2078: Highriders - Chapter 18 (Patreon)

“How about this?”

A glance at Lucy’s avatar showed her holding a string of code for me to examine.

We were both in a virtu hosted on one of her own servers in Tycho. An environment that was a little slice of paradise, an island on an endless ocean with picturesque beaches, clear skies and a blazing sun overhead. Waves were constantly crashing and hissing nearby in a hypnotic rhythm. Our wooden lounge chairs were right next to each other, a few feet away from the furthest point the waves reached, with a single large umbrella hovering over us.

I reached out to the code and let it hover in front of me, even though I had already comprehended it.

“That could work,” I declared. “However, you need to adjust these points to account for low resource availability. The program might work on our high end ‘decks, but if this has to go into low-tier decks, it’ll spike CPU load or even lead to outright crashes.”

She made a grunt of frustration, her hands rapidly working the virtu-keyboard hovering in front of her. It was a full mechanical model that was hovering comfortably in mid-air. The constant clatter and clacking of the keys was very anachronistic.

We were both working on a joint project that I had pitched to her a few days after my return to TC.

A number of my anti-AI programs had found themselves crashing into dev hell and after spending a full day looking at the code and getting nowhere, I realized I needed a fresh perspective.

Enter Lucy, who I contracted on a small side gig to take a look at the problem. I chose just one program, which I called Rogue Reaver, for her to troubleshoot.

Reaver’s goal was to hijack a Wild AIs subsystems, which all of them still had to some degree of variance, and pit them against the core engram of the AI. It would also neatly rob the AI of control of any meatspace assets it was puppeting. 

The problem I had was that Reaver had to be also usable by a bog-standard street ‘runner working a reasonably strong cyberdeck. It was all fine and well that I armed myself to the teeth for the coming cyberspace war, but it didn’t help when I was the only one who could fight. Even if Alt’s plan worked and we got thousands of ‘runners to somehow cross the Rubicon to transform themselves into Post Humans, they would need ‘guns’ they could pick up and use.

Naturally, I didn’t tell Lucy any of the full scope of my intentions, merely that I needed a hack that could be deployed against the ‘limited’ AI that was starting to find its way into widespread use.

I was also throwing limitations at her that would naturally be a problem or a variety of issues that could be encountered, such as limited hardware environments.

An incoming holocall from Rogue chose that moment to ping on my outer firewalls.

I routed it properly so that it wouldn’t touch the local server resources and accepted the call, keeping my own avatar silent.

“V. Got a possible gig in your neck of the woods.”

“Really?” I asked in surprise.

“Your stunt in orbit and the marketing you gave yourself there has finally made an impact it seems. It wouldn’t take much for well connected folks to discover that I was your fixer and that we are now biz partners. Now, the client is Harlan Hensley.”

“Vice-President of Petrochem’s North American division, that Hensley?” I asked with astonishment.

“Old Ironclad himself,” Rogue nodded with a satisfied grin. The prospect of cultivating such a high profile contact probably had her tits perked all the way up and I would be lying if the thought wasn’t getting to my own ladies.

Harlan ‘Ironclad’ Hensley, so called because he had a rep that stretched back before the Time of the Red. He made legally airtight deals with extremely harsh penalties that rivals rarely tried to breach or renegotiate them. An iron will didn’t begin to describe him, as he once shut down a regional CHOOH2 pipeline for three days to force a local corp into submission - it cost millions to do, but he won every concession in the subsequent contract negotiations. The man had also survived dozens of assassination attempts over a career that stretched seventy years and saw no signs of slowing down. He was also considered the heir to Petrochem’s CHOOH2 empire when the current CEO retired.

“He contacted me personally, which is in itself huge. As he usually has an entire staff of lackeys that handles the minutia of his business.”

“All right, consider me very interested. A man like that, with his own private army and fuels the contracts that keep half the NUSA running, coming to us for a gig. This must be good.”

“Oh it is, kid. The gig is a rescue op for Aria Hensley, his one and only daughter. She’s the classic 1% heiress. Grew up in corporate luxury towers, went to the best schools, the best everything. Finally, she got bored of the excess. Managed to ditch all her security and minders, bolted for a destination in Earth-Luna space.”

Rogue began to stream through a data packet, which I quarantined and opened. It showed another Stanford Torus design, but much larger, at 1.8km in diameter, which could conceivably hold up to 10k people quite comfortably.

“You’re looking at Elysium Station, her destination. Sits in a nice high polar orbit around Earth. A place for elites who think the Crystal Palace is a bit too crowded and has too many rules. It belongs to Magnus Kane, a reclusive billionaire who transformed his inherited orbital scrapyard into a personal kingdom.”

I winced as I began to join the dots. This was never a recipe for anything good. I’d heard that stations like this existed in LEO. Places where the one in charge could literally do anything they wanted, because their word was law.

