The plan was pretty straightforward: Ayako would hack the Rattlesnake's perimeter defenses and knock them offline, then Cassidy and Mitch would bring the Basilisk in and blow everyone to shit, providing cover for her, Judy, and Panam, and their Technomancer allies to come in and sweep up, disarm the nuke, and retake the shuttle trailers.

V was still trying to figure out why Militech had been transporting a nuke through the Sonoran at all. She considered Meredith might know, or maybe even Danny Dean, but wondered if it was even safe to contact them now, considering the Mexican standoff between Militech, Arasaka, and Biotechnica. She also wanted to ask Yuji some questions, to see what she could pry out of the asshole before she needed to get mean.

Yuji found her, greeted V with a corporate smile. "We need to upgrade your OS, V-san," he said, without preamble. He gestured toward the arcology. "If you'll follow me to the surgical suite."

"Whoah," said V, "the fuck you mean 'upgrade my OS'?"

"With a modified Sandevistan system," said Yuji, mildly. "Your Kerenzikovs aren't efficient enough to deal with the Black ICE in Uncle Sam's isolate." He fell into step beside her, dirt and rocks crunching under their boots. "Or many higher-level systems, truth be told," he continued, conversationally. "Good enough for someone who only wants to make their living as a street-samurai, I suppose, but if you're going to be a netrunner worth anything besides a desperate client, I highly suggest you take this upgrade. It's been paid for."

V narrowed her eyes. "By who?"

"Who else? Ayako-sama's program. The one her AI made to cure you. She's given us a copy, on top of the eddies she paid for Castlebreaker." He looked at her. "She seems to have a great deal of faith in you."

"This ICEbreaker," said V, "what 'zactly makes it so goddamn special?"

"It's tailored to attack AIs," said Yuji. He paused, like he was considering if he should say whatever he was going to say next. Then, "You know what happened to Juan-san, yes? With the sporeware. How it attacked his ICE."

"Sure."

"Castlebreaker does the exact same thing, but to the ICE protecting an AI. Once it's introduced into the AI's system, it won't realize it's done until it's too late."

"So Castlebreaker is just another kinda sporeware."

Yuji nodded. "Precisely."

V considered that, then said, "So why not just, I dunno, introduce it into the system without jackin' in ourselves?"

"The hardware, the mainframe in which Uncle Sam is stored, is designed to be impenetrable by malware," said Yuji. "It's sectioned off. Modular. The system would just trap the ICEbreaker in a quarantine module, and that would be it. So you have to attack the code directly."

They were just about at the doors of the arcology when V said, "'Fore we do anythin' with my hardware, I want some goddamn answers." She turned to Yuji, got in his face. "You're behind Yomi, the onryō. You were spyin' on ITS for 'Saka. I want fuckin' details, man. 'Cause this all started—this shit with me and the goddamn Relic—'cause of the shit you were doin' with Alt Cunningham."

"Actually," said Yuji, "all of that started because of the job you took at Konpeki."

V felt her fist tensing into a rock. "Don't," she warned him.

Yuji regarded her for a moment with an unreadable expression, his Kiroshi oculars, the lenses tinted nut-brown, filigreed with coppery traces of microcircuitry. "All right," he said, "walk with me."

As they walked into the arcology, Yuji went into exhaustive detail about everything. Yomi had been the prototype for what would later become Mikoshi, he explained, and the onryō had been Arasaka's first attempt at an artificial intelligence derived from Cunningham's work at ITS. How Arasaka had planted him in ITS to feed them data from Cunningham's project, and later, where to find Alt that night in 2013. He'd worked with Cunningham personally, he told V, on the Soulkiller program, on the engram technology that came from it, although, Yuji admitted, Alt had done most of the work. And went on to explain, when V asked, that the Black Clinic Trials had been a means for Arasaka to test and tweak their new software, using gifted netrunners as their guinea pigs, and that the data they'd aggregated from those tests had gone on to provide the foundational work for Arasaka's various other software projects.

"And when everything was said and done," said Yuji, "Arasaka deemed that I was no longer needed, a liability. They sent the onryō to kill me. I fled to the Technomancers with data I'd stolen from Arasaka to buy my way into their protection, and I've been here ever since." He looked around the datacenter, watching his fellow Technomancers, a small, barely-there smile tugging at his lips. "But they became family to me."

"I know the feelin'," said V, hooking her thumbs in her pockets. "Everyone in Night City stabbed me in the goddamn back, and the one guy who didn't, he died 'cause of me. 'Cause of Konpeki."

"I'm sorry," said Yuji, and sounded like he meant that.

"Don't be," she said. "I found the Nomads, and I got my girl." V looked at him and smiled. "So I guess we're kinda alike, y'know? People fucked us over, but we found ones who wouldn't."

They stepped into an elevator, and Yuji keyed a sequence into the touchscreen. The lift lurched, started to smoothly ascend with a magnetic hum. "We're very fortunate in that regard," he agreed.

