6.2

  “Shouldn’t be too much of a problem,” Dance says, not bothering to turn as I step in, his focus fixed on the blue hologram kicking up from the mini circular projector on the coffee table, the light catching on the crisp white button-up stretched across his shoulders and the slacks hanging loose on his frame, one leg propped against the sofa’s arm, hand raking absently through his wild mess of hair. Seems overdressed for the occasion. Not like him to go fancy.

  The usual suspects are also here: Vander, Raze, Cormac O’Cormac, and, of course, Fingers, all standing around, waiting, eyes flashing my way the moment I step in, but I’m not late, not early either. Right on time, not a minute past the hour, not a second, and without reeking of pitfighter sweat, thank the Lord. I hadn't been to HQ since getting my senses back, and now that I have, everything smells dusty with a trace of chemical, a peculiar scent that comes in bursts rather than a steady drift. Honestly, not bad. For a run-of-the-mill gang on the south side, it’s probably even good.

  “Well, we’ll find out now, mmmm, won’t we?” Cormac says.

  I approach the table. “Start the presentation already?”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, lefty.” Raze and that damn cigar, blowing it everywhere. And yeah, I can smell that, too, especially when he gets all close and personal. At least he has enough sense to shower, unlike some people in this city. “You look weird with that visor.”

  “Has to look the part of a netrunner, wouldn’t you say?” replies Cormac, then he gestures to the hologram.

  The hologram is blank, just a blue glow in the dark, but then Dance steps off the arm of the sofa, grabs the remote off the table, and presses a button at the top. Soon, the image shifts, digitises, transforms, showcasing a map of Neo Arcadia, just like before. The aerial view zooms in on a blinking orange convoy travelling along the outskirts of the city, where it then catches the highway into the city centre, heading north towards the canal. It travels through busy Luminara streets, past all the kiosks and dancers and popping champagne bottles, moving with a cartoonishly sped-up pace, stopping. Right there, before the bridge. Time is frozen, and then the bridge is highlighted in gold.

  “Righty-ooooooo mates,” says Dance. “Keepin’ things simple, did some ironin’ out with Fingers. This is gonna be a tough doozie, but I’m sure many of you knew that already, because this isn’t the low-end, gang dookie stuff we normally deal with. This is corporate America, and these people are elite.”

  I unzip my jacket and place it over the head of the sofa, keeping it pressed there, fiddling with the fabric, feeling a tad nervous. Just how serious are we talking?

  “So, pay attention,” he continues. “Convoy’s runnin’ a hard-fixed route. Not just ’cause it’s corporate, but ’cause these blokes can’t afford to change paths on the fly. See, high-priority cargo like M-Gates? They don’t just roll through the streets like a cheap haul from the black markets. They’re on a scheduled, encrypted route, one that’s pre-approved weeks in advance by the corp’s logistics AI. Every intersection, every sector gate, every damn traffic signal? Pre-coded. Locked in. No deviations. No backtracking. That’s why we know exactly where they’re gonna be.”

  “Is it not dangerous for them to travel through the city during the Luminara festival?” I ask. “I see they’re coming from the south side, so I’m guessing the M-Gates are outsourced.”

  “Might be dangerous for you or I,” says Dance. “But these are some pretty decked-out units. We’re talkin’ overclock spinal relays, ghostkeys, you name it. Ain’t nothing even the strongest southsider could do.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Raze, folding his arms. “So how do we fare?”

  “Glad you asked.” Dance presses another button and suddenly the bridge flashes red, the two halves parting where a boat would normally travel under. “We stop them in their tracks.”

  “A drawbridge...” I say.

  “Didn’t even know that thing could lift up,” Raze says. “It happen often?”

  Fingers juts in. “Not at all,” she says. “Boats rarely travel through the canal anymore. Was more common back in the 2080s, before you showed and stunk everything up.”

  Some laughter. I admit, it’s pretty accurate.

  Raze scoffs. “Go on then. How do we lift it up?”

  Dance presses the remote again, and this time the hologram shifts towards an area on the north side, across the canal, to a medium-sized building, and I mean medium by city standards. Big enough to turn heads, but not so big it swallows the skyline. It’s got the opulence of a rich man’s hotel, but the structure leans more towards corporate fortress than anything inviting. And at the top, words take form, revealing a name: ‘The Ghost in Satin’. Before I can even ask what that is, Dance continues: “An avant-garde performance hall. Not sure many of you would’ve heard of it, but it’s pretty popular ’round Luminara. Dancers, opera singers, plays, the whole kit and caboodle. And underneath?” He clicks the remote again, and the hologram fizzles out, revealing the levels beneath, as if peeling back the city’s skin.

  Under The Ghost in Satin, the curving layers of its sublevels appear, at first the foundation, then the cavernous underbelly of maintenance shafts, storage rooms, and finally, deeper still, tunnels.