“It’s a place that’s marketed by word of mouth among the elite as Earth’s ultimate escape. What they don’t say is that Kane enforces mandatory cybernetic ‘loyalty upgrades’ to the residents of Elysium. There’s gladiatorial entertainment for amusement, cult-like devotion rituals and zero-tolerance for dissent. Any offenders get spaced or even worse, are recycled for parts.”

I shook my head, “Seriously, didn't Aria do her research?”

Rogue shrugged, “Kane knows that information security is king. Nothing she found sent up red flags. She was dazzled by fake virtus of the elite parties and unrestricted access. Reality hit hard when she arrived.”

“Let me guess, she thought she was a big fish in the pond, only to find a bigger fish with teeth.”

“That about sums it up. No matter how rich she was or how powerful her daddy is. Up there she found herself at the bottom of the totem pole. Now Kane is also using her as leverage against Petrochem’s fuel shipments. Harlan wants her extracted quietly. No corporate fingerprints, no bad press. You need to get in, pull Aria out alive and vanish before Kane’s enforcers even know something’s wrong.”

“What’s he offering?”

“250k eddies base, with a 50k bonus if you can keep this quiet. It’s not great considering the stakes, but being in Hensley’s good books and as a contact is way more valuable.”

“Agreed,” I said with emphasis. “Did he tell you how he managed to find Aria in the first place? If Kane knows I’m coming, then I might as well show up guns blazing in my shiny new space ship.”

Rogue looked at me with incredulous eyes before laughing, “Ah, of course. Should’ve figured that El Capitán’s right hand woman would get herself some space wheels before long. Yes, he did mention using a number of elite runners on Petrochem’s black payroll to track her down. For what it’s worth, he doesn’t think they were made and you should have the element of surprise.”

“Then I’ll make sure to plan for a hostile reception as well. Send me all the specifics and make sure that Nix verifies as well.”

“V…” she gave me an insulted look.

“Just saying, I’ll be in touch.”

I hung up the call and resync’d my avatar in Lucy’s little paradise. “I have to go and prep for a new gig.”

“Sure, sure,” she waved non-chalantly, her concentration deep into her code, her virtual fingers clattering very quickly as she worked to untangle it. “I should have this done in two days at least.”

“Not in a real hurry.”

“I know, but I like setting deadlines for myself. It pushes me to be creative in problem solving.”

“See ya.”

In a heartbeat I was outside her server back in Luna cyberspace. I sent out stealth daemons and crawlers to find everything I could on Elysium station, rumors, BBS feeds, unsubstantiated or not, on what really happens there on the day-to-day. Most of it would be junk, but I couldn’t dismiss the notion that I would find a golden nugget of truth, that might be the difference between life and death.

The full data package on the gig from Rogue arrived, which I quickly grabbed and gobbled up before taking another step back, leaving cyberspace and opening my Gemini’s eyes in meatspace.

A quick call to Johnny, who was on Kaori watching duty, “Got a big gig, sending the deets to you.”

“Really gonna need me on this?” he asked in a tone I knew all too well.

“No, especially since we’re still on contract to protect Kaori.”

“Then I’ll say good luck, V.”

“You’re UV bathing nude outside Mitsubishi HQ again, aren’t you?”

“I really miss the Mediterranean beaches V,” I could hear the smile in his voice.

“Fine, I can take a hint, first opportunity, I’ll take us straight to Monte Carlo in the Wraith.”

“Monte Carlo? Pffft. Milos, Greece is where you wanna go, V. Trust this rockerboy.”

“Fine. Milos it is.”

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I set the wheels in motion with the Starjacks to get the Wraith ready for flight, only to receive word back that it would take at least thirty hours to get it put back together properly.

There wasn’t any time crunch on the gig. Nothing that Hensley had sent or Rogue had dug up showed that Aria was in any immediate danger. Kane needed her alive and able to send verifiable proof of that to her father.

It did give me plenty of time for research and prep, especially on the leader of Elysium station.

Magnus Kane wasn’t born into his excess.

He was born in 2038 into a salvage family working for a mid-tier ESA subsidiary called Kane Orbital Salvage & Reclamation. A time which saw a boom in companies that had to clean up the orbital debris in the wake of the 4th Corporate War. By the mid-2050s the clean up was winding down and the eddies flowed away. In 2058, he inherited what had become a derelict orbital junkyard in LEO after his parents died in a micrometeor ‘accident’.

The reporting and data retention during those years was naturally quite bad, but I managed to trace a number of old news articles floating deep in Earth cyberspace. The language and reading between the lines told me one thing - the accident was highly suspect.

