AN: Kinda forgot to set this up. Sorry for the late chappie...
The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices call_me_b4rti and James.
Operatives Petre daniel and Gnomon.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
- Murphy's Law
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They arrived at the warehouse in Arroyo, which sat somewhat isolated from the surrounding structures. It made sense, though. You wouldn't really want people to be able to see just what it is you're hiding when you're running an operation like the one Thumbart was running.
Santi and V approached the loading area carefully. The building was your run-of-the-mill industrial construction made up of corrugated steel walls over a reinforced concrete frame, a flat roof with HVAC units, and a loading dock with three bays, two of which were sealed and the other one occupied by a delivery truck that had been backed in. The building also contained floodlights on the dock's exterior, which ensured anybody sneaking around would be seen before they were within forty feet of the building. Four cameras on the building's north face also covered the approach.
Maine had stayed back, parked in the shadows of some rubble a quarter mile back. He was in V's new ride, which was just a Villefort Columbus V340-F Freight van that had been revamped to be an armored beast.
"I still think what you lot are doing is stupid," Maine said through the comms.
"You're seven-four," V said. "There is no way you can sneak around."
"Ghost is like six foot seven. He can't do stealth either," Maine argued.
"That's where you're wrong," V countered. "Ghost didn't just name himself that, but he proved to be worthy of the name. Sure, he bulked up and is easier to spot now, but he's still got the skills and reflexes that would allow him to sneak around. You cannot do stealth, Maine. You physically cannot. You would have to fold yourself in half to fit through the maintenance hatch, and then you'd have to unfold."
"I've done infiltration work," Maine stated.
"What did you infiltrate?" V asked. "The Grand Canyon?"
Maine muttered something that the comms did not fully capture, though it didn't sound complimentary.
"You're the exfil," Santi said. "And the contingency. If shit goes sideways, which around V it tends to do-"
"Hey!" V pouted.
"No offense, V, but you're kinda like a bad luck magnet," Santi said. "But back to what I was saying, Maine, if we need the wall to come through, then you'll know what to do."
"Fine." A pause. "But I'm not sitting here all night."
"Hehehe," V chuckled. "Well, you can also twiddle your thumbs together or stick a fist up your-"
"V!" Santi interrupted her.
"What? You don't know his kinks," V defended herself.
"I swear I'm working with children," Maine sighed over the comms as Santi reached the external terminal mounted beside the loading dock's service door. He had been moving low along the building's wall in the dead zone between two camera arcs to reach the standard industrial access panel of a terminal. It had a hardline port beneath a hinged cover that looked like it hadn't been opened in a long time.
Santi opened it and jacked in, and was immediately smacked across the face with mil-spec ICE. But not only was it just mil-spec ICE, but it was also mixed with combat ICE. From the looks of it, it was definitely Militech, which meant it would take a little to bypass it.
"Welp," he said quietly. "Thumbart's got Militech ICE on the perimeter. And it's not some surplus shit either. He's got the real deal preem bullshit. Newest gen on the market too."
"Guess it's not standard for a black-market operator," V said from her position at the corner of the building.
"Nope," Santi said. "But it's still Militech slop."
He got himself in a groove and made his way through the first layer in just under eleven seconds. Combat ICE was built to stop intrusions cold rather than to degrade gracefully, which meant its architecture prioritized hard barriers over adaptive response, something that a runner with Santi's current get-up could hammer through faster than the barrier could regenerate.
And just like that, another five seconds went by, and he was inside the perimeter network. He pulled the feed management subsystem of the cameras, identified the four exterior units covering the north face, and cut their power routing at the junction rather than their signal so that it wouldn't give an alert. He repeated the process with the other cameras on the exterior and then moved on to the internal ones.
He wrote a daemon on the fly that would run a loop-and-replace routine that would capture sixty seconds of interior footage from each internal camera and play it back continuously while suppressing the timestamp overlay. It was something standard, and just four seconds after uploading the daemon, he had control over what the internal cameras saw. As soon as he did so, he felt something prick at his head, but couldn't really pinpoint what it was, so he just shrugged it off.
"Feeds are looped," Santi said. "You've got a window through the maintenance hatch on the east side, twenty meters from your position."
