Chapter 5

The following morning, Jon stopped by Noriko’s room to give her a final thank you before heading home. His knock on the door went unanswered, though, so he waited. He knocked again, assuming maybe she was just taking a shower. He tried to send a text and call, but both went undelivered, which confused him.

Heading downstairs, he approached the front desk clerk.

“Hi, I was getting ready to check out, but I think left a credit stick in room 204 on the 10th floor. I knocked, but no one answered. Could someone come up with me and to open the room so I can leave?”

“Certainly, Mr. Masters,” the clerk summoned a gold-skinned employee to follow Jon up and open the room. Jon didn’t want to liken the guy to security because he didn’t exactly look the role. He was an average size guy, not huge by any stretch. But then again, being a full body skin job, it was hard telling what the unassuming man’s gold gloss coated artificial body could do. Jon tried not to stare at the man as they made for the elevator.

As the lift rose, the man glanced at him feeling Jon’s eyes on him. Forcing a Jon to clear his throat and speak.

“Can I ask a question?” he paused as the man nodded, his glowing blue eyes dimming as his gold plated cheeks rose in a smile. Continuing, “Why do that? Sell your body? Sell your life to Toranaga like that?”

The man paused, framing his response. His lips pursed together, rolling the words around a moment. “The hotel will always need caretakers. And money is no longer flush in this region now that oil is no longer so high a demand. My family needed money and to be taken care of. If this is the cost of feeding them? Then so be it,” he said proudly.

Jon chewed on that for a moment. Just another life ground up in the constant devouring machines of corporations. How many people’s stories matched this guy’s? How many lives had they chewed up and spat out as gold plated facsimiles of people?

Golden guy opened Noriko’s door after jacking into the port and overriding the door. When he opened the door, Jon smelled acrid smoke, and his entire body tensed. He called her name out of habit. His gut told him something was wrong and the lack of response set off mental alarms.

“Ms. Kyoshi?” Gold guy said. “This is Hotel staff.”

Jon saw her feet on the bed. Tensing, he stepped around the corner. Noriko lay dead on the bed, the input jack still plugged into her implant and had been for sometime. Jon frowned at Noriko’s body. Someone killed her while she interfaced with the network terminal by the bed. The attack charred her eyes. Blood had drained from her ears and nose. No signs of a physical struggle lent the theory weight.

A NetRunner? It had to be. No signs of forced entry. And she was still wearing her clothes from last night.

Gold guy backed out of the room, clearly not living up to the whole security shtick. Jon watched him unamused as the guy raced back to the elevator to report the incident. Refocusing on Noriko, Jon sighed, folding his arms. What had she been up to that got her killed?

Her implant and lenses smoked, so there was no hope of pulling any data from those. An acrid burned plastic and meat smell lingered. And the v-lens screen was blank, its cache memory cleared. Whoever wiped Noriko blanked the screen, too. This was definitely a Runner hack.

There were no answers for him here, so he left the room and grabbed his bag from his own room. It was time to go before anyone questioned him. He bypassed the front desk and hit the concierge for his car. The valet driver just got out as someone at the front desk came out, looking presumably for him.

He drove away calmly as the silver-skinned woman rushed down to the concierge to question the valet parking attendants. The drive back to the airport passed in silence. Heavy thoughts pressed in on him as he tried to determine who took the reporter out. It couldn’t have been anyone in CommNet because she accessed the sat data just fine, which meant she had to have left their private network somehow.

Maybe she got greedy and tried to sell the report? Or blackmail the wrong company, or maybe the right one? Just another victim of trying to hustle the system too fast. If he had the time, he would have tried to hire a tracer to dig into the hotel’s network logs and track the data.

Being forced to leave the issue unresolved left a bitter taste in his mouth. His hand forced, though. He couldn’t stay out of the country too long or someone would come by to check on him. He needed to be around and play the part of the good soldier for Wilson.

Building a better picture of what happened when Sam died. A corporation hit them for certain. And they operated specific model armored van. While there weren’t any logos to id the vehicles, he knew of the corporations that worked in the region.

