Phoenix was a hot mess when they rolled into town. Through the Behemoth's hologram windows, V saw that Militech had mobilized their Phoenix people, had effectively put the city on lockdown while they struggled to deal with Juan and the Biotechnicas he'd slaved to his OS. Most of the shit, from what V could see, had been contained behind huge, solid steel mobile fences Militech usually employed in riot control. That meant, V told herself, shit really had hit the fan, and it had hit it hard.

"Phoenix is essentially under martial law," said Meredith, lighting a cigarette. She blew a cloud of smoke, and it sort of hung in the air, made V choke. "Until," she added, "this shitshow gets resolved, anyway."

"S'gonna happen to us?" asked V, staring at Meredith.

Meredith shrugged, tapping something out on a touchscreen mounted to the cabin's walls. V heard the purr of a ventilation fan, the smoke slowly dissipating. "Dunno," she said, "that's up to Myers."

"Fuck y'mean Myers?"

"Who you're on your way to see, Mox," replied Meredith, sucking down another lungful of fragrant carcinogens. "Don't shoot the messenger," she added, and smiled like a skull.

If Judy's hands hadn't been cuffed, V knew she would've punched Meredith's teeth down her throat, then and there. Panam looked pretty tempted, too. "So you're taking us to the president of the NUSA," said Panam, frowning. She stared evenly at Meredith, then asked, "Why?"

"How the fuck should I know?" said Meredith with a shrug, flicking ash to the floor: scuffed steel covered by worn cuts of grip-tape.

The streets of Phoenix looked like something out of an apocalypse vid, like a Bushido set after all the explosions and gunsmoke. People had abandoned their cars, civilians herded around by Militechs like so much cattle, corralled into buildings and shuttered there. She heard the pop and rattle of gangoon and corpo iron. Saw a couple of New Luddites watching the street from the baked midday shadows of an overpass, peering out from their tinfoil swaddles, sure that the end-times, the Technoapocalypse, had finally come. Militechs didn't even bother chasing the Luddies off; V figured their lack of hardware—that they were incorruptible by the techno-necrotic touch of Juan's deck-voodoo—lent to their disregard of them, and V was beginning to wonder if maybe those crazy fuckers had had the right idea all along.

Their truck rolled to a stop in front of Militech Phoenix, over in Biz Square, just north of Gijutsu in New CityScape. The three of them were herded onto sun-baked concrete, her photochromic compensators adjusting the molten glare of sunlight to something that wouldn't cook her Kiroshis in her skull. It was hot, the kind of humid that boiled and stewed around you like soup, and V, in her black leather jacket and jeans and surplus combat boots, felt like she was barbecuing in her clothes—wished to God she'd kept her netsuit on. If Hell existed, V decided, it was Arizona.

The Militechs marched them into a huge lobby slabbed in green marble, Militech's logo hovering above the expansive front-desk, where a woman sat behind the dark, glossy plastic of a dataterm. As she looked up, the microlights in her Kiroshis flashed blue—SID scan, V guessed. "Good evening, Ms. Stout," said the receptionist, in a polite, manicured telemarketer voice. "Conference Suite One."

"Yeah, thanks," said Meredith, herding them toward the tube-glass of an induction lift. "Make sure the medias fuck off."

The receptionist tapped something out on her dataterm, then said, "Anti-personnel turrets are armed, ma'am."

Meredith gestured at the Militech heavies shuffling around and behind them. "Get your asses outside, keep 'em planted on the doors." The soldiers saluted and hurried off. Meredith shoved them into the elevator. "Fucking hate this job sometimes," she muttered, tapping the touch-screen for the conference floor. "Don't get any stupid fucking ideas," she said, and looked at them. "Cams all over this place, and the security system's armed and under the control of three dedicated dwellers. You'll be gunned down before you make it to the street."

"My combat cyberware's been shut off," said V. "I ain't goin' nowhere. Don't got much choice."

"Glad we understand each other, V," said Meredith.

Judy scowled at her. "Man," she said, "when I get my hands free, I'm smackin' that mullet off your head."

Meredith looked at her and snorted. "Okay, Mox. No hard feelings."

"Just biz," said Judy, frowning. "Yeah, sure. Think y'gotta stick up your ass 'bout Val and me gettin' together. I know all 'bout that No-Tell Motel shit."

Meredith smirked. "Maybe a little jealous," she conceded, looking at V. "She was good. Real good."

Judy headbutted Meredith square in the face, the corpo stumbling back in surprise, blood gushing from her nostrils. "That," she said, "was also real fuckin' good."

"You're lucky," said Meredith, wiping her nose on the back of a leather-gloved hand, "Myers wants you alive, Alvarez. I'll let you have that one, but try that shit again, see what happens." The elevator came to a smooth stop, the doors opening up to three Militech suits, all of them staring at Meredith's face. "Just a fucking nosebleed," she told them, snatching a proffered handkerchief from one of the suits and dabbing at her nose, shoving V and her two chooms ahead of her. The suits boggled for a moment at the scene, then quickly stepped into the elevator, gone. "Fucking can't stand this place sometimes," she seethed, crumpling the handkerchief and dropping it into a nearby trashcan.

