StarWaves - Chipping In! 37

Chapter 37:

– Nadia Kerr –

Nadia Kerr had worked for NetWatch for ten years, and in that time she had seen some truly insane shit.

She'd seen a netrunner in Heywood cook his own brain trying to talk to something behind the Blackwall, then keep talking for six hours afterward in a voice that didn't belong to him. She'd seen a corpo lab in Arroyo where the scientists had decided that "containment protocol" meant locking the doors and letting the thing inside sort out the problem. She'd seen what was left of the scientists.

She was starting to think this assignment would top all of it.

NetWatch had caught wind of Dexter DeShawn's little crusade three nights ago. A fixer with more ego than sense was recruiting half the expensive mercs in Night City for a hit on a Maelstrom stronghold. Maelstrom had stolen experimental hardware and planned to use it to reach across the Blackwall. It was the kind of job that could only end in a bloodbath or an apocalypse, and headquarters wanted eyes inside when it went wrong. 

That meant agents posing as mercs. In practice it meant someone expendable.

Nadia had drawn the short straw. The straw had been handed to her personally.

Officially, it was a matter of her field experience and her "unique suitability for extended cover work." Unofficially, she had spent the last four months fucking Director Hollis in his office, in his car, and once, memorably, in a supply closet during a security briefing on insider threats. Then Hollis's wife had started asking questions. Maybe the wife knew, or maybe she only suspected. Either way, a week later Nadia's name had turned up at the top of a deployment list for a suicide run into Maelstrom territory, signed off by the man who used to call her brilliant while he undid her belt.

She wasn't sentimental about it. She had never loved Hollis. She had wanted a promotion, and he had wanted to feel young, and for a while that had seemed like a fair trade. His dick hadn't even been worth the effort. It had been thoroughly, forgettably mediocre, and now she was probably going to die for it.

Fucking annoying.

She shifted her weight and glanced at the two men flanking her.

Their files called them Unit Seven and Unit Nine. Nadia called them Big and Bigger, silently, because they wouldn't have cared either way. Both were enormous, dark-skinned men built like bank vaults and covered in chrome: reinforced arms, subdermal plating that stretched their suits across their shoulders, and optics that never blinked quite often enough. Anyone looking at them would see a pair of elite, very expensive bodyguards.

They weren't. Not anymore.

Both had been netrunners once, the reckless kind who pushed too deep and came back with smoking ports and empty eyes. NetWatch had a program for people like that. It kept the bodies, burned out what was left of the minds, and installed obedience in the gaps. 

Big and Bigger would follow her orders without hesitation, walk into gunfire if she told them to, and fight until something vital came loose. What they couldn't do was think. They couldn't improvise, notice what didn't fit, or recognize when an order had stopped making sense.

They were attack drones wearing people, and in a real crisis they'd be about as useful as a pair of very loyal refrigerators.

So if Nadia wanted to walk out of Pacifica alive, she was going to need allies who had working brains. She'd need someone in this room she could get close to, lean on, and, if it came to that, put between herself and whatever came crawling out of the Maelstrom base when the shooting started.

At the center of the ruined conference hall, Dex was still talking.

"...some real good for this city," he was saying, rolling the words around his cigar like fine liquor. "Cleaning up a mess nobody else has the guts to touch. When all's said and done? Some folks might even call us heroes."

Nadia let her face stay blank and let her contempt stay private. Heroes. She'd read DeShawn's file on the drive over. He was a fixer who had built a career on taking more risk than his competitors, then outlived the people he'd sent into it. 

He wasn't a hero. He was a man who had figured out that the dead can't file complaints.

When he finally got around to the part about the ritual, she watched the room react. Some of the mercs went pale. A runner by the wall with a cheap deck at his temple started counting exits. Then Dex dropped the rest of it, casual as a weather report. The Voodoo Boys have promised millions for that tech in one piece.

Nadia's blank expression became a slight scowl.

Maelstrom trying to summon something from beyond the Blackwall wasn't new. They tried about every eighteen months, usually with a stack of cheap cyberware, and a lot of chanting. Usually all they got was a basement full of fried chromeheads and a cleanup crew with a strong stomach. 

The Blackwall held because Maelstrom's toys weren't good enough to scratch it.

This time was different. The hardware they'd lifted from Militech's Santo Domingo research annex wasn't a toy. 

NetWatch's own analysts had called it a dimensional handshake array before someone upstairs classified the phrase. 

It was built to open a stable, filtered channel through the Blackwall, a door with a very good lock. 

If Maelstrom were stupid enough to plug it in without the lock, they might actually succeed.

And if they failed, the Voodoo Boys would walk away holding the same door and a much better understanding of how to use it.

There was no fucking chance Nadia was letting that happen. The rest of the operation she could improvise. That part wasn't negotiable.

She kept her expression neutral and turned her attention back to the room. If she was going to find allies, she needed to know who she was working with. She also needed to know who would be dead by tomorrow morning, which, she suspected, was most of them.

Under her skin, the NetWatch sentinel suite ran its slow, silent sweeps, tasting the air for anything that thought faster than a human should. It had been quiet since she walked in. Nothing in the room was pinging as an intelligence. That should have been comforting.

It mostly meant that when things went wrong here, they'd go wrong in the ordinary way.

She started with the obvious threats.

The Gorilla Arm woman near the back was ex-Militech by the look of her posture, strong enough to rip a car door off its hinges and smart enough not to advertise it. She was competent, but she worked alone and wouldn't take on dead weight. 

