2078: Highriders - Chapter 4

Back in the clothing and identity of Mrs. Paigles I watched from the crowd of shocked and awestruck One Percenters as they gawped at the mansion going up in flames.

Station maintenance and emergency services had arrived within less than two minutes once my little sabotage had finally kicked in. The fire was already well under control, with various maintenance borgs openly surrounding the mansion and dousing the fire with specialized foam grenades that they launched into any room or area requiring it.

“What is this station coming to? First the pirates of last year and now a fire?!”

“Urgh, borgs, can’t they… become invisible or something?”

“Heads are gonna roll for this!”

“I’m calling my lawyer, the ESA is going to pay! I don’t live here to worry about dirtside shit like this anymore!”

It was hilarious listening to them complain and I idly made sure my Agent was scrolling the audio of it. Quite a few of my fellow mercs at the Afterlife and Tiny Mike especially would get a kick out of it. If I ever saw them…

I had to forcibly stop my mind from going down that nihilistic spiral again.

That was the problem with having death nipping at your heels for long. The temptation to just give in, let go, to stop fighting and embrace that oblivion became more and more seductive. All the chaos, effort and death wore you down, your nerves start to go and you ask yourself, ‘Wouldn’t it just be easier?’

With an inward two handed, middle finger salute towards death that Johnny would be proud of, I turned around and wormed my way through the crowd towards the nearest tram.

I purposefully thought only about my last gig on the station, reviewing everything with my Agent as I returned towards Torus 4 and Hyperion Fashion.

“Back so soon Mrs. Paigles?” asked Elijah Kramer with a wide smile.

“Yes, my friend enjoyed the clothing very much, but now I need something else.”

I tightbeamed him the outfit specs with the point of a finger.

“Interesting, going retro are we? Especially on the jacket.”

“I have another friend who is a sucker for the classics.”

“Very well, I see you want smart memory material, that will bump up the price significantly.”

I only gave him a bland look in reply.

“Money is no object then. Again, take a seat, the clothing will be ready in an estimated twenty minutes. Apologies for the extra time, but memory material isn’t exactly easy to work with, despite what the marketing says.”

I took the opportunity for more ultra luxury coffee and left with my new clothes exactly on time.

My next destination was Torus 5.

It was a residential and park hybrid torus, but this one leaned more towards the big events. Lizzy Wizzy had a performing residence here at the moment and Kerry had told me he was leaning towards doing the same, when she moved on in her current music tour.

It was very tempting to hit up Lizzy for a drink. We were both mild friends at this point after I had done a number of ‘security’ gigs for her at concerts around the world. Most of which revolved around me securing the local net and hunting down a deranged griefer who had been hacking her concert’s holo systems and antigravs to fuck things up during performances. 

After everything’s done Valerie, not now, I thought to myself.

My destination was the Orion Casino.   

It was the largest and wealthiest of the entire Crystal Palace and took up almost an entire quarter of the torus’ real estate. In terms of floor space and the amount of eddies that flowed through, it made a fair percentage of earthside casinos look like chumps working with small change.

It didn’t just have multiple gaming floors, but also boasted hotels at least on par with Konpeki, restaurants and various live entertainment spectacles. How they crammed it all into the torus, whilst balancing mass and the centrifugal forces was a minor miracle of engineering that even left my own techie head spinning.

The place overall looked like someone had lifted old Venice into space and thrown a constantly shifting starfield above each building, projected in holo from the ceiling. It was far from a natural starfield - as it was constantly being worked on by a dedicated artist and an AI called Ferrero.

Walking down the casino streets, surrounded on each side by such architecture and art, the patrons of the place were equally fantastic to match.

Some were dressed in ultra luxury neokitch, others in brutal neomilitarism, but the most eye-catching were those who straddled a line between outright ridiculous costumes meant for a circus and some freaky art house fashion. You didn’t know whether to laugh or take it seriously and that dichotomy was the entire point.

One notable fashion that even had me tempted was the pure holo-clothes. Some mid tier joytoys in Night City wore simple holographic tops and skirts, but those were simple things. These creations were literal holo art that a person ‘wore’ and acted as a moving centerpiece for it. Most of the time the person wearing them at least had some underwear here and there, but occasionally they only wore the holo and depending on the angle you were seeing them, it offered titillating glimpses.

One daring woman was only wearing shiny high tech sneakers and light neon blue holo-clothes that hugged her body mere millimeters above the skin in an alluring natural pattern that reminded me of the extinct zebra. 

I allowed myself the time it took walking to my next destination to watch the fantastic sights.  

The Auriga was a dedicated gaming floor within the greater casino that dedicated itself to the more traditional games of chance and in an anachronistic fashion, made you play it in a completely analogue way. There were no fancy holos, virtual chips or cards - you played as if it was the 20th Century. The only modern convenience the place held was in banking your bets or winnings.

