The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices collin miners, Lupus Umbras, and Emmpty Extra.
Operative Brendan.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
Incoming call: Unknown.
I accepted the call since it could only be exactly who I expected it to be.
"Ghost," Meredith Stout said in a flat tone. "I'm here. Where are you?"
"The nature of this transaction doesn't warrant my physical presence at the exchange point, Ms. Stout," I said, keeping my voice in the low tone I used as Ghost. "But don't worry. I'm watching."
I activated my Paraline for the first time since I had gotten my Kiroshis and witnessed the world turn green and red. I scanned the Hellhound and saw its outline turn a light shade of blue with a few options popping up on my periphery. I could even make this thing self-destruct if I so wanted to, though I guess that the vehicle's local ICE would probably be good enough to fight such an attempt off. But it's not like I was planning on flatlining them, so I sent the signal to shut off. The process took less than three seconds. The Hellhound's dashboard went dark, and the engine cut out with a stuttering whine that echoed across the silent freight yard.
"What the fu-" Meredith started.
"Calm down, Miss Stout. I'm not stupid, and neither are you," I interrupted, keeping my tone calm. "I'm not going to try anything funny, and you're not going to try anything funny. This is strictly biz. But I needed you to understand something from the outset, and it is important that we are both on the same page about this."
I could hear her breathing through the Agent's audio feed, and I could picture the corporate operative sitting in the dead Hellhound, recalculating her assumptions about the person she was dealing with.
"Understood," Meredith said, and her tone shifted, adopting a the careful cadence of someone who had just realized that the person on the other end of the line wasn't some street-level gonk trying to make a quick buck. "You've made your point, Ghost."
"Good," I said. "Now, if you wouldn't mind, the goods are displayed and ready for inspection. Please step out of the Hellhound and take your time verifying everything. Your men can stay inside the vehicle."
There was another moment of silence, though it was shorter this time.
"Fine," Meredith said.
I watched from thirty feet up as the front passenger-side door of the Hellhound opened and Meredith Stout stepped out. Even from this distance, I zoomed in with my Kiroshis, and I got a detailed view of the Corpo. She was tall, blonde, and moved with confidence, which I'm guessing she gained from assuming she was the most dangerous person in the room. She wore a dark corporate coat that probably cost more than most people in Rancho Coronado made in a month, and her posture carried a rigid, yet controlled energy.
She walked to the display area and began inspecting the merchandise. She moved methodically, pulling back the protective sheeting on the paintings, examining each one with a scanner built into what looked like a custom-chromed Agent mounted on her left wrist. She ran her fingers along the edges of the crates, checking seals, checking labels, probably cross-referencing against a list she had loaded onto her retinal display.
After five minutes had passed, she finally broke the silence.
"Everything checks out," Meredith said over the line, her voice carrying a note of reluctant respect. "Quality is as advertised. Now, for the last time, where are you, Ghost?"
I let out a short laugh. "Do you really expect me to answer that?"
She didn't say anything.
"Yeah, didn't think so," I said. "Here's how we finish this. Transfer the remaining one hundred and eighty-seven thousand eddies to the account I provided during our initial negotiation. The Mantis Blades go in the cab of my truck, which I'm unlocking now."
I sent the unlock command to the Bratsk's cab, and its locks disengaged with an audible click that echoed across the yard.
"And what's to stop me from simply loading the goods and leaving?" Meredith asked, and her voice carried a hint of something that sounded like genuine curiosity.
My tone went flat, and the smile was immediately wiped from my face. "That wouldn't be a wise choice."
The implication didn't need to be spelled out. She was sitting in a vehicle I had just remotely killed. She was standing in a location I had chosen. And she was dealing with a netrunner whose bandwidth she couldn't begin to estimate.
Meredith chuckled in a way that told me she appreciated the move even as she evaluated its sincerity. "Fair enough, Ghost. Fair enough."
She turned toward the perimeter gate and raised one hand. The Behemoth's engine growled to life, and the massive armored transport rolled forward into the complex, its headlights sweeping across the freight yard as it navigated toward the display area.
While the Behemoth's crew began loading the crates, my Agent chimed with an incoming transfer notification. One hundred and eighty-seven thousand eddies had been routed through Militech's corporate financial infrastructure and a fuckton of other accounts before finally landing in my account. I ran a quick verification sweep, checking the transfer for embedded tracking protocols or delayed-trigger audit flags, but there was no such thing. The eddies were genuine.
