Over a month had passed since Santi got his last bit of chrome installed, and the calendar had flipped to the 2nd of January, 2070. Santi had turned seventeen, and Vik still hadn't found a suitable Sandevistan for him. Julia had baked Santi a cake, and his chooms had brought him presents.
Vik had brought a bottle of fancy champagne, which was duly appreciated, but Judy had brought in a bottle of cheap whiskey, and everyone agreed it was better than the champagne.
It had been a quiet birthday since the anticipation of what the NUSA would do next kept everyone on edge. But the NUSA had not attacked, and that was driving Night City to the edge of the little sanity it still retained. By the end of November, a second division had joined the military division that had been spotted approaching, and a third in late December. As satellite imagery leaked, it showed how a staging area in the Badlands had grown from a forward operating base into a full theater-level military zone.
There was armor, aviation, infantry, quickly constructed airstrips, and full-blown logistics. It was a display that conveyed the full intent to fight a sustained urban campaign, rather than a quick strike.
But even as their number grew, they had yet to attack. Night City had not yet received an ultimatum or a declaration of war. The NUSA was just slowly and deliberately accumulating its forces on the city's doorstep, making the tension and the stakes grow heavier by the day. Not knowing whether tomorrow would be the end of the world for Night City's residents was worse than the attack would have been, because the uncertainty let people's imaginations do the work and led to discord, panic, and overall public unrest.
The City Council had been in emergency session since late November and had publicly debated defensive measures, civilian evacuation protocols, and diplomatic channels that had produced nothing and wouldn't produce anything, because it appeared the NUSA didn't intend to negotiate. But behind closed doors, the Council was fractured between appeasement, defiance, and the paralyzed indecision common among democratic bodies when the stakes were existential, and there was no good way out.
It was then that Councilman Lucius Rhyne broke the deadlock. He had been an old-guard of Night City, a career politician who had survived the Time of the Red, the rebuilding, and the decades that followed of corporate power brokerage. Through it all, he had built a contact list longer than most corporations' client rosters. He had relationships with people on every side of every fence in the Pacific Rim, and when the Council's debate ground into futility, Rhyne did what he had to do. He picked up the phone and called the only group who could actually solve the problem.
ARASAKA.
The corporation that had been banished from Night City since the tower bombing in 2023, and they were still spoken about with reverence in the city, with even the Tyger Claws maintaining close ties with the old hound that had been forced to retreat to lick its wounds. It had been almost forty-seven years since its exile, and since then it had only grown in power and influence, keeping a watchful eye from across the Pacific as Night City rebuilt itself on the rubble of Arasaka's own headquarters, waiting for the day it would be allowed to return.
Rhyne's plea had been simple. He had offered Arasaka a chance to come back and protect the city, and in exchange, he would take care of lifting the ban that had exiled Arasaka from Night City for nearly half a century. He would restore their corporate operating rights in full, reopening the doors that had been shut in 2023.
To Rhyne's surprise, Arasaka's response was faster than anyone had expected, revealing just how Arasaka had been waiting for someone to ask for their return. As a sign of good faith, Arasaka immediately dispatched the Kujira, which hadn't been sitting too far away in the Pacific.
The name of the ship meant "The Whale" in Japanese, and the ship had more than earned it. It was a supercarrier, the flagship of Arasaka's Pacific Fleet, carrying enough military hardware and corporate security personnel to alter the strategic balance of any theater it entered. It was currently en route, cutting across the Pacific at a speed beyond what anything its size should have any right to move. If all went according to plan, it would arrive in about four to five days.
The public did not know about the Kujira, nor did they know about Rhyne's call and promise to the merciless corporation. The public knew only that the NUSA was on their doorstep and that the Council was debating and that nobody had fired a shot yet. The tension of that sustained uncertainty was turning Night City into a militarized city, to the point that it was starting to resemble Texas.