Smart creds were on Haltech. But why would they put a hit on a govie? He knew the corporations weren’t exactly big for picking fights with govies. Unless they were trying to protect themselves from something.

That meant whatever Sam brought back was more dangerous than he thought. He cursed himself mentally, slapping the steering wheel. He tried calling Polanco’s number; it rang several times and went to the inbox. He opened the text interface.

“Hey man, just Jon here. Checking up about that dive job I gave ya. How’s progress?”

No reply came immediately. A reply this soon with anything substantive isn’t likely. Polanco wasn’t the type to let something sit idle if there was work to do. He probably already plugged into the chip, scrubbing information from it. Jon just hoped he didn’t just pull the pin on a hand grenade and drop it in Polanco’s lap.

#

The flight back passed by with little of note besides his general sense of unease. He had some answers, but that left him with a hard choice. If Haltech was behind Sam’s death, was he ready to take a corporation down? That was a David vs Goliath fight.

Was he ready to take his need for revenge for Sam that far? His mind drifted to the memory of Sam handing him the chip. The way the blood felt tacky and half dried. The concern in Sam’s voice.

The decision settled over him like a blanket. He needed to make Sam’s sacrifice worth it. He owed that to Sam. It’d been his choice to put Sam in the region, so it fell to him to make it right.

First, he needed to follow up on a hunch regarding Noriko’s death. Then, if that panned out, he had another stop to make. He strode through the living room, and the v-lens screen projected the news. The reporter looked prim and proper with a bright pink suit blazer and well-groomed hair that matched her suit.

“And in other news this morning, we regret to report that one of our best photojournalists met with an untimely demise today in Baghdad, Iraq. Details on her death are scarce at the time of reporting.” An image of Noriko appeared, followed by a slide reel of some of her work, and some of her stories.

Jon scoffed, knowing that was corpo speak for the fact they didn’t want to let on how or why she died.

“What we know is that she was investigating the site of a recent disturbance near the General Electric Solutions/Haltech Solar Farm. She always accompanied by a man matching this mock up.”

An image flashed next to the Reporter that kind of looked like him if you maybe squinted one eye and closed the other. He sighed, swiping the news off to turn for the door. He had some questions, but he didn’t want to bring in Raven, so he had to do this off books.

He needed another fixer. Q-ball would not want to talk to him after their last exchange. He always held grudges so hard. He scrolled through his contact list. No one came up, but knew a place to get what he needed.

A short drive later and he pulled into the parking lot of Knowhere. Originally, a library repurposed into a bar. He visited frequently since it offered the chance of a good read and a good drink. The library turned bar also gained notoriety for being a place where Fixers and Mercs found each other. It also helped the fixers to pull up information needed for gigs.

Walking up the steps, he spotted the last vestiges of the library’s former life in the faded typography in the concrete beneath the massive neon lit sign. Several patrons stood outside conversing with each other until he got within sight of them. Jon noted that all side conversations carried on in hushed tones, but no one spoke near him.

And why should they? He was a govie, the antithesis of the civil merc. He still worked for the man. Or at least they thought he did. They just didn’t realize the man had changed out of the government for a boardroom, with no one noticing.

At the door, a big burly man stood with his hands casually clasped in front of him. Sporting shortcut hair, a five o’clock shadow and a cleanly pressed black suit with a white dress shirt whose buttons stopped at the neck, letting the color flash hints of his larger than average pecs. He had the look of a man who’d been stuffed into the suit a size smaller than intended. Whether that was flattery or intimidation, Jon didn’t care. The big man glanced down at Jon with as close to a sneer as he could manage politely.

“What do you want?”

Jon tilted his head to the side. “Arthur. You wound me. Am I not allowed in for a drink?”

“The boss said once a week. You disrupt customers too much any more than that. And I got you logged as having made your weekly visit already.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Jon nodded, expecting this. “True. That was Monday. But it’s Sunday now. Sunday starts a new week, you know.”

