The shriek of her neurowire jolted V awake, jarred her from a dream about Donald Lundee watching her from the deep shadows beyond a pool of light cast by an antique Emeralite lamp.
Gotoda was looking at her, leaning against the window overlooking the CocoQuay's hologram seafront, in which ghost-gulls wheeled above fluorescent blue surf. "It's a Militech sig," he informed her. "Encrypted tight."
"Y'got access t'my hardware?" she asked, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her palms, Judy sleeping like the dead beside her, limbs tangled in the crisp white sheets.
Gotoda shook his head. "No, Valerie-san. I'd need a direct link. But I've been monitoring Militech's comsnet via Ayako-san's WNI. Last ping hit your chrome."
V looked at the neural matrix on the bedside table, pushing the covers off her legs. Ayako was sleeping in the other bed, out cold. "Y'can piggyback off her hardware when she's asleep?" she asked.
"Why would I not be able to? Ayako-sama doesn't shut off her hardware, Valerie-san."
"Good point," she agreed, and sighed. Then, "But y'said Militech?"
" Hai ."
"Fantastic," muttered V, making her way past Gotoda and padding out onto the balcony to take the call. She lit a cigarette and opened the commslink, watching the hotel's pretend-beach through a thin, blue haze of smoke, the neon phyllotaxies of the palms shivering in a make-believe seabreeze.
Myers's call-window unfolded in the upper-right corner of her Kiroshis. "Didn't think I forgot about our little arrangement, I hope," said the president of the NUSA, smiling in a way that reminded V of serial killers. "Saw that you made it to The Crystal Palace. Our robots had you tagged the moment you set foot onto the station."
"NUSA spyin' on the ESA with a backdoor channel, Myers? For shame," said V, and leaned on the balcony, blowing a cloud of smoke.
Myers ignored her. "Wanted to let you know we have everything prepped and ready for the hypersonic. You try to fuck me, a lot of important people are going to die." She stared at V, her expression clinical and measured, like they were colleagues discussing biz, not mass-murder.
"Ain't gonna fuck you," she lied. Although V didn't see any alternatives yet, it didn't mean that alternatives didn't exist; she just had to buy enough time to find them.
"Militech has eyes all over the station," Myers told her. "Just remember that. That said, I heard Daisuke Gotoda got fried in that gang-scuffle at the old Phoenix spaceport." She paused. Then, "Did he have anything with him? Piece of hardware. Little black cube."
"No," she lied, glancing back at the room, Gotoda watching her through the glass, "ain't seen any hardware 'sides his fried deck. Why? What's so important 'bout this cube?"
"Night Corp hardware that Militech would really like to get our hands on," said Myers, her tone suggesting that that was as much as she was willing to tell V.
"I'll keep an eye out," said V.
"And so will Militech. Good-bye, V. I'll be in touch." The call-window vanished, the afterimage of Myer's face hanging in her visual field for a few seconds before slowly ghosting away.
"Fuck," was all she said.
That following morning—or what passed for morning on the station's circadian system—Ayako gathered the group in the room. Buster stood beside Ayako, his cyberware artfully concealed under a pale peel of polysaccharide-collagen RealSkinn. If you took away his CRT oculars—those small, round green-mirrored lenses nested in deep pockets of wrinkled flesh—and ignored the old seams of his facial implants, the huge borg almost passed for virgin meat. Lucy was there too, stood beside Panam, her thin frame lost in the fluorescent swells of David's jacket.
"You joinin' us?" asked V, looking at Lucy.
"Nope," said Lucy, and shook her head. "Just here to walk you through the run."
"Peachy," grunted Buster, scratching his cheek.
"Gonna sync the shard up to your neuros," Ayako told them.
A 3-D model of the station overtook V's visual field, unfolding from the matrix like an image in a pop-up book. The middle torus was highlighted; it was, according to the precis, where the station housed its factory-works: the sprawling industrial complexes of the corporations, a playground for proscribed tech to germinate and flourish before it was shipped down the orbital well by corporate contractors, and smugglers looking for an even sharper edge in an already razor-sharp black market. A line traced their route from their current torus—Torus One—down into the factory-works. "You'll take the lightrail to the spacelift, under the guise of corporate netrunning contractors hired by Militech for some routine debugging," said Lucy, the microlights in her Kiroshis glowing with television light. "Upon arriving at the middle torus, you'll make your way here," and the map spun and reoriented, zooming in and highlighting an access-point in the torus' security sector, "and disable the torus' security suite. The station's security subnet is modular—meaning each torus has its own security isolate that's only accessible from a dedicated access-point, and overseen by the DHC's partition. You try to hack into the system from outside these access-points, you're gonna fry."
"Any dwellers?" asked V.
