The modded Sandevistan OS they'd fitted her with was unlike anything V had ever experienced before. All V did was hit that synaptic switch, and it was like the space-time continuum shattered : the world slowed to singularity as she juked and slewed around the Rattlesnakes posted around the warehouse, all of them oblivious to her presence, like she was fucking invisible. And to the naked eye, V was invisible: a run in the reality-fabric.

The assholes didn't even see her shoot; there was a delay, a lag in reality, and then time caught up to the shot, the Rattlesnakes' heads blowing apart, their bodies surrendering to gravity as the laws of physics reasserted themselves. She stood in the dusty, sand-scoured doorway of the warehouse now, her limbs tingling, vertebrae throbbing with dull, arrhythmic pulses of pain. Buster had warned her not to push herself too hard, at least not at first; it took a while for a Sandevistan to settle, he'd told her, because the shit was mil-grade, an OS built for soldiers who'd been trained from bootcamp and onward to handle all that horsepower without falling apart. But fuck, she thought, it felt so fucking good.

Judy jogged up behind her, gawking at all the bodies lying around, looking like someone who'd been slapped across the face by God Almighty. "That OS is fuckin' nova," she said finally, recomposing herself. "Holy shit, the preemest . What the fuck did Buster modify it with? A fuckin' scramjet engine?"

"Fuckin' feels like it," laughed V, making her way into the warehouse.

A group of Rattlesnakes were inside, but Judy took them out with The Chaos, frying their hardware with a sweep of microsonic flechettes. Their skin cooked as the microsonic frequencies overclocked their chrome, the reek of burnt electronics and fried pork hanging heavy in the stale air, and they crumpled, charred hunks of teppanyaki meat sizzling on the concrete griddle of the floor.

It didn't take them long to find the nuke; the thing was pretty fucking conspicuous, racked up on a steel framework and secured by mag-clamps, dead-center of the room. The bomb was long and tapered, like a giant steel cigar, with stabilizing fins on one end of it, a nuclear warhead on the other. V ran an ocular scan, and her Kiroshis highlighted the access point she'd need to jack into to access the bomb's isolate within the Rattlesnake subnet.

"Wish me luck, babe," she said, grimacing.

Judy kissed her, and she kissed her like she'd meant it, tongue and all, before pulling back and saying, "Y'got this, Valerie." She smiled, stroked V's cheek, her thumb running along the seam of her facial implant. "Chill, okay? I got your back." Judy kissed her again, then said, "C'mon, calabacita. Jack in, kill this fuckin' bomb, then we meet with Yuji and the 'Mancers and get our ride to the Crystal Palace." She ran her black-tipped fingers through V's hair, tucking it behind her ear. "Easy shit, right? You been in worse sitches."

V smiled. "I dunno what I did t'deserve ya."

"Bein' hot," said Judy, grinning.

V snorted a laugh. "Fuck, is that all I am to ya? A pretty face?"

"Pretty much."

V gave her a playful shove, and they both laughed. "God," said V, "sometimes I can't stand ya, Jude."

"Bullshit," said Judy, beaming. Her tone went sing-song. "You love me. Can't live without me."

"Cryin' shame, that," joked V, grinning. "Shoulda left your ass in Night City."

"You'd miss my ass too much," said Judy, batting her eyelashes.

"Your ass is fantastic," agreed V. She heaved a sigh, then looked at the bomb. "Fuck." She took a deep breath, slowly exhaled. "Guess," she muttered, hauling herself toward the platform, her boots feeling like blocks of cement, "I should get started."

V heaved herself onto the platform, glancing back down at Judy, who flashed her a thumbs-up. "You got this," she assured V, smiling.

"Wish I felt so confident," she mumbled, extruding her personal link and connecting into the access point. She would have felt better if she'd brought a cyberdeck, but V hadn't owned one in a while, not since upgrading her neuroware. She made a mental note to change that, once they were back in Phoenix. Assuming, V thought with some trepidation, she managed not to blow them all to shit.

