2078: Highriders - Chapter 10

When you thought about ‘night’ on Earth, it was the absence of the sun, things cooled down, and the stars came out.

Every land dwelling organism on the planet had evolved around the diurnal cycle in some fashion; birds settled into nests, most feline predators became active, ancient humans went into their caves and a whole host of other adaptations. Then humanity invented fire and was the first species to break away from the ‘tyranny’ of evolved behaviors when that big source of light and warmth in the sky went away. It was a war that had continued and in the relatively modern era, was generally won.

That war opened an entirely new front when the first lunar colonists arrived to stay.

Lunar night was harsh, to say the least.

The biggest hazard for any equipment, which included the very systems keeping you alive, was the temperature drop. From the early probes sent by humanity in the 1950s all throughout the early Space Age, it was learned that the best material sciences and electronics of the time just couldn’t survive going through 14 days of -173 degrees Centigrade then be expected to return to the blistering 127 degrees in the day. The thermal expansion and management systems of the time were just too bulky and so scientists built them to last for the 14 Earth days of Lunar day.   

By the early days of Lunar colonization, material sciences had improved greatly, but not far enough. So humanity went underground, taking their delicate machinery below as well to sit within the thermal heat envelopes that were keeping them alive. It meant surface work on the moon practically ceased every 14 days.

This was unacceptable to the corps and so they took up humanity’s torch to wage war against the tyranny of a new cycle imposed on it.

Billions of eddies were poured into science and research, until finally a partial victory was attained in the late 2010’s, with the invention of the first memory materials. Substances and materials that ‘remembered’ their ideal state and position, which could ride out the deep roller coaster of swinging temperatures and not break down during thermal contraction and expansion. It hadn’t helped with the finer electronics, but it meant that the first mass drivers could be built and not wreck themselves after the first lunar night.

Then came metamaterials, which considerably miniaturized thermal systems and allowed their application on the tiny scale that allowed electronics to survive that roller coaster as well.

Therefore by the 2050s, surface work in the Lunar night became generally possible.

The complete darkness, however, with only starlight and Earthshine to help, was another obstacle - this time to the human psyche.

My world in meatspace was reduced to only the tiny cabin of the rover, beyond its windows was a void, one that we couldn’t pierce with the exterior lighting without unnecessarily waving a huge optical flag to everyone within sightline. The only clue that there was even anything out there was the feeling of the traction on the wheels, the occasional bump and thump as the suspension system did its work to keep us on the surface.   

The rover had a digital night vision system with IR illumination, but I had to keep the latter off to minimize our radiant signature. This reduced its effectiveness and presented me with a narrow forward cone of vision at a significantly reduced resolution. I could see enough for proper navigation but detail to spot anything smaller than a person was out of the question beyond a few hundred meters.

The one thing that nothing could hide was our thermal sig. We were a big ball of heat thanks to the Starbreaker Nomad’s radioisotope heater units, that could be easily seen from high lunar orbit if any ship or satellite was up there.

The only way to ‘hide’ the rover was in misdirection and subterfuge, meticulously planned for by the highriders.

To anyone looking or scanning, this would be a fully registered and sanctioned rover on its way to an ESA outpost in the east of Mare Tranquillitatus, carrying two technicians for a repair on the Apollo museum dome. It would soon be suffering an unfortunate malfunction that would be delaying their arrival.

I pulled my foot off the accelerator and feathered the Nomad’s brakes slightly, to drop us from our blistering speed of 20 kph down to five, the safe speed for any significant turns, and turned the wheel to avoid the looming crater ahead.

Yes, I could’ve made life in the rover much easier by only relying on the shield of subterfuge, switching on everything, but I knew better.

Back on the accelerator I pushed us back up to 18 kph steadily.

I gave a mild glare to Johnny’s seemingly sleeping form in the passenger seat. He had completely clocked out of meatspace and was in his own Relic fortress doing whatever he did in there. I wasn’t even remotely tempted to visit as we had spent enough time in each other’s heads already.

He wasn’t being a complete loafer though, as I could sense his data flows managing the rover’s LIDAR for terrain mapping and general threat detection, the ground penetrating radar for subsurface cavity detection and he had his proverbial finger on the trigger of the 10mm railgun mount.  

It was a little undergunned by my own standards, but you couldn’t exactly drive the equivalent of my custom Herrera Outlaw ‘Weiler’ with dual heavy caliber machine guns on the moon. It would fly in the face of keeping the moon ‘demilitarized’ and my Weiler was a tank in stylish disguise.