It was dedicated to clientele who were still alive from that era - meaning they were consequently rich enough and had the fortitude and luck to survive with their fortune through multiple Corporate Wars; the Saburo Arasakas and similar ilk. It also attracted the New Money, as the newest generation of corpo CEOs wanted to smoosh, mingle and get in the good graces of the Old Generation.

This meant the Auriga was also the most secure place in the entire Palace.

Just a casual passive scan as I walked past the fake ‘Venetian’ building housing the game floor, let me count 39 bodyguards standing over the shoulders of their specific protectees as they were seated at various gambling tables.

I found the double doored entrance and casually passed through a hidden weapon scanner integrated into the wooden doorframe.

I was instantly the center of attention, feeling the active and passive scans of every bodyguard on the floor.

The space was filled with low relaxing jazz music, the air thick with smoke from cigarettes and cigars. The lights bright on each table, making it seem like each was a small island in darkness.

My pace was casual, seemingly indifferent to all the scans, as I walked towards the local restroom.

Once inside I found a stall and locked it.

My new clothing acquisitions were ultra low rise leggings in black that clung to my skin, stiletto shoes with steel tips on the heel. A simple black bustier for my chest and the final piece, a replica Johnny Silverhand Samurai Jacket.

I reverted to my own natural form, so I could fit in the stuff properly.

A sigh of relief escaped my lips as I was finally back in my own skin.

In cyberspace, I was also working with my Agent and Butcher to preserve my fake digital ID for a little while longer.

I dumped my Mrs. Paigles dress in my Hyperion labeled paper bag, picked it up and emerged from the toilet stall as V.

A final check in the mirror, showed my hair was properly reverted to the dark red I favored and the proper style. Sometimes the faceplate systems had issues with coloration of such fine structures and it especially happened if you changed appearances too often within a certain span of time.

My Agent also showed a proper link with the smart material I was wearing, meaning it could split the leggings on my right leg to properly allow me access to my weapon and would work with my faceplate to adjust coloration and even style within certain limits.        

I rolled my shoulders and stretched my neck, luxuriating in my true body for a moment, feeling augmented muscles flex and shift.

“Here we go.”

I stepped forward, pushed on the restroom door and emerged back onto the gaming floor.

My true digital ID emerged and the clock was ticking until I was flagged as an anomaly on the station.

The first bodyguard I passed at a Blackjack table, frowned at me, his optics flashing as he passively scanned me.

The guy was over six and a half feet of muscle encased in a corpo suit and he visibly twitched as his own Agent was no doubt delivering my public profile to him.

I gave him a lopsided smile, flashing my own blue optics at him with a knowing look.

He was clearly tempted to raise the alarm amongst his team of two other meathead bodyguards, who had their backs to me, but after a long few seconds he relaxed his hands, folding them over his stomach.

He was clearly stuck in a dilemma - if he made a fuss for nothing, then he risked angering a lot of very angry powerful people. If I really was here to fuck shit up, then he would be target number one to die. His eyes were cool, professional but I caught the hint of ‘Oh shit, oh fuck’ in them.

It was moments like this that made my rep worth every bullet fired and drop of blood shed.

I kept my hands in sight and every body language signal I was sending as casual. It unfortunately didn’t help reduce the stress this bodyguard was feeling. Gone were the days where you could trust those sorts of signs. The fact that I didn’t have a gun in hand was also immaterial when you were also known as a prolific combat netrunner.

The next table had a poker game running between the CEO of Raven Microcybernetics, Roman Fellini, Petrochem’s Lars Muhammad and Tsunami’s Hideki Kobori. 

The bodyguards of these esteemed gentlemen locked optics with me and visibly glared, as if daring me to try something.

I spotted in cyberspace the signal between the lead bodyguard and Fellini.

The CEO of the company that made one of my personal favorite cyberdecks, looked up at me with an intrigued smirk as I walked past them.

He was well into his 90s but didn’t look a day over 30 and it was only in his optics that I could see the weight of years on him. This was a recurring theme amongst most every power dealer in the room. There were only a handful of them who were like Saburo Araska, wearing their advanced age like a mark of pride, but with the internal bodies of the young thanks to organ and cyberware replacement.

Halfway through the room my path was blocked by a wall of muscle nearly six and half feet tall. The bodyguard could’ve fit right in with the Animals, except he actually had a normal if somewhat attractive face that wasn’t discolored from abusing Juice.

I looked up into his blue optics that were set in a stubborn stance as he raised a hand, palm outward to halt my advance.

My Cripple Movement went through his firewall like it wasn’t even there.

A dodge to the side and I’m past him, though his two buddies clearly objected to my not getting with the program.

Both had top-tier Gorilla Arms, which hissed as they flexed with potential strength.

My Sandy activated as I dodged goon number one trying to bear hug and crush me.