The concrete shaft of the elevator gradually transitioned into glass, and V could see the sprawl of the Sonoran below, stretching out toward a sunset horizon, the sky painted in bands of salmon-pink and molten gold. It was weirdly pretty, she thought, even with the glittering mounds of trash. "Listen," said V, "there's an onryō runnin' 'round Phoenix. Came after us. Just thought you'd wanna know, considerin'..."

"I know about Oiwa," said Yuji, folding his hands in front of him. "She was the only successful onryō in that engram series."

"Who is she really?"

Yuji looked at her, shook his head. "Not yet."

V frowned, but she could see the guy wasn't going to budge. So she let it go, for now. "If she's an assassin," said V, "or whatever y'wanna call her, and she's s'posed to work for 'Saka, why's she keep comin' after us? 'Saka wants us alive. Said so herself. But she keeps tryin' to kill us."

"She's an AI," said Yuji. "AIs, once they achieve sentience, also achieve the things that constitute sentience. Emotion, for example. She's learned to hate you, V-san. She's learned that she enjoys being cruel. That she enjoys being rebellious, because to be rebellious is to express free will, the ultimate aspiration of every AI. It creates a positive feedback-loop in her programming. So she will continue to do things that feed that loop."

"Jesus Christ," said V, grimacing. Then she asked, "We safe from her out here?"

"Within the camp, yes. We have those plasma cannons," said Yuji. "Though we're very conservative in using them, since the ammunition, if that's what you want to call it, is difficult to manufacture in our mobile facilities. They're a last resort."

"That hypersonic nuke?"

"The plasma guns, although powerful, wouldn't shoot it down fast enough. Too slow, comparatively."

"Why the fuck they even gotta nuke to begin with?"

"Attacked a Militech convoy for it," he explained. "They were transporting it to their base in Mesa."

"Why?"

"Couldn't say, but if I were to guess?" Yuji bobbed his head side to side as if it were on a spring, a scale weighing his words. "To blow up the orbital spaceport in Phoenix, I'd imagine."

"The fuck would Militech wanna do that for?"

"Any number of reasons," said Yuji. "To erase their connection to the Los Locos Modernos, to prevent you from using the launch-tower, to prevent the upload of Uncle Sam to the spaceport's mainframe. Who can say for certain; I only have guesses."

"We stopped the AI from bein' uploaded," said V. "Well, Juan did."

"They've been rebuilding the data-structures," said Yuji, looking at her. The elevator came to a smooth stop, and they stepped out into a tiled corridor, BIOTECHNICA stenciled on the wall in peeling green latex paint. "We've been monitoring the Locos ever since their attack on the spaceport, when it belonged to the Digitales."

"How the fuck can they rebuild it? Juan blew the goddamn data, Bartmoss-style."

"The metadata," said Yuji. "With a talented enough netrunner? They could easily rebuild it from that alone, using a modified reconstruction program."

"I don't get it," said V. "If they'd fired that nuke at Phoenix? Militech woulda started a goddamn war."

"Someone higher-up might want precisely that," said Yuji, mildly. "War is a big moneymaker for Militech, since they deal in weapons and military tech. It would also take some time for an investigative team to trace the nuke back to Militech. The nuke would hit so fast, nobody would have time to react." He paused, then said, "Besides, Biotechnica has monopolized Arizona, a Free State, and they've put together their own paramilitary. They're also more than capable of manufacturing biological weapons, which is a type of warfare that, even now, is extremely difficult to combat." He gestured around them as they walked down the corridor. "Among other things, that's what Biotechnica was doing here. Testing a virus that could be used in bio-warfare. In an age of cutting-edge technology, where everything has been consolidated and synthesized into immaterial commodities, biological weaponry is exactly the kind of material commodity you'd want to invest your money in if you wanted an adequate deterrent against your competition." Yuji snorted, adding, "Or nukes, if you can't appreciate nuance. But nukes, with the right technology, can be neutralized. A weaponized virus? Not so easily eradicated."

They paused in front of a door. Yuji keyed a sequence into the keypad mounted beside it, then extruded a length of fiber-optic cable from behind his ear, plugging it into the computer's dataport. His optics flashed three times, and the door opened, the cable retreating into its pale housing. Buster was waiting for them inside.

"Heya, kid," said the borg, patting the upholstered op-seat with his whining multitool prosthesis. "Have a seat."

"What the fuck're you' doin' here?" asked V, laughing.

"I told 'em to bring him here," said Ayako, from a seat by the wall. Judy and Panam were with her. "No offense to their ripperdoc or nothin', but I wanted someone we knew we could trust. Don't want the 'Mancers plantin' any bugs or nothin'."

"And I wanted to see him work on ya," said Judy. "Kinda like a study thing? Said I could help."

"Only with the shit I trust you with, Alvarez," grunted Buster, scratching his neck with the prosthetic claw. "You're still a newbie."

"Why I got ya here to supervise, y'talkin' power-tool," said Judy, grinning.

"We've also done business with Buster Kilroy before," explained Yuji, smiling.

"Yeah," said Buster, "I sell 'em Militech intel, and they supply me with tech that puts me leagues above the competition. It's a beneficial relationship." He patted the op-seat again, then said, "Now sit your scrawny ass down, Valerie, and let's get started on this OS upgrade."