  Actual tunnels.

  “You're looking at a relic of the old North,” Dance says, pointing. “Before this place became a playground for the rich, back when industry actually mattered, these were maintenance tunnels. Originally for wirin’, plumbin’, and service access when the power grid still needed human hands. You followin’?”

  I scan the map, noting the distinct lack of straight lines. The tunnels twist, double back, some leading into dead ends while others seem to spiral. Some corridors are wide enough to fit vehicles, service trams, maybe, while others are so narrow that someone broad enough would have to turn sideways to squeeze through. They look like veins. Small, pulsing, electric veins.

  “So, I’m guessing this is all linked to a power source of some kind?” I say, thinking it would only make sense that it would be underground.

  Dance snaps his fingers. “Bonus points to Mono.” Another click of the remote, and the hologram drifts towards the far-left end, where a large though featureless room lays dormant. “Electrical substation, underground, controlling the entire sector on not just the north side but also the south, and in the middle: the drawbridge. So, step one of the plan: enter The Ghost in Satin, access the tunnels, access the electrical substation, and activate the drawbridge right before they’re about to cross, stopping the convoy.”

  There are a lot of questions to that plan, such as how we would be able to access The Ghost in Satin, the tunnels, everything, especially without drawing any security. I ask him, keeping it straight, and he answers pretty quickly, as if already considering all angles:

  “That’s where you come in, my dear netrunner friend,” Dance says. “We’re going to stage a little ‘electrical fault’ before the Luminara festival starts, and we’re going to draw out some electricians to the area.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “The fault will be in the side alley, disrupting the external grid connection to The Ghost in Satin, juuuuuust enough to cause a panic but not enough to shut the place down. We don’t want that.” Dance waves a hand, and the hologram zooms in on a cluster of tangled power lines and junction boxes nestled against the side of the theatre. “Now, here’s the trick.” He leans forward, grinning like a devil with a good idea. “It won’t look like sabotage; it’ll look like wear and tear.”

  “Old wiring?” Vander asks.

  Dance winks. “Old wiring, voltage inconsistencies. Hell, maybe even a dodgy transformer if we wanna make it convincin’. It’s gotta look natural so the theatre calls in their trusted electricians instead of triggering corporate security. Bad enough to call in two, maybe three electricians, but not serious enough to have a whole squad wonderin’ what the hell the problem is.”

  Fingers chimes in, flipping a coin. “And while those poor bastards head out to check the electrical supply, you’ll take care of ’em, spoof their IDs to match up with your fake names, and simply walk on down to the electrical substation posing as the electricians carrying out maintenance, telling them it’s an internal fault.”

  “Take care of them?” I ask, discomfited by the phrase. Surely, they couldn’t mean...

  Raze chuffs out smoke and does a cutting motion across his neck. “Iced.”

  My eyes flash wide. “Hold on a second. I don’t know about that.”

  “Know about what?” Fingers asks, sounding snippy.

  “I understand the whole ‘kill-or-be-killed’ method when it comes to dealing with other criminals, like Li Wei and that asshole on the cargo ship,” I say—and not to mention Nyah Boba-Strider. “But innocent workers? These people have families. I’m not just going to kill innocent people trying to do their jobs.”

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  “Knew she’d start bitchin’,” says Raze, letting out a loud sigh. “Looks like this plan’s a bust because New Girl doesn’t want to co-operate.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth.” I let go of my jacket and step away from the sofa. “I didn’t say I don’t want to co-operate. I said I don’t want to kill innocent people. Maybe start listening for once.”

  He scowls. “Don’t get so ballsy with me, kid. You’re here a month and pulled off one job successfully without shitting yourself.”

  “Relax,” says Fingers, then she lets out a sigh of her own. “Look, if we let them live, they’ll alert security one way or another, and then we’ll all end up screwed. Possibly worse. And I don’t want to think about that.”

  “I understand,” I say. “But surely there has to be another way? I mean surely?”

  “She has a er point.” Vander reaches into the pocket embedded in his sleeve and pulls out a ChapStick. Gently, he starts rubbing it over his dry lips. “It’s not often we just er kill off innocent workers. I mean, push comes to shove, sure, I’ll der anything, but we could prerbably just knock ’em out and tie ’em up or somethin’.”

  “Yes,” says Cormac, “but indeed what if they wake up? What if someone hears them, wherever you decide to hold them captive? You are placing undue pressure on yourselves, where eliminating them entirely and hiding the bodies provides a permanent solution.”

  “Listen,” I say, “I’m not killing innocent workers. So, we may as well scratch that off the drawing board. Crooks? Criminals? Sure. But not people doing nothing wrong.”

  Cormac massages his metal chin with his steel fingers, making eerie little taps that set my teeth on edge. “It appears we’re at a conundrum.”

