Bright lattices of logic unfolded over the noncolor of cyberspace: a low-poly render of the spaceport, and of the dashboard in which V sat behind. Blurs of rich data streamed past the window-renders of her sham Quadra as it hurtled, silent, along the gridlines of the matrix. Reminded her of an antique driving simulation program. The Locos were rendered at a slightly higher resolution, humanoid approximations composed of dense high-poly counts—enough detail there to differentiate them from the friendlies, but streamlined enough that the graphics weren't chugging the Quadra's subnet latency. Optimized performance. V was impressed.

A small, directionless voice spoke, keyed to some Japanese pop-ideal of Kawaii. "You aren't Ayako-sama," said the voice, its weird intonation making V think of a cat meowing human words. "So you must be V-sama."

"Who the fuck is this?"

"Mochi is Mochi's name," said Mochi, in its sugary cat-voice. "Mochi is a DHC."

"A dedicated heuristic controller?"

"Yes, Mochi assists Ayako-sama in low-level Net task-management. Basically, Mochi does smaller things for Ayako-sama so she can focus on bigger things."

"Look, Mochi. Real nice to meetcha. But I'm kinda in the middle of—

"You wanna kill some fuckers," replied Mochi, sweetly. A small, white cat with a brown spot on its nose rezzed into existence at a higher polygon-count than everything else within the cage of the subnet, curled in a furry crescent on the virtual dashboard. It extended a paw, and the combat module's CLI appeared. "Mochi has granted you access to the entire combat suite." Mochi started pawing at the CLI as if it were a cat-toy, scrolling through commands until it found the protocol it had been looking for. "Mochi suggests the PMB, the precision microwave burst. Cook those fuckers real good."

"I like you," said V, and scratched the cat behind its ear—biofeedback giving the sensation of soft fur brushing against her fingertips.

"Mochi will also establish a real-time link with realspace," purred the cat. Its eyes flashed, binary cascading within its amber irises as the DHC executed its link-protocol.

Within the approximated frame of the windshield, the simplified armature of cyberspace vanished as the mobile connected to the Quadra's high-definition camera array. "Smart," said V. "Utilizin' a cam-array to link into the subnet instead of overtaxin' the CPU by upping the rez and polygon count to render things in real-time. Keeps things smooth."

The cam-array gave V a full sphere-view of the spaceport. She saw Judy leaning out of the back-window, firing The Chaos at a group of Locos, grinning with a sort of feral ecstasy, her hair whipping around her face as the Quadra drifted around a curve of floodlit asphalt skirting the spaceport terminal. V couldn't help but think she looked hot like that.

"Establishing audio-feed," meowed Mochi.

V heard automatic gunfire rattling in over the link, the dull sounds of explosions, people yelling, the roar and judder of the Quadra as it hurtled along the asphalt of a shuttle-loop. And, louder by proximity, Judy's hysterical giggling as she hosed down the Locos with lead, erasing them in humming, bloody clouds of electromagnetic hollow-points. God, V thought, she was fucking perfect.

V tapped out a command in the CLI, saw the hood of the Quadra transform like mechanical origami: a thing that looked part high-powered cannon, part radar dish unfolding, rising smoothly from a compartment on the hood. It swiveled on a pivot as it honed in on the nearest Locos, pulsing out a concentrated EMF burst; V felt the force-feedback on the shot, subsonics thrumming down into her bones. The Locos baked from the inside-out when the compressed microwaves hit them, their skin charring, sloughing off their chrome as the circuitry cooked and sizzled out.

"See?" said Mochi. "Cooks those fuckers real good."

"Real good," agreed V.

"Yo, Valerie," said Judy, squatting in the footwell between the backseat and driver's seat, the Locos' gunfire pinging off the Quadra's reinforced chassis, her hair windblown as air streamed in through the open window above her head. "Can you drop some bullet-shutters? Gettin' a little tight out here." She winced as a shot glanced off the edge of the window. "Real tight."

"I gotcha, babe," said V, hearing her own voice crackling out of the voxbox on the cam-feed. "Mochi, execute the defense protocol."

"Who the fuck is Mochi?" asked Judy.

"Executing defense protocol," announced Mochi, and the cat's eyes flashed.

The shutters dropped on all of the windows, and V watched as Judy slumped against the door, breathing a sigh of relief. She wiped at the band of sweat on her forehead, ejecting the empty magazine from her gun. "Mierda," she said, "that was close."

"You're not hurt, are you, Jude?"

"Nah, Valerie," she said. "I'm fine." She looked in the direction of the voxbox. "How's cyberspace?"