He got a CM and Short Circuit for his trouble.

It looked hilarious - a massive guy in a suit trying to hug air, absolutely frozen, whilst his own cyberware capacitors discharged into his nervous system, arcing over his body. He was totally unable to stop his momentum and tipped over, until he face-planted into the floor. His frozen arms serving to prop him up and keep his ass in the air.

Goon two threw a three punch combo with enough strength that would’ve obliterated concrete.

I danced aside the hits, slapping them away, firing off a CM and tuned Overheat.  

The cookie cutter Overheat had the potential to be lethal, overheating cyberware and flesh made for a barbeque after all. This one did enough to induce an effective mild heatstroke in the organic bits of a person, which promptly led to unconsciousness. He’d feel like shit when he woke up, but it was survivable.

“Ha! Ha! Bravo!”

The man clapping was Menshikov Arseni Yakovich, Senior Board member of Techtronika and it had been his bodyguards who I had just practically humiliated. In fact, it seemed he had sicced them on me just to see how I would handle them, judging from his amused expression. 

“Yakovich, it’s your turn,” said his fellow at the Baccarat table in annoyance. It was with annoyance that I recognized that fucker and I was seriously tempted to let Butcher loose and gobble the asshole’s psyche to beyond the Blackwall. It was Roy Levack, CTO of MoorE Tech.

He was also an NC denizen, whose limo had accidentally ploughed through ten children on their way to school, just last year. The fucker wasn’t arrested for manslaughter or criticized by the media due to his wealth and power, nor did he lift a finger in compensating the families of those affected. That same night after the accident he was seen smooching at an election fundraiser for Councilman Gonzales.

I gave Levack a flat stare, weighing the hassle and shit I’d have to deal with if I killed him right there.

Unfortunately, he was not part of this gig and while I could improvise and adapt with the best of them, my professional instincts railed against the thought of an unplanned assassination. He might’ve been rich corpo scum who didn’t give those below him a second thought of consideration, but it would achieve nothing in the long run. There was another just like him, waiting in the corpo structure to be elevated into his role.

“V, is it? Love your work,” Levack gave me a lecherous grin. “I’m sure I have Rogue’s number somewhere. Be giving her a call soon.”

Though the majority of my gigs in the last few months had come to me directly, because my rep had somewhat transcended the normal dynamic of fixer and merc, I was still technically on Rogue’s list as one of hers.

I put the asshole out of my mind, giving Yakovich a nod in turn as I passed the table. I liked his company’s weapons.

At this point, the news of my presence had spread across the game floor. I was under the eyes of many powerful people now and kept my purposeful walk towards the ‘Employees Only’ door. The din of low chattering voices reached my augmented ears, wondering why I was here, what my gig was, whether they should call Europol station security, expressing wonder at the presence of an Edgerunner of my caliber on the Crystal Palace.

I heard all of it and could only think of Jackie.

Becoming the stuff of legend was his thing. I had just wanted to survive in the aftermath of being an ex-corpo who worked in Arasaka Counter Intel. That first month after I had been fired had been the worst of my life, worrying every moment about getting tracked down by any corp that wanted either revenge or looking to gain knowledge of Arasaka through me. I had felt so small, tiny, insignificant, a bug waiting to be stepped on.

Now here I was, my name on the tongues of a room full of power dealers.     

It was as I approached the door that my attention returned to cyberspace; the call had already gone out from one of the employees manning the tables.

Butcher had already intercepted it, posing as the automated Europol receptionist.

I threw a daemon into the local net that effectively made a snapshot of the security system and replaced the output signals with the ‘situation normal’ ping to the rest of the Palace. It was my go-to hack for isolating any area I was operating in.

Through the door, I was greeted with a long carpeted hallway with muted lights and a number of doors on either side.

A door on my left swished open to reveal a formally dressed waiter with a tray of filled whiskey glasses and a tall bottle.

“Uh, sorry ma’am, you can’t be here.”

I breached him and within seconds he was unconscious.

My hands snapped forward and caught the tray that fell from nerveless hands, rescuing the whiskey that probably cost enough to pay his salary for an entire year. A quick scan had me tempted to swig the bottle; it was a 70 year old Glenfarclas Scotch. It could by rights have been in a museum, yet up here these assholes drank it over a deck of cards.

“Sorry choom,” I said, looking down at the collapsed waiter. For the sake of his job, I put down the priceless whiskey next to him, a few feet in front of his face, so he could recognize what was in front of him, yet not accidentally knock it over or break it.

I eyed one of the glasses of poured whiskey… 

“Fuck it.”

My hand swiped one and I downed the whole thing in one gulp.

Oh… oh wow.

I tasted marmalade, honey, coffee and sherry notes all at once, whilst a nutty scent hit my nose.

Tequila was more my thing, but you eventually became a connoisseur of anything alcoholic when you frequented the Afterlife.