Myers looked the same as V remembered her, but it hadn't been too long since they'd last seen each other anyway. She was dressed in a black suit, a NUSA flag-pin glinting on her lapel, sitting at the far end of the huge conference table. Holofeeds scrolled inside the glass tabletop, ghosted up from a lattice of microprojectors built into its aluminum frame: company news-feeds V didn't give a shit about, and Militech ads. "Congratulations on your reelection," said V, sagging into a seat. "Heard y'won by a landslide. Also heard the Chinese helped you out with that."

"V," greeted Myers, ignoring her jab. "Been a while. Haven't seen you since you killed Solomon and flew So Mi into space." She paused, looked at Meredith, her brow furrowing. "What the fuck happened to your face, Stout?"

"Ran into a wall, ma'am," said Meredith, and sat down at the conference table, trying and failing to look composed and aloof.

"Ain't killed nobody," said V, smiling sardonically. "Solomon, he ate some friendly lead, is all."

Myers stared like she was sizing her up. Then, "These must be your friends, Judy Alvarez and Panam Palmer."

"I'm her output," corrected Judy.

"Right," said Myers, leaning back in her seat and steepling her fingers. She regarded them blandly, then said to V, "You're in deep shit. Very, very, very deep shit."

V shrugged. "Ain't nothin' new there."

"Working with Arasaka," said Myers, as if she hadn't heard V, "and not just Arasaka. But an Arasaka. Yorinobu's prodigal daughter." She paused to take a sip of what looked like scotch, taking her time with it. "And not just Ayako Arasaka," she continued measuredly, "but Daisuke Gotoda as well." Myers set the scotch-glass down on a plastic coaster printed with Militech's logo. "He was one of Arasaka's best Shinobi. Real thorn in the FIA's fucking side. Pioneered a bunch of proprietary software for Saboru."

V said nothing.

"Gotoda is, as we speak, rebuilding the spaceport's net-architecture, working with those fuckers, the Los Locos Modernos." Her lips pressed into a thin, hard line. "And Gotoda's just one problem you're involved with. You're an associate of that cyberpsycho rampaging in Downtown. Juan Torres has been on the FIA's shit-list for years. He and Ayako have been trashing and vandalizing corporate Nets for years. Set back several of our projects by decades with their netrunning antics. And now they're building an unregulated Net."

"Get to the point, or y'just gonna keep talkin' 'bout shit I don't care 'bout?" That bit about Gotoda surprised her, but V kept a solid pokerface; Rogue had once told her that a pokerface was a necessary survival tool in their line of biz, and besides, V didn't want to give Myers anything to latch on to. "'Cause I think y'should be takin' care of that cyberpsycho instead of wastin' time with us."

"I don't waste time, V. I'm getting to my point. Just illustrating the shit you're standing knee-deep in." Myers finished her scotch, watched her with an unreadable look. Then, "And now you're planning to steal Militech property. Uncle Sam."

V looked at Meredith, wondering if she'd been the one who'd said something, but her expression betrayed nothing. Corpos were good at looking unconcerned, because they generally were. "Ain't stealin' nothin'," said V.

"I want you to find the AI," said Myers. "Get through its defenses, shut them down." She must have seen something in V's face, because she smiled and said, "When the Russians hit us in that orbital skirmish back during the Fourth Corporate War, they destroyed a lot of data. Data we couldn't entirely salvage. And the whereabouts of Uncle Sam were lost under Kress. If she knows where to find the AI, she's not telling anyone."

"And you want us to find it. Get you in, nice'n easy."

"You do this for us, I'll pardon you for that shit that went down in Dogtown. For all the shit you've done since. Clean slate. The only other stipulation I have is that Ayako Arasaka is turned over to the FIA."

"What if I tell ya to fuck off?"

"Then we're going to take that nuke we repossessed from the Rattlesnakes, aim it at the Crystal Palace, and fire. We'll blame the Nomads for it—they did have it in their possession, after all—and say you were their middlewoman, got help from Arasaka to steal it. And finally, we'll deem it was Stout's incompetence that the nuke wound up in the Rattlesnakes' hands in the first place. After all, she lost a convoy back in Night City to Maelstrom. Her track record isn't exactly good."

"We didn't do anything!" shouted Panam, her eyes flashing. "The Rattlesnakes are Raffen Shiv. They're outcasts. The Seven Nations have nothing to do with them!"

Meredith shot up from her seat. "You fucking—"

"I wouldn't finish that sentence, Stout," said Myers, shooting Meredith a sharp look. "Sit down. Now."

Meredith's jaw worked, the muscle in it twitching. But she sat back down, stiffly.

Myers looked at V. "The choice is yours, V. I'm sure you're not going to be stupid about this." She looked at Meredith. "Stout, lock them up until this situation with Torres is dealt with."