The Starbreaker Nomad rather fittingly felt like I was back in Panam’s Thorton Warhorse, but with enough space to almost stand, tons more controls, holos and systems. 

I could imagine her derision at the comparison.

No earthbound nomad would be caught dead in something as relatively flimsy or slow, but I challenged any vehicle to handle lunar dust in low gravity as well as the Starbreaker Nomad could, easily climb more than a thirty degree slope and laugh at craters up to 1 meter deep.

The slight ache in my heart made me wish I could fire up the com system and try contacting my second best female friend again. I had tried a few days ago immediately after catching up with Vik and Misty, but had been unable to reach Panam on standard holo.  

Reception in the Badlands outside Night City was spotty at the best of times and with the Aldocaldos moving away from the region into Southern California, it wouldn’t be getting better until they got near Los Angeles. I had left her a suitably vague message that would at least get some of the major non-classified points across to her and a localized contact path that would let her reach me in Tycho City.

That couldn’t happen while I was on mission and under digital disguise.    

“We there yet?”

I gave Johnny an annoyed look for the utterly anachronistic and cliché question. He knew down to computerized longitude and latitude measuring precisely where we were on the lunar surface at the moment, what our average speed was given the current terrain and our ETA. Even the onboard AI, a TensorFlow based neural net model built by the Starbreaker highrider workgroup, gave Johnny the equivalent of an unimpressed raised eyebrow.

“Fine, sue me for trying to inject some life into this slow bucket of bolts. My grandma could walk faster than this.”

“We have seven hours to go before we have to continue on foot, you could spend it doing anything in cyberspace.”

“Did that for six months V and can only stomach doing it now for so long at a time. You know what the problem is with the ability to do anything in virtu? You can live out your most vivid fantasies to fool all your five conventional senses, but we don’t have just those five any more. We can feel the data behind it all and with that comes the sure realization that it’s hollow, fake and nothing more than a construct that will disappear the instant you will it to. No consequence to any action, no mark left or ripple that spreads out in the pond of existence.”

“Meaningless fun,” I nodded, idly steering around a nasty boulder.

“Precisely, but trust me, the novelty wears off very quickly,” Johnny leaned back in his seat and thumped his head against the rover’s titanium-carbon composite cabin strut, staring into the expansive forward viewport. “Prefer to be in meatspace for the moment.”

“Do you wish for me to take control, V?” asked Nomad 32.

“No thank you,” I said to the rover’s AI. “You can focus on watching out for corpo drone and other aerospace traffic over our heads.”

“Very well, I must point out that having such a conversation whilst driving in manual mode-”

“Yes, and were I a normal human, you’d have to worry, but I’m not.”

“Apologies V.”

“You don’t have a lot of experience yet 32, especially not with us, but you’ll get there eventually.”

The AI was barely a few months old and the rover was similarly new. Children of the Net could learn whatever they wanted fast, after they had been safely exposed to new concepts, but it was all theory and there was still no substitute for training and experience in meatspace.

Johnny reached forward and started fiddling with the rover’s radio.

The cabin was filled with static from the speakers as he adjusted the frequency buttons.

Luna had a number of radio stations and networks. The line between official and pirate stations was a blurry mess here. Technically, every highrider station would be considered illegal by Earth standards, but since there was nothing that could really police the spectrum in CIS Earth-Luna space, it was something of a Wild West in that regard.

He first found Highrider Freewave, a station that could be considered the primary voice of the Confederation, which broadcasted to all its citizens in their space stations and on Luna. The music was typical of the highriders, best described as afrobeat remixes, lunar folk songs and occasional electronica with pulsating bass lines that were uniquely suited for low gravity dancefloors.

Johnny grimaced and tuned away from it.

“Try 88.1 FM,” I suggested.

Heavy punk rock guitar riffs blasted into the cabin and immediately caught Johnny’s ear. His fingers were already twitching and moving as if he had his favorite axe in hand, imitating the riff.

“Interesting,” he admitted as the music smoothly transitioned with a drum baseline once more with an african-style primal drum mixed with modern design. You could hear it in the crisp sharpness and variety of the sound.

“Moonshot Rebel Radio, surprised you haven’t found them already.”

“Guess I’ve had my head up my ass too much lately to think about music,” Johnny leaned back into his seat to let the music thunder and flow over him.

I gave him an incredulous look, “Seriously?