The Sandevistan by the window wore a top-shelf spinal rig and a cheap haircut, which meant he'd put every eddie he had into speed and nothing into judgment. He'd die first and fast, and he'd probably take someone useful with him. 

The crew beside the pillar were ex-Tyger Claw muscle with katanas and resentment. 

The trio near the door had matching tattoos and matching smirks, and Nadia gave them until the second wall breach before one of them tried something stupid.

The newcomers were interesting.

The one leading them was young. He was nineteen, broad through the shoulders and built like he'd been put together very deliberately, but with a face that hadn't yet learned how to hide what it was thinking. Nadia had heard his name in the past month. 

The Bartmoss auction…

NetWatch had bid on Rache Bartmoss's corpse. NetWatch had lost. And whoever found the most wanted netrunner in history frozen in a landfill after fifty years had, supposedly, been led there by a teenager who'd only been in the business for two weeks.

Nadia studied him more carefully.

There was a netrunner at his side, pale-haired, with a monowire coiled at her wrist and a visible pistol she wore like she hated it. When Dex said Blackwall, the girl's face drained so fast it was like watching a light go out. 

The boy had covered her hand without looking at her, and she had held on like it was the only solid thing in the building.

On his other side stood a tiny woman with bright green hair, a shotgun, and a jacket that clinked when she moved. She'd pushed past the bodyguard at the door with a lot of confidence and not much sense of self-preservation. Beside her was a boy, a kid, seventeen at most, clutching a charged tech shotgun like a sacrament and staring at the hologram with the terrible, shining determination of someone who still believed he couldn't die.

It was a strange crew, all things considered. It was far too emotionally attached to one another to be professional.

Nadia watched the young leader while Dex droned on about phased entry. He wasn't looking at the hologram much. He was watching the rest of the room the way she was, making the same inventory. When his gaze passed over her, it didn't slide past the way everyone else's had. It stopped for just a fraction of a second, then moved on.

Something about that bothered her. Probably nothing, she told herself. He's a kid who got lucky twice and learned to look nervous at strangers.

But he was also the only person in the room holding someone's hand.

Nadia had survived ten years at NetWatch by knowing that the people who died in Night City were usually the ones who stopped caring about anyone but themselves, or the ones who cared about everyone. The ones who survived were the ones in between, the ones with a small circle and the will to burn down the world for it. 

The boy had that look. So did his crew, the way they'd arranged themselves around him without being told.

A crew like that wouldn't leave its own behind.

That made it exactly the kind of crew a lone NetWatch agent with two walking refrigerators and a director who wanted her dead might want to get close to.

Nadia Kerr began deciding exactly how she'd introduce herself…

– John Welles –

"...She's looking at us."

I didn't turn my head. It took more effort than it should have, the way it's hard not to look when someone tells you not to look. Who?

"The NetWatch agent. She's been looking at us for about forty seconds. Mostly at you." Cortana's voice was quiet and careful, stripped of every trace of teasing. "Her detector just ran another sweep. It's clean. She didn't see me. But she's interested in you anyway, and I don't like it."

Maybe she likes blonds.

"John!"

…Sorry. Nerves. I kept my eyes on the hologram, on the slow-turning map of the Maelstrom base with its red heat signatures crawling through the concrete. If NetWatch wanted to watch me, it could watch a nineteen-year-old who'd gotten in over his head and was paying close attention to a briefing. 

That was easy to play, because it wasn't entirely an act.

Beside me, Lucy was still holding on to my arm. She hadn't loosened her grip since Dex said the word Blackwall. Her fingers were cold, and I could feel a fine tremor running through them, the kind she'd never have let anyone see if she'd had any control over it. Her face was calm, the same mask she wore on the NCART while she picked corpo pockets. 

But her breathing was too shallow and too even, like she was counting every breath.

I turned my hand over under hers and laced our fingers together. Then I ran my thumb slowly along the back of her hand, over and over. 

I didn't look at her. Looking would have made it obvious, and she'd hate that more than anything.

After a minute, her breathing slowed. She leaned in until her shoulder pressed against mine and whispered so softly that only my augmented hearing caught it. "I won't let them through. Whatever it takes. None of those things are getting into this world." Her fingers tightened around mine. "Not again."

Not again. I squeezed her hand and didn't ask.

Lucy had never told me what happened to her. At the landfill she'd admitted there was something in her past involving hostile AI, and I'd told her she could share it in ten years or never. I'd meant it. I still meant it.

But I also knew, and that was the problem. I knew because I'd watched it on a screen in another life. I knew about the Arasaka program, the children they'd trained to dive deeper into the Net than any adult could survive, and the ones who went in and didn't come back as themselves. 

I knew about the girl who'd escaped and spent the rest of her life staring at the Moon because it was the one place far enough away from everything she'd seen.

She hadn't told me any of that. I'd just taken it out of her life without asking, the way you'd read someone's diary.

"You didn't take anything," Cortana said gently. "You remember a story. She lived it. Those aren't the same thing."

It feels like cheating.

"Then when she's ready to tell you, listen like you've never heard it…"

I let out a slow breath and kept stroking Lucy's knuckles.

At the center of the room, Dex was finally winding down. The hologram shifted through the last phase of his plan. Staggered entry points, assault teams hitting different sides of the complex at once, an overwatch team on a half-built hotel tower to the north, and a netrunner cell running interference from a van two blocks back. It was more thought out than I'd expected. It was also built on the assumption that a hundred Maelstrom psychos would react the way normal people did when they were attacked, and in my experience Maelstrom didn't do anything the way normal people did.

