Chương 54: Investing in your Future I

"The wise man builds his house upon the rock." - Matthew 7: 24 The weeks following the Militech deal were supposed to be all about the Mustang. That was the plan. Offload the remaining merchandise, pocket the scratch, and finally start sourcing the components Santi needed to build the twin-turbo CHOOH2 engine that would mark the return of pre-Krash American muscle from its grave in the loudest and fastest fashion. In Santi's mind, it would be a date for the history books.

He would own the first pre-Krash American muscle to ever tear through the streets of Night City.

He had the V8 conversion BD from El Capitan, the open-sourced ECU map from the Badlands nomad, and a preliminary parts list with three potential turbocharger suppliers, and a lead on a nomad fabrication shop east of Rocky Ridge that supposedly built custom engine blocks from scratch. However, he didn't have a clear path from point A to point B. The problem Santi was going to face wouldn't only be due to knowledge, but also logistics.

Building a CHOOH2 engine from the block up required a level of precision machining that he simply couldn't do in his Arroyo warehouse with a set of hand tools and a heavy-duty dolly. The engine block itself needed to be cast from 41xx steel that could handle the thermal stresses of synthetic fuel combustion, and the casting process required a foundry, or at the very least, a CNC mill capable of tolerances measured in microns.

The turbocharger assembly needed ceramic bearings rated for 45, 000 RPM and exhaust housings that could withstand sustained temperatures north of 500 degrees Celsius. The fuel rail system needed to be fabricated from corrosion-resistant titanium tubing, and the injectors needed to be custom-calibrated for the specific viscosity and burn rate of CHOOH2.

Every component led to another component, and every component led to a specialist, and every specialist led to a price tag that made his eyes water even after the biggest score of his life. Santi spent two weeks chasing leads, messaging vendors, and running cost projections through his Neural Link, and by the end of it, he had a rough estimate for the complete engine build that sat somewhere around four hundred thousand eddies.

That was assuming he did all the assembly work himself, which he planned to, but the raw materials and precision-machined components alone would eat through every eddie he had and then some. And that was just on the engine. It was sad to say, but for the time being, the Mustang was going to have to wait. However, eddies were not the reason it needed to wait. It was actually due to the fact that things had been getting worse.

Every morning for the past three weeks, the news feeds had been dominated by a single narrative that was picking up pace, transforming the NUSA's Unification War from a distant political conflict playing out in states most Night City residents couldn't find on a map, to a conflict in their own backyard. President Myers had pushed her military forces into the Pacific Northwest, and the frontline was now close enough that you could feel the economic tremors in Night City's supply chains.

CHOOH2 prices had jumped forty-eight percent in two weeks. Corporate security contracts were being renegotiated at premium rates. And the Arasaka shadow operations that Santi had stumbled into during the warehouse haul were just one thread in a much larger web of proxy warfare that was slowly tightening around Night City's throat. And Militech was starting to get more on edge, quickly joining forces with the NUSA. The smart money was getting out. The smarter money was digging in.

Unfortunately for Santi, he didn't have "get out" money. But he had enough scratch to dig in, and that's exactly what he decided to do. The remaining merchandise from the warehouse haul moved faster than he expected. Meredith Stout had helped offload some goods, and Sasha's connections through the fixer network, combined with Regina's growing list of contacts, allowed him to offload the mid-tier antiquities, the remaining paintings, and a collection of pre-Krash decorative pieces over the course of three weeks.

Some sales were straightforward, with only single buyers who knew exactly what they wanted and paid without haggling. Others required a bit more finesse, like the Valentino art collector in Heywood who spent forty minutes trying to convince Santi that a set of Ming dynasty vases was actually a modern reproduction, despite the fact that Sasha had already authenticated them, and he knew it.

In the end, the gonk paid full price, because the alternative was watching someone else walk away with the only set of genuine pre-Krash Chinese porcelain in Night City. And he was lucky too, because a few hours after the sale, Santi got an offer to buy them from none other than Wakako Okada. But he'd already made the sale, so he couldn't just tell her yes.

The total gross came to another three hundred and seventy-five thousand eddies, which, after the various fixer commissions and facilitation fees that he had to pay to brokers who helped arrange the individual sales, netted him three hundred and twelve thousand in untraceable scratch.

Combined with the three hundred and eighty-seven thousand he had cleared from the Militech deal and the roughly forty-five thousand he had accumulated from netrunning gigs, stealing from the SCSMs, and mid-tier data extractions, Santi was sitting on a shade over eight hundred thousand eddies. It was the most money he had ever had in his life. It was also, as he was about to find out, nowhere near enough. His first instinct was to fortify the house in Rancho Coronado.

He and Julia had been living there for almost eight years now, after Alejandro was killed. And while the neighborhood was a dump, it was their dump. The neighbors knew them. The 6th Street gangers who ran the block knew to leave them alone. And the house itself, while in need of repairs every now and then, had a detached garage that Santi had converted into a training space and a small workshop. Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

But the house was also a single-story structure with no security infrastructure, no reinforced entry points, and walls thin enough that a stray round from a drive-by would pass through the entire building without slowing down. If the war came to Night City, and every indicator suggested it would, their house would offer about as much protection as a cardboard box.

His initial plan was to buy the two adjacent homes, connect them, knock out the connecting walls, and create a small, fortified compound with multiple entry and exit points, a secure interior, and enough space to set up a proper workshop and server room. It was a solid plan... on paper. When he ran the numbers, he noticed that each house in their section of Rancho Coronado was listed at a hundred and fifty thousand eddies.