He looked at his own hands, spreading out his fingers, before dexterously manipulating and testing the precision of every finger. “The Rockerboy belongs to another life, V. I will admit I had an impact, but Alt was at least partly right that I was deceiving myself.”

“You can’t go back as Johnny Silverhand, sure, but music is still a part of who you are at the core. Get yourself an axe and play. Fuck, I’ll get one too and we can duo.” I had experienced quite a bit of bleedthrough from Johnny when we were still merging with the old Relic, which included motor reflex skills related to guitar play. Since we had been disentangled, I’d been keeping up that ‘inherited’ skill and made it my own.

“Used to think that playing guitar solo in a room with no one else around was like getting yourself off, feels good but then fades too quickly and you’re left with the bitter hollowness afterward. Well, if there’s one thing you learned from me, at least this one is constructive.”

“I’ll begin a background search for finding some decent guitars around Tycho. Might have to get them made.”

“Parts can be lathed, but have to be put together by hand for them to be any good. Any wood around here is gonna be expensive as fuck, pure synth guitars are mostly shit.”

“If we can’t find anyone, I’ll build them myself.”

I could be a gunsmith or a cybertech at this point, which kinda came with the territory of being a good Edgerunner.

“Should be an interesting side project if nothing else,” Johnny admitted, he looked intrigued at the notion.

Further discussion was interrupted when Nomad 32 pinged us in cyberspace.

“Drone detected at 094, three hundred meters, it was loitering at low altitude inside a small crater.”

“I see it, Johnny, railgun.”

I focused the rover sensors and also picked up the drone’s own signal back to whoever was controlling it.

It was about the size of a large briefcase and even had similar dimensions, painted black as night and puffed about on cold gas thrusters. It almost reminded me of a Militech style drone, except minus the outfolding wings, which would’ve been useless on the moon anyway. What pegged it as different was the lack of any visible internal or external weaponry and when I plunged into the data linkage…

“Not corpo or Militech, despite appearances,” I declared, keeping the rover straight and steady. We’d thankfully left the boulder field behind now and had relatively smooth lunar regolith ahead and the walls of a few craters a couple of kilometers away. I pushed on the accelerator and the rover lurched to 24 kph, just below the hardcoded safety redline. Technically, the Nomad could do 50 with its four-wheel electric drive with independent hub motors powered by a nuclear thermocouple, but that was asking for disaster. A bump or unexpected terrain deviation at those speeds would send the rover flying and there was no guarantee it would land back on the wheels.

“You sure?” Johnny had the railgun traversed and ready to deliver shots.

“Pretty sure, the drone software is good, custom, but not corpo. It’s highrider.”

“Think Gakulu would have mentioned it if there were any workgroups out here.”

“If he knew about it in the first place, there are rumblings on highrider BBS about some tribes who manage to live completely off grid, even to the Confederation. They view it as too much like ‘what the Earthers would do’ and stay aloof, even to their fellow highriders. The drone encryption is very good and while I could break through it’ll be seen as a hostile act.”

“Drone is keeping pace, at two hundred meters.”

Then a message came through, piggy backing off the drone’s systems.

‘The Eclipse sees you, umntak. (brother) Do not deviate from your current route.’

“What the fuck?” Johnny frowned.

A quick internal database search let me understand somewhat. “Shit. We have a case of very fortunate mistaken identity here. The Eclipse Veil is a reclusive highrider tribe that wants one thing above all, privacy. Gakulu gave me a general primer on every tribe that’s known and these guys take it to a murderous extreme. If they figure out we’re not highrider, that drone will kamikaze us immediately and if that doesn’t work, a drone swarm will finish the job.”

“Should I keep the turret locked on the drone?”

“Yes, doing otherwise would immediately send up a red flag in their minds that we’re not who we appear to be. To a highrider, survival is everything, even from others.”

The drone kept shadowing us for another hour when it abruptly banked to the side and disappeared into a crater.

“We should avoid that territory in the future,” Johnny traversed the turret into a standby mode.

“If only, the Eclipse Veil are also believed to be semi-nomadic, they live in self-sustaining habitats carved into lunar craters and lava tubes. What could be their territory one day, could suddenly change when they move to another habitat.”

Johnny shook his head, “Think Gakulu just used us as a stick to see what came poking out of the cave.”

“If that’s the case, I’ll be sure to add extra to our fee.”

