The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Tyler Garner, suspicious, Milos Budimski, Robert King, Alex Duque, and Antique.
Operatives Daniel Daivalar and Mitchk82.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
AN: You lot reached another 400 stones last night. So here is a bonus chapter as per our agreement.
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"Quiet life... or blaze of glory?"
- Dexter DeShawn
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The address Dino had given me was for a bar in Heywood called The Silo. It wasn't easy to find, since it didn't even have a sign above the door or appear on any map app I had ever seen, but with a few context clues, I managed to find it. The entrance was a steel door set into the side of a converted grain storage building on a street that dead-ended at a concrete retaining wall, and the only indication that something lay behind the door was a small, hand-etched symbol above the handle, resembling a stylized eye with a line through it.
Before I even reached the door, I felt a deep bass line hit me. It was coming from inside the building in a distorted throb that vibrated up through the sidewalk and into my boots. Somebody in there was playing bass through a stack built to punish rather than entertain, and the tempo carried a sloppy urgency that reminded me of some sort of Samurai cover.
It was 6:52 PM, meaning I was eight minutes early, wearing my get-up. I ran into Clarita Ibarra a few weeks back, and she was with that yapper Valerie as well. I wasn't wearing anything to cover my face then, and they immediately recognized me thanks to my height and hair color, which I should probably change at some point. Seeing the difference between the two styles of clothing, I found myself liking the more formal style.
It reminded me of a movie series Sasha and I had watched, where a retired assassin has his dog killed and his Mustang stolen by some gangers from back in the day. The actor playing the role looked almost identical to Johnny Silverhand but was actually Keanu Reeves. He wore suits as an assassin, and so did everyone in that movie, and I won't lie, I really found myself attracted to that style. But seeing Clarita standing side by side with Valerie cemented the idea.
I pulled the door open and was met with a staircase descending in amber light and a bass that was growing louder by the second. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, The Silo opened up to a small space that could maybe fit forty people at full capacity. It was laid out in a wide, low-ceilinged space that had the unfinished bones of a repurposed industrial basement and concrete walls painted flat black.
There was a bar along the left wall, built from scrap metal and mismatched wood, and a small stage against the back wall, elevated maybe six inches off the floor. There were also a handful of booths along the right side, and a crowd of maybe twenty-five people watching the four-piece band on the stage.
The bassist was locked into the low end of an unofficial live cover of Never Fade Away. The rocker was really into it, playing it with a dropped shoulder and his eyes half-closed.
I recognized the bassist as Dino Dinovic from the headshots I had found of him. I had assumed the man was going to be sitting in a corner booth waiting for me or something, dressed in a corpo suit given his reputation, but nope, he was on the stage in a sleeveless denim vest, his forearms sleeved in tattoos that I recognized as a mix of chrome-etched runework and traditional ink. He had dark hair falling forward across his face in an unkempt configuration. From what I knew, he was in his 70s or 80s, but he looked like he was in his mid-forties, and he was wearing enough eyeliner to hint that he partied hard.
To my surprise, he clocked me the second I walked in, but didn't stop playing. He just tracked me over the top of his bass guitar with a deliberate look, as if he owned the room, and then returned his attention to the song.
I found a spot at the bar and waited for him to finish. The bartender was a broad-shouldered woman in her forties with a shaved head, chrome-plated forearms, and a faded Samurai t-shirt. Her name tag said MOJO. She looked at me, took in the mask, the glasses, my height, and the holster at my hip, and pushed a coaster across the bar in front of me without asking what I wanted.
"You wanna drink, or you wanna wait for him?" she asked.
"I'll wait," I said.
"Suit yourself," she said. "RealWater's on the house if he wants you to have it."
"Does he?" I asked.
She looked me over one more time, then poured the water and slid it across the bar.
"Yeah," she said. "He does."
I did not touch the water for the moment, but Mojo did not seem to mind.
Once the band finished the song, I turned to see the crowd applauding and shouting at the top of their lungs. I leaned against the bar as I scanned the crowd. Some of them looked like corpos slumming after work, still wearing their office clothes under the leather jackets, while the rest looked like some street-level mercs. One booth held what was clearly a joytoy on her night off, drinking with a woman in an NCPD detective's coat.
The lead singer said some shit about the NUSA into the microphone that got a laugh from the front row before the band stepped down.
Dino handed his bass to a roadie, wiped his hands on his jeans, and crossed the floor toward the bar as if he was not in a rush to meet me. And shit, I guess he wasn't, since I'm the one who needs the gig and I wasn't going anywhere.
