Charter Hill, the second wealthiest subdistrict in Westbrook, was one of the newer projects that arose during the Rebuilding Period post-Night City Holocaust. It was the dream neighborhood of every mid-level corpo: just a few minutes by car away from the City Center and most places of employ, as well as being close enough to the party sub-district of Japantown that one could easily unwind after each day of stress and toiling away.

  It was a fishbowl of guppies, and I was a shark. Far too big. Far too in need of more substantial nutrients. These dreamers and mid-tier artists and musicians weren’t a part of my game, or my world, even. They were background characters.

  I enjoyed that. I could relax in their midst, knowing that none of them could so much as touch me. North Oak was more central to my business interests, and living there had a bigger degree of prestige attached to it, but as someone that had spent their life living in Megabuilding H4 in Arroyo, this place was a good enough upgrade that I really didn’t see the need to be living in the same neighborhood as Masaru Ryuzaki.

  The building, called the Grand Rising Plaza, was one of the taller buildings in the area, though not the tallest. It was known for having once housed all the biggest stars in the city, and according to rumors, Ratboy lived here as well.

  I wouldn’t lie and say that that hadn’t swayed my decision to move in here, but I wasn’t likely to seek those musicians out, either. Though I wouldn’t decline it if they ever rang my buzzer.

  As I walked into the lobby, with its own doorman, reception and coterie of armed guards, I breathed in deeply and enjoyed the simple concept of having neighbors that I might actually like. What an incredible novelty.

  I traded a few quick words with the smiling receptionist, whose warm grin seemed almost entirely out of place in this scenario. I had expected more suspicion and naked hostility, but as we continued chattering, I realized that she knew who I was the moment I walked in.

  Then she rounded the wide reception counter and led me up to the elevator.

  “We have furnished your new home to your partner’s liking. She indicated that she would take charge on that front.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I wouldn’t know the first thing about interior decoration.”

  The receptionist lady punched in the highest button on the inside of the elevator, and I wondered what the hallway would look like for a penthouse apartment. Wasn’t the point to have those entire floors to myself?

  As the elevator door opened at the top floor, I realized that my concern was entirely moot. For this elevator opened to my fucking apartment.

  I had to take a mental second to look at that elevator in betrayal. I did not like the implications of anyone having such easy access to my living quarters. “What’s the… ICE on these elevators anyway?” I chuckled uneasily as I followed the receptionist into the main living room.

  Translucent chairs and tables that were either purple or pink sat atop a wide carpet next to the wall-to-wall windows—another big point of vulnerability to anyone wanting to take potshots at me from the ground—and above our heads were crystalline chandeliers that shone with a warm white-yellow glow.

  On the far end of the living room stood Lucy, now dark-haired and wearing her tech-mask. She was staring out the window, directly at Arasaka Tower, or what peeked above it from an obstructing tower between us.

  “I can assure you that we only provide the highest degrees of security for our esteemed penthouse clients,” the receptionist said. “Our ICE is mil-spec and our physical security is every bit as… overwhelming in density. You need not worry at all. The windows are also made of bulletproof glass rated up to Level 10 in the NUS Rating System. That is powerful enough to withstand the shot of a rail-powered firearm.”

  “An Omaha maybe,” I muttered.

  “Pardon?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Thank you for everything. I think I’ll pass on the tour.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, then,” she bowed to me. “Welcome to your new home, Mr. Martinez. I hope we can deliver on our promise of quality and excellence in service.”

  I shot her a few eddies to make her go away faster, and walked towards Lucy, still staring at the tower. A part of me noted with some amount of gratitude and guilt that she wasn’t smoking. She usually would have, in a situation like this.

  “Hey,” I said to her softly as I approached her, so as to not spook her. No reaction. She probably knew I was approaching. I hugged her gently from behind, and she melted into my embrace.

  And we both took a moment to stare at the eyesore of a building.

  Lucy had wanted this apartment. I had thought that it would be nice to be even closer to the Academy. I could actually see a part of its wide green golf turf if I craned my neck.

  She had wanted this in spite of the view.

  “There they are, David,” she said softly.

  “Yes.”

  “There they are,” she said more quietly, and I could feel her heart pounding. Sense the tension in her frame.

  “Are you—”

  “Fired up?” she asked. “A little. Guess a good stare at the worst people you know is as good as any triple shot of espresso in the morning. Can’t say I hate this… system.” She then turned around and looked up at me with a flat expression. “So. Why haven’t you said anything about my new look?”

  I blinked. “Your new face is—“

  She backed away from me. “I meant the dress, stupid.”

  I had to do a quick brain reset as I looked at her, and realized, ‘holy fucking shitballs, she’s hot’.

  Jesus Christ, she’s…

  She wore a purple dress with a really deep V-neck, and I wondered what sort of tech she used to keep her boobs from spilling out. The dress was double-slitted at her waist, which gave such an insane view of her hips.

