The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novice Milkbobatea.
Operative Travis Brittain.
Director Nick DiRubio!
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
"God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best."
- Voltaire
---
Padre gestured toward the shorter woman first with an unhurried open hand.
"This is Valerie," he said, and his voice carried a soft tone. It was as if he had accepted a quantity of chaos into his life that no priest should have to accept and had made his peace with the arrangement. "She is, in her own particular way, rather energetic."
Valerie tilted her head and pointed two fingers at me in a loose approximation of a gun, the index extended, the thumb cocked back as if she was pointing imaginary iron at me.
"Ghost, huh?" She said with a bit of appreciation. "That's preem choom! Very... eh, mysterious? Very brooding."
She then scanned me head to toe with her eyes and whistled softly. "But you're a big boy for a ghost, choom. Most ghosts I know aren't, like... you know?"
"Valerie," Padre said to the woman who was still lazily holding her two fingers in the form of a gun.
"What?" She asked, almost sounding offended. "I'm just saying... You know, just... giving him a compliment. A bona fide compliment, Padre. Call it scout's honor."
"You were never even close to being a scout," Padre said, letting out a soft sigh as he shook his head.
"I mean, spiritually, I was a scout," she said as she hooked her thumbs into the silver-studded belt at her waist and gave me a grin that said she had been in worse rooms than this one and had found most of them at least mildly entertaining.
My Kiroshis worked behind my glasses, cataloguing the subdermal grip pad on her right palm, the retracted forearm housings tucked under the leather of her bomber sleeves, the personal link cable coiled in her inner wrist housing, and the neural port nested behind her right ear.
I didn't say anything and just let her feast her eyes. Her grin held for another two seconds before she nodded once, satisfied with whatever silent test she had been running on me. She took a step back and stood next to Clarita.
"And this," Padre let out an amused chuckle and moved his open hand to the taller woman, accompanied by an unmistakable shift from warmth to pride, "is Clarita."
Clarita Ibarra looked at me with total indifference, her optics tracking from my face to the Malorian Overture on my thigh, and then back up to the silver pendant at my throat and back to my face in a single emotionless sweep. Her wolfcut sat sharp against the golden line of her jaw, and her gold cybernetic forearms rested at her sides.
She looked, in the most literal sense, like the calmest armed person I had ever been in the same "parish" with. Granted, this was the first-ever parish I had ever found myself in.
"I took her in when she was fifteen," Padre said, "some time after my own daughter passed."
He did not elaborate, and he did not need to since the way his right hand settled briefly on Clarita's shoulder, and the way she let it sit there without leaning into the contact or shrugging it off encoded a shared complicated and grief-shaped history in under two seconds of physical contact.
Clarita gave me a single, slow nod, and I returned it.
Padre turned to both of them and gestured between them and me with the same open motion he had used a moment earlier.
"This one goes by Ghost," Padre said. "He will be your runner this evening."
And that was it. A couple of words spoken, no surname given, no neighborhood, no resume recitation, no list of completed gigs or favorable references or technical specifications. Just a couple of words delivered with absolute confidence that spoke of the amount of due diligence Padre had done on me.
Honestly, I don't think I have ever been introduced with fewer syllables in my life. But I found myself appreciating it.
Valerie's eyes ping-ponged between Padre and me and back to Padre. "That's the whole intro? That's it? Not even a vibe? Maybe a fun fact?"
"Ghost is sufficient," Padre said.
"It's like maximum efficiency, fine, but I-" Valerie was interrupted halfway through her sentence.
"It is enough," Clarita said in a flat tone.
Valerie wanted to say more, but she closed her mouth, looked at me, and shrugged one shoulder.
We stood there on the cracked sidewalk for a long moment while the afternoon heat pressed down on The Glen and the distant rhythm of the pickup game on the basketball court rolled over us in the form of sneaker squeaks and shouted insults.
"So," Valerie said, planting her feet and squaring up to me with her thumbs still hooked in her belt. "Operational logistics. Let me guess, you're outside, yeah? Cracking cameras from the alley? Or are you going hot inside the building with us, jacked into doors and dropping daemons in real-time?"
"I'll be doing both," I said. "I'll take care of the external breach for the initial subnet entry, and once we cross the threshold, I'll be working on terminals, panels, and any networked hardware that's broadcasting while giving you some tactical info over the comms."
She pointed at me again, the finger-gun returning. "That's nova, genuinely nova. We had a guy last year, called himself Vector, sat in a car with a thermos of synth-coffee while we cleared a whole Maelstrom drop. The fucking gonk had the balls to call it 'overwatch.' But with you, it seems like we're getting an upgrade."