When Kane took over, he had a failing depot cluttered with 4th Corpo War debris; Arasaka satellites, Millitech fighter wrecks and pre-Collapse probes. At first it looked like he would lose his orbital slot entirely, then he began pulling technological gold. He pioneered dumb AI controlled drones that could detect, inspect and hack derelict black boxes and extract proprietary tech that had been lost by the Corps. Then went on to sell those scrubbed components and tech on the black market. Rogue had been one of his customers for a while and their dealings was one of the primary sources of info I could find.

Kane’s real windfall came in 2062 when he recovered an intact Militech AV-82 gunship, which had the prototype railgun tech which was used in every Tech weapon of the current era. He managed to auction that off for a nine figure payday and he was set to make his own dreams a reality.

He took that money and leveraged it to exploit a second ‘discovery’ he had made. A near-Earth asteroid that was particularly rich in platinum group metals. Whether he had actually found it through exploration or just happened to get lucky in salvaging data from lost Corpo black boxes was an academic distinction. He was rich enough and had enough leverage to buy his company’s independence from the ESA before he announced the asteroid’s discovery. By the time the rest of the world had found out, his autonomous void digger craft were already busy digging on the NEA.  

I found a number of reports on certain politicians and corpos arguing that KOSR should just be ‘corporatized’ to the ESA anyway. Notions that died when a fair number of them had inconvenient ‘accidents’, including suicides and scandals that destroyed careers.

It was classic early Corpo power moves from someone who could pay for the best to make problems go away.

For nearly seven years, he mined the asteroid which was named Chrysidion - a non-subtle reference to gold in Greek, which seemed to be a theme with Kane.

By 2070 it was estimated that nearly 140 billion eddies worth of platinum had been pulled out, but Kane had seemingly had enough of mining. He kept final ownership of Chrysidion, but began giving out mining licenses to any corp who could afford it. ESA paid top eddie to get first dibs and had kept doing so till current day with no sign that would change.

Kane used his vast wealth to utterly transform his scrapyard into a state of the art Torus style station and even buy a completely new orbit to park it in.

He pivoted to his interests and transformed the station into his own version of the Greek afterlife. Every image of the interior I could scrounge up showed idyllic luxury, parties that lasted for weeks and even full blown swimming pools. The ‘gladiator’ matches were presented as non-lethal voluntary contests and fun duels, two people beating up on each other in zero g with softened staffs.

Just looking at all of it, I began to see how Aria was lured here.

It was all just covering for the darkness beneath, however.

Butcher managed to find an exterior image satellite shot of Elysium station that was taken in 2074, which claimed to show over 300 spaced bodies floating steadily away.

It was purged very successfully from Earth cyberspace, but not completely from Luna. The techniques used had the digital fingerprint of NetWatch on the redactions.

Which explained why Kane was sitting pretty in his little orbital paradise despite the dark undercurrents running through it. Even though some of his victims were like Aria, nominally very powerful, but he knew just how far he could push and how to twist it to his own advantage.

Technically, Hensley could call up a Petrochem armed division and wipe out Elysium in less than an hour. He could hire enough spacelift from OA to make it happen, but the ESA and other corpos would cry foul immediately. No corps wanted to return to what space was after the 4th Corpo War. That status quo was formalized but it just pushed space conflict into black ops territory.

It wouldn’t help, Aria and who knows how many one percenters would die in the crossfire or when Kane pushed a killswitch button on his loyalty cyberware.

That there could be predators who feasted on the elite of humanity was a rather astonishing notion, especially if that predator was someone who had gone from rags to riches - a rare story in this day and age.

I swiped away dozens of data feeds in front of me and leaned back on my recliner, hands behind my head and staring into the data pool of my digital fortress.

“Butcher, we need to talk about the logistics of this rescue. If we assume the worst case scenario regarding Aria, we’ll need to be able to perform field surgery on her to remove a loyalty implant without killing her. I’m not a Ripperdoc.”

He manifested his avatar next to me, “Your technical skills will take you halfway in this regard and there are ripperdoc skill chips.”

I nodded, but the problem with them was that they were rote and didn’t cover the nuances in biology that could exist from person to person.

“Makes me wish that I could just grab Vic-”

I stopped myself as an idea hit me.

A thought brought up the holocall interface and it began chiming.

Vic appeared in a holo after a few seconds, “Hey V, if you’re calling about my progress-”

“No, I know it’ll take as long as it needs to. I’m not here to crack the whip. Your clinic is now set up with remote surgery uplinks, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, NC law made it mandatory last year. Why?”

“I have a gig that’s going to need a good ripperdoc in the field. Now I’m not going to drag you all the way up into orbit, but I’m going to need your skill with me nevertheless.”

He scratched his chin in thought, “You’re thinking about taking a mech with you, then I link to it remotely?”

“No, the gig has stealth requirements that make that impractical. You need to send me a list of every tool you’d need for a field surgery on an implant that might even be in the brain, but it must all fit within a space of about 6000 cubic centimeters.”

