Chapter 44: Dino's Gig: Project Chimera I (Patreon)

"We are born of the blood, made men by the blood, undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open."

- Master Willem (Bloodborne)

---

POV: Santiago "Santi" Reyes

I was currently in a cab on my way to the afterlife, and was going over what Dino could possibly have for me when I remembered the earlier events of the morning. It was like nine-something when I left my place and had called a cab over. While I was waiting for the cab, I glanced over to where Judy always kept the decommissioned NCFD firetruck and noticed the spot was empty.

My first instinct had been to think of the worst that could have possibly happened, and that was her getting killed. However, I quickly pushed that out of my mind since that gonk that hosted the body lotto, Stan the Man, would've been itching to do a special announcement this morning about a chick getting killed while riding in an NCFD firetruck.

So I shifted my thoughts into something more reasonable. Judy had spent the better part of a year rebuilding a fire truck and had finally gotten to drive it on a day when the entire city's law enforcement apparatus was distracted by war crimes. And knowing Judy, the idea that she simply kept driving until the fuel ran out was most likely what had happened.

Once the cab dropped me off, I made my way into the Afterlife and quickly realized that the Afterlife in the morning was a completely different building than it was at night.

The main floor was mostly empty, except for the two booths that were occupied and a man asleep at the bar with his forehead on the countertop and a half-finished drink beside him. The screens above the bar were running N54 on mute, which was off to suck big daddy NUSA off by trying to downplay what actually happened in Sacramento through eight words: "Unification War: Insurgents in Sacramento have been Defeated."

I didn't clock it on my way in, but there wasn't really a bouncer on shift either. I looked back and saw a guy, almost half-asleep, sitting just before the entry, using his Nue and his hand as a pillow. The gonk didn't even try to see if I belonged in here.

I walked towards Dino, who was in the corner booth with his denim vest on and his boots up on the seat. He had an almost empty bottle in front of him this early in the morning, and I got the sense that it was most likely his daily routine.

"Ghost," he said. "You look well rested... Not a fan of that shit."

"Clearly," I said. "You look like you haven't slept at all."

"Haven't gotten the chance to do so," Dino said. "Been on call since three in the morning with four different clients who all suddenly discovered they have urgent business in Night City now that Sacramento's a parking lot. And sit the fuck down already, looking up at you is making my neck hurt and my head spin."

I obeyed and slipped into the booth.

"Here's the gist of it," Dino said. "Client wants a data cache. Data cache is encrypted and volatile. They know approximately where it is, what it relates to, and they're willing to pay good eddies for it. But, knowing where something is and getting your hands on it ain't really the same thing, now is it?"

"Any idea on what it's related to?" I asked with genuine curiosity.

"A Militech project called Chimera," Dino said as he scratched the side of his head.

"Never heard anything about it," I said after I had attempted to jog my memory on whether there was information about this project or not in the data I had copied during the last gig.

"No shit," Dino said as he took a drink and set the bottle down. "The Chimera is a Militech black-budget program that has not produced a single leak. Which is astonishing, because from what we know of Militech, they leak like a colander at the best of times, and something being this clean for this long is itself a signal."

"How clean are we talking?" I asked.

"Clean enough that I've been trying to run down what a Chimera actually is, and everything I've turned up is second-hand rumor about the program's existence, none of it about the program's content. What I do know for certain is that it's being developed under the direct supervision of Militech's armored division chief engineer, a man named Filippo Andrews. Design work started in 2065 under the classification of an urban combat platform, which could mean anything from a personnel carrier to a tactical AI. But whatever it is, Militech considered it important enough to run the entire program off the books, off any network, and out of every regulatory framework."

"So if I took a shot in the dark, I'd guess that the client wants the specs," I inferred.

"The client wants everything on the project," Dino said with an eyeroll and an expansion of his arms. "I'm talking blueprints, manufacturing specifications, component sourcing, test data, doctrinal notes- did I mention blueprints already?"

I nodded, so he continued speaking. "They want every file available. If it's in the cache and it's Chimera-adjacent, they want it."

"Okay..." I said slowly. "And this cache is where?"

"Pacifica," he said before taking a quick pull from the bottle. "In the subterranean levels of the development zone. Deep below the flood line, in a section that never got finished."

