V toed aside a grubby beer bottle stuffed with used condoms, wrinkling her nose. "This place fuckin' sucks. And it stinks," she said, wishing she'd opted for those olfactory filters Viktor had suggested when she'd complained about the piss-smell of the alley outside his clinic.
Ayako had been quiet since they'd started up the stairwell. Judy asked, "Y'okay, Ayako?"
"The elevator ain't usually down," said Ayako.
"Been to Fabrika 'fore?" asked V.
Ayako shook her head. "Not me. A proxy workin' for me." She paused, adding, "I do biz via proxies and facilitators. Don't generally like dealin' with people. But you? You were the exception, Val. Wanted you to trust me."
"S'difference between a facilitator and a fixer anyhow?" asked Judy, side-stepping a waxy takeout carton filled with fat, mutant-looking roaches. "Seems like the same kinda thing t'me."
"Facilitators ain't career professionals. That's the distinction," said Ayako. "Facilitators, they're just people who help people shake hands. Fixers take a percentage, operate by a rulebook. Facilitators, they're casual, take a flat fee. It's more 'bout the networking for 'em."
"Gotoda, what's he networkin' for?" asked V.
"Help," said Ayako.
V's legs ached by the time they reached the twentieth floor. Despite having hyaluronic shock-absorbers fitted in her joints, high-tensile ligaments and alloy flexors woven into her natural muscle, none of those things had spared her from the pain of walking up that many fucking steps. Could've employed pain-editors to pump her full of endorphin analog, she knew, but V didn't fuck with those things, not with their mortality rates.
The stairwell wasn't air-conditioned, so all that heat from earlier had stewed, thickened the air into soup. Ayako looked fine, but that was unsurprising since most of her wasn't even 'ganic anymore. Judy, on the other hand, was mostly 'ganic and a smoker—sweat-slick and looking as if she were a wheeze away from keeling over. "Fuck," said Judy, stumbling through the door leading out of the stairwell, "we're never fuckin' doin' this again."
Ayako frowned. "Don't like it."
V looked at her. "Don't like what?"
"This," said Ayako, and sniffed the air. "It stinks."
"No shit," said V, gesturing at all the trash.
"Not what I mean. This," and she motioned at the three of them, "stinks. Sergei's up to somethin'."
"Like you said, no sweat," said V. "Scavs try anythin', we tussle."
The hallway on the other side of the door was long, lined with electronic doors, these ones sporting ancient solanoid card-readers that had once read the magnetic particles coded into the stripes of keycards. They didn't make cards like that anymore, as far as V knew; everything was digital, tied to your firmware and SID, your single identity designation.
A Myasniki hood watched them from an open doorway, smoking a cigarette, dead, tattooed flesh grafted to his cyberware. V glimpsed the room behind him, saw a woman's corpse lying on a steel slab, her body opened like a purse. A Myasniki woman in a rubber apron stood over her, digging around inside the dead woman's guts, cutting out implants and gently placing them into a plastic cooler filled with a few kilos of dry ice. Canopic jars. That was what it reminded V of.
"Meat-mill." V wondered if the apartments were even used as apartments anymore. She doubted it. Probably just a giant slaughterhouse, V thought, each room dedicated to the processing of trafficked street-meat.
"'Course it is," said Ayako. "Myasniki. It's their thing."
"They sleep here?" asked Judy, making a face.
"Why wouldn't they?" said Ayako, glancing back at her. "Scavs. Got no qualms sleepin' on mattresses next to dead people."
Sergei met them inside the last apartment on their right. He wore a dark velour tracksuit, some sports logo printed on it, and worn, dirty sneakers. His pale eyes glittered, heightening the effect of his corpse-mask. The Myasnik smiled, and it was an ugly, uncomfortable smile.
"Welcome," said Sergei, in his uneasy English. "Bodies is being in here. Money?"
Ayako produced a glossy paychip, holding it between her thumb and finger. "Right here," she said, her laser-dots trembling in the depths of her insets. "But we wanna see the bodies first, Sergei. Make sure you ain't picked 'em clean."
"Of course, yes," said Sergei, stepping aside to let them into the room.
The room contained bodies, but they weren't the bodies of the Locos. People who, V assumed, had been rolled off the streets, right into the meathouse. Their implants, heaped into coolers of dry ice, were cheap back-alley jobs, aftermarket hardware assembled in the corp-subsidiary sweat-shops of the world.