And as it turns out, the old saying that war was rather lucrative proved itself again and again. In the past few weeks, the Afterlife had done more business than it had done in the previous two years combined, and a few names had risen among the ranks for merc work.
Maine was sitting at the back of a bar called The Rumble on the edge of Arroyo, in a booth with cracked vinyl seats and a table that wobbled. He sat by a window, looking out onto the dimly lit parking lot. The Rumble had been a dive bar in the 2030s, and the years hadn't been kind to it. But nonetheless, Maine liked it.
Nobody asked questions or cared why a 7'4 giant of a man sat in the back booth with arms heavy enough with chrome to be classified as a walking disaster. It was the kind of bar his mother would have played in, back when she was still traveling, still chasing the dream that some talent scout would walk through the door of whatever lounge she was singing in that week and tell her she was the voice they had been looking for.
Maine's mother had been a jazz singer, and a good one by the accounts of the people Maine had tracked down years later. People who remembered her said she had a big voice and an even bigger smile. She had worked her way up and down the East Coast, carrying nothing but a suitcase and a voice, propped up only by the unshakable belief that the right person would hear her someday.
But that person never did. What she found instead, in Portland, Maine, was a pregnancy she hadn't planned, from a man she couldn't remember clearly enough to contact, during a period of her life she had later described to her son as "complicated." She had liked Portland. The state of Maine had been good to her, so she decided to trade the suitcase and the stages for a waitress apron and a small apartment with the son she named after the only place that had ever felt like home.
Maine. Named after a state by a woman who had run out of places to run.
He had been a small kid, quite sickly and frail. In his childhood, he got picked on, beaten up, and had his face pushed into the frozen mud by boys who were bigger and meaner than he had been. They had decided that the skinny kid, the son of the jazz-singing whore, was the one they were going to use to feel powerful that afternoon.
And during those days, Maine had made a promise to himself. He was going to get bigger and stronger than anyone around him. It was the kind of promise frail children make and forget by the time they grow into average-sized adults. But Maine did not forget.
As he got older, he got bigger. He got into underground boxing, won his first prize fight, and used the money to buy his first piece of chrome. With titanium metacarpals and phalanges in his right hand, he was now sure that the next time he swung at someone, they would not get back up. And with those improvements, the promise was fulfilled.
But life can only be kind for so long. His mother died a few years later in the same apartment she had raised him in Portland, and he found himself twenty-two years old with chrome in his fist, no plan, and grief. He processed it the only way he knew how, hitting things.
He worked as a bouncer. Club after club after club, each gig shorter than the last because Maine's definition of "troublemaker" was considerably broader than any club owner's, and his response to troublemakers was considerably more permanent. So the clubs kept firing him, and he kept finding new ones.
Then, one night in a club in the Pearl District, he beat up five men who had been starting shit near the bar. Beat them so badly that it was scary. Unknown to him, those five men were NUSA SpecOps.
The club fired Maine before the ambulances had even arrived, and the following morning, his Agent pinged with a call from a private number. The voice on the other end told him that the five men he had hospitalized were impressed, and that the NUSA had a job offer for a man who could beat five trained operators in a bar fight using nothing but his hands.
Maine, with no direct path to follow and tired of drifting, took the job. Getting paid to hit people who deserved it sounded like a good career.
He joined the NUSA's SpecOps unit and was deployed to South America. Deep in the jungle, walking through the humid heat and pulling operations that never appeared in any official record, he soon realized he was really good at it. His size, his chrome, and his relentless physical aggression made him an asset in close-quarters work that other operators found hard to stomach. And in that unit, he met two men he would come to consider brothers.
Solomon Reed and James Norris.
The three of them had served together for two years in conditions that built a bond that would either last forever or break completely. The bond never broke, but two years of watching villages burn, two years of operations whose strategic rationale grew thinner with every briefing, two years of being the fist at the end of an arm whose brain was making decisions he could not justify, slowly broke the frail inner kid from Portland, and Maine took his discharge.
