The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Operative Lolan.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him."
- Sun Tzu
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Three hours is a long time to sit around doing fuck all. I only lasted about four minutes before restlessness kicked in, and since I couldn't exactly go for a jog around an abandoned Petrochem freight terminal without looking like a squatter or a scav, I opted to just lean back, close my eyes, and dip into the Net.
'This could never get old,' I thought to myself as the Kiroshis turned what had once been a mental approximation into a full-blown immersive experience, projecting the Net's architecture across my retinal display with a clarity that made my old method of internally rendering the data feel like looking at a painting through a shower curtain. The local subnet around the freight terminal was sparse and barely alive, carrying only the faintest residual data signatures from Petrochem's abandoned infrastructure. There were also a couple of dead nodes here and there, and a handful of dormant server clusters.
But past the dead zone of the terminal's local grid, the greater Night City subnet stretched out in every direction, creating a massive organism that pulsed with neon-colored data pathways and corporate ICE barriers that I could now see with a level of detail that bordered on overwhelming. The Kiroshis helped me out immensely by tagging and categorizing everything automatically, overlaying metadata on every node, connection pathway, and security protocol that fell within my scanning range.
So, with a new way to view the Net, I did what anyone would do and spent an hour just revisiting old haunts. The Watson commercial grid, where I had learned to become a runner three years ago, looked completely different through the Kiroshis. What had once been a blurry mess of competing data streams and not-so-easy-to-decipher node clusters was now an intricate web of interconnected systems.
I was able to see the individual ICE layers protecting the Kabuki storefronts, the hidden data relays that the Tyger Claws used to route their communications, and the barely perceptible footprint of NetWatch's monitoring subroutines skimming the surface of the public layer.
It was like going back to your childhood neighborhood after being gone for years and suddenly realizing the entire place was different because you were looking at it with grown-up eyes. Well, not like I had much of a neighborhood to visit or experience.
I felt a shiver run down my spine as I remembered just how many times Sasha and I had slipped past the blackwall and had, by a reason that was nothing short of a miracle, not been zeroed by NetWatch.
I shook my head off the thought, and drifted through the Arroyo industrial subnet, watching the massive data flows of the power plants and the factory control systems, and I noticed something I had never been able to see before. The corporate ICE protecting Petrochem's active infrastructure was layered in a pattern I recognized from my father's old schematics and the problems he'd fed me. It was a Fibonacci-based encryption spiral that rotated its access keys every seven minutes. It was elegant and old-fashioned, the kind of security architecture that a more aggressive runner could brute-force given enough time and bandwidth.
I filed that information away for later with no real interest in actually cracking Petrochem's grid. But as they say, knowledge is power, and in Night City, it was also a currency. Plus, you never knew when a piece of forgotten architecture would become your exit strategy.
After an hour had gone by, I decided to shift my focus to the Mustang I had finally gotten my hands on.
I had been carrying the mental blueprint of the Boss 429 rebuild in my head for months with full plans of what I was going to do. I planned to reinforce its current chassis with some sort of carbon-laced alloy system, create a custom twin-turbo CHOOH2 engine built from the block up. I'd also do an all-wheel-drive conversion since the original drivetrain was gone, make my own custom ECU that I would write from scratch, kind of like I had done for the Galena.
But there was so much planning can do. There were gaps in my knowledge that the racing BDs and the mechanic tutorials simply hadn't filled, specifically around sourcing the kind of high-performance components that a build like this demanded.
I moved deeper into the automotive underground subnets, passing through the standard vendor listings and into the grey-market forums where Badlands nomads, Santo Domingo gearheads, and the occasional Wraith with stolen military surplus traded parts and expertise. Sure, I had that new "El Capitan" gearhead who could prove valuable, but there was only so far I could trust a gonk with a three-month-old account.
Plus, the forums were also a goldmine of technical data themselves, if you could make your way through all the bullshit, that is. I spent a solid forty minutes scrolling through threads about CHOOH2 fuel rail fabrication, turbocharger sizing for big-block V8 applications, and a particularly interesting discussion about sourcing pre-Krash forged crankshafts from a scrapyard in the Biotechnica Flats.