V looked at Sergei, who had a gun pointed at them, its transparent barrel sawed down, modified to chamber handloaded microsonic flechette slugs. Each slug was programmed to disintegrate, unleashing a payload of tiny darts that would, upon impact, generate certain frequencies that would incapacitate a target without harming their cyberware. Nasty Scav shit, V knew, that could throw someone into some mutant variant of a musicogenic seizure. And by the time it passed, you were already rolled, rolled right into a cooler.
Sergei stared, stood there like something carved of heavy stone. Something glitched in his oculars: quick, successive flares of red visual artifacts. "New deal," he said, licking his chapped lips. "Your parts being the deal. They are being mine to keep."
V whipped her arm in reply, unspooling the oiled monowire from its plastic housing. Chrome-glint, the razor-sharp filament arcing out, passing laterally, then whipping up and snapping down like flashes of hairline lightning, cutting into the hood as if he were made of soft, warm butter. Sergei stood there, rooted. Then tumbled apart in a delayed, slow-motion cloud of grayish-pink synth-fluids. The microsonic gun clattered to the floor.
Ayako squatted beside the dead Myasnik, running a scan. Her laser-pupils shuddered, morphed into scanlines, something faintly whirring in her head. "Bugged," she said, after a moment. Her pupils shrunk, reverted to flickering red dots. "The sporeware," she said. "Must be. Only gotta cursory read, though. My neuralware ain't programmed for firmware scans."
"Seriously?" said Judy. "All that fuckin' chrome, and you ain't kinked for deep-scans? Wild."
"Needed the storage and memory for the biochip's subroutines, my WNI, my ocular programming," explained Ayako, and stood. "If I installed a deep-scrubber, I'd bottleneck my neuralware."
"Ain't y'worried 'bout catchin' viruses?" asked V.
"My self-ICE is very good ICE," said Ayako. "Would have to be a damn subtle virus to slip through and kink my system." She shrugged. "'Sides, I got Mochi for debugging. Her antivirus soft's real preem." She looked at the pieces of what had once constituted Sergei, strewn across the dessicated tiling like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. "Caught the sporeware from those Locos, bet your asses. Jacked into their neural ports to run diags, probably. Guarantee he spread it to the Fabrika subnet." She looked at them, adding, "Don't jack into anything here."
"Wasn't plannin' on it," said V, hooking her thumbs in the belt-loops of her tight black jeans. "Anyway, the Las Palmeras subnet was trashed. They actually gotta subnet t'infect?"
"Myasniki got their own subnet," said Ayako. "They piggyback off the Phoenix Net's data-architecture. Repurposed an old subnet used to belong to one of the factories 'round here, and kinda magpied it over time. Digitales never entertained the idea of lettin' the Scavs access their stuff." She frowned, then said, "Gonna trash the Fabrika subnet while we're here."
"Wouldn't you or Val needa jack in t'do that?" asked Judy, furrowing her brow.
"I can do it," Ayako told them. "Got that self-ICE and Mochi to help me out. Just gotta jack into their mainframe, and it's here, right here in Fabrika."
"You were plannin' t'do this," said V, squinting.
"Knew they wanted to roll you," agreed Ayako, looking sheepish. "Promised he'd pay me mega for the trouble of bringin' you in. But I wasn't gonna actually take his eddies. Just needed to get into Fabrika."
"And y'ain't mentioned the plan to us 'cause why?" demanded Judy, and she shoved Ayako, a tendon in her jaw going taut as a bow-string.
"Didn't wanna risk puttin' Sergei on me," said Ayako, stumbling back and throwing up her hands. "Would've never lemme in if he thought somethin' was up, Judy. I swear, wasn't gonna make the deal. Besides, I did warn you. Told you Sergei was up to shit, back in the stairwell."
Judy looked as if she were psyching herself into throwing some punches, but V stepped between them, gently nudged the women apart. "Chill, baby," she said to Judy. "Don't think she's lyin'."
"Because I ain't. Remember those 'tumors' I'd mentioned seein' in the dataflows? Well, Fabrika was turnin' malign." Ayako kneaded the skin around her WNI, as if massaging away a migraine. "Gotta stop the sporeware 'fore it germinates into an AI. Fabrika mainframe's old, but it's still in better shape than whatever system Sam's being stored in." She paused. "Remember how I said AIs jettison spores into cyberspace as they're dyin', hopin' somethin' sticks? Sam's current hardware, it's failing, so it'll take whatever real-estate it can get."
"Wouldn't it be easier if we just let Uncle Sam upload itself here?" asked Judy. "Instead of goin' into space."
