The Sunrise Motel wasn't a particularly secure place, more like a run-down slab of concrete smack-dab in the middle of nowhere, but it was the closest thing to a safe place to rest that Falco could find for them.
After they'd parked the car and booked their rooms, the crew had mostly split up to do their own thing. Falco was still busy with swapping out the licence plates, and most of the others were getting ready to turn in for the night.
Kiwi had left for a smoke break, and after a short while, Lucy had done the same. She found the senior netrunner leaning against the motel's neon sign, giving her a half-lidded stare as she approached. It was a decent spot for a private chat. Far enough away from the motel to not get eavesdropped on, but not to the point where they were split up from the group, and still illuminated enough to see.
Lucy scanned the area searching for electronic bugs, just in case, and when the results came back showing only the unhackable device above them she made her way over to a concrete railing and sat. Wordlessly, Kiwi tugged a cigarette out of her case and tossed it over.
She caught and lit it quietly, guessing that she was going to need it for the talk ahead. Lucy took slow, deep drag and waited. The two of them stayed like that for a while, staring at the motel in silence, the neon light painting them both in pallid pink as Lucy waited for the nicotine to settle her nerves.
Eventually, Kiwi broke the silence. "What did you see in there?"
Lucy simply tugged a shard from her neck and held it out to Kiwi, too drained to explain. The senior netrunner took the shard and examined it with a critical eye, as if it would bite her, before slotting it in.
As Kiwi worked her way through the stored copies of the files, Lucy glanced around, still paranoid that there would be pursuers. It was nearly impossible to make out anything in the dark desert landscape, she could only see the dry bush, dead grass and dusty dirt illuminated by the motel lights.
Lucy was interrupted by a low whistle. "Not bad. Not bad at all." The senior netrunner seemed genuinely impressed, even if she spoke in her usual drawl. "This could be worth a lot, to some Militech higher-up. Might even shift the balance a little." She considered for a moment, before amending her statement. "At least, the balance in Night City."
Both of them knew that even if the multi-billion eddie project turned out to be a complete catastrophe for Arasaka, that didn't mean much in the struggles of Megacorporations. At the end of the day, the tower at the heart of the city would still be standing proud.
"The personnel records are pretty big on their own. That's already enough to compromise whatever security they've got. Definitely enough to figure out where this place is, with a little digging. Back it up with the reports, and we've got indisputable proof of something big happening. Everything else is the cherry on top." Kiwi's voice was calculated and clinical as she put things together, but Lucy could hear the underlying excitement bleeding through. "Worth several million, I'd guess. Maybe higher. I'm not used to evaluating this sort of thing, though."
She tapped some ashes off the end of her cigarette, and they danced in the cold breeze, glimmering purple and pink under the motel's glow. "But that number's going to start shrinking. I doubt Arasaka knew about Tanaka's secret room, but they can probably make some educated guesses about what was inside." Her tone turned contemplative. "Passing it off quickly might be a way to get the heat off of us. Better for them to be preparing for an assault than plugging a leak."
"How long before we're found dead in our tubs?" Lucy sardonically asked.
Kiwi snorted. "A while, if Arasaka is too busy to put together who did it. Whoever we sell to isn't going to be interested in selling us out… though they might turn around and zero us so that we don't sell to anyone else. We're gonna have to spend some of our payout hiring security." She let out a smoky sigh. "A whole lot of security."
Lucy stared at the motel. A couple million between the eight of them… it would still be more money than she'd ever seen in a lifetime. Thoughts like that seemed so distant, though. She had far more immediate concerns.
As she thought back to the thing in the Data Fortress, Lucy suppressed a shudder. She couldn't recognise the Black ICE Tanaka had used. It'd been far more advanced than anything she'd ever seen in a corporate Data Fortress, like comparing a Slaught-o-matic to an Achilles. It seemed intelligent. Alive, almost. But it wasn't quite like the chaotic, mesmerising pseudo-life that inhabited the old Net, instead it was more sleek in form and function.
"What was that thing?" Lucy's voice sounded hoarse to her ears.