He stopped in front of me, tilted his head slightly, and looked up. The height differential was pronounced, and I had at least ten inches on him.
"Ghost," he said. His voice was smooth, as if he hadn't spent his entire life smoking, singing, or whatever an old ghost from the time of red had done in their prime.
"Mister Dinovic," I said.
"Don't fucking call me that. Call me Dino," he said as he gestured at Mojo, who slid a bottle of liquor across the bar without needing further instruction. He caught it and cracked it open. "Dinovic is for the tax returns I don't file. Come sit down."
He turned and walked toward a booth in the back corner without waiting to see if I was following.
The booth was screened off from the main floor by a hanging tapestry depicting what appeared to be a graphic account of the Fourth Corporate War, rendered in the style of a Renaissance oil painting. The table was covered in ring stains and old carvings from patrons who had etched their initials and threats against specific corpos into the wood over the years.
Dino slid into one side without much of a care, and I slid into the other.
"You're different in person," I said.
"Everyone is," Dino said as he set the bottle on the table. "You only get the real deal when you meet the real deal."
He took a slow swig and looked at me over the rim of the glass. His eyes were dark and considerably sharper than the loose delivery had suggested.
"So," he said. "Fourteen days I've been reading you. Not that it took fourteen days to figure out who you are, kid. Took me about six hours. Made some calls, found out that your gonked ass went to meet that old hag Wakako without a mask when you were younger. Santiago Andrés Reyes. Sixteen years old, born to corpo parents on November 26th, 2052. Father was iced by Militech, and since then, your life spiraled. But you managed to stitch it back together for your mother. Quite the backstory. At least I know you're not a corpo rat."
He took another swig before continuing. "I still had to take thirteen and a half days to decide whether I actually wanted to sit across from a runner your age or whether Regina had finally lost the plot and started sending me children."
I didn't give him the reaction I believe he was expecting after my identity was found out. "And your conclusion?"
He grinned widely, using every muscle in his face.
"You're a child, but the good kind. The kind who does clean work and doesn't leave a mess for anyone else to sweep up." He paused and took another pull from the bottle. "From your work history, you seem to leave subnets the way you found them. You slip in and out without leaving as much of a trail. The corpos who own them don't know they've been touched until the inventory no longer matches, and by then you're three jobs deep somewhere else. That's not a talent I see often. Not at any age."
"I guess Regina's been generous," I said.
"Nah." He set the bottle down and tilted his head. "So here's how this is going to go. I have plenty of gigs lined up, and you want a gig from me. Before we get to the gig, though, I need to see the work in person. I couldn't give a rat's ass what the boards say about you or what Regina has seen. I wanna see what you can do, right here, right now. I brought a special little piece of hardware specifically for this conversation."
He reached into the inside pocket of his denim vest and produced a small portable terminal with a single data port. He casually set it on the table between us.
"Three ICE layers," Dino said. "Rotating auth with a data target at the bottom. You've got no time limit that I'm going to tell you about, but I have one in my head, and if you don't beat it, we're going to have a much shorter conversation than expected."
I looked at the terminal and then at him. "Right here? While the next band sets up?"
"Kid," Dino said, taking another pull from the bottle without breaking eye contact, "if a bass amp forty feet away is enough to break your focus, then you're not the runner your rep put you up to be, and I'm not the fixer I know I am. Do the work. Or don't. Either way, we'll know."
I nodded and pulled my link cable from my pocket, connected one end to my Neural Link port and the other to the terminal, and dove in.
The simulated subnet materialized across my overlay, and I chewed through the first authentication layer, riding on a spoofed maintenance credential that the temporary firmware bridge processed with only a slight lag. The second layer was more adaptive, modifying its defense topology in response to intrusion patterns. So I fed it a null-pattern probe that tricked it into reconfiguring around an attack vector that didn't exist, and slipped through the gap it opened in its own defenses.
Then when I got to the third layer, I found a trap. A honeypot designed to look exactly like the extraction target, with a silent alarm that would flag the entry point for forensic analysis the moment a runner grabbed it. A metadata discrepancy in the directory structure was the tell, easy to miss if you were tired or arrogant. I caught it, located the shadow partition where the real target was buried, extracted it, and disconnected.
My total connection time was three minutes and forty-one seconds.
I unplugged the cable and folded it back into my pocket. "Done."
Dino had been watching me the whole time, the bottle held loosely in one hand. He checked a beat-up analog watch on his left wrist, took in the reading, and then let an appreciative smile spread across his face.
"Now that," he said, "is style."
"Style?" I asked, caught off-guard by the word.