  “Fuck me,” says Raze. “Why don’t I come with you, Dance? I’ll fuckin’ do it.”

  “Need a netrunner,” Dance says. “The plan is me and Mono accessing the electrical substation. I’ve already set the rest of you up. Look, it’s fine, mate.” He turns to face me. “Thought you might have an issue with it. I can cook somethin’ up that’ll keep ’em knocked out for hours. We tie ’em up and keep ’em someplace safe but quiet. That sound fair to you?”

  It did, very much so. The fact that it wasn’t the first option is absurd. I get that, as Fingers once explained, they usually operate by a ‘kill-or-be-killed’ MO, but that should only apply when absolutely necessary. Even then, I’m not sure it’s something I’d want to be part of unless my life depended on it.

  “Yeah,” I say. “But why do you specifically need me?”

  “The electrical substation unit has to be overridden,” he says. “I can’t do it. Fingers can’t do it. No one without a spoofer can do it. That leaves you. Make sense?”

  There’s a hint of peevishness in his tone, but I’ve come to realise that’s just how he talks, and he doesn’t seem to care much either way.

  I shift my weight, scanning the holo-tunnels. “Once we make it to the electrical substation,” I begin, “then what? We just override the controls for the bridge and lift it up when they arrive? Stop them in place?”

  Dance flashes a toothy side-smile, the kind that makes him look like he’s just walked off the poster of some retro-futuristic action flick. I know the style, the badboy beer-can-and-shades look. “You follow along well,” he says. Then, as if suddenly coming to mind: “Mate.”

  Raze smothers his dying cigar against his jacket, then swings a leg over the side sofa, snatching up an ashtray and letting the ember fade inside. “What about after that?”

  Suddenly, Fingers drops something heavy onto the coffee table with a dull thud. A silver case. Big, bulky. Familiar. She flicks it open, and there it is: the spider-bot from before, nestled in a foam cutout like it had crawled in and curled up to die. The way spiders often do.

  She reaches into the side compartment of the case’s interior and brings out the control shard, and I expect her to hand it off to Dance for another demonstration, for an explanation, but to my surprise, shock even, she passes it over to me and says, “Slot it in.”

  “Me?” I say. Not waiting for a response, I slot the control shard into my neural port.

  “Suspicious data identified,” my neural AI says. “Are you sure you wish allow this access to your primary neural system?”

  I think it’s safe to say I’ve gotten used to saying ‘yes’ in this city. So, I do. My perspective shifts. A window opens, flooding my vision: a dark rectangle at first, glitching at the edges. Then, slowly, the top half peels away like a camera feed booting up.

  And the first thing I see?

  Dance’s ass.

  I can see everything the spider sees, and I can feel it. Controls lie at the top right, but they’re indeed a lot more complicated and precise than something like, say, the crane head trolley. Really a lot of this is just a feeling, a sensation of thoughts where the spider’s movements reflect my will. I picture raising the spider’s front right leg or pincer—frankly, I’m not sure what you’d call it—and it responds, pretty accurately, too, with little buffering.

  “As a netrunner, you’ll be able to control the bot from a strong distance,” Dance says. “And, more importantly, for a while. Your software is designed to handle high processing power for longer durations than most; yeah, that’s right, mate.”

  “It feels weird,” I say.

  Dance says, “Don’t I know, mate. Point is, this little doooooozie is our ticket to inserting the spoofers into the M-Gate visors. See, mate, when that bridge is raised, Fingers will drop off the bot someplace nearby, top of an apartment complex on the southside. You’ll tap into it, climb in the back of the vehicle, and slot them in.”

  “Seems impossible,” Raze says. “Corpo-shits everywhere. It might not be a huge bot, and it might be quiet, but they’re gonna see it if it tries to pry itself into a convoy.”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute.”

  I ease the spider-bot out of its foam cutout and guide it off the table, metal legs clicking as it creeps onto the floor and around the sofa. At first, the movement is erratic, jerky, like trying to steer a vehicle with loose suspension. But gradually it steadies. Maybe I’m adapting to the bot, or maybe it’s adapting to me.

  One thing’s certain, though: I’m going to need a hell of a lot more practice. Especially with the Luminara festival only a couple of nights away.

  I bring the spider-bot up along the wall, up to the ceiling, looking down on us. I can see myself tapped in, the visor glowing blue instead of pinkish red, and a new option pops up on the top right: Spin.

  Curious, I press the button and the spider suddenly drops. Shit. But it stops just before it hits the ground, moving with a slight bounce before settling into stillness. An outline of the spider’s body appears on the bottom right, showing the entire anatomy, and at the back a single line appears, going up and up.

  A web.

