The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novice Zaqxsw694.
Operative Peter.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
Clarita produced a compact mag-key from her jacket, fed it into the panel, and released the lock, opening the door without a sound.
I killed cameras one through three before we had even crossed the threshold, leaving only the office feed for me to monitor every once in a while. The service corridor was narrow and dimly lit by a single failing LED strip. The Tyger Claw at the base of the stairs was still facing the rear door and was still standing in the same posture he had been in a few minutes ago.
Clarita closed the distance walking along the left wall, and by the time the gangoon had registered the shift behind him and began to turn, her right arm was already around his throat. She then snapped the man's neck, which sent a shiver down my spine, because I'll be damned, who would've ever thought it'd sound like that.
She looked at Valerie, who pointed at the broken-down cardboard pallet stacked against the near wall, and they tucked him behind it in under a minute.
We took the service stairs and the second floor opened into a low-ceilinged hallway with three doors on the left wall and a Tyger Claw at the far end, his back partially turned as he talked in a low voice to the second man on patrol. My overlay kept their tags lit as I fed the camera-three data to Clarita and Valerie.
We were halfway down the hallway when the second Claw turned his head at the exact wrong angle.
He didn't see us directly. He saw the shadow my not-so-subtle six-foot-six frame threw across the wall under the LED strip at the hallway junction, the angle just steep enough to cast a silhouette he didn't recognize. His hand began its descent toward the iron at his hip, and his throat opened to yell.
I sent the Synapse Burnout quickhack subconsciously, and he froze, his hand stopping above his weapon, his jaw locking against the yell his nervous system was no longer accepting commands.
A dull ache bloomed at the base of my skull and pressed forward behind both of my eyes in an expanding pulse that my Neural Link logged.
Neural Link load spike: 94%.
Residual thermal discharge: 0.1°C.
Estimated recovery time: 5 seconds.
Clarita was on him before he finished freezing, and Valerie crossed the same distance to the second man with a fluid approach and grabbed him from behind before snapping his neck. We moved the bodies into the closest of the three doors, which was an unused supply closet.
The northwest office door was a Militech CV-7 series commercial security panel with a six-digit PIN and a biometric backup that the current occupant had disconnected. The biometric was running in an open-state loop, broadcasting its own defeat across the panel firmware.
I pulled out my personal cable, slotted it into my Neural Link, and connected it to the door, sending the unlock signal and routing the override through the Paraline into the panel's control firmware.
The LED changed from red to green, but I did not open the door.
I tapped back into camera four's feed, and Hiroto Aoki filled my overlay, sitting behind the folding table, separating noodles from a paper container with a pair of disposable chopsticks, talking to one of his three guards.
I queued a chain of quickhacks and checked the sequencing twice, because the order of operations against a target with Aoki's hardware loadout was a variable that would've punished improvisation. Cyberware Malfunction first, to hit the Kang Tao plating on his forearms and disable his offensive chrome before it could be triggered. Reboot Optics second, to strip his vision for the duration of the optical reboot cycle and remove his ability to acquire targets. Sonic Shock third, to take his spatial orientation. Short Circuit, fourth and last, which would ride through every piece of chrome left in his nervous system and convulse him to the floor.
I looked at Valerie and Clarita, who were in position with Clarita to the left of the door, her Nue raised and her back flat against the wall, and Valerie to the right.
I sent the chain and pushed the door open.
Aoki had half-risen from his chair when the Cyberware Malfunction hit. He swayed, gripping the table's edge with locked hands, his mouth hanging open in pain as the Short Circuit dropped him, his legs folding into a full-body spasm that took the chair, the steaming-hot noodles, and a quarter of the table's contents to the floor.
All three of his guards reached for their weapons, but they were too late.
The two Tyger Claws on that side of the table dissolved into a mess of suppressed muzzle flashes at Valerie's hands, while Clarita went right and put one round through the third guard's throat before he finished drawing his sidearm. The shot ripped through his carotid artery, and blood came pouring out of his neck. One of his hands shot up to hold his neck, but it never reached its destination as a shot ripped through his hand, taking his middle and ring fingers, and punched into his face just below his eye socket. It was followed by a third shot which entered his open mouth and severed his brain stem. He crumpled almost immediately.
On the floor, Hiroto Aoki's optics rebooted, and he looked, his arms still partially locked at his sides by the residual freeze of the Cyberware Malfunction. His jaw was working against the lingering interference, and his eyes tracked across the room, finding the three of us stepping over the corpses of his subordinates.
