V could see the hoverbikes coming in hot, their jets propelling them across the drifts of trash like airboats. "Aw, fuck," she said, and before she could tell Panam to haul ass, she was already whipping the truck out from behind the trashed AV and speeding down the track behind Carol.

They could hear the distant whoops and hollers of the Rattlesnakes as they closed in on them. A rag-tag bunch dressed in tattered moto-suits of vat-grown snakeskin, all of them wielding chains and guns, their hair bright fluorescent crests, or long and matted with grease and grime, skin baked to leather by the hot, unrelenting desert sun. Some of their hoverbikes were decorated with bleached human bones: skulls and tibias, femurs and ribs. One of the Rattlesnakes even had a woman's shrunken head mounted between their handlebars, a floodlight in her mouth.

A distant boom, and the hoverbikes vanished in a humming missile-cloud of fire and dust. The Basilisk roared along their right, its propulsion system kicking up a cloud of rocks and garbage as it surfed several feet above the drifts, its jets shrieking. Over the comms, Mitch said, "Ain't all of 'em. More comin'."

"Deckhead," said Panam to Ayako, "jack into my onboard computer and connect to the turret." She glanced at V. "And V—"

"On it," interrupted V, already climbing out the window. She was small, able to squeeze through the gap without much effort, arm extended, finger squeezing the Malorian's trigger. The gun bucked in her hand, would have bruised her wrist if it hadn't been for her cobalt-chromium ligaments. A Rattlesnake's skull dissolved into red mist, his hoverbike fishtailing, then spinning like a top and smashing, with meteoric force, into a heap of junked vehicles.

V hugged the side of the truck as it swerved to avoid gunfire. Above, the turret rattled out a rejoinder, took out a couple of the hoverbikes before they could glide into V's orbit and pulp her skull with weighted chains. She swung into the truck-bed, gritty wind scouring her skin, and unspooled her monowire just as another hoverbike sped toward the truck, its breakneck momentum carrying it right into her razor-wire. The rider's head flew off the stump of his neck in a violent spurt of arterial blood, his bike screaming onward, pitching the headless Rattlesnake into a dune of corroded steel.

More Rattlesnakes came, and V found herself falling into a kind of egg-slicer dance, weaving out hair-line flashes of cold steel filament, mincing the bikers into chunks like so much meat. Their bikes struck the trash-drifts, plumes of black smoke rising up from the mounds of junk like gravemarkers.

Another barrage of fire from the turret took out the stragglers, and those who tried to retreat, haul ass back to Painted Springs, were taken out by the Basilisk in a huge, glorious cloud of fire.

V snapped her monowire back into its casing, then swung herself into the backseat of the truck, caked in sand. "You're a fuckin' gonk," Judy told her, and she smacked V's arm, not hard, but enough to let V know that she was emphatically punctuating that statement.

"They went away, ain't they?" said V, grinning.

Ayako disconnected from the onboard computer, her personal link sliding smoothly back into its housing behind her ear, and looked back at her. "Looked like you were enjoyin' yourself."

"Wouldn't you?"

"Got me there," said Ayako, and grinned. "Been itchin' to use Onibi."

"That would not have been advised," meowed a little voice from the computer. "Suboptimal choice when the turret was right there, Ayako-sama."

"Who the fuck is that?" asked Panam.

"I'm Mochi," said Mochi. "Ayako-sama's—"

"You put a fucking AI in my truck?" hissed Panam, scowling at Ayako.

"Not in your truck, Panam-san," said Mochi's little cat-voice. "Your onboard systems would have fried if Ayako-sama had downloaded my software onto your truck's harddrive. Not that it could have handled me to begin with. No, I'm assisting via Ayako-sama's personal link." The AI paused, then said, "I cleaned up your onboard system to the best of my ability while Ayako-sama was connected. It was a mess. Insultingly outdated."

"She disconnected. How the fuck are you still talking?" asked Panam.

"Wireless link," said Mochi. "Less stable than a hardwired connection, so not ideal for more intensive tasking, but fine enough."

Panam glanced between Ayako and the computer, hands tightening on her steering wheel. "What the fuck," was all she said, and they drove behind Carol in silence.

It was getting late. After an hour, maybe two, they stopped at some shit-hole called The Old Saguaro Motel and Bar to book rooms for the night (Panam was tired, and kept insisting she needed to check her truck for any tampering). The Technomancers were pretty deep in the desert, in an old Biotechnica research facility called Twin Mesas, which was still miles away.

There were only two other people staying at the motel that night: a Nomad from the Jodes, the other a woman heading to Night City to visit family in Santo Domingo; but they mostly kept to themselves. Mitch, Carol and Cassidy had gone into the bar, a squat brickwork building on the end of the motel-strip, neon stuttering in its windows. An ancient hologram of a cartoon cowboy flickered in and out of existence on its projector unit beside the door, attempting to beckon people inside the bar ("Howdy, pardners," said the hologram to nobody, in its parody of cowboy-speak, "how 'bout you mosey on in and wet your whistle with some of our fine Arizona 'shine? Tonight is Two-For-One-Tuesday at the Old Saguaro Motel and Bar").

The land surrounding The Old Saguaro Motel and Bar was wide and flat, carpeted in a mulch of plastic and steel. "This place really is the fuckin' pits," said Ayako. She was walking with them around the parking lot so the three of them could stretch their legs after the long ride from Phoenix. "Ain't nothin' around. Nothin'. Last town we blew through was just a bunch of trailers and a strip-mall from a century ago. What was it called?"

"Thirsty," said V, helpfully.

"Who fuckin' names a town Thirsty?"

"Whoever built it really wanted some water," said Judy, grinning.

Ayako snorted. "Out here? Probably." She gestured toward the desert. "Whole lot of nothing. Includin' water."

"Arizona was havin' a water-crisis 'bout a century ago," said V, remembering something she'd read on the Net. "Like it was literally runnin' out, the water. And you hadda buncha assholes from Saudi Arabia buildin' alfalfa farms out here. So they were suckin' up all the groundwater, 'cause alfalfa needs a lot of water to grow, and shippin' it back to their country."

"Probably why barely anyone lives outside Arizona's major cities," said Ayako.

"No kiddin'," said V. "The water out here is imported, and most of it's tied up in the cities. Why it's so goddamn expensive." She paused, looked at Ayako. "So," she said, after a moment, "what's the plan when we reach the 'Mancers?"

"I buy my ICEbreaker and a ticket on their shuttle," said Ayako, and paused, as if hesitating to say the next thing. Then, like someone ripping off a band-aid, she said, "And we hafta take the spaceport back from the Los Locos Modernos."

"You're kiddin', right?" said Judy, staring at her. "We barely got our asses outta there the first time."

"How else are we gonna launch the shuttle, Judy?"

"Don't the 'Mancers have a fuckin' launch-tower?" asked V.

"No," said Ayako, "they don't. They rent 'em when they need 'em from the spaceports."

"Fuckin' great," said V, and she sighed, gazing out into the dark desert.

"Relax," said Ayako, "we'll make it work."

V looked at her. "And how do ya s'pose that?"

"Dunno yet," said Ayako. "But I'll figure it out, don't worry."