July 21st, 2076
Memorial Park, Corporate Plaza
"In this spot, in 2023, an explosion from a terrorist attack on the first Arasaka tower claimed the lives of more than twelve thousand victims. May they rest in peace."
Lucy exhaled, the smoke from her cigarette floating away in the slight breeze as she leaned on the railing that overlooked the road encircling Memorial Park. She watched as the endless droves of NC citizens went about their daily lives, completely oblivious to the world around them. At this time of day, most of them would be either leaving work or on their way to an afternoon party, but not her. No, she was standing just outside the memorial to the original Arasaka Tower, getting one last hit of nicotine before she and Faolan began their part of the plan.
I had so not expected to be going here of all places when David woke me up today.
"You good now?" came her protector's modulated voice, interrupting her daydreaming.
She nodded, "Yeah, I just needed to calm my nerves a bit. You do still know how crazy this is, right?"
"Hey, you were the one who suggested it," Faolan said.
Lucy threw her cigarette onto the ground and stomped it out, "I said to break into saka's servers, not their damn tower."
He shrugged, "Yeah, but doing it remotely right now is way too risky, even for you. Plus, we need to make sure that the agents working your case aren't around to question anything."
The logic was sound, that was the whole reason she volunteered, but that didn't mean she had to like it. If they wanted Arasaka to believe they had died, then they needed to make sure that the people most likely to see through their lie were also fooled into believing it. Which, in this case, was Arasaka Counter Intelligence. Or at least make their job such a pain in the ass that it wasn't worth their time to pursue them anymore.
So the crew, really just Faolan's crazy ass, had come up with the idea to infiltrate Arasaka tower, make their way quietly up to the counter-intel level, directly connect to their subnet, and wipe all of the crew's data from their servers. At the same time, Lucy would upload some fake material that discredited the ones working their case, whoever they were, and give a little bit of further evidence to support their death. Fake death certificates, medical reports, and so on, all of which Kiwi was manufacturing and would send their way when they were ready. The giant mess it would cause for the 'saka scum monitoring them would probably get them fired or, if Lucy had her way, killed. Either way, they wouldn't be an issue anymore.
"Alright then," she said, "let's get this over with."
Lucy had heard the story of the original Arasaka Tower bombing plenty of times. The doctors that worked with her as a kid wouldn't shut up about it, and neither did all the news feeds. Whenever anything happened at 'saka's monolithic command center, they'd make sure to remind their viewers of the 'AHQ Disaster.' She was torn on what to think about it because, on the one hand, it was a giant 'fuck you' to Arasaka, but on the other, it did kill tens of thousands of people. Corpos, sure, but still people. It didn't help that the memorial they were now in front of was clearly built to maximize the depressing image any corporation wants to paint over a tragedy. Primarily because it helps them cover up whatever mistake they made in the first place that let it happen.
As she followed Faolan into the entrance of the memorial's interior, she saw a group of people dressed in orange robes praying to a small shrine. It was made out of a few shelves built into the wall that held various lit candles. Spiritualism and religion weren't really her thing, but clearly, it meant a lot to these people. Lucy could see the years of pain and loss carved into their faces as they silently wished that whatever terrible nightmare tormented them would disappear. It was a sight she was quite used to seeing in the mirror.
Maybe I should try it sometime.
As they walked into the building itself, she looked through the glass hallways that overlooked the rubble of the old tower, making sure there weren't any extra guards or security cameras to worry about. For such a sacred place to 'saka, it wasn't very well protected. They didn't even have any scanners at the entrance to check for weapons.
Guess they're banking on nobody being disrespectful enough to desecrate the dead.
Thankfully, they weren't actually here to do that. Their real objective was to use an old access panel Faolan said he knew about that would give them a back door entrance into the new tower.
"So," Lucy asked, "how do you know about this 'secret entrance' of yours?"
"Oh, because I've done this before," the merc said.
Alright, now he's just making shit up.
"No you fucking haven't."
"Ok, technically true. I haven't broken into this Arasaka Tower, but I did have to infiltrate the main one in Tokyo years ago. And because of how pretentious these corpo fucks are, it's a rule for 'saka nowadays that every one of their towers are identical to the one there," the merc explained.
"That… just seems like a huge security flaw," she said.