Reality dissolved behind a cascade of data, and she was falling down the rabbit-hole of the Net, into the colorless void. It was always an unpleasant sensation, like that sudden whorl of vertigo and lightheadedness right before you passed out, and she tasted ozone in the back of her throat. She rode the gridline down to the isolate's gateway, which, in the non-place of the Net, rendered as a solid wall of something that approximated the texture of anthracite.

Mochi was waiting for her there. "Black ICE," she meowed, padding over to V and dropping onto her haunches beside her avatar's foot. V reached down automatically and scratched the tiny cat's head, biofeedback giving the sensation of warm, soft fur. "Ayako-sama sent me to help you, V-san," said the cat, gazing up at her, code swirling in her eyes like tumbles of snow. "This is only the first layer of ICE. Once it's cracked, the system will launch an attack program. And from there? Be glad you have that modified Sandevistan." Her ear twitched, swiveling like a fuzzy sat-dish tuned to the dog-whistle frequencies of cyberspace. "It's almost time to crack it," she told V. "Got to get the timing right."

"Shouldn't you be helpin' Ayako?" asked V, staring at the little white cat.

"I am. Remember, V-san? Data partitions. Subroutines." Mochi paused, then said, "Prep your ICEbreaker."

"I don't think I got somethin' powerful enough for this, Mochi."

"You have a copy of Castlebreaker," said the cat. "They loaded it into your hardware while you were getting upgraded. You can access it on your CLI."

"I thought Castlebreaker was meant for AIs," said V.

"What do you think this is, V-san? An AI. Not a very advanced one, but an AI nonetheless."

"You're fuckin' tellin' me Militech has an AI loaded on this goddamn thing?"

"Very minor one, V-san. A Dedicated Heuristic Controller."

She frowned. "Related to Uncle Sam?"

"A subroutine," meowed Mochi. "Militech didn't entirely discard the AI's code when they locked it away. Its calculative abilities were too advanced, too valuable, to discard. So they used derivatives of its code in a lot of their experimental weapons and tech." The cat paused, her ear twitching. Then she suddenly said, "Now! Here." Mochi lifted her paw, tracing barely-visible seams in the ICE.

V pulled up her CLI, scrolling through the executables until she found the ICEbreaker. She launched the command: a bright red katana rendered in her hand, its polygonal framework textured in high-resolution molten steel. "Onibi," she said, and laughed, because of course Ayako would fucking modify the code like that, her own personal touch. V swung at the seams in the ICE, the katana's blade carving out the seam-pattern until she'd made her ingress, riding the gridline through the hole in the code-fabric, into the second layer.

Something broke away from the Black ICE, then: several solid black spheres splintered off the ICE, hurtling toward her like a barrage of cannonballs. But the upgrades she'd gotten made maneuvering around them easy: split-second synaptic reflexes weaving her through the attack program, jumping her from gridline to gridline as though she were a skater grinding rails. One sphere came close to derezzing her, but V whipped around, cut through it with Castlebreaker, shattering the thing into a million jagged shards.

Mochi was just ahead of her on the gridline, impervious to the attack soft; V guessed the program wasn't targeting her because she, too, was an AI. "It's about to get more complicated, V-San," said the cat. "Stay sharp!"

She opened her mouth to ask for some elaboration, but stopped when she saw the second wall of Black ICE hurtling toward them, breaking apart and coming together again like the shapes in a kaleidoscope. If she hit that fucking thing, V thought, she was dead, flatlined. She needed to time this right, wait for a gap large enough to slide through.

V readied Castlebreaker, white-knuckling its hilt, counting down.

Now .

She hurtled through, struck the ICE before it could close around her, blade slicing through the code-fabric. More spheres broke off from the Black ICE, speeding toward her, but the Sandevistan carried her around and through the system's hailstorm assault, her lower latency allowing her to smoothly and easily outmaneuver the higher latency of the attack program.

"V-san," said Mochi, "just a few more layers before we're at the core!"