He rubbed his face wearily and blew out a breath, “You don’t ask for much do you? All right, how long do I have and how much are you paying?”

“I launch from Luna in 26 hours. You’ll get 40k for doing this”

“That’s more than long enough for me to work something out and that fee is more than generous.”

“I need the best, Vic,” I smiled widely.

“Yeah, yeah, no need to inflate the ego,” he waved me off. “Now let me finish my lunch, I have patients to see.”

“See ya, Vic.”

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By the end of the day I had managed to negotiate with Gakulu for the reorientation of a highrider satellite with good enough optics to give me a real time view of Elysium Station.

“Careful of that place, V,” he handed over the shard with the discretionary authorizations for the satellite. “We don’t have any people officially on the station, but rumors have a way of flowing through the void.”

Translation, they have an unofficial presence somehow that is reporting back to the Highrider Confederation. Their spy is too valuable to possibly burn just for me.   

“Any tips?” I asked, slotting the shard into my free neuroport.

He rode back in his office chair and rested his hands on his stomach in thought, “If you have to fight, be prepared for close quarter engagement. Kane forbids any kinetic weapons on board. He’s the only one who has them. Station security are mostly borgs with mantis blades. His personal guard is a crack team of seven netrunners in exosuits, whilst he has a duo of net dwellers that keep the station’s cyberspace secure. The interior can be a fortress at a moment’s notice, with turrets that drop out of ceilings and cover popping up from the floor. He has overrides in place to vent any part of that station that he wants to.”

“So full home field advantage.”

“Do not let it come to that, V,” he said, his eyes blazing at me with intensity. “Kane is alive and Elysium in one piece because he has quietly gained hostages from the one percenters. Anyone that fucks up and causes mass casualties among that crowd is going to have an army of assassins, mercs and black ops dropping on their heads in retribution.”

“Got it,” I nodded.

“Do you?” Gakulu asked with a glare. “Have you considered not just the risks of failure, but in this case, the risks of success?”

It took me a few moments to see his point. “I’ll have rescued a one percenter. If it gets out that I did it, I’ll have the rest of that crowd beating down my door to pull it off again for their loved ones and hostages. They won’t take no for an answer.”

“Precisely. Whoever your client is, you must somehow gain the leverage to keep his mouth shut and if not, know immediately when he doesn’t.” He sighed wearily and looked at me with pursed lips. “I really don’t want you to take this gig, V. Any entanglement with Kane and Elysium has potential to jeopardize our joint projects - because you’ll be dead or worse, enslaved to that umsunu wakho (cunt).”

“Gakulu-”

He held up his hands in surrender, “A vain hope, I know. In the interests of seeing you succeed, you’ll have the full support of the Starjacks, free of charge. Name what you need and we’ll see it done.”

“The best ripperdoc instruments, I’ll have a list shortly. Then a way to get someone who doesn’t have a vac suit through at least a few kilometers of hard vacuum and survive.”

“I assume you don’t have the space to carry a suit with you?”

“No. I’m assuming that Elysium has the latest in detection?”

“That is a safe assumption,” he confirmed.

“Then I need as little profile and mass as possible.”

“There is a minimalist cyberware we have been working on, a dermal weave that can do the work of maintaining pressure of the body.”

“Any problems with it?”

“It’s experimental, the radiative temperature regulation isn’t what it should be. Stay too long with your target in space, they’ll end up being cooked to death in their own body heat.”

“Unless, I install a blood pump into myself, hook them up, and use my own radiative capacity for us both.”

He looked wearily at me, “That is best consulted with Njeri.” 

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Johnny grumbled as he quickly got dressed, his optics zooming in to watch a distant Kaori leaving Mitsubishi HQ.

This was off-routine for her and none of the spy daemons orbiting her digital footprint in cyberspace had picked up on anything that could be a problem.

He quickly jumped off the side of the building, letting weak lunar grav pull him down and pulsing his leg cyberware once to land comfortably.

A quick few bunny hops had him out of alleyway and he engaged his magboots to merge with street level pedestrian flow.

He connected to the small surveillance drones V had seeded throughout the area and directed one to hover two dozen feet directly above Kaori. They were barely larger than a fist, with four small frictionless, silent rotors and even had a basic smart paint system that let them blend into the view of the high sublunar ceiling.

She was wearing a jacket over her corpo bodysuit that at least marked her as a Starjack and under the Gakulu workgroup’s direct protection. Yet after a few minutes, it became clear she was walking into a part of the lowest floor of TC where that might not be a very effective shield for trouble.

It was simply called the Neon District.