Meredith walked back to the Hellhound, opened the trunk, and retrieved a case. It was about the size of a standard travel suitcase, matte-black with reinforced corners and a biometric latch that she had already unlocked. She carried it with both hands, walking toward the Bratsk with a calm stride.
"Stop," I said, and she stopped. "Open the case."
Meredith looked up at the shipping containers above her, scanning the elevated surfaces with a calculated sweep of her eyes that told me she was trying to pinpoint my location, but she didn't look toward mine, which told me she didn't know exactly where I was. But nonetheless, she opened the case.
I zoomed in with my Kiroshis, pushing the optics to 8x magnification. The case's interior was lined with custom-molded foam, and nested inside were the Higurashi 20-13 Mantis Blades. Two complete cyberarm assemblies, each one a work of art in the form of engineering. The retractable blades were folded flush against the forearm housing in their resting configuration. I was also able to see that it had no RealSkinn applied, and the metal surface caught the moonlight in a way that made the blades send a perfect reflecting glint of light towards me.
I swept my gaze across every visible component, checking for obvious defects against a schematic I had pulled up of other Mantis Blades. But everything looked factory-fresh.
"Close the case," I said. "Leave it where you're standing. Walk away."
Meredith closed the latches with a deliberate click and set the case on the asphalt. "If someone steals this before you pick it up, that's not my problem."
"That's something for me to worry about," I replied.
She turned and walked back to the Hellhound, sliding into the driver's seat. Behind her, the Behemoth crew had finished loading the final crate, and the armored transport was already backing toward the perimeter gate.
I activated my Paraline once again and restored power to the Hellhound.
"It was a pleasure doing biz, Ms. Stout," I said.
"Likewise, Ghost," Meredith replied. "And Ghost? There are other items in your collection that may be of interest to my employer. I'll be in touch."
"I'll be around," I said.
The Hellhound pulled away, following the Behemoth through the perimeter gate. The five Ragnars fell into formation behind them, and the convoy disappeared down the access road, their tail lights shrinking into the distance until they were nothing but faint red pinpricks against the night.
I stayed on the container for another ten minutes.
It was like an unwritten rule. You never moved until you were certain the coast was clear, because the fastest way to get flatlined in Night City was to assume the deal was done the moment the buyer drove away. Corpo hit squads operated on delayed timelines. They let you relax, let your guard drop, and then they came back with a second team that you never saw coming.
So I just chilled while running passive scans on the surroundings, checking for vehicle signatures, drone activity, and active surveillance pings. But I got nothing. The terminal was dead quiet after the convoy had gone. There were no signs of any secondary vehicles approaching the area.
When I finally decided to move, it was 10:27 PM.
The descent was much faster than the climb. I jumped from the suspended container towards the container I had used to get up here, and landed with a roll to disperse the impact. I repeated the process once more, and I simply climbed down the last container, landing on my feet in a crouch that sent a dull ache through my ankles.
I walked to where Meredith had left the case, pulling the balaclava off my face and stuffing it back into my jacket as I went. The cool night air hit my skin, carrying with it the faint chemical tang of the industrial surroundings.
I knelt down by the case and opened the latches, lifting the lid to get a proper, close-up look at what I had just been paid with. The Higurashi 20-13 Mantis Blades sat in their foam cradle, two complete cyberarm assemblies that would someday replace everything from my elbow joint down. The housing was a matte gunmetal alloy, each forearm unit about eighteen inches long and surprisingly light for their size.
The retractable blades were folded into recessed channels along the top of the forearm housing, and I could see the micro-hydraulic actuators that would deploy them at the speed of a neural command. No RealSkinn meant the chrome would be fully visible once installed, but honestly, that wasn't a problem. If anything, it looked more intimidating without the synthetic skin trying to pretend these weren't weapons. And I could just apply it any time I wanted.
I ran my fingers along the seams of the housing, checking the joints and the cable routing. The build quality was exactly what I expected. Everything was clean and precise, and every component I could see looked factory-standard.
Then I turned my attention to the case itself.
I wasn't born yesterday, and I sure as shit didn't trust a Militech exec to hand me a piece of hardware without attaching strings to it. I ran a deep-spectrum scan of the case's interior lining, and the Kiroshis painted the results across my visual field.