  The bot is held in place by thin threads of metal. I ease the spider up, slowly this time, then drop it back down onto the floor. The web retracts behind with a smooth, whispering slide.

  “Already gettin’ the hang of it,” says Dance.

  I remove the control shard, and my vision stutters. Static, distortion. Then clearing. Hazy at first. Sharpening. Solid. Clear.

  “I get it.” I rub the back of my neck. “But how am I supposed to match my ID to the electrician’s? Even if the names line up, they’ll still flag me the second they scan me—because, according to the system, I’m dead.”

  Dance smirks. “That brings me to my next point.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a small, familiar-looking case, identical to the one Rico used for his money shard. Sliding it open, he takes out a slim shard and holds it up between two fingers. Then, extending his other hand, he says, “Wire.”

  For a second, I feel like I’m back in Flux, cutting that deal with Rico. I pull out my wire, and he takes it, plugging it into the side of the shard. A notification pings at the top of my neural display:

  ‘Uploading Data…’

  The progress bar creeps forward, fills to 100%. A new quickhack materialises in my interface, the name glowing in the left corner of my vision:

  Gossamer Sig.

  “Fresh addition to your toolkit,” Dance says. “Gossamer Sig. Big in the netrunning scene; that’s right. Temporarily alters your or anyone else's body signature. Name, age, status, whatever you need to pass as someone else, even a legit civvie. And here’s the fun part: I already picked out a couple of real electricians from Neo Arcadia for us to spoof.”

  I nod. “Alright. And those names are?”

  Dance straightens up. “I’m going to be Reeve Calder,” he announces with a flourish, like he’s proud of it. Then he turns to me with a grin. “And you, my dear netrunner choooomie, are gonna be Juno Harlyn. Disabled veteran turned electrician. Yeah, that’s right. Disabled. No arm.”

  I let out a low chuckle, leveling him with a stony stare. Either this guy is completely insane or an outright genius. Maybe a bit of both. He has a knack for solving problems that seem impossible, though I suppose it makes sense. Netrunners have been around for decades, and with them, technology has evolved to the point where almost anything is possible. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look, what to exploit. Good thing Dance and Fingers put their heads together for this one, covering all the angles, or at least, most of them.

  I’ve already come to learn that things rarely go to plan, but we really can’t afford to make any mistakes with this one. On the southside, things are different: the NACP don’t give a flying damn about crooks unless they’re a serious threat to the community or national security. Here? We’re on their turf. If anything goes wrong, it’ll come back to haunt us. No question. This isn’t some under-the-radar cesspit like Quick Bites. This is a performance hall, a place where the city’s elite gather, where the most expensive, meticulously crafted shows take place. No space for wrong moves. No shot in the dark, as Rico likes to say.

  Dance runs through the rest of the crew’s roles, and it’s clear that everything needs to go off without a hitch if we even want a chance at pulling this off. From what I gather, once the bridge lifts and the convoy is forced to a stop, Cormac and Raze will act as a pair of southside drunks, creating a distraction while I control the spider-bot. I’ll slot in the control shard from underground and take over. The key move will be sneaking the spoofers into the M-Gate visors at the back of the convoy while the units are distracted, slipping out unseen, then triggering the bridge lift to make it look like a temporary outage caused by a festival power surge. Meanwhile, Vander will be monitoring the inside and outside of The Ghost in Satin through a hand-held computer, and we’ll tap him into the building’s camera network through the spoofer. Vander will also take the electricians' unconscious bodies somewhere quiet, carrying them in the trunk of Raze's car. Fingers will keep watch on the convoy, stepping in when needed to guide me while I control the spider-bot. And since the bot doesn’t have Chroma-Skin, I’ll have to be extra careful. One wrong move, and the whole thing falls apart. Timing is another issue. We’ll need to arrive early, but not so early that the electricians have a chance to wake up, and not so late that the convoy crosses the bridge before we reach the electrical substation. Every second will count.

  Once that’s done, the only thing left will be resolving the ‘temporary electrical outage’, a simple fix with access to the electrical substation. Reactivate the side panels, make it look like a routine reset, and walk away clean. By then, it’ll be early morning, probably around one o’clock, maybe later, depending on how smoothly things go. After that, it’s just a waiting game for the M-Gate visors to activate. Once they do, we’ll have a front-row seat to classified corporate meetings, siphoning off any crucial intel we need. Job done. Money made. A lot of money. Fingers says Quillon Bennett is offering over a million eddies to the gang that can get him the intel he wants, and lately, his focus has been locked onto one thing:

  Elydrine.

  Or, as I’d seen at the cargo terminal: that inky-blue coolant running through the androids. Supposedly, it’s rare. Valuable. And no one seems to know much about how it’s made, except that a scientist named Isolde Crane created it. Techstrum, of course.

  I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what she left behind.

  But I have a feeling that one of these days I’ll find out.