Arthur pressed his hand to his hear to listen to his earpiece, then glanced back down at him. “Boss wants to know what you want. Why you here?”

Jon exhaled finally. About time he could get down to business. “Tell Nomad I’m here about Noriko Kyoshi’s death.”

Arthur shook his head. “Boss wants to know why he should care about some corpo reporter.”

“Because I think it was a corpo NetRunner that zeroed her.”

A beat of silence, then Arthur replied, “Boss says that’s just life in the corporate world. He’s not seeing the hook.”

“The hook is that once I find out how who got her, I’m going to burn them to the ground.”

Not for Noriko. Not at first, anyway. She’d just been collateral. Ok, not completely collateral. She was still just another innocent life ground up under the ebb and flow of the life. This was mostly about getting even for Sam.

“You fittin to fight the Corps?”

“I am. Soon as I have a target.”

Arthur hesitated a moment, then nodded to himself at something in his earpiece, stepping aside to allow Jon entry. He gave Arthur a friendly pat on the shoulder as he passed by drawing an annoyed grunt from the mountain of a man. Stepping through the doorway threshold, his ears fell under assault from high-volume music pushing through the speakers, turning the library into its own inverse hell. He imagined angry grey haired librarians all shushing madly trying to silence the assault on one’s senses Knowhwere now conducted.

He passed the wrap around counter. The old librarian’s desk converted into the bar. The barkeep, Bella gave him a nod as she served a down on his luck merc.

“Nomad’ll see ya now,” Bella pointed to the booth in the center of the aisle dead ahead of him.

“Sure,” Jon said with a nod to Bella, and continued walking. He visited Knowhere often enough, but he never met Nomad in person. That said, he had heard enough about her. She took no shit from no one. If anyone ruled the underworld of Capital City, it’d be Nomad.

His train of thought derailed when a latina in Outrider wear bumped into him, storming for the exit. “Watch your step, cabron!” She stormed out muttering something about needing heavy weapons. Tracing her path backwards, it ended at Nomad.

Nomad unofficially fit the chief fixer’s role if such a position existed. She knew everything and who to get it from if she didn’t. Information was her primary product these days, and she traded it well. He was banking on this with his interaction to come.

‎ He also knew she used to run guns as a merc in her youth. She’d carved this little niche for herself out of the very chest of Capital City with her bare hands.

Nomad sported a half shaved head revealing some neural hardware, and long raven hair spilled over the other side of it with a bright magenta highlight in the bangs. She had smokey eye makeup with purple accents. She wore a ragged t-shirt that said “Fuck off” in faded white font under a plaid button-up shirt. Her jeans also had a few holes in them, with untied military style boots finishing out the ensemble. She looked every bit the part of the rugged and aged merc he’d expected.

She propped a foot up on the table in front of her, gesturing to a goon at the front of the booth. The poor guy shuffled off to the bar counter, and Nomad gestured for him to sit next to her with a pat on the cushion. He settled down next to her and she sat forward, turning to face him.

“Arthur says you’re here about some poor corpo reporter that got herself done in? Me personally? I don’t give a shit. But then Arthur tells me this govie spook shows up and wants to talk. Says he’s ready to go to war with the corpos if I can help him.”

Nomad leaned back, eyeing Jon appraisingly. “And I still don’t understand why I should care. You’ve never come here looking for work. I’ve always let you in, provided you don’t bother the clientele. Why should I not rethink this arrangement?”

It crossed his mind to mention the outrider that stormed by him, but Nomad was direct and didn’t brook bullshit well, so he got to the point.

“Someone killed my friend.”

Nomad’s brow arched curiously. “Do you have any idea how many people die around here? How many hit orders I alone contract out? And you’re worried about one man. Why does he matter?”

“The corporation had him removed for finding something hot, and somehow they have fingers in the government too. They need to put in check. Someone got my friend killed, and now because of that, Noriko Kyoshi is dead too. If I don’t stop this now, the bodies are going to pile up. I don’t give a shit about some big grand mystery. I just want the motherfuckers that sixed my friend to burn.”