He reached into the inside pocket of his vest and produced a data shard, and set it on the table between us.

"Client provided a briefing package," he explained. "Everything they know about the target, the location, and the operational parameters. It's not a lot, but it's what they have. Take a look for yourself."

I picked up the shard and inserted it into the port at the base of my skull, and the contents unfolded across my overlay.

The first section was the target profile. The Militech Chimera program. Everything the client had managed to compile from years of corporate espionage, source recruitment, and passive signals intelligence amounted to a document that was long on inference and short on confirmation. The Chimera was, according to the compiled intel, an armored platform intended for urban combat operations that had legs, plural, though the exact number was disputed across the different source reports.

It was designed to withstand engagement from contemporary anti-armor weapons, which meant its armor package was significantly heavier than that of any current Militech platform in service. It carried a mixed weapons loadout that the client's sources could not fully confirm, and its command architecture employed a dedicated cyberdefense suite.

The intel report noted that approximately thirteen units had been produced, though the number was flagged as low confidence. The program was believed to be in the transition phase between prototype production and full manufacturing tooling, which meant this specific moment, before the mass-production run committed Militech's supply chain, was the window during which a Chimera package would be worth the maximum amount to the buyers. After the mass-production run, the specs would naturally leak as component vendors, assembly-line workers, and shipping manifests began distributing information. Before the mass-production run, all program information was concentrated in a small number of highly secure locations.

The cache was housed in an off-the-books observation post on Sub level four of a never-opened retail development, in a server room whose existence did not appear on any official Pacifica infrastructure map. The briefing included a floor plan reconstructed from thermal imaging of the site, which meant the client had someone good enough to bounce a thermal signal through six levels of concrete and get a usable image back, and some really deep pockets.

The observation post was presumed inactive, and their recommendation was a light infiltration team, since it should just be a simple in-and-out gig.

The third section had timing and contact protocols for post-extraction delivery. The final page contained a note in a slightly different tone from the rest of the document, the specific tightening of voice that indicated a personal message rather than a briefing insert.

"Time is of the essence. The Sacramento situation has accelerated the market clock. If the package is not in our hands within seventy-two hours, our position weakens materially. Please execute at earliest opportunity. All questions to the fixer. No direct contact."

I unplugged the shard and handed it back across the table.

"Client's probably a NUSA task force," I said.

Contrary to my expectations, Dino did not react to my inference.

"Or somebody one degree removed from a NUSA task force," I continued. "Looking at the document structure, sourcing language, and operational sign-off tone, whoever wrote that has staff training, which most likely means NUSA, Militech, or Arasaka. Sure, I can maybe say Kang Tao, but they don't deal in what they asked us to get, so the next guess would be Militech, but they're the target, so not them either. Next would be Arasaka, and with their support for the free states, they're a maybe, but the most likely suspect would be an entity within the NUSA... Someone who wants to steal information to something they'll eventually have..."

Dino picked up the bottle and looked at it, noticing that it was empty. So he set it back down.

"Listen, kid," Dino began. "You're smart, maybe too smart for your own good. You are not being paid to draw those inferences."

"I was making those inferences for you," I tried to argue my case.

He looked at me for a moment, and I noticed the corner of his mouth twitch as he leaned over.

"I appreciate the concern," he said in a low voice. "But I'll pretend I didn't hear it. Client's identity is not my problem. Client's motivation is not my problem either. But the client is paying, and paying well, and paying quickly due to the shitshow up in Sacramento. What matters to me and you is that the site is exactly what the briefing says it is. Not whatever fucking ideas you're getting. This is the downside of working with young people. It's good that you bring me more than I asked, but you have to learn to monitor what comes out of your fucking mouth and learn when to shut the fuck up."

"I understand," I muttered, feeling like a scolded child, which, technically, I was.

"Good. Memorize that shit, 'cause it can very well get you flatlined in this line of work," he said. "Now, there is a bit more I want to add myself. The briefing understates the digital side of things. Client's netrunner consultants classified the Chimera's own cyberdefense as significantly above current-generation baseline, meaning that if Militech built the platform's ICE at that level, they built its documentation vault at the same level or higher. My read is that the architecture is going to be a fortress, and my read on my read is that we should assume worse and be pleasantly surprised."

