The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novice Nikkolas.
Operative Harrison
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
"Dreams don't work unless you do."
- John C. Maxwell
---
The NCPD internal affairs server was hosted on a Militech-contracted municipal subnet running behind three layers of corporate ICE, a biometric authentication gateway, and a rotating encryption protocol that cycled its keys every forty-seven minutes. This was, without a shadow of a doubt, something an IT chronie had thought was clever enough to be unpredictable, or maybe they never expected someone to actually try and hack into their servers.
But that didn't mean jack shit for Santi as he cracked the rotation pattern in under ninety seconds from his dive chair in the second-floor server room of his home.
He was reclined in the netrunner dive chair he had installed against the server room's eastern wall. It was a padded, fully reclining rig with integrated biometric monitoring, adjustable head and lumbar support, and a hardline terminal port built directly into the right armrest, which had cost him a pretty penny. His link cable ran from the neural port at the base of his skull into the chair's terminal connection, and he felt a bit of warmth behind his frontal cortex as his cyberdeck processed the breach in real time
The server room's climate control kept the ambient temperature at a steady 32 degrees, and the blue-white glow of the twelve rack-mounted processing units painted the walls.
He was through the first ICE layer in four minutes, sliding past the outermost firewall with a spoofed authentication handshake that mimicked a legitimate NCPD terminal access request from a precinct in Heywood that had actually been offline for maintenance. The second layer took him a little longer, since it was a more aggressive partition wall, and he had to use a narrow vulnerability in the Militech firmware's certificate validation subroutine to brute-force his way through, exploiting a known defect in the CV-7 authentication stack that hadn't been patched.
In reality, Militech knew about the vulnerability; hell, they had known since 2067. But for them, patching it would require admitting it existed, and admitting it existed would require a corporate disclosure filing that would affect their municipal defense contract renewal.
The third layer was actually the quickest to fall. It took less than two minutes for Santi to identify the key rotation sequence and synchronize his decryption daemon to the cycle.
Once he was through the ICE, the internal affairs database opened before him like a filing cabinet. It was surprisingly organized and indexed, which really fucking sucked for the NCPD, since it also held a massive amount of incriminating evidence. There were badge numbers, case files, disciplinary records, surveillance logs, informant rosters, and, buried in a subdirectory that some gonk had labeled the most un-fucking-subtle filename, was a complete and detailed ledger of officers who had been flagged for corruption investigations and subsequently cleared by internal review boards whose members had themselves been flagged for corruption investigations in previous fiscal years.
Santi accessed the "CONFIDENTIAL_DO_NOT_ACCESS" file, copied the target data set, compressed it, encrypted it with his own keys, and pulled it to a dedicated storage partition on his Ex-Disk. The extracted file contained over 2 gigabytes of incriminating information, and the entire gig, from the initial breach to disconnection, took just under 23 minutes.
He disconnected his link cable from the terminal, packed it up, and leaned back in the chair, feeling the residual warmth of the Paraline cooling behind his eyes as the deck stepped down from active processing to standby mode. The server room hummed around him with the low drone of the cooling fans, and for a moment, he sat there, listening to the sounds of the room.
Shortly after he was done, he sent the data to Regina Jones as a compressed archive with a verified integrity hash. She got back to him an hour later with a short text that read "Clean work. More to follow." and payment confirmation for thirty-two thousand eddies.
Santi stared at the message for a moment, satisfied. From the few gigs he had pulled for the woman, he had come to know that Regina Jones did not hand out compliments. The fact that she had written two words of praise meant the data was leverage-grade levels of good.
His new balance was 313,271 eddies. He'd gotten an extra 1,271 eddies from his SCSM skim that was still running strong, though the number of machines that had shut down had increased.
The Aiden Protocol was an evolution of Santi's first piece of original code. It evolved from the Ratatad.exe daemon that skimmed 0.5% of the eddies from every SCSM vending machine it was connected to, to snatch one thousand eddies per trigger from corpos.