"On a subnet of the Phoenix Net? Judy, damn thing could escape into the wider Net from here." Ayako shook her head, her glossy ponytail swaying. "If we can keep Uncle Sam in the Highrider Net, it's like keepin' an ocean between us and it," she continued. "It's also weaker there, on the Highrider. It uploads itself here? Be like fighting a young, fit guy instead of an old, decrepit man. We wanna keep it an old, decrepit man. We wanna keep it on the other side of the ocean."
An alarm went off in the megabuilding. V supposed the security man had flipped a switch, operating on some predetermined emergency protocol. A man's voice came over the sound-system, sounding slow but panicked, as if he were laboring to work up that much fear through a thick haze of sedatives. V heard the Scavs rushing out into the hallway, the pops and rattles of gunfire. Someone, a woman, cried out in Yazyk, her voice tapering to a wet gurgle.
In the hallway, they saw Oiwa flowing around the Myasniki hoods like a dark jet of water, the subtle flash of metal across their necks, heads slowly rolling off stumps in delayed recognition that they were no longer attached to bodies, down to the stained polypropylene carpeting. Quick and efficient. The assholes never saw her coming, and even if they had, it wouldn't have mattered.
The onryō gracefully swayed to the side of a muzzle-flash from an open doorway, the smooth sweep of a blade across a midriff grafted with tattooed corpse-leather, the woman's torso separating from her pelvis in a spray of gore. Spaghetti-work of intestines and alloy filament glistening wetly on the carpet.
"Some interesting things going on here, Ayako-san," said the onryō, her pale, narrow face sticky with the blood of other people. "Bad data accretion. Something Militech put you up to?"
The cyberninja lunged, her blade connecting with Ayako's, the momentum grinding the carbon-steel katana down Onibi's molten edge. Ayako struck at Oiwa, but she easily parried the blow, giggling like a child at a party. "Don't have fuckin' time for your shit, Oiwa-san," said Ayako in Japanese, through gritted yaeba teeth, and she whirled, her katana riding the rotational force, clashing hard with the onryō's burnished steel.
V cut into their chambara dance, her monowire unwinding from its housing, snapping out toward the onryō like a cobra-strike. Oiwa ducked, her servos shrieking with the effort, the sharp filament slicing through the air above her head, shattering a light-strip. A fine, powdery shower of phosphors shimmered down, dusting her shoulders and head.
Oiwa sprang toward her, riding pneumatic velocity—and then something popped, the cyberninja seizing suddenly, crumpling like a malfunctioning toy. A dozen vibrating flechettes bristled in her back, like the quivering antennae of supersonic longhorned beetles. Judy stood behind her, looking vaguely shocked, Sergei's homemade microsonic gun in her hand. The onryō jerked and flipped spasmodically on the carpet at Judy's feet, her oculars glitching, artifacting into fragments of visual code.
"Won't keep her down forever," said Ayako. Then, "I gotta get to the basement."
"Whaddabout the Locos? The bodies," said V. "They in the basement, too?"
Ayako shook her head. "They were bugged, and the Myasniki ain't equipped to smooth out those kinda kinks. Probably been cremated. That's the usual protocol for unsalvageable goods." She started walking. "And anyway, don't matter. Dead. Uncle Sam can't reanimate corpses, and their hardware would've blown regardless, eventually."
"Then how'd the sporeware infect Sergei?" asked Judy. "Y'know, without blowin' him up."
"Spores take time to grow and take time to die," said Ayako, gingerly picking her way across the anatomical litter in the hallway. "Linger in the various niches of the host's firmware, dead or alive. Jack into a dead host's been bugged, it's like catchin' a communicable disease from a corpse. Sergei probably jacked into all those Locos, lookin' for one ain't kinked to shit." She turned to them, pointed in the direction of the room V had killed Sergei in. "And speaking of Sergei, grab whatever pieces you can of our old comrade and bring 'em to Buster," she instructed. "I'll take care of things here, then meet up with you guys later."
"Sure," said Judy, "but why not pull the sporeware off the mainframe? Fresher, more complete sample."
"That's the problem. Way too volatile. Fresh," said Ayako. "Risking enough as it is. Now go, get what you can of Sergei before the ninjabitch comes around." She hurried off, Onibi in her hand.
Judy glanced at Oiwa. "Should just shoot her," she advised. "Could end it, right here."
"And piss off 'Saka even more," said V, making her way down the hall. "'Sides, it don't matter, Jude. She's onryō. Just come back in another body." She glanced back at Oiwa's inert form, frowning. "And anyway," she said, "got this feelin' she's gonna be important later."
"Makes y'say that, Valerie?"
"Ayako ain't told us t'kill her."