The Flues reminded V of Northside in Night City: a blasted rustscape of ferroconcrete and chain-link, of warehouses, CHOOH2 refineries, nuclear plants, protein and hydroponic factories owned by Biotechnica.
They were driving on the Rossi Interchange, northbound. Below, on all sides, the sprawl of The Flues blanketed the rocky hills of the Sonoran like some strange species of industrial mold, forever cooking under a permanent inversion layer of factory-smog and desert heat. And on the very fringe of that rusting factory-straggle stood the unfinished spaceport, its launch-tower a skeletal finger pointed toward the sky, sun-baked steel buffed smooth, glittering fire in a molten Arizona sunset.
"Place is fuckin' depressin'," said V, in the backseat. She watched Ayako drive, her personal jacked into the mobile net-station. "Y'conscious?" she asked Ayako, waving for her attention in the rear-view cam.
Ayako didn't respond, her face a smooth, catatonic mask in the cam.
"She's drivin' this fuckin' car from the Net," said Judy, beside her. "I dunno how I feel 'bout that, calabacita." She grimaced, shifting uncomfortably, folding her legs up so her knees were pressing into her breasts. "S'like Delamain without Delamain. But y'expect this kinda shit from Delamain, 'cause that's kinda its whole deal. And y'ain't worried 'cause it's an AI specifically made for driverless drivin'. But Ayako's human." Judy stopped, probably realizing she was rambling; she did that whenever she was nervous, V knew. Then she said, "Think I liked it better when that fuckin' mobile wasn't ridin' shotgun."
V opened her mouth to say something, closed it, her phonics picking up on a crackle somewhere in the car. A modulated voice—Ayako's modulated voice—spoke, as if coming over shaky radio-waves. Voxboxer. "I'm scanning the Las Palmeras subnet for Locos netrunners," said Ayako's radio-voice. "Keeping Juan informed. Don't worry, Judy, I ain't gonna crash the car."
"Just like the captain of the Titanic said he wasn't gonna crash the boat," said Judy, holding The Chaos in her lap and peering through the bullet-proof window as if she expected to shoot something soon.
"Fuck is the Titanic?" asked V, furrowing her brow.
"Old boat," said Ayako. "Crashed into an iceberg, way back in 1912."
V looked at Judy. "How d'you fuckin' know this shit?"
"Edited a Titanic BD once," said Judy, shrugging. "Used to hustle edits on the side when I wasn't workin' at Lizzie's. Some Danish gonk who was super into nautical shit commissioned it. He was willin' to pay mega eddies, so I said fuck it, did some research. Used an old movie as a reference point for a real preem experience." She grinned. "Client was happy, and so was I. Bought some shiny new 'ware for my work-rig. Was actually not too long before y'showed up at Lizzie's to look at that Konpeki BD."
"That fuckin' movie," said Ayako, "was a fuckin' phenomenon way back when." There was a lull in the car, and then some song drifted in over the sound-system, a woman warbling about how her heart would go on. "Found this. Little slice of history, ladies. You're welcome."
"What the fuck is this shit?" said V. "Yo, turn it off ."
Ayako turned the music up, the woman warbling her heart out in V's phonics to slow, saccharine percussion, and the trilling of woodwinds.
"I think s'kinda nice," said Judy. "Gotta real old-school feel to it."
"Y'would like this kinda shit."
"Y'know me, Valerie," said Judy, smiling innocently. "Real mushy when I get into my feelings."
Ayako hit the Quadra's blinkers, switched lanes and slowed, coasting down a ramp into The Flues. It funneled them onto a street lined with shuttered shopfronts. Some of the shops were still open, subsisting on a misery-business of alcohol, sex, fast-food and thrift. The usual suspects in rundown neighborhoods like this one. They drove past lurid neon signs advertising peepshows and strip-clubs, BDs and dollhouses, cheap fast-food and booze in a dozen different languages, although the dominant species seemed to be cyrillic. Sovs, V thought, who'd managed to shake off SovOil's steel grip, find their way across the Atlantic on smuggler-boats.
Holograms, all of them female, their looks an obvious composite of the decade's most attractive supermodels, flickered glitch-like on the smooth pedestals of ancient projectors, beckoning passersby into seedy-looking shops that, V figured, probably doubled as Scav meat-factories. Scavs were big among the Sovs, V knew: countless tribes of people-butchers looking to make an eddy or two off choice cuts of hardware. She asked Ayako about it.