88888888888888888888888888888888888888

We parked the Nomad behind a rising crater wall some hours later and chanced using some external lighting just to make the general task of unloading easier.

The rover looked distinctly eerie, as if we were on a tiny island of light and regolith, floating in an impenetrable void. The exterior was what I was coming to associate with highriders; vibrant geometric patterns and, when they were on, holographic tribal markings for the Starbreaker workgroup.

We let RALF out of the rear cargo bay and the robotic dog obediently came out and waited patiently for us to hook up our life support tethers and mount the articulated railgun on its back. 

We were barely done before it rose up on its legs and stomped the regolith impatiently, eager to set off.

“Easy boy,” I chided him. “You’re getting dust everywhere.”

RALF’s response was to radiate his discharge field and shed the dust in an almost smug fashion.

I gave him a flat look as best I could through my pressure helmet but got busy with the job of putting on a combat harness, rigging the armor plates and the weapons we would carry on us. Both Johnny and I were carrying snipers, whilst I also carried SMG and pistol. Our ammo was specialized, Militech spec, which had been mysteriously ‘misplaced’ in cargo handling by Gakulu’s own workgroup.

When we had checked and double checked everything, I ordered the Nomad into low emission standby mode. The radioisotope thermocouples were needed for the heater units that kept the rover in a decent condition, so there was nothing that could be done about that, except use the crater wall as a shield in the direction our prey was coming from.

I settled the SMG in my arms, “All right, I’ll take point, lights off.”

Our island of light vanished, to be replaced by utter darkness beyond the face shield of my helmet. Only balance and the light gravitational pull down kept us orientated. Luckily, my own integral Gemini optics came with built-in digital night vision, which was interfaced with the pressure suit to use a built-in forward IR illuminator mounted on the left shoulder. Johnny still had the Kiroshi ‘Cockatrice’ of my old body, but had it modded on a hardware and software level to feature DNV in the black clinic.

Meatspace became a world of augmented reality, giving real time generated renders of the environment mixing with a surreal drenched heatmap of false color assigned to temperature.

I turned my head experimentally, seeing no lag or errors as my perspective shifted and changed.

“Everything preem, Johnny?” I said over our line of sight laser link.

“Five millisecond lag, but it’ll do,” he grumbled.

We turned and began the hopping gait.

It was still the most efficient movement technique for a space-suited human on the outdoor lunar surface, pioneered by the Apollo 11 astronauts in 1969. Technology had come a long way and whilst we were infinitely more flexible and dexterous with a modern suit, it still didn’t take away the physics that necessitated the technique.

Low gravity meant each standard running step propelled you higher and further, hampering control and losing traction on the loose regolith was asking for you to kiss the moon.

The hopping gait was a gentle push off with both feet, aiming for a low, forward leaning trajectory to minimize the vertical bounce. The landing was performed with bending knees to absorb impact and maintain traction. The strides were long but had to be controlled to no more than 3 meters per hop. Arms had to be kept tucked in and learning to hop with a SMG in hand and even shoot while hopping had been quite a fun endeavor in the training shards.

RALF also easily kept pace and didn’t need to hop, between its four legs, grip pads and internal gyros it could perfectly speed across the regolith with no issue.

“Fuck,” Johnny muttered as he overcooked a hop and sent a small wave of regolith dust shooting forward. He quickly recovered, restarting the hops that flowed into each other.

Our speed for the next hour averaged to 13 kph and after two hours we took a break, mostly to give our suit’s heat management systems a chance to circulate and dump coolant fluid to RALF, so it could safely radiate from the flanks of the robot dog. It would’ve been nice to sit down, but the thermal balance of our suits was a delicate thing and it didn’t need to also be bothered with the complication of sitting our asses down on freezing cold regolith.   

Johnny rehydrated from the suit’s water reclamation before we set off again.

At hour three of our EVA, we started going uphill and soon finally arrived at our destination.

It was the summit of a hill that didn’t even have a name, only a number and it looked out over an pockmarked expanse. To the north, the sloping edge of an impact crater was deep enough that there were parts that didn’t see sunlight even during the day, the east had a relatively flat escarpment with the occasional boulder the size of a car. The west had the tall hill we were standing on and looked directly down on the route our quarry would take.

“How sure are we that the Arasaka gonks are going to pass through this?”

“More than 90%, it’s the most efficient route towards the Mitsubishi mining concession,” I gazed across the landscape, measuring potential spots for our perch and simulating potential scenarios and reactions that the black ops team would have once they were under fire.

