Someone killed her connection to the Net before she'd finished deploying the Net-nuke, but had done it in a way that hadn't flung her into a seizure, which suggested they'd done this kind of shit before. Ayako found herself staring up at Panam's data-aggregate: a humanoid armature of densely packed code within the dataflows of realspace. She seemed tweaked up about something, so Ayako tongued the microswitch on her right incisor, toggling hi-res rendering on her oculars, seeing the world as though it were displayed on the screen of some panoramic hi-definition Fuyutsuki TV.
Sweat glazed Panam's tanned face, her lips chapped from the heat, every detail, every pore and sweatdrop, rendered in excruciating clarity. "Militech's coming," she said. "Carol just called me. And I can see the dust-cloud their Behemoth convoy is kicking up." She pointed north. "See?"
Ayako closed her cyberdeck, hitching it to her hip. She stood, looked. Zoomed in, magnified. Six Behemoths. "Fuck," she said, "just what we fucking need." She tongued the microswitch again, toggling half-space, the world disintegrating into raw data, flows and cascades of it.
She stopped. The data that was Phoenix had gone malign, swollen into tumors. Something bad was going down. "Mochi," she said, "get me into Militech's comms."
"Right away, Ayako-sama," replied the AI, in her head. "Just need you to key a primer so I know what port to connect to. Unless you'd like me to scan for one."
"No, don't have time for that." Ayako flipped open her cyberdeck, keying a primer sequence. "Port 876. Go," she said, watching the datafeed on the Masamune's holo-display.
"Got it!"
A few seconds later, Ayako heard the Militechs chatting over her neurowire. "This is fucking shit," said a woman's voice, and Ayako was pretty sure it was that corpo-suit, Meredith Stout. She sounded like she was talking to someone on a phone, not to anyone in immediate proximity of her. "We got a goddamn cyberpsycho to contend with, a fucking onryō running around, and now come to find V's working with Arasaka. And I mean Arasaka." Stout paused, listening to whoever she was speaking to. Then, "Kunoichi. She's Yorinobu's kid. Myers didn't know that either. Just wanted her skillset, you know? To replace So Mi. Get the FreeNet under NUSA control. But now it's come to light she's part of the fucking dynasty, good buddy. And with Hanako gone and Yorinobu shitting the family bed, there's a goddamn chance Ayako could take over the company if the Board decides to force Yorinobu's resignation." Another pause, the sound of Meredith sucking down a generous lungful of cig-smoke. "Yeah, I fucking know Yorinobu's got other family members," she said. "Michiko's not interested in taking over; she supported Yorinobu's bid for CEO, and Kei's been fucking dead for years."
Ayako snorted derisively. She'd rather rip her tits off and eat them than take over the Arasaka Corporation. The family biz wasn't shit to her; it was corpo-shit, and corpo-shit wasn't her ecosystem. "Think you could sus out whoever she's talkin' to?" she asked Mochi, on the neurowire.
"Doubtful, Ayako-sama," said the AI. "But I could transcribe their conversation for Judy-san to clean up later on her editing deck."
"No, don't bother. Don't matter who Stout's talkin' to, anyway." Her gaze was fixed on the Phoenix dataflow in the distance, swelling larger and larger against the electrostatic void of the matrix. "What's goin' on in Phoenix, Mochi?" she asked, feeling her stomach suddenly drop. But she was pretty sure she already knew.
"Do you really want to know, Ayako-sama?"
She considered the question. "Yes."
Meredith's voice vanished, Mochi feeding her a local news report from Phoenix Today. "The cyberpsycho rampaging across downtown Phoenix has been identified as wanted cyberterrorist Juan Torres—"
Ayako cut the newsfeed; she didn't want to hear anymore.
Panam must have read her face, because, without even asking what her problem was, she said, "I'll stay here, wait for the others. We'll rendezvous in Phoenix."
"What about Militech? They're comin'."
"You act like I haven't handled Militech before," said Panam, smiling. "I'll be fine. Don't worry."
