The Sonoran looked like a giant landfill: twisted metal and melted plastic glittered in the hot sun, saguaros jutting up from the drifts of trash, plastic bags fluttering on their spiky branches like flags of surrender. The roads, like most roads outside of the cities, were cracked and sun-baked, tufted with weeds and scruffy chollas. Occasionally, rising up from the sea of garbage and rust, V could see the squat, hazy shapes of hills and mesas, rusted trailers and cars strewn down their sides.
They were in the Quadra, and Ayako was driving. They were headed for the Aldecaldos camp to rendezvous with Panam and the others, where they planned to discuss the border-crossing out of the PMA, the Phoenix Metropolitan Area, and their subsequent route to the Technomancer encampment.
"Ain't nothin' out here," said Judy from the backseat, watching the bone-dry landscape blur past her window. "But I guess s'how it always is these days. Cities're the only places anyone cares 'bout."
"Lots of ghost towns," agreed Ayako, watching the road. A freight-truck advertising Valdez Fine Mexican Foods was trundling in front of them, HOW'S MY DRIVING beaming out from its license plate in hologram. "But there are people who still live out here," she said, hitting her blinker to pass the truck. The driver flipped them off. "Tiny blue-collar towns that are, despite everything workin' against 'em, still holdin' on."
"Ain't nothin' 'round Night City anymore," said V, in the passenger seat. She extended her middle-finger at the trucker without any real rancor; it was just the expected protocol of the road, in the same way people expected to be blessed whenever they sneezed. "All those towns died off. 'Cept this one tiny place just over the Night City border. Stopover for a lotta Nomads comin' into the city."
"I know the place," said Ayako. "Heard the Sheriff's a real asshole."
The Aldecaldos camp was forty minutes outside of Phoenix, near a spit of a town called Chuparosa: a huddle of rusting mobile homes, a CHOOH2 station and service garage, a Taco Ted's, a diner called The Chuckwagon, and a franchised convenience store called Curly Bill's.
They drove into Chuparosa, then turned off onto a dirt road near The Chuckwagon. The road slithered a few miles north across the trash-drifts, past several Biotechnica solar-farms fenced in by razor-wire and chain-link, their perimeters patrolled by drones and robots. Ayako parked the Quadra just outside the Aldecaldos encampment. The camp sat in the shadow of a defunct wind-farm, a cluster of trailers and weather-stained canvas tents squatting among the saguaros and trash, a chugging mobile CHOOH2 generator providing power to the camp's equipment.
Panam was the first to greet them when they stepped out of the car. She wore a dark racer jacket, roper boots, and dusty jeans. Her mirrored sunglasses reflected the glittering trashscape of the Sonoran. "Surprised your Quadra made it out here," she said to Ayako. "Looks a little too fancy for the desert."
"I've modified it extensively," said Ayako, smiling, patting the dusty hood of the car as if it were a beloved pet.
"You made it out here, so I suppose you did," said Panam, chuckling. She glanced at V. "Sorry I couldn't get through to you sooner. Something weird has been going on with the comms."
V thunked the car door shut and looked at Panam, furrowing her brow. "What kinda weird we talkin'?"
"Lots of interference," said Panam. "We thought it might have been something on our end, but Carol couldn't find anything wrong with the equipment."
"Did, uh… did anyone talk to you?" asked Judy, dragging the back of her hand across her forehead. "On the wire, I mean."
"I thought I heard a voice once," said Panam, uncertainly. "In the static. But Carol said it was just my brain looking for patterns in the sound." She paused, noticing the micropore bandage taped across Judy's midriff. "What happened?"
"Got hurt," said Judy. "But I'll be okay, Pan. Had a good ripperdoc patch me up."
"Still think you should swing by Hutch's trailer and have him look at it."
"I was told I ain't s'posed to touch it," said Judy. "But sure, I can have Hutch look at it, it'll make ya feel better."
"It would," said Panam.
"Fine, fine. On my way over to Hutch's right now, mamá ."
"Carol, Taco, and a few others are on a supply run right now, over in Rancho Los Pozos. Slightly bigger town west of Chuparosa; it actually has a store." Panam looked at Ayako, then said, "The others want to meet you. Mitch, Cassidy—the rest of the clan."
"You wanna size me up," said Ayako.
"Of course we do," said Panam. "Our clan is cautious about who we work with. And we don't have a happy history with Biotechnica. Our former leader, Saul, nearly sold us out to your corporation." She paused, looked Ayako over again, then said, "We also know you were a former employee of Arasaka. We also don't have a happy history with them."