The empty glass was returned to the tray and I resumed my leisurely walk down the corridor.

Third door on the right was my destination. It looked utterly ordinary and had no markings or any indications of what or who was beyond it. In cyberspace, that was a very different story. Just this simple lock had a team of dedicated Black ICE daemons defending it. Anyone trying to cookie cutter hack this would find their brain fried in short order.

“Realspace it is,” I muttered.

My right hand surged forward smashing against the edge of the armored door twice. It created enough of a gap for my fingers to find purchase.

Custom militarized Gorilla Arms strained and internal actuators whined.

The door put up an impressive fight, to the point that I had to stop and let my arms cool down before trying again.

Finally I heard a tell tale snap and the door’s mechanisms lost the battle of physics.

The door was half open when I heard the faint click of a gun mechanism, as a trigger was about to be pulled from inside the room.

My Sandy was engaged with a thought and I ducked, rolling into the room beyond.

The loud electric crack of a tech weapon gunshot reached me as the bullet missed me by a few handwidths, burying itself into the equally armored wall.

The micro radar ping my Agent let out returned the details of the room.

A relatively large office space; 430 square feet, 9 foot ceiling, fancy modern desk that looked like it grew out of the floor, smart frames filled with constantly cycling artwork and the shape of an optically camouflaged man standing three feet to the left of the desk, aiming an Araska Kenshin where I had just been.

Even as my roll was completing, feet just about to touch the ground again, I was already digging away at his firewalls.

He had a Self-ICE module installed, which was naturally fighting back against my hack into his personal network.

It was a stock model from Rostovic and no runner worth their cyberdeck hadn’t already written a hack to obviate these over-the-counter solutions. Usually, rookie runners just overwhelmed a Self-ICE by feeding it hacks until it overloaded. Professionals just needed to fire off one custom virus and send the module into a runtime frenzy, overheating the processors before internal safeties kicked in and it shut itself down.

My counter to Self-ICE was to turn the thing against its user.

A custom trojan worm that it ignored, slipping into the personal network, until it reached the module itself. Normally the Rostovic took the hostile program trying to screw shit up, quarantined it and came down like a sledgehammer on the hostile data. My worm piggybacked on that function and when the hammer came down, it actually served to only unleash the payload within.

“Aa…rrr….rghh!”

My hidden Short Circuit unleashed itself on the man as I rose to my feet, the sound reaching my ears distorted into a deep base as the Sandy skewed my perceptions.

The electric arcing and discharge haloed his outline and his camo started to fritz, leaving parts of his body visible and other parts transparent.

His gun went off again, shooting into the floor as his finger contracted involuntarily on the trigger.

In sheer reflex, my right upper thigh opened to deliver my own pistol, but I halted the process when I saw my opponent was starting to collapse.

I let my Sandy shut down prematurely to help its cooldown process and my perceptions normalized.

The optical camo failed utterly now as the man thudded onto the tiled floor, his legs awkwardly bent and arms splayed outward.

In contrast to his austere surroundings, he was wearing a floral shirt, classic jeans and synleather boots. I didn’t want to think about the extra cost for those to be synced with the optical camo tech in his subdermal layers. When I wanted to go invisible passively these days, I usually had to wear my netrunning suit as an underlayer, I couldn’t be bothered forking out the cash to have all of my wardrobe treated.

Thank God the early days of my merc career were over, when I had to fork out the entire pay for a low level gig just to get one set of clothes compatible with optical camo.

A quick scan and my Agent brought up the details of my attacker; Victor Anglés, the owner of this office and the primary target of this last gig.

He was a Spaniard, hailing originally from Seville, but now working for this casino as a floor manager. The problem was he had let this lofty position and new level of wealth go to his head recently. At an art auction in England, he had been bidding for a certified original from Salvador Dali, an artwork with the clunky title ‘The Disintegration of the Persistance of Memory’.

He was promptly outbid by my own client, who had a significantly better wallet on the day.

Victor didn’t like that and so hired a team of local Edgerunners to steal the artwork in transit.

He then promptly returned to LEO, thinking he would be free and clear from any reprisal. It was after all known that the Crystal Palace was ‘secure’. There were no mercs operating on it and unless my client went through the even more expensive and time consuming route of securing Europol aid, then the artwork would be forever left in Victor’s grubby mitts.

So my client went to the place known for the craziest mercs on the planet, hoping there would be someone who would take a gig on the Crystal Palace. He just so happened to arrive while I was negotiating with Mr. Blue Eyes on the details for the gigs he wanted me to run.

I immediately saw the potential in the gig as being the thing that would splash my name all over the planet.

I stepped forward and kicked the gun out of Victor’s limp hand, kneeling next to him to begin feeling his pockets for anything like a physical keycard or a code token. My scan pinged something on his neck and it revealed a gold chain with a tiny statuette of the Virgin Mary, within which was an RFID.