"Fine," said V. "Super fine. Got this DHC helpin' me out."

"That who Mochi is?"

"Yeah," said V.

Judy snorted, wiping her nose on the back of her wrist, drawing her knees up. "Who fuckin' names a dedicated heuristic controller after a rice-cake?"

"Ayako," answered V. Then, "Presents as a cat. Real cute cat, too."

"Why ain't we heard it before when Ayako was talkin' to us on the voxbox?"

"Ayako-sama asked Mochi to be quiet. She doesn't like talking about Mochi."

"Why?" asked Judy.

"It's painful for Ayako-sama," said Mochi.

"So why talk to us now?"

"Ayako-sama thinks very highly of V-sama and Judy-sama. Mochi thought it would be safe to talk to you."

V paused, then said, "Thought? DHC's don't think."

Mochi said nothing. The cat regarded V blandly from the dashboard render, then stirred suddenly, its fur raising into stiff spikes. Mochi hissed, then leaped from the dashboard, dissolving into code.

Cyberspace surged as if teetering on the precipice of an outage. The cam-feed showed the Quadra skid to a stop in front of the terminal, and V felt it, force-feedback whiplashing her in her seat. She tried to override to manual control in the CLI. ERROR flashed in red monospace across the windshield facsimile, and she saw nothing but the digital void.

V saw a face rendering in that colorless void, then. A huge, excessively ugly thing of sharp, geometric planes arranged within a wireframe matrix, its rough-cut features suggesting maleness. The face was grotesque in its simplicity, a low-poly Melpomene that, when she looked too long at it, made her shiver and ache, trickling ice down her spine.

"We meet," said the thing, its mouth contorting perversely as it spoke. Its voice sounded as if it had been engineered using stock soundbites from a war documentary: explosions, gunfire, men screaming and dying, the rattling of war-machines. "We meet at last, V," continued the face, its mouth distending, twisting around its words. "I am Uncle Sam."

Ayako spliced in her comms-link, glitching within the artifacting cage of her call-window. "Jack out now," came her garbled voice. "Jack out now!"

The ache V felt started to hit her in mounting waves of pain, the intensity driving her into terminal neuroshock. Her body felt as if it were vibrating, her cells oscillating with some nameless agony-frequency. Couldn't move, her synapses burning out micron by micron...

She was going to flatline if she didn't jack out. She was going to die.

"Jack out—" Ayako's voice fizzed out.

Uncle Sam regarded her with cold fury, its eyes wells of corrupted code. The face, slowly, began to shred apart, and then it was torn and whipped away down some furious hurricane corridor. The matrix glitched, its gridlines flickering out, and she found herself pulled, pulled from the pain and torment and the digital tomb by Judy's strong hands.

V's personal jack snapped back into the plastic inset on the heel of her left palm, and she became aware of the blood gushing from her nostrils, pooling on her upper-lip. Judy's face hovered above her, lit from behind in a quartz-halogen nimbus from the spaceport floods. V felt asphalt, rough and cool, through her thin gloveleather jeans.

"I managed to get the door open after hot-riggin' the auto-locks," said Judy, tearfully. Her hands felt clammy against V's cheeks. "What the fuck happened in there, baby? You started twitchin' in the car, bleedin'. Y'were spazzin' out." Judy hugged her, tattooed arms gently cradling V's head. "Jesus fuck, I thought I was gonna lose you."

"Ain't even got to use the railguns," lamented V, her voice small and weak. She managed to smile, with great effort.

"Shut the fuck up," sniffled Judy, smiling, wet mascara streaking her cheeks.

V sat up, and feeling as hammered shit as she did, it was quite the trick to sit up. "What happened?" She wiped her bloody nose on her jacket-sleeve.

Judy told her. Mochi had managed to regain control of the Quadra and drive them to safety while Judy, who stressed how careful she'd been in disconnecting her, jacked V out of the mobile. "You were burnin' up, but Ayako had some coolant in the car." She stroked V's red-black hair, still holding her close and tight, as if V were liable to evaporate at any moment. "The Locos took the spaceport. Most of the Digis are dead."

"How long was I out?"

"A while," answered Judy.

"Where's Ayako?"

Judy didn't answer. Instead, Mochi's little cat-voice meowed out from the Quadra's voxbox. The driver-side door was open, inert on its vertical struts. "Ayako-sama is coming," assured the DHC. "She had to jack out Juan-sama before the crash."

"Crash?" V was coming around now, but in no hurry to shrug off her girlfriend's arms.

"Juan-sama went Rache Bartmoss on the Las Palmeras subnet," said Mochi.