A long moment of silence passed, before Kiwi took the cigarette from her cyberjaw and looked at her fully. "Not really sure. I've never seen anything automated that could move across subnets. Got some theories, though. I only got a few glimpses of it, so I'm not exactly sure what I saw. What did it look like to you?"
Lucy sucked in a breath as she tried to remember. The appearance of ICONs could be deceptive, and no two netrunners really saw the same thing, but there were commonalities that helped them identify all the dangers they ran into. There wasn't really a community to help keep track of it all, and the knowledge was usually hoarded closely, but Lucy would take any chance she could get. "Sort of canine, mostly. It had several heads, too. And it kept chasing me." She considered what she was going to say, before continuing. "It felt like it was… hunting me, like it had my scent, or something."
Kiwi quietly listened to her speak, sucking in a lungful of smoke in a long drag. Then, she tilted her head back and let out an explosive, caustic sigh. "Fuck."
"What?" Lucy straightened up, alarm bells ringing in her head. "What is it? Is it a new kind of ICE or-"
"It's not new." Kiwi stated flatly, her tone leaving no room for argument.
Lucy blinked. Once. Twice. She stared at the senior netrunner incredulously as she processed what she'd said.
Kiwi ignored her bewilderment as she lifted her face out from her hand, staring down at her lit cigarette as it burned down. "Everything I am about to tell you is speculation, based on horror stories and scraps of info I have no way of verifying from decades ago. Understand?"
Lucy was only able to nod numbly.
The older netrunner didn't seem to notice as she rolled the cigarette between her fingers, as if studying it. "Before the Fourth Corporate War, before Bartmoss, we had the Net. It was different back then. Everything was more connected. And as a result, it was more of a pain in the ass to guard something." She gestured vaguely with her cigarette. "Netrunners could try and hack into anything, anywhere. Security wasn't focused on preventing intrusions, so much as dealing with them when they happened."
"Of course, there were your run-of-the-mill script kiddies, trying to poke their noses where they didn't belong. But there were also the savants. People like Bartmoss, or Alt, the Mozarts and Einsteins of netrunning. The Net was their playground, and everybody else was just playing catchup with whatever scraps they tossed out."
"As you can imagine, the corps didn't like that very much, so they put together the program to do something about that." She blew a jet of smoke, looking at nothing in particular. "Enter the Hellhound. It was expensive, rare, and took a lot of processing power, but it was worth it. It didn't just attack Netrunners, it hunted them beyond whatever they were hacking. After it caught your scent, no matter where you went on the Net, you were never safe. And even if you managed to jack out, if you ever went back online, wherever you went online, it would be sitting there, waiting."
Lucy felt her guts turn icy cold as her mind whirled, trying to piece together implications and possibilities. "But we've fought Hellhounds before." She'd seen Black ICE named the same thing in the tougher Data Fortresses they'd cracked together, black metal wolves with fire rippling over their bodies, but what Kiwi was describing sounded completely different. "They were nowhere near that powerful, and they never acted anything like that."
Kiwi hummed in agreement. "The DataKrash changed the rules. Chances are, the method they used to get around the Net became obsolete, but the base program could still be used as a guard for a Data Fort just fine, or as a basis for something similar. Whatever this is, it'd have to be pretty well-programmed to hop networks like that, though. Or smart enough to figure it out on the fly."
Lucy could feel goosebumps prickle her flesh, and her heartbeat hammering in her chest. Her mind wanted her to deny it, but everything was falling into place. "You're saying that thing is an AI."
The senior netrunner inclined her head. "I doubt it's self aware, or anything like that. The server rack isn't big enough to hold something that complex, and it's moving from place to place way too fast. But it's close enough."
Her thoughts tumbled over each other, jumbling up until all that came out of her was a single, quiet word. "Fuck."
"With a rusty hacksaw." Kiwi agreed with a morbid sort of humour.
"...Think we can take it out? Just the two of us? Maybe with some backup?" Lucy amended after a moment of thought, clutching at whatever straws she could. "I could hire some netrunners with my cut."