  [Why does this make her look better to you than when she’s naked? I don’t understand.]

  “You look amazing, Lucy,” I said. Then I looked up at her face and then realized something was wrong. She was still wearing her tech mask. I gently pulled it off her head and stepped back to get another look at her, with her normal face and hair. “Now you look perfect.”

  She giggled. “You cornball.”

  I dragged a hand down my face as I stared at her, and sighed. “You know what? I have an idea.”

  “You want us to fuck on every surface this new place has to offer, right?”

  I chuckled. “Yep. Give me a tour guide.”

  She ran up to me and jumped onto me, kissing me deeply.

  I felt like the happiest man in the universe as she did.

  God, I’m lucky.

  000

  We had to cut ourselves short after an hour, as we still had a lot to do for the day. I took charge of moving our most important valuables to our new place while Lucy went around town hoarding as much silicon as our new place could conceivably hold.

  I took my own initiative after I finished hauling our shit, going around town searching for Netrunner suits worthy of the both of us. Nanny had assured me that I was as good as any borged-out Netrunner at keeping cool now, and that an ice bath would suffice for most of our purposes.

  But why bother pretending as if we couldn’t afford greater resources? Ultimately, our only limit was all the energy that the building was allowed to route to our purposes. Our electricity bill would be through the fucking roof, but we weren’t exactly hurting for eddies.

  And once QianT started paying its dividends, we never would be again.

  While I was in a tech-shop in Japantown, following Rogue’s lead on a pair of good runner chairs and suits, I received a call. From V.

  I picked it up.

  David: What’s up? You need me for something?

  V: The Task Force is moving. We need the Tsviets. They want to talk to you instead of me.

  David: What? Why?

  V: Thought you said you wanted to be kept in the loop.

  David: I’m just asking what their interest in me is. I’m on my way.

  V: Just tell me where you are. I’ll pick you up by AV. It’ll be faster.

  Damn.

  I sent V my address, tried to finish up with the tech-shop attendant as quickly as possible, probably overpaying for the obscenely expensive, and apparently mil-spec, equipment.

  V’s flying ride landed outside the shop on the street. I quickly got in, sat down, and accepted a shard from V as he handed it to me. He looked… stressed. I slotted the shard in. “Was in the middle of moving into my new digs, you know,” I said with a grin. “Really nice place—“

  “Enough talk. Just focus on the shard.”

  I read through it quickly.

  Then I gaped in astonishment.

  The document contained all of that call to action that I had given to the people of the room. My call to devour the corpos and give the city back to those that bled for it. And according to the document, they were already on the organization stage of things.

  Someone fucking snitched.

  Someone in that room fucking snitched.

  “The Tsviets were asking for you because they’re psychos and they like you,” V said. “And they want to deal with us through you exclusively on account of that. No other reason that’d satisfy you. It’s just… fucking lunacy, all the way down.”

  That didn’t drag my brain into a hard reset nearly as much as what the fuck was in this shard.

  Calm. Calm down.

  I schooled my expression and stared at V. “So that’s it, then. They’re all going to die right now.”

  “Once we get a bead on Regina Jones and Mr. Hands, then yeah.”

  I focused on the Soviet name. “And Mikhail Akulov? Data says he’s a Soviet asset. Won’t that cause an incident?”

  “Mikhail gets the FIA treatment. Extraordinary rendition, bag over the head, the works. They’ll ship his ass through the iron curtain like same-day delivery and leave him with a stern warning. The Soviets will understand that it was a measured response from us.”

  I nodded, feigning a grin.

  Wakako Okada, at a pachinko parlor in Jig-Jig Street. Several eyes on her at all times. Rogue Amendiares, Little China. Muamar Reyes, Rancho Coronado.

  Sebastian Ibarra.

  Padre.

  “Jesus,” I said, trying to shelve that for later. “Impressive work, V. Who’d you flip for this? Couldn’t have been any of the fixers, right?”

  “David,” V growled. “I’m sorry if I’m being a little testy at the moment, but I need you to shut, the fuck, up and focus on work. If you could do that, I’d be real fucking grateful.”

  I scoured through the data, searching for this guy’s informant. The asshole that wanted to burn me. Found nothing. V kept that info as far removed from the official data as possible, probably to protect that person.

  V was nice like that. But that nice? Who the fuck were nice enough to protect the data of a traitor mercenary who wanted to flip his own people for eddies?

  …no one. Because mercenaries never warranted that level of respect or kindness.

  This wasn’t a mere traitor. This was a mole.

  Not a corporate mole, or his name would be on the data somewhere. I was above suspicion, in V’s opinion, at least. If this mole was on the company’s payroll, I’d probably know of it.

  Or maybe I was overestimating my clearance levels.

  I probably was.

  Fuck.

  Nothing a good round of hacking wouldn’t fix, at least. I’d get their name in time, and fucking slaughter them. Before that, however, I needed to figure out a way to…

  I felt my stomach clench.