"We move at twenty-three hundred," Dex said. He stubbed out his cigar in a crystal ashtray that had probably been looted from the hotel's penthouse. "Until then, the building's yours. There's food in the old ballroom, and my people are handing out comms and the final entry assignments." He spread his hands, rings glinting. "And since y'all are gonna be walking into hell side by side tonight, might be smart to get to know each other a little. Watch each other's backs out there, huh? Makes for fewer funerals."

Around the room, I saw at least six people roll their eyes. The Sandevistan guy by the window didn't bother to hide it. The trio by the door snorted in unison.

Mercs didn't make friends on jobs like this. You didn't learn the names of people you might have to leave behind.

Jackie had apparently never heard that rule.

Before Dex had even stood up, my brother was across the room, a big warm grin on his face, one hand already out toward the ex-Tyger Claw crew by the pillar. "Ey, Jackie Welles," he said, like they were meeting at a family barbecue instead of a suicide briefing. "That's some nice steel. That a Murasame? My abuela's cousin had one, swore it was cursed, used it to cut birthday cake anyway..."

The Claws looked at him like he'd grown a second head. Thirty seconds later one of them was laughing.

"How does he do that?" Cortana asked, genuinely baffled. "I have analyzed every social interaction he's had in front of you for weeks. There's no pattern. He just walks up to people and they like him."

That's the pattern…

V hadn't moved from her spot. She was watching Jackie work the room with the particular expression of a woman who had seen him do this a hundred times and still found it a little unbelievable. Then her eyes flicked to me, to my hand wrapped around Lucy's, and to Lucy's pale face. The ice in her expression thinned for just a moment. She gave me the smallest nod.

She noticed.

"She notices everything. It's one of her more irritating qualities." Followed by a resigned pause. "It's also why she's still alive."

Not everyone in the room was warming up as fast as Jackie's new friends.

The woman with the Gorilla Arms was walking toward us. Up close she was even bigger than she'd looked from across the room. She had to be well over six feet, and every inch of her was built for violence. She had cropped gray hair and a jaw like a cinder block. The Gorilla Arms were matte black with old Militech serial stamps scraped half off the shoulder plates, and the way she moved told me she'd spent years in somebody's uniform before she'd ever gone freelance. Her crew stayed behind her, two quiet men with rifles, watching us like we were a problem they hadn't been paid to solve.

She stopped in front of us and looked us over with open, professional contempt. First me. Then Lucy, clinging to my arm. Then David and his shotgun. Then she looked down, a long way down, at Rebecca.

"Solberg," she said by way of introduction. Her voice was flat, faintly accented, and it didn't sound like she was asking for anything back. "Ex-Militech. Fourteen years." Her eyes stayed on Rebecca. "And you're a crew of kids..."

Rebecca's eyes narrowed.

"No offense," Solberg continued, in the tone of someone who didn't care much whether offense was taken. "But this isn't a scav den. It isn't some joyride. There will be a hundred chromed-up lunatics in there, and they won't care how brave you are." She jerked her chin toward David, who had gone rigid with his hands tight on the Satara. "That one's what, sixteen?"

He glared at her. "...Seventeen," David said through his teeth.

She smirked. "Seventeen." She repeated it like it proved her point. Then she looked back at Rebecca. "And you. How old are you? Does your mama know you're playing with grenades?"

That did it…

Rebecca's face went through three shades of red, her lip curled back, and I watched her draw in a breath that I knew, from long experience, was about to become the most creative string of profanity ever spoken in Pacifica. Her hand was already drifting toward Guts.

I reached over and put my hand on her shoulder.

It was just a light touch. I didn't squeeze or pull her back. I just let my hand rest there.

Rebecca stopped mid-breath. She looked at my hand, then up at me. The fury drained out of her face all at once, replaced by something flustered and pink that she clearly hadn't planned on. She huffed loudly, crossed her arms, and turned her glare to the ceiling. "...Fine," she muttered. "But I'm cursing her out in my head. Like, a lot. Really filthy stuff."

"Totally fair," I said.

"Interesting," Cortana murmured. "One touch. She went from homicidal to docile in under a second."

Solberg watched the whole thing with a flat, unimpressed expression, like she'd just seen a dog obey a command. She opened her mouth to say something else.

Then Cortana went tense in my head. "Incoming..."

I turned.

The NetWatch agent was crossing the room toward us. 

She moved like she owned the building. It was an easy, unhurried, hip-rolling walk with her chin up and her hands loose at her sides, a stride designed to make everyone in her path decide on their own to get out of the way. 

I'd seen that walk before. 

V had it when she was in corpo mode, the confidence of someone who had spent years being the most dangerous person in rooms full of dangerous people and had never once been proven wrong. On V it was terrifying. On this woman it was terrifying and, now that she was close enough for me to see her properly, annoyingly attractive.

She had short dark blue hair and lips that looked like they had spent a lot of time smirking at people they planned to outlive. 

The agent stopped right beside Solberg. She didn't look at me first. She looked at Solberg, slowly, up and then down, the way you'd look at an ugly piece of furniture someone had left on the sidewalk.

"Fourteen years at Militech," she said. Her voice was low and amused, with a rasp at the edges. "And you still think the dangerous ones are the ones who look dangerous." She tilted her head toward our little group. "That's adorable..."