I found five trackers in places that were almost embarrassingly easy to find. Three of them were embedded in the foam lining, standard Militech-issue GPS micro-transmitters the size of a grain of rice, each broadcasting on a low-frequency band that was designed to be picked up by Militech's satellite network. The fourth was tucked into the hinge mechanism of the left latch, a passive RFID chip that would activate when scanned by a Militech proximity reader. The fifth was built into the biometric lock itself, a secondary transponder that would ping Militech's tracking grid every time the case was opened.
Ten seconds. That's how long it took me to find and physically remove all five. I pulled them out with my fingers and crushed them under my boot, grinding the micro-circuitry into the asphalt.
But five was too easy. Five was the number they expected you to find. Five was the decoy layer, the trackers that a competent but not exceptional operator would locate and destroy, walking away confident that they had swept the case clean. So I went deeper.
I found a sixth tracker after two minutes of searching. It was embedded in the structural reinforcement of the case's corner, sandwiched between two layers of composite material that shielded it from standard electromagnetic scans. My Kiroshis almost missed it, and I only caught it because the thermal signature of the corner was 0.3 degrees warmer than the others, a discrepancy so small that most scanning rigs wouldn't have flagged it. I pried the corner open with my fingernails, extracted the tracker, and crushed it.
Then I found a seventh inside the carry handle. A fiber-optic transmitter threaded through the hollow interior of the handle grip, so thin that it was practically invisible to the naked eye. And if there were seven, then there sure as hell was an eight. It was built into the case's internal battery, which ran the biometric lock. The tracker was integrated directly into the battery's circuitry, piggybacking on the power supply and broadcasting a burst transmission every forty-five minutes that would be nearly impossible to distinguish from the battery's normal electromagnetic output. I only found it because I decided to scan the battery itself on a whim, and even then, it took me a full five minutes of analysis to confirm that the anomalous signal wasn't just standard operational noise.
I removed the battery entirely, cracked the casing with my thumbnail, and separated the tracker from the power cell. The tracker died the moment I disconnected it from its power source.
Eight trackers. Eight separate surveillance devices embedded in a single carrying case.
I sat back on my heels and stared at the dismantled case for a moment. Part of me wanted to just leave the case behind and carry the arms bare, but two disembodied chrome forearms with retractable blades tucked under my jacket would make me look like a Wraith coming back from a chop shop raid. Not exactly the kind of attention I needed at eleven o'clock at night.
I repacked the blades into their foam, closed the case, and carried it to the Bratsk. The cab door was still unlocked from the remote command I had sent during the exchange, and I slid the case behind the driver's seat, wedging it between the seat frame and the rear wall of the cab.
I climbed into the driver's seat, started the engine, and pulled up Ma's contact on my Agent as the turbodiesel rumbled to life and warmed up.
She answered before the first ring had even finished.
"Mijo?" Her voice was tight with barely controlled anxiety. "Are you okay? Is it done?"
"Yeah, it's done, Ma," I said, and I felt a tension I didn't know I had been carrying in my shoulders for the past five hours finally release. "Everything went smoothly. There were no problems. The buyer inspected the goods, paid in full, and left. I gotta drop the truck off first, and then I'll be heading home."
I heard her exhale, a long and shaky breath.
"Gracias a Dios," Mom whispered. "Okay. Okay, mijo, drive safe. Please drive safe."
"Will do, Ma," I said, putting the Bratsk into gear. "I'll be home in about an hour and thirty."
"Okay," she said softly. "I will leave you some food in the fridge. Heat it up when you get home."
"Te quiero, Ma," I said.
"Yo te amo, mijo," She replied. "Come home."
I pulled out of the freight terminal and onto the access road, the Bratsk's headlights cutting through the thin layer of smog that had fallen even lower as I navigated toward Arroyo. In the side mirror, the decommissioned terminal shrank behind me, its rusted cranes and empty platforms swallowed by the darkness.
The deal was finally done, and I had just netted three hundred and fifty-seven thousand eddies in cash, plus a set of Higurashi 20-13 Mantis Blades. Even after taking into account Sasha's twenty percent and Regina's ten percent, I was still raking in quite the scratch.
I felt the reality of what I had done finally settle on me. I was sixteen years old, and I had just completed a six-figure arms-length transaction with a Militech executive. Night City was a hell of a place.
---
Stones pls...
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).