Ayako approached V. "Yo," she said, "use the car when the assholes show."

V blinked. "The fuck am I gonna do with your car?"

"Weapons system," said Ayako, smiling. That was when V noticed her teeth for the first time. Yaeba. "Real flash stuff," she added. "DEWs, semi-automatic railguns. The fun kinda toys."

"Directed-energy weapons ain't a thing outside, maybe, some corpo R lab," said V, skeptically. She and Judy were sitting on a stack of old shipping crates, smoking cigarettes.

Judy looked interested, but she was a techie nerd, so shit like this always got her panties wet.

"Microwaves," said Ayako. "Cook those fucking Locos inside-out."

"Where the fuck didja klep tech like that?" asked Judy.

"Militech. Was gonna use it to barter with the Technomancers. But they weren't interested. Said they already had somethin' better. Plasma." Ayako paused, her laser-eyes peering at V. "You ever reach out to the Aldecaldos 'bout that, V?" She sounded cautiously hopeful. "'Bout the Technomancers," she added, helpfully.

"I did," said V, and took a long drag off her cigarette. A few flakes of synthtobacco crumbled off the cherry, dusting the leather of her Aldecaldos bomber-jacket. She tried to wipe it off, only succeeding in smearing streaks of ash over the fabric. "Goddamn," she said, "this synthtobacco's messy. Somethin' 'bout dyes they put in the shit."

"What happens when you kill off the real thing. You need cheap substitutes," said Ayako. "Biotechnica's working on cloning tobacco up from some vault-seeds in their hydroponic farms." She paused, nimbly hopped up onto the crates beside them, squatting on the toes of her tabi-boot exojacks. She moved, V noted, with a gymnast's grace, no wasted movement. "So what'd your choom from the Aldecaldos say?" Ayako stared at her, like a cat watching a fat goldfish swim in its bowl.

"First, stop lookin' at me like you're gonna eat me," said V, and squashed the urge to make a joke about buying her dinner first when Judy shot her that sharp shut-up-Valerie look. "Anyway," she continued, finishing her cigarette, "my choom mentioned one of our people might've dealt with 'em before, and that she'd get back to me."

"And I'm assuming she ain't gotten back to you," said Ayako, heaving a sigh. She sat down beside V, her legs folded neatly underneath her.

V always wondered how the Japanese sat like that, in seiza. Anytime she tried to sit like that for longer than a couple minutes, V just wound up with a godawful charlie horse, and several complaints to Judy about how the floor was killing her knees, so please, could she just tongue her pussy on the bed. "Nah," she said finally, trying to jostle her mind away from thoughts of Judy's pussy. V needed to concentrate on the gig at hand, she told herself; but man, she thought, she would rather be thinking about Judy's pussy. "She hasn't gotten back to me yet."

Ayako looked worried, maybe a little disappointed. V couldn't tell, exactly. It was hard to read emotions, she found, when the person you were trying to read had oculars like Ayako's. Eyes were communicative, told you a lot about a person. But looking for those things in Ayako's eyes was like looking for those things in sunglasses. "You think your choom's gonna pull through?" Before V could answer, Ayako said, "V, you're my last hope of getting put in front of the Technomancers. They won't stay around Phoenix long enough for me to arrange another meeting. They're Nomads. They'll be moving on soon."

V finished her cigarette, stubbing it out on the crate and dropping the crumpled butt to the ground. "I'm gonna do everything I can," said V, and meant it. She squeezed Ayako's shoulder. "But all I can do right now is wait for Panam t'call."

The three of them sat there quietly, watching the Digitales inspect cables, run diagnostics on equipment, their faces bathed in the restless glow of dataslates. They moved with cold efficiency and purpose: a swarm of colorful ants laboring for the good of their colony.

"Bum a cig?"

Judy passed Ayako one, lit it.

Ayako smoked, but she smoked in that slow way people who didn't smoke much did. "Haven't smoked since this chairjock bar I used to frequent in Harajuku. I'd tube in from Chiba, pick up jobs from Kuchisake-Onna, the fixer there." She shrugged, drew her legs up and put her chin on her knees, the cigarette, slightly bent at its filter, smoldering in her mouth. "How I got picked up by 'Saka." She plucked the cigarette from her mouth, flicked the old ash. "They needed a good netrunner, and Kuchisake-Onna personally recommended me. They put me on the Relic job."

"And gave all the credit to Anders Hellman," said V, nodding.

"Anders had the vision, designed it, worked out the theories, the math. But it was me and my 'runners who did all the heavy lifting." She looked at V. "Do you know how fuckin' hard it is to transpile an AI's source-code? Flatlined most of my team. Rest just got zeroed by 'Saka ninjas when the suits shook hands. But you already know that." Ayako paused, scratching at the skin around the edges of her WNI. "Anyway, those're the breaks in corpo-world."

