistan, which had somehow found its way into his possession.

Which was how he moved into the Afterlife merc roster and eventually Maine’s Crew, which soon became David’s Crew, when the former had lost the battle with cyberpsychosis.

In the end, both Lucy and David, having pissed off Arasaka too much, received the fate that all such nuisances met in those days - Adam Smasher.

The only reason Lucy was still alive was because of the expert timing of her accomplices and Smasher had been kept too busy fighting Martinez.

‘Fucking hell, this chick tried to quickhack Smasher whilst that chrome bastard was on a rampage.’ Johnny looked at their contact with some respect. ‘Gotta admire those cojones.’

“Please sit,” Lucy invited, a sad glint in her eyes. We took her up on the offer and I waved over the waitress, quickly putting in an order for two local beers. “Better watch out for the local brews, they’re an acquired taste if all you’re used to is Broski.”

“Consider us forewarned,” I smiled at her. “Shall we get down to business?”

She reached into a pocket of her jacket, producing a small device she put on the table, which immediately began broadcasting a localized acoustic buffer, which would prevent long range microphones from eavesdropping. In cyberspace, her avatar moved and with rapid manipulations of controls that sprouted in the air around her and gestures, she encased us in a distortion shell program that blurred and obscured us completely.

“Yes, but first…” she trailed off, warring with uncertainty. “I might as well say this now, get it out of the way.” She bowed deeply, as best she could whilst sitting down, almost smacking her head against the table. “Thank you, V.”

Just from her tone, I could feel that had come from a deep place. Lucy was not the first survivor or close family member of a victim from Smasher’s long list of bloodshed who had sent me thanks, gifts or even heaps of eddies. No one had ever really been insane enough to officially list a bounty on Smasher, not when he was in Arasaka’s pocket with their long reach into every corner on and off Earth, but that didn’t mean there weren’t all kinds of people who had suffered in some way who wanted to anonymously thank the Yurei of Night City.

I bowed in acknowledgement of her thanks.

She took a deep breath of composure, rubbing away an errant tear. “Now, the mission Gakulu is sending you on is something you’ll be needing some prep time and gear for. Combat on the lunar surface is an entirely different animal than what you’re used to, which is why I’ve got a number of training shard BDs for you to run. He’s given a marginal advance in eddies, but you will be required to outright purchase the gear you’re going to use. Plausible deniability has to be maintained.”

“What’s the cover story?” Johnny asked.

“The Arasaka sabotage team you have to take out, must seem in the aftermath, to have been done in by Militech.”

“So we’re playing with a false flag as well,” I folded my arms in thought. “That will require specific equipment and of course, everyone will assume that Militech already had a defense squad secretly on the moon because they naturally don’t trust Araska will abide by the Lunar Accords. It will just be their bad luck to only spot the sabotage team going for the Mitsubishi facility, oops.”

The Lunar Accords were the ‘play nice’ treaty on the moon that generally stopped any large scale military action from ever occurring on Luna by any nation or corporation. That didn’t stop covert dirty tricks or black ops, however, as this whole situation neatly demonstrated. It would be neatly in both belligerent parties' interest not to make public what will occur. Even if Militech knew that they hadn’t been responsible for what Johnny and I would do, they would write it off as a fait accompli. They would have lost their Sea of Clouds operation to sabotage but it was a small price to pay for kicking Arasaka out at the end of the day. 

Someone at Militech, would eventually make the conclusion that the actual play had come from the Highrider Confed and I suspected Myers and Lucas Harford, Militech’s CEO, would have some words then with Gakulu and his fellows at that point.

“Precisely,” Lucy confirmed, she held up a hand to pause the conversation, remotely disabling our acoustic buffer. Letting the waitress deliver our beer mugs without the artificially cheerful woman noticing a thing.

The beer and the mug was creatively named ‘Regolith Ale’ and the color was quite pale and a brief taste left a metallic tang in my mouth that was characteristic of lunar water, with the typical bitter sweet flavor of barley grown in hydroponics only coming afterward. The alcohol content was also just below 4%, allowing workers to down a mug without impairing performance.

“Urgh, don’t know whether to throw this mug or keep drinking,” Johnny complained.

Lucy chuckled knowingly, enabling our acoustic buffer with a gesture. “Now, any further questions?”

I gave a glance to Johnny, who only shook his head. “No. It seems we can move on to the buying.”