Solberg's jaw tightened. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me." The agent smiled, and it didn't reach her eyes at all. "You want to know who that is?" She jerked her thumb at me without looking. "That's John Welles. Three weeks ago nobody had ever heard of him. And then he found Rache fucking Bartmoss in a landfill after fifty years of NetWatch and Arasaka coming up empty." She let that settle. "You found anything lately, Solberg? Besides a bad attitude and a pension that didn't come through?"

Behind Solberg, one of her rifle men made a small noise that might have been a smothered laugh. Solberg turned her head, and he suddenly found the floor very interesting.

The agent went on. "The little one you just mouthed off to?" She nodded at Rebecca. "Ex-Mox. I've heard stories. You know what happens to people who call her a kid?"

Rebecca, still cross-armed, grinned slowly and viciously. "They get their dicks blown off."

"They get their dicks blown off," the agent agreed, as if it were a well-known fact. She glanced at Solberg's crew, her eyes lingering meaningfully on their belts. "Your boys might want to stand a little further back."

Both of Solberg's men took a half step backward before they realized they were doing it.

The agent went on. She lowered her voice to something almost friendly. "So maybe, instead of lecturing a crew with that kind of record, you go back to your corner and spend the next nine hours figuring out how you're going to keep up with them."

For a long moment Solberg didn't move. I could see her weighing it. The insult, the audience, and the two silent chrome giants standing a few feet behind the agent with nothing at all behind their eyes. Then she huffed through her nose, turned on her heel, and walked away without a word. Her men followed.

Rebecca watched the rude bitch go, and then she smirked at the woman she did not know was a Netwatch agent in disguise. "Holy shit," she breathed. "I like her. I like her a lot."

"Of course she does," Cortana muttered. 

David was staring at the agent with his mouth slightly open. Lucy had stopped trembling. Her grip on my hand was still tight, but her eyes had sharpened, and she was studying the other woman with cool, careful suspicion.

Good. She didn't trust her either.

"John," Cortana said, very low. "That was a demonstration. She's telling you she knows who you are, and she did it in a way that made you look good and her look like a friend." A pause. "It was very well done. I hate it…"

The agent turned to face us fully for the first time. She held out her hand to me, easy and confident, and gave me a lopsided smile that looked almost real. "Sorry about that," she said. "Some people forget you don't get to judge a crew by how old they look. You judge them by who's still standing when the shooting stops." Her smile widened a fraction. "Name's Nadia. Nadia Kerr. And I have a feeling, Mr. Welles, that we're going to be good friends."

"Absolutely not…" Cortana said with a huff.

I shook her hand anyway, so I wouldn’t look suspicious.

A couple of minutes later, the crowd started drifting toward the hotel's old ballroom, and my crew drifted with it.

It must have been beautiful once. The ceiling was three stories high and painted with a faded mural of ocean waves and white sails. Most of it had water-stained into brown clouds, and someone had tagged a Voodoo Boys logo right in the middle of it. The chandeliers had been stripped down to bare metal skeletons. Half the windows along the far wall were boarded up, and the other half looked out over the gray Pacific.

Dex had filled the ballroom with food.

There were long folding tables down the center of the room, loaded with real food—trays of fried chicken, grilled skewers, rice, noodles, stacks of flatbread, bowls of fruit that might actually have come from a tree. There was even a dessert table. After three weeks of Night City, I knew exactly how much money that represented. Someone had shelled out a small fortune to make all these hardened mercenaries feel appreciated before sending them into a meat grinder.

"It's a morale tactic," Cortana said. "Feed the troops before the battle. Make them feel valued. It's been used for about five thousand years."

Is it working?

"...On Rebecca? Clearly."

Rebecca had stopped dead in the doorway, staring at the tables with the reverence most people saved for religious experiences. "Free grub," she breathed. "I don't care if Dex is the devil. I have never turned down free grub, and I'm not about to start now."

She started toward the nearest table, then stopped, turned around, grabbed Lucy by the wrist, and started dragging her along.

Lucy stumbled after her. "Becca, what the hell—"

"You're eating," Rebecca announced without looking back. "Don't argue. You look like a ghost that skipped breakfast, and I'm not carrying your skinny ass through a Maelstrom base because you passed out."

Lucy opened her mouth to argue, glanced back at me, and then closed it again. She let Rebecca pull her along.

I watched them go. Rebecca hadn't said a word about it in the conference room. She hadn't teased Lucy or made a scene or even looked her way when the color drained out of her face. But she'd noticed. 

"Rebecca is significantly more observant than she pretends to be," Cortana said, and she sounded a little grudging about it. "The grenades and swearing are camouflage. Half of it, anyway."

The other half?

"The other half really is just grenades and swearing."

I nudged David with my elbow. "Go with them," I said. "Make sure Becca doesn't pocket the entire dessert table, and make sure Lucy actually eats something."

He looked from me to the girls, then over my shoulder to where V was standing alone by a boarded-up window, and grinned like he'd figured out something very clever. "Sure thing, boss."

"Don't call me boss."

"Sure thing, boss," he said again, and jogged after them.

"He's learning from Rebecca," Cortana observed. "That's concerning."

I made my way across the ballroom.

V had claimed a quiet corner by the windows, where she could see both entrances and most of the room without turning her head. She was leaning against the wall with one boot crossed over the other, a bottle of NiCola in her hand. There wasn't any alcohol in the room. Dex had apparently drawn the line at feeding a bunch of armed mercs booze nine hours before a firefight. It was probably the smartest thing he'd done all day.

She watched me approach without moving. Her face didn't change, but her eyes did.