“What if they don’t?” Johnny insisted.

“They’d be adding almost twenty hours to their journey, going around that crater. Found a spot you like yet?”

He gazed around and pointed to a smaller crater to the north-west. It was barely rendered in our digital vision, but was about six meters wide and two deep.

“Good enough, I suppose. I’ll take the other side, we create an enfilade of fire they’ll walk right into.”

“What about the launcher?” he suggested, tapping the extra surprise we had brought on his back.

“Last resort only, Johnny. They’re trying to be stealthy and can’t exactly do that packing rovers and drones. You take RALF as well,” I unhooked my support tether from the robot dog, switching over to internal life support.

“Fine.”

He was clearly reluctant, either thinking I was babying him by giving him RALF’s support or he’d rather that I keep the robot in some protective instinct. Either way, he shrugged off both and began hopping away to his little crater with RALF in tow.

A moment later, I also began hopping back down the hill to take a long way around to the other side of our ambush point.

The obvious problem was that the lunar regolith had a long memory. If I hopped straight across our ambush zone to my perch, my passage would draw a massive line pointing right to my location. Lunar night would obscure the disturbance in the virgin regolith somewhat, but I had to assume that the Arasaka sabotage team had the best inhouse DNV system that could be fitted to their suits.

It took me most of an hour to hop around our ambush zone and set my perch up behind a lunar rock slightly larger than a Basilisk tank.

From my back I unfolded a thermal blanket and laid it down onto the regolith, which would at least isolate me from the extremely cold surface in the same way my boots did, letting me go prone. I unhooked the sniper from my back and with quick movements, loaded it and settled in behind the scope.

A quick scan from right to left and back again confirmed my field of fire and Johnny’s position.

“In position and ready,” I reported to him.

“Same. How long do you think?”

“Given when they left and we left, eight hours at most.”

Gakulu had intel assets on the ground, which had confirmed the sabotage teams had left the Arasaka outpost in the Sea of Clouds. There were no further details beyond that, which was singularly annoying but which I could understand. Anything that could fly under Arasaka’s watchful radar, would by nature be clandestine and very limited due to risk of discovery.

We settled in and waited.

One hour, nothing, only a still lunar landscape that hadn’t been disturbed for hundreds of thousands of years, not since the asteroid which had made that huge nearby crater had hit.

By the second hour, I began to feel the first temptation to retreat into my datafortress, but easily resisted. Stakeouts, ambushes and waiting for the target of a gig to show was old hat to me at this point.

“Hate this part.”

Johnny’s voice practically exploded into my ears after so long of just hearing my own breathing. 

“Yes, it sucks Johnny. Nothing we can do about it. Surely you’ve been on a gig like this during your Rockerboy merc days in the ‘20s.”

“Sure, loads. Usually my partner or someone in the team at least filled the silence.”

I sighed wearily, at least I could shut him up this time. “What exactly could we really talk about, Johnny? Nothing needs to be said at the moment.”

“Wrong. Still need to kick you in the ass for fucking it up with Judy.”

“Nothing you can say about that, that I haven’t kicked my own ass for, Johnny. Yes, I could’ve done things differently. I could’ve let her in more, explained more, but then she would’ve been privy to shit that would bring her on NUSA’s radar. I also don’t need to explain why I couldn’t tell her I was working on a way to save my life all this time.”

“Bullshit, you’re telling me you don’t have a surveillance safe room in that mansion of yours?”

“Of course I do, Judy is many things, but she doesn’t have a poker face. She was under just as much surveillance as I was from many interested parties. The deception had to be as real as possible. Even with that, do you know how many times I had to fight off a variety of corpo ‘runners and hired freelancers in cyberspace from fucking up her day-to-day life?”

“Enlighten me.”

“Twenty-three, most of which were Arasaka middle management gonks who were trying their luck, NetWatch made a few plays too, but they quickly got the message when I fried the brains of the fourth runner.”

At this point I’d probably Blackwalled, fried or knocked out NC’s entire branch of NetWatch active duty personnel at some point. There had been times where I was very tempted to do a repeat of Arasaka Tower on those assholes, but the local director had quickly thrown up the proverbial white flag and declared an informal truce.

“All that effort then and you’re still letting her go?” 

“Yes,” I said flatly. “You of all people know that there are no happy endings in NC or this world.”

“What do you think I’m going to do first thing, when I get back to NC?” he said pointedly.

“Rogue.”