“Then drink up and follow me.”

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Lucy led us to another part of the surface level and one of the primary domes that was dedicated to industry in the city.

The major difference being that here factories were all enclosed in their own hardened shells that could in an emergency contain its own life support in the case of a dome breach. Every gaseous pollutant emission was also captured and reused in some way, which made for a very different cityscape. It almost looked like a field of giant tortoises had nestled themselves into the regolith.

We ended up taking a small electric cart and Lucy drove us along a street made of lunacrete to the far end of the dome.

Here we entered a non-descript factory that looked like all the others, the main doors opening only after Lucy was scanned.

The entrance lobby looked normal, like any other similar place you’d care to name on Earth. The highrider manning the reception desk looked utterly bored, but his eyes were sharp, alert and followed my every move. I also perceived cams, motion sensors, IFF receivers, pressure sensors on the floor and even a CO2 sensor.

We stepped into an elevator and here further security interrogated whether Lucy was who she claimed to be; a keycard was slotted in, a code she typed in rapidly, her hand scanned, all the while she was busy further disarming complex codes in cyberspace and keying us as authorized guests in to the system.

The elevator took us down rapidly a total of sixteen floors before the doors opened and we emerged into a long industrial corridor bristling with pipes, conduits and tubing. The hum of machinery and air cycling systems filled the space with a constant repetitive rhythm.

A few dozen feet further brought us to a secure door that only needed a single code to open and beyond was a large space with six large racks of reinforced shelving and mountings all along the wall housing enough weapons of every flavor to equip a small army.

“My old gunsmith would cream his pants just looking at this place.”

Especially because one side of the room had the tooling and machinery to equip mods to the various weapons.

“First, you have to worry about simply surviving on the surface,” Lucy led us to a long crate that stood up to waist level from the floor. A simple code hack and its locks released.

Inside was the clear form of pressure suits in white, but these were not the typical bulky suits that used enriched oxygen air pressure to keep a human alive in the void of space.

“Huh, mechanical pressure suits with only the helmet using air pressure?”

“Precisely, you’re much more nimble in these and there are attachment points for body armor plates. This way you can at least take a shot to the body and not be trapped in your own flaming oven when the bullet ignites the oxygen in a conventional suit. That can still happen in a headshot with this. Given that Gemini you’re in, you’ll at least only experience a blinding flash and not have to worry about your head being roasted.”

“If anyone can get a bead on my head in combat, they deserve to take the shot,” I said half-seriously.

“Just remember, even with a Sandy, low grav and low traction on the lunar regolith will make you slower, but that’s for later. These suits on their own will give you about sixteen hours of life support, which is generally too short for any worst case scenario where you lose your transport and have to hike back. That’s why…” Lucy abruptly whistled a quick high low pitch.

From behind another shelf I heard actuators whining, then rapid steps on the floor and into view walked a four legged robot that stood up to the level of my thigh. It was clearly modeled after a dog and its body was also armored to military standards, which shimmered currently with a white color but I could see it had active optical camo. It had a twitching head with two glowing sensors that rapidly looked around to scan the room, before locking onto us.

It trotted forward before obediently lowering itself to lie down at Lucy’s feet. She rolled her eyes and gave its solid chassis a rub, which it clearly enjoyed as it shuddered and leaned into her touch.

“Meet RALF, or Robotic Air and Life support Functions. Yes, the highrider engineer who designed it was obsessed with dogs and he continues to petition the Confed council to allow him to import an actual canine from Earth.”

“Crazy, never mind the logistical issues, depending on the breed a dog would go loco up here eventually.”

“Precisely, so they rather wisely deny him every time he asks. Now, RALF extends your EVA endurance by up to three days and while it does take charge from integrated PV panels on its back, it has an internal RTG so it can operate even in lunar night without problems.”

I stepped closer to RALF and noted a few mounting points on the back. “Weapon mounts?”

“If you’re confident you can defend it from hacks, then it can provide some fire support.”

She gestured us toward a large table that had a selection of weapons from pistols all the way to an anti-material sniper. Just like RALF, all of them were white and had other adaptations to account for vacuum operation, but each also had an odd mod that was attached to the receivers.

I picked up an SMG that looked like a general copy of the Arasaka Shingen MK.V and was made by a highrider workgroup called ForgeVex Armaments. It definitely massed heavier than a similar SMG built to work on Earth. “This mod?” I pointed it out.