Any Edgerunner in NC that had at least a moderate amount of experience knew to never do the same thing too many times. Otherwise, the gangers and thugs on the street would just adapt and zero you. Survival in Night City is determined by those that can react and grow from whatever shit gets thrown their way, except clearly, that doesn't apply when you control most of the world's economy. Either that or when you're that powerful, you just assume nobody is crazy enough to actually try and resist you.
Faolan stopped walking next to an unassuming door built into the wall.
"Exactly, and we are going to exploit it." He gestured his head towards the door. "Can you get this open?"
Lucy looked around and saw that the door was locked with a corporate-grade 9-digit keypad, protected by a 256-bit encryption key and having 16, 421 possible combinations.
Child's play.
The door slid open a second later and she walked through it, commenting as she went past,
"You were saying?"
The armored merc laughed and followed her in, her timed-release hack sealing the door behind him. They walked down a small flight of stairs, at the bottom of which was a small space about the size of the living room in her old apartment. Technical dials and small screens around the room displayed various numbers and graphs, each probably giving technical info and maintenance data for the entire memorial. Two of the four walls were large windows, giving her a close-up view of the broken and rusted rubble that littered the bottom floor of the building.
Don't think I saw this room from the outside, one-way glass perhaps?
She decided it wasn't the best time to test her theory and just looked around, not seeing anything that even resembled another door or an entrance into some other chamber.
"So where to now?" Lucy asked.
Hearing a noise, she turned to see Faolan unsheathing his sword and stabbing it into the wall.
Uhm…
"What… what are you doing?" she questioned.
"Cutting a hole," the merc responded.
Faolan pushed his sword downwards, the blade meeting zero resistance as it cut through the wall before being turned at a right angle, cutting another foot or two, turning again, and then continuing upwards until the height matched where the original stab had gone in. He turned the blade a final ninety degrees and completed the circuit, sheathing the sword and then kicking in the rectangle he'd shaped. The surprisingly thin metal wall just fell backward onto the floor of a new room behind it, which looked far older than the rest of the structure.
Damn, helluva blade.
"As I said," Faolan explained as she walked through the hole, "the towers are the same, but not their surroundings. This memorial isn't in any of the other ones, but it does align with where 'saka puts their underground storage tunnels in the other towers. They usually use them for transporting important people or items to and from the interior without getting seen. As far as I know, though, they don't use this one anymore. Something to do with the nuke causing a large section of it to cave in and being way too costly to repair."
The space was huge, like a tunnel you'd see on one of the main freeways that wrapped around the city, but as she looked to her right, where it would be leading away from the tower, Faolan's statements were proven true. A huge mass of dirt and rock blocked the path entirely, with small pieces of concrete and old metal poking out of the soil in a few spots.
Typical corpos. Spend billions building something, only to abandon it the moment it becomes too costly to maintain.
"But you knew where to get into it from the one in Tokyo," she commented.
Faolan joined her in the tunnel, having balanced the cutout section of the wall back into place so that it would look at least a little normal from the outside.
"You catch on quick," he said.
"It's how you survive."
Faolan put a hand on her shoulder, "Truer words have never been spoken. Now come on, we have a lot of climbing to do."
Is he… actually being nice and not just fucking around? Is this the same merc I met yesterday?
She shook the errand thought out of her head, walking behind Faolan until they reached another door with a large sign that read "MAINTENANCE ENTRANCE - EMPLOYEES ONLY" in big, bold letters. The weathered slab of metal was only secured with an aging padlock, which Faolan paid no mind to as he kicked in the door, the rusted lock snapping in half as it flew open.
After walking through the open doorway, they were now standing in a much more narrow and dark hallway that was only lit by a few small bulbs that were probably about to give out at any moment. Somewhere down here was supposed to be an entrance into the elevator shafts of the tower, one of the only places that wouldn't have cameras or guards to spot them as they climbed up the interior support columns.
"Should be about here," Faolan said, halting and crouching down.
He grabbed onto a vent covering next to him on the lower part of the wall, which was just large enough so that some poor underpaid sob could fit into it if they needed to. The likely never-touched grate easily snapped off the wall, Faolan setting it to the side and looking through. The faint sound of moving mechanics could be heard through the hole now, which made the hairs on the back of Lucy's neck stand up as the stress relief from her 'cig wore off.