He went back to the NUSA, drifted, and eventually, because Night City was the place where drifters went when they wanted to stop drifting, he came here.
That had been about a year ago, and now he was sitting in The Rumble, drinking bourbon he couldn't really afford while thinking about putting a crew together. Every sip left him wondering whether becoming an edgerunner was a career choice or a death wish, and as he contemplated his future, looking out onto that dimly lit parking lot at his shit of a ride, he felt a hand land on his shoulder.
"Shit," Maine said, keeping his eyes on his ride. "I know that grip."
"'Course you do," said a voice behind him.
Maine turned in the booth to see two men standing beside his table. The first was a tall, bald man with a full beard and dark eyes, wearing a nondescript jacket over a plain shirt. He had on unremarkable clothing that would make people's eyes slide off him. Without the bartender's apron and the fake name tag, Solomon Reed was just another muscular black guy from around the block.
The second man was James Norris, or Torque as he had come to be known in merc circles. He was standing beside Reed with his hands in the pockets of his tactical jacket, his grey eyes carrying a bit of warmth.
"Sol," Maine said. "It's been a minute."
"It's been three years," Solomon Reed said, sliding into the booth across from Maine. "You look good. A little bigger too."
"I look old, man, I look fucking old," Maine said as he looked at Norris. "And Jim. Still pretending to be a merc?"
"Still pretending," Norris said, taking a seat beside Reed. "Getting pretty good at it, too."
"Yeah, I can tell," Maine chuckled. "Deep cover suits you. You always were the best liar in the unit."
"Second best," Norris said. "Sol was always the one with the silver tongue."
"Yeah, this bastard was always first at everything," Maine said. "That's why we hated you."
For a moment, the three of them just sat in the booth. It was as if friends had finally come together for a drink after a long time. But Maine knew better than that. Sol didn't do social calls.
"So," Maine said, picking up his bourbon. "You going to buy me a drink before you pitch me, or are we skipping the foreplay?"
Reed smiled. "Bourbon, neat. Same as you're having."
Reed signaled the bartender, who produced two bourbons with disinterest.
"How have you been?" Reed asked.
"Surviving," Maine sighed. "You?"
"Just about the same," Reed said. "But in a different way."
All three of them drank and began to recall the past.
"How's the back?" Maine asked.
"Still hurts when it rains," Reed answered.
"You know we have this magical thing nowadays called chrome," Maine said, tilting his drink. "It could get that fixed up for you."
"Nah, I'd rather maintain as much of my fesh as I can," Reed said, shaking his head.
"Well, at least you know you'll be bleeding a lot," Maine sighed. "After all, you were always bleeding. That was your thing. Sol bleeds, Jim lies, Maine punches things. We had our roles."
"We did," Norris nodded quietly.
The warmth cooled as the memories of Bogotá and other places in South America replayed in their minds.
"Those were different times," Maine said.
"Yeah, they were," Reed agreed.
"I don't know about you guys," Maine said, taking another drink. "But I don't miss them."
"Neither do I," Reed agreed.
"Bullshit, Sol. You loved it," Norris said.
"I was effective at it. That's in an entirely different ballpark," Reed defended himself, setting his glass down and folding his hands.
"Here it comes," Maine said, taking note of Reed's change in body language.
Reed let out a long sigh and shook his head, a smile creeping onto his face.
"I have an offer for you," Reed said. "The NUSA plans on taking direct military action within the next few days. Kurt Hansen is leading the forces staged in the Badlands, and they aren't going to sit through January like they've been ordered. We believe the attack will target the outer districts first. Pacifica, the Badlands perimeter, possibly Heywood."
"That bastard's still alive?" Maine questioned. "Shit. How many lives does he have?"
"Yeah," Norris said. "And the fucker is my CO too."
"My condolences," Maine said. "Now, what do you want, Sol?"