  How could I fix this?

  I disabled the comm-shine on my eyes so that V wouldn’t know that I was transmitting any data, and sent a message to Rogue. I considered sending one to the others, but… no. Rogue was my best bet for now: ‘SOS—but keep cool.’

  “Fine,” I said. “I get the gist, V. Are the Tsviets handling everyone, or are we outsourcing to the other corporations?”

  “This is an in-house op,” V said. “And the Tsviets will ideally take everyone out, and then pin it on the gangs.”

  “That’ll cause a war,” I said.

  “It will. But it’s a war that we have the advantage in. If we turn the mercs against the gangs, the megacorps might even get to pick them off while they weaken one another.”

  I frowned. “What about—“

  “What about what? The gutter-dwellers who’ll get caught in the crossfire?” He sneered at me. “Didn’t you say you moved into some new digs already? So why the fuck does it concern you?”

  What the fuck?

  “Because I don’t think war is fucking okay.”

  “Neither are the fucking gangs,” V said. “Shit might get rough for a little while, but eventually, we’ll be better off than ever before. If we can get rid of the gangs and thin the ranks of the mercs, then D’ll have no one to recruit from. It’s fucked up, but it’s the only decision we can make, given what’s at stake. You read the shard yourself. You think you’d be safe if D got what he wanted? You’re more corpo than I am.”

  I sighed and nodded. “Fine. You’re right. This nutjob has to fucking go. Can’t deal with his shit for much longer, with all the other crap I’ve got on my plate already. You’re right, V. Let’s kill them all.”

  The AV flew us clear over downtown and towards the Port. When we finally arrived, the moon was starting to shine far brighter than what little remained of the sun in the oceanic horizon.

  “The concept is simple,” V said. “They want you to present the data. After that, they’ll follow the steps of our in-house operatives already posted across the city, monitoring our targets. Then, they’ll want to take charge on the operation. Do things their style, and ply the skills that we’re paying them for.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that. “So… what’s my job after the presentation?”

  “You’re an in-between. You tell me what they’re planning, and through you I’ll moderate and make sure they’re not making any big mistakes. But they’re professionals. You’ll mostly be keeping us posted. There really isn’t much we can tell these guys to do when they’re on the job, except fulfill the parameters.” He clenched his jaws. “Even if a few eggs have to break.”

  “Eggs? What do you mean by that?”

  “You need me to draw you a picture, too? Collateral damage.”

  “You’re taking this way too lightly, V,” I said quietly. “Pardon me for being a little fucking testy about having a front-view seat to a bloodbath.”

  “You asked for this!”

  And I didn’t regret that one bit. This was an advantageous position to be in, all things considered.

  I had considered this scenario. Namely what would happen if the Task Force were to attack prematurely, abandoning Meredith Stout’s pleas for this ‘cointelpro’ approach of infiltrating, disrupting and discrediting the movement.

  This, however, was a direct attack.

  A rallying point.

  Some potential allies dying would… help things along.

  So… who were my least favorite fixers?

  The ones I had the worst rapport with… or the ones that had the least amount of influence?

  000

  As the AV flew across the city, Vincent agonized.

  He couldn’t call Padre to warn him away.

  He just… couldn’t. He kept twisting the choice over in his head, and it just kept hurting worse and worse, because each time, with all the information he had, with every hypothetical and what-if he wrestled over, it always came out to the same answer: he couldn’t say shit.

  Because if he did, Padre would know that Jackie blabbed. And while Padre was many things, he was not forgiving when it came to threats to his own life.

  Knowing the old bastard, he might have told Jackie to make a choice and stand by it. Cut ties with Vincent, or blab to him, and then get the fuck out as soon as possible before Padre did what he had to do.

  Jackie, torn between so many different ties of obligation, was unlikely to imagine how much danger he had put Padre in by talking to him.

  So he couldn’t call Padre to warn him away, because that would kill Jackie, and it would put Heywood on high alert, and that high alert would spill over to every fucking fixer out there.

  And they would be back in square one.

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  Vincent ignored the growing agony in his stomach, and the whirlwind of emotions so high that it caused him physical pain. Psychosomatic pain that his pain editors had no way to address. Those signals came from the brain.

  And why should he avoid them, anyway? He deserved this for what he was going to be party to: utter betrayal.

  It was D’s fault. All of it was D’s fault. And like the coward that he was, he was nowhere to be found.

  Vincent saw David study up on the shard dutifully. On his way to do his job and get further ahead in life. For all the good it would do for his conscience.

  And that shit was on D, too. A kid barely out of highschool, busting his ass to clean up after that psycho’s mess, working with monsters just to catch him. Did that bastard even realize how many lives he was ruining, going on as he did?

  Of course he did. Hundreds dead, and for what? To stick it to the corps.

  It was a damn travesty, all of it.

