Chương 43: Of Corpos, Gonks, Gangs, and Mustangs VI

He followed the three men to the massive AV. They boarded the craft, ascending a short metal ramp into a dimly lit passenger cabin that smelled of hydraulic fluid and sweat. Santi took a seat on a metal bench near the rear, keeping his back to the wall and his hand near his pocket. The three smugglers strapped into the seats across from him, keeping a very respectful and fearful distance. The doors hissed shut, sealing out the biting chill and the roar of the engines.

The pilot up front engaged the thrusters, and the entire cabin vibrated as the massive transport lifted off the grass. Through the reinforced porthole window, Santi watched as the AV deployed magnetic tethers, effortlessly grabbing the loaded cargo container from the ground below. With a lurch that pushed Santi back into his seat, the AV banked sharply and accelerated into the smog-choked evening sky, leaving the Northside of Watson far behind.

The flight path took them southwest, cutting across the sprawling, neon-drenched expanse of Night City. Santi stared out the window. From a thousand feet up, the city at nearly seven in the evening looked like a glowing circuit board. The sun had long since dipped below the horizon, and the monolithic skyscrapers of the Corporate Zones stabbed upward into the darkness, their glass facades flashing with massive advertisements for Rayfield, Biotechnica, and Militech.

Down below, the streets were choked with the bridge and tunnel crowd, rivers of red taillights and blue neon as wage-slaves and straphangers crawled through the evening commute, completely obscuring the grime, the desperation, the violence, and death that defined life on the street. The location Santi had chosen for his new base of operations was a specific, meticulously researched edgezone of Arroyo.

It was a geographical sweet spot that wasn't far enough into the corporate-controlled zones to attract the attention of high-end corporate security or NCPD badges from Pacific, but it wasn't deep enough into the gang-controlled depths of Santo Domingo to risk getting his warehouse raided or taken over by scavs. It was an industrial gray area, a place where proles minded their own biz and kept their heads down. The flight was going to be quick, roughly ten minutes, which Santi utilized.

He searched for his mother's contact on his agent and began a holo-call with her. The call connected almost instantly, and Julia's voice filled his auditory cortex.

"Santi? Mi niño, where are you? It's been raining all day, and it's getting dark." Hearing her voice, stripped of the posturing, caused the cold knot in Santi's chest to instantly loosen. He maintained his Ghost persona on his exterior, but inside the holo call, it had faded, leaving just the exhausted sixteen-year-old boy. He didn't even bother moving my lips. The beauty of having an internal Fixer-grade Agent was that you could just translate your thoughts directly into the digital audio feed.

To the three smugglers sitting across from Santi in the dim cabin, he was just staring blankly out the reinforced porthole.

"[Hey, Ma,]" Santi sub-vocalized, projecting a soft, casual warmth into the transmission.

"[I'm chilled. I'm just calling to let you know I'm going to be arriving late today. I had to secure a new... workspace. For my gigs.]""A workspace?" Julia asked, a hint of maternal worry creeping into her tone.

"Is it safe?"

"[Very safe,]" Santi assured her quickly.

"[It's an industrial unit in Arroyo with good security, and it's in a quiet neighborhood. It'll give me the space I need to work without bringing the noise back home to Rancho.]" With a frictionless thought, he sent the exact GPS coordinates of the Arroyo warehouse directly to her.

"I see it," Julia said, her tone softening.

"Well... if you're going to be working through the evening in a new place, you need to eat something. You're growing too fast to skip dinner. I'll make something, and I'll bring it down to you." A genuine smile tugged at the corners of Santi's mouth beneath the mask.

"[That sounds preem. Thanks, Ma, I'll see you soon.]""Take care, mi niño. I love you." Mom said.

"[Love you too.]" Santi ended the connection just as the AV began its descent and the towering, rusted smokestacks and sprawling factories of Arroyo rose up to meet them through the twilight. The pilot navigated expertly through the industrial maze, bringing the craft down into a wide, deserted alleyway situated between two massive, unmarked brick warehouses. With a soft thud, the AV gently set the cargo container down on the cracked concrete. The craft touched down a moment later, and the doors hissed open.

Santi stood up and transferred thirty thousand eddies from his proxy accounts directly to the squad leader's terminal. It was three times the original payment for the ten-minute flight, but it bought compliance.