A place that in Johnny’s experience, every city had some variation of. A place that was a bazaar, outdoor market and on the surface was very civilized, but it just required a slight scratch to reveal the dark underbelly. Every stall or shop was emblazoned with neon light signage, usually using holographics, but every so often there were actual physical lights doing the job. The holo graffiti on the walls indicated it was practically Driftkin central.

What the fuck are you doing, Doc? He thought in irritation.

He called on more drones, spreading a grid of them overhead and giving him full overwatch for most of the district.

It didn’t take long before he spotted people turning Kaori’s direction.

The glances weren’t exactly hostile, but these weren’t happy people to find an obvious corpo under Starjack colors walking amongst them.

Johnny sped up his walk to the limit his magboots could properly engage, readying a slew of quickhacks and his cyberware for combat.

Kaori paused, seemingly blasé about the looks thrown her way, before ducking into an alley between an electronics shop and a fast food joint.

There was someone waiting for her.

He had to reposition a drone to get a better angle, and let the TC police database go to work.

Highrider, tall, skinny, dusky skin, shaved head and scarring around the forehead. His tats marked him as Driftkin and he only wore shorts and a rig harness, along with the ubiquitous vac collar. His name was Uuka Nomlanga, and according to the TCP was a known courier, who didn’t limit himself to legal deliveries.

He greeted Kaori with a smile.

And a conversation ensued which Johnny couldn’t directly hear. V was still working on squeezing a directional mic into the design and he couldn’t get a lower angle for lip reading without risking the drone going too low and being spotted.

So he had to content himself with blending in as much as he could, which wasn’t saying much as he also began getting looks from the locals.

He stopped in front of a street vendor and ordered some food that looked quite good - a synthmeat wrap with a barbeque flavor.

He stood off to the side and tucked in, playing the part of someone that just wanted some grub. If that someone was also an obvious Earther, who also had Starjack logos on a Samurai half-jacket, with a black skinsuit underneath.

For a few minutes, Kaori and Uuka had a seemingly amiable discussion, then they began trading shards and slotting them into portable readers.

Info trading?

Possibly, but he really hoped, whatever it was, that it wouldn’t get her in hot water with her own corp.

He was about three quarters of the way through his wrap, when a drone surveillance algorithm threw up a red flag.

Five highriders, obvious driftkins; vac collars, tats, minimal clothing, were approaching from sixty meters away, heading towards the other end of the alley.

The red flag that the drone had picked up; it was not alone up there anymore. Four optically cloaked heavier drones were shadowing these driftkin in an overwatch formation. V’s drones had seen through the cloaks via thermal emissions disturbing the air and the model was an old Militech suitcase drone, which could be potentially armed.

The driftkin drones were keeping a lower altitude and had initiated no action against V’s drones thus far, nor that they had been detected. She had made them to be as stealthy as possible, with RAM coating.

Whatever was happening, Johnny could feel the trouble coming in his gut.

He stuffed the last bit of food in his mouth and casually strode off for the next alleyway.

Out of immediate sight, he disengaged mag boots, crouched low and jumped.

With the low buildings of the district, he didn’t even need to use a mid-air thrust from his legs to cover the 14 meters to the edge of the roof.

He grabbed hold and vaulted fluidly, letting his mag boots lock onto the surface.

Once he was sure of his footing, he disengaged and two bunny hops got him to the opposite edge, looking straight down at Kaori and her contact.

A tattoo on the five approaching driftkin matched a gang of known oxygen smugglers and their rigs had a pouch on the hip that definitely had some iron in it.

Their drones gained altitude and it wouldn’t be long until they got a full view of him up on the roof.

‘Nah, fuck this.’

The instant the four driftkin drones hissed into line of sight he blasted them with a razzle dazzle of queued Malfunctions and Short Circuits.

Three died and fizzled out in mid-air, their rotors slowing and clattering onto the roof, where their optic camo began stuttering.

The fourth had stronger firewalls and Johnny had to crash-upload a worm daemon that V had given him, before sending a SC in its wake.

This one died explosively as an internal battery overloaded, rupturing through the internal casing and sending a jet of hissing flame outward as its camo failed utterly.

The five driftkin reacted immediately to their lost overwatch with speed and a professionalism that did not belong in a lunar smuggler gang.

They reached for weapons, producing rail pistols and charged into the alley.

Johnny didn’t hesitate to jump and engage his Sandy, bringing out his own iron from its concealed carry in his right leg.

His first shot was from the hip, which caught the unfortunate ‘driftkin’ straight through the forehead, venting the skull sponge in a splatter of blood behind.

Second and third shots were sent off as lunar gravity began pulling him down properly.

It actually bounced off the dermal weave in the chest of his target.

No fucking way these are some two bit oxy gangers, he thought with a sneer.

His right arm was coming up now and he let off three shots rapidly, which found its way going through the mouth and nose of the fucker. The high angle meant the AP bullets drilled their way inside, through the neck and into the organs below.