Ayako didn't know what to say to Panam, so she just thanked her, then ran back toward the encampment, pushing her Sandevistan to its brink. She commandeered some dead Rattlesnake's hoverbike after overriding its driver-authentication with a skeleton-sig, then swung herself onto the bike, revved the thruster and tore off through the Sonoran, the anti-gravs carrying her over the drifts of trash, crumpled plastic and sheet-metal, and tattered, sun-bleached screamsheets scattering away from the bike, whipped up by its slipstream and sent cartwheeling through the air in a frenetic junk-ballet.
"Mochi," she said, lead-footing the turbos, hot wind whipping her hair around, Onibi's tantalum-carbide rig white-hot against her shoulder, "get me back on Militech's comms."
Meredith's voice phased over the neurowire, still chatting to her mystery phone-choom. "Still not sure what sent the stupid fuck over the edge, but consensus seems to be he cold-turkeyed off his Net-habit, got a bad case of the junkie-shakes, then jacked back in for a hit of Net-junk to take the edge off, and went fucking beserk ." Ayako heard her inhale more smoke, blow it out. "Broke into Biotechnica's security subnet like it was nothing," she continued furiously. "But no surprise, those idiots are a bunch of fucking ecohippies, goddamn granola-munchers new to paramilitary shit—of course they'd be ignorant about all the goddamn encryption goes into military systems. They didn't consult us. Rookie mistake."
Ayako frowned, feeling a sudden, intense pang of guilt. She'd told Juan to disconnect. This was on her, she told herself. What was happening to Juan was on her.
She and Juan had been online friends, penpals from when she'd lived in Japan, working for Kuchisaka-Onna. She'd met him on a BBS about netrunning, and they'd become fast friends; he'd helped her learn English and taught her Spanish, and she'd taught him Japanese. He'd tell her about how much he loved anime, and Japanese video games and culture, and although she'd found his otaku-like enthusiasm for Japan annoying and slightly fetishistic at first, she'd later realized it was all coming from a good, well-meaning place, and had slowly begun to find it endearing, even flattering, instead of creepy.
They'd made plans to meet up in Night City, but she'd fried on that Uncle Sam run, the one that had driven Gotoda crazy, and found herself stuck inside Mikoshi, waiting around for something to happen. Johnny Silverhand had been her only company while she'd been inside, because he'd been the only engram capable of interacting with hers on any meaningful level. They'd cooked up that plan for Saboru, and she'd managed to get Yorinobu in on it—up until he'd cut out on her with Johnny's engram. Gotoda had been the one who'd gotten her out of Mikoshi, him and Juan, but it had been Juan who had saved her, risked everything to stop Arasaka's netrunners from pursuing them.
In Arizona, they'd gotten close, eventually started dating. She'd slept with him on her third night in Phoenix, had enjoyed every second of it, and that had scared her. In Japan, she'd been a loner, unaccustomed to kindness, Chiba-11 gomi. She'd nudged him away, afraid of feeling anything but a mundane kind of contempt for her fellow humans, retreating deeper and deeper into the Net until she'd relapsed into her digital hikikomori habit. Ayako had always told herself there would be a day where maybe things could work out, that maybe tomorrow things would change, but that day or tomorrow never came, and eventually, they'd broken it off.
But she'd never stopped loving him, and knowing this was her fault was something Ayako couldn't stomach.
"You fuckin' two-faced bitch!" Ayako heard Judy suddenly yell, snapping her out of her thoughts. "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!"
"Don't just stand there with your goddamn dicks in your hands!" snapped Meredith, and Ayako heard her take another drag off a cigarette. "Get them to the transport, pronto, and get our shit out of here. Useless fucking idiots."
"They have Val and Judy," she said aloud, realizing, right then, that she'd abandoned her friends in her rush to get back to Phoenix. "Mochi," she said, hurtling at breakneck speed across the Trash Pan, the bike's anti-gravs kicking up tumbles of dust and garbage, "get me Yuji on the neuro."