Chương 55: Investing In Your Future II

Along the far wall, a row of heavy-duty electrical outlets and conduit channels suggested the previous tenants had run serious industrial equipment, and a reinforced door in the northeast corner opened into what turned out to be an old transformer room. The industrial transformer was still there, a massive, oil-cooled unit that hummed faintly when Santi ran a diagnostic ping through his Kiroshis. It was dead, but potentially salvageable.

Next to it sat a backup diesel generator that looked like it hadn't been started in years, and behind both, someone had spliced in a set of illegal grid taps that ran through the wall and into the city's power infrastructure. They were crude but functional, and Santi made a mental note that whoever had occupied this building before the owners abandoned it had been running off-the-books power for a reason. The entire ground floor was big enough to park five or six cars with room to walk between them.

Machine shop, vehicle bay, cargo staging, storage, shit, if he dropped the Mustang here, he could probably lose track of it. He checked the four roll-up bay doors from the inside. The mechanisms were seized but the panels were solid, made out of heavy-gauge steel that would stop anything short of a focused explosive charge. The grey-side entrance beside the bays was in better shape than the blue-side door he had come in through, the frame mostly intact and the lock mechanism only partially corroded.

He made mental notes as he moved through the space. The stairwell was at the back of the ground floor, a concrete switchback with metal railings spotted with rust. The steps were solid, and there was no cracking or structural compromise. As he climbed, he passed a mezzanine level that opened onto a network of catwalks and maintenance corridors suspended above the main warehouse floor. The catwalks ran along three walls, connecting to elevated storage platforms and overlooking the entire ground-floor space.

From up here, you could see every corner of the warehouse below. Sniper overlooks. Observation platforms. He could easily turn this from a building into a killbox for anyone stupid enough to breach the ground floor without clearing the high ground first. The second floor was roughly seven thousand square feet, split into a series of rooms that branched off a central corridor. It was old office space, mostly.

There were filing cabinets rusted shut, desks covered in dust and mold, a security room with dead monitors, and a gutted access terminal that had once controlled the building's camera network. There was also a communal bathroom with burst pipes and water damage that had spread across the ceiling tiles and down the walls, leaving dark, branching stains that looked like a circulatory system drawn in mildew.

The wiring was exposed in several sections, stripped of copper by scavengers who had taken about forty percent of the building's internal cabling, leaving empty conduit channels and dangling connector clips. But the bones were good. The walls were reinforced concrete, and some of the interior doors were blast-rated. In the back corner, behind a heavy door that took Santi two minutes of manual leverage to pry open, he found a room that had clearly been designed as something more than an office.

The walls were lined with mounting brackets for server racks. The floor had cable routing channels cut into the concrete. And the ventilation duct feeding the room was oversized and likely designed to push enough cold air to cool electronics running at full load. At some point in time, someone had been running a server room in here. Or had been planning to.

The third floor was a partial addition, smaller than the floors below, roughly three to five thousand square feet of space that had been converted into living quarters at some point in the building's history. There were three separate rooms, each large enough to serve as a bedroom, connected by a central hallway that opened into a larger common area with windows overlooking the lot and the surrounding apartment blocks.

It also had a communal kitchen with rusted appliances and dead plumbing, and a shower block with cracked tiles and seized valves. The whole space had the feel of converted worker housing. The view from the third-floor windows wasn't scenic, but the sightlines were excellent.

The open lot, the approach road, the rooftops of the residential buildings surrounding the warehouse on three sides, the alley behind the building, and the Ringroad North overpass cutting across the skyline to the west, and the corporate towers glittered in the distance. It was simply full of tactical vantage points that a solo would pay a premium for. The roof access was through a reinforced hatch in the third-floor hallway ceiling.

Santi climbed up, and the rooftop had multiple industrial HVAC exchangers that sat in rows along the eastern edge, their housings rusted but structurally intact. Heat exhaust stacks rose from the southern corner, suggesting the building had once handled chemical processing or fabrication work that required dedicated fume extraction.

The ventilation system was split into separate zones, individual duct networks servicing different sections of the building, which meant the warehouse air, the living quarters air, and whatever had been running in that server room had all been on independent climate systems. Rooftop water tanks sat on elevated platforms near the western parapet, connected to a grey-water reclamation system that was rusted but potentially functional.

A small enclosed structure in the northeast corner housed what looked like a communications array, which had been stripped of its equipment, but with the mounting brackets and cable routing still intact. And scattered across the remaining surface, bolted to the concrete at irregular intervals, were the mounting points for solar scavenger panels that had probably been removed long before the building was abandoned. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

Santi stood on the roof for a long time, looking out across the rooftops of Northside Watson. The surrounding apartment buildings were close enough to see into, their windows glowing with the blue flicker of braindance sets and the warm yellow of kitchen lights. The Maelstrom presence was visible further out, their territory markers glowing against the smog. But the immediate area around the building was quiet. It was the kind of neighborhood where people minded their own business.