  At least Martinez wasn’t the dead weight any other kid in his shoes so clearly would have been. He was still studying the CoIntel datashard with rapt eyes, and Vincent was fairly certain he hadn’t done anything else for the entire flight, not even peeked outside the window.

  The kid was dedicated, Vincent would give him that.

  After he and the kid exited the AV, David walked ahead of him, towards the entrance to the run-down Bratva port building complex that overlooked oceans of the heavy shipping containers that always littered the Port. He felt a surge of guilt for involving the kid. He’d been so eager to get ahead in the corpo life.

  The Bratva soldiers got out of the way and Martinez strode in like he owned the place, fists clenched. Vincent wondered if he still had access to their localnet. Probably.

  As they ascended the stairs and entered the room where Raduga and a few more of his band of psychos were packing up their gear, David wasted no time on preamble. “We have your targets. And we trust in your discretion for this operation. All we ask is to be kept in the loop on your every movement. At least, the substantial ones.”

  “Hahah! It’s the little puppy!” Raduga cackled. He stepped towards David with his spider-legs, and stretched them so that he stood head and shoulders above the kid.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” David said, expression guarded, as he nodded to the far wall.

  Vincent took in all of what had changed in the last 24 hours. The Tsviet’s hangout was now starting to look like a proper military operation. Wire cabling, everywhere. Newly installed netrunner chairs. Guns everywhere. A second-story shipping/receiving port that now opened into an entire shipping container of yet more guns, many of which looked thoroughly modded. Many steel crates of Militech gear, and a few suspicious-looking SovOil crates that had no doubt been used for the Bratva’s smuggling ops.

  Well, shit.

  “Da, da.” Raduga nodded from atop his spider-form linear frame. Then he spoke. In English. “You have targets for us, you say? Alright, do you have piss-breaks for us too?”

  “Use your discretion on those,” David said. “I know better than to get in the way of an op run by real professionals. But listen.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Don’t dick me around,” David said quietly. “You won’t like the outcome.”

  One of Raduga’s spider-arms whirled.

  David ducked clear under it and stepped back.

  “Are we clear, Raduga?” David growled.

  “You don’t fear death, little puppy?” Raduga stepped up closer to him, overshadowing David by several entire feet. Vincent stepped forward, but David put a hand on his chest to stop him.

  “Slow the fuck down,” Vincent bit out.

  “If I feared death, you think I’d come back here to look at your ugly face again?” David asked, glaring almost straight up. “I don’t fear death, I don’t even fear failure. All I feel is disgust at the prospect of having this operation ruined because your psychosis-suffering brain is too addled by machismo to do a fucking job right!” David roared at the end. “Understand me when I say this, Raduga: we don’t need you. You need us! And you better fucking cooperate, or I’ll stop being polite. I’m not your fucking friend. I’m not your fucking pet. For all intents and purposes, I’m Saburo fucking Arasaka, and you’ll report to me.”

  Raduga’s spider legs curled, and he sank down to a height of six and a half feet, just so he could properly look David in the eyes. His friends had stood still through the entire speech.

  Then one guy chuckled.

  Another snorted.

  A third grabbed at his mouth to stop sound from coming out.

  That broke the dam. Raduga howled in laughter.

  “Saburo Arasaka!” One guy laughed.

  “This kid—”

  Raduga slowly reached an arm over to David, and patted his shoulder. “You’re funny boy. I like you. And,” he nodded, schooling his expression, trying to suppress a grin. “You’re right. Very right. Big man, we should respect you. And don’t worry, I will make this a smooth one, Saburohohohoh—“ he couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Sorry, sorry, my bad. Yes, this will be a quick operation. Come, give us the details, while I show you our guns, huh? You like guns? They’re big guns.”

  What the fuck were you thinking when you sent him here, Arthur?

  But try as he might, Vincent couldn’t deny that the kid had pull with these psychos. Dubious as that pull was for now.

  000

  I briefly presented the data as Raduga walked me through the Tsviets’ makeshift armory, unloaded from whatever ship they had used to get to here from across the Pacific.

  It wasn’t much but a quick rundown of the whereabouts of the fixers, their likely number of enforcers, and how we wanted the job done: all at once. Total annihilation.

  After the presentation, I reluctantly handed Raduga the shard, and some other asshole among his outfit had dragged me away to show me the big guns.

  He was a tall, broad man with a portly build and a lug face that made me think of a particularly ugly Animal bodybuilder, though I’d never seen one of those idiotic gangoons get to anywhere near this size of body build before: he probably weighed over eight hundred pounds, chrome and muscle and fat all interlayered together. Eight and a half, maybe nine feet tall and half as wide, with enormous cybernetic arms like interlocking bricks. He was bald, and had a big blue beard, and he introduced himself as Lazurnyy.

  “You make the boss laugh,” he slapped me on my back, gently. “You make us all laugh. You’re funny boy.”

  “How come you’re all speaking English, now?” I asked. I wasn’t short any more, but I still had to look up to properly talk to this guy.