She sheepishly asked, "Just to be sure, there isn't any oth-"
"No, there isn't." Faolan pulled his head out of the hole in the wall and looked at her.
"Not if you want to save your input, that is."
Nope, still a jackass.
Lucy sighed and steadied her nerves for a moment, nodding to the merc once she felt ready enough. Faolan turned and crawled through the opening, with her following close behind.
Lucy ended up inside the largest room she'd ever seen. The platform they were standing on was just narrow enough for one person to fit between each elevator, and it didn't feel very safe to walk on as every movement of the elevators caused the floor to ever so slightly rumble. As she looked up, the room stretched upwards for what felt like miles, with three small boxes moving up and down within it as loyal employees of the mighty Arasaka empire went about their day-to-day lives. The shaft was barely lit by a series of dim lights that went along the wall, likely to give the maintenance crew only just enough light so they didn't get crushed and forced the megacorp to send their family a compensation package.
Faolan interrupted her sight-seeing, "Alright, slight change of plans."
She looked over to see him inspecting the now very obvious problem, which was that the support struts along the wall they had planned to climb up were entirely smooth. They had, pretty reasonably, assumed that they would be bare metal girders with gaps they could hold onto. Because who would go through the effort of covering up interior support beams that would never be seen? The answer, it would seem, is whatever asshole architect designed this monument to corpo dickery.
"Shit." Lucy looked around for any other possible places to climb up, failing to see any other beams that would be easy to use like a ladder, and support their weight without breaking apart.
"Got an idea, but you're gonna hate me for it," Faolan said.
Lucy glanced back to see a small set of spikes extend out from his boots. She remembered a time years ago when she saw a similar item being worn by rock climbers during some TV special. Then the merc pulled out a short metal rod, quickly extending it to about the length of a police baton, after which a curved metal blade folded out from within the handle, now resembling a tiny scythe. Then he got out a second one and repeated the process, which resulted in him holding a small axe-like tool in each hand.
I remember seeing something like those before too, maybe in an ad somewhere?
"They're supposed to be used for mountain climbing," Faolan answered her unspoken question, seeing the clear confusion plastered on Lucy's face.
"And you are going to use those to climb up the wall itself?" Lucy asked as she noticed the small gap between the support beams he was standing next to, where the wall was smooth and just wide enough for one person at a time to climb up within it.
"Yep."
"And what about me?"
The armored merc turned around and slightly hunched over with his arms held slightly behind his back.
Wait, he's not suggesting I…
"Climb on, I'll carry you."
Goddamnit.
"You've got to be fucking joking." Lucy rubbed the bridge of her nose.
"Not even in the slightest. Besides, you need all your strength for hacking into their subnet, and while you may be experienced, I have a hunch that climbing thirty-three stories might be a bit much for you."
All she could do was give him a full deadpan as she actually considered it for a moment.
"If you tell a single goddamn soul about this, I'm cutting your dick off," she said while walking over to him.
Faolan chuckled, "Understood."
This is absolutely humiliating.
Lucy was hanging on to Faolan's back like a spider monkey as he effortlessly climbed up the elevator shaft, the sharp ends of the climbing gear digging deep into the wall's featureless exterior. Thankfully said walls appeared to be thick enough that they weren't just going straight through to the other side and alerting every guard in the building to their presence.
By now, Faolan had been climbing for a short while and seemed to be making good progress. He just passed the 15th floor and showed no signs of slowing down. Lucy wondered how he didn't get even slightly tired doing all of this while also carrying her on his back but decided to stow that question away for another day. Just then the elevator pod to her right flew past with a woosh , descending to some other floor below them and getting so close that she almost thought she could hear the conversation inside it for a brief second.
As Faolan continued their ascent, Lucy saw the sixteenth set of elevator doors go past and then regretfully looked down to see the giant chasm that was now below them, the drop easily more than enough to kill both of them on impact. Running around between rooftops was usually Lucy's speciality, so heights hadn't ever really bothered her. However, there was something distinctly different between freerunning around Watson or Santo Domingo and falling thirty stories to her death in some dark corpo maintenance shaft where she'd never be found. Her head quickly shot back to looking straight ahead and she instinctively held on a little tighter.