"On it," V said, already moving.
Santi tracked her through the building's own security network, watching her progress as a heat signature in the feed since she had just been made invisible to everyone else. She reached the maintenance hatch, worked the seal, and slipped inside.
There were two guards in the interior corridor, and Santi watched as V came up behind the first one while he was mid-sentence in a conversation with the second, put one hand on his jaw and the other on the back of his skull, and snapped his neck. The second guard turned, opened his mouth, but V was already inside his reach. She sent one hand clamping over his face and driving him backward into the wall while her other hand slid out a knife, shoved it repeatedly into his throat and then into his temple. He was dead before his body hit the ground.
"Remind me never to piss her off," Santi said to himself. She had just killed two men who were taller than her by half a foot in less than five seconds.
"Corridor's clear," V said. "Ghost, you can come on in."
Santi entered through the loading dock's service door, which he had unlocked from the terminal, and moved through the corridor past the two bodies and pooling blood that V had left behind. The one that had his neck snapped had shat and pissed himself, making Santi scrunch his nose as he walked by.
"Server room's ahead," V said as Santi approached. "The floor plan Padre gave us says it's the door at the end."
"Hold on," Santi said as he sent out a passive ping into the server room. Beyond it, a larger open space that the floor plan had labeled as a storage bay and that was, based on the density of signatures inside it, functioning as something considerably more populated.
He got wind of fourteen signatures spread across the storage bay in a loose distribution. They were most likely huscle, gonks with guns who had been paid to stand around and look dangerous, positioned without regard for overlapping fields of fire or defensive coordination. And there was one more signature near the bay's far end. Their heart rate was elevated, and they seemed to be pacing back and forth.
"I found Thumbart," Santi declared. "He's got fourteen others, most likely some huscle due to their lack of coordination in their positioning."
"That's a lot of huscle," V said.
"Meh, I think we've faced worse," Santi shrugged. "He's probably expecting somebody since the buyer meeting's tomorrow morning. He keeps on pacing, so I think he might be nervous about something."
"Good," V said. "Nervous people can't shoot worth a shit."
They moved to the server room door, and Santi quickly worked the lock through the building's network. The room beyond was cold and lit in the blue-white of active status LEDs. It was packed with rows of full-height server racks and the air handling system pushed a steady current of chilled air through the aisles.
As they walked in, Santi felt that prickling sensation in his mind once again and finally realized what it had been. Somebody was walking his own connection backward.
"Shit," Santi said. "There's a runner in the network, and they're tracing me."
As soon as the words left his lips, the alarms triggered, and every light in the building shifted from white to red as a klaxon began cycling at a disorienting frequency. Santi's ping notified him as the fourteen huscle began moving with accelerating urgency.
"Well," V said, drawing her SMG. "So much for nervous."
The huscle started firing through the server room doorway at chest height as they split and went wide, tearing into the rack at the end of the second row of server racks and blowing a server unit apart in a spray of circuit board fragments and shattered cooling fins. They then fired a second burst with better aim and caught the edge of the doorframe, sending concrete dust across the aisle.
V sprinted toward the right and slid into the gap between two racks, coming up with the SMG braced against her shoulder. She fired in controlled bursts, her smart-link rounds curving in flight to track targets she could not directly see. Two men through the doorway went down before they cleared the threshold. One of them took a round through the throat and dropped to his knees, hands clutching at a wound that was pumping arterial blood like an open hose across the floor. The other took two rounds in the sternum and folded forward onto the first one.
Santi threw himself behind the third row of racks as a burst of gunfire tore through the space he had just been standing in. He was distracted as the netrunner had reached his defensive perimeter and was hammering at it, throwing ICE-breaking daemons at him in rapid succession, each one probing for weaknesses that would let them into his rig. However, Santi's custom firmware held, though it barely did so. Whoever this runner was, they were competent, and they were well-equipped. They were also exceptionally aggressive, and the combination meant that Santi was allocating processing to defense that he desperately needed for offense.
He traced back the signal of the runner, which took him a few seconds. As he did so, a burst of bullets tore through the server racks above him, prompting V to fire back in controlled bursts from twenty feet away. The netrunner's signal originated from over 40 meters below him, which explained why his initial ping failed to track the runner.