  “Boss told us to use language chips from now on,” Lazurnyy said. “But language chip give… gay accent,” he shrugged. “No hate to gay, but I’m not. So I only use chip to learn, and I speak how I speak.”

  Made sense why it sounded so broken. Chipware would have had him speaking with a predetermined ‘standard’ American accent. No clue why that would sound ‘gay’ to his ears. Then again, who the fuck knew what these psychos were thinking anyway?

  “Also, it messes with head, language chip,” Lazurnyy whirled his hand next to his head. “Language and thinking is… same thing, no? Now, you think in one language, speak in another, by force. There is gap. Distracting,” he grimaced. “Distraction is deadly.”

  “Now you guys worry about distractions?” V spat. “This whole troupe of yours has offered nothing but one circus act after another.

  “Does this child molester in a suit speak for you, Saburo?” Lazurnyy asked me. Jesus.

  “About the chipware,” I said, forcing the topic back to the matter at hand. “Makes sense. It’s not the most reliable way to attain skill.” Chipware was cheap, as always. And from his explanation, I could totally see why it would screw with your brain to have such a gap between thinking and action.

  “Now, here is thing: we will kill every single one of targets,” Lazurnyy grinned brightly. “And boss wants you to know how fucked they are. Check this out.”

  “This?” I asked skeptically. “Looks like something out of a museum.”

  The reconverted second floor lounge had an open port over on the right to a couple of unsealed shipping containers, no doubt put in place by some crane on the outside. And they apparently contained the Tsviet’s weapons, so many that it could have been mistaken for an entire Soviet armory. Every wall of the container I was looking at was lined with racks of rifles, hand-cannons, and blades, all their barrels etched with cyrillic letters.

  Lazurnyy clapped me on the shoulder so hard my knees almost buckled. “Museum! Hah, yes, good joke! Come, I show you Soviet history.” He strode toward the racks, pulling weapons free one after another with flair. First came a battered… was that an AK-47? “This one, classic! Older than my grandfather’s grandfather. Still reliable as sunrise, cheap as potato, every African warlord has three hundred. Will outlive cockroaches after nuclear bomb.” He kissed the stock with reverence, then tossed it back on the rack like junk. “This container for what we give out to hired help.” Next came out various shotguns and precision rifles, rocket launchers and pistols. Nothing fancy, but all of it was at least up to lower-grade military spec. “No, this not what I wanted to show you. But good eye, puppy!”

  “Why do you have these?” I had to ask. I had expected to see top of the line gear, not… archaic garbage. I was looking at weapons that didn’t even have microchips or anything that a netrunner could—

  Oh shit.

  Lazurnyy chuckled, grinned languidly. “I see you find answer yourself, puppy. 20th century guns, beautiful. No net! Yet as much killing power as 21st century gun! Except fancy tech stuff. Better, no netrunner hack, no police trace. Ever. Like ghosts, these guns! Can give to mercenaries, handle battle data ourselves. No enemy netrunner can stop, no detective can trace.”

  This was… a problem. How much had I relied on quickhacks to disable enemy weapons, hack into targeting data? The Tsviets were taking this option completely off the board, not just with their top-class personal ICE, but by setting things up so that even their mooks didn’t need to have ICE period. How was I supposed to respond to this?

  But Lazurnyy, heedless of my twisting thoughts inside, moved on to the next container happily. I forced myself back into the moment. Can’t act suspicious here, not at all.

  And, in fairness, this next container looked far more interesting. “Now I show you good stuff,” Lazurnyy said, stomping over to the next. He, casually, thumbed in a code on a red keypad marked with warnings in cyrillic to not even try opening this container if you didn’t know the code. Next to the warnings were several stickers of stylized skulls. Easy to imagine what would happen if you fucked up the code.

  With a heavy hiss, the door split apart and folded down into a ramp.

  And inside, resting on cradles of shock-dampening coils, I saw half a dozen massive… I didn’t even know what these were. I’d never seen anything like them before: whatever they were, they were obscene.

  Lazurnyy casually unhooked cables and lifted one of the things with a reverential air, grinning through his blue beard as he showed it off.

  It was probably some kind of tech rocket launcher, but not like one I’d ever seen or heard of before. It looked like a rectangular carcass of gunmetal black, about the size of a big car’s engine block. Instead of a single big tube, the launcher’s forward face housed a honeycomb of no less than eighty tiny tubes, each barely wider than a man’s wrist, all capped with little protective caps that for some damn reason all had flower stickers on them, like some little girl had gone wild on decorating the Tsviet’s heavy ordinance. It had some kind of complicated-looking control system where aiming sights usually would have been, all in cyrillic.

  “See! This is Soviet anti-fortress personal artillery! T40 Uragan, we call it Flower of Motherland! Micro-missile system, eighty-four-per-salvo swarm launcher. You can either direct the salvos, or spread them out. Directed volley can punch through shielded structural columns and make a skyscraper cry uncle. Spread volley?” Lazurnyy grinned. “You take half a city block off the map.”