That was three hundred thousand for both, which would eat nearly forty percent of his total savings before he even started on reinforcement, security systems, or structural modifications. And at the end of the day, he'd still be sitting in a residential neighborhood in Santo Domingo with thin walls and a single-lane access road that any halfway competent assault team could block in about four seconds. He scratched the idea off his mind and called Arturo.

"Ghost, my favorite customer," Arturo answered on the third ring as N54 news played in the background.

"What can I do for you today? Another truck? An AV? A submarine, maybe? I can be a miracle worker."

"I need a building, Arturo," Santi said with a sigh.

"I'm looking for Something I can own, not rent. It needs to have enough floor space for a workshop, a server room, and living quarters. Ideally, I'm looking for some place in Watson, since that's where I've been pulling most of my gigs, and make it somewhere with low foot traffic and multiple access routes. Budget is one-fifty for the purchase, and I'll throw in five grand for your trouble."

"A whole building? In Watson? For a hundred and fifty racks?" Arturo whistled. Santi could hear the gears turning in the man's head.

"I can't promise anything, but if I do find something, you're talking about a fixer-upper, amigo. Anything in good condition in Watson is going to be five times that. The only properties in your range are going to be abandoned, condemned, or sitting in a zone hot enough that the previous owners decided their lives were worth more than the real estate."

"I'm aware," Santi said as he rolled his eyes.

"Just find me something."

"Right. Magic man go do magic..." Arturos said before letting out a sigh.

"Give me a week. I know some people." Arturo has asked for a week, but it only took him six days to get back to Santi. The building he'd found was located just north of the Charter Street data term in Northside, Watson. It was a three-story commercial structure that had originally served as a small logistics hub for a shipping company that went under during the economic fallout of the DataKrash. The original owners held on to it, thinking that they'd eventually manage to get back in the game.

But when the Maelstrom presence in the surrounding blocks had escalated to the point where operating a legitimate business became untenable eight years ago, they decided to call it quits. Since then, it had been sitting empty, slowly being reclaimed by weather, neglect, and the occasional squatter. Santi drove out to scout it the same day Arturo sent him the address. The building sat at the edge of what could only be described as urban wasteland.

The lot surrounding it was a wide, open stretch of cracked earth and muddy ground, pockmarked with standing puddles of rainwater that reflected the corporate skyline rising in the distance. Dead weeds and scrub grass pushed through the broken asphalt in patches, and a row of rusted shipping containers sat stacked along the eastern edge of the property, covered in faded graffiti and chemical staining.

A few scraggly palm trees lined the perimeter, their leaves brown and wilting, and overhead, sagging power lines cut across the sky between the massive utility towers, and a set of metal railings and chain-link fencing separated the lot from the road that ran along its southern edge, where traffic moved in a steady flow toward the Ringroad North overpass visible to the west.

Beyond the lot, the towers of Night City's Corpo district loomed on the horizon, their massive holographic billboards and neon signage visible even from this distance. Softsys, Data Inc., and the blue glow of a Kiroshi advertisement could be easily seen.

It was one of those strange juxtapositions that Watson specialized in, where you could be standing in a puddle of stagnant water surrounded by shipping containers and dead grass, and if you looked up, you could see a hundred billion eddies worth of corpo architecture glittering against the sky. What struck Santi immediately was that this wasn't an industrial district. The surrounding blocks were almost entirely residential, rows of apartment buildings and low-rise housing stacked on top of each other.

The warehouse was one of the few commercial structures on the block, sitting like a relic from a different era among the apartments and residential units that had grown up to its left (if you look at it from the data term). A yellow residential building sat adjacent to the back alley, and from the lot, Santi could see a group of about six gangers loitering against its wall, passing something between them.

He tagged two of them as Maelstrom affiliates based on their chrome profiles, but the rest were unaffiliated, just a bunch of low-level, territorial streetrats. He'd deal with them later. For now, they were nothing more than background noise. The building itself was exactly what Arturo had described: a fixer-upper. Three stories of concrete, the exterior split between sections of faded blue and weathered grey paint that had been peeling for years.

The windows on the upper floors were either boarded up or missing entirely. The building had two separate entrances. The first was on the blue-painted side, a standard pedestrian door that was hanging by a single hinge, and a second on the grey side. It was a larger entrance set beside cargo bay doors that had once served as the main shipping access. The roof was flat, lined with decommissioned cooling units and ventilation infrastructure that looked like it hadn't been maintained in a decade.

It had two ways in and two ways out, if he ignored the four different cargo doors. Tactically, that was already an advantage. Santi walked to the blue-side entrance first and pushed the door open, which gave way with a single firm push, the rusted hinge groaning as it swung inward and scraped against the concrete floor. The smell of musty stagnant air, wet concrete, chemicals, and God knows what else had been baking in the sealed interior for the better part of a decade assaulted his nostrils.

His Kiroshis ran an automatic air quality analysis and flagged elevated particulate levels and trace mold spores, but it wasn't anything that a proper ventilation system wouldn't solve. The ground floor was massive.

Not the three-thousand-square-foot workspace he had been picturing in his head on the drive over, but something closer to ten or eleven thousand square feet of open industrial space with ceilings high enough that the steel support beams and ceiling-mounted rail hoists were barely visible in the dim light filtering through the grimy bay door windows. The concrete floor was stained with decades of industrial use, oil patches and chemical residue forming dark, overlapping patterns.

Four numbered roll-up doors lined the front wall, each one leading to its own separate bay. Each one could easily house a vehicle, a shipping container, or anything else you didn't want people knowing about. Internal forklift lanes were painted on the floor in faded yellow, the lines worn but still visible, tracing routes between the bays and a cargo lift at the back of the space that connected to the second floor.