"Understood," I nodded.

"There's a second problem," he said, leaning back. "Sacramento spooked the money, and right now every corp with an investment position in Pacifica started pulling assets the second word began to spread yesterday. They're recalling whatever personnel were still maintaining a presence down there."

"That was fast," I said.

"That's Night City, kid. You'll understand when your balls drop," Dino said as he put his hands behind his head. "Money doesn't have loyalty, choom. The corpos pulling out created a vacuum, and the vacuum filled in under twenty-four hours. Ever since the Pacifica project was put on pause, there have been new crews, scavs, and other opportunistic bastards that moved in to claim a new home. So when you go down there tonight, you're walking into an empty basement full of people who have been setting up and may be clashing with those who arrived yesterday. There's no word on established territory, just that they're all competing for the same scrap. You up for it?"

I thought about it for a few seconds before asking, "What's the payout?"

"That's a fair question," Dino grinned. "I'd have been disappointed if you didn't ask."

"So?" I asked.

"Base pay is eight hundred thousand," Dino said. "Split three ways between you, Moth, and Torque. That's two hundred and sixty-six thousand and change for each of you. For a single night's work."

My heart skipped a beat at the number, but I wasn't surprised, especially since I had made two hundred grand with Dino in the last gig we pulled.

"Any space for bonuses?" I asked.

Dino shrugged. "Depends entirely on what you bring back."

I nodded at his answer. "So, when do we leave?"

---

Moth met us at the edge of the Pacifica development zone at eleven that night. They had slipped out of the shadows of a half-built parking structure without making a sound, wearing optical camo emitters at the shoulders and hips. A compact sidearm was holstered at the small of their back.

"You're both late," Moth said.

"We're four minutes early," Torque argued.

"You're late," Moth repeated. "I take into account the walk as well."

Torque did not argue with that response.

He was carrying the same suppressed Tsunami Kyubi he had used in the last gig, strapped across his chest on a two-point sling. He was also wearing the same dark tactical jacket and ballistic vest. His eyes swiveled back and forth, scanning the perimeter as he stepped out of the van.

"Entry point is about one hundred and eighty meters south," Moth said as they signaled for us to follow. "There is a service stairwell that leads into the sub-basement of the never-opened retail complex. As far as I know, it's unlocked since the whole zone's been in evacuation mode since yesterday, and I doubt anybody was thinking about locking service doors on the way out.

"Any idea on who had access to the place?" I asked.

"Petrochem, Kang Tao, Zetatech, and about half a dozen private equity outfits nobody's ever heard of," Torque was the one to reply this time.

"If I were to guess, they burned billions yesterday," I said.

"At the very least," Torque agreed.

Unlike the rest of Night City, Pacifica had half-built towers that rose in black silhouettes against a sky painted with the faint hues of all the holo-ads running in the rest of the city. Pacifica had all the infrastructure to match as well, with functional streetlights and project floodlamps on the tops of the tower cranes still on, their corpo branding still lit on the sides of the half-completed structures.

But for some reason, it all felt wrong. In a place that should be crawling with scavs and other gangers or crews, the lights were on, but nobody seemed to be home.

Half-completed towers rose around us, their upper floors still unfinished with scaffolding freshly bolted on, and tarps still hanging where the day-shift crews had left them yesterday afternoon. There were site trailers with their doors open, a stack of rebar bundles on a pallet, and concrete mixers with their load probably beginning to set by now, and the wind coming in off the ocean smelled like salt and drying concrete.

"This is fucking weird," I said quietly.

"No kidding," Torque agreed.

Moth led the way without hesitating. We went down a service alley between two active construction sites, past a stack of construction materials and a stripped-down forklift somebody had abandoned mid-load, through a temporary chain-link fence that had been erected to separate the residential-tower work zone from the retail complex build/ We also went across an open plaza, which left us exposed for a what felt like a long time, but thankfully nothing shot at us.

However, not getting shot at didn't mean that we were in the clear or that nothing was watching us. Scavs had moved into this place in the last twenty-four hours, and they were still figuring out where the good scores were. That meant that they weren't set up in defensive perimeters yet, but it also meant they were skittish, jumpy, and prone to shooting first at anything they couldn't recognize.