  V muttered under his breath, “Jesus Christ. You people are out of your damn minds.”

  “Jesus?” Lazurnyy only grinned wider. “Hah! Jesus will need body armor if he on wrong end of Flower.”

  Shit. My thoughts were twisting. Shit. The Tsviets had brought weapons capable of bringing down buildings, mass destruction. They were bringing these into the city.

  But V wasn’t complaining, at least not out loud. He gave the weapons a long, complicated sort of look before he just said nothing at all.

  “Impressive,” I said. “Fixers won’t know what hit ‘em.”

  “That’s the plan, puppy,” Lazurrny grinned cheerfully, before describing more of the tech rocket launcher’s traits that I didn’t really care about. While he spoke, my gaze lingered too long on a row of interesting looking tech rifles. Many of the designs I was seeing were archaic, but heavy with overengineered potential. Seemed like the Tsviets had a particular taste for overengineered, decades-old Soviet mil-spec weapons.

  “And now… “ Lazurrny laughed. “I show you my gun.” We stopped in front of another cargo container, this one covered in blue stripes. He thumbed in another code and got it open and proceeded to dig through it, grumbling as he did. Whatever it was, it had come in essentially its own cargo container and was kept strapped in a long box atop several shock-absorbing pallets.

  When he turned and exited the cargo container, bounty in hand, my breath caught.

  The gun he carried was less a rifle and more a personal artillery piece. Just… what the fuck.

  It had to be eight, maybe nine entire feet long. It was all blackened steel barrel, wide at the base and tapering to a finer end, complete with a nest of light blue cooling vents and an aperture that opened wider than any gun I’d ever seen before; I could have fit my entire arm down with room to spare. What caliber did it even shoot? The stock looked reinforced with steel plating of the kind that belonged on a vehicle, not a proper gun - the whole thing absurdly oversized, as if it belonged mounted on a tank, not slung over one lunatic’s shoulder. Or maybe slung from the hip, I noticed, getting a better look at the grip layout.

  Lazurnyy planted it on the floor, and it dropped with such weight that I felt a tremor in the floorboards.

  “What the hell kind of a gun is that?”

  “Rostovi? Vladic,” he laughed. “Last name is after Serb war-criminal. Named in honor of him. Based on design for German hunter of elephants, modernized! Now a glorious Soviet anti-tank railgun made for one thing only: to humble God Himself! Before, it kill elephant. Now? It kill Basilisk.”

  He passed over to me a heavy foot-long tapering metal thing, presumably the thing’s ammunition, and grinned. “Depleted uranium-tungsten alloy slug, launch ten kilos at mach nine point five. Almost as good as small orbital bombardment, when aimed right.”

  “…Impressive,” I managed. I bounced the depleted uranium slug in my hand once or twice, ran the numbers in my head quick, and it was… yeah. Holy fuck. V for his part was just speechless.

  “Hah! Yes, impressive. Arzamas laboratory in Sarov only ever make a few of these. Prototypes, turned out too expensive to mass produce. Better to give railguns to heavy tanks and ships than infantry, you see? And only biggest of borg infantry could ever use, anyway!”

  “I bet.”

  He took the projectile back, turned around and dropped the… the weapon back into its crate with a boom, and continued his tour of the armory.

  “This one less impressive, but valuable support for field ops.” We reached another crate, and he tapped on it before muttering, “Initiate active-mode.”

  Several bulky drones flew out from the box. They differed drastically from the Militech Wyverns I had liberated from Green Farm in that they were using rotor propulsion rather than jets. Two rotors on each side, and a bulbous, round main body, from which a machine gun was hanging underneath, with a dangling chain of ammo.

  “Look like dick, no?” Lazurnyy pointed at the machine gun and laughed. “Soviet engineers have sense of humor.”

  “What are they called?” I asked as I subtly tried to hack them.

  “Techtronika Shershen. It mean wasp. The stinger is the, you know, dick gun.”

  Tsviet ICE caught me dead in my tracks, once again.

  Time to get to work, then.

  There was no way this ICE was going to stop me. Not now.

  But to get far, I needed to jack in.

  I looked up at Lazurnyy. “I need to piss.”

  “Ah. Toilet is somewhere. Want me to hold your hand?”

  “I’ll find my way. Thanks.”

  He just laughed.

  V gave me a serious look, as if to say ‘be careful, and don’t fuck around’. I didn’t really care what he had to say at this point. I had lost quite a bit of respect for him now, for being okay with… all this. Swarm missiles, cyberpsycho lunatics being released to the public, operating with his knowledge and co-sign.

  Maybe that was for the best? It never paid to view a potential enemy as a viable friend.

  Even though I knew he had likely been caught between a rock and a hard place. He wasn’t the one calling the shots. And knowing his attitude on this op, he likely wouldn’t have made this call in the first place.