"Lucy, we both know that if something's got you running scared, then I'm not going to be able to do jack shit. And even if whatever help you can hire doesn't bug out, do you really think they can tear the thing apart before it flatlines you?" Kiwi retorted, her words biting both in tone and honesty.
Lucy slumped forwards, her elbows digging into her knees and her mind spinning. "So I can't go on the Net anymore, then. Fine. Whatever." It was not fine. It was the singular most important thing that she could do, about who she was. It was built into her. Without it, she may as well be dead. "What now?"
"You're missing the big picture." Kiwi's cyberjaw gleamed purple-pink in the neon lights as she leaned down, her face looming in front of Lucy's. "Just because you're safe from the Hellhound doesn't mean you're safe from Arasaka."
Lucy's breath hitched, and her eyes widened as the dots connected.
"The thing's waiting for you on the Net, but how does it know which 'runner is which?" Kiwi's voice was low, dangerous, and Lucy couldn't do anything except listen. "The how doesn't matter. What matters is that it can track you down. And I'll bet that whatever info it's got on you is enough for Arasaka to do the same."
A cold, clammy sweat broke out on Lucy's skin as the implications slammed into her. "...They're going to come for me." She breathed out.
Something in Lucy's voice seemed to snap Kiwi out of whatever fugue she'd been in. The senior netrunner straightened up, and something shifted in her expression, but Lucy was too numb to pay attention. The air around her suddenly felt freezing. She was going to be dragged back, kicking and screaming. Back into that prison underground, back into that cluster of stations, to be forced to dive over and over until her brain boiled in her skull. Or worse, they'd rip her apart and find someone else to stuff all her cyberware into. Someone too blind to see that they were circuits, meant to die diving into places no-one was meant to see.
She was dead. A corpse with a beating heart. She could almost see her spine being torn out of her back in her mind's eye, coming free in a mess of gore-
A burning pain encroached on the edges of her senses. Lucy blinked, and realised that her cigarette had burned down until it was touching her fingers. She dropped it and hissed, before turning her eyes upwards. Kiwi had an pensive look on what remained of her organic face as she met her gaze, something flickered in her eyes for a moment before she looked up and put a hand over her eyes, letting out a loud sigh.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
After a moment, she pulled it away and looked Lucy in the eye. "Maybe there's a chance." She muttered. "If we're being realistic, the Hellhound isn't loyal to Arasaka itself. It's loyal to Tanaka, and Tanaka alone. They'll have to have their 'runners track it down if they want to use it against you. So if you can stay off the net and figure out a way to destroy the thing, then maybe you'll be in the clear. Maybe."
Kiwi's expression turned flinty as she flicked the worn butt of her cigarette away. "You'll need help. Lots of it." She considered her words before continuing. "The Voodoo Boys are your best chance. They have more netrunners than any other gang in Night City. If anybody can crack Tanaka's toy, it's them."
Lucy's mind returned to something resembling function. Gangs were dangerous business, but it was better than nothing. Even so, she knew that she needed something to trade in return. Lucy sucked in a shuddering breath, clenching her hands. "How much should I offer them?" She couldn't imagine the number they'd ask, but she'd try and find a way.
Kiwi's cyberjaw shifted, as if she was chewing on the words. Her eyes searched the area, darting back and forth, before she leaned in and lowered her voice. "They don't care much about eds, or at least, not what you can pay. Give them the files, but keep it on the down low. Don't mention them to anyone until you get to the higher-ups." She took a deep breath, and exhaled. "You'll be looking for Maman Brigitte. She's their leader, and the most skilled netrunner they have. Try to meet her in person and negotiate directly, if you manage to strike a deal with her, you might have a shot."
Lucy nodded, committing every word Kiwi spoke to memory, but something nagged at her. "What about you?" Lucy asked hesitantly.
Kiwi broke eye contact after a moment's silence. "...It's better if you go alone. The Voodoo Boys might be more willing to meet with you that way." She stated, her voice terse.
Fear flared into fury as Lucy tensed. "Bullshit." She hissed. "You just don't want to risk your neck."
