The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices CostcoCheesecake, qvecksilver, and a sumner.
Operative ALMS.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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A little over twenty minutes had gone by when Julia pulled up and parked in one of the bays. The rolling door lowered behind her as she stepped out of the Galena, whose engine and exhaust were still ticking. Santi took a good look at the car and the sounds it was making, which told him that his mother had been breaking every single traffic law. Sure, most of the time the NCPD didn't really care, but Julia had always been a stickler for the rules. Having done so meant that she had reached a certain level of worry that should be eye-raising at the very least.
Her purse hung over one shoulder, and her jacket was half-on as her eyes swept the ground floor. Sasha and Judy were still there, and Santi was at the engine bench, hands dirty, torque wrench in his grip, and still going to town on the motor.
"Alright, mijo," Julia said. "Talk to me."
Santi continued working on the engine, but as he did, he ran her through the turret delivery that was coming later that day. He let her know the number of turrets that would be arriving and where they would be dropped off. She would have to be the one to sign for the shipment using the Reyes Logistics Solutions name that had been on the building's registration. Then she would have to personally verify the count and ensure that the delivery crew does not set a single foot inside of the building. As a last piece of advice, he told her not to engage in conversation beyond what was necessary to confirm the order.
Julia looked at the engine Santi had not stopped working on, then at the fabrication line against the back wall, at the raw materials stacked beside it, and at the Widowmaker's partially assembled frame sitting on the lift. Then her eyes finally made their way to her son's eyes. Having worked in Militech, she knew what Kang Tao HMG turrets went for in a seller's market, and the number she was calculating behind her eyes was making the muscles in her jaw tighten, but rather than saying anything about it, she simply nodded.
"You don't have to worry about anything, mi amor," Julia said. "I'll handle the delivery."
"Thanks, Ma," Santi smiled softly and continued to work on the engine.
"Don't thank me and do not look away from me, young man," Julia said, causing Santi to freeze. "When we spoke earlier, I remember telling you that you better have a plan. So please, por el amor de Dios, just tell me you have a plan beyond bolting guns to the roof and hoping for the best."
"Yeah, don't worry," Santi said, looking up to meet her eyes. "I have a plan beyond bolting guns to the roof and hoping for the best."
Julia stared at him blankly. "Do you actually, or are you just saying that because I told you to?"
"Why can't it be both?" Santi asked with a smile and ran a greasy hand over his hair. "Ah, shit, I forgot."
Julia looked at him for a long moment, a smile threatening to break across her face. Santi always found a way to make her smile even in trying times. Then she shook her head and started walking towards the stairs. "Me voy a bañar."
A couple of hours went by, and Sasha and Judy both left for their own homes. Santi had just managed to finish installing the third connecting rod and was currently chomping down on a bag of synthetic jerky. Well, what Judy had left of it. Santi had worked in silence for quite a while, accompanied only by the ambient noise of a city that continued operating as if it wasn't about to be invaded, maybe even destroyed.
Santi's silent work was interrupted by the arrival of the delivery truck with all of the turrets when it was almost midnight, so technically still within the scope of the same-day delivery he had paid extra for.
Julia handled it exactly how Santi had asked her to, meeting the driver at the grey-side entrance. She signed for the manifest with the building's registered business name, and counted the crates as they came off the truck's hydraulic lift. There were a total of fifteen crates, each one roughly four feet long and two feet wide.
Santi waited until the truck pulled away before he made a move to come outside. He was wearing a white, grease-stained tank top, sweatpants, boots, a mask pulled up over the bridge of his nose, a pair of dark wraparound glasses he didn't even know he had, and a ball cap pulled low enough that his white hair was invisible beneath it. The mask and glasses and hat turned him from a six-foot-six teenager with distinctive hair and eyes into a six-foot-six man with no visible features and a well-defined body.
Once he looked at the crates, he went back inside and grabbed the dolly from the ground floor and started moving crates. The turrets were heavier than he expected. Each crate weighed approximately four hundred and ninety pounds, which was manageable for a single trip with the dolly, but accumulated into a workout over fifteen trips between the building's interior and exterior.
Julia held the doors while Santi wheeled, and by the time the last crate was inside and the door was closed behind him, he was sweating through the tank top, and his arms were burning from the sustained effort of maneuvering four hundred ninety-pound crates.