"Yeah, they're around," replied Ayako. She'd turned the radio to some screaming Japanese rockerboy noise, and V was vibing, even headbanging a little, to the angry drums, the howling screech-vocals and shrieking guitars. "Biggest Scav group here in The Flues are the Myasniki. Nasty motherfuckers. Wear masks made from human skin. They cut it off, tan it like leather."
Judy winced. "What the fuck?"
"Also make jewelry outta the bones of the people they kill," said Ayako, conversationally. "Thankfully, they don't really leave their turf."
"Please tell me their turf ain't anywhere near the spaceport," said Judy.
"Nah, they conceded the spaceport to the Digitales when Orbital Air fucked off," said Ayako. "They stay away, 'cause they know the Digitales got no problem putting 'em down. Ain't a gang in Phoenix who like the Myasniki, 'cept maybe the Paradise Cooks, since they're the Myasniki's main supplier of Black Lace."
"Drug-pushers don't care who they associate with, long as they're buyin'," said V, knowingly.
The Quadra swung right, its headlights snapping on with the streetlights, illuminating battered tarmac tufted with weeds, drifts of garbage collecting in gutters, greasy tents huddling behind lengths of chain-link while homeless burnouts stumbled and swayed on the sidewalks, slumping against streetlights and walls, over fire-hydrants and inert hologram projectors. It dredged up memories of this documentary V had seen once on Kensington Avenue, during the drug crisis of the 2020s. Not that Philadelphia had improved since the 2020s; it had only gotten worse under consecutive do-nothing political regimes, and then the gangs had taken over, chopped it up into turfs that were constantly warring with one another for scraps while the Paradise Cooks, who had originated in Philadelphia, pumped the survivors full of junk and got fat off their eddies. People called it The Landfill now, because that was all the city was these days, a wasteland where society's trash aggregated and doped themselves into sweet oblivion. You could get any drug you wanted in Philadelphia, Jackie had once told her. He would have said the same about The Flues, V decided.
They arrived at the spaceport, where a couple of Digitales met them at the security gate. The terminal beyond the security fence was nice: tinted glass and concrete arranged in a sleek, contemporary design that seemed to revolve, primarily, around sharp, impossible angles. It almost, at least to V, looked as if the building had shattered at one point, but someone had glued the shards back together in some modern kintsugi ritual.
The Digitales guys wore jackets like Juan's, one scrolling a colorful calaveras design, the other a moody watercolor of rain glittering on concrete. "What's the word on the Net, Yako?" asked the man in the calaveras jacket.
"Quiet," replied Ayako's voxbox voice. "I don't like quiet, man."
The man in the moody jacket spoke. "Probably still lickin' their wounds. Huitzilopochtli flatlined their 'runners, and we zeroed a good chunk of their foot-soldiers."
"I ain't even gonna try pronouncing that name," said V. "Who's Huitziwhatever?"
"Their demon," said Ayako, helpfully.
"Go on in," said the man in the calaveras jacket. "Juan's waitin' for you."
They drove toward the terminal, parked where passengers, if the place had ever been completed, would have been dropped off or picked up. Ayako disconnected her personal from the mobile and stepped out of the car, her thermal katana, which she'd named Onibi, strapped across her back in its tantalum carbide rig.
"You expectin' to do some fightin'?" asked V, staring at the sword, trailing a few paces behind Ayako. "Thought y'were gonna be helpin' the dwellers."
"Gotta disconnect eventually," answered Ayako. "Don't wanna be unarmed when I do."
"Fair 'nough," agreed V.
The concourse shone with dull chrome and marble, and it smelled like neglect, and something V imagined as disappointment. Hologram projectors and flat-screens mounted on attenuated steel frameworks stood inert, waiting for reactivation, waiting for the tourists that would never come.
Their footsteps echoed as they walked, hanging in the air like ghosts. Sodium vapors from the concourse floods filtered down through the glass ceiling, casting the terminal in jack-o-lantern light. Part of the terminal was unfinished, a rough, skeletal framework of steel-alloy and color-coded wires. Old expansion-grate scaffoldings sat collecting dust along the unfinished sections of the building, and from atop those scaffoldings, like parrots roosting in trees, Digitales hoods watched her and Judy, their jackets crawling with various patterns of colorful lights and shapes, oculars winking ruby pinpoints as they ran scans, trying to suss out who exactly these two bitches with Kunoichi were.
There were other hoods in here, too. One of them, a tall blonde guy swollen with grafted muscle, turned to look at them. He was wearing a face that wasn't his, the flesh resembling pale leather, and bracelets of human teeth, polished to a pearlescent sheen, on either wrist.