Moth checked the door once we reached the service stairwell before cracking it open and listening for a bit. They then held up two fingers, pointed at their ear, and moved their hands to show someone talking, which probably meant they had heard voices.

For maybe thirty seconds, the three of us stood in a dead-still triangle beside the doorway while I was able to pick up what Moth had overheard. There were two voices, and both of them were male. They sounded like they were arguing about something in Russian. The voices slowly got closer to our location before they started to go further as the two men appeared to have passed us.

Moth waited another twenty seconds after the voices faded before they pulled the door open the rest of the way.

"That's going to happen a lot down there," Moth said quietly. "This whole place is full of new crews, who are noisy. Thankfully, noisy is good for us if we don't get caught inside their sight lines, and very bad for us if we do. So, if I stop, you stop. If I signal, you comply. If I whisper, you whisper back once, not twice."

"Understood," Torque said.

"Understood," I nodded, and we went in. 

The stairwell descended in a tight spiral. Each level was marked with construction stencils that Militech's site crews had spray-painted in bright orange to keep the sub-basement work zones straight.

SUB-1.

SUB-2.

SUB-3.

SUB-4. 

Each landing had construction materials stacked against the walls. Apparently, Sub-4 was where the finish work was underway. Or had been. I scanned the state of the level as we stepped off the landing. It had framed corridors with electrical rough-in complete, plumbing pipes stubbed out and capped for eventual fixture install, and cable runs partially pulled through the overhead lights.

Things were pretty light for a little while, but it didn't really take long for us to run into another crew who was on Sub-3. I had sent out a ping quickhack to scout our surroundings and ended up tagging seven people about twenty meters away through the concrete. As we got closer, I was able to overhear them talking in a mix of Russian and English, which I was able to understand because I still had that translating program Sasha had given me. The gist of their conversation was about who got to keep a set of Kang Tao surveying equipment they'd apparently hauled up from one of the corpo staging trailers.

"Stop," Moth said through our comms as they signaled for us to halt by putting up their hand. Torque and I stopped moving and tried to blend as best as we could against the wall, which wasn't all that well since I was six foot six, and he was six foot five. I sent out another Ping to confirm the count, and then a third to a different piece of tech, which pinged five new signatures drawing closer along the corridor perpendicular to this crew's camp.

"We have five more joining the party," I said through our comms as I held up my hand pointed in the direction of the new ping.

"Let's wait and see what happens before doing anything," Torque said as he readied his rifle.

We waited while the new variables got closer to the camp, and once they did, an argument broke out, and demands flew back and forth about which territory each crew was claiming, and some threats about the Kang Tao equipment. Then a louder voice from somebody in the camp told the newcomers to walk unless they wanted to get flatlined.

There was a tense moment of silence before the newcomers walked away from the original seven. I sent out another ping, and we waited until they were out of my scanning range, which was 35 meters.

"Alright, Torque, if you would," Moth said.

Torque moved past us without a word. I watched as his back started to brighten, and I knew that he was about to activate his Sandy, so I activated my Kerenzikov. And fuck me, did Torque make that fucker that almost killed me look slow. Even with my Kerenzikov active, I was only able to see the afterimages Torque had left behind, every single one of the seven unlucky souls that happened to be in our path.

About two seconds later, Torque was leaning on the crate containing the Kang Tao equipment these guys wanted as all seven of their bodies dropped like marionettes with their strings cut while their frontal lobes exploded since Torque had shot them all in the back of the head. Smoke escaped his suppressed rifle's barrel, and blood started to seep out of their cratered skulls.

"Fucking Nova," I whispered. I definitely had to get my own Sandy installed one of these days.

"What are you ladies waiting for?" Torque asked. "An invitation or something?"

"That was fast," I said.

"Yeah, well, we didn't come here to dilly dally," Torque said. "We've got a job to do. Their unluckiness and stupidity got them killed."

"Fair enough," I nodded as I took another look at the dead bodies. The way their brains were barely even contained in what remained of their heads reminded me of Jax's suicide and soured my mood momentarily. But Torque was right. We had come here to do a job, and death was something unavoidable in our line of work. If I didn't want to end up like these poor fuckers, I needed to up my chrome, and to do that, I had to make more eddies.