He opened the first crate and his eyes were met with a Kang Tao HMG turret sitting in its foam cradle. It had a matte-black housing with the angular geometry that Kang Tao was so well known for. Hell, they applied it to everything they built, from handguns to defense platforms. The barrel assembly was folded into a transport configuration, the targeting array was capped and sealed, and the mounting bracket, which was a universal clamp system designed to attach to any surface that could support the turret's weight and recoil, was packed separately in a sub-compartment beneath the main unit.
Santi began placing them around the building. Five were spread around the ground floor, where two covered the grey-side entrance from elevated positions on the mezzanine support beams, one covering the blue-side door from behind the fabrication line, one covering the main bay door from the far corner, and a last one in a position that covered the stairwell access. Santi made sure that if anybody got past the exterior turrets and made it inside, the stairwell was the chokepoint they had to pass through to reach the upper floors.
He only placed two on the second floor due to the small amount of space available. One of the two covered the landing from the stairwell while the other covered the window that looked out onto the side alley, giving it a field of fire that extended sixty feet in either direction along the alley's length.
He placed three of them on the third floor, with one at the top of the stairwell, one covering the window facing the street, and another one in the hallway outside of their rooms.
He placed another two on the rooftop, which was only accessed through the hatch on the third floor's ceiling. One of them was facing the approach from Charter Street, covering the lot, and another covering a stretch of the street entrance and the alley. Between them, the two rooftop turrets provided solid coverage of the building's exterior.
To end it all off, he placed one directly in the back alley where the gangers usually hung out. It was mounted on a bracket Santi bolted to the building's exterior wall with great struggle, giving it a downward angle of fire that covered the alley from end to end. He placed another on the side alley, mounted at the same height on the opposite exterior wall, covering the narrow passage between Santi's building and the adjacent structure. And the last one he placed just outside the building itself, tucked into the corner beside the blue-side entrance, positioned to catch anyone approaching the door.
These fifteen turrets were a defensive network that, once linked and programmed, would turn the converted building into something that would make almost anyone think twice about approaching without armored support.
Julia watched Santi install every single one of the turrets attentively, giving her silent approval of the decision her son had taken, even though her heart mourned the innocence her son had long lost.
Each turret needed its targeting parameters configured, its IFF protocols loaded, its engagement rules defined, and its network handshake authenticated against the building's local mesh that Santi had built during the renovation. The factory firmware was adequate for basic point-defense, but Santi did not want adequate. So he rewrote the targeting priority trees to distinguish between armed and unarmed contacts, between approaching and retreating movement vectors, and between single targets and grouped formations.
He also wrote exception lists for every biometric signature he wanted the system to recognize as friendly: himself, Julia, Sasha, Judy, and Vik. Anyone not on the list who entered a turret's field of fire while carrying a weapon or displaying hostile movement patterns would receive a single audio warning followed by a three-second grace period before giving a second warning with the same grace period. If they hadn't dipped after that second warning, then they better be ready to face everything the turret had.
The ammunition loading took another two hours since each turret's hopper held right around eight hundred rounds of standard 7.62mm. Santi had ordered the ammunition separately through Faraday's supply chain at a bulk rate that he had not bothered to negotiate. He loaded each hopper by hand, feeding the belted rounds into the feed mechanism and confirming the feed path was clear before sealing the hopper and running a dry cycle to verify function.
By four in the morning, all fifteen turrets were installed, networked, coded, loaded, and ready to go.
Santi stood on the rooftop in the warm night air, looking out over Watson at the city lights that stretched to the horizon in every direction for a little while before finally deciding it was time to go to bed.
Over the course of the next few days, things got real tense for everyone in Night City. N54 ran continuous coverage, and the NCPD deployed to visible positions on major intersections, which was unprecedented and told the severity of the situation better than any broadcast. Convoys moved through Watson twice a day, armored vehicles heading north in columns that forced civilian traffic to part or get parted.
And as it all happened, Santi had just kept on working. He had shifted his focus away from the Mustang momentarily and onto the chrome problem that Vik's call had turned into an engineering challenge. The Mantis Blades and the monowire.
