There were, it turned out, three more layers to go, each an infinitely more complex pattern than the last. But the Sandevistan carried her down the gridlines, smooth and easy, threading her between derezzing spheres, Castlebreaker carving through the code-fabric of the Black ICE like the stuff was script-kiddy code.
She was coming up on the final layer of the isolate's defenses, and from V's perspective, the thing looked like a shifting mandala of ICE-fragments, providing very few openings for her to slide through. Not that she really needed to slide through anything, she thought; Castlebreaker, if V timed it right, would smash right through the code-fabric like a sledgehammer to ceramic.
Counting to herself, she readied the katana render—a real flash graphical asset, the kind she normally eschewed in her netrunning to free up memory, keep her latency smooth, but Ayako had optimized the fuck out of it—and swung the blade, slashing through the Black ICE, riding the gridlines down into the isolate's core, jagged fragments of data wheeling around her like so many slivers of dark glass.
The core of the isolate displayed as a cluster of nodes and vertices arranged in a vaguely humanoid wireframe render. The DHC, she assumed.
The derezzing spheres had abandoned their pursuit; she'd reached the core, embedded herself too deep in the firmware that the attack program could no longer sus her out as a threat; if the system wanted her gone at this point, it would need some preem anti-rootkit soft to extract her without damaging the DHC.
The DHC was pretty rudimentary, far as AIs went; its simplistic armature told her as much. "It has the intelligence of a robovac," meowed Mochi, suddenly beside her. "But a robovac that's highly efficient at calculating risk-assessment."
"Whaddya mean?" asked V, peering down at the little bobtail avatar.
"The DHC can assess potential targets on the fly, pick the most or least damaging in accordance with whatever parameters it was programmed with." Mochi looked up at her. "Basically, V-san," the AI continued, "once the bomb's launched, the DHC can course-correct in real-time, make rudimentary decisions to mitigate or maximize casualties."
"So what's the point of havin' parameters if it can choose what it basically wants t'do?"
"When you're given instructions," said the cat, "do you follow them to the letter, or do you make decisions based on your observations with those instructions in mind?"
"Ah," said V, and nodded, "gotcha." V stared at the nodes and vertices, hopping from grid-line to grid-line to get a better look at the whole construct. "Not even sure where half these fuckin' nodes connect to in the DHC's programmin'," she said, frowning. "Figure I can't just bash it with Castlebreaker; might detonate the goddamn bomb, I do somethin' wrong."
"Here," said Mochi, and she started showing V where to cut the vertices, hopping from node to node. "Just be careful," added the cat, "the vertices are sheathed in Black ICE."
"Ain't you a handy little AI," said V, her avatar animating a grin. She cut the vertices exactly as Mochi showed her, then felt something shift—
The sudden transition to realspace hurled her mind into a conniption fit, and V seized, flopped onto the expansion-grate of the platform like a sack of dumbbells, her oculars glitching into bright, variegated artifacts.
Someone heaved V to her feet, and through bursts of neurofireworks, she saw Meredith's scowling face, heard Judy yelling somewhere from behind the corpo, cursing her out.
"You're being taken to Militech's Phoenix HQ," said Meredith, ignoring the fact V was jerking and twitching in her grasp like an electrocuted tweaker. "Sorry it had to be this way, V."
"You fuckin' two-faced bitch!" V heard Judy yell, and glimpsed her over the crisp black shoulder of Meredith's uniform, being manhandled by a couple of Militech heavies in ceramic body-armor. "She's fuckin' flatlinin', and you're just standin' there with a thumb up your ass. I swear to fuckin' God, if she dies, I'm gonna fuckin' kill you. Y'hear me, corpobitch? I'll fuckin' zero you, puta!"
Meredith turned and whipped Judy with her pistol until she stopped yelling, went limp in the heavies' hands. Not dead, V was sure, but cold-cocked to shit. V tried to whip out her monowire, but nothing happened. Meredith turned back to her and said, "Your combat cyberware's been deactivated. For our safety." She put her gun away, lit one of her too-expensive cigarettes, looking at the heavies. "Don't just stand there with your goddamn dicks in your hands," she snapped, blowing a cloud of fragrant smoke into their visored faces. "Get them to the transport, pronto, and get our shit out of here." She shook her head, flicking ash off the platform. "Useless fucking idiots."
V went out like a light, her Kiroshis stuttering into blackness.