"Vector was useful," Clarita said.
"Vector had a fuck-ing thermos," Valerie said, putting emphasis on the word "fucking."
Clarita looked at Padre and asked, "Tonight?"
"The meeting between Señor Aoki and his Maelstrom contacts is confirmed for twenty-one hundred hours," Padre said. He reached into the interior pocket of his clerical jacket and produced three identical data chips, and handed one to each of us, like he was handing out bread during communion. "The floor plan, camera placements, and the drop point coordinates are on the chips. The payload leaves with you."
He held my eyes for half a second longer than the others.
"Quietly," he said. "This is my parish."
"Entendido, Padre," Clarita said.
"Yeah, yeah, low and slow, got it, gospel received, hallelujah," Valerie said as she turned. "Meet at Nunzio's at eight? The one on Bercedo?"
"Fine," Clarita said.
I pocketed the chip and turned to follow them out, and as I crossed the boundary of the basketball court's chain-link fence, I heard Padre's voice behind me.
"God watch over you," he said.
---
Nunzio's occupied a narrow, deep-set slot between a permanently shuttered laundromat and a tire shop, and it smelled, overwhelmingly upon entry, of synthetic cheese product, industrial tomato base, and the faintly burnt residue of an oven that had cleaned God knows how long ago.
The lighting was red and dimmed, and the booths were cracked synthetic vinyl in an orange that hadn't been confidently fashionable since 2041. The two televisions mounted above the counter were tuned to N54 News with the audio cut, the Ridgecrest casualty ticker scrolling across the bottom of both screens in corporate-sans-serif font that compressed three thousand and seventy dead human beings into a number small enough to fit comfortably between a Petrochem stock update and a weather forecast.
I arrived four minutes early and found Clarita already in the corner booth, her back to the wall, both gold arms resting flat against the chipped formica, a can of sparkling Real Water in front of her, and her eyes trained on the front door.
I pulled up the data chip's contents through my Neural Link and projected the floor plan onto an internal overlay one last time.
Valerie arrived six minutes after me, slipping through the door with a paper-wrapped slice tucked under her right arm, the rest of a half-eaten pie in a grease-stained box balanced in her left hand. She dropped into the booth beside Clarita with complete disregard for stealth, which I was rapidly recognizing to be one of her defining traits.
"Okay," Valerie said, setting the box in the middle of the table. "Critical, mission-essential tactical inquiry. Does anybody want pizza before we go zero a bunch of Tyger Claws, or is that just me being weird about pre-gig caloric intake again."
"That is just you," Clarita said as she deadpanned at her.
"Ghost?" Valerie asked.
I took a slice, and Valerie nodded once, satisfied to have fed one of the crew. She bit into her own slice, chewed for a moment, and glanced at the Ridgecrest ticker with a little bit of interest.
"War's getting close," she said, around the mouthful.
"It was always close," I said, thinking back on how I almost died earlier in the year.
"Yeah," she agreed and continued to chew.
Clarita's eyes dropped to the floor plan chip I had left visible on the table between us, and she tapped the surface with one finger. "Service corridor with an entrance along the east wall and a rear exit at the ground level. The office Padre marked is on the second floor, northwest corner, single entry, single small window facing the alley. We go up the service stairs, clear the second floor first, then wipe the main floor on the egress."
She lifted her gaze to look me in the eye. "How many hostiles did you identify on your reference footage?"
"Thirteen across four cameras," I said. "But the footage is forty-eight hours old. I expect tonight's meeting to draw more."
"It will draw more," Clarita confirmed.
"It'll draw more," Valerie agreed.
"We have to move methodically," Clarita said. "So do not rush or stack bodies in places that can be seen from the main floor. Valerie."
"Tch, I know, I know," Valerie said as she sucked her teeth.
"Valerie," Clarita said again.
"I heard you the first time, Clari," Valerie said with an eyeroll.
We left Nunzio's and headed toward a Villefort Columbus V340-F Freight van, which sat parked on a side street two blocks south of the target. It was a wide and flat-nosed cargo van in a dark grey-green primer that had been painted over what I can only estimate to have been a fuckton of times.
The chassis sat low on a reinforced suspension that had been clearly upgraded from the factory spec. The cargo compartment extended behind the cab, and the front windshield carried a hairline fracture that ran from the lower-left corner up toward the rearview mirror. The passenger-side door seal had been replaced at some point with a strip of black adhesive foam that compressed audibly when Valerie pulled the door shut.