But there was this one thread that caught my attention. A nomad mechanic out in the eastern Badlands had posted a detailed breakdown of a CHOOH2 conversion he had performed on a pre-Krash Pontiac, complete with fuel flow diagrams, injector specifications, and a custom ECU map that he had open-sourced for the community. I'm guessing this was the man that El Capitan was telling me about, since the data seemed solid enough, and it matched almost identically with the V8 conversion BD I had bought from him earlier today, which gave me confidence that both sources were working from the same fundamental engineering principles.
I bookmarked the thread, downloaded the ECU map to my Agent's local storage, and made a mental note to reach out to the nomad directly. If he had access to forged crankshafts, he might also have connections to the kind of machine shop that could fabricate custom engine blocks.
The standard approach would be to source a modern CHOOH2 engine and modify it, but that felt like cheating. I wanted to build something that would be unique, not using the engine of another car... and with the remaining plans I had, I doubt that a V8 would be enough.
By the time I pulled out of the automotive forums, I had compiled a preliminary parts list, identified three potential suppliers for the turbo assembly, and found a nomad-run fabrication shop that supposedly had experience building custom engine blocks from scratch. The shop operated out of a converted gas station somewhere east of the Rocky Ridge wind farm, and they didn't advertise on the public subnet. I only found them because someone in one of the forums had mentioned them in passing, and I had set my Kiroshis to flag any reference with a geolocation tag.
I saw that it was already 9:43 PM by the time I checked my HUD. I had been browsing for almost three hours, and it had only felt like thirty minutes.
I opened my eyes, blinking as reality reassembled itself around me. I noted the concrete platform, the stacked crates, the paintings propped against the shipping container, and the distant hum of the city bleeding through the perimeter fencing. Everything was exactly as I had left it, bathed in the cold, blue-white glow of a quarter moon that had punched its way through the thin layer of smog.
I stood up from the concrete barrier I had been sitting on, rolling my neck and stretching my arms above my head until the joints popped. Three hours of sitting still had stiffened everything from my shoulders down, and I needed my body loose and responsive for whatever the next hour was going to bring.
The freight terminal was a maze of shipping containers and rusted loading cranes. The containers were stacked two or three high, and in some areas up to five or six, creating narrow corridors and elevated vantage points that would give me a clear line of sight across the entire complex. And this was the advantage of being the one to choose the location. I knew the terrain, and whoever was coming to meet me wouldn't.
I broke into a jog, weaving between the containers until I found a stack that looked promising. It was three containers high, roughly thirty feet, with the top container suspended from one of the decommissioned loading cranes by a pair of steel cables. The crane's arm extended out over the main access road, giving the top container an unobstructed view of the approach and the area where the goods were displayed.
"Getting up there will be fun," I said to myself.
I ran at the nearest container, planting my right foot against the steel surface about four feet up and pushing off hard, my hands catching the top edge of the first container. The metal was cold and slick with condensation, but my grip was just fine, so I pulled myself up onto the surface in a single fluid motion. The first container was about ten feet high, putting me just above ground level. I scanned the layout from this new elevation, mapped my route, and ran.
I sprinted across the top of the first container and launched myself toward the second container stacked about six feet away and ten feet higher. My leading foot hit the wall of the second container about halfway up, and I pushed off into a slippery wall run, converting my horizontal momentum into vertical height, my body angling upward as my arms reached for the top edge. My fingers caught the lip, and I swung my body up, landing on top of the second container in a crouch.
I was now twenty feet up and had just one more to go.
As I scanned for a path, I noticed that the third container was going to be a tricky son of a bitch. It was suspended from the crane about ten feet above me and offset to the left by nearly ten feet, hanging in open air with nothing beneath it but a drop to the concrete below. I had no wall to run on or an intermediate surface to use as a stepping stone. Just a gap that I needed to clear with a running jump and enough upward reach to catch the bottom edge of the suspended container's frame.
I backed up to the far edge of the container I was on, giving myself a fifteen-foot runway. I closed my eyes and took a breath, setting my feet. When I opened them, I began to sprint.
The edge of the container came up fast, and I planted my right foot on the very lip and jumped upward, throwing my arms toward the sky as my body arced across the gap. For a fraction of a second, I was weightless, and my body was suspended above the concrete with nothing but air between me and a very unpleasant landing.
My right hand caught the bottom rail of the suspended container's frame. My left hand reached for the adjacent rail, my fingers curling around the cold and rusted steel. I thought I had it, but then my left hand slipped.
