The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novice K.
Operative TwistedToaster.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
Moth met us at the edge of the Pacifica development zone at eleven that night. They had slipped out of the shadows of a half-built parking structure without making a sound, wearing optical camo emitters at the shoulders and hips. A compact sidearm was holstered at the small of their back.
"You're both late," Moth said.
"We're four minutes early," Torque argued.
"You're late," Moth repeated. "I take into account the walk as well."
Torque did not argue with that response.
He was carrying the same suppressed Tsunami Kyubi he had used in the last gig, strapped across his chest on a two-point sling. He was also wearing the same dark tactical jacket and ballistic vest. His eyes swiveled back and forth, scanning the perimeter as he stepped out of the van.
"Entry point is about one hundred and eighty meters south," Moth said as they signaled for us to follow. "There is a service stairwell that leads into the sub-basement of the never-opened retail complex. As far as I know, it's unlocked since the whole zone's been in evacuation mode since yesterday, and I doubt anybody was thinking about locking service doors on the way out.
"Any idea on who had access to the place?" I asked.
"Petrochem, Kang Tao, Zetatech, and about half a dozen private equity outfits nobody's ever heard of," Torque was the one to reply this time.
"If I were to guess, they burned billions yesterday," I said.
"At the very least," Torque agreed.
Unlike the rest of Night City, Pacifica had half-built towers that rose in black silhouettes against a sky painted with the faint hues of all the holo-ads running in the rest of the city. Pacifica had all the infrastructure to match as well, with functional streetlights and project floodlamps on the tops of the tower cranes still on, their corpo branding still lit on the sides of the half-completed structures.
But for some reason, it all felt wrong. In a place that should be crawling with scavs and other gangers or crews, the lights were on, but nobody seemed to be home.
Half-completed towers rose around us, their upper floors still unfinished with scaffolding freshly bolted on, and tarps still hanging where the day-shift crews had left them yesterday afternoon. There were site trailers with their doors open, a stack of rebar bundles on a pallet, and concrete mixers with their load probably beginning to set by now, and the wind coming in off the ocean smelled like salt and drying concrete.
"This is fucking weird," I said quietly.
"No kidding," Torque agreed.
Moth led the way without hesitating. We went down a service alley between two active construction sites, past a stack of construction materials and a stripped-down forklift somebody had abandoned mid-load, through a temporary chain-link fence that had been erected to separate the residential-tower work zone from the retail complex build/ We also went across an open plaza, which left us exposed for a what felt like a long time, but thankfully nothing shot at us.
However, not getting shot at didn't mean that we were in the clear or that nothing was watching us. Scavs had moved into this place in the last twenty-four hours, and they were still figuring out where the good scores were. That meant that they weren't set up in defensive perimeters yet, but it also meant they were skittish, jumpy, and prone to shooting first at anything they couldn't recognize.
Moth checked the door once we reached the service stairwell before cracking it open and listening for a bit. They then held up two fingers, pointed at their ear, and moved their hands to show someone talking, which probably meant they had heard voices.
For maybe thirty seconds, the three of us stood in a dead-still triangle beside the doorway while I was able to pick up what Moth had overheard. There were two voices, and both of them were male. They sounded like they were arguing about something in Russian. The voices slowly got closer to our location before they started to go further as the two men appeared to have passed us.
Moth waited another twenty seconds after the voices faded before they pulled the door open the rest of the way.
"That's going to happen a lot down there," Moth said quietly. "This whole place is full of new crews, who are noisy. Thankfully, noisy is good for us if we don't get caught inside their sight lines, and very bad for us if we do. So, if I stop, you stop. If I signal, you comply. If I whisper, you whisper back once, not twice."
"Understood," Torque said.
"Understood," I nodded, and we went in.
The stairwell descended in a tight spiral. Each level was marked with construction stencils that Militech's site crews had spray-painted in bright orange to keep the sub-basement work zones straight.