I stopped in front of her, stuck out my hand, and put on my most professional voice. "Well, hello there, fellow mercenary. What brings you to this completely insane gig?"

V looked at my hand. Then she looked up at me, and one corner of her mouth twitched. She shook my hand, playing along. "Name’s V," she said. "And honestly?" She sighed and took a slow sip of her NiCola. "My dumbass partner took the money up front without asking a single question about the job." She tipped the bottle toward the other side of the ballroom, where Jackie was laughing with the Tyger Claw crew like they'd grown up on the same block. "I love the guy. I really do. But I'm starting to think I should be the one picking our gigs from now on."

"Sounds like a smart call," I said with an honest nod.

She pushed herself off the wall and took a step closer. "I'm full of smart calls." Then another step. Suddenly there wasn't much space between us at all, and I could smell her perfume under the ballroom's dust and salt. It was dark and warm, something I'd learned to recognize on my pillow. "Here's one," she said, lowering her voice. "A young, handsome stud like you shouldn't go running into a Maelstrom compound on his own. It's dangerous in there. Lots of scary men with too much chrome." She reached up and straightened the collar of my jacket, even though it didn't need straightening. "You should stick close to me during the assault. I'll keep you safe."

"Oh, for the love of—" Cortana began.

I grinned down at her. "Yeah? And what's that going to cost me?"

V's eyes went half-lidded. She leaned in slowly, deliberately, and I felt the brush of her breath against my lips and her body against my chest. Everything else in the ballroom went quiet and far away. I leaned down to meet her in a k—

At the last possible second, she pulled back.

I blinked at empty air, like an idiot.

V smirked, took another sip of her NiCola, and gave me a long, satisfied look over the top of the bottle. "We'll figure out the price afterward," she said. "When we're both still alive to collect."

I stood there with my mouth slightly open, feeling like someone had just yanked a rug out from under me. It was a very specific kind of disappointment.

"Ha!" Cortana burst out. Then there was a flicker of blue at my side, and Cortana was standing next to me in her netrunner bodysuit, the smug amusement fading from her face. "As… fun as this is," she said quietly, "may I remind you that there's a very large cyber elephant in the room? The NetWatch bitch is still here. She's in the hallway right now with her two walking refrigerators, talking to one of Dex's people. And she very clearly just decided she wants to be your new best friend."

The warmth drained out of me all at once. I glanced sideways at Cortana.

It was barely anything, just a flick of my eyes to the empty space on my left. But V caught it. She'd been with me long enough now to have learned my tells. She couldn't see Cortana unless Cortana let her. But she knew that when I glanced at the empty air beside me with that particular look on my face, the air usually wasn't empty.

The teasing slid off her face and the ice came back, fast and smooth. She set her NiCola on the windowsill without looking at it. "John," she said quietly, her eyes flicking once to the space beside me and back again. "What's wrong?"

I stepped in close, closer than anyone watching would think twice about, since we'd just spent the last two minutes almost kissing. I slid my arm around V's waist and dipped my head until my mouth was near her ear. "NetWatch," I murmured. "There's an agent in the building, undercover as one of Dex's mercs. Cortana spotted her running the same AI detector Faraday had." I felt V go still under my hand. "So we have to be careful. Really careful. Cortana's going to stay dark as much as she can."

V didn't pull away or glance around the room. She just let out a slow breath against my neck and swore under it, low and vicious and with real creativity. It was the kind of language that would have made Mama reach for a wooden spoon.

Then she tipped her head back far enough to look up at me, and her expression was grim but not surprised. "Honestly?" she said quietly. "I'd be more surprised if they didn't send someone. A Maelstrom cult with stolen corpo hardware, trying to punch through the Blackwall? That's the one thing NetWatch actually exists for. If they'd dropped the ball on this one, I'd start wondering what else they were missing." Her eyes flicked past my shoulder, toward the hallway, then back. "It's the woman with the two borgs, isn't it? The dark jacket. The one who looks like she's never been impressed by anything in her life."

I nodded.

"Nadia Kerr," Cortana supplied grimly, this time V could hear her. "She introduced herself. With a lot of enthusiasm."

V hummed and tapped a finger thoughtfully against my chest. "Then she shouldn't be focused on you. Not really." Her voice went cool and analytical, the voice she used when she was pulling someone else's plan apart. "If NetWatch sent her, she's here for Maelstrom and whatever toy they stole. Maybe the Voodoo Boys too, if she's smart enough to see where the tech ends up afterward. You're not her mission." She gave a little shrug. "Stay out of her way, keep Cortana quiet, and she'll be too busy trying not to die to pay attention to one more merc crew."

I opened my mouth to tell her that wasn't how it had gone. That Nadia Kerr had already crossed the room to talk to us, had quoted my greatest merc exploit back to me like she'd read it off a file, and had shaken my hand and promised we'd be good friends.

I didn't get the chance.

"JOHN WELLES!"

The voice boomed across the ballroom, deep and warm and full of good humor. I felt V's hand tighten on my jacket for half a second before she let go and stepped back to a respectable distance.

Dexter DeShawn was coming toward us. He moved through the crowd like he owned it, which I supposed he did for the next nine hours. Mercs stepped aside for him without being asked. His bodyguard trailed a few steps behind like a wall on legs. 

And right beside Dex, matching his pace easily and looking entirely at home, was Nadia Kerr.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," Cortana said.