The condensation on the steel rail turned my grip into ice, and my fingers peeled off the metal like they had been greased, and my entire body swung sideways, held up by nothing but my right hand locked around a rusted piece of industrial infrastructure. My shoulder screamed as the full weight of my body wrenched the joint, and my legs kicked in open air as the momentum of the swing threatened to tear my remaining grip loose.
I looked down, noticing that the fall was a long way down, and the quarter moon cast just enough light to show me exactly how unforgiving a thirty-foot fall onto an industrial surface would be. My biomonitor spiked as my heart rate jumped to 128 BPM, and the Kerenzikov twitched at the edge of activation, ready to fire if my brain interpreted the situation as a genuine threat.
I let out a nervous chuckle at the stupid and reckless absurdity of it.
"Working from home is leaving you rusty, Ghost," I muttered to myself, shaking my head as I swung my left arm back up and locked my fingers around the rail with a grip that I made sure wasn't going to slip a second time. I pulled myself up, muscles burning, until I could hook my elbows over the edge of the container floor, and from there, I used the stairs on the door and hauled my body up and over, rolling onto the flat surface of the suspended container with a grunt.
I lay on my back for a few seconds, catching my breath, staring up at the thin smog that clung to the sky, and the faint stars poking through it. My Kiroshis automatically identified three visible celestial bodies and tagged them with astronomical data that I absolutely did not need right now.
I sat up and surveyed the terminal from my new vantage point. The view was perfect. The main access road stretched out in front of me. To my left, the area where I had displayed the goods was clearly visible, the crates and the folding tables catching the moonlight with the Bratsk parked nearby. To my right, the perimeter fencing and the gate, the only vehicle entry point into the complex.
I pulled the Ghost balaclava out of my jacket and slid it over my head, adjusting the fabric until the mask sat properly against the bridge of my nose. I don't know what it was about the mask, but the familiar compression of the material against my face triggered a shift in my mental state, and I stopped being the gonked kid Santi and embraced my fabricated persona.
I checked the time and saw that it was 9:55 PM.
I sat cross-legged on the container, my hands resting on my knees, my eyes fixed on the access road. The Malorian Overture pressed against my ribs from inside the jacket pocket. My Kiroshis hummed as it ran passive environmental scans that tracked ambient temperature, wind direction, and the signatures of any approaching vehicles.
The city hummed in the distance. A gunfight went down somewhere, and an NCART train rattled across an elevated track half a mile to the south. The freight terminal was silent.
And then, at exactly 10:00 PM, the silence broke as five pairs of headlights appeared at the far end of the access road, cresting the slight rise that separated the terminal from San Amaro Street. They were moving in formation, evenly spaced, and if my Kiroshis were to be trusted, traveling at a controlled thirty miles per hour. As they drew closer, I used my Kiroshis to tag each vehicle and began pulling data.
The first five vehicles were something I hadn't seen before. They were built on the Chevillon Emperor 520 Ragnar platform, but someone at Militech had taken the standard corporate SUV and crossed it with something far more aggressive. The chassis was wider, lower, and armored with what my Kiroshis identified as some unknown composite reactive plating. The windows were tinted black and reinforced, and the front grille had been redesigned to accommodate what looked like a concealed weapons platform beneath the bumper line.
The five Ragnars stopped just outside the perimeter gate, their engines idling, but nobody got out.
After a few seconds, a sixth vehicle rolled into view. I instantly recognized the Militech Behemoth. It was painted in the standard matte-black corporate livery, its armored hull dwarfing the Ragnars like a tank pulling up behind a row of sedans. The Behemoth passed through the perimeter gate and entered the freight yard, but it stopped just inside the entrance, its air brakes hissing as the driver killed the forward momentum.
I watched from my perch as another thirty seconds passed. Then the sound of another engine reached my ears, something lighter and faster than the Behemoth rounded the corner from behind the armored transport. A Militech Hellhound with its sleek and angular armor plating was painted in the same matte-black as the Behemoth. It slipped past the larger vehicle and drove directly into the complex, navigating the narrow corridors between the shipping containers until it pulled up alongside my parked Bratsk.
The Hellhound's engine idled, and the headlights illuminated the displayed merchandise with a white light. A second later, my Agent pinged.
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Rent is due, pay in stones.
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each).