We moved and ended up coming up on a second crew who had rigged an improvised trip in their corridor, using a chemical sensor cobbled together from stolen construction equipment that they'd wired into a hand-held detonator. I quickly turned the trap friendly by corrupting its detection logic just enough to make it read us as ambient background, and Torque moved through it and fully deactivated it. Apparently he had experience disarming explosive devices, and this was just up that alley.

After that, I sent a couple of Sonar Shock and Reboot Optics quickhacks to the crew of six. Moth threw one of their throwing knives at one, striking him between the eyes, before slitting the throat of the woman who was standing next to him. At the same time, I stacked two Synapse Burnout quickhacks on one of them while Torque took care of the other three. He then went the extra mile and put an extra two bullets in each one of their heads.

I raised an eyebrow as I looked at him, blood splattered all over his jacket.

"What?" he asked. "Ammo is cheap. Better to make sure they're dead than to have them stand up and shoot you in the ass."

"I'm not complaining," I said while raising my hands. "It's just... couldn't you have done that without painting yourself like a piece of modern art?"

My question made him chuckle and shake his head.

"Alright, let's stop wasting time," he said just as Moth finished retrieving their throwing knife from the one ganger's head.

Moth took the lead once again, and it didn't take long for us to come across a third group in a corridor junction that we couldn't bypass. They were another six people spread across a rough defensive perimeter, and one of them was clearly a netrunner because I could pick up their subnet activity.

"They're waiting for a rival crew," Moth said through our comms. "That's why they set up like that. Probably a rival crew wanted the same area, but they managed to get here first, and now they're guarding it."

"Can't we just go around?" Torque asked.

"Not without adding forty minutes," Moth said while shaking their head.

"I don't like fighting combatants that are waiting for an attack," Torque said through the comms while cracking his neck. "But I guess we'll just have to go through them."

Torque was right. Fighting a prepared group would leave us at a big disadvantage, and they also had a netrunner. If I engaged their netrunner and lost, we were in an open firefight with six chooms in a defensive position, and if I engaged their netrunner and won, the other five would notice their runner going down and the firefight would still happen, just with better odds.

So I could only try to improvise a third option. The art of distraction. 

I had noticed that there was an Access Point just a couple of meters back, so we retreated a bit, and I plugged myself into it, piggybacking off it to tap into the building's power grid, which was still live since nobody had bothered cutting it before pulling out. I rerouted a segment of the corridor lighting three sections away and killed the overhead panels in the wrong sequence, then triggered a false alert in a network node that would read, to a paranoid crew waiting for rivals, as somebody actively splicing into the local grid.

I had already disconnected myself from the Access Point by the time their netrunner tagged it and called it out to the rest of the crew. Two of them peeled off to check, leaving only four behind and turning the odds in our favor.

Moth snuck up to the netrunner using their optical camouflage, and I sent a Sonic Shock quickhack to the other three. As soon as my quickhack landed, Moth thrust two knives into the back of the neck of the netrunner and pushed them in opposite directions, crossing their arms and effectively decapitating the netrunner while Torque handled the rest with a hail of bullets. 

Two of the men Torque attacked had subdermal armor, so although they were injured, they weren't dead. They reached for their weapons, but I had already activated my Kerenzikov and sent a stack of three Overheat quickhacks to both of them, setting them on fire from the inside out. Doing so gave me a quickly fleeting dull headache where my Neural Link was, and I reached to touch the location. It was noticeably warmer than the rest of my head, which meant that I was starting to push it a bit. Sure, I could still keep on going without much strain, but I needed to be in my best shape to sift through all of the files I had to go through.

We moved through the junction while I sent out a Ping. I noticed that the two who'd peeled off were coming back at a jog, and Moth pulled us into a temporary storage alcove right before they turned the corner, and we waited in the dark while they walked past us and they found their chooms flatlined. Before they could even react, Torque had put four bullets in the back of each of their skulls, allowing them to be united with their chooms in life and in death.

We kept moving forward while Moth guided us. They moved through the half-finished sub-basements as if they knew the floor plans like the back of their own hand, possessing some innate sense of subterranean geography that I did not have a word for. We never had to backtrack or decide as a group which route we were going to take. They knew which corridors were dead ends and which ones connected through to the next section, and they took us on a route that avoided as many people as possible.