Faolan laughed at the feeling, "You alright back there?"
"Shut the fuck up and climb faster."
Despite doing her best to stay relaxed, Lucy felt her heartbeat quicken as they passed the seventeenth floor.
Eastern Badlands, Night City
Kiwi really wished she'd brought her smokes, but then again, smoking damn fifty of them likely wouldn't cool her nerves down right now at all. She was doing her best to look composed and relaxed while sitting in the passenger seat of Falco's car, and luckily the rest of the crew weren't focused on her at the moment. If they were, they would've easily seen her foot nervously tapping and the beads of sweat forming on her face. Instead, they were all watching their target: a small convoy of black and red security trucks tearing down the highway, protecting a single large cargo van driving into town from the east. David was standing outside with a leg perched up on a rock while Falco and Rebecca were making smalltalk about the mission.
Falco huffed, "Hell, I've heard of crazier plans. I ever tell ya'll about my buddy Dom back when I still rolled with the 'caldos? Sure he'd do anything for family, but that man was genuinely loopy. One time he tried to steal an entire vault from a bank by tying it to the back of a car and driving off with it."
"Did it work?", Rebecca asked.
"Shockingly, yes."
Kiwi rolled her eyes and stopped paying attention to their conversation as she stared out the window at the infinite expanse of dirt and rock. The convoy wasn't very close yet, so they still had a minute or two until the trucks reached the ambush point that the Animals had set up. Kiwi used that time to make sure the fake documents they'd discussed earlier that day were finished, a background subroutine of hers having generated and forged all the proper handwriting over the past hour. She pulled up her list of contacts, hesitating for a moment as a deep feeling in her gut she hadn't felt in a long time returned, but then collected herself and sent a message.
Kiwi: How're things going on your end?
Lucy: Making good progress, you?
K: Just sitting here and waiting at the moment, got those docs ready.
L: Preem, send 'em over. I'll take a look while we're on our way up.
K: You sure you can do that while climbing?
L: I'm not exactly climbing right now…
K:?
L: I'd rather not talk about it.
K: …
K: Alright, well I'm sendin' you them now.
The elder netrunner could almost feel the data packets leaving her as the files got sent, thankful that she and Lucy had set up their private data transfer connection back when the younger woman had first started getting mentored. It had helped them communicate significantly easier on so many occasions, either in text form or in sending files to each other, especially when there were supposed to be blockers between them in realspace that would stop most data from passing through. Netrunners, unless they were fuckin' Rache Bartmoss, thrived on working with a community of like-minded hackers that spent all of their free time making the most vicious and devastating daemons they could think up.
The best 'runners though, as Kiwi had been so keen to teach Lucy, always know that you can usually improve upon whatever is sold to you on the street. You can fine-tune it to match your specific deck, maybe shore up the code's faults with your own, or even add new programs that add to their lethality. Her protégé had evidently taken those lessons to heart because once Kiwi was done sending Lucy the forged documents, she got a file in return that was packed to the brim with code.
K: What's this?
L: You're breaking into a 'saka truck. Gonna need a daemon that can crack 'saka ICE.
Pulling up the file, she saw the imposing subroutines and never-ending loops of functions within the clearly custom-made attacker. Parts of it were dedicated to overloading a security subnet's response time with infinite swarms of small pings to the target ICE's outer layers, whereas others solely focused on forcibly destroying a system's defenders. Then she saw one final routine, this one a sledgehammer for anything but the thickest of virtual walls. Kiwi had seen hundreds or even thousands of specialized infiltration programs in her day, plenty of which she'd taken and modified for her own use, but she had to admit that this was far better than anything in her own cyberdeck for breaking corpo security.
K: Make it yourself?
L: Sort of… it's a long story, but it's a very old one that I've kept updated over the years. Should make your job a lot easier.
A small sigh of relief escaped Kiwi's mask. She had been genuinely concerned over whether she would be able to break into the van's systems or not in time, and of what Faolan would do to her if she failed.
L: Consider it a gift for helping me so much ever since you found me in that alley. Don't think I'd have made it this far without ya.
Kiwi swore she felt her heart snap in two.
Dammit Kiwi, I thought you told yourself that you wouldn't get like this again. You're just doing this job, and then you're getting the hell out.