Nomad’s smile loosened. “There’s a fire in you, Masters. You’re pretty high-strung, though. You might have made a good merc. but that fire’ll get you killed if you aren’t careful.”

She waved a hand dismissively. “But color me curious enough. It’s not the first time the corporations have made moves and caused waves that had ripple effects on the rest of us. We maintain a delicate balance. If the companies want to upset that balance, then they’ll need to answer for it. So. What do you need?”

“Noriko Kyoshi was pulling comsat feeds of the attack where a black hat team dressed as locals hit my partner and I. Shortly after that, someone scorched her while she jacked into the hotel.”

“Sounds like a runner,” Nomad mused.

“That’s what I thought, but I don’t think I can trust anyone close to me enough to put on this.”

“Is it really a matter of trust? Or danger?”

Jon shrugged, finding it hard to admit it might be both. Nomad picked up on this and nodded, leaning back.

“Both it is, then. So, you need a Tracer to burrow into the hotel data feeds and find the digital footprint of whoever burned your poor reporter. In the hopes of what?”

“Following the trail back to whoever handled the hit on Sam.”

“Breadcrumb trail. How fairy tale. But potentially effective if you’re right.”

“And if I’m wrong, I just pay a Tracer for wasting a couple hours of their time.”

“Alright,” Nomad said.

Jon blinked, confusion settling in with sudden mood shift in Nomad. “Just like that?”

She shrugged, “Well, I am a Fixer. This is my job. Wouldn’t be good at my job if I turned away work. But this’ll cost ya.”

“How much?” Jon asked.

“15,000.”

He hesitated. He had that easily. But that was his retirement savings. The thought of getting out early and looking forward to buying his own piece of happiness for himself had carried him through a lot. Could he really buy peace, though? Not that he deserved it. Sam was dead, and this was to make things right. Happiness be damned.

With a sigh, he allowed the transaction, swiping the creddy’s to Nomad. The fixer leaned back with a pleased smile on her face as she accessed her contacts list and placed a call.

“Yea. Got a gig for ya. Hush-hush. No, it’s a data dive.” She looked to him for the deets.

“Oh, uh, the Baghdad Toranaga Palace,” Jon said.

“Did you get that?... Right. A runner burned a reporter there. Find the trail and hit me with an origin point, that’s it.”

Her eyes stopped glowing blue, and she turned back to him. “It’s as good as done. I’ve got my best man on it.”

Jon opened his mouth to say something in reply, but paused when a message from Raven pushed through.

“You’re up. Mission’s a go. 48 hrs wheels up.”

He swiped the message aside and smiled apologetically. “I have to go. Duty calls.”

Nomad gestured to the booth’s mouth. “I’ll be right here.”

He had just one more stop to make. He put feelers out for information, but he also wanted to try a personal hunch and look at Haltech’s corporate tower himself. The tracer was a good bet, but he had a hunch the trail would be too scattered to lead directly to Haltech proper. More than likely, it would lead through a subsidiary. But if he sneaks in and peek at their network logs from a few days ago, he might conclusively tie his suspicion down and have something presentable to Raven.

It wasn’t enough to have evidence that local rebels didn’t kill Sam. He needed to prove to Raven who hit them. He felt like he was wasting time, but reassuring himself this was all necessary helped keep him cool. His plan was straightforward. Get into Haltech’s NetRunner wing while the Runners were jacked in and active.

It was risky since they effectively became the building and any device within reach. But that also meant they’d be busy conducting company business. All he had to do was maintain a low profile. His vulnerability risk rated exceptionally low since he didn’t have any augs a runner could hack.

As long as he didn’t directly jack into the network, it wouldn’t treat him as an invasive presence. This meant he needed one of the corpos to fetch what he was after for him. That gave him the start of a plan as he made his way out of Knowhere. Jon strode down the stairs, passed Arthur standing at the door on his way down, and gave the big man a parting wave. Arthur simply grunted in reply. He let the car drive him back as he reclined in the driver’s seat to plan.

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