“Moon dust mod that keeps the stuff from clogging the works, which is a pervasive problem once you leave the EM fields of the city. RALF also has a small emitter which will let you discharge any dust that accumulates on your suits.”

“Only Tech weapons up here?” 

Lucy nodded, “Most highriders call them by the old term ‘railguns’. You don’t want to be dealing with spent brass out on the surface.”

I moved on to a large weapon that was called a Vortex LMG. A beast of a Tech LMG that you had to be chromed to wield, this one was gyro-stabilized and had its own micro-thrusters to manage recoil in the low-grav environment.

“Those are generally mounted on a vehicle but you won’t have any problem. My own suggestion would be a combo of sniper and SMG. Your potential range of engagement on the lunar surface is much longer than on Earth. No atmosphere robbing your slug of energy, less gravity pulling it down and your sightline on flat plains will be about just under three kilometers. The moment you get on a hill, mountain or high ground that balloons out considerably.”

“So high ground on Luna is even more of a tactical advantage.”

She nodded, “With that Shattervex sniper, if you were on the peak of Mons Huygens, you could take someone out at over forty miles assuming nothing is in the way.”

Johnny and I looked at each other instantly with wide eyes.

He smiled at Lucy, “We’ll take the lot and are you charging for the training shards?”

“Consider them a gift,” she waved him off.

“What about transportation? We can’t exactly be walking about Tycho streets with milspec gear to our apartment,” I pointed out.

She walked over to one side of the room, where a hip height, two meter cargo pallet with both wheels and thrusters were waiting. 

“All your gear can be stored and secured in this. For your actual journey to the Sea of Clouds, it needs to be via rover, which will be ready and waiting for you at southern airlock G341 when the time comes. Shuttle hop is too conspicuous and there can be no record of one flying to your target area.”

“Well, let’s talk eddies then.”

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We left the factory dome with our mobile pallet, RALF and a bunch of eddies lighter in our pockets but for the first time we could actually consider ourselves armed and ready to actually do some gigs.

The virtual intelligence in RALF was quite rudimentary and I spent the time during our walk back to the apartment evaluating the coding and testing improvements on a copy that I brought into my Relic datafortress.

Then on a slight whimsy I gave the RALF VI the avatar of the gene-spliced Labrador I’d had as a child, Marly.

I’d only had him for six years in my teens when he was literally stolen out of our house yard in Charter Hill. By the time I’d gotten home from corpo school, it was already too late to activate the tracking implant and our security company only managed to find the implant discarded in a dumpster in North Side. Then came the Pet Policies of the late 2060s which made the monthly license to keep a pet ridiculously expensive, consigning their ownership to the 1%, which my family certainly wasn’t.

I threw together a behavioral patch and with a wave of my virtual hand RALF began barking and running around the data pool, before weaving between my legs and demanding attention.

“Calm down, you stupid mutt,” I smiled, giving him a few scratches behind the ears before letting him go and throwing out a neutered daemon for him to play with.

Back in meatspace, we arrived at our apartment without incident, though we did get a few curious eyeballs from other tenants who had to squeeze past us in the hallways.

We set RALF to a standby mode in the corner, where he automatically plugged himself into a wall socket to keep his batteries in top shape. He might have a small nuclear RTG but the default programming was only to rely on it during lunar night.

Next task, get familiar with all the new equipment and especially the vac suits. The materials were flexible and smart enough to be mostly one size fits all, as the suit contracted around you to form the mechanical pressure to simulate one earth atmosphere. The integral backpack containing the life support was barely larger than 13 inches and the suit had its own Agent to manage the systems for the user.

“Do we really need this?” Johnny complained, stuffing the insert uncomfortably between his body’s breasts, before letting the suit contract over him.

“Yes, otherwise the void between your chichis will be filled with your own skin peeling away from your chest in vacuum.”

The apartment’s front door rumbled as someone knocked on it.

Given how strong it was, as it was rated to keep atmo pressure inside the space in an emergency, it meant that our unannounced interlocutor was packing at least a decent set of Gorilla Arms.

A directed thought hacked the cams in the hallway and I gained an isometric view of three highriders waiting outside our door.

