Chương 42: Of Corpos, Gonks, Gangs, and Mustangs V

"All warfare is based on deception." - Sun Tzu Twenty minutes had passed since Santiago fired off the coordinates to the off-the-books crew. In that short window, the rain had heavily reduced to a cold drizzle, though the damp air did little to wash away the cloying stench of blood, ozone, and burnt chrome. Santi stood beside the rusted, stripped-down chassis of the Mustang, his chest rising and falling in slow breaths.

He had pulled the skull-painted Ghost balaclava over his face since, with it on, he was no longer a tall kid from Rancho, but an edgerunner with quite a reputation to uphold. And right now, he needed every ounce of that persona to deal with the transport. It was barely past six o'clock in the evening, but the smog-choked winter sky had already turned into a dark purple. The deep and resonant thrum of approaching thrusters vibrated in Santi's chest long before the headlights cut through the gloom.

He looked up, squinting his eyes against the lingering drizzle as the shadows of the city's skyline loomed in the distance. Descending from the clouds was a massive, heavy-lift cargo AV. If the Arasaka gunship from earlier had been a sleek shark, this transport AV would be akin to a whale.

It was a slab of dark grey armor and exposed industrial hydraulics, a flying kombi completely devoid of corporate branding or registration numbers that featured four massive ducted fan engines that screamed as they fought gravity. It was, by all means, a raw display of mechanical power meant strictly for off-the-books logistics. The AV hovered directly over the parking lot, its size dwarfing the no longer burning cars.

The downdraft whipped the light drizzle into a blinding horizontal frenzy, kicking up ash, dust, and debris alike. Santi had to turn his head and brace himself against the Mustang just to keep from being blown off his feet. The cargo bay doors beneath the belly of the AV ground open, and thick, braided steel winch cables lowered a battered cargo container directly toward the cracked asphalt. It hit the ground just a few yards from Santi with a metallic slam that sent a tremor through the pavement.

Once the cables detached and retracted, the pilot clearly realized that the lot, cluttered with burning vehicles and the scattered, mutilated remains of the gangoons, was far too tight to actually land the massive craft safely. The AV sluggishly rotated, its thrusters scorching the wet air, and drifted toward a patch of overgrown, weed-choked grass just off the shoulder of the main service road.

With a hiss that rattled Santi's teeth, the transport settled onto the uneven ground, and the side door of the AV hissed open. Three men stepped out into the damp chill, and Santi watched them approach, his posture relaxed while he passively scanned them as they walked, capturing fragmented broadcast data bouncing off their cheap hardware. They appeared to be some hardened smugglers, the kind of crew that made their scratch moving illicit goods across city borders without asking questions.

They wore heavy, synthetic leather dusters coated in waterproofing grime. Two of them sported cheap, exposed chrome. A cyber-jaw on one, and a set of mismatched, early version hydraulic-assisted Gorilla Arms on the other. The third man, walking slightly ahead, seemed to be the leader, his eyes hidden behind a bulky visor of optics.

They stopped a few yards away, their eyes darting from the burning cars to the slaughtered Maelstromers, and finally resting on the tall and imposing figure of Santi wearing the skull mask.

"You Ghost?" the leader asked, his voice a gravelly rasp. Santi didn't move, letting the silence hang for a moment to establish dominance. When he finally spoke, he pitched his voice lower to project a deep and mature voice that sounded entirely too calm for a man standing in the middle of a slaughterfest.

"What do you think?" Santi replied, crossing his arms over his chest. The leader grunted, unintimidated but clearly respectful of the carnage surrounding them. He gestured toward the Mustang.

"That the cargo? A rotting piece of pre-Krash gomi? You paid for a heavy-lift rig for that?"

"It's part of it," Santi said, uncrossing his arms and pointing toward the hole in the warehouse.

"The rest is staged just inside that hole. High-end, fragile pre-Krash antiquities, and if you drop anything, you're buying it. And they ain't cheap." The three men exchanged glances, and a sudden spark of greedy curiosity ignited in their eyes.

"And just so you know," Santi continued, dropping his tone even further to carry the authority of a solo who had just supposedly butchered a bunch of gangers.

"I'm paying you top-tier scratch for the transport. But I know how your line of biz goes. You see something shiny, you get ideas, you talk. So, consider this your bonus and your hush money." Santi gestured broadly to the vast interior of the warehouse visible through the hole.