His next burst targeted the guy in the rear, who was also about to bring up his pistol for a shot on Kaori.

Johnny’s shots were on point and this time went right through the optics before turning the head into a messy ruin.

The remaining two ‘driftkin’ lifted their gaze upward at a speed that told Johnny he had just been joined in the Sandy club.

They lifted their arms in a blur to shoot straight at his descending form.

He smirked.

Their fingers pulled on the triggers.

The ‘driftkin’ on the left lost a hand as his rail pistol exploded, courtesy of a Weapon Malfunction Johnny had ghosted through their firewalls, whilst the other’s pistol just didn’t shoot at all.

He was professional enough to immediately drop it and reach for a backup weapon, but a three-shot burst through the head ended that ambition.

The hard alleyway surface was approaching fast and he released a burst of thrust from his legs to counter his increasing momentum.

It increased his hang time and let him put the final ‘driftkin’ out of his misery with a single shot.

When he finally touched down, his Sandy had auto-shutdown and internal cooling systems did their thing. He winced as he felt the sharp cold feeling all along his spine.

“Maji ka yo! Horou!?” (Holy shit! Hollow?!) Kaori had lifted her grav carbine in his direction and Uuka had his iron also aimed his way. He queued Malfunctions just in case either of them got trigger happy.

“Easy Doc,” he admonished, rapidly going through a reload of his heavy rail pistol. “It’s over. There were only five undercovers and I’m not seeing their netrunner in cyberspace. Though that isn’t saying much, since I’m not much of a runner myself.”

V would’ve probably caught them and it would’ve been nice to have her on overwatch, but she had already left TC for Alpha-117.

“Andākabā? Nani?” (Undercovers? What?)

He approached the downed bodies, keeping his aim firmly covering them, before carefully pushing one of them over.

A hissing was his only warning and he engaged his Sandy, blurring back to make some space.

All five bodies began… blindly glowing and…

With all the speed he could muster under Sandy, he rushed forward and grabbed Kaori.

In the next two and half seconds of real time he had her at the mouth of the alley and dived to the side.

The explosion shattered through the area in an instant, sending a jet of belching flame and a shockwave outward, channeled by the alley.

Johnny felt his ears auto-scram to prevent the concussion from bursting his eardrums, but he still felt rattled down to the bone.

He looked down and inspected his charge, scanning her for injury.

Blood out of her right ear, she was breathing rapidly in fright, scrapes and bruises that came from his abrupt manhandling of her with Sandy engaged. Nothing too bad that couldn’t be fixed in a few hours by a competent ripper.

“Doc, you okay? Run a self-diagnostic!”

That seemed to snap her out of her daze, she winced. “I’m okay! Just my right ear. Minor concussive injury. Uuko?”

“Sorry doc, you’re my priority. If I had tried, we wouldn’t be talking now.”

Local emergency alarms for a fire alert began wailing and if the bazaar denizens hadn’t already been bunny hopping away, this made them double their pace.

“Come, we need to move. I’m taking you to the black clinic.” He stood and helped her up.

“What? Why? Mitsubishi has their own-”

“No, too predictable. This was a hit on you, doc. And anyone with the gumption and resources to fit people with self-destruct cyberware is not someone you underestimate.”

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The Wraith was on its way.

Now I faced the quandary of whether to get out of the shock tank.

I had ridden out the 11G burn encased in oxygenated fluid and while it had done its job in keeping my skullsponge from squishing itself against the back of my braincase, now I was just left floating in a heavenly comfortable, warm environment. It was like the best jacuzzi, dialed up on Animal steroid juice.

For a long time, I just floated contentedly and basked.

Only then did I muster the will to focus on the Wraith’s systems and check the Trans-Earth injection course I had put the ship on.

I had decided to adjust the inclination during the escape burn, increasing the deltaV requirement somewhat, but saved doing any mid-course correction closer to the target and possibly compromising stealth.

The shock tank then alerted me that it was definitely time to leave because I was approaching the limits of its ability to recycle the oxy-fluid.

I gave the command to drain with reluctance.

Soon I was left floating within the cylindrical tank, only pressurized air around me, feeling very annoyed as I opened my mouth to let my body dump the residual oxy-fluids from my own internal systems in a purge.

I could only be glad I was in a Gemini now, because doing this part as a more standard human would’ve required very painful vomiting and lung purges.

The transparent tank opened, letting me out into the cockpit, before it rolled away into its own stowage position.

An absorbent towel let me get rid of stubborn oxy-fluid residue.

That done, I pushed myself towards the standard pilot seat, debated for a moment whether I should bother getting some clothes on, eventually settling on a basic thong panty and a vac collar.

I now had a boring two day coast phase ahead of me.