Dex stopped at the table beside us and surveyed the platters. "John Welles and Ms. V," he said with enormous satisfaction. "Two up-and-coming mercs with a whole lot of potential. I'm glad I got talent like you on a job this important." He picked a chicken wing off a tray, looked at it with deep appreciation, and bit into it. "This is a heroic mission, y'know," he added, chewing. "Heroic. Folks are gonna remember this one."

V smiled at him. It was her corpo smile, perfectly pleasant and completely empty. "Thank you, Mr. DeShawn. We appreciate the opportunity." Then, with no change in her expression at all, she said, "...Did you need something from us?"

Dex laughed around his chicken wing and pointed at her with it. "See, now that's why I like you. Straight to business. No bullshit." He wiped his fingers on a napkin and turned his attention to me, and something in his gaze shifted. The easy good humor stayed on his face, but his eyes were measuring. "Your name's been going around, John. A lot. Fixer circles, the Afterlife, all over. A kid nobody ever heard of pops up out of Heywood and starts doing the kind of work veterans take ten years to build up to." He tapped his temple with one ringed finger. "I vet all my talent personally. So I looked into you, and I know you're good. But more than that, I know you can keep your head on your shoulders when things get loud. That's rare. That's worth money."

"...Thanks," I said carefully. Praise from him made me feel dirty…

"Same goes for you, Ms. V. You and your partner." Dex grinned wider. "Jackie Welles. Who, it turns out, happens to be John's big brother." He chuckled and shook his head like the whole thing tickled him. "Small world, huh? Small, small world."

"Small world," Cortana muttered. "He's telling you he knows exactly who your family is..."

I felt my jaw clench and made myself relax it.

"Now," Dex went on, stepping aside and gesturing to the woman at his elbow with a little flourish. "I don't know if you two have met yet. This here's Nadia Kerr."

Nadia smiled at me. It was warm and friendly and only slightly crooked. "We've met," she said. "Briefly." Her eyes slid to V and held there a beat longer than was polite. 

V met the look with a perfectly pleasant, perfectly blank expression of her own. I had the sudden, vivid image of two sharks passing each other in dark water, each one politely deciding not to bite yet.

"Ms. Kerr came to me a little bit ago," Dex said, "and brought up a real good point. Something I hadn't considered with the plan." He leaned in and lowered his voice, the way a man does when he wants you to feel like you're being let in on something. "See, I got all these mercs in this building. Some of 'em are the best in the business. Some of 'em..." He tilted his head toward the far end of the ballroom, where the trio with matching tattoos were loudly arguing over the last tray of skewers. "...are less reasonable. When the shooting starts, and the equipment's sitting right there in front of 'em, worth more money than they've ever seen in one place..." He spread his hands. "People get greedy. People get stupid."

"So it'd be better," Nadia said smoothly, picking up exactly where he left off, "to have the more reasonable crews be the ones who actually secure the equipment. People with good heads on their shoulders. People who understand that the payday only comes if the hardware gets delivered intact." She smiled at me again. "Crews like yours..."

"Exactly," Dex said. "Y'all move with the assault teams like normal. But when we breach the facility, you, Ms. V, Jackie, and Ms. Kerr's people peel off and go straight for the tech. Lock it down. Keep it safe. Keep it away from any… other hands." He smiled and took another wing. "Naturally, we don't have to bring this up with the other crews. No need to complicate things. Everybody's got their assignment already…"

I looked at him, at the easy smile and the gold rings and the chicken grease on his fingers, and I understood exactly what he meant.

The other crews wouldn't know. They'd go in thinking they were part of the main plan, and they'd throw themselves at a hundred chromed-out Maelstrom psychos while a handful of "reasonable" mercs slipped past them to the prize. Some of them wouldn't come back. Maybe a lot of them. And every merc who didn't come back was a cut Dex never had to pay.

"He's hoping they die," Cortana said flatly. "He's not even hiding it that well. And she handed him the perfect excuse to arrange it." Her avatar flickered into view at my side, arms crossed tight and eyes narrowed at Nadia Kerr like she was trying to set her on fire through sheer willpower. "And of course the NetWatch bitch put herself right next to the tech. Right next to V. Right next to you. She's like a bad virus, John. I keep isolating her, and she keeps getting back into the system."

You can't quarantine her in real life.

"Watch me." A pause. "Actually, don't watch me. That would be very bad for our cover."

Nadia tilted her head slightly, still smiling, and waited for my answer as if she already knew what it was going to have to be.

Hours later…

I'd sent Rogue a message.

I kept it short. The target was a Maelstrom compound of about a hundred members, sitting on experimental tech they planned to use to punch a hole through the Blackwall. The Voodoo Boys were bankrolling the hit and planned to walk away with the hardware. Dex had hired at least six crews, paid them all up front, and was quietly arranging for most of them to get chewed up in the front assault so he could skip their cuts.

And when it went off, it was going to turn Pacifica into a war zone.

Rogue called me back eleven minutes later. She wasn't happy. I'd expected that. What I hadn't expected was how quiet she got once she was done swearing.

"A hundred Maelstrom," she'd said. "In Voodoo territory. With Dex stirring the pot and the Voodoo Boys holding the spoon." There was a long pause on the line. "That isn't a gig, Welles. That's the opening shot of a gang war."

I nodded at her on the holo call. "That's what I figured."

She grimaced. "I have two crews working jobs within six blocks of that compound right now." Another pause. I could practically hear her doing the math. "I'm pulling them. All of them. Tonight." Then her voice softened, just slightly, in a way I'd never heard from the queen of the Afterlife. "You probably just saved some of their lives, kid. I won't forget it. I'll make sure you're paid back."

