The Surveyors came in hot on Painted Springs, weaving between turret-fire before dropping a scrambler to fuck with their electronics. Gave Ayako enough time to jack into their network before the redundant systems kicked in, and wirelessly slip through their firewall to disable their perimeter guns, allowing the 'Mancers to take two of the AVs down into the camp. The third AV stayed airborne, circling the camp like a vulture, pounding Painted Springs with suppressing fire from its neuroturrets, while the Basilisk came blasting through the gate, turbines screaming, crumpling the carbon-steel like cheap aluminum.

V hopped out of the AV, Ayako, Judy and Panam right behind her. Some Rattlesnake came at her with an electrified manriki chain, but she ducked and fired the Malorian, blew a ragged hole into the guy's chest. He wheezed once, then toppled back. His buddy, a huge graftee whose real body was lost under swells of synthetic muscle, tried to grab her, but V side-stepped the clumsy move, Panam's buckshot dissolving his skull into red mist.

Painted Springs, on the inside, looked like an unfinished housing development, the cheap kind where corpos put up fiberglass or concrete prefabs instead of actual houses to cut costs, then rented them out at exorbitant prices to the trashpickers, what people in Phoenix called the rural denizens of the Trash Pan. She'd also heard the term peccaries to describe the people out here, but V had no idea what a peccary was, only that there had been a lot of them once around Phoenix.

It was also a fucking meathouse inside the Rattlesnakes' stronghold. Like a scav-haunt, but so much worse. And only worse because the Rattlesnakes seemed to enjoy creating art out of the corpses they collected. V saw some kind of sculpture made out of human bones and decomposing bodies, with a woman's severed head, fresh enough that she'd probably only been dead for an hour or two, piked atop of it like some kind of fucked-up cake-topper. Another sculpture was just an elongated human spine—assembled out of multiple human spines, V realized, and lashed together with corroded wire—with a man's head serving as the snake's skull.

"Jesus fuckin' Christ," said Judy, looking and sounding queasy. "This place makes fuckin' Fabrika look like a resort."

"The Rattlesnakes," said Yuji, fingering the trigger of his smart rifle, "are monsters. Which is why Militech would have had no issue convincing the public that they, and all Nomads, were the true masterminds behind an attack on Phoenix."

Behind them, the Technomancers who'd been aboard their AV came trooping out in the Centaurs, trading gunfire with some Rattlesnakes who'd hunkered down behind the stacked, rusty chassis of cars, their bullets ricocheting off the Centaurs' massive shields. Couple of the Rattlesnakes even caught some of those ricochets in the head, and V, after seeing the shit in their camp, couldn't have been happier to see the scum-suckers get theirs.

"We needa find the nuke," said V. "Once we flip that manual switch, we can look for the shuttle."

"Don't worry about the shuttle, V-san," said Yuji, turning his visor on her. "Myself and my fellow Technomancers will find the trailers. Just locate the bomb and disable it."

Yuji went ahead of them, raising his rifle and firing shots at the Rattlesnakes from behind the Centaurs, the smart-bullets zigzagging through the air and around their cover, blowing the Raffens into fleshy chunks. Lead-azide smartshells, thought V, impressed. The Technomancers really didn't skimp on firepower. His fellow Technomancers joined him on the back-rank, advancing like a shieldwall, with the Centaurs as their shields.

Mitch's voice came over her neurolink. "Val, me and Cassidy are gonna sweep 'round the perimeter. Assholes are bringin' reinforcements from some smaller camp out east someplace."

"Thanks, Mitch," she replied. "Just be careful."

"Always," chuckled Mitch, and he cut the link.

Above them, the one airborne Surveyor banked, volleying down another round of neurogunfire that broke the Rattlesnake ranks, scattering them like a swarm of roaches, funneling them into the open so the Centaurs and the Technomancer soldier-boys could pick them off.

Ayako said, "They're keepin' the bomb on the far side of Painted Springs."

"How the hell do you know that?" asked Panam.

"She can wirelessly jack," said V. "Been scannin' their network since before we landed. Probably hacked a camera, or someone's oculars."

"Thought you could do that, too," said Panam.

"Very limited," said V. "Don't gotta preem WNI like Ayako does. Or an AI t'help me multitask."

They made their way across the encampment, toward a massive storehouse on the far side.

Judy erased a couple Rattlesnakes in a humming cloud of microsonic flechettes, the shells' frequencies tweaked to blow hardware. Their chrome, what little the assholes had of it, popped and fizzled, burning so hot their skin cooked from the inside-out, crumbling away like chicharrones. Ayako took out another who came at them on a hoverbike, flowing to the side and angling Onibi toward his neck, letting his momentum carry him right into the blade, the molten edge slicing smoothly through the ligaments and bone. The bike bucked and screamed as the guy's headless body weighed down the clutch and turbo-thrusters, pushing the anti-gravs to their absolute brink, and exploded against the broadside of an unfinished house.

The storehouse was a modular steel structure, like a warehouse-sized shipping container. The thick layer of rust and weather-damage suggested the thing had been sitting there for a decade at least, its robotic security system long-dead. The Arasaka logo was baked on the side of the storehouse, mostly scoured away by years of relentless Sonoran sandstorms.

"Ain't known 'Saka did these housin' projects," said Judy.

"They do anythin' makes 'em money," said Ayako, squatting behind a huddle of rocks and saguaros, keying a sequence on her cyberdeck. She jacked her personal into the deck's neurointerface port. "Ain't really profitable, buildin' out here in the desert, so they hauled off. No real money to be made. Peccaries ain't got the eddies for their rental rates, so what little presence 'Saka's got in Arizona, they contained it to Phoenix."

"What're y'doin'?" asked V, eyeing her.

"Runnin' my net-nuke," she told her. "Needed a quiet spot, 'cause once I'm under, I'm under ."

"What 'bout the actual nuke?" asked V.

"You guys go in there, hit the manual switch," said Ayako. "Uploaded all you need to know, and sendin'—now."

ACCEPT flashed in bright monospace across V's oculars, and she did. The data downloaded, opened up on her Kiroshis, showing her the hypersonic's specs, the location of the manual override, the exact sequence she'd need to bypass the ICE and shut off the nuke's isolate core. "Whoah, whoah, whoah, wait," said V, a lump catching in her throat. "I gotta jack into this fuckin' thing?"

"Into its isolate," said Ayako. "Why we can't shut it down from the Rattlesnakes' subnet. Only one access point, choom, and it's right on the bomb."

"Why the fuck do I gotta do it?"

"'Cause I gotta net-nuke to handle," said Ayako. "Besides," she continued, "you gotta new OS. You'll be fine."

"Won't the goddamn net-nuke wipe it out?" asked V.

"No," said Ayako, "it won't. What part of isolate ain't you understood, Val?"

Panam said, "You can do it, Valerie. I know you can." She glanced at Ayako. "I'll stay with Ayako and make sure she's okay while she's jacked in."

V sighed. "I wish I had half the fuckin' faith in myself as people seem t'have in me." She rubbed at her face, then said, "If I fuck up, that's it. We're dead. Gone."

"You gotta believe in yourself more," said Ayako. "Remember how you saved our asses back at that PMR station?" She grinned. "Just find that sense of urgency again."