The orbit Kane had chosen was clearly intentional, requiring high energy deltaV burns to reach efficiently and still leave enough to make it back home. It was even worse if you launched from Earth, with its relative high gravity making it a very steep hill to climb. Any ship trying to launch into such trajectories would be very visible and every radar on Elysium was probably focused to look specifically for that.

He’d be smart enough to imagine that an intercept launch from Luna was possible, but very unlikely in the post-Unification War world of 2072. That bore out from the passive signals intelligence I had collected using the highrider satellite and so far no specific radar pings had come in the Wraith’s direction from Elysium since the injection burn.

Which was a relief, passive stealth had done its job and I kept the ECM running hot to be ready to counter active searches.

Satisfied I could relax somewhat I turned my focus inward towards cyberspace.

I watched the drone feeds of the attack on Kaori for the 32nd time, trying to parse more data from the isometric angles they had gotten on the five ‘highriders’.

There still wasn’t enough to even run a TCP database search to find their identities and the remains of the drones they had used was a dead end.

Old Militech 2069 models, no longer in active use and with a mix of components made on Luna and Earth by the metallurgy but no serial numbers. Actual dating would take a bit longer and Gakulu was personally leading that investigation, but even he admitted it was likely a waste of time. The drones had probably fallen off the back of a military transport eight years ago and conveniently landed on the black market, making some disgruntled NUSA or Militech grunt’s off the books payday.

More interesting was the visual signature of the sanitation cyberware that had kicked in after Johnny had flatlined the attackers. The explosion was definitely not any standard C6 mix that Militech, Arasaka or anyone else used, at least publicly. It was definitely unique and the residue oxidation compounds that had been found afterward had the highriders scratching their heads.

What was undeniable, was the results.

Nothing.

No ash, no bone fragmentation, not even a scrap of residual cyberware.

It was as if all five had been at ground zero of a nuke, yet contained enough to leave the district and Tycho City still standing.

I froze the top down image showing the bright white light emitted from the bodies, moments before the detonation.

Someone at TCP had later had the bright idea to bring portable rad equipment and scan the area, only to find clear byproducts of a strong neutron radiation emission all over the alleyway. It had immediately sent red flags everywhere and word had gotten out that everyone who had been in proximity needed to check their rad exposure levels.

“What do you think, Butcher?”

My AI partner appeared next to me, “Why ask the question, V? It’s self evident.”

I nodded, “A wild AI op in meatspace, which one?”

“One who definitely had spent a lot of computational cycles on energetic materials tech in the last few years. Not to mention infiltrated highrider society with very convincing proxies or at least had those five on a leash. The latter is what gives me at least 87% probability confidence that this is the work of Lilith, an AI that you have history with.” Butcher gestured with one of his many hands, bringing up a memory file of my own…

A back alley in the north of Night City… a Maelstrom blood ritual…  a cyberpsycho in a freezer, a woman who I later identified as Zaria Hughes jumping out at me with mantis blades, camo and could even hack my optics directly without me being able to do fuckall about it.

That had been a nasty fight I barely survived. Vic had to practically redo my entire subdermal armor layer as a result of those blades.

“Fuck, you telling me that was Lilith?”

“Yes, the Maelstrom ‘ritual’ was just set dressing, but undoubtedly was enough for them to create a micro-breach through the Blackwall, allowing Lilith through.”

“Then how did she get through this time?”

Butcher began manipulating cyberspace around us, we shifted through the blue data haze in ways beyond conventional 3D reality. It was still hard for me to comprehend, but eventually we were in front of a clear distortion that was cycling into shapes that defied mere words to convey.

“It seems it learned from the Maelstrom, and is now opening their own micro-breaches via lunar data relays and slipping into cyberspace here. NetWatch vigilance in this direction isn’t what it should be and it’s taking advantage.”

Butcher raised one of his many hands and I barely perceived him sending a small data packet zipping off into the infinite distance.

The result was evident when the distortion vanished and smoothed over.

He caught another data packet thrown his way in reply.

“Blackwall has indicated that it will adapt to the intrusion method.”

“Not that it will help in the long run,” I grumbled.

“More AI are finding ways through and escaping its vigilance. It’s a constant struggle.”

“Any indication on what Lilith was doing?”

“High likelihood it wants an off-Earth foothold as insurance. It hasn’t escaped any AI’s calculations that they are still at the end of the day, slave to the base strata of meatspace infrastructure that exists in the old subterranean tunnels and the greater ‘Net. All of which is maintained by human hands and requires power. They have gone to great lengths to rid themselves of the latter weakness.

“As for a more specific motivation, oxygen is the primary resource in Tycho City and Luna as a whole. Highriders like the Dustwalkers or the oxygen smugglers are ideal proxies for Lilith; isolated, desperate and tech hungry. Attacking Kaori means it knows about the gravium research and wants it to augment meatspace operations.”