"I got nothin' to hide." Ayako folded her arms, the canary yellow leather of her pozer jacket creaking softly. "Biotechnica's who I'm contracted to right now," she said. "But after that shit I pulled at Fabrika? Not for much longer." She paused, her mouth pressing into a thin, hard line. "And," she continued, "I wasn't a willin' employee of Arasaka. At least I don't think I was."
"You don't think you were?" said Panam, scrutinizing Ayako, her pale reflection twinned in the lenses of her sunglasses.
"I don't remember much from my time with Arasaka from before the Relic Project," said Ayako, sounding almost apologetic. "Memory's fuzzy between my childhood in Chiba-11 and the Relic Project. Full of holes, blanks. I know I ain't wanted to help 'em build that fuckin' biochip, so that's gotta count for somethin'. Right?"
Panam looked vaguely concerned. Sweat beaded on her smooth, tanned forehead. "Well," she said, finally, "I guess that does count for something. Still, the clan wants to meet you. So come on, follow me, deckhead. We don't bite."
The three of them walked toward the canteen trailer, trash crunching underfoot, dust hanging in the air like gunsmoke. Ayako said to Panam, "So how'd you find all that out 'bout me? Val?"
"Yes," said Panam. "But also no. A lot of our information came from Carol Emeka, our netrunner and techie. She knew you by reputation, dug up what she could."
"Dunno if I should be flattered or concerned," said Ayako.
"Nothing to be concerned about," Panam assured her, hooking her thumbs in the pockets of her racer jacket, face shiny with sweat from the oppressive hell-heat of the cloudless Arizona afternoon. "We just wanted to get a picture of who you are. Wasn't much data to go on, however. You're practically a ghost."
"I like to keep it that way," said Ayako, smoothly kicking aside a mutant-looking bark scorpion with the toe of her tabi exojack. It curled into itself, sailing in a perfect arc and landing in a heap of moldering cardboard boxes stuffed with greasy bubble-wrap and sheets of sun-bleached microfiche.
There were plastic tents tacked to the sides of the canteen trailer. Panam pushed aside the flap, and they stepped into the arctic purr of an air-conditioner someone had rigged up from a huge plastic cooler, a fan, and PVC piping, into the smell of humanity and old plastic. People chatted around aluminum fold-out tables, drinking and playing cards, or drinking and watching sports on a portable television bolted into a makeshift framework in the corner of the canteen.
Panam got them cold beers, and they found a table. Judy joined them soon after and said, "Yo, they got air-conditionin' in here now? Fuckin' nova. Also, Hutch says I'm fine. Told you it was nothin' to worry 'bout, Pan."
"Just wanted to be sure," said Panam, smiling.
Mitch came into the canteen a few minutes later with Cassidy. Mitch was tall and built like a soldier, with dark, thinning hair, and a receding hairline that made his forehead look too big for his face. He wore grease-stained coveralls, and sported a 3D-printed prosthesis that had been military-standard a decade ago. "So this is the deckhead I been hearin' 'bout," he said, making his way over to their table. Panam handed him a beer as he sat down. "The one goin' after Uncle Sam."
"You know 'bout it?" asked Ayako.
"Little bit? I was a panzerboy. Used a very stripped-down version of its predictive programming in the Basilisks durin' the Unification War," said Mitch, the pores in his scruffy face dark with dirt. "But beyond that? Just a whole lot o' rumors, most of which sounded like bullshit to me."
Cassidy was taller and lankier than Mitch, somewhere north of sixty but south of seventy-five. His hair and mustache were gray, face sunbaked and weathered like a rockface that had been unevenly eroded by the elements. He wore a battered cattleman hat, and talked with a slight drawl. A sharp tang of metallic aftershave wafted off him. "So you're Kunoichi? Pleasure to make your acquaintance." Cassidy tipped his hat to Ayako, somehow making the gesture look more genteel than cringey, then took it off his head and set it down on the table, running a hand back through his short, stiff cut of gray hair. "Was a mighty fine thing you did for Valerie, fixin' her bike," he told Ayako. "That machine means the world to her."
"Mitch and I put it together," said Panam, grinning. "But yes, we couldn't have done it if she hadn't paid for the parts."
"Was the least I could do," said Ayako, and sipped her beer. The beer was some kind of Mexican brand V didn't recognize, a picture of a donkey printed on the label. "Val's a good choom, and I try to do right by my chooms."