"How do you know this place so well?" I asked in a hushed voice while Torque went to check one of the corridors out.

"I don't," Moth said.

"You're telling me you've never been down here?" I asked in disbelief.

"No," Moth said flatly.

"Then how the fuck are you doing this?" I asked.

Moth was quiet for a moment before answering.

"Buildings have grammar," Moth said. "Militech built Pacifica to a standard commercial spec. Once you know the specs, you are also privy to the building, and every Militech-led corpo development in the last twenty years has done the same thing over and over again, and I have studied them all. Every corporation builds the same three or four floor plans, only hiring different architects to disguise them. But once you learn the plans, you can navigate anything built by a corporation without ever setting foot inside it first."

"You've studied Militech commercial architecture?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. "What are you, a corpo?"

"I used to be," Moth said. "During my previous form of employment, I had climbed fairly high up the corporate ladder. But a sudden shake-up in upper management made someone feel as if blood needed to be needlessly spilled for the altar of corporate efficiency. Unfortunately for me, I had been chosen as its sacrificial lamb."

"Oh, shit," I gasped. "And it's clear you survived everything thrown at you."

"Not quite," Moth said as they slipped off the gloves they had on, showing a pair of mechanical hands. "Such attempts on my life left my hands and facial features... rather undisposed. I scraped up all I had to replace what I could. I get a handful more payouts like the one for this gig, and in no time I shall be able to come to the light as a changed man, though I may need to continue pulling the strings from behind a veil."

"Well, that's fucking Nova." I chuckled. "What are you going to do? Become a fixer, maybe start your own corporation or something?"

"Hmm," Moth hummed. "A fixer does sound like quite a way to come back into the spotlight without actually being seen. But for that I'd have to change my handle. After all, I doubt anyone would want to work for a fixer named Moth."

I nodded. He was right. No one would want to work for someone with such a shit name.

"Well, you got a story behind your, err, hands," I said. "And you obviously want to keep your identity secret since you have a voice modulator and everything. Talking about that, this is just a personal curiosity of mine, but what does your real voice sound like?"

"Now you are asking one too many questions," Moth shook his head.

"Fair enough," I said, knowing that I was pushing it a bit.

"Hands..." I heard Moth whisper as Torque was making his way back to us. "A puppeteer, controlling from the shadows... Hands does have a nice ring to it."

As soon as Torque reached us, our conversation was officially over, and we kept moving, eventually making it to the supposed observation post. However, as soon as we arrived in what was supposed to have been abandoned for quite a long time before the developments had been stopped, it felt wrong.

What started as a cold feeling in my stomach was slowly getting considerably worse with every step we took. The corridor leading to the server room was hidden very well and finished with painted walls, a sealed floor, overhead lighting that lit up as we walked, and a proper door with a proper frame.

Whoever built it had buried themselves in the earliest phases of Militech's excavation, and then let Militech construct the rest of Pacifica around them like a shell. This was not what "presumed inactive" looked like.

Moth checked the door, and it opened to a server room that was maybe ten meters by ten, climate-controlled, and populated by multiple full-height server racks running in an active state. The LED status indicators were also live while the cooling system operated and the ambient temperature maintained itself at a cool fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

Torque stopped three steps inside the door and looked at the walls, the paint job, and the finish work on the ceiling. The longer he looked, the more the expression on his face shifted into heightened alertness that reinforced my gut feeling. This was very bad news.

"This place isn't Militech-owned," he said. "And it most definitely is not inactive. There's no dust accumulation anywhere."

The cold feeling in my stomach got significantly colder. I noticed a wall-mounted access station with a physical interface panel and a dormant screen, and approached it, bringing it out of standby with a manual keystroke. The screen lit up as a golden line traced the outer edge of a pointed shield, followed by geometric latitude and longitude grids inside the crest that interlocked to build a wireframe globe. The Roman numerals "MCMXCI" appeared at the bottom point of the badge, and the words VOS VIDEMUS loaded beneath the main banner as a solid horizontal band cut directly through the center of the sphere with block lettering illuminating across the band to spell...

"NetWatch."

AN: Anyone wanna guess who Moth will become?