  I wanted to fucking hate him, and yet I just couldn’t. Dammit.

  [That’s the reality of working in a corp] Nanny manifested next to me as we walked out of the armory, in search of a discreet enough access point we could jack into, outside the view of the Bratva soldiers or the Tsviets. [You don’t make your own calls. You live with the decisions of your betters.]

  D: Ain’t that the truth.

  [So. Who do you think should die? I know that’s what we’re planning, right? Letting our own blood spill to--]

  D: Not our blood. Not our people. The fixers are a means to an end. Always were. Always have been. You think they’d lose a nick of sleep over selling out to the corps if it paid them? That’s where all their fucking money comes from in the first place.

  [Even Reyes? Your main guy?]

  I didn’t want Reyes to die. He had my back after all.

  I’d… I’d save those I could, within my means. And those means weren’t many. Not if I wanted to keep my backstabbing discreet. And my civilian life intact, for that matter.

  I caught an access point and quickly jacked into it.

  Tsviet ICE was thick. Every bit as good as upper level corporate ICE.

  But I already had my fair share of practice against corporate ICE, and my Sword program was better than anything else I’d seen on the market.

  I got through within seconds, and jacked out.

  Then, I started quietly infecting everything within reach, adding remote triggers I could use to jam the drone guns at will, not to mention the few actual guns that were connected to the Localnet. But the Tsviets were real professionals: almost every weapon they possessed were air-gapped. They weren’t relying on any targeting software, or tech advantages to cheat their way out of requiring skill, it seemed.

  I couldn’t get into the merc’s personal ICE. But I was inside their communications network now. Whatever Raduga wanted to withhold from me during the op, for whatever reason, I could hear it all now.

  That was good enough for now.

  000

  Raduga’s decision had been to give his band twenty-four hours before attacking. That meant that CoIntel needed to continuously keep an eye on our targets for all that time. Raduga was setting up his own pieces for a frame job.

  And we still needed to figure out where Regina Jones was before he could act on that data. He had his own contacts on the lookout, but he relied on us for precise information.

  Thus, our work for the night was done.

  V was still in a surly mood as he took the company AV towards my building to drop me off.

  I sighed. “Hey.”

  “Kid,” V forestalled. “Listen. After this is over, get out. For your own good.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll… see, I guess.” No way, actually, but I wasn’t going to be so upfront about that. “But I was gonna tell you: it’s not your fault, however this goes down.”

  “Do you actually believe that?”

  Not even a little. “Was it your call?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “It matters if you didn’t have a choice.” Which… he did have. His choice was between inciting a street war for a promotion, or to just get fired and become unemployable in the corp world.

  Self-sacrifice had been his choice to make, but instead he would rather betray the streets which he came from. That was his choice to make, and he should live with the guilt.

  “That easy, huh?” V gave a half-hearted grin. “I figured you for someone with even the least bit of loyalty to where you came from, but I guess I was wrong.”

  I frowned at him. “I guess you were.”

  The AV landed, and I got out. “Later, V.”

  “Later.”

  The door closed. The car flew off. And I proceeded into my new place, with a heavy heart.

  I ignored the receptionist welcoming me back and got into the elevator. Once I was in, I called Rogue.

  Rogue: Is your line secured?

  D: Very. Yours?

  Rogue: Very. Now. Talk. Why are there suits staring into my windows?

  D: It goes down tomorrow. Now, Rogue. I need you to be very, very, VERY fucking careful about what you’re going to do about it. Because the moment you start flailing around for no reason, changing up your patterns, I’ll be in shit.

  Rogue: Jesus. How deep in are you?

  D: Deep enough that we can swing this to our advantage if you’re game.

  Rogue: What do you mean by that?

  D: I have intel on this storm, and we’re in a position to avoid the worst of it, while taking advantage of what it could potentially do for our organization’s cohesion.

  Rogue: That’s ice-cold. And relieving. I’m glad we can see eye to eye on this matter.

  D: I’m surprised you’re even willing.

  Rogue: I’ve been in this biz longer than you’ve been alive three times over. And now that there’s a chance to pull something real off, something that’ll actually have those corpos gushing blood, I’ll be damned if I let a sense of heroism get in my way. We gotta crack some eggs, D. That’s just how it is if we want to survive.

  I sighed.

  D: Anyone in mind in particular?

  Rogue: Come on, D.

  I could hear the grin playing in her tone.

  Rogue: Don’t start getting sentimental. It’s an ugly business, but you know this is how it has to be.

  D: Did I say anything?

  Rogue: I can tell that you’re very close to changing your mind and doing something fucking stupid.

  Rogue: Let’s shelve that for later. Did you tell anyone else?

  D: No.

  Rogue: Wise. How much time do we really have?

  D: Twenty-four hours, like I said. But I’ll be in the know at all times.

