Chương 62: Unspoken Interest

"Without ambition, one starts nothing. Without work, one finishes nothing." - Ralph Waldo Emerson The N54 News broadcast resounded throughout the third-floor common area when Santi walked out of the shower, a towel around his waist and his hair dripping with water.

"... Colonel Kurt Hansen, commanding officer of Militech's 3rd Expeditionary Brigade, has emerged as the most operationally effective field commander in the western theater since the conclusion of the Battle of Ridgecrest.

Hansen's forces, designated Task Force Ironclad by NUSA High Command, have advanced one hundred and forty-seven miles northwest from the Ridgecrest forward operating base in the eight weeks since the battle's conclusion, establishing a chain of fortified supply depots along the Highway 14 corridor and systematically reducing Free State defensive positions in the southern Sierra Nevada foothills.

"Defense analysts on the WNS network have described Hansen's operational tempo as 'relentless,' citing his brigade's twenty-two-hour daily operational cycle and his documented willingness to bypass hardened defensive emplacements in favor of rapid encirclement and siege tactics that deny the defenders resupply rather than engaging them directly..."

Santi toweled his hair and looked at the screen from which the anchor's voice came, carrying a smoothness that could make anyone feel like they were at a boardroom presentation. The man spoke Hansen's name with a reverent familiarity that corpo media only reserved for generals who were good for ratings, which meant Hansen was either genuinely dangerous or extremely photogenic.

But based on the satellite footage cycling beneath the news ticker, showing column after column of Militech armor rolling through the desert in a haze of dust, it was probably both. Santi killed the broadcast with a blink command and pulled a clean black t-shirt over his head, then put on dark cargo pants and a pair of new tan combat boots.

He left the tactical gear in his room, not taking a holster or anything to help him disguise himself, since just waltzing around with an Overture would be a headache if a NCPD Cuntfficer tried to stop him. The past two months had been rather productive for Santi. Since the gig with Padre in July, Santi had thrown himself back into netrunning to help sustain the three-story building's operational costs, any other living expenses, and his eventual goal of having the Mustang resurrected from the dead.

He had pulled fourteen solo gigs across Watson, Westbrook, and Japantown, mostly filled with data extractions and corpo subnet breaches, which he ensured to leave no trace whatsoever. 5 of the jobs had come through Regina Jones, who, thanks to their interaction to sell the goods he'd taken and his honesty in paying her a fair share, had decided to throw Sasha's choom a couple of bones to chew.

He'd also gotten another 3 through Padre, and another 2 through Wakako Okada, who had apparently changed her mind about working with him since the last time he had shown up at her parlor. The rest of the jobs were taken through three independent clients who had found his handle on the runner boards and had liked what they read.

The cumulative payout from the fourteen gigs sat at just over one hundred and thirty thousand eddies, all of which he took the precaution of routing through his Aiden Protocol and further diluted them by opening 3 new bank accounts in Sweeden, the Switzerland, and France, as well as a crypto reserve that existed on a banking satellite whose orbital inclination placed it outside the jurisdiction of every nation-state on the planet.

Santi had been tempted to put all his money in a single account, but decided against it because you should never put all your eggs in a single basket. Combined with the fifty from Padre's commission and the remaining balance from the house sale, his total liquid assets amounted to two hundred and ninety thousand eddies. It was the most money he had ever held at one time since the building purchase had zeroed him out, but he still needed more. Sure, that amount of scratch could get him some nova chrome.

But what good was it if he couldn't install any of it yet? And as the underlying rule of Night City, that amount would never be enough. His Agent had pinged twice while he was showering.

The first was a system update notification from the building's security subnet, which he dismissed, and the second was a message from Regina Jones requesting a callback at his earliest convenience regarding a data extraction opportunity targeting NCPD internal affairs records with no hard deadline and an estimated payout of thirty-two thousand eddies, potentially higher depending on the depth of the pull. Santi read the message and tagged it for follow-up under next week's operational queue.

The NCPD gig was good money and clean work that he could most likely pull from the safety of his own server room without ever having to leave the building. But today was a chill day, and he'd already made plans to hang out with Sasha... well, more like she had made plans to hang out with him. He walked out of the bedroom into the hallway and came across Julia at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading something on a tablet she had bought two weeks ago.

She looked up as Santi passed, noticing what he wore, his posture, and the absence of his iron from his right thigh. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"No gun?" she asked.

"I always carry a loaded one," Santi said while bringing his index finger to his head.

"Plus, I'm taking the day off."

"From the gun or from everything?" Julia asked.

"Both," Santi replied.

"I'll be hanging out with Sasha." Julia's expression shifted toward a smile she was visibly suppressing. She returned her attention to the tablet with an exaggerated casualness.

"Have fun, mijo," she said.

"It's not like that, Ma," Santi sighed. Julia raised her brows as she brought a hand to her chest in mock shock.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were thinking it," Santi said, as his right eye decided it was the perfect time to twitch.

"A mother is allowed to think," Julia said, turning her attention back to her tablet.

"Tell Sasha I said hello." Santi rolled his eyes and made his way out of the building into the September morning that was more than tolerable. The smog layer that haunted the city for the previous week had almost completely disappeared, and the sun was cutting through the industrial haze of Northside with warm clarity. He walked towards the data term and took a cab to Kabuki. Santi and Sasha met at a ramen stand on the corner of Sagan Avenue and Holly Street at ten in the morning.

It was a narrow, open-fronted stall that served boiling synthetic tonkotsu in disposable bowls to whoever needed the calories more than the authenticity. Sasha was already there when he arrived, sitting on one of the three wobbly metal stools with her legs crossed and a half-finished bowl in front of her. Her dark hair fell in a loose curtain around her face, her pink-and-blue eyes scanning the morning foot traffic of Kabuki with a constant alertness.

She was wearing a dark, fitted jacket over a grey shirt and plain boots. She looked up as Santi approached, and an instinctive flash of warmth flashed on her face before being replaced by a carefully constructed expression of casual, platonic friendliness.

"Hey, you," she said.

"Hey, yourself," Santi said, dropping onto the stool beside her and ordering some ramen for himself.

"You look taller," Sasha said.

"I'm the same height I was three weeks ago," Santi said.

"Okay," Sasha said, tilting her head, "but you look taller."

"It might be the boots," Santi said, stretching one leg.

"They're new."

"Hmm, maybe," Sasha said.

"But I don't think it's the boots." Once they finished their meals, they left the ramen stand and began to walk. After hanging out with Sasha over the past months, Santi had come to learn that spending a day with Sasha was never planned.

They would set a rough meeting point and a rough time, and then they would just walk, letting the city carry them from one block to the next, through the crowded markets and the narrow side streets and the elevated walkways that connected the residential towers of Kabuki, talking about whatever was sitting at the top of both of their heads, which, today, was the war.

"Hansen's going to hit the Central Valley inside of two months," Santi said as they crossed the Watson Bridge on foot. It vibrated beneath them with the constant rumble of traffic.

"I doubt that he will follow the standard Militech advance-and-consolidate pattern since he's been doing something different altogether. He's bypassing the defensive positions and cutting supply lines instead of punching through them, which means the Free State militia forces in the Sierra passes are going to starve before they get a chance to fight."

"I mean, it's the smart play," Sasha said, her eyes drifting toward the skyline.

"It's more than smart," Santi said