SUB-1.
SUB-2.
SUB-3.
SUB-4.
Each landing had construction materials stacked against the walls. Apparently, Sub-4 was where the finish work was underway. Or had been. I scanned the state of the level as we stepped off the landing. It had framed corridors with electrical rough-in complete, plumbing pipes stubbed out and capped for eventual fixture install, and cable runs partially pulled through the overhead lights.
Things were pretty light for a little while, but it didn't really take long for us to run into another crew who was on Sub-3. I had sent out a ping quickhack to scout our surroundings and ended up tagging seven people about twenty meters away through the concrete. As we got closer, I was able to overhear them talking in a mix of Russian and English, which I was able to understand because I still had that translating program Sasha had given me. The gist of their conversation was about who got to keep a set of Kang Tao surveying equipment they'd apparently hauled up from one of the corpo staging trailers.
"Stop," Moth said through our comms as they signaled for us to halt by putting up their hand. Torque and I stopped moving and tried to blend as best as we could against the wall, which wasn't all that well since I was six foot six, and he was six foot five. I sent out another Ping to confirm the count, and then a third to a different piece of tech, which pinged five new signatures drawing closer along the corridor perpendicular to this crew's camp.
"We have five more joining the party," I said through our comms as I held up my hand pointed in the direction of the new ping.
"Let's wait and see what happens before doing anything," Torque said as he readied his rifle.
We waited while the new variables got closer to the camp, and once they did, an argument broke out, and demands flew back and forth about which territory each crew was claiming, and some threats about the Kang Tao equipment. Then a louder voice from somebody in the camp told the newcomers to walk unless they wanted to get flatlined.
There was a tense moment of silence before the newcomers walked away from the original seven. I sent out another ping, and we waited until they were out of my scanning range, which was 35 meters.
"Alright, Torque, if you would," Moth said.
Torque moved past us without a word. I watched as his back started to brighten, and I knew that he was about to activate his Sandy, so I activated my Kerenzikov. And fuck me, did Torque make that fucker that almost killed me look slow. Even with my Kerenzikov active, I was only able to see the afterimages Torque had left behind, every single one of the seven unlucky souls that happened to be in our path.
About two seconds later, Torque was leaning on the crate containing the Kang Tao equipment these guys wanted as all seven of their bodies dropped like marionettes with their strings cut while their frontal lobes exploded since Torque had shot them all in the back of the head. Smoke escaped his suppressed rifle's barrel, and blood started to seep out of their cratered skulls.
"Fucking Nova," I whispered. I definitely had to get my own Sandy installed one of these days.
"What are you ladies waiting for?" Torque asked. "An invitation or something?"
"That was fast," I said.
"Yeah, well, we didn't come here to dilly dally," Torque said. "We've got a job to do. Their unluckiness and stupidity got them killed."
"Fair enough," I nodded as I took another look at the dead bodies. The way their brains were barely even contained in what remained of their heads reminded me of Jax's suicide and soured my mood momentarily. But Torque was right. We had come here to do a job, and death was something unavoidable in our line of work. If I didn't want to end up like these poor fuckers, I needed to up my chrome, and to do that, I had to make more eddies.
We moved and ended up coming up on a second crew who had rigged an improvised trip in their corridor, using a chemical sensor cobbled together from stolen construction equipment that they'd wired into a hand-held detonator. I quickly turned the trap friendly by corrupting its detection logic just enough to make it read us as ambient background, and Torque moved through it and fully deactivated it. Apparently he had experience disarming explosive devices, and this was just up that alley.
After that, I sent a couple of Sonar Shock and Reboot Optics quickhacks to the crew of six. Moth threw one of their throwing knives at one, striking him between the eyes, before slitting the throat of the woman who was standing next to him. At the same time, I stacked two Synapse Burnout quickhacks on one of them while Torque took care of the other three. He then went the extra mile and put an extra two bullets in each one of their heads.
