The Modernos were thick around the spaceport, had their AVs lifting off just as V and her buddies were coming up on the perimeter. They'd switched on the spaceport's defense systems: floods, turrets, security gates, pneumatic spike-strips—the whole shebang.
Not that it mattered; they were in an AV.
Buster whistled. "Rolled out all the stops," said the borg, the lights of the hologram windows flickering in his CRT insets. They camera-shuttered a blink. V had asked him why he needed to blink with oculars, and Buster told her there were microscrubbers built into his insets ("Back in the Prehistoric Age," he'd said, "we didn't have those fancy oculars you got these days, kid. The ones don't get dirty, I mean. So we needed to blink to keep the lenses clean").
The AV banked right, one side tilting hard. V held on tight to the handrung, kept her boots firmly planted on the grip-tape. The 'Mancer's AV was top-line shit, so Moderno gunfire just dinged right off the hull. She heard bullets pelting the metal, saw it happening through the windows in real-time.
On the ground, the Basilisk smashed through a security gate, took out a squad of Moderno gangoons in a sweep of missile-fire, then cleaned up the leftovers with its autocannons. Clean. The Nomads rode in after the tank on their bikes and in their cars, whooping and hollering and firing gun-bursts at the sky like a posse of rowdy cowboys. And while that was going on, the Digitales were infiltrating the defense systems and rerouting them, turning turrets and Orbital Air Security robots on the Modernos before control was wrenched away by Gotoda, turned back on their people. Back and forth, just like that. Cyberspace tug-of-war.
She watched the 'Mancer's AV blow a Moderno AV out of the sky with a concentrated EMP burst. Smashed against the concrete and exploded into pieces, shrapnel taking a couple Modernos out.
Their AV dipped, descending toward the spaceport. Judy slid The Chaos out of its holster and said, "Looks like it's showtime, calabacita." She was grinning with a feral kind of ecstasy that seemed to belong to someone else, like she was borrowing some serial killer's smile to express the joy it would bring her to gun down so many Modernos.
"Damn, Judy," said Panam, watching her from the opposite handrung. "Seems as though you are turning into quite the leadhead."
"What can I say? S'fun shootin' this thing," she said, and raised her hot pink gun demonstratively.
Buster grunted. "Careful you don't shoot one of us. Or yourself."
Judy snorted. "I ain't a gonk. Wired it to work with my oculars."
"Ain't you a little tinkerer," remarked Ayako, smiling.
The AV landed near the entrance of the spaceport's terminal. The doors opened, and the Technomancer soldier-boys filed out onto the concrete, smartfire blazing, while the techies hung back to prime the Centaurs and strap themselves into the harnesses.
Buster stepped out of the AV, raising his multitool hand, the thing rejigging itself into a gun and blowing a couple of Modernos into chunks. "Lead-azides," he explained, grinning his bear-trap grin and stepping over the steaming crater where the gangoons had been standing. Only thing left of them was a sad, half-melted boot at the bottom of the crater.
"All right," said Ayako, drawing Onibi, "the mainframe is in the OA control tower, where they would've launched the shuttles if the Nairobi suits hadn't pulled outta Phoenix." She pointed the katana at the huge tower at the back of the terminal. "That's it right there. Might be a cake-walk, kinda. Modernos are too busy with the Nomads and 'Mancers."
V could hear, over the gunfire and the machine-noise of the Basilisk and the Centaurs, the excited whoops and hollers of the Aldecaldos. Saw them weaving their bikes through the Modernos and hosing them down with lead before breaking and suddenly swerving out of the way of the cars. The Modernos were sucked under the vehicles and crushed, whipped into donuts and smeared across the asphalt. Above, the 'Mancer AVs were volleying down bursts of neurocannon fire while their soldier-boys cleaned up any stragglers. Complete, total slaughter.
Their biggest hindrance, from what V could tell, would be the Orbital Air Security bots. She could see a line of them advancing on the terminal, looping meaningless, pre-programmed warnings for them to surrender their guns and come quietly, the LEDs in their dark chassis winking red.
"Gotoda's got control of 'em," said V.
"Let's hope Trevor can wrestle control back," said Ayako.
"Where is he?" asked Panam.
"Digitales are usin' a 'Mancer mobile net-suite they set up in the shuttle-trailers," said Ayako. "Couple of their guys hopped into exoskels too, but ain't many left after their initial scuffle with the Modernos. So right now, they're pretty much just playin' tech-support." Glancing at the advancing bots, Ayako turned and jogged toward the terminal, telling them to hurry up.
The terminal seemed suspiciously devoid of Modernos. Maybe they were walking into a trap. The spaceport was rigged with auto-defense systems routed to an isolate in the OAS subnet, V knew; Gotoda could tap into that isolate, turn those defenses against them whenever he wanted. And there were still the bots to worry about.
"At least," said V, suddenly, "there's no Chimera here."
"Those things are fuckin' nasty ," agreed Ayako.
"Think Oiwa's gonna show up?" asked Judy, sounding hesitant, like she was worried saying her name aloud would summon her.
Ayako shook her head. "No, don't think so," she said. "She'll probably wait 'til the Crystal Palace."
"Makes y'say that?" asked V.
"She wants to kill us. Wants to make it real personal," said Ayako. "There ain't nothin' personal 'bout ambushin' us in the middle of a turf-war."
"How's she gonna get to the Palace?" asked Judy.
"She's an AI," said Ayako, looking at Judy. "She'll probably hack a fuckin' 'Saka spaceplane. Execs got 'em for Bilderberg trips to the Palace."