The one in the lead was a pale mocha skinned guy with clear scars on his face and arms from regolith abrasion, with a neon violet mohawk hair on his head interlaced with fiber optic strands that pulsed in tune with his heart. He and his pals, wore patched-up vac-suit jackets in black and silver, reinforced with kevlar weave, paired with cargo pants studded with hidden pockets. Finally to add to this wonderful wardrobe, a rebreather mask slung around his neck, etched with the Driftkin’s elaborate symbol on it.

“Fuck,” I sighed in aggravation.

“These our first customers?” Johnny joked wryly.

I gave him an aggravated look, “Given what I can reference about them, I should just slap them with Short Circuits and call Tycho PD, but the guy with the mohawk is a mid-tier enforcer for the Driftkin. I’d rather not get on a major tribe’s bad side so quickly.”

Johnny quickly grabbed a heavy railgun pistol, charged and loaded it, whilst taking a seat at our worktable to keep it out of view, “Just in case.”

The highrider vacsuit was not the best attire for a potentially dangerous meeting which would be setting the tone for the rest of our stay on Luna, but there wasn’t time to change, so I stepped forward to the door and remotely sent a signal for it to open just as the guy had been about to knock again.

“What can I do for you, Dustfang?” I said politely, standing in the doorway with folded arms and solidly blocking any idea the three might’ve had about barging in.

Jax Vorez’s optics widened slightly in surprise as I used his nickname, but he quickly recovered a cool composure. His mouth quirked and he eyed the way the vacsuit was clinging to my form with an appreciative look. “Sawubona, V.”

“Sawubona, what do you want?” I gave marginal points for doing the smart thing and at least looking up who he was about to visit or shake down.

“Merely to welcome you to the neighborhood. It isn’t every day we get an Earther coming to stay in our city, especially one with your credentials.”

“Thank you for the welcome, now stop buttering and get to the point,” I said flatly.

He frowned briefly, “Are all Earthers so impatient?”

“Only when they’re busy or from Night City.”

“I see, I’m actually here for a gig the Driftkin would like to offer you.”

“Really? What’s the pay?”

“We’ll not insult you by offering pocket change, V. Twenty K eddies and a 50/50 loot split.”

“Loot implies that we’re robbing something from someone, usually after flatlining them. What’s the gig?”

Jax looked up and down the hallway, “This isn’t exactly a place for this conversation.”

I made a theatrical twirling gesture with my hand, hacking every cam looking down the hallway, spinning them around in their housings before shutting them down. The doors to the other apartments also locked themselves down and for extra effect I flickered the lights a few times. The three Driftkin flinched at the visible reminder that they were dealing with an upper tier netrunner, who could cook them with a thought.

“It is now.”

Jax wearily held up his hands before slowly reaching into a pocket on his jacket with only two fingers before pulling out a shard that he offered to me.

“Given your history, we thought you’d be interested in this. There’s a fortified transport shuttle currently orbiting Luna, it’s carrying stolen property from ForgeVex and the workgroup is very pissed off about it. The Driftkin wants to do their fellow highrider tribe a solid, so we’re putting together an op to retrieve the property.”

“And you want to hire two edgerunners to make sure it goes smoothly. Who did the stealing?”

“Arasaka,” Jax smirked.

“One day I’m going to turn down a gig like this. Just to show that it takes more than waving an Arasaka flag to get me interested,” I grumbled.

“And is today that day?”

I gave the Driftkin a long look, “No. What’s the timetable for this?”

“Tomorrow there’s a refueling tanker scheduled to launch and meet the shuttle before it makes the journey back to Earth. We’re aiming to be on it.”

I slotted the shard in my neuroport, doing the usual quarantine and sweep. It was all clean except for the smallest of inconspicuous spyware programs that tried to hitch a ride through the process. It would’ve gone unnoticed by the majority of runners and was easily on par with what Netwatch fielded a few years ago.

My metaphorical cyberspace boot came crashing down and deleted it. “Tell your runner, nice try and for that my price has gone up to 25K.” I pulled out the shard and tossed it back to him.

Jax caught it on his chest and rolled his eyes. “Tried telling him it wouldn’t work, but our crew’s boss is the runner in question. Fine, 25K it is.”

He held out his hand and we shook on it.

“Sala kakuhle, V, look forward to working with you.”

I nodded and the three driftkin promptly walked off.

“Really, V?” Johnny said when the door was closed.