I raised an eyebrow as I looked at him, blood splattered all over his jacket.
"What?" he asked. "Ammo is cheap. Better to make sure they're dead than to have them stand up and shoot you in the ass."
"I'm not complaining," I said while raising my hands. "It's just... couldn't you have done that without painting yourself like a piece of modern art?"
My question made him chuckle and shake his head.
"Alright, let's stop wasting time," he said just as Moth finished retrieving their throwing knife from the one ganger's head.
Moth took the lead once again, and it didn't take long for us to come across a third group in a corridor junction that we couldn't bypass. They were another six people spread across a rough defensive perimeter, and one of them was clearly a netrunner because I could pick up their subnet activity.
"They're waiting for a rival crew," Moth said through our comms. "That's why they set up like that. Probably a rival crew wanted the same area, but they managed to get here first, and now they're guarding it."
"Can't we just go around?" Torque asked.
"Not without adding forty minutes," Moth said while shaking their head.
"I don't like fighting combatants that are waiting for an attack," Torque said through the comms while cracking his neck. "But I guess we'll just have to go through them."
Torque was right. Fighting a prepared group would leave us at a big disadvantage, and they also had a netrunner. If I engaged their netrunner and lost, we were in an open firefight with six chooms in a defensive position, and if I engaged their netrunner and won, the other five would notice their runner going down and the firefight would still happen, just with better odds.
So I could only try to improvise a third option. The art of distraction.
I had noticed that there was an Access Point just a couple of meters back, so we retreated a bit, and I plugged myself into it, piggybacking off it to tap into the building's power grid, which was still live since nobody had bothered cutting it before pulling out. I rerouted a segment of the corridor lighting three sections away and killed the overhead panels in the wrong sequence, then triggered a false alert in a network node that would read, to a paranoid crew waiting for rivals, as somebody actively splicing into the local grid.
I had already disconnected myself from the Access Point by the time their netrunner tagged it and called it out to the rest of the crew. Two of them peeled off to check, leaving only four behind and turning the odds in our favor.
Moth snuck up to the netrunner using their optical camouflage, and I sent a Sonic Shock quickhack to the other three. As soon as my quickhack landed, Moth thrust two knives into the back of the neck of the netrunner and pushed them in opposite directions, crossing their arms and effectively decapitating the netrunner while Torque handled the rest with a hail of bullets.
Two of the men Torque attacked had subdermal armor, so although they were injured, they weren't dead. They reached for their weapons, but I had already activated my Kerenzikov and sent a stack of three Overheat quickhacks to both of them, setting them on fire from the inside out. Doing so gave me a quickly fleeting dull headache where my Neural Link was, and I reached to touch the location. It was noticeably warmer than the rest of my head, which meant that I was starting to push it a bit. Sure, I could still keep on going without much strain, but I needed to be in my best shape to sift through all of the files I had to go through.
We moved through the junction while I sent out a Ping. I noticed that the two who'd peeled off were coming back at a jog, and Moth pulled us into a temporary storage alcove right before they turned the corner, and we waited in the dark while they walked past us and they found their chooms flatlined. Before they could even react, Torque had put four bullets in the back of each of their skulls, allowing them to be united with their chooms in life and in death.
We kept moving forward while Moth guided us. They moved through the half-finished sub-basements as if they knew the floor plans like the back of their own hand, possessing some innate sense of subterranean geography that I did not have a word for. We never had to backtrack or decide as a group which route we were going to take. They knew which corridors were dead ends and which ones connected through to the next section, and they took us on a route that avoided as many people as possible.
"How do you know this place so well?" I asked in a hushed voice while Torque went to check one of the corridors out.
"I don't," Moth said.
"You're telling me you've never been down here?" I asked in disbelief.
"No," Moth said flatly.
"Then how the fuck are you doing this?" I asked.
Moth was quiet for a moment before answering.