My hand grabbed it and with a light tug I ripped it off his neck.

“Found anything yet, Butcher?”

“Behind the smart frame.” He pinged and highlighted the frame in my vision, on the left wall relative to the desk.

I hurried towards it and began feeling around the edges, carefully scanning the frame for any sensors or traps.

“Hiding a priceless physical artwork behind another digital artwork display no one would look twice at. I can’t decide whether it's clever or too obvious.”

The first hurdle was a simple contact sensor on the rear of the smart frame. The frame itself was another security measure as it would sound an alarm if any accelerometer inside detected movement.

The weakness here was the Kiroshi smart frame itself. It did not have the internal firmware to stop even a cookie cutter runner, no matter how much ICE you loaded onto it. The limit was that you needed a certain level of hardware to support defensive firewalls and daemons. The armored locks on an office safe room could have that, not a smart frame.

My viral attacks went straight through defenses without even the firewalls registering them.

This let me fool the contact sensor as well and I lifted the smart frame off the wall.

Beyond that only a bare black wall to the standard optic.

My Cockatrice Kiroshis spotted the minuscule flaw in the physical camouflage in front of me; a less than hair width imperfection in a seam of a hidden wall panel.

I held up the Virgin Mary statuette and interrogated the onboard RFID for its encryption scheme. Even with this, it wasn’t enough to open the panel as my Agent highlighted further details as it displayed for me a generated radar image of the guts behind the panel; a directional microphone, clearly waiting for a vocal passphrase component to open it.

Well, clearly Victor wanted to admire his painting from the comfort of his smart foam office chair without having to get up.

I was hoping to avoid this.

I carefully put down the smart frame and returned to the unconscious Victor, unwound my personal link from my wrist and inserted it directly into the neuro port behind his right ear.

His internal network and systems was in crash recovery mode, trying to resolve everything keeping him unconscious. Thankfully, my Short Circuit, while not entirely my own work, (A collaboration between Nix, Yoko and myself), was specifically designed to gum up the works of bio recovery systems that came standard to everyone with general cybernetic interfaces and even dedicated recovery cyberware like a Second Heart. It would take him about eight hours of further enforced nap time before his systems worked through the issues I had induced.

In this state, it was easy to breach into any onboard supplementary memory, including the cache of his own optics and ears.

He had set his own memory to clear cache every 12 hours, which was quite handy as it allowed my Agent and Butcher to quickly sift through it to find the passphrases and any other security procedures he had in place for the painting.

I disconnected, running a quick self-diagnostic.

Nothing came up after a full scan - which I was thankful for. A lot of netrunners carried Black ICE around their neuroports, to deter physical linking if they just happened to be sleeping or unconscious. Butcher also doubled as a very hostile anti-viral for my personal network.

Back at the wall panel, I had enough data for my faceplate to initiate an imitation of Victor’s voice.

“The Chromosome of a Highly coloured Fish's Eye Starting the Harmonious Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory,” I drawled in a deep south Mediterranean accent of Spanish.

That combined with the RFID, did the trick.

The seams of the hidden panel split, pushed out and lowered to reveal a darkened recess.

Another smaller panel emerged and lights switched on to reveal the true artwork I was after.

It was actually quite small, only thirteen inches in length by ten inches, mounted in a classic wooden frame, hand carved by a carpenter from New York in 1954. The whole thing was actually an evolution of an earlier Dali painting, ‘The Persistence of Memory’, with elements of that painting being flooded in water and depicting the effect it had on them.

The whole thing was supposed to be an artistic representation of the first revelations scientists had made about quantum mechanics - the breakdown of matter into atoms.

It was… interesting, I suppose. Dali wasn’t exactly to my own taste and I preferred early 21st century art to hang in my mansion.

I shook my head to clear it from aesthetic contemplations and got busy with the procedure to dismount the painting from the panel.

Victor had made some provision for quickly removing it, since it was a very valuable asset that he wanted to be able to grab and run. 

To facilitate this, there was a cluster of ten touch sensors arranged in a classic numeric keypad to the right of the painting, hidden behind the surface. With a bit of help from my left hand, I arranged my right hand fingers into the proper positions and pushed down on the sensors without hesitation.

There was a click as the mechanism let go and the Dali painting inched forward, slumping on a single retaining wire that prevented it from falling to the floor.

From there it was as simple as lifting it off the panel.

I gave a satisfied grin of triumph and walked back to my dropped shopping bag, wrapped the artwork in my leftover clothes and picked up the bag in my left hand.

My Agent pinged for my attention and it brought up a security feed of the gaming floor in my vision.

I sighed as it helpfully highlighted a nineteen member strong Araska special ops squad that were moving amongst the gaming tables. They were all in their typical black outfits and armor, with monomolecular katana style blades gleaming in the overhead lights. None of them were armed with the typical Masumune assault rifles, Shingen smart weapons, heavy weapons or even a pistol as the ESA set strict rules on what armaments corpo security could bring to the Crystal Palace.