Lucy shook her head. "No, the station's security is managed by AI." Seeing the look on V's face, she added, "Dedicated heuristic controllers, V. Relax. Uncle Sam's the only sentient AI aboard the station—other than that Arasaka cyberninja, Oiwa."
In her ocular field, Gotoda was studying the map. "Oiwa-san will likely intercept you aboard the middle torus," he told V, and flopped back on the couch, its upholstery patterned in blue spindrifts and hot pink flamingos. "But you don't need to worry, Valerie-san. I can help you beat her." Before V could ask how he planned to do that, Gotoda said, "Myself and Yuji-senpai created the onryō engrams, Valerie-san. I know how to bypass her ICE. You'll need to wire me into your hardware, however."
"How the fuck am I s'posed t'do that? Stuff that fuckin' neural matrix into my skull?"
Gotoda shook his head. "Micropore tape, Valerie-san. Run a line to your neural port."
She snorted. "Crude, but real effective." V eyed him, then asked, "I don't gotta worry 'bout you rewirin' my skullsponge or whatever, right? I do this, I mean."
Gotoda laughed. "No, Valerie-san. My engram isn't on your biochip."
"Val," said Ayako suddenly, "you payin' attention to this?"
V fumbled for a response, then managed, "Sure, yeah. I was listenin'."
Lucy frowned. "You have to take this more seriously if you want to get through this run in one piece, V." She sighed, then said, "Okay, for V's benefit, I'll repeat myself. Once you've disabled the torus's security isolate, you'll have exactly an hour before the systems come back online—"
"Don't gotta worry 'bout the redundancies kickin' in," Ayako cut in. "We got Castlebreaker."
"Seriously?" said Lucy. "And you didn't mention this before because ?"
"Didn't want word gettin' back to the corpos," said Ayako, shrugging. Then she clarified, "Not that I was worried you'd snitch or anything. But corpos got eyes all over this station—you know that, Luce. Had to debug this entire goddamn hotel room; they had listeners all over the place."
"I didn't pick up on any listeners," said Lucy, looking a little embarrassed.
"Real subtle kinks, Lucy. Had to throw a couple boolean functions in the hotel's subnet codebase. And you don't gotta AI helpin' you like I do." She paused, then said, "Besides, you've been outta the netrunnin' game since—well, I don't gotta tell you." She smiled, adding, "Just a little rusty is all. Stretch those netrunnin' muscles, you'll be fine."
Lucy smiled. "Think I'll stick to fixing," she said. Then, "Anyway, once you've used Castlebreaker to bring down the torus' security isolate, and the DHC subroutine running its ICE, you'll go here," and the map reoriented itself again, rotating on its X-axis and stopping, zooming in on the Militech Restricted Zone, "to Militech's sector of the torus. There's an old maintenance access here that'll bring you to the abandoned research facility where Uncle Sam is housed. It was a pain in the ass trying to find it; Elizabeth Kress wiped the records, and it took ten of my best netrunners to cobble enough metadata together to find it again."
"Why would Kress hide it?" asked V. "Doubt she fuckin' cared 'bout it bein' misused."
"Same reason she nationalized Militech after the Fourth Corporate War and the bombing of the Arasaka Towers," said Lucy, shrugging. "To save face. She didn't want word getting out that Militech was doing some real illegal shit with AI. Didn't want Arasaka using that information in the same way she'd used the bombing to blame Arasaka. That spin drove Arasaka out of the NUSA until the end of the Unification War. Kress didn't want to see the same thing happen to Militech if her detractors got their hands on that intel."
"Arasaka still found out," said Panam.
"They were always going to. Militech used data they'd stolen from Arasaka to lay the foundation for Uncle Sam," said Lucy. She added, "Despite the put-together image Kress liked to project to the public, she was impulsive and rash in a lot of her decision-making. But she was shrewd, knew how to spin the media."
"But before we launch this run," said Ayako suddenly, "we need to get Val to the Technomancer clinic, get that fuckin' chip outta her head and put the new one in."
V shook her head. "Not until the run's over," she said, ignoring the sharp look Judy gave her. "What I promised, Ayako. I don't collect payment 'til the job's done; keepin' my rep's important." She grinned.
Truthfully, V wanted the biochip out of her head as soon as possible—but not at the potential expense of Buster's life. She needed to buy time, find another way to get around someone else dying for her. Maybe, V thought, they'd find a solution in the Militech Restricted Zone—some proscribed Cynosure-type tech they could klep. If something like Cynosure had existed in Dogtown, then V could only imagine what sort of things existed aboard the Crystal Palace.
"Kid, come on," said Buster. "Just get that damn thing out of your head."
"Sorry, Buster," said V. "I got scruples now."