Solomon Reed leaned forward on the table and spoke in a hushed tone. "I'm building a network of intelligence operatives inside Night City. The FIA needs eyes on the ground, people who know the city, who know its people. I need people I trust, and the list of people I trust is short, and you're on it."
Maine looked at his bourbon, at Reed, and then at Norris.
"No," Maine said. "I'm done, Sol. I did my time. I did it in places I don't like to talk about, and I stopped believing in that patriotic bullshit a while ago. I came to Night City to start something new. I want to be an edgerunner, build my own crew. I want to do the kind of work where the only person I answer to is the fixer and the only thing I owe anyone is results... That's my play. Going back under for the FIA is the opposite of everything I came here to do."
"I understand," Reed said. "The offer stands if you change your mind."
"I won't." Maine shook his head.
Norris chuckled softly.
"For what it's worth," Norris said, leaning forward on the table, "I get it. I've been running deep cover as a merc for two years now, and I'll be straight with you, Maine. I've enjoyed it. More than I should. There's something about this life."
"Jim, the uniform fit fine enough," Maine said. "It's the orders that didn't."
"Fair enough." Norris took a sip. "I've been running with a crew, small outfit, with a fixer named Dino Dinovic. Good work, good pay. And there's this kid on the crew."
"Holy shit," Maine said, sobering up a bit. "You're working with Dino? The guy's like a big-time fixer. And you're saying a kid is working with you?"
"Yeah, a kid," Norris confirmed as his eyes shifted into some sort of admiration. "Reminds me of that girl, Songbird, you got working with you, Sol. But I think he might be even better. He's seventeen, maybe, and runs under the handle Ghost. He's a Netrunner, and from what I've heard, his rig is fully custom. The kid's real talented, talented in a way that makes me uncomfortable."
"Ghost," Reed said, trying to place the face. "You talking about the new tall kid I've seen around the Afterlife? White hair? Violet eyes?"
Norris nodded.
"I served him his first real drink," he said, pausing momentarily. "The FIA has a file on the family. Father was a former solo turned Militech operative. He led a classified program that went sideways in '52. The son is interesting."
"Well, shit, Sol," Maine said, finding himself leaning forward despite his intention to stay uninvested in anything Reed brought to the table tonight. "Trouble's afoot when you find someone interesting."
"He catches attention from people who collect interesting things," Reed said. "The kind of interesting that doesn't stay quiet for long."
Norris nodded. "I don't know all the details on his background. What I know is that I've worked with him, and there are rumors he wrote his own firmware from scratch. He's been in the business for a few years, but his netrunning is cleaner than operators I've worked with who have two decades of experience, and his combat instincts are developing fast. He's raw, but I'm telling you now, that kid might end up putting the NUSA's current protege to shame if he keeps growing the way he is."
Maine thought about that. He knew that in Night City, being a kid was merely a title. Children usually took their first life at twelve, so seventeen was more than old enough. That kind of talent either burned bright and died young or burned bright and changed everything around it. He understood what it meant to build yourself from nothing at an age when most people were still figuring out who they wanted to be.
"He's a kid, Sol," Maine said.
"You and I know that doesn't really mean anything in this city," Reed said. "From what James has told me, he's already got the marking of a merc legend. God can only tell what he will be like if he survives long enough."
Maine sat with that for a moment, turning his empty glass in his hand.
"You should meet him," Norris said.
"Why?" Maine asked.
"Well, I won't be in this undercover business for much longer, and the eddies I've earned working with him have set me up to retire and live a happy life with Elizabeth once this is all over. You're going to need a netrunner when you build that crew, and he's going to need somebody watching his back who knows what they're doing. You would've probably crossed paths eventually. I'm just saving you the time."
Maine set his glass down and looked back out the window.
"I'll think about it," he said.
They sat in the booth for another hour and started to catch up on life. The bourbon kept flowing, and songs kept on playing.
Oh, how peaceful and beautiful life was when war was just days away.
---
Maine is in town! Stones will keep him here...maybe...
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