Kiwi gave her a cold glare. "You know how this goes. If any of us are with you when Arasaka shows up, we're going to get gunned down. This isn't a risk we can take."
Lucy's lips drew back into a snarl. "You-" She cut herself off before she could go any further, realising her mistake before she could make it as she stared her crewmate in the eye. Just barely, she had stopped herself from threatening to spill her guts when Arasaka got their hands on her. With moments to spare, she had stopped herself from forcing Kiwi to kill her.
She would do it, both of them knew that she would, if Lucy didn't kill her first. Kiwi had taught her well, and her ruthlessness leaked into her lessons, even if she tried to hide it. If it came down to it, their bond didn't matter in the face of survival.
And even if she had her crew with her... it was a long shot. It was possible that Arasaka already knew. That this last-ditch effort was pointless. She wasn't just a liability, she was a ticking time bomb, and if they tried to stand between her and Arasaka, she'd drag them down with her.
Kiwi's face was neutral, but Lucy could tell that she'd come to the same conclusion.
Lucy felt her fury evaporate, and she swallowed thickly. She turned away and hugged herself, the cold breeze cutting through her clothes. Memories flickered through her mind of others who she'd once known. People who'd put their faith in her, only to be gunned down one by one. The sound of screams and gunfire rang in her ears, and the smell of blood filled her nose.
"...Fine." She croaked out. "I'll do it myself."
Kiwi accepted her decision with a slow nod. Lucy could barely bring herself to care. She was going to be alone again, but at least this time nobody would be going down with her. The cold winds blew, and the two netrunners stayed silent.
Eventually, Kiwi broke the silence again as she began slowly making her way to the motel. "Get some rest. I'll wake everyone up early tomorrow. We'll get Falco to drop you off in the city while we figure out who we're going to sell the data to." She paused, before turning to look Lucy in the eye. "Good luck."
Lucy watched as Kiwi disappeared into the motel, before turning to the sky and staring at the moon. She closed her eyes and breathed in, and out.
She was scared. Terrified, even. But she'd been through this song and dance before. And compared to then, she had a lot more to fight for. And a lot more to fight with.
Even as she shivered, she felt the determination settle into her bones.
She was going back into the jaws of Hell alone.
But she wasn't going in unprepared.
----------------------------------------
Faraday rubbed the sleep from his eyes. There was no time to indulge his weakness, not when things were spiraling out of control. He needed to be awake. Alert. Ready for the next step.
He had meetings coming up, some which he couldn't cancel, but he had cleared the schedule as best as he could. During the one check-in he couldn't afford to miss, he'd been sweating on the inside, thinking over his next course of action, as he had been for the entire night and the morning after.
That damned fool. Him and his blasted band of lunatics. They were ruining everything. He felt as much fury surging through him as he had disappointment in himself for assuming the better of them. He shouldn't have accepted their rebellious streak, he should have either reigned them in or cut them off. And now-
Faraday ripped that train of thought off its rails and tossed it to the side. It was far too late to admonish himself for his mistakes. He had a problem on his hands, and now all there was left to do was fix it, as soon as possible.
He'd caught wind of Palm Towers being attacked somewhere in the space between late night and early morning, and had wasted valuable time panicking and pacing furiously. Now though, he had a set of objectives.
Locate Maine's Crew, tear whatever they had managed to recover from their cold, dead hands if need be, and flatline the worthless screwups before they could ruin even more than they already had.
So here he was, casting out every line he had and checking every source he could scrounge up. His office had turned into a battlefield, and less important documents had been shoved off to the side. Several monitors displaying whatever camera footage he could access alongside maps of the city were stacked on top of each other on his desk, blocking out the sunlight.
They'd gone east. Of that, he was sure. He'd already sent informants and agents and probed the few contacts he had out in the Badlands, but nothing had come back since. Meanwhile, he was monitoring the Arasaka security team that had been dispatched to Tanaka's penthouse the only way he could, a patsy with binocular vision.