I shook my head. "You don't have to—"

She cut me off. She looked amused for a moment. "Yes, I do. That's how this works." A beat. "And Welles? You bring your crew back in one piece. All of them. I didn't recommend you to Dex so I could name a drink after you."

She hung up before I could answer.

"She meant that," Cortana had said quietly afterward. "That woman seems surprisingly gentle whenever it comes to you. I’m starting to wonder why?”

I know. I’ve been getting the same vibe whenever we meet with her. Questions for later though.

At eleven o'clock that night, I pulled the Cthulhu into an empty alley in Pacifica, three blocks from the target building, and killed the engine.

The alley was narrow and dark, lined with rusted dumpsters and the peeling skeleton of an old advertisement for a beach resort that had never opened. There was nobody around. Pacifica at night had a particular kind of emptiness to it, like the whole district was holding its breath.

"No one's going to touch the car," Cortana said, with something close to relish. "And if they try, that's what my daemons are for."

Please don't cook anyone's brain in the parking lot.

"No promises. It's Pacifica. The bar for 'deserves it' is very low here."

Lucy climbed out of the passenger seat and stretched, rolling her neck until something popped. Rebecca squeezed out of the back with Guts over her shoulder and her jacket clinking like a wind chime made of hand grenades, followed by David, who unfolded himself from the cramped rear seat with a groan and the Satara slung across his back.

Down at the mouth of the alley, an engine rumbled and cut out. Jackie swung off the Arch, and V climbed down from the seat behind him with considerably more grace, pulling off her helmet and shaking out her hair. For a second, in the dim orange light, she looked like an ad for something expensive and fatal.

Jackie slapped the bike's tank affectionately, then turned to the rest of us, all business. "Okay. Before we go anywhere." He pointed at David. "Chico. You got that nova Sandy of yours warmed up?"

David straightened. "Yeah." He wouldn’t have taken orders from anyone else, but this was my older brother so he knew it was fine to listen to Jackie if needs be.

Jackie nodded at him and gave some very professional orders to the kid. "Do a quick sweep of the area. In and out. Look at everything, touch nothing, and no shooting. I mean it. If you see Maelstrom, you come back and tell us. You don't start a party without the rest of us."

David grinned. "Got it."

Then the air shimmered, there was a faint crackle, and he was gone. It was just a blur where he'd been standing and a small swirl of dust settling back onto the pavement.

"Gloria is going to kill you if anything happens to him," Cortana said softly.

I know…

In the silence David left behind, I looked at my brother.

Jackie was trying hard. He was doing the thing he always did, standing tall with his chest out and a big easy grin, making sure everyone around him felt like this was just another night. But I'd lived in the same apartment with him for weeks now. I could see the stiffness in his shoulders, the way his thumb kept rubbing over the grip of one of his pistols, and the way his eyes kept sliding to V and then to me and then quickly away again.

He was scared, and not really for himself. He was scared because he'd taken the money, and now his best friend and his little brother were standing in a dark alley in Pacifica because of it.

I stepped over and clapped him on the shoulder. "Oye," I said quietly, just for him. "Todo va a estar bien, hermano."

Jackie blinked. For a second, the grin slipped, and he just looked at me, surprised and a little lost, like he'd forgotten I was the younger one.

Then he took a long breath, let it out slowly, and the grin came back. This time it was real. He reached up and grabbed the back of my neck, rough and affectionate, and gave me a little shake. "That's my line, hermanito," he said. "You don't get to steal my lines."

I gave him a cheeky smirk, the kind I had definitely not secretly been practicing. "Just did."

He laughed, let go of me, and pulled his pistols. They were La Chingona Dorada, twin gold-plated beauties he'd polished for an hour last night while Misty watched and pretended she wasn't charmed. He spun one around his finger with a showman's flourish. "Now," he said, "let's go kill some Maelstrom gonks."

"Yeah!" Rebecca pumped a fist. "Finally!"

V just shook her head, but she was smiling.

That was when the air shimmered again, and David reappeared in front of us, skidding to a stop in a little spray of grit. His eyes were wide. "So," he said. "We might have a slight problem…"

We followed him out of the alley and around the corner, keeping low and hugging the shadows of a half-collapsed parking structure.

The road leading toward the target building was blocked.

Maelstrom had built a barricade across the entire street out of cars. There were half a dozen of them flipped on their sides and roofs, shoved together bumper to bumper from one sidewalk to the other, and all of them were on fire. The flames roared up into the night in greasy orange columns, throwing wild shadows across the empty towers on either side and filling the air with the stink of burning rubber and chemical smoke.

Behind the barricade, silhouetted against the glow, were at least a dozen Maelstrom.

Even at that distance I could see the intense chrome. Faces peeled back to expose metal skulls, red optics glowing in clusters, and arms that ended in blades or barrels instead of hands. One of them had a heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod, sweeping slowly back and forth across the street. Another was pacing along the line of burning cars, waving a rifle and screaming something that got lost in the roar of the flames.

"Twelve hostiles," Cortana reported, her voice clipped and focused. "Fourteen, actually. Two more on the roof of the building behind them. One heavy weapon. Several have cyberdecks, but they're running Maelstrom's usual homebrew garbage." A pause. "I could take them apart in seconds. But if the NetWatch bitch has sensors anywhere in this district, an intrusion that clean would light up like a flare. I'll keep my hacks small and ugly, so they look like something a street runner would do."