The sea of bodyguards they were moving through had drawn their own weapons in response; which was a wide variety of melee weapons as well; some blunt, some edged, all augmented with modern tech to give them all sorts of lethal twists. There was even one guy with a damn Cut-O-Matic chain sword, where had he fit that thing in?

“Well now doesn’t this have the potential to be a clusterfuck,” I chuckled.

Arasaka could sometimes be so predictable.

I knew that there would likely be someone from the local Arasaka office here and that when I showed my true face it would elicit some sort of response. The local director would jump at the chance to bring the head of Smasher’s Bane to the young emperor, Yorinobu Arasaka.

What I did not expect was for him to throw Arasaka’s entire elite security contingent at me.

Not to mention set them into a pool with the most highly trained bodyguards on the planet amongst power dealers who could command heaps of shit to land on Arasaka, if their ninja’s so much as disturbed a hair on their very valuable heads.

I began to laugh.

A fit of humor that seemed to erupt from my stomach and just demanded expression.

‘Oh this is perfect,’ I thought.

Still chuckling and giggling, I secured the shopping bag around my left hand, twisting the flexible handle into a partial knot.

I hurried out of the office and back down the corridor.

The Arasaka ninjas were almost ready to breach through the employee door. They were stacking on either side, their blades held high next to their heads, keeping them out of the way from their comrades.

In cyberspace, the battle had already begun.

My security daemon was fighting against what had to be a local Arasaka runner, judging from the viruses, worms and hacks that were being used.

I hijacked more of the casino’s server infrastructure, setting loose five more daemons to play with the runner. It was tempting to sic Butcher on him, but I needed my AI free for the action to come in realspace.

My advance paused just a few steps outside the door as the first soldier readied a flashbang grenade on the left side, whilst on the right, the other inched his hand forward to push it open.

Then I purposely let my feet make noise as I finished the last few steps.

I could see both spec ops freeze as their own heightened hearing picked up on it.

My Sandy engaged and right foot surged forward to hammer into the door.

The stiletto on that foot barely held up to the abuse as the door went flying off its mag runners to crash into the three ninjas who had the bad luck to be in the way. The cramped conditions with so many VIPs and bodyguards didn’t leave much room for a proper tactical envelopment.

My first blurred sprint carried me to the left, where another kick to the groin doubled over the soldier. Such was the speed of my kick, that my stiletto heel almost penetrated the stab proof rated groin armor, but physics ensured that the soldier was in a world of pain.

My right hand snatched his blade, before a moment later, a follow up kick to the chest sent him flying into his three buddies behind, resulting in a cascade of bodies falling backward.

The pilfered blade was a typical Arasaka weapon; dark matt green finish, logo stenciled near the hilt, but of supreme quality given it belonged to an ‘elite’. 

It parried the strike of a soldier with a thermal blade in a blur to my right, as he also activated his own Sandy.

Our blades traded blows and within two real time seconds, we had already tested each other's guard eight times.

Sparks and small hints of flame erupted between us.

When he was just that moment too late to match my strike, he lost both his forearms as the sharp blade cleaved through armored steel, circuitry and actuators. My Short Circuit sent him twitching to the floor in agony.

My perception of time normalized and the three soldiers I had buried under the door, shoved it off themselves.

To my left, the four I had used as bowling pins surged to their feet, while the three to my right tried to rush me around their armless comrade.

I burned all my local RAM and all seven sprinting soldiers, three of them with Sandy’s active, froze as my rapidly queued Cripple Movement hit all of them.

Their momentum dictated that they continued forward and within a moment I had seven ‘saka elites kissing the floor at my feet.

A quick overclock of my Canto, followed by a coolant flush, allowed me to further spread Short Circuits in a truly ridiculous manner. Both Nix and Yoko would’ve called bullshit. The seven ‘saka soldiers agreed as they twitched and moaned in pain as their cybernetics discharged their capacitors in a truly nasty manner.

The twelve remaining didn’t hesitate to try their luck in overwhelming me.

Only problem was that their own now unconscious comrades formed a nice little corridor with their bodies in what was a lucky accident. The only way to approach me was either to jump over the wall of asses sticking in the air or charge straight to my front.

The first two to reach my little arena jumped in from the left, their blades held high and slashing towards me.

A dodge and block followed by riposte took care of one, sending his head flying one way and his body collapsing behind me.

The second jumper tried to wheel around in a blur of Sandevistan, but my own Sandy was already engaged again, stopping his attack on my back with an inverted blade.

A follow up kick sent him crashing into the wall; a gong of bent steel reverberating around the entire room.

“Haaaa!”

Three ‘sakas charged me from the front with glowing thermal blades.