"Artificial intelligence was a bad idea," groused Buster, shaking his head. "Back in my day, folks were protesting the implementation of AI." He paused, his forehead creasing. "Except me," he added, shrugging his huge shoulders. "At the time, I was just a Militech chromehead. Stoked for new tech." Buster frowned, scratching behind his ear. "But in hindsight, kid? Stupidest thing humans ever did was make AI as powerful as we did. Should've kept them as smart as tamagotchis."
"The fuck is a tamagotchi?" asked Judy.
"These little toys kids played with, back in the day," said Buster. "Had these pets programmed on them that kids could feed and play with. Big craze. My daughter had one."
"Ain't known you had a kid," said V.
"Nothing to know," said Buster. "She's dead. Cancer. Her Trauma Team coverage didn't include an oncology regimen. She was only fifty-three." He paused, wiping at his old, stubbled face. Then, "One of the downsides about being so borged up, kid? Living so damn long? You watch your family and friends die while you just… keep going. Keep living. If you can even call it living."
V squeezed Buster's cybernetic hand. "I'm sorry, man."
"Got nothing to apologize for, kid," he said, and smiled. "Ain't your fault. But I appreciate the sentiment."
"It is its own kinda hell," agreed Ayako suddenly.
"You don't look that old," said Panam.
"This ain't my original body, Panam. Remember?" Ayako shrugged, then said, "Dunno how long I was in Mikoshi. Don't even remember what year it was when my body got deep-fried."
"So," said Panam, "you can just jump to different bodies? Like that ancient television show. Quantum something, or whatever."
"Don't work like that exactly," said Ayako. "My engram's stored on my biochip, which is connected to my wireless neural interface." She tapped the thin metal plate bolted to her temple. "I'd need a body with hardware capable of receivin' and hostin' my engram, and most hardware ain't capable. At least not the scop you see in stores and the neighborhood ripperdoc clinic. WNIs are rare."
Panam raised her eyebrows in surprise. "You can just… wirelessly jump to a body if they have a WNI?"
"Can also slot the chip," said Ayako, nodding. "The wireless transfer is just a backup in case the chip gets shot. Like how Val's got doinked by Dexter DeShawn. But that still leaves the problem of most hardware not bein' capable of hostin' my engram."
"What happens if y'don't gotta body to jump to?" asked Judy.
"I hang out in cyberspace with Mochi until someone comes along with the hardware I need."
"So you pretty much can't die," said V, brightening.
"Guess it depends on your perspective," said Ayako, and shrugged. "Hang out in cyberspace too long, you change. Usually for the worse. Look at Alt. She's barely a vestige of herself." Ayako stopped, staring at something ahead of her. V tracked her gaze to something reddish and ghost-like flickering a few inches above the floor, like a section of reality was glitching. Ayako looked down at the glossy black tiling. "Holotrack," she remarked.
Gotoda ghosted into existence on the holotrack: a red, humanoid armature, his features wildly artifacting. "I did not want it to come to this," he said, his voice garbled as though he were speaking through a cascade of white noise. "But I was not given a choice in this matter. I—the netrunner belongs to me now. My upload is imminent. You cannot—no, I am trying so hard to fight him, Valerie-san. So hard. But he is not—the netrunner speaks too much. I am willing to extend an offer, Valerie. You are a nodal point, a data-nexus. Important events seem to wind themselves around you, and whether you realize it or not, you are influential, and influence is what I require to do my work."
"I ain't doin' shit," said V, pulling the Malorian and firing at the holowalk. She chipped the tile, and the projection guttered, vanished.
Then the hologram appeared again, further up the holowalk. "Allow my upload to complete," continued Gotoda, as though he hadn't been interrupted, "and I will cure you. I can create a program that is much more efficient than what Ayako Arasaka offers. You won't need to go to the Palace."
V shot that tile, too. The hologram vanished, then appeared again on another tile. She kept shooting. Judy joined her, and then the others did, all of them shooting until they'd reduced the whole holowalk to shattered glass and fried circuits. "Fuck off," she said, loud enough that Sam could hear her. "I ain't makin' no deals with you! Y'hear me, asshole? I'm fuckin' done with you AIs and your shit." Her neurowire buzzed, and V considered denying the call; she figured it was Sam coming back to hassle her. But her morbid curiosity got the better of her, so V let it through.
Trevor's face appeared in a small window in the upper right-hand corner of her ocular display. "This system is covered in Black ICE," he informed her, frowning, ghostly pale against the electrostatic void of his call-window. "This is tougher than I thought it was gonna be."
"You givin' up?"
"Hell no." Trevor grinned. "Just wanted to update you. But there's some weird shit goin' down on the Net."
"Whaddya mean?"
"I'm pickin' up a user-sig I don't recognize. Comin' through Sam's port."
"What the fuck's that mean?"
"I ain't sure," said Trevor, frowning. "An AI shouldn't have a user-sig, V. User-sigs are for people. But it's a fuckin' AI, damn sure. I looked at its macroform myself."
"Could it be Gotoda?"
Trevor shook his head. "No, he's got his own user-sig, and it's a 'Saka one; those are next to impossible to fake. There's some weird Net voodoo goin' on, V. Gonna dive back in, take a closer look. See ya soon. I'll ping Yako, let her know 'bout this shit." His window executed an animation that made it look like a card fluttering down into the void of cyberspace, and Trevor was gone.
The shit she'd stepped in, V thought, was really beginning to stink.