“A quick gig will help pass the time until the big one later. I don’t feel like being holed up in this apartment running BD sims for the next three days.”

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Our rendezvous with Jax was the next diurnal day at Tycho Landing Pad 6 in the north-eastern part of Tycho Crater.

It was one of three pads that was solely for use by the highriders, the rest being leased to Orbital Air.

That we were waved through by Tycho PD without so much as a search, despite carrying our disassembled weapons in non-descript suitcases also indicated that this gig definitely had some high level support from the Confed.  

Jax was waiting at the airlock with two others, all wearing similar vacsuits that despite showing clear signs of ageing, wear and tear, was clearly still good enough to entrust their lives to. Armor plates were clipped to attachment points at vital spots, which were further decorated with Driftkin symbols and stylized graffiti. They were already geared up and armed, double checking their rigs and equipment.

“V, Hollow,” he greeted with a nod. “Meet Zandi, our orbital mechanic and tech head for this gig.”

He gestured to a tall, dusky skinned woman fiddling with the seals of her helmet, whilst a low-g multi-tool drone floated over her shoulder. 

“And finally, Luthando, our pilot, who will hopefully get our shiny new armored shuttle down to Luna’s surface in one piece.”

This highrider was practically a walking skeleton, with pale skin dusted with freckles on his face, a classic symptom of having gone on extensive surface walks without enough UV protection in his helmet. He gazed at us both with a distrustful, almost hostile glare before turning to Jax.

“Do we really need these two mudfeet for this?”

Jax punched his fellow highrider lightly in the shoulder, causing Luthando to wince. “These two are experts at flatlining Arasaka grav-leeches and our intel indicates there’s some serious firepower waiting for us on that shuttle. So get your final checks done. We hit vac in two minutes.”

Luthando sneered at his team leader but obeyed.

“He gonna be a problem?” Johnny asked.

“No, he’ll do his job. You can get your weapons out. All cams in this sector have mysteriously malfunctioned.”

It was a quick look in cyberspace to confirm that and I spotted the data tracks of a reasonably good runner on overwatch.

With quick assured movements I assembled my new ForgeVex SMG and slung spare caseless ammo mags into my harness before lifting my armored helmet up and slotting it into place. The suit’s HUD and other data feeds were piped directly to my cyberspace instance, so I didn’t even technically need it to display using the onboard projectors. However, it would look odd if I didn’t use it, so I left it on.

Johnny, had his sniper rifle in two pieces mounted on his back, but had a ForgeVex hand cannon for close-range work. No matter how much he had protested to the contrary, I knew he was still longing for his old Malorian and that was the closest Luna equivalent.

Jax led the way into the large airlock, whilst Zandi did the work of managing the systems to ensure a smooth transition.

We had to wait nearly six minutes after the inner doors closed behind us before my own suit registered us as being in a proper vacuum.

“Stupid pump seals need replacing again,” Zandi snarked over the radio and gave the side of the control panel a good kick.

The outer doors opened and we emerged into the utter silence of the lunar surface, where the only sound was our breathing and the thumps of our footsteps on lunacrete, which reverberated through our bodies. Our helmets auto-polarized under the punishing unfiltered glare of the distant sun that was hovering ever closer to the western horizon. Our walking also had to change since mag boots were useless now, our movement transitioning to a slight bunny hop. 

In front of us, sitting on the pad was a 260 feet tall spheroid spacecraft that was sitting on squat landing legs. Its beige white hull cast a long void shadow to the east and we could see a crew of half-dozen highriders working with long hose and pulling them off the ship’s inlet valves.

I tried not to think about the fact that I was going to ride into lunar orbit not just on a rocket, but on a tanker rocket… which was essentially just a gigantic bomb twice over, waiting to go off if things went horribly wrong.

We headed for the skeletal crew tower that was docked to the side of the ship and got in the elevator that would bring us to the docking collar at the nose of the craft.

As we were rattled inside the rickety ascending elevator, the name of the tanker came into view, stenciled in large letters on the side, ‘Vanta’.

‘V, this thing blows and we’ll be lucky if even our Relics survive the blast,’ Johnny pointed out grimly.

‘Let’s not think about that, shall we? Besides, I’ve looked up the operational record of this one. They’ve kept it in good shape.’

‘Assuming the records are accurate, never know when someone might be covering up something to save their own ass.’