"What the fuck are these assholes doing here, Juan?" demanded Ayako, pointing at the man wearing another man's face and bracelets of human teeth. "Myasniki? Seriously?" She spun, looked up at the man. "Piss off, you fucking vulture."
"I am no understanding she," said the man to Juan in uneasy English, his accent thick as batter.
"Relax, Yako," said Juan, raising his hands, pacific. He'd swapped his neotacs and jacket for a cooling suit, though the same bright Aztec pattern slithered over its mimetic polycarbon fabric. "Sergei's just here to clean up the dead Locos. Piled them up in baggage claims." He smiled at his own joke.
Sergei studied V and Judy like a jeweler appraising the clarity of diamonds, his too-pale eyes peering out from behind the dead man's face. "You much good parts. Sell very good," he said to V, decisively. He looked at Judy and shook his huge head. "You not so good parts, but is okay. Is pretty devushka." Sergei signed OK with his thumb and finger. The tip of his thumb was missing, a scarred pink nub.
"Come anywhere near me, you creepy Scavfuck, I'll blow your goddamn head open," said Judy, brandishing The Chaos. She pointed the hot pink gun at him, thumb contemplating the safety switch. "Y'understand that, comrade? One fuckin' inch too close, you're dead. Fuckin' goddamn hijo de puta wearin' some goddamn pendejo's fuckin' face."
"I am not understanding," said Sergei.
"Chill," Juan said to Judy, gesturing for her to lower the gun. He turned to Sergei, both their oculars flashing blue. Then Juan said, "Pleasure doing biz with you, Sergei. Enjoy the bodies." He patted the man's graft-swollen bicep, watching him trundle off toward baggage claims. Once Sergei was out of earshot, Juan said to Ayako, "Paid mega eddies, and it gets the bodies out of here. Couldn't say no, Yako." He looked at her and shrugged. "You know how biz goes. Opportunity knocks, you don't ignore it."
"But Myasniki, Juan?" Ayako sighed, shaking her head.
"Just an exchange of eddies, Yako," said Juan. "Locos damaged shit in the last attack, and that shit needs to get fixed, which costs money."
"Speakin' of which," said V, "where're the Locos?"
"Hit them pretty hard when they attacked," said Juan. "Pendejos retreated, but now that they've had a chance to recover, they'll be back."
"When'd they last attack?" asked V.
"Couple days ago."
"Makes y'think they're comin' back tonight?"
"Dwellers intercepted and cracked some encrypted comms," said Juan, crossing his arms. "But funny thing? Dunno who the fuck the Locos were talking to. Couldn't sniff out the destination port."
V didn't like the sound of that. Judy gave her a look that told her she agreed something smelled funny. "Yo, those Locos," said V, carefully. She hesitated, then asked, "Was there anythin' weird 'bout 'em? Like outta the norm."
Juan paused, thinking. He stroked his chin meditatively, then said, "Erratic. They were acting real erratic. Kinda like cyberpsychos."
Ayako frowned.
"Dunno if they were actually cyberpsychotic," said Juan. "Never actually encountered a cyberpsycho. Just heard about them, seen stuff on TV. Heard there was a real bad rash of them in Night City, couple months ago. Some merc took them out."
V had been the one who'd taken those cyberpsychos out, and it was weird, she thought, hearing someone talk about her as if she wasn't standing right in front of them. To Juan, if he'd ever bothered to scan her, she was Sherry Shiv. "You know the name of the merc?" she asked, mostly curious to hear if her reputation had ever made it beyond the borders of Night City.
"Think her name was Vee," said Juan. "Pretty well-known. Net was abuzz about her couple months ago after that Konpeki shit went down."
V felt a fleeting pang of pride that someone outside Night City had heard about her, although it was quickly subsumed by a sense of guilt. Nobody knew who Jackie was, who T-Bug was. They'd been the ones who'd died. Legends were only legends when they died, she'd been told, over and over again, in Heywood, until it had become a kind of mantra. Yet here she was, the sole survivor, and someone from Phoenix had heard about her.
"Two people died in that Konpeki shit," said V, trying to sound aloof, removed from the situation, a spectator merely commenting on something interesting she'd read once. "Jackie Welles, and a netrunner by the handle of T-Bug." Juan gave her a puzzled look, and she quickly added, "Just somethin' I read in the tabloids."
"You from Night City?" asked Juan, raising an eyebrow. "Yako said you were a Nomad."
"I am a Nomad. Night City was a long time ago," said V. "Left it behind. Shit place full of shit people." She looked at Judy, then smiled and said, "Mostly."