“Precisely, so fuck history, fuck NC, get your ass on a shuttle for Oregon and do whatever it takes to get her back.”

Oh goodness, it was so tempting and if anyone could see the problem and truly understand it, it was Johnny Silverhand. However, I just couldn’t, I had too much potentially lethal baggage that could come to haunt me and her.

“Sorry Jo- wait, heads up, got movement and thermal spike.”

“I see it.”

Hopping into distant view, roughly nine kilometers away, was eleven vac suited forms, with two blobs of trailing heat that was probably the Arasaka equivalent of a RALF.

“Fuck, V, is it my imagination or is the gonk, fourth from the left, wearing a fuck huge linear frame?”

I quickly refreshed my digital night vision and the algorithms straightened themselves out to show that Johnny was correct.

It looked quite odd to see an LF in the lunar environment, given how it also had to hop. Unlike the blocky utilitarian Militech civilian and military frames that were common around NC, these were three meters tall, sleek and armored. It was also entirely enclosed and given the space available, the only way to fit a human inside was if he was literally implanted into it, minus the arms and legs. The user literally became one with the machine.

It was clearly the evolved version of the LF that David Martinez had been tricked into testing, but everything had indicated that the weapons division had abandoned that project as being unfeasible.

I scowled inwardly, of course it had been a lie. Just as the FIA had lied about behavioral faceplate tech being a ‘failure’. Compartmentalization and deceiving your opponents, since it was inevitable that there could be moles and leaks from within Arasaka. It was in the standard Counter-Intel playbook that I had lived and breathed for years.

My attention split between meatspace and my datafortress.

I hovered over the data pool and with gestures brought up every spec of data I had on all Arasaka LFs, the experimental version that Martinez used and began inferring what it would take to bring one up to lunar specification and solve the not so small issue of massive cyberpsychosis risk to the user. Most worrying was the grav field generators the thing could use offensively and which it depended on for proper locomotion on Earth. On Luna, that was mostly solved because it now only weighed 136 kg.

A military grade Omega LF could let the user project up to 800 kg of force in various ways; lifting, bending, breaking and punching. Scaling that to lunar grav variables meant a strength multiplier that would generally translate to 3000. The weaponry it could pack with that allowance would be something to behold.

“V, this is supposed to be a deniable stealth sabotage team, not a fucking assault group.”

“I know. More than likely we’re looking at their escorts. They definitely anticipated someone trying to crash the party.”

I felt the small bubble of approaching cyberspace that represented the group’s network streaming between them. A quick passive scan found the open ports that allowed data to flow between their individual firewalls and I could immediately tell one more thing.

“There’s a runner among them as well.”

“V…” Johnny’s tone told me he was an inch from calling an abort.

“We can do this.”

“With an LF of unknown capability on the field, we’d be perfectly justified in telling Gakulu to shove it, V.”

And this was why I liked working alone.

My stealth daemon sneaked through in between the millisecond gaps between data packets and the enemy network unfolded before me.

“Butcher, you take the runner on my mark. Johnny, work your way left to right, I’ll take care of the LF.”

“Fuck V, fine,” groused the former Rockerboy.

The enemy advanced, tufts of regolith kicked up and bounced away from each landing.  

My focus fell on the Linear Frame and it naturally had the strongest firewalls and an onboard non-sentient AI, but was far from the sophistication of a Soulkiller derived variant. It was limited to real-time tactical analysis and terrain mapping only and would play no part in a cyberspace battle - the team relying on their runner for that.

I focused on the firewall and while it would’ve taken me months to parse and solve in the past, now the data structure unfolded and instead of finding an unyielding wall, it was remarkably porous from my point of view. My ‘hand’ caressed up and down, left, right, forward and back, then in dimensions that would’ve been incomprehensible to my meatmind self just a few weeks ago.

I practically ghosted through the firewall like it wasn’t even there and the pilot of the frame entered my view.

Sure enough, he had been integrated into the thing. It was a young man with features that seemed Japanese at first glance, but a closer look made me think he was Korean, especially around the eyes and jawline. Above each shoulder within the enclosed cockpit of the frame, was a system designed to inject a new baloperidol variant I hadn’t seen before. So that at least explained how they managed the cyberpsychosis risk.

I forcibly put out of my mind his apparent youth, the glassy dark eyes that still somehow shone with determination. In this business, it was best not to let things get… personal. His age, his name, his circumstances, it had to be irrelevant. He was just a weapon being wielded by Arasaka, molded from a young age just like Goro had been.  