It had worked, though it had also been, in retrospect, idiotic.
He had come to realize that a one-thousand-eddie trigger amount could be large enough to flag automated fraud-detection algorithms if anyone ever bothered to run a pattern analysis on the daily transaction logs, which they hadn't.
But Santi had leveled up his game, and the Aiden Protocol V2 reflected that.
The updated daemon operated on a delayed trigger system with a randomized activation window that fluctuated between one and twenty-four hours after the initial transaction contact, making the skim temporally decoupled from the event itself and therefore invisible to any real-time monitoring system. He had also reduced the trigger amount from one thousand to three hundred eddies, a number small enough to fall beneath any automated fraud-detection threshold.
The funds were also no longer deposited into a single account. They were routed through the Aiden Protocol's full distribution network, split across the Swedish, Swiss, and French accounts, and the orbital crypto reserve, resulting in Santi riding the NCART on any given day, tagging a dozen corpos during the commute, and having the money trickle in across the next twenty-four hours.
By the end of the week, the cumulative effect of Regina's payout, three additional netrunning gigs he had pulled, and the steady trickle from the Aiden Protocol V2 had pushed his total number of eddies to 387,289. It was more than he needed by 47,289 eddies, which would allow him to buy the equipment and still have a very comfortable amount of scratch left to not work the rest of the year if he wanted to.
He swiftly pulled up El Capitan's contact and placed the call.
El Capitan answered right away with his typical enthusiasm. "Ghost, mi amigo! Don't tell me you're calling to cancel on the equipment already. I should've told you, but the down payment you put on it for me to hold them is non-refundable."
"I've got your three-forty," Santi said. "Want me to transfer it right now?"
"Hold it," El Capitan said, and the energetic tone of his voice shifted. "Don't send it yet. With the deal being this big, we're going to do this face-to-face. I'll be making the delivery personally with my crew, because this is not the kind of hardware you want to be shipping through a third-party freight service and hope nobody opens the crates to see what's inside."
Santi understood the need for a personal drop and actually appreciated that El Capitan was volunteering to do it since the equipment was industrial-grade fabrication machinery, and moving it required heavy transport that would attract attention if it wasn't handled by people who knew what they were doing.
"How many vehicles?" Santi asked.
"Six," El Capitan said. "Including a Bratsk for the CNC. That thing weighs more than your ego, man, and I mean that as a professional, respectful compliment."
Santi sent him the building's address and agreed to have the delivery scheduled for the following morning.
"I'll be there by ten," El Capitan said. "You'd better have your wallet ready."
---
The next morning, Santi was sitting at the dining table by 7:30, eating eggs that Julia had made. The eggs were not synthetic, reconstituted, printed from a protein cartridge, but actual eggs from an actual vendor in Kabuki who somehow kept actual chickens.
Julia stood at the kitchen counter in a fitted jacket and dark slacks, her hair pulled back and her makeup applied, bordering on the edge of looking like a corpo. She crossed to the table, leaned down, and pressed her lips to the top of Santi's head while he was mid-bite.
"I'm heading out," she said as she straightened up and adjusted the collar of her jacket. "Meeting up with some friends from my Militech days. Magda and Lourdes. They used to work under me, but we would eat lunch together every day before... you know."
"Former wageslave reunion," Santi said as he stuffed a forkful of eggs in his mouth. "Sounds fun."
"Don't call it that," Julia said, though the smile pulling at her mouth suggested she did not entirely disagree with his words. She adjusted the collar of her jacket in the kitchen window's reflection, turning her head to check the angle. "We are going to have coffee and catch up. Maybe lunch. Maybe shopping, if Magda's husband is still sending her guilt money from the affair he thinks nobody knew about, which everyone in our former department knew about."
"Take care of yourself, Ma," Santi said. He pulled up his primary account and routed a transfer of twenty thousand eddies to Julia's personal account.