The two forearm-mounted systems that would be competing for the same physical space, neural pathways, and motor control interfaces. Vik had said it couldn't be done, and if Santi were to take the conventional approach of installing chrome, then he would be right. But Santi was not taking the conventional approach. The conventional approach assumed that both systems needed to occupy the same mounting architecture, and after spending some time staring at the schematics of the two pieces of chrome, he had arrived at a configuration that didn't.
The monowire's deployment mechanism was, at its core, a spool system. A length of monofilament wire stored in a compact housing, extended and retracted through a guide channel, powered by a micro-motor that controlled the wire's tension and reach. The conventional mounting put the spool housing in the forearm and the deployment port at the wrist.
So, instead of giving himself a headache, Santi decided to move it.
In his configuration, the wire's deployment port sat in the palm of the hand, and the guide channel ran along the underside of the forearm, from palm to wrist to the midpoint of the forearm where the spool housing would sit in a recessed compartment beneath the Mantis Blade's folded position. When the Mantis Blades were retracted, the monowire's guide channel was invisible, tucked beneath the blade housing. When the blades deployed, extending outward from the forearm in their characteristic curved sweep, the guide channel became partially visible as the blades cleared the forearm's surface, and the thin line of the wire's track running from palm to wrist to spool would be exposed by the parting of the skin.
It was elegant and compact, and it solved the spatial conflict by putting the two systems on different layers of the forearm rather than the same layer. The Mantis Blades would be occupying the dorsal surface while the monowire would occupy the ventral surface, with the neural pathways partitioned by a firmware arbitration layer that would prevent simultaneous deployment.
Santi spent two days refining the physical schematics and a third day building the arbitration firmware. Once he had been satisfied with the configuration and sure that it would work in theory, he turned his attention to the Mantis Blades' existing code to find a way to bridge their deployment.
He dove into the firmware that had come with the blades in their hardcase, the factory-installed operating code that would govern their deployment, retraction, and neural interface once they were installed in a human forearm.
What he found made him sit back in the dive chair and stare at the ceiling in awe at the sheer stupidity of it all. The code was chaos.
It wasn't chaos like something that pretended to be chaos. In other words, it was not the organized complexity of a system designed by competent engineers working under deadline pressure, nor was it the expected rough edges of military hardware that prioritized function over polish. It was genuine, architectural chaos.
There were conflicting priority calls that would fire simultaneously and force the neural interface to arbitrate between contradictory instructions at speeds that the human nervous system was not equipped to handle. Memory allocation routines that competed for the same address space without collision management. Motor control subroutines that referenced calibration tables containing values that did not correspond to any standard human forearm anatomy, as if the code had been written for an entirely different species' limb and then imperfectly adapted.
Every line of it was a conflict waiting to activate. Every routine was a fight between the code's own subsystems that the user's nervous system would be dragged into mediating, and the cumulative neurological load of mediating those fights would push any human brain past its carrying capacity within weeks.
All in all, there was a recipe for cyberpsychosis written into the firmware at the factory level.
Santi used his cyberdeck to help him catalog the conflicts. What started as dozens of them quickly became hundreds. Each one individually manageable, but collectively, they were a death-by-a-thousand-cuts in the form of digital architecture that would degrade the user's neural stability incrementally until the threshold was crossed and the chrome, as Vik has said, started talking louder than the meat.
And then, buried in the deepest layer of the firmware's initialization sequence, in a subroutine that would activate the instant the Mantis Blades were installed and connected to a human neural interface, Santi found two processes. They were small and clean, written in a coding style that was completely different from the chaotic mess surrounding them. It was a professional construction of code that had been inserted into the firmware after the factory build by someone who knew exactly what they were doing and who had taken care to hide their work inside the noise.
Digital trackers.
The first would ping the blade's location to an external server in six-hour intervals, using the host's own network connection as the transmission medium that was disguised as routine firmware update checks and would pass through any standard firewall without flagging. The second would log the host's biometric data, neural activity patterns, and geographic coordinates, and transmit the compiled package to a different external server on a twenty-four-hour cycle.
Militech was tracking every single person who installed this specific model of Mantis Blades. Tracking where they were and what their neural activity looked like, using code hidden inside firmware that was already designed to drive its users insane.
Santi stared at the code and whispered to himself, "What kinda bull-"
---
Stones improve chrome quality, or so I heard...
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