‘True, but let’s be a bit more optimistic, Johnny. I think we’ve got a lot of good karma to work through given the shit that’s happened to both of us.’

‘Urgh, don’t tell me that you’ve bought into Misty’s view of the world since I was gone.’

I couldn’t help the small smile that blossomed on my face at the mention of Jackie’s old girlfriend and my own close friend. The last six months had seen something of a slight estrangement between us, simply because I couldn’t give the Taka faction of Arasaka any excuse to potentially use her and my other friends as leverage. Not to mention the little fact that I had been operating on borrowed time. Now with that behind me, perhaps it was time to make a few calls and reconnect when this gig was done.

‘Let’s just say I’ve seen some distinct weird shit in the last six months on a few occasions that left me more open minded to her point of view,’ I explained as the crew elevator came to a stop and opened.

‘Something you feel like sharing?’

‘Later perhaps,’ I dithered. Johnny would more than likely think I’d been high at the time.

We hopped over the access arm and had to duck into the small airlock of the Vanta. We thankfully didn’t have to go through a whole pressurization cycle as the entire ship was kept in vacuum as a matter of SOP. The only life support the ship had was for the crew to connect their vacsuits to an onboard isolated oxygen supply.

The crew compartment of the Vanta was just the top 5% of the ship, a small module with six seats and a sliver of forward crystal glass to provide an actual view to the outside. The interior looked worn down and used as an old nomad vehicle plying the deserts of Southern California, but still functional in all respects.

Luthando and Zandi maneuvered themselves into the two forward seats for the pilot and flight engineer, whilst the rest of us made do with three of the crew seats behind them.

“Weapon stowage is under your seats,” Jax pointed out.

There was a clever adaptive latching mechanism here that would hold almost any weapon short of a long sniper. It also kept it within reach in an emergency, yet would keep it from being a hazard in any high-G burn.

With my SMG stowed and Johnny and I strapped in, I got comfortable and started to ping the ship’s computers. The cyberspace here was relatively slow and tiny, a little bubble of a universe connected to the greater lunar cyberspace, but it let me get a feel for the actual condition of the ship, which was coming alive as Zandi began startup sequences and checklists at a methodical yet blistering pace. In just seven minutes she turned a mostly dead ship into a bristling collection of potential energy that was breathing, groaning and turning the crew module into a kaleidoscope of flashing indicators and screens. She even extended her personal neural link and plugged it in.

Luthando in the pilot seat controlled the entire ship with a single screen in front of him and a HOTAS setup that had seen many hands wear it down over the years.

“Tycho Tower, this is Vanta 15291, request clearance and clean departure vectors,” he broadcasted, which was also piped into the shipnet for us to hear.

“Vanta, Tycho Tower, clearance granted, takeoff window in three minutes, vectors transmitting. Confirm reception.”

“Reception confirmed. Thank you Tycho Tower.” Luthando tapped a few buttons and holo with a 3 minute countdown appeared on the overhead panel.

In that time I really began to appreciate an OA spacecraft. In comparison, the Vanta was a beat-up hauler. My feet against the bare metal deck let me feel every thump of a valve opening, the groan of pumps and shifting of propellant. In cyberspace, I saw the feed from every engineering sensor and it was not doing my nerves any good. I was no space engineer but a lot of the numbers I was seeing were barely within tolerances given what I could reference.

Luthando did not even do us the courtesy of narrating a countdown.

He just waited until the appropriate time and jammed the throttle to full forward.

The Vanta rumbled and shook as she blasted off the launch pad, pushing down on us with 6G of acceleration.

I bled off my nerves by focusing inward on cyberspace and just luxuriating at the side of my datapool within the Relic fortress.

A wave of a digital hand and I brought up a rendering of Luna from an extremely high orbit and the Vanta slowly shooting itself up into an appropriate interception orbit for our target.

The Arasaka shuttle was at a 110 KM equatorial orbit with a marginal deviation of a few degrees. The Vanta would require just over 2 kilometers per second of delta-V to climb slightly higher, circularize and then another small burn for the final stage of the intercept.

I folded my hands behind my head on the virtual deck chair and watched the delta-V numbers rising and rising.

My gaze found the position of our target.

“Now just what could you have on board that would warrant all this?”

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A/N: V getting back into the saddle without the urgency of a busted Relic bomb ticking down on her life must feel so good. Enjoy your weekend choombas, stay awesome.