The open lot below provided clear sightlines, and the multiple access routes meant he'd never be boxed in. Twenty thousand square feet of usable interior space, industrial power infrastructure, split-zone ventilation, a cargo lift, catwalks with overlooks, blast-rated interior doors, a pre-wired server room, four individual vehicle bays, and living quarters on the top floor with windows that caught the morning sun. It was more than perfect, and Santi knew that it was going to cost him everything he had.

He bought the building for a hundred and fifty thousand eddies, routed through the Aiden protocol and processed through a shell company that Arturo had set up to handle the property transfer. The deed was registered under a corporate entity called Reyes Logistics Solutions, a name so aggressively boring that no fixer, ganger, or corpo analyst would ever give it a second look. He threw Arturo the extra five thousand for his trouble, and Arturo promised to keep the transaction quiet. Then, even more spending began.

The restoration took another week to arrange and three months to complete. Santi contracted a crew through one of Regina's contacts, a team of four construction specialists who worked exclusively with fixers and edgerunners, building and renovating safe houses for clients who needed places to disappear. And though they weren't cheap, they were discreet and they knew how to work fast without attracting attention, which was more than worth the money.

The scope of work was significant since twenty thousand square feet of building meant twenty thousand square feet of problems. Power had to be fully restored, which meant rewiring the entire building with modern, shielded cabling that could handle the electrical load of a server room, a workshop, and residential living quarters simultaneously, while salvaging the industrial transformer and replacing the backup diesel generator with a unit that actually started.

The illegal grid taps were ripped out and replaced with a clean, high-capacity connection to the city's power grid that was routed through the shell company to avoid questions. The water system needed new pipes throughout all three floors, and the burst plumbing on the second floor had caused enough water damage that several sections of the ceiling and floor had to be ripped out and replaced.

The mold situation was worse than Santi had initially assessed, requiring a full environmental remediation of the second floor that involved gutting three of the old office rooms down to the concrete walls. The grey-water reclamation system on the roof was repaired and reconnected to the rooftop tanks, and the split-zone ventilation network was cleaned, resealed, and fitted with new HVAC exchangers.

The crew patched the roof leaks, replaced the windows on all three floors with reinforced, tinted panels, restored the cargo lift between the ground and second floors, refurbished the mezzanine catwalks with new railings, repaired all four roll-up bay doors on the ground floor, and installed new reinforced doors with hydraulic track systems on both pedestrian entrances. The third-floor living quarters got new kitchen appliances, replumbed showers, and sealed flooring throughout.

The bill for the restoration came to three hundred and fifty thousand eddies. More than twice what the building itself had cost, but Santi processed the payment without a second thought, since it had been much cheaper than he expected. But he wasn't done just yet. What good was a brand-spanking new building if it had no security? The building needed a comprehensive surveillance and access control system that would turn it from an abandoned logistics hub into a sealed, monitored fortress.

He contracted a second team, this one sourced through a Watson fixer named Faraday who specialized in security installations for high-value clients. The package included exterior and interior camera coverage on all three floors and the rooftop, new biometric locks on every access point, a centralized monitoring terminal on the third floor, and a hardened local subnet with its own ICE that Santi would personally take his time in configuring once the hardware was in place.

The security package ran another hundred thousand eddies before he thought about adding turrets. He had gone back and forth for days since it was a given that turrets were expensive, conspicuous, and technically illegal for civilian installation within Night City limits, which meant that every turret he mounted was a potential legal liability if the NCPD ever decided to give a shit about building codes in Northside Watson, which they wouldn't, but still.

The paranoid part of his brain refused to leave the building's physical defense to cameras and locked doors alone. He sourced twelve Kang Tao light turrets through the same grey-market vendor network that had supplied the construction crew. Each turret was a compact, retractable unit built around an SMG-caliber rotary barrel with motion-tracking capabilities and a neural-link compatible targeting system that he could integrate into the building's central security subnet.

They were designed to be concealed, mounted inside ventilation ducts, window frames, and structural recesses where they could deploy in under two seconds and retract just as quickly. Twelve turrets at fifteen thousand eddies each came to a hundred and eighty thousand. Installation, which involved cutting mounting points into the building's structure and running dedicated power and data lines to each unit, added another twenty thousand. He had spent two hundred thousand eddies for a turret network.

Santi sat in the Galena after authorizing the final transfer and did the math on his HUD while Julia was inside the house making dinner. He had spent a total of eight hundred and seven thousand eddies in about four months. He had zero eddies to his name. Well, that wasn't entirely accurate since his automated daemon was still trickling in a good amount of eddies from the SCSMs.

But he still had the Arroyo warehouse with the Mustang sitting in it, costing him four thousand a month in rent that he currently couldn't afford. He had the Mantis Blades, which he could sell if things got desperate, but he knew that with his skill set, he could eventually make up the eddies. He second-guessed himself for about thirty seconds.

Then he thought about the war that had advanced even further in the past couple of months and about what would happen to his mother if the NUSA pushed into Northern California and Night City became a warzone, and they were still sitting in their house in Rancho Coronado. It had been the right call to make. Now he just had to break it down to his mother and help her understand why and how he blew through over eight hundred thousand eddies while he was still just a 16-year-old kid.