Clarita moved to stand directly in front of him, the suppressed Nue held at a downward angle along her thigh. She looked down at him with an indifferent expression.
"Wakey, wakey, Aoki Hiroto," she spoke to him fluently in Japanese.
"You! You know who I am. If Padre finds out-" Aoki replied in Japanese.
But Clarita interrupted him with a single sentence spoken in English. "Padre sends his regards."
She fired two shots. The first round entered Aoki's forehead just above his left eye and exited the back of his skull at a downward angle, painting an arcing fan of brain matter and red-black blood across the ground behind him. The second round followed right after through the same entry wound and severed the brain stem.
His body seized up, and his hands clenched into fists as he leaned forward from his seating position. He then slowly fell sideways as his body released a spine-shivering exhale, followed by a dull thunk as his head hit the floor.
I nudged his body out of the way with the heel of my foot and dropped into the office chair beside the table. I plugged myself into the terminal's data port and punched into the system's root directory. I hit the encrypted partition walls and began processing through them. The ledger partition was nested behind two layers of Kang Tao standard AES-256, which was commercially solid, but to me it was worth jack-shit.
It took me less than twenty seconds to open the ledger. I pulled the data chip from my pocket, slotted it in the terminal's peripheral port, and initiated the transfer protocol, watching the progress bar fill across my overlay while the file unpacked and the names, badge numbers, payment dates, and bribery records of every NCPD officer who had been allowing Aoki to operate inside Padre's domain loaded themselves into forty-three megabytes of encrypted archive.
I unplugged myself from the terminal, and once the download was done, which was almost instantly, I pulled the chip.
I stood up and turned to see that Valerie already had the Kang Tao crate in both hands. Clarita stood at the door with her back to the room, the Nue down at her side as she tapped one finger in a musical rhythm against the suppressor.
"Good to go?" she asked, without turning.
"Yup," I said, pocketing the chip. "Time to delta."
"Then we..." Valerie started speaking, but I didn't pay attention because my internal alert had fired.
The front camera, which I had reactivated and set to motion-threshold detection on the main-entrance feed, tagged a new cluster of movement signatures at the building's primary access point. I ran the count before the alert finished its first cycle.
Ten bodies. Moving with purpose, with proximity, in the loose, overlapping, comfortable formation of men who already knew the building, who already knew each other's spacing, and who were walking through the front door with the physical ease of arrival rather than approach. They were already inside before I had finished counting.
"We have a problem," I said. "Ten new contacts meeting with the seven remaining Claws gonks at the main entrance."
"Maelstrom?" Valerie asked.
"Looks that way," I pulled the floor plan back up across my full overlay, scanning the second-floor architecture for anything I had missed in the initial mapping.
From below, the muffled sound of a man calling Aoki's name resounded.
"Aoki!" the man called out.
"Aoki!" the man called out again, but louder this time.
"The window," Clarita said in a hushed voice. "Now!"
Valerie crossed the office with the Kang Tao crate clutched against her chest like a child, swung her right boot up in a tight arc, and drove the reinforced heel through the painted glass. The glass detonated outward in a sheet, the painted coating fragmenting along its impact lines into a constellation of black flakes that scattered into the alley.
From below, the conversation had quickly turned suspicion into footfalls, with the sound of boots making their initial decision about which staircase to commit to, and slides were racked, chambering a round into their weapon's chambers.
"Go!" Clarita said.
Valerie tossed the Kang Tao crate through the window, the case dropping into the alley with a dull thud, and then she vaulted the frame in a smooth, low-shouldered roll.
I went after her, holding the Unity in my right hand without holstering it. I planted my left palm flat against the casing's right anchor and inverted my body through the opening. Thanks to my previous experience with parkour, I was able to shake off the four-meter drop with a smooth roll, dispersing the impact.
Clarita followed behind me, dropping the four meters with ease, which I could only attribute to Titanium Bone Lacing.
"Get moving," she said.
I scooped the Kang Tao crate up by its molded handle as I passed, and matched Valerie's stride toward the V340-F's rear hatch. She yanked the hatch open, and I shoved the crate into the cargo compartment, pulling myself in after it, and the rear sealed behind me as Clarita slid into the passenger seat and Valerie.
The van rolled out of the alley at a slow and inconspicuous pace that made me feel like I was going to age four years in eight seconds.
"Faster," I said.
"If we go any faster, it'll only look like we're running," Valerie said. "Posted speed limit looks like we're commuting. If you want to blend in, look uninteresting."
"They're going to follow," I said.
"They might," Valerie said. "Probably not. They have no idea what they're chasing or who, since we didn't leave a face."