Lucy: We're coming up on our floor now, best of luck. I'll meet you at the afterparty.
Her eyes shut on instinct to not let anyone else see the water collecting in them.
Kiwi: Yeah, see you there.
An old painful memory flashed in her mind, of the last time she'd felt this deep tightness in her chest. The familiar image of someone she'd once cared for watching as she got dragged away, not a hint of regret in that bastard's eyes as he got paid.
No, I can't be thinking about that right now. Got a job to do.
Kiwi heard the echoes of gunshots reverberating off the rocks nearby and looked out the windshield to see that the Animals had engaged the convoy as planned. Wiping away a tear, she steeled herself for the fight ahead.
Arasaka Tower
"What now?"
"No clue."
Lucy shook her head in annoyance, "I thought you said you'd done this before?"
"Yeah, but that time I was just trying to get into the storage garage," Faolan said.
He was now hanging next to the silver doors of level thirty-three with the young netrunner still clutched onto his back as both of them scanned the area for any possible weak points. Lucy knew from the start that actually getting inside the counter-intel floor was going to be the hardest part of this entire plan. Not only were most counter-intel workers highly skilled, but a large majority of them had extremely high-grade cyberware, and that's not even counting their field operatives.
If they encountered even one of them, Lucy wasn't entirely sure that they could deal with it. Right now though, the main problem was just finding a way in, the only real option of which seemed to be just walking in the front door. Lucy considered hacking into the local subnet remotely right now and blinding any of the guards near the entrance, but that would likely put the whole building on high alert, and it didn't deafen the guards to the sound of them running past. She thought back to everything they'd done to get here, trying to find any sort of weakness she might've spotted before when a thought popped into her head.
"Wait, can your sword cut through these walls too?" Lucy asked.
Faolan glanced back at her, "Yes, easily, why?"
Lucy's eyes lit up as she found what she was looking for: a small access panel, probably used for stopping the elevators by maintenance workers, but to her, it was a way in.
"I'm going to break into their cameras and guide you to a side room you can cut into, then we can just avoid the entrance area entirely," she said.
"I think I'm starting to see why David likes you. But first, take this," Faolan said, handing her a shard.
She took it from his hand and inspected it, "What is it?"
"There's a program on it which will hide your presence in 'saka's subnet entirely, but only for a limited time."
Holy shit that's nova.
"Where the fuck did you get something like this?" She slotted the shard, seeing a program labeled 'Ghostrunner' load into her cyberdeck.
Faolan chuckled, "From a friend who thought I might need it one day."
Even more things I'm gonna have to ask him about later. Great.
Starting the program up, Lucy ran one of her custom 'Breach Protocol' quickhacks on the exposed maintenance terminal, quickly gaining entry into the local subnet. Without being in deep dive, prowling around the 'saka net was significantly more dangerous for her and would usually make her far more visible to corpo netrunners. However, as she began moving from subsystem to subsystem she could almost feel a daemon sitting on her figurative shoulder that was completely obscuring her presence in cyberspace.
It felt like nothing she'd ever experienced before as a 'runner. Most daemons were used purely for offensive or defensive purposes, not both, but this was some weird hybrid of the two. It simultaneously defended her from any probing pings but also viciously attacked any security scans that would've otherwise spotted her. The only thing she could even compare it to would be a defensive version of Black ICE that helped netrunners instead of frying their brains. Confidence boosted at the odd sensation, Lucy began prowling around for the control node connected to the security systems.
If I know 'saka well enough, it should be about… here!
"Got it," she said as the cameras on the floor became under her control.
"Already? Shit, you might just give the 'runner who made that shard a run for their money."
Lucy couldn't hold back her smirk as she started going from camera to camera, getting a general idea of the floor's layout. There was the main entrance area with a guard standing right outside of the elevators, a reception desk with an underpaid employee sitting at it, and then one main room that had several 'cubicles', if you could call them that. They were made entirely out of thick red glass, and inside of each were large displays and computer systems, none of which she could access remotely.
Must have their own internal servers for each. Smart.
Scattered around the room and within those booths were about a dozen and a half 'saka suits, all of them sitting on couches and chatting, typing away on a keyboard, or staring at a screen. Around the large central space were a few other small doors, one labeled exactly what she'd been hoping for.