"I got the scratch," the leader said, his eyes widening slightly at the amount of eddies hitting his account.

"Prime biz doing work with you, Ghost." Santi walked toward the open door, the damp air of Arroyo rushing in to meet him. Before he stepped out, he paused and looked back over his shoulder at the three men.

"Just remember our arrangement," Santi said softly, using his actual voice this time.

"You all will keep your mouths shut," Santi said, his eyes locking onto the leader.

"Right, Marcus?" The leader stiffened, the color instantly draining from his face. Santi shifted his gaze to the chromed-jaw smuggler.

"I like it when you're quiet, Elias. So keep it that way." Finally, he looked at the man with the Gorilla Arms.

"And you, Dawid. Take your antiques, sell them quietly, and forget tonight ever happened." You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. The three men sat in stunned silence. They had never given him their names or handles. To them, it was proof that Ghost had indeed burrowed deep into their neural architecture and sifted through their skeletons.

"N-no worries, Ghost," Marcus managed to stammer out, his voice shaking.

"We're ghosts too. A-and thank you f-for the extra scratch." Santi nodded once, stepped out into the alleyway, and walked toward his rented warehouse. Behind him, the AV doors slammed shut, and the heavy transport tore out of the alleyway like it was running from the devil himself. Arturo Vargas was true to his word. The side door of the warehouse labeled "Section 4" was unlocked, and the security cameras covering the alleyway had been conveniently tilted upward to stare at the concrete wall.

Santi spent the next two hours engaged in grueling, back-breaking labor, systematically unpacking the cargo container, dragging the heavy wooden crates inside the spacious, dry interior of his new warehouse. He organized the antiquities meticulously, stacking the Ming vases, the oil paintings, and the vintage iron in a secure, climate-controlled corner of the unit.

Finally, using a set of heavy-duty dollies he found in a supply closet, he rolled the stripped, rusted husk of the 1970 Mustang Boss 429 into the dead center of the room. It sat there beneath the buzzing fluorescent lights. Santi wiped his brow, exhausted but entirely satisfied. For the time being, he had a new base, a car to work on, a good amount of eddies coming constantly into his accounts, and assets that needed liquidating.

He had a handful of low and mid-tier fixers in his contacts who might be interested in moving some of the smaller pieces, but dumping over eight hundred grand in authentic pre-Krash artifacts in Santo Domingo or Watson was begging for a bullet to the back of the head. He needed a direct line to the ivory towers and the people who actually spent this kind of absurd money. For some reason, Kotka came to mind when he thought of it. He sat down on a crate, pulled off the Ghost balaclava, and hit her holo-line.

A few seconds later, a sleek, stylized audio waveform pulsed in his vision as she answered.

"Ghost," Kotka's voice chimed, sounding slightly breathless.

"What's up? Haven't heard from you in a few days." Since he was alone in the warehouse, Santi decided to use his actual voice, enjoying the physical sensation of speaking freely after so much tense silence.

"I had a busy evening," he said, leaning back and resting his head against the concrete wall.

"Kotka, I'm calling because I need a favor. A big one."

"I'm listening," Kotka replied.

"I stumbled onto a bonanza. A massive stash," Santi explained, keeping the bloody details and the involvement of Arasaka strictly to himself.

"I'm talking Pre-Krash antiquities. Museum-grade shit. I got Edo-era katanas, Ming-era vases, combustion firearms, the whole nine yards. I did a quick subnet appraisal, and I'm sitting on roughly eight hundred and twenty-five thousand eddies worth of merch." The waveform on his HUD spiked dramatically, freezing for a full three seconds.

"You are shitting me," Kotka finally gasped.

"Eight hundred grand? Ghost, that's... God damn, that's top-tier fixer territory. How do you plan on selling it? It's not like you can just dump that at a pawn shop in Kabuki."

"Yeah, I know," Santi replied.

"That's why I'm calling you. I have a few contacts, but I doubt anyone would be able to move this kind of scratch without catching heat. I need you to help me fence it. Get it off my hands safely. I'll cut you in for twenty percent of the total."

"Twenty percent of eight hundred grand..." Kotka breathed, her voice dripping with absolute awe.