Valerie took a route through residential blocks that I would not have chosen, and stopped once at a four-way intersection to let an elderly woman with a folding shopping cart cross the street ahead of us with the patience of a saint and the wave of a long-haul trucker. The old woman waved back, and Valerie waved even harder.
"You are something else," I said.
"I'm a professional," Valerie said. "Professionals respect the elderly."
Clarita did not say anything the entire ride.
We reached the drop point, which was a service garage tucked behind a Spanish bakery on the northern edge of San Amaro. The roll-up doors were halfway raised when Valerie pulled the van into the rear alley, and a man in a faded Valentinos jacket was already standing at the threshold with a light pointed at the ground and a hand resting comfortably on the grip of a Lexington holstered under his left arm.
He nodded at Valerie and nodded more deeply at Clarita, then glanced my way to register my mask and my height before stepping aside. The doors slowly came down behind the van, and we made our way to Padre, who was waiting in the back office.
He sat at a folding card table with a small thermos of coffee in front of him, an open laptop displaying what looked like a parish prayer schedule, and a paper bag of pastries from the bakery upstairs. He looked up as the three of us entered, and the warmth that flooded his face at the sight of his two daughters was immediate.
"Mijas," he said as he stood and embraced Clarita first, then Valerie, who returned the hug with a quick, completely unprompted update about the pizza we had eaten at Nunzio's. Padre listened to her attentively before finally turning to me.
"El fantasma," he said, finally turning his attention my way.
I produced the data chip from my pocket and held it out to him. He took it and looked at it for a moment in the palm of his hand, weighing it before tucking it into the interior pocket of his clerical jacket without further inspection.
"And the crate?" Padre asked
"It's in the van," Valerie said.
"Hector will retrieve it," Padre said, gesturing to the table. We sat, and Padre poured espresso into three small ceramic cups, and he slid one to each of us before settling back into his own chair.
"And Aoki?" he asked.
Clarita met his eyes and gave him the smallest possible nod.
"Con los peces," she said.
Padre's eyes closed for a moment before he crossed himself, and when he opened his eyes again, the expression on his face was contemplative.
"Que Dios tenga misericordia de su alma," he said quietly. "O que arda. He will decide."
He turned to me.
"Your work this evening was clean," he said. "Quieter than I had any right to expect, given the scale of the cell you walked through. The ledger you secured will protect my parish for the next several years, and the crate you recovered will protect it for considerably longer. The reduction of Señor Aoki was performed with a kind of professional discretion that does not usually exist in operators your age."
"My age?" I asked, a bit surprised.
"Yes, mijo," Padre nodded. "You're young, very young, and very talented. I say you're still not even an adult yet, given your height, which was only supposed to be six-foot-two from what I had learned. The only explanation for a mostly ganic person is a growth spurt. And those don't tend to happen in your twenties."
I said nothing at that, and he just reached into his interior pocket again and produced a credit chip, which he slid across to me.
"Your commission," he said. "Fifty thousand. The ledger work bears its own premium, and the cleanliness of the execution bears another. I tip for quality."
I picked up the chip and ran an authentication, resolving the encrypted credit balance via the embedded chip and confirming the amount against my internal overlay.
Credit transfer authenticated: 50,000 eddies.
Source: Anonymous bearer instrument.
Destination wallet: Pending acceptance.
I accepted, and the eddies were routed using my Aiden Protocol before finally landing in my wallet.
"Appreciated, Padre," I said.
"Appreciated and earned," he said with a gentle smile. He lifted his coffee cup in a small, ceremonial gesture toward the three of us. "You worked well together this evening. I would like to use this composition again."
"I'm in," Valerie said immediately.
Clarita did not answer verbally, but she lifted her own coffee cup, looked at me over the rim, and offered the same slow nod she had used to acknowledge me at the basketball court.
I looked at her, then at Valerie, and finally at Padre.
"I wouldn't mind it," I said.
Padre smiled, and the smile reached his eyes.
I drank the coffee, which tasted good and probably cost more than the cup it was served in. I sat with two killers and a priest in the back of a Heywood garage on a Tuesday night, and I drank real coffee.
The war was still coming. The Net was still full of names I had not yet decided what to do with. The Mustang in my building was still a stripped husk that I would likely have to fully rebuild and fabricate.
But with an extra fifty large ones in my account, two new contacts who knew how to clear a Tyger Claw cell without leaving a trail, and a priest who had decided, for reasons of his own, to keep me around, today was a better Tuesday than most.
---
We are family, so come and give your stones to me!
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
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They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each).