Good call.

"Well," V said quietly beside me, surveying the burning wall with the flat professional calm of someone reading a threat assessment. "They're certainly taking their security seriously."

Lucy folded her arms over her tight top. "They're psychos having a séance," Lucy muttered. "Of course they're taking it seriously."

Then the night exploded.

It started somewhere to the north. There was a boom that shook dust down from the parking structure above us, followed by the harsh chatter of automatic weapons. Then another explosion came from the east, and another from somewhere to the south, close enough that I felt it through the soles of my boots. Gunfire erupted from every direction at once, echoing off the empty hotels and dead casinos until it seemed like the whole district was screaming.

The other crews had started their assault.

Behind the barricade, the Maelstrom guards jerked toward the noise, shouting at each other, and the machine gunner swung his weapon toward the sound of the fighting.

Jackie was the first one to move. "No point standing around," he said, and stepped out from behind the corner of the parking structure into the full glare of the burning cars with both golden pistols raised. He threw his arms wide like a man stepping onto a stage. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he bellowed over the roar of the flames. "JACKIE WELLES!"

"Oh my god," Cortana said. "He's a gonk. Your brother is a complete gonk."

Then Jackie opened fire!

– Maman Brigitte –

Maman Brigitte did not often leave her own compound.

She had no need to. 

The world came to her in the dark beneath the old church. It arrived as signals and whispers through the Net, carried by the currents she had spent half her life learning to navigate. Her body was a vessel that stayed in its chair, wired and cooled and watched over by her children, while her mind went wherever it pleased. The physical city was loud, slow, and crude by comparison. It smelled of salt and rot and gun smoke, and it was full of people who confused noise with power.

But some things could not be done from a chair.

Tonight was one of them.

She stood at the edge of a rooftop six blocks from the Maelstrom compound, on top of a half-finished hotel whose developers had fled Pacifica decades ago and left its concrete bones to the ocean wind. Her long coat snapped around her legs, and the implants along her temples glowed faintly in the dark. 

Below her, Pacifica burned.

The battle had spread faster than even she had predicted. Explosions bloomed across the district in bursts of orange and white. Tracer fire stitched across the streets. A car barricade was burning on the southern approach, and three blocks east, a gas main had gone up in a column of blue flame. Everywhere she looked, the dead towers of the resort that never was lit up with muzzle flashes, and the echoes of gunfire bounced between them until it was impossible to tell where any of it was coming from.

It was chaos. It was ugly and inefficient and very human.

It was exactly what she had paid for.

Dexter DeShawn's mercenaries were throwing themselves at the Maelstrom compound from four directions. Maelstrom answered with everything they had. Chrome, bullets, and the kind of mad, grinning violence that came from minds that had long ago traded their humanity for metal. 

Neither side cared much about anything but killing the other. 

Behind her, her second in command, Placide stood silent and patient, as he always stood, the solid shadow at her back. He understood what was waiting inside that compound as well as she did.

The Maelstrom fools had no idea what they had stolen.

To them it was power. It was a key to open the door to the gods beyond the Blackwall, so they could kneel and be remade. They thought the things on the other side would welcome them. They thought chrome and blood and screaming would be enough to earn their attention.

Brigitte knew better. She had spent years brushing against the edges of that darkness, listening at the wall, learning what could be spoken to and what must never be allowed to answer. The things beyond the Blackwall were not gods, and they were not kind. Some of them could be reasoned with, and some of them could be bargained with. The rest would devour anything that opened the door without knowing what it was doing.

In the hands of Maelstrom, that hardware would be a catastrophe. In the hands of the Voodoo Boys, it could be the first step toward freedom. Freedom from NetWatch and its walls, and from the corporations that had carved up the world and left Pacifica to rot.

It belonged to them. It belonged to her!

And it certainly did not belong to Dexter DeShawn.

A cold smile touched Brigitte's lips.

She had promised the fixer millions, and he had believed her. His eyes had gone greedy, and he hadn't asked a single question worth asking. Men like DeShawn always believed a promise when it was big enough. They mistook generosity for weakness and never stopped to wonder why a woman who lived in the dark beneath a church would hand millions of eddies to a man she had no reason to trust.

He would never see a single eddie.

He was not one of them. Neither were any of the mercenaries he had hired. They were outsiders, tourists in Pacifica, people who had come into Voodoo Boys territory for money and would never leave. Their deaths would not trouble her sleep. Night City would not even notice. By the time the smoke cleared, their story would be simple. They had gone to war with Maelstrom, and they had lost.

Brigitte watched another explosion flower across the southern barricade and turned her head slightly toward the man behind her. "Placide."

His voice was deep and even. "Maman. Is it time?" 

"Prepare our own forces," she said. "It is time."

He inclined his head. "All of them?"

"All of them." Her gaze returned to the burning compound, and her eyes glowed faintly in the dark. "We will come up behind Maelstrom and the mercenaries while they are still busy killing each other. When they are tired and bleeding and have nothing left, we will kill all of them." Her voice was calm and unhurried. "And then we will take what is ours!"

Placide was already turning away, his fingers moving as he sent the signal. Across Pacifica, in darkened doorways and empty lobbies and abandoned parking structures, Voodoo Boys began to move. There were dozens of them.

Maman Brigitte stood at the edge of the roof with the wind pulling at her coat and watched the district burn. Somewhere in the heart of that fire, the door to the other side was waiting to be opened.

She intended to be the one holding the key…

XXX