“Butcher, do it.”

I felt my AI partner’s tentacles rip into the small realm of enemy cyberspace.

My programs shorted the baloperidol system into uselessness even as I went hot and rammed through a System Collapse on the pilot and a Takeover Hack on the LF.

Butcher had caught the netrunner mid-hop, causing him to stumble and crash face first into the regolith, before he began grotesquely twitching as he was mind harvested. The sickly red distortions of the AI child of the Blackwall unfolded in my vision.

Simultaneously, a tungsten AP round from Johnny’s railgun sniper went through the thinner neck armor of his target and finished its journey by burying itself into the shoulder of the next Arasaka goon.

My Takeover hack finished its work and with flex of will, its systems yielded and overlaid on my digital form.

I twisted the upper high caliber auto railgun mounted on the upper left hand arm and let out a brief burst that utterly tore apart my first target - the Arasaka officer who was in charge of this group.

The large spray of blood became a frozen crystalline wave instantly and made me wish my DNV system wasn’t quite so good, given what else became flash frozen.

My own sniper thumped into my shoulder as I sent an AP round downrange, straight into the elite on the far right of their formation.

The round pierced through the front of the neck, just missed the frontal chest plate, continued on and made a mess of the throat. He instinctively grabbed at his neck in shock. I knew Arasaka void suits had an internal smart sealant that reacted and could seal up minor breaches. He wouldn’t die from exposure to vacuum, but he’d suffocate all the same.

Our opening gambit had resulted in four dead and the LF under my control.

The seven remaining black ops blurred and scattered as they actually used a Sandy on the lunar surface. 

It was a desperation move, inspired by sheer necessity at being caught in the ambush with absolutely no cover.

Regolith dust clouds exploded upward from their feet as they streaked through the vacuum in a fairly randomized starburst. It was a good idea to divide our aim and try to get out of the enfilade, but physics quickly caught up with them and taught them the hard way why Sandy movement wasn’t recommended on Luna.

One Arasaka goon lost balance completely when his feet touched the regolith again, unable to find any traction to stop his momentum, he went ass over teakettle and bounced up off the regolith again, kicking up another cloud. 

However, these were Arasaka elites and all of them had triangulated where Johnny and I were.

Even as they flew and in some cases flailed through the vacuum, their own SMGs and assault railguns came around to send timed retaliatory fire back at us.

My own reflexes were already on overclock and I was behind my cover. 

A number of rounds buried themselves into the boulder, the thump of which I could feel through my body and the rest passed through the empty space where I had been, eventually hitting other boulders behind me.

This should be interesting, I thought with a savage grin as I spooled up the LFs grav field.

Two of the elites actually managed a decent landing, usinf their suit’s thrusters to reorientate and slow down enough to use hands and feet to dig into the regolith.

They barely had a moment to savor their success when I dropped a circular, targeted 80G field on them.

The loose regolith instantly compacted and crushed down, the effect on the elites was akin to a giant stepping on an egg, the spreading yolk of which was instantly frozen a few milliseconds later.

I too had little chance to savor my new toy as I was bombarded with error messages from the LF.

‘Great, burned out both grav generators.’ Not surprising given how new and relatively fragile the tech was.

I locked onto the four remaining elites, who were only just recovering from their tumbling encounters with the lunar regolith.

The LF had four arms, each with a high caliber auto-railgun, which spoke into the lunar void with tungsten rounds, each barrel glowing with blue discharge arcs.

Most of the rounds overpenetrated and kicked up more regolith dust, but mere moments later, the last members of the sabotage team crumpled to the surface, dead.

A quick check on the pilot of the LF, showed the System Collapse had done its job thoroughly.

I had chosen it initially because any lethal quickhack had a significant chance of outright disabling the LF.

“Johnny, status?” I asked, uploading a Synapse Burnout, flatlining the pilot.

“Lost my sniper and got some shrapnel lodged in my helmet, already patched up.”

“There, see? Nothing to worry about.”

“Yeah, well, didn’t think that Frame would have such pathetic ICE. Could’ve been a nasty AI in there, V.”

“I’ll give ya that,” I admitted, letting go of the Takeover hack. The LF slowly fell into an ungainly heap of artificial, armored limbs.