It rankled him to be resorting to something so base, so hodgepodge. If he had the time and the awareness, he was sure that he could have had his own men combing the penthouse under cover, ready to feed Arasaka whatever lie he'd prepared, but he'd been leery of risking whatever reach he had within his employer's greatest rival, and- He was getting distracted again.
Faraday's eyes swept over the monitors again, searching for whatever details he could have possibly missed. His hands itched. He needed to be doing something.
He struggled against the impulse to call the less palatable options he had on hand. Poorly-thought out action could easily be worse than inaction. If his colleagues got a whiff of the prize he was after, his most valuable defence against his rivals, his veil of secrecy, would be ruined beyond repair.
His eyes flickered over to the notes in the corner of his vision, a list of names paired with details that he'd been collating, collecting, and pruning over decades-long career as a broker of all kinds. He flipped through them again, focusing his mind on the matter the best he was able. He'd already sent his most loyal men out, even if all they could do is comb the desert. Now, had to once again consider which of the less loyal agents he had at his disposal could be convinced to keep their mouths shut.
A call caught his attention. As he realised the identity of the caller, his vision pulsed red as his biomonitor gave an alert. Something about his blood pressure. He ignored it, reaching into his desk and ripping out an airhypo which he immediately applied to his wrist, barely even considering the idea of rolling up his sleeve for a more easily concealed mark. As a chill like ice water ran through his veins and up his spine, Faraday took the call. "Maine." He growled.
The voice of the thug on the other end sounded downright smug. "Faraday. Wonderful weather we're having."
Faraday took a slow, deep breath to steady himself, reminding himself to triangulate the call. As he directed his agent to do so, he spoke as if nothing was wrong. "I see. Do you have the items I requested?"
"Oh, I guess you can say so." Maine chortled to himself. "Got everything you want, wrapped up all neat and nice. We even put a bow on it. Only the best for our oh-so-generous client." He taunted, derision dripping off his tongue.
Faraday clenched the side of the desk as a condescending smile screwed itself onto his face. "Good. Now tell me, where are you? I'd like to pick up the package as soon as possible. Before the approach you've taken to acquire it destroys whatever value it holds."
"Whoa now, hold up. What's that, Kiwi?" Maine called out, as if shouting at someone off to the side. "Faraday's tracing us? Well, say it ain't so!" His audio became normal in tone again, a malicious glee taking hold of his voice. "Damn, Faraday. I never did take you for a two-enny, lying snake. Can't possibly believe you'd be trying to pull some shit over our heads! Well, I guess if that's how you're going to treat the people who did the whole damn job for you, you can piss right the hell off! Maybe I'll find another buyer for this little package of ours! Not like you're the only Militech fixer in Night City, after all."
"Wait!" Fear coloured his tone, ruining whatever semblance of presence he'd managed to gather. Faraday cursed himself for his own cowardice, but there was no salvaging his image at this point, all there was left was damage control. "There's no need to escalate this. I'll pay! Just tell me where you are and your price and I'll send a car with what I owe, immediately!"
A bark of laughter rang out through the connection. "Sure, Faraday. Real fucking convincing. Listen, we'll meet with you. But we ain't doing it anywhere you can bring some chooms over to gun us down, or blow us up, or whatever else you're planning."
It was ridiculous for him to believe that anywhere in Night City was beyond his reach, but he played along with his illusion of safety. "Very well, Maine, name your location and time, and I'll-"
"Shut up and listen, Faraday. We're setting the terms. Not you. First things first, call off the trace. I'm giving you all of five seconds to comply. Five!" Maine hammed up the theatrics, and Faraday scrambled for the command to end the trace.
"Four! Three!" Maine continued, growing louder and louder as he went.
"It's done! It's gone!" Faraday shouted into the connection.
"Two! One!" The merc practically roared into the mic as Faraday struggled to make himself heard.
"STOP! Stop! I did what you wanted, what are the terms!" Faraday frantically demanded.