One blade was held forward tip first, trying to skewer me, whilst the remaining two were poised for slashes to my left and right.

Hitting them with CMs would only plug my little arena off and force me to leave it.

I had to dodge quickly left, right and bend backward at the waist to avoid thrown Tanto knives from some of the ‘sakas who were not content to wait their turn.

In my annoyance, I picked the cheapest quickhack I had and adjusted to be way more useful and queued it on all seven remaining soldiers.

My custom Blind Optics, a retooled version of the cookie cutter Reboot Optics, wormed through the firewalls and strobed their visual cortexes as if I had detonated a flash bang in their face.

“Aaargghg!”

The soldiers reeled letting out a chorused scream of pain, some only barely managed to keep hold of their blades, whilst those with throwing weapons dropped them and futilely clawed at their eyes.

My blade intercepted the lunging ‘saka’s weapon with a twirling slash going left to right, driving his weapon towards his own comrade.

My speed and strength was such that the thermal weapon slapped his fellow ninja’s armor and began burning through the outer layers.

I used the last of my Sandy time to dodge right, causing the third slash to miss me entirely.

Internally, I used up another cartridge of coolant flush on my cyberdeck, allowing me to throw a Blackwall Gateway to my left, which quickly spread and jumped to the other two.

I took a step back as the three ‘sakas began screaming and writhing, their bodies twisting into painful caricatures as Butcher took his harvest of their psyches. Only I saw the awful digital red fire that erupted from their bodies like an aura of fire.

Their bodies collapsed to the floor, now useless sacks of meat and steel.

My Optics hack had run its course and now the seven remaining soldiers saw me standing casually with pilfered katana and shopping bag, surrounded by their dead or unconscious fellows.

Millitech, Kang Tao or any other corpo soldier would’ve immediately called for a retreat at this point.

I knew Arasaka would not.

“HAAAAA!”

It was their damned honor overriding their common sense. They couldn’t go back to the local director in failure, especially since he was in the room.

All seven first tried to tag me with throwing weapons.

I was already moving, dropping my blade, picking up the dead body of a soldier at my feet, letting it take the three hits I couldn’t dodge.

My body twirled around to build momentum and I chucked the body to meet the soldiers now jumping through the air to reach me.

I continued my economy of movement, ducking again and regaining my blade.

Four blades were now slashing down to carve me into little bits.

My left fist anchored to the ground let me continue my spin, flaring my legs outward in a useful move from Capoeira I had incorporated into my training and skill set.

It let me quickly gain some space, retreating backwards just enough for their blades to miss and strike only air and floor.

I came back to my feet, my blade whipping through the air.

I beheaded the one to my right, the blade continued but was deflected enough for it to end up buried in the shoulder of the second ninja.

It had lost its molecular edge and was now reduced to just being very sharp, stopped by the titanium laced ribcage of the ‘saka elite.

My left leg snapped out, kicking the hands of the third soldier, still trying to reset his balance.

His blade went flying, the thermal edge leading the way and embedding itself into the torso of his neighboring ‘saka who had just been about to try and slash me again.

My foot lashed out again, crashing into the chest of the disarmed elite and he was sent flying backwards to perfectly land in the gap between the nearest two game tables. The bodyguards there barely dodged out of the way in time.

I had fucked up a bit on the angle and I had heard my stilleto heel crack under the punishment.

Now I was forced to stand on the ball of my left foot to retain balance… annoying.

The ‘saka who had my blade lodged in his chest by now finally focused past his pain to do something.

With the speed of a striking snake he tried to latch onto my right arm with his hands to improve the chances for his three remaining buddies.

I glared at him and simply let go of my blade, using my forearm to deflect the attempted grab.

It left him wide open for my fist to smash into his neck.

It was a place that was rather well armored in the gear the ‘saka spec ops wore, but the head still had to be able to turn, which required flexibility.

Now instead of being beheaded, it merely damaged vertebrae and transferred a ton of kinetic force that rippled outward, disrupted nervous system control, breathing and gave a nasty concussion that instantly resulted in unconsciousness.

That the last three still attacked me despite everything…

It made me angry, frustrated and it spoke to the reason why, all things being equal, Arasaka would always lose in the long run.

I overclocked and unleashed the Blackwall Gateway on all three, just as they were blurring towards me with Sandy’s activated.

The screams and contorting bodies came.

They collapsed at my feet, writhing, their momentum forcing me to contemptuously hop over the now dead bodies.

It took about four seconds for the screams to stop.

The jazzy soundtrack of the casino game floor resounded in my ears as I was fearfully regarded by almost every eye in the room. I could see some intrigued faces from a number of power dealers, some were delighted, clearly entertained at the impromptu bloodsport they had witnessed.

There was one person among them who was not delighted at the turn of events and the failure of the ‘saka elites.