Julia's Agent pinged, and she looked at him. The expression that crossed her face contained a mixture of gratitude, pride, and discomfort. No matter how much time had passed, she had spent most of her life earning her own money, and though it had been a couple of years now, she still wasn't used to her sixteen-year-old son being the household's primary source of income.
"You didn't have to do that, mijo," she said softly.
"I know," Santi said, looking up at her with a half-smile. "But I wanted to."
Julia looked at him for a moment, her dark eyes holding the full weight of everything she wanted to say about the man he was becoming and the boy he had been, and how the distance between those two points seemed to grow every time she turned around. She reached down and squeezed his shoulder, her hand warm and firm against his skin.
"Thank you," she said before grabbing the keys to the Galena and walking to the stairwell.
Santi spent the next hour and a half in the server room, running a diagnostic cycle on the building's security subnet and updating the ICE architecture across the external camera network when his Agent pinged at 10:14 am with an incoming call from El Capitan.
He was already dressed to meet, wearing the same outfit he had worn to meet with Padre. Black, short-sleeved button-down shirt with the top buttons open, exposing the silver cross pendant at his sternum. Dark fabric mask covering his nose and mouth. Wireframe glasses softening the violet of his eyes. Thick-banded analog watch on his left wrist. Dark tactical cargo pants with utility pockets. Black utility belt cinched at the waist, and the drop-leg holster strapped to his right thigh with the Malorian Overture seated in its retention housing.
He answered the call.
"Morning, Ghost," El Capitan said. "I'm about five minutes out. You got those bay doors open for me?"
"They'll be open when you get here," Santi said. "Pull into the lot and back the transports into bays two and three. Bay one's occupied."
"By what?" El Capitan asked.
"Something you're going to like," Santi said, and killed the call.
He walked to the ground-floor control panel mounted beside the cargo lift and keyed the manual release for bay doors two and three. The armored roll-up panels slowly climbed their tracks, emitting a hydraulic groan. Morning light poured across the ground floor in two wide, golden rectangles, and the sound of the city filtered in.
He heard the grinding diesel rumble of the Kaukaz Bratsk announced itself from three blocks away, followed by the lighter, higher-pitched hum of smaller electric and hybrid motors running in formation behind it. Santi stood inside the building with his arms crossed and his back to the Mustang's rusted silhouette, watching the lot through the morning glare as the convoy pulled into view.
The Bratsk was at the front of the convoy, the flat-nosed Kaukaz heavy transport truck painted in a faded industrial grey, its cargo bed stretching long enough to hold the CNC machine and the furnace assembly side by side under a taut canvas cover that didn't really do a good job disguising the shape of what was underneath.
Behind it were two Kaukaz Zeya U420 light cargo trucks. They were compact little shits, and their beds were loaded with the gear cutter, glass press, and scrap-fab unit distributed across both vehicles and strapped down with heavy-gauge cargo ties.
Behind the three cargo trucks followed a Thorton Colby CST40 station wagon, a Thorton Galena GA32T, and a Villefort Columbus V340-F Freight van that probably carried the installation tools and the crew. There were six vehicles total, just as El Capitan had stated, and the convoy rolled into the lot with precise coordination, indicating that this wasn't their first rodeo.
The Colby, the Galena, and the V340-F pulled into the open spaces along the lot's perimeter, and their doors opened, spilling the crew out. There were two women and five men, all of them wearing work boots and thick gloves without a shred of curiosity about the building or the area they were in.
The two Zeyas reversed into bay three side by side, their compact frames fitting with a few feet of clearance between them, and four men stepped out of the two cabs and started unstrapping cargo ties. The Bratsk took bay two, its massive chassis consuming the entire width of the opening, and a single figure stepped down from the Bratsk's driver-side cab.
---
Stones... idk what to say, running out of lines here. Just hand them ovah.
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 (Though currently that number has dropped because work is killing me and I don't have much time to write.)