A moment later, Carol ducked into the canteen and sat down at their table between Mitch and Cassidy. She unrolled a holosheet, the kind they used in screamsheets, and on it was a map of Arizona.
"Have the route figured out, I think." Carol was a soft-spoken woman with a shag of black hair. She was broad and stout, her skin sun-browned and sparingly tattooed. Her clothes were dusty from the road. She regarded Ayako blandly from behind her sunglasses. "Good to finally put a face to the netrunner Kunoichi," she said, accepting a beer from Mitch. "I'm familiar with your work."
"Ayako," said Ayako. She grinned, then said, "But you're familiar, huh?"
Carol nodded. "Quite the Net-anarchist, you," she said. "You and the Las Digitales have been taking subnets from the corpos, annexing them."
"What?" said Panam, looking at Carol.
"Taking territory back from the corporations, one subnet at a time," said Carol to Panam, her eyes still lingering on Ayako. "The FreeNet. RogueNet. Whatever you'd like to call it. Took quite the blow when they lost that datacenter in Las Palmeras, but it seems someone has managed to salvage some of the data, move it." She smoothed and gently flattened out the holosheet, then said, "But, ah, we're here to talk about the route." She took a lightpen from behind her ear, tracing out a route in bright digital green on the map. "Here," she said, "it's an old smuggling route that circumvents the PMA's border. But there's a problem."
"Let's hear it," grunted Cassidy.
"It cuts through Rattlesnakes' territory," said Carol, frowning. "Granted, we've already dealt with the shitheads. But they've taken over a ghost town out on this route, a place formerly known as Painted Springs." Carol circled a cluster of houses on the map, then tapped twice to magnify the sat-view of the buildings. The place, from what V could tell, looked like a fortress, and was decked out like one: salvaged drones and robots, high walls built of compacted scrap topped with shitloads of razor-wire, a comms-tower, mobile sat-dishes. Probably robbed a couple of Militech convoys, V decided, if they were tooled up like that.
"How close does this route run to Painted Springs?" asked V.
Carol tapped the lightpen a few times until the map-view reset. "Fifteen miles," she said. "Far enough they won't have a visual. We've got scramblers to throw off their scanners, too. But they have scouts riding around on hovercycles to navigate the trash, so expect trouble."
"Going to keep our convoy small," said Panam, finishing her beer. She licked her chapped lips. "Mitch and Cassidy are going to back us up in the Basilisk. I'll take you, Ayako, and Judy. Carol's going to take her own car; my truck can't fit all of us." She swept her eyes over them as though she expected someone to object to her plan, and when nobody did, Panam continued, "We'll set out at dusk. Nighttime is our best chance to slip by Painted Springs without a conflict, but their scouts have floods on their hovercycles. So as Carol said, expect trouble if they get too close to our position."
"Don't worry 'bout the hovercycles," said Ayako. "They get too close, Val and I can quickhack 'em."
"Even so," said Panam, "we're still taking the Basilisk. Just in case."
"No complaints there," said Ayako. "Be interestin' to see a Basilisk in action. Only ever seen 'em on the Net, in the vids."
"It ain't much to look at," Mitch told her. "It's old. Older'n Cassidy here." He snickered, gently elbowing the older man in the ribs. "Ain't that right, Cassidy?"
"Damn right," said the old man, grinning under his large mustache. Cassidy looked at Ayako. "So, if you don't mind my askin', why the Technomancers? I know it's got somethin' to do with that AI. But what?"
"They gotta ICEbreaker I need," said Ayako. She added, "And a shuttle."
"A shuttle?" said Mitch, squinting at her. "The hell you need a shuttle for?"
"To get to the Crystal Palace," said Ayako. "That's where they're keepin' Uncle Sam."
"In a glorified fuckin' casino?" said Mitch.
"Not just a casino," said Ayako. "It's a city, a resort, a playground for proscribed tech."
"Why's this matter to you so much?" asked Cassidy. "The AI, I mean."
"A loaded question requirin' a loaded answer," said Ayako. "But suffice it to say? Better off gone, that AI. Trust me."
"Can't say I like how oblique you're being," said Panam, frowning, watching Ayako over the rim of her mirrored sunglasses. "But Val trusts you, so I'm willing to reserve my judgment for now."
"It's chill, Pan," said Judy, who'd been quietly observing the conversation until that point. "She's a choom."
Panam didn't seem convinced. She pushed her sunglasses back up the bridge of her nose. "Hope you're right, Judy."