"Anything in there that isn't stacked in my designated staging area is yours. You can klep whatever you find. But in exchange, you keep your mouths shut about me, about this location, and what you have seen here this evening." The man with the chromed jaw let out a low whistle, peering into the dark warehouse.

"Nova. But how do we know you ain't setting us up for a double-cross?"

"There's always a gonk who doesn't know when to shut up," Santi said with a disapproving look, and, without moving a muscle, crafted an incredibly complex and highly aggressive, but ultimately completely harmless daemon. He compiled a dummy file, wrapping it in the terrifying crimson code-structure of mil-spec tracking ICE, and slipped the file seamlessly past the incredibly weak, civilian-grade firewalls of the three smugglers' personal links before their systems even realized they had been pinged.

All three men simultaneously flinched. The leader grabbed his head, his visor flashing brilliant red. The man with the Gorilla Arms stumbled backward, his hydraulic servos whining in surprise as phantom error messages flooded his optics.

"What the fuck did you just do?!" the leader barked, his hand dropping toward the heavy polymer one-shot holstered at his hip. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"That's a little something I call Gonk Insurance for the average Joe," Santi lied smoothly, his voice carrying the icy detachment of a corpo samurai.

"I just uploaded a dormant polymorphic tracking daemon directly into the core architecture of your neural links. It's heavily encrypted so that if you try to go to a ripperdoc to scrub it, it will trigger." Santi took a slow and deliberate step forward, towering over the kneeling leader.

"For the next three hundred and two years, that daemon is going to monitor your vocal and digital communications. If any of you speak a single word about your meeting with me, the antiquities, or the shit you've seen on this lot to anyone other than each other... that daemon will burrow into your brainstem and burn you alive from the inside out. You'll cook in your own skulls before you even get to finish the sentence."

The three men froze, terrified by the unwavering confidence in Santi's voice that, paired with the terrifying red warning prompts currently flashing across their internal HUDs, was deeply convincing. But unbeknownst to them, it was a total bluff. The file Santi had uploaded was essentially a digital post-it note wrapped in scary colors. It had no executing subroutines, no tracking capabilities, and couldn't even give them a mild headache, even if it tried, let alone burn their synapses.

But with the number of crazy people in Night City, perception was often scarier than reality. If they believed they were rigged to blow, they would stay quiet.

"You son of a bitch," the chromed-jaw smuggler snarled, recovering his bravado faster than the others. He took a threatening step toward Santi, his fists clenching.

"You think you can just rig us? I say we flatline you right here and take all the cargo for ourselves. Ain't no daemon gonna stop a bullet." Santi drew the Malorian Overture from his pocket in one fluid motion and leveled it directly at the center of the aggressive smuggler's forehead. Santi cocked his head slightly to the side, the skull mask staring blankly back at the terrified man.

"What did you just call my mother?" Santi asked, the metallic click of the hammer pulling back echoing like a thunderclap in the damp air.

"I wasn't able to hear you, choom. What did you just call my mother?" The atmosphere in the blood-stained concrete plunged to absolute zero. The chromed-jaw smuggler looked down the cavernous barrel of the. 577 caliber hand cannon, his bravado instantly evaporating. He swallowed hard, his eyes darting to the slaughtered gangers and back to the unmoving, terrifying figure beneath the mask.

"Easy, hermano," the squad leader intervened, raising his hands in a placating gesture and stepping between his crewman and the barrel of the gun.

"He's a gonk. He didn't mean what he said. We're chilled. We're professionals. You pay the eddies, we haul the freight. We keep the bonus, we keep our mouths shut. Just put the iron away."

"I'm still wondering if he thinks I'm bluffing," Santi said to the other man while keeping the barrel leveled at the gonk's head.

"Take a look around, choom. Do I look like the kind of gonk who bluffs? Does any of this make you think that my mother is a bitch?"

"L-look choom. I'm sorry. I-I was just, I don't know what the fuck I was saying. S-shit, I-I'm sorry about it," the man stuttered his apology out. Santi held the aim for two more seconds, letting the fear permanently cement itself in their minds before slowly lowering his revolver, though he didn't holster it.

"Get to fucking work," Santi commanded. The tension broke and was quickly replaced by frantic energy. Since the steel container was already parked in front of the breached warehouse doors, the three men immediately began hauling the heavy wooden crates out of the staging area and packing them tightly inside. Santi stood back and watched as they carefully loaded the antiquities. He kept a running tally in his head.