"Buildings have grammar," Moth said. "Militech built Pacifica to a standard commercial spec. Once you know the specs, you are also privy to the building, and every Militech-led corpo development in the last twenty years has done the same thing over and over again, and I have studied them all. Every corporation builds the same three or four floor plans, only hiring different architects to disguise them. But once you learn the plans, you can navigate anything built by a corporation without ever setting foot inside it first."
"You've studied Militech commercial architecture?" I asked, raising an eyebrow. "What are you, a corpo?"
"I used to be," Moth said. "During my previous form of employment, I had climbed fairly high up the corporate ladder. But a sudden shake-up in upper management made someone feel as if blood needed to be needlessly spilled for the altar of corporate efficiency. Unfortunately for me, I had been chosen as its sacrificial lamb."
"Oh, shit," I gasped. "And it's clear you survived everything thrown at you."
"Not quite," Moth said as they slipped off the gloves they had on, showing a pair of mechanical hands. "Such attempts on my life left my hands and facial features... rather undisposed. I scraped up all I had to replace what I could. I get a handful more payouts like the one for this gig, and in no time I shall be able to come to the light as a changed man, though I may need to continue pulling the strings from behind a veil."
"Well, that's fucking Nova." I chuckled. "What are you going to do? Become a fixer, maybe start your own corporation or something?"
"Hmm," Moth hummed. "A fixer does sound like quite a way to come back into the spotlight without actually being seen. But for that I'd have to change my handle. After all, I doubt anyone would want to work for a fixer named Moth."
I nodded. He was right. No one would want to work for someone with such a shit name.
"Well, you got a story behind your, err, hands," I said. "And you obviously want to keep your identity secret since you have a voice modulator and everything. Talking about that, this is just a personal curiosity of mine, but what does your real voice sound like?"
"Now you are asking one too many questions," Moth shook his head.
"Fair enough," I said, knowing that I was pushing it a bit.
"Hands..." I heard Moth whisper as Torque was making his way back to us. "A puppeteer, controlling from the shadows... Hands does have a nice ring to it."
As soon as Torque reached us, our conversation was officially over, and we kept moving, eventually making it to the supposed observation post. However, as soon as we arrived in what was supposed to have been abandoned for quite a long time before the developments had been stopped, it felt wrong.
What started as a cold feeling in my stomach was slowly getting considerably worse with every step we took. The corridor leading to the server room was hidden very well and finished with painted walls, a sealed floor, overhead lighting that lit up as we walked, and a proper door with a proper frame.
Whoever built it had buried themselves in the earliest phases of Militech's excavation, and then let Militech construct the rest of Pacifica around them like a shell. This was not what "presumed inactive" looked like.
Moth checked the door, and it opened to a server room that was maybe ten meters by ten, climate-controlled, and populated by multiple full-height server racks running in an active state. The LED status indicators were also live while the cooling system operated and the ambient temperature maintained itself at a cool fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.
Torque stopped three steps inside the door and looked at the walls, the paint job, and the finish work on the ceiling. The longer he looked, the more the expression on his face shifted into heightened alertness that reinforced my gut feeling. This was very bad news.
"This place isn't Militech-owned," he said. "And it most definitely is not inactive. There's no dust accumulation anywhere."
The cold feeling in my stomach got significantly colder. I noticed a wall-mounted access station with a physical interface panel and a dormant screen, and approached it, bringing it out of standby with a manual keystroke. The screen lit up as a golden line traced the outer edge of a pointed shield, followed by geometric latitude and longitude grids inside the crest that interlocked to build a wireframe globe. The Roman numerals "MCMXCI" appeared at the bottom point of the badge, and the words VOS VIDEMUS loaded beneath the main banner as a solid horizontal band cut directly through the center of the sphere with block lettering illuminating across the band to spell...
"NetWatch."
---
AN: Anyone wanna guess who Moth will become?
---
Stones are lovely, especially when chucked my way!
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get various long-form chapters weekly.