It smelled, on the interior, of synth motor oil, used fast-food wrappers, and a very faint undertone of something copper that I made the conscious, professional decision not to investigate further.
"She's not pretty," Valerie said as she settled into the driver's seat and brought the electric motor online. "But she's reliable."
Clarita folded herself into the passenger seat, and I settled into the cargo compartment on a folded grey tactical blanket and pulled up the building's external subnet through my internal overlay while Valerie navigated the last two blocks.
She pulled the van into the narrow service alley running along the east face of the former pachinko parlor at twenty-oh-one. She killed the headlights and coasted on momentum alone until we reached the deep shadow under the building's overhang.
The alley was dark, and the overhead light fitting above the east exit had been smashed at some point and never replaced.
"We are parked," Valerie announced as if it were a meaningful personal accomplishment.
I quickly used my Paraline to wirelessly hack into the building's security cameras. The pachinko parlor's external surveillance was running on a Militech-branded civilian NVR unit, model CV-14, which had not received a security patch in approximately fourteen months and was broadcasting its local IP across the subnet.
I mapped the four cameras against the floor plan in my overlay.
Camera one was mounted high above the main entrance, fish-eye lens, covering the front door and the first twenty feet of the converted gambling floor. The pachinkos had been ripped out years ago, and the open floor was now an unsentimental storage and transaction space.
There were wooden pallets stacked with shrink-wrapped cargo lining the left wall. Seven Tyger Claws were distributed across the main floor, two flanking the front door, two at the far end near the base of the staircase, and three loosely clustered around a folding table at the center. I sent a Ping quickhack, and their chrome profiles resolved in under a second as threat tags materialized in my overlay, floating in amber along the edges of each silhouette.
Camera two was on the east service corridor. There was one Tyger Claw watching the rear door from the base of the service stairs with his arms folded across his chest. He was alone and poorly positioned, his back angled away from the most likely breach point. He had on a light cyberware loadout, civ-spec optics, and was definitely not the type of man you assigned to guard anything important.
Camera three was on the second-floor landing where two Tyger Claws did a bored patrol loop, walking opposite vectors with no overlap in their visual fields. They had some okay-ish chrome, and one shared Kerenzikov between them.
Last but not least was camera four, which was in the northwest office where Hiroto Aoki sat behind a long folding table in a room that had originally been the parlor's administrative office. He was in his mid-forties with a lean physique and dressed in a black Tyger Claw jacket with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows, leaving the chrome on his forearms exposed for all to see. Three more Tyger Claws stood behind him, and on the table to his right, still sealed and latched, sat the Kang Tao transport crate Padre wanted.
With a total of fourteen hostiles identified and tagged, and the target and payload located, the first part of my job was done. I surfaced from the feed to an empty van as Valerie and Clarita had already stepped out.
Clarita had drawn a suppressed Nue from her right shoulder holster, checking the round count and seating the magazine again and racking the slide. Valerie had zipped her bomber jacket to the high collar against the cooler evening air, her right hand hanging loose near her hip as if she were a wild west cowboy.
I leaned forward in the cargo compartment and walked them through the full picture in a low voice, laying out the distribution, patrol patterns, office configuration, and the position of the crate. Clarita absorbed the information, and Valerie's eyes flicked left as she built a parallel mental map alongside the one I was speaking of.
"So thirteen gonks and one mega gonk," Valerie said.
"Correct," I said.
She looked at me and tilted her head. "Okay, choom. So what are you waiting for? Come on out."
I stepped out of the van, noticing that Clarita was already at the east service door, examining the lock panel. She glanced back at me, and produced a Unity from what I could only guess to have been thin air. It had a factory-threaded suppressor barrel already mounted, the matte black polymer absorbing zero of the dim ambient light, and she held it out to me grip-first.
"Padre prefers his work done quietly," she said. "That hand cannon you have in your holster is not so quiet."
I took the Unity, which sat lighter than the Overture by a noticeable margin, even though its suppressor added four inches to the barrel. I pulled the mag out, counted 14 rounds, and noticed that it already had one in the chamber, bringing my number up to 15. Clarita then handed me three additional mags, and I slid them into my right pocket.
Then I reached into the left side of my waist and pulled out a Punknife. Clarita glanced at the knife once, then looked back at the door.
"Ready?" she asked.
"Born ready," Valerie said.
"That phrase has never meant anything," Clarita said.
---
Step into the mouth of the Tiger, or hand over the 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).