  Rogue: I’m going to tell you something that you already know: we don’t have many options, given what little you’re able to contribute from your… position of knowledge. I won’t ask, but I know that if it was easy, you wouldn’t be begging me to keep fucking cool, right? And I will reiterate that people will die. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. So let’s discuss names on who we should save.

  D: Tell me. Fuck it, just tell me.

  The door to the elevator opened, and I saw Lucy sitting on the couch, watching TV. The runner-chairs had arrived inside giant, unopened metal cases.

  Rogue: Wakako’s got the Tygers on her corner. And moreover. Given that you didn’t actually kill any of her relatives, she’s likely to forgive you for what went down given enough inducement. She’s worth saving. Dinovic is an all-rounder, with a finger in every criminal pie in the city: 6th Street, Valentinos, Tygers, even the Maelstrom. And he’s in with plenty of the corps, too. He’s an overachiever. And he’s not someone the people will miss. Unlike Padre, who the Valentinos would at least try to avenge. And Dakota Smith, the static nomad. Not exactly a leader, but the Aldecaldos respect her. They’d get heated if she died.

  Jesus Christ.

  D: Right, so nobody would miss Dinovic, so he gets to live. But since people would miss Padre and Smith, they should die?

  Rogue: Glad you’re paying attention, at least. Dexter DeShawn… too likely to stab us in the back. He’s got to go. Mikhail Akulov—

  D: They’re just gonna deport him.

  Rogue: I figured. He’s connected. I’d be surprised if they could find Mr. Hands, but I’m sure that if we tipped him off, he’d be even more of a ghost than he usually is. We need to protect Jones. She’s the media. We’ll have a use for her. Especially if your whole cyberpsychosis cure pans out.

  D: I’m not hearing about Reyes yet.

  Rogue: The people would miss him. He’s… decent. For a fixer. He’s not all that influential in terms of huscle, but he’s got street cred. He’s the type of guy that people would get pissed about if he died.

  D: Fuck that!

  Rogue: Think, David. Or what the fuck did you think this game was going to be? You said it yourself: this is a war. And people die in wars.

  No way. No fucking way was I considering this.

  [She has a point, David]

  No fucking way.

  Rogue: No one’s asking you to sell out your crew, D. But Reyes… he ain’t your crew. You think he wouldn’t fuck you over if he knew he could get away with it? Do you remember a man by the name of Spring Roberts? Rat bastard that set you up and tried to kill you cuz he thought you weren’t shit? Thought he could get away with it? Who do you think filled his head up with that idea?

  What?!

  What the fuck?!

  Rogue: His ploy worked. You ended up trusting him more than anyone else, because you knew he’d never fuck you over like old Roberts did. But he was the one that set up that fiasco.

  I walked up to the window behind the couch that Lucy sat on, and stared out at the city, feeling a deadening chill overtake me.

  D: If you’re lying to me—

  Rogue: I have the chat logs from our group chat, D. I’m sending them over right now

  I clenched my fists and bared my teeth at the sight of my reflection.

  I looked over at the chats between Spring Roberts and El Capitan.

  ‘Reyes: Right, here’s the info I was offering you, about the kid. I’m sure he won’t mess up or anything’

  ‘Roberts: Does he… mess up?’

  ‘Reyes: No, of course not. I misspoke: He’s as good as they come! Trust me, alright?’

  Rogue: Do I have to point out the clear manipulation to you?

  Fucking hell, Reyes.

  D: No.

  D: But even so, he doesn’t deserve this.

  Rogue: Definitely not. But he’s not your responsibility. That’s what I’m telling you.

  And if I had been less skilled than I was back then, this Roberts guy might have ended up fleecing me for nothing. Or even killed me.

  All so Reyes could have… what, a better rapport with me?

  Why the fuck would he do something like that?

  [Because he deals in human resources? Because he’s probably sent scores of other people to their deaths before without batting an eye? What made you think this line of work could ever accommodate anyone of virtue?]

  That was different. Death was an obvious risk that everyone accepted. This was far worse.

  [Nothing is worse than death, David. I don’t know why this social construct continues to persist, but it’s a lie.]

  For an intelligence as boundless as she was, her limitations were painfully obvious at times.

  D: Good talk, Rogue. I’ll keep you posted.

  Rogue: And Reyes? What’s your take on him?

  D: You want me to fucking say it, too?

  Rogue: I want us to be on the same fucking page, at least.

  I cut the call then.

  I took a deep breath in, turned towards the couch and spoke. “Lucy—“

  “You got us runner chairs. And suits.” Her tone was icy.

  “Yeah. Wait, was there something you wanted to do?”

  Lucy stood up and turned to me. Her eyes were downcast. “I don’t do chairs. Or suits.”

  I furrowed my eyebrows. “What’s the matter?”

  She looked up at me, and then walked to me.

  And she grabbed me by my wrist and pulled me towards the elevator.

  “We need to talk,” Lucy said to me.