V got this sense Ayako was stalling for time, and there was something else too, an undercurrent of nervous tension. "You okay?" she asked, carefully. "Seem a little off, choom."

Ayako blew a ragged, blue cloud of smoke. "Thought I saw some shit while I was jacked into the mobile. Not netrunners. Somethin' else." She paused, then said, "Didn't wanna mention it. Could be nothing." Another pause, slight hesitation. "The dataflows. I'm seeing tumors, V. Bad accretions of data. Subtle, small, right now, but they're growing."

"Yako." Juan appeared from deeper shadow, the bright Aztec shapes coming on slowly, crawling over his netsuit like lumps of paraffin wax in a lava-lamp. "It's showtime."

"Fuck," muttered Ayako, putting out her cigarette. Then, louder, she replied, "Sure, Juan." She hopped off the crate. "Don't wanna keep the dwellers waiting."

"Where d'ya want me'n Trude?" asked V.

"Head out front to the drop-off area," said Juan.

"My car, Sherry," said Ayako. "Remember." She left with Juan.

V reached under her jacket, ran her thumb along the molded plastic grip of the Malorian in its synthleather shoulder rig. She hopped off the crate, making her way toward the drop-off area with Judy.

The Digitales, V decided, had money, and lots of it. Techies strapped into mil-spec exoskeletons patrolled the perimeter of the drop-off area, the servos in the skeletons' articulated limbs whirring as they moved under the synaptic whips of their pilots. Each pilot sat enmeshed in a cocoon of rubber cables, their minds interfacing with their rig's OS via neurotrodes, faces unreadable under the slick composite-glass of their HUD-visors. Tripwires and autoturrets, probably powered by dedicated netrunners, had been rigged up at key choke-points around the drop-off.

"S'like they're preparing for war," said Judy, carefully avoiding the attention of the Myasniki, who were packing body-bags into a repurposed Trauma Team shuttle, its alloy-steel hull spraybombed in messy clusters of cyrillic and grinning Baba Yagas.

"Y'know how turf-wars go," said V, looking at her. "Ain't the Mox ever had one?"

Judy shrugged. "Sure, but I was just some techie. Wasn't out there in the streets beefin' with Tyger Clawz or whoever." She paused, grimacing slightly. "Other than that Clouds shitshow, I mean. But that wasn't no turf-war. That was just me bein' stupid."

They were halfway to the Quadra when the ground exploded in a spray of concrete and rockdust, snuffing two exo-pilots and a Digitales soldier-boy, nothing left of them but pieces. Drones, their chassis glittering like beetle-shells in the spaceport's sodium floods, swarmed overhead, spraying frag-bombs at anything that moved.

There was a collective war-wail from the Digis, crescendoing into a kind of white noise, and the exos and autoturrets burst into flashes of gunfire. Drones tumbled out of the sky like so many dying insects, smashing against the asphalt with enough velocity and stored kinetic energy that they popped, burst into jagged little pieces.

The exos were moving, and so were V and Judy. V could see an AV coming in hot, this one looking like something straight out of Militech's arsenal. But the graffiti paint-job bespoke gang affiliation. V could make out an emblem on the hull: an oblong crackhead face with wild eyes, skull exploding, as if from a gunshot, into a cloud of binary.

"Guess those are the Los Locos Modernos," said V. She looked at Judy. "C'mon, honey, we needa hustle to the car."

The AV was quickly joined by more, all of them descending on the spaceport like an alien invasion. Locos gunners opened fire, and V could hear them laughing like crazed junkies, Digitales soldier-boys exploding into mincemeat around them. Judy traded a few shots with the gunners as they sprinted toward the Quadra, managed to zero a Locos in a fluorescent green netsuit. She, the Loco, plummeted toward the ground, smashed into the concrete with a wet, visceral thud. Nothing left of her but a smear barely recognizable as human.

Now V had seen her share of questionable elective surgery, but the Locos woman's seemed to be keyed specifically for shock-factor. Her face, what was left of it, was an inflamed horror-work of tech fused to meat by, seemingly, the crudest, dirtiest means possible. It almost looked, V thought, as though someone had welded the tech to her skin as an afterthought, then said fuck it, looked good enough.

They piled into the Quadra just as the Locos touched down. V jacked her personal into the mobile, while Judy took the backseat, and the Quadra's subnet came on like livewire voodoo, and V tasted the strange ozone of cyberspace in her mouth.

V had forgotten how much she missed netrunning, felt a weird sort of elation about it, a high. Her consciousness inhabiting the digital hallucination now, the bright vectors of cyberspace extending before her into a void like a dead television screen, she scrolled the subnet for the combat module, and punched for go.