"Yeah, hell yeah, absolutely. I can move and see what I can do. But not through my usual biz, though. It's my dad's network." Santi blinked.

"Your dad?"

"Yeah," Kotka said, a hint of bitterness bleeding into her tone.

"He's a lab rat for Biotechnica. A heavily underpaid researcher pulling eighty-hour weeks. But his department heads? The execs he reports to? They hoard this kind of shit like dragons."

"Corpo buyers are risky, Kotka," Santi warned, thinking back to the kill squad he had narrowly avoided just hours ago.

"I know, which is why we can't just cold-call a Biotechnica executive," Kotka agreed quickly.

"We are going to need a proxy. An info bro or a face. I know a fixer who can handle it. I did a few gigs for her recently, mostly data-slates and media surveillance, and I'm pretty sure I'm in her good graces. Name's Regina Jones."

"Regina Jones," Santi repeated, committing the handle to memory.

"Can we trust her?"

"She deals with high-profile clients and media types constantly," Kotka assured him.

"She's smart, and she doesn't burn her mercs. She'll take a cut, obviously, a finder's fee, but nothing close to my twenty percent. And more importantly, she'll make sure the eddies clear safely and we don't get zeroed by corpo hit squads once the exchange is done."

"Preem," Santi smiled, feeling a massive weight lift off his shoulders.

"So, how do we do this?"

"Well, there's a catch," Kotka said, her tone suddenly shifting, becoming slightly hesitant.

"Moving physical merch of that value... It's not something we can just broker through cyberspace, Ghost. Regina and I need to authenticate it. I need to take high-res optical scans of the items to prove to the buyers that it isn't some forged polymer. If you want my help..." She paused, taking a deep breath.

"We're going to have to meet in realspace." Santi's heart suddenly spiked. Kotka has wanted to meet in realspace. For nearly two years, Kotka had been his closest confidant, his partner in digital crime, and to a certain degree, his mentor in the Old NET. But they had existed strictly as lines of code, avatars floating in a digital sandbox. To cross the boundary into meatspace felt monumental. It felt... terrifyingly real.

"Okay," Santi said, his voice cracking slightly. He cleared his throat, trying to regain his composure.

"I mean, yeah. Let's do it." He pinged his Agent, sending her the exact GPS coordinates of the Arroyo warehouse.

"Whoa," Kotka said, genuine surprise coloring her voice as she reviewed the detes.

"Arroyo? I... wow. I never expected you to live out here."

"Why not?" Santi asked, suddenly feeling extremely self-conscious about his roots.

"Because you're always pulling gigs in Watson!" she laughed.

"Your routing is so clean I assumed you were a bored Corpo kid running a multi-million-eddie rig out of an ivory tower in Westbrook. I live in Kabuki, by the way. But I actually just finished a nasty little bag job that dragged me all the way down to Heywood."

"Heywood isn't that far from here," Santi noted.

"It's not," Kotka agreed, the smile evident in her voice.

"Give me like an hour to navigate the Metro and grab a cab. I'll drop by. See you soon, Ghost." Kotka cut the line and left Santi sitting alone in the warehouse, staring blankly at the rusted frame of the Mustang. He reached up, running a hand through his messy white hair, suddenly acutely aware of how he looked. He was covered in soot, dried mud, and pulverized concrete. He was wearing ripped jeans and a scuffed jacket. For the first time since he was a child, he felt helplessly flustered.

He stood up, pacing nervously around the empty engine bay of the car. He was about to meet Kotka. In an hour. In the flesh.

'What the hell does she even look like?' Santi thought, his stomach doing nervous flips as he stared at his dust-covered boots. He then hit his mother's holo-line, which was answered almost immediately.

"Ma, are you still at home?" Santi asked.

"Yeah, mijo," Julia confirmed.

"I just finished packing your dinner. Made some arroz con frijoles just the way you like it. I should be there in around forty minutes."

"Can you please bring me a change of clothes?" Santi asked.

"Something I would look nice in."

"I can, but why?" Julia asked.

"My clothes are all dirty and wet," Santi stated.

"And I have a friend coming over. A female friend. But it's not like that-""AY JESUS SANTISIMO," Julia screeched.

"My little boy has got himself a girlfriend!"