The Ming vases, the Edo period Katana, the WWII M1 Garand, the original oil canvases, and the crates of smaller jade statues and jewelry. Based on his rapid subnet searches, the total value of the loot being loaded into the container was hovering right around 825, 000 Eurodollars, with the exclusion of the Mustang.

"Eight hundred and twenty-five thousand eddies," Santi softly said to himself. It was an incomprehensible sum of scratch. Hell, less than a year ago, he got baited into a kill box for just forty thousand eddies and was ecstatic to pull in ten to fifteen grand from a high-tier corporate data extraction. This was generational wealth for a lot of people living in Santo Domingo. The kind of scratch that could buy an entire conapt complex, or partly outfit a solo in the highest tier of mil-spec chrome on the market.

Once the crates were secured, the crew turned their attention to the rusted frame of the Mustang. Using a set of heavy-duty, industrial winch cables attached to the Gorilla-armed smuggler, they hauled the stripped husk into the back of the massive container, securing it to the floor with magnetic clamps. True to his word, Santi allowed the crew to scavenge the rest of the warehouse. While they prepped the container for transport, the three men hurried into the dark recesses of the building.

Within minutes, they emerged grinning, each carrying a couple of antique items that hadn't made Santi's priority cut. A set of ornate silver candlesticks, a vintage rotary telephone, and a sealed crate of pre-Krash Cuban cigars. Even to Santi's quick scan, the items they took would easily net them an extra ten to fifteen thousand eddies apiece on the black market. It was a king's ransom for a transport crew, one that would ensure their loyalty and compliance.

As the men finalized the magnetic seals on the container, Santi stepped away, pulling up a contact he had established a few weeks prior on his Agent: Arturo Vargas, a mid-tier Hispanic warehouse manager who oversaw a string of off-the-books storage facilities in Arroyo. The line rang twice before a slick voice answered.

"Ghost. My man. Calling right around dinnertime, to what do I owe the pleasure?" Arturo greeted, the sound of a sports broadcast echoing faintly in the background.

"I need the small unit in Arroyo," Santi said, keeping his voice strictly professional.

"The one we discussed. I'm ready to move in this evening, actually, right now."

"Ah, this evening? That's short notice, amigo," Arturo sighed, the fabricated hesitation dripping from his voice.

"Look, biz has been picking up lately. Six o'clock rush, Arroyo is getting gentrified by the edges, you know? Supply and demand. The price for that unit went up. I'm gonna need five thousand eddies a month." Santi's eyes narrowed beneath the mask. When they had negotiated last week, the price had been firmly set at four thousand. Arturo was trying to squeeze him, assuming the urgency meant Santi had no other options.

"The price is four thousand, Arturo," Santi said, his voice dropping into a chilling, warning register.

"We had an agreement. If you want to change the terms now, I can easily reroute my transport to a half-dozen other managers in Santo Domingo who would kill for a steady, untraceable income stream. I will find somewhere else, and you get nothing. Make the call." There was a tense pause on the line, and the sports broadcast in the background seemed to go quiet.

"Carajo. Alright, alright, relax," Arturo chuckled nervously, quickly realizing he had pushed too far.

"Four thousand it is. You drive a hard bargain, man. But look, considering the short notice and the evening hour, just slide me an extra five hundred eddies on the first month's rent. For 'safekeeping,' you know? To make sure the evening guard looks the other way while you unload." It was a blatant shakedown, a tiny exertion of power to save face. Santi could easily afford the extra five hundred. Hell, he was sitting on nearly a million in untraceable funds, but it was the principle of the matter.

"Fine," Santi agreed.

"Four thousand, plus five hundred for safekeeping. But Arturo?"

"Yeah?" the man asked.

"You're playing with fire trying to squeeze me," Santi warned softly.

"Take the deal and be happy. Because if I ever find out my unit has been compromised, or if you try to bump the rent again... you can expect a visit from me in that nice little blue house of yours on Grey Road." Santi didn't wait for a response before ending the call and transferring the 4, 500 eddies directly into Arturo's proxy account from his reserves. Santi turned back to the transport crew as they sealed the container and locked it.

"Ghost, we're ready," the squad leader called out.

"Good. Let's delta," Santi said.