Santi composed a hack on the fly out of components he had written for other purposes, creating a mirror construct that would sit between his defensive perimeter and any incoming attack, reflecting that attack back at its source with the payload duplicated. It took him over twenty seconds to get it done, and he could feel his mind starting to run hot since he had unconsciously used his brain's full throughput. Once it was ready, he fired it into the network, and the next attack the netrunner sent hit it, bounced, doubled, and returned to sender.
Santi felt the netrunner's throughput drop by forty percent as their own construct detonated inside their defensive architecture. But he couldn't afford to wait and watch. He had a room full of hostiles making their way to his location. He threw a Contagion quickhack to a clustered group of the huscle and drew his Overture.
He fed Ping data to his targeting overlay and stood up, firing through a server rack. The round punched through the rack's sheet-metal housing, through three server units, out the far side, and into a man who had been using the rack as cover. The round entered below his collarbone, expanded, and exited through his back, carrying a section of his scapula with it.
Santi walked left along the aisle and fired again through two racks, into the hip of a woman who was moving toward V's position. The round shattered her pelvis, and she went down screaming, one leg bent in an awkward direction until V shut her up with a burst of rounds through her skull on her way past.
Another woman tried to round the corner to surprise them, only to be greeted by the end of Santi's Overture. He opened fire and sent her brains flying and her body crumpling to the ground. The act brought back some painful memories from Jax's suicide and left Santi semi-frozen for a split second.
It was just enough time for him to be hit with a burst of rounds to the chest. The impact threw him backward into the server rack behind him with enough force to crumple the rack's housing and drive the edge of a server unit into his shoulder blade. Pain immediately slammed into him across his sternum and left pec, and he felt like he couldn't breathe.
His subdermal armor had thankfully absorbed all of the hits, but subdermal armor didn't magically make you immune to the pain. Without the armor, he would be dead.
He slid down the rack to the floor and told himself to get up. His body spasmed a bit, as if fighting for control over itself, and air finally entered his lungs in a strangled gasp that felt like he was swallowing glass.
"Santiago, get the fuck up," he said to himself, barely above a whisper.
But he didn't get to do that just yet as one of the walls exploded and the armored freight van came through the warehouse wall at a good speed.
The corrugated steel peeled backward from the point of impact like paper, and there were two of the hired muscle standing where the van entered.
The first one, a bald guy with asian features, disappeared under the front bumper and reappeared behind the rear wheels in several pieces, his upper body completely severed from his lower body along a line that ran diagonally from his left hip to his right shoulder. The second one was caught by the corner of the van's brush guard and driven backward into a server rack, where the speed drove a length of the rack's structural steel frame through the back of his neck and out through his throat, pinning him to the rack. His legs kicked momentarily and then quickly stopped.
The van ground to a halt in the middle of the room, its engine still roaring as dust and debris rained down from the collapsed section of wall. Then the driver's door opened and Maine stepped out holding an HMG that had been designed for vehicles, yet he was carrying it by hand.
"Surprise motherfuckers," Maine said, and opened fire.
A man in the line of fire was torn to shreds as rounds hit him across the abdomen, quickly turning him into half the man he used to be while his torso and its components traveled in different directions. Another one tried to run and took a burst across the back that removed his spine and turned his head inside out across the server racks in front of him.
The remaining people broke, diving behind racks, crates, and the overturned table where they had been playing cards, and Maine swept the room with sustained fire that chewed through their cover.
Santi got up, and it hurt. His chest was a single continuous bruise and something in his left ribs was definitely cracked, though not fully broken.
As he stood up, anger overcame him. He noticed that the server rack he had been thrown into had a maintenance access port on its lower housing, and it was still live. He decided to quickly jack into it and was greeted with the building's core data architecture.
He saw Thumbart's inventory, financials, contact records, and, in a partition that matched Padre's briefing, the perimeter defense data. It contained data on every structural weakness in Night City's automated defense grid, compiled into a package any competent military planner could use to walk an army through the front door.
Santi copied all of it in less than thirty seconds while Maine kept on firing. Once he was done, Santi pulled the cable, straightened up, and activated his Kerenzikov.
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