When her oculars came online again, she was sitting in an armored transport, padded benches along either side of the cabin. On those benches sat Militech soldiers in full-kit, and from what V could see on the hologram displays that served as windows, they were still somewhere out in the Sonoran.
"How do I always end up in these situations because of you?" Panam was sitting beside her, cuffed and secured to the bench they were sitting on, looking exhausted, swaying and bobbing as the vehicle jounced and rocked on its shocks. She didn't sound angry, just resigned. "For once," she continued, "I just want to have a normal, uneventful day when we hang out, Valerie."
"Oh, fuck, thank you Jesus, you're okay," said Judy, who was sitting on the other side of her, looking real roughed-up. Her eye was swollen, her lip split. There was a deep, crusted gash above her right eyebrow, the skin around it purpling.
"Told you she would be fine," said Panam, knowingly.
"Fuck happened t'your face?" V asked Judy thickly, her head aching deeply. Her temples felt like someone had hammered them to her skull with rusty roofing nails. "Other'n the pistol, I mean," she said, with a weak laugh.
"Militech's heavies. After I came 'round," said Judy. "While y'were out, they 'interrogated' me. Wanted t'know 'bout Ayako, what we were doin' with the bomb. Yadda yadda." She peered at her, then said, "But Jesus, I'm so glad you're okay. I thought you were gonna die."
V shook her head. "Got dampeners built into my neuroware. S'like shock-guards for a computer, 'cept these shock-guards keep my skullsponge intact." She looked at her hands and feet; they were cuffed in high-end plasti-cuffs, made from a mil-grade polymer that was pretty much unbreakable, used in the production of lightweight aerial crafts and drones.
She thought it was weird they hadn't cuffed her in ions; V guessed they were using some kind of scrambler to interfere with her hardware instead, like they used in spaceports, or maybe Meredith had spiked her with a virus.
"Quit talking," said one of the Militechs, a woman. "Can't fucking think with you three yammering on."
"Fuck off," said V. "What're y'gonna do? Punch me like y'did my girl?"
The Militech did exactly that, smashing her armored fist into V's face. She felt her cheek bruising, tasted blood in her mouth. Panam gave her this look that said: chill, please.
"Don't fuckin' touch her!" seethed Judy.
The Militech struck Judy without a word, and Judy swore in Spanish, grimacing in pain.
The transport rolled to a stop. From what V could see on the holos, it was some kind of security checkpoint. She saw a couple of peaheads outside the vehicle, looking at a dataslate and talking to Meredith. Biotechnica's security perimeter had expanded, V decided.
The back of the vehicle creaked open, extending a ramp to sun-baked asphalt. Meredith stood at the foot of the ramp, a stark black shadow against the bright haze of sunlight, regarding them blandly from behind tinted aviators: the lenses so dark they gave the impression of the orbital sockets in a skull. "Out!" she barked at the Militechs, and when they just sat there, she snapped, "I said out , you fucking morons!"
The soldiers filed out, swapped over to the other transport, a Militech Behemoth painted dark green and emblazoned with the company's logo. Meredith came aboard, the ramp creaking up behind her, plunging the cabin into temporary darkness before the holo-windows stuttered on again, showing steamy desert, and an endless, glittering sea of trash.
"What the fuck is goin' on, Meredith?" asked V.
"Why do you think I kicked my people out? I wanna talk." Meredith sat down on the bench, removing her shades.
"Talk 'bout what?"
"What you were doing with our fucking bomb. Your connections to Arasaka, and a certain fucking cyberterrorist named Juan Torres."
"What 'bout Juan? What's he got to do with shit?"
"He went fucking cyberpsychotic," said Meredith. "Guy's been rampaging across downtown since this morning. Took control of Biotechnica's fucking street-force—goddamn netrunning shit. Militech's managed to quarantine him to that section of the city, but it's only a matter of time before the asshole finds a way to get out."
"He—how?"
"Guy's so fucking jacked on chrome and the wire that disconnecting sent him into fucking cyberpsychosis." She took out a cigarette, lit it. "My guess? Guy jacked to try and take the fucking edge off, but all it did was tweak him over the goddamn line." Meredith draped a leg over her knee. "Phoenix, this fucking shithole in the desert, doesn't have a fucking MaxTac unit to deal with him, and Militech doesn't have much power here; this is Biotechnica territory, a Free State." She looked at her. "But that's just the icing on this shit-cake. We have questions for you and Kunoichi, but we can't fucking find her."
V knew where to find her.