Maine sounded like he was having the time of his life. "Alright, alright, if you say so. We'll meet at the Sunrise Motel in…" He hummed to himself, audibly working his jaw. "I'm gonna say half an hour! And if you don't show up by then, we'll assume that you didn't want it anyway! No need to worry in that case, we'll just delta and figure out who else wants a piece of the pie. Capiche?"
Faraday could only grit his teeth and nod as he frantically searched for the motel's location. "I understand." He hissed out.
"And what's more, we want payment, then and there. We'll take credchip, but cash is just fine too. Whatever we can stick in our pockets and run with. Eight million eurodollars. That's the price. No negotiation, no bargaining, and no funny shit. You get us what we asked for, we give you what you asked for, we go our separate ways."
Faraday's teeth ground together, his jaw creaking with the strain. His biomonitor was beeping insistently in his ear, yet another infuriating distraction on top of everything else- "Understood." He could feel his heart hammering in his chest. Eight million. That was a small fortune, but he could scrape together four million if he moved quickly. But wait- "The Sunset Motel is an hour's drive from my location!"
"Then I guess you'd better get moving, Faraday." Maine hung up before Faraday could even attempt to argue.
A vein burst somewhere near his temple, and a searing pain stabbed through his skull. Seething rage flooded every inch of him, and for a moment, Faraday's vision scrambled as his four cybernetic eyes struggled to focus through the mental feedback caused by his haze of fury.
But there was no time to lose. Faraday's shin slammed into his desk as he stumbled out of his chair, toppling his wall of monitors. The pain barely even registered as he began mentally dialling numbers and barking orders.
He was going to find those ingrates and make damn sure that they regretted ever crossing him.
No matter what it took.
----------------------------------------
I watched the man visible only through my cybernetic eye pushed his way out the door, barking orders through his internal agent at whoever was on the other end. As he cycled through bribes, threats, and appeals to every more people that I'd ever seen him talk to, I tilted my head.
Well, something had certainly lit a fire under his ass. I wonder what it could be? I queried [Sorairo Days], but the connection stuttered and fizzled out, the information I had on the whole situation being not nearly enough to seek out whatever he was looking for. I grimaced in annoyance as I considered the road ahead.
I had been preparing for a day out in the Badlands, hoping to try and improve my skill with the Kolac I'd gotten from Wakako by shooting whatever Wraiths I could find. As good as fire drills were, the simple fact was that I grew faster when I was up against a living opponent. I was pretty sure [Martial Talent] was playing a part, but I also figured that the way the system calculated the increases in my stats was greased with blood.
After all, it's not like I got quests and EXP without getting into conflict.
But the engine of the world aside, I'd been watching Faraday wear a line into the floor of his office for a while now, ever since I woke up. I'd been trying to figure out what the hell had happened, but all I could tell was that something had gone down at Palm Tower that had completely screwed whatever Faraday had in mind.
And, of course, there was the name that he'd been pleading with. Maine. Leader of the crew that Rebecca and David were a part of. I couldn't seek out the 'holder of what Faraday wanted', but Maine's location on the map was clear and obvious to me. More than a dozen kilometres away.
I had absolutely no chance of making it there in time as I was. Hell, I was pretty sure I'd have trouble even if I didn't have my inventory overloaded with…
...The car.
My eyes scanned to the left, and then scanned to the right. Other passenger cars were a relatively common sight, there was no way I'd be able to just pull a Caliburn out of nowhere without anyone noticing.
I needed privacy, a corner without eyes where I could drag the damn thing out of my inventory. And I knew exactly how to find it.
I turned my gaze to the road up ahead, my view of Faraday blurring as I focused on a map of the Badlands instead. All around me were structures of various kinds, mostly small by the metropolitan standards of Night City. My vision flickered again as I began to look at these buildings, not through a minimap, but through a bird's eye view. After a few moments searching that was accelerated by [Reflex], I grinned as I noticed an abandoned farmhouse a few kilometres to the Northeast.
A steady stride turned into a jog, the fastest I could manage despite my burdened soul and body. I gave a slight snort as I noticed the time, and shook my head in disbelief.
Nearly high noon. What other time could there be for a showdown?