"Style, kid. You cracked through the layers like you had somewhere better to be and spotted my trap," he said while tapping the terminal with one finger. "Fifteen runners have sat where you're sitting over the past three years. Eleven of them either failed or took the fake. Of the ones who didn't fail. the fastest took six minutes and change and looked like she was going to pass out doing it. You did it in under four, and didn't even break a sweat. That's presentation, and to me, presentation is currency."
"I appreciate the compliment," I said.
"Don't appreciate it, kid. Learn to use it," he said before taking a long pull from the bottle. "Because here's the truth about this business, Ghost, and I'm going to give it to you for free since we're going to be working together. Most of you gonked runners are competent. And I get it, because competence is the floor. Competence is what gets you a callback. But this city is drowning in competent motherfuckers, and the ones who move up and get the calls when the real money is on the table are the ones who do the work with something extra. Style. Flair. The ability to walk into a room like they own it, do the impossible, and walk out like it wasn't even interesting. Legends aren't made by being good at their jobs, because if that was the case, this city would be chock-full of them. Legends are made by being memorable while they do them."
He gestured vaguely at the stage behind him. "Silverhand ain't burn down Arasaka Tower because he was good. He burned it down cause he wanted people to remember they were watching him do it. Style, kid. That's the whole game."
I sat with that for a second.
"So," Dino said, leaning back into the booth. "The gig. Let's talk business."
"Yeah," I said as a smirk crept up on my lips. "Let's talk shop."
Dino rolled the bottle between his palms and looked down before smiling.
"Target is a Militech logistics facility in the eastern industrial district. Officially, it's the world's most boring building. Procurement records. Vendor contracts. Supply chain paperwork that keeps their western theater funded and armed. It has six guards, no gate worth mentioning, minimal chrome, basically a filing cabinet with a fence around it." He paused and clasped his hands over the table as he leaned forward. "But beneath the surface is a different building. Three sub-levels that Militech does not acknowledge on any public filing, yet I managed to get my hands on it. It's supposedly some classified research division with physical security, biometric locks, and a digital architecture that my sources described as mil-spec and then some. Fixer-speak for someone getting paid a lot of eddies to keep other people out."
"And what is the extraction target?" I asked, intrigued by the gig and fueled a little bit by the reminder that militech had been the ones to take my father from me.
"Specific file set from the research division's primary server. Client wants it, client pays well, client remains a client of mine as long as I deliver." He shrugged casually. "What's in the files? None of my biz. Whose secrets? None of my biz. What they'll do with the data after I hand it over? Still none of my biz. My biz is that you extract the file set cleanly. Try not to leave any bodies or forensic trail, and everybody involved goes home with a fat wad of eddies."
"What's my cut?" I asked.
"Seventy-five," Dino said. "That's the number for showing up and doing the job. If you bring me something back that surprises me, and I don't surprise easy, the number goes up. If you get caught, get zeroed, or get anyone else iced, the number becomes an obituary. And I ain't sending you flowers. But since you did that test in record time, I don't think we're going to have that problem."
"By when do I have to be ready?" I asked.
"Everything will be ready in five days," Dina said. "You'll work with a crew of three operators I've personally assembled. They'll handle the physical side of things while you take care of the digital. They know their part, and now you know yours. Nobody's going to step on your toes."
He raised the bottle in a ceremonial gesture. "This is the part where a lot of fixers give you a speech about trust and mutual respect. I'm not going to. You're going to figure out whether we trust each other by the outcome of this job. If it goes well, you'll keep hearing from me. If it doesn't, you won't. That's the arrangement. Simple and with no hidden bullshit."
"Simple works for me," I said.
"Simple always works," Dino said as he extended his hand across the table.
I took it, noting that his grip was firm and his hand calloused. He was considerably stronger than his body suggested, and held the shake for exactly the right amount of time.
"Five days, kid," he reminded me. "Meet's gonna be here at seven PM. I'll send the crew details."
I nodded in understanding, and he released my hand. He picked up the bottle, drained the last of it, and slid it across the table for Mojo to eventually retrieve.
"One more thing, Ghost," Dino said.
"Yeah?" I asked.
"Style, kid. Whatever the job asks you to do, do it with style. The eddies pay for the work, but the reputation you gain pays for the next ten years." He slid out of the booth with the same loose grace he had used to sit down. "Nobody in this city ever became a legend by being invisible. Even the ghosts who do their best work in the dark get remembered for what they leave behind. Make sure your work is worth remembering."
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If you want more bonus chappies, then send stones, or go onto the infamous P@treon if you want to continue reading ahead during this hiatus.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around long-form chapters (4-6k words each)