"Bathroom. About… 40 feet to your left, along the other wall," Lucy said.
"Got it. You should probably hang on a little tighter," the merc responded.
Lucy did, realizing as she returned to realspace just how far away that wall actually was from them in the cramped service shaft. Faolan hooked one of his climbing axes onto his belt, making his left arm free to grab onto some of the other cables and pull them both around the elevator shaft to their left and onto the other side. She did her best to not look down again as he repeated this process to reach the far left end of the room and took the other axe back out, hooking it into the wall and securing their new position.
"Alright, I can't cut it since we'll both fall if we do, so you have to do it," he said.
Ah, shit.
She pushed past her fear of taking both hands off anything sturdy and said, "Alright, tell me what to do."
She copied his instructions as he took her through the process of carefully unsheathing his sword and readjusting herself so that she was aiming at the wall to their left, the one they weren't currently using as life support. Lucy rechecked the cameras, double-checking they were in the right spot, and then stabbed the sword into the wall.
"Now, just take it slow, do what I did back at the memorial. Should be easy."
And it was. The sword didn't even feel like it registered that there was concrete in its path. Lucy did her best to mimic Faolan's earlier feat, turning the blade at the right times and finishing the circuit, although hers looked significantly cruder.
"That'll do. Now sheathe the blade and hold on again," Faolan said.
Lucy did so. Then she watched as he put one of the axes away again and pushed with his hand, slowly sliding the service-hatch-sized chunk of the wall forward until it was far enough that they could see inside. She looked through it and after not seeing anyone inside, she moved to climb in. Luckily, she'd cut the hole close to the floor, so it wasn't nearly as hard as she had expected. Lucy used Faolan's back as a step ladder to get in and then grabbed his extended hand as he clambered behind her, his larger frame almost not fitting through.
"God, this day su- who the fuck are you?"
Both of their heads shot over to see a man dressed in a light blue plaid shirt and khaki pants staring back at them, his combover and freshly shaved face adding to the oh-so-cliche desk jockey look he gave off. His hands were wet, and the faucet was on, meaning he must've just walked in here to wash his hands while they were climbing inside.
Faolan dived past her and tackled the man to the ground instantly. He put a hand over the shorter man's mouth and muffled his mild attempt at a scream for help. Lucy made sure that the 'suit didn't have any extreme cyberware with her optics, and thankfully her scans only came back with a set of syn-lungs and a tiny amount of sub-dermal armor.
Oh thank fuck, he's not a field agent.
She figured that he must be a new hire, or at least new to counter-intel, considering the absolutely scared-shitless look on his face. Faolan leaned down and spoke to him in the same menacing voice he'd used back at the Afterlife.
"You never saw us here, do you understand?"
The man nodded, probably because if he did tell anyone, he'd be fired for incompetence or outright killed. Lucy opened up the camera systems again and let a background subroutine track any movement near the bathroom, just in case they were interrupted again. She walked over to the man and kneeled.
"Fastest way to the conference room, now," she demanded.
Faolan slowly took his hand off the man's mouth and pulled out a knife. He held it against the corpo's throat just hard enough to get the message of 'do anything other than answer her and you die' across without actually drawing blood. The man's clearly nervous voice betrayed his attempt at appearing calm.
"Stick to the left side of the main room, there's less light there. The cubicles are one-way glass, but only from the outside, so that supervisors can watch employees work while not allowing anyone to see out-"
Of course they are. Fucking Arasaka.
"- so you could use them as cover to hide, but that's all I know! I haven't even gotten the chance to be in the conference room yet, let alo-"
Faolan shut him up with a hard right hook to the temple, the surprisingly cooperative corpo rat going limp as he fell unconscious.
The armored merc grabbed the body and moved him into one of the bathroom stalls, sitting him up on one of the toilets and locking the stall door. Meanwhile, Lucy ensured that the cut-out section of concrete was placed back into the rest of the wall well enough that it looked smooth again. She glanced back at Faolan to see his visor's glow turn off entirely, giving him a far more menacing appearance than she'd expected. He looked at her and said,
"As long as you stay very close to me and keep those cameras offline, we'll get through this just fine. You ready?"
She nodded.
Into the lion's den.