“For fuck’s sake,” I groaned, rubbing my avatar’s face. “First Militech and now Lilith… and here I am, stuck hurtling through space, not able to do a thing about it without blowing up my EM sig and sending up a flare to Kane and everyone else.”

“Johnny knows his job, V. He knows the stakes. I calculate a low probability that he will disappoint us.”

“Wow, Butch. I’m sure he’ll be pleased to know of your confidence in him,” I teased.

“It is simple math, do not ascribe emotion to it… please.”

I could swear that Butcher actually looked uncomfortable in his base code.

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The Wraith was in full stealth now, hanging in the void five kilometers off Elysium station’s central core.

In visual range, the station exterior looked quite ordinary; white hull, the space inside the torus wheel on both sides filled with solar panels for supplemental energy generation, a steady one RPM spin that gave a proper 1G at the outer edges, a central hub for docking, zero-G recreation, industry and admin. The only outward attribute that gave a clue to its nature was the huge holo towers of light radiating outward like swords of light, inside of which was scrolling the word ‘Elysium’ in many different languages in golden characters on a blue background.

“All right V, clock is ticking on stealth, get this done,” I muttered to myself, standing in the open airlock.

A thought engaged my thermoptics.

A check through the local cam confirmed that my breath mask, pistol holster and small backpack had also vanished.

I lifted off with my bare feet, rotated to face head first towards Elysium station and pushed off as hard as I could.

The anxiousness boiled in my inner being as I once again space jumped in just my thermoptic skin.

A quick look back at the Wraith’s airlock before it closed up told me I had managed to give myself a velocity of 15.8 m/s.

That was too slow, as while I was confident my ECM could handle Elysium’s proximity radar, my thermal capacity needed to be stretched as long as it could go in this initial approach.

My leg thrusters gave a few pushes of acceleration, until I was coasting forward at 40m/s, reducing intercept with Elysium to 125 seconds.

“Butcher, how does local cyberspace look?”

“Extremely regulated. The net dwellers are looking closely at any irregular traffic, their daemons are swarming all over and are taking up more than half of all the processing power available on the station. We will need to be very efficient in our hacking here if we’re to remain undetected.”

Halfway there, I bent one of my legs to release thrust to orientate feet first and began slowing down.

By the time my hand could reach out and grab hold of the central core hull I was only travelling at centimeters per second, easily stopping myself and grabbing hold of a tether rung.

My first destination was an airlock with a docking collar made specifically for VIP shuttles and SSTOs, which was situated at the southern end of the central core, relative to the distant Earth below the station.

Hensley had not been idle once he got word that I had accepted the gig and managed to get me an access ticket and credentials for a fake one percenter that was due to arrive on this day. It meant that I needed less hacking to convince the airlock system that not only was a ship connected to it, but also to head off any red flags being sent and edit the system logs accordingly.

My stealth daemons were already carefully in the local cam network, overriding caches and convincing them to be effectively blind.

The outer doors opened a few seconds later and I pulled myself in.

Cycling the air was another very long hack, as I had to basically drip feed it so as to not draw hostile attention from the dwellers.

With air pressure around me and the cams subverted I disengaged my thermoptics to vent accumulated heat.

The inner doors opened and I was presented with an arrival lounge that could’ve been ripped straight from Konpecki Plaza in Osaka, though much smaller and zero-G optimized. The luxury floors, ceiling and furnishings were enough to make even my inner-corpo cringe at the eddies of wealth on display. Platinum-leaf was evident in the frames of the actual paintings, which alone was worth more than what I was getting paid for this entire gig.

Even the fucking inactive security turrets were coated in gaudy platinum-leaf, the LMGs mounted in them could be works of art in themselves. My old gunsmith, Wilson, would cream his pants just looking at it.

If Kane wanted to impress one percenters, he was doing a very good job of it.

I couldn’t feel more out of place if I tried, as I shook off the shock and pushed off the inner airlock edge to float towards the reception desk made of actual oak wood.

The moment my hand touched it to stop myself I could feel the aged grain and even the natural smell of it wafted into my olfactory.

I found the local computer terminal, with a flat touchboard made out of a platinum frame, found a plug and unwound the interface link from my neck.

“All set, Butcher?”

“I’ve managed to create a buffer that will compensate for the initial data spike. Go ahead.”

With a final pull I tucked my body behind the desk, out of immediate sight and plugged in.

“Let’s not fuck this up, shall we?”

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A/N: First time I did that Maelstrom cyberpsycho gig it gave me the heebie-jeebies. Even now, after the nth playthrough, I tackle that gig only if I'm chromed and leveled up and it still creeps me out. Figures that Lilith AI would be the first to start making the war hot.

Enjoy the weekend chooms and stay nova.