I carefully got onto my knees, doing a final scan of the area before standing up fully and surveying the carnage of the ambush point. The one thing that our training shards and this had shown us about combat on the lunar surface, was that invariably, the one who fired first won. The sheer hostile environment, the lack of traction and inability to move at Sandevistan speeds with combat effectiveness all contributed to it. You could absorb and tank some fire if it hit your body, but generally any suit breach that made it through your armor plate meant game over for most.

“All right Johnny, break cover, let’s go on some intel scavenging.”

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For the next twenty minutes we went about the grim task of inspecting the remains and pilfering any intact memory shards or drives. Mostly, because that was what any Militech black ops would do.

Most of the stuff would probably end up useless as any Arasaka elite would have counter-intel protocols that wiped data the moment they detected their user flatlining.  

We loaded up everything in our harnesses and when that was full, we used RALFs storage compartments.

Our hike to return to our rover had barely started when we spotted a Veil drone shadowing us again. Just peeking its head over a nearby crater wall.

“Think we’re going to be in for an ambush of our own,” Johnny commented grimly.

“All our gear and the rover is highrider, the fact that we’re not openly showing tribal markings should tell them we’re part of Gakulu’s black ops.”

“Hope you’re right.”

“The one thing that will give us away though is our build, not tall or slender enough, which translates to our movement.”

“Fuck, hadn’t thought of that.”

“If we get ambushed, use Sandy, just drop to the ground and shoot. Butcher and I’ll handle the rest.”

Our journey continued, the forward hopping becoming more fluid and second nature. Our route back was eminently predictable, so we began a zig-zag pattern, scooting west around certain craters or landmarks where we had gone the other side beforehand. I kept myself busy in my datafortress, surveying the route ahead and trying to put myself in the Veil’s shoes of where the best intercept points were. It was when we were just half-an-hour from the rover that we finally reached a point where there was no going around, a crater that would take more than a day’s hopping to circle.

“If it’s going to be anywhere, it’ll either be here or at our rover.”

Johnny used his next hop to bring his right hand to his waist and unlatched his pistol.

How the Eclipse did it, I dearly wanted to know.

On our left was a mild hill that only had an eleven degree gradient, on our right, the edge of a kilometers wide crater.

From that hill, in an explosive burst of regolith, seven vac suited highriders popped out like jack-in-the-boxes and the heat sigs of seven more popped their heads and weapons over the lip of the crater.

They had timed it perfectly to emerge when we were halfway through a hop, without our feet on the ground and no possibility of traction on regolith.

Sometimes, I hate it when I’m right.

“Not another hop, Earthers!”

The cold angry voice broke through on the common emergency frequency.

Our Sandy’s were already active and under cyberspace time-dilation within our datafortresses, Johnny appeared above my datapool.

“Well, at least they didn’t shoot first. Now the question is, should we?”

With a few gestures I brought hires closeups of the imagery our NVDs had rendered. Just how these highriders had hidden their heat sigs or so perfectly blended themselves into the lunar regolith was a question I dearly wanted an answer to but couldn’t afford the time to really speculate.

“If this was any other place, I’d hack and shoot first, ask questions later.” These highriders were wearing a material that flowed over their suits, almost like a poncho which our NVDs were struggling to resolve properly for some reason.

“Can you even hack them?”

An understandable concern, given the propensity for minimal cyberware amongst those who lived beyond Earth’s magnetosphere. I threw out the smallest of pings against all the highriders surrounding us. The results were not encouraging, all of them at least had interface neuralware, but beyond that it was a coin toss. A Short Circuit couldn’t do its job if the target didn’t have some form of onboard power capacity or generation, Contagion was a similar story - no cyberware, you couldn’t induce a toxicity reaction by attacking the insulation. The only attack options I’d have would be the Synapse Burnout and Blackwall to their skull sponges, Short Circuit and Overheat applied to their suits - all of which would be lethal in this environment.

The only option to go non-lethal here would be my version of the Weapon Glitch, suitably downgraded to just fuse the railgun coils into uselessness and not detonate the entire thing in their hands, which could be potentially lethal via suit breaches.

I decided to ghost breach through their firewalls and successfully seeded the Glitch in every gun our opponents had on them. That would at least take ranged weapons out of the equation, but if these highriders didn’t have a blade on them, I’d eat my cyberdeck.

Devolving this to a melee encounter on the regolith surface was not a good idea.

“All right, let’s see how the dice rolls.”

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A/N: It was rather fascinating to imagine/research the problems you face in combat on the lunar surface, then apply it to the setting. Hope you enjoyed chooms and stay awesome.