I grabbed one of the fallen thermal blades and walked in his direction.

To his credit, he did not move or try to run away. He only had one bodyguard, who looked ready to try his luck, but a curt gesture from his principal told him to stand down.

I stopped behind the man and held the thermal blade mere inches from his left ear.

“Director Matsui Norishige, head of Arasaka’s Crystal Palace office,” I addressed him formally, even doing him the courtesy of an appropriate bow.

He turned his head to regard me out of the corner of his dark brown eye. “V, the Yurei of Night City. Are you going to take my head?”

He spoke in fluent Japanese with a Kyoto dialect. At this point I didn’t need translation soft’ to speak, read or write in the language, something I had done in preparation for the day when Arasaka picked up the pieces I had left in my wake and Yorinobu wanted to even the score. The name of Yurei was one of the more amusing ones that the rank and file of my old company had bestowed on me, if somewhat on point.

In Japanese folklore, the yurei was a deceased person who had not been able to join their ancestors in the afterlife; condemning them to wander around in limbo for eternity.

“I probably should,” I replied in fluent West Kanto Japanese. “You called practically your entire security contingent to kill me. Should I take this as a formal declaration of war from Arasaka? Am I going to have to kill my way up the steps of the young emperor’s Tower in Tokyo to enjoy any moment of peace in the future?”  

“No, no!” he shook his head frantically. “It was… it was, my responsibility only. When I saw you walk in…”

“Hmmm, so you thought you could score big with Yorinobu and the Taka controlled Arasaka Board, if you brought them the Yurei’s head?”

“Yes! It was… foolish. Please, do me the honor of a death at your blade.”

I sighed, feeling very tired all of a sudden. Arasaka bullshit! Johnny had a point when he said that they wreaked madness wherever they went.

“You’re trying to avoid the shame of gutting yourself in ritualistic suicide before Yorinobu. My Agent indicates you have a wife and two daughters. They’ll likely be forced to watch.”

Norishige’s hands clenched on the table. The two power dealers sharing his table, a board member of Akaromi Biocorp and a director of SegAtari, had faces of granite as they looked at him with expectation and hostility. Neither appreciating the fact that their precious skins had been endangered by him unleashing a double hit squad in their presence. In fact, they looked about one second away from ordering their own bodyguards to do the deed anyway.

The only thing stopping them was the thought of consequences for their residence visa and business operations on the Crystal Palace. The ESA could come down like an orbital strike on any corp that messed with the Palace’s reputation and infrastructure. As it was, Norishige would also face the heat from them for unleashing his security on me. At best Araska was going to be hit with a huge fine in the millions of eddies, at worst, they’d be kicked off the station entirely.

The loss of face and rep, just when Arasaka was starting to regain it from the Relic fiasco, the massacre of Arasaka Tower in NC and the coup engineered by Yorinobu could not have come at a worst time.

Norishige was dead, it was now just a question of who did the deed.

“No,” I said finally, pulling the thermal blade away from his neck and dropping it to the floor. “Killing you is just another trap you’re hoping I will fall into. Up till this point, I can justifiably point to self defense. If I kill you in front of all the distinguished guests present, which includes the CTO of the World News Service,” I lazily turned my head to regard the older yet extremely hot woman sitting two tables away, who was watching events with wide eager eyes. I could see an active encrypted connection radiating away from her through cyberspace. “I lose that, and I’d rather not have to fight the ESA and Europol for my right to not suck vacuum in LEO.”

My security daemon couldn’t catch everything unfortunately, especially when it came to the high end communications that power dealers walked around with. Which is how Norishige got out his call to the local Arasaka office to summon the hit squads.

It was only now though that the runner finally managed to overcome my little daemon squad and turn his full attention to me. I recognized him trying to hit me with a Cyberpsychosis hack. 

‘Butcher,’ I prompted the AI.

I hardly needed to ask, because the Blackwall AI was already unleashing himself on the netrunner.

“Now, I hope the show has been entertaining for all of you,” I turned around with a slight bow to everyone in the room but locked eyes with the lady from WNS, switching to my West Coast English. “It certainly wasn’t my intention and I apologize for disturbing your evening. I just came here to do some shopping after all.”

I ordered my Agent to access Victor’s primary account in Spain, which thanks to my hacking was wide open to me, my client wanted to send another message.

“A round of favorite drinks for everyone in the room in a more concrete apology.” My hand gestured expansively to encompass the room as the financial transaction went through towards the gaming floor account.

I internally winced as I saw the amount of eddies flow, which considering the tastes of everyone in the room present, was very substantial.

The digital screams of the netrunner reached me as I walked towards the exit amid scattered applause and sounds of appreciation as everyone’s Agents were informed of the very expensive drinks coming their way.

Gig complete.

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A/N: Well, V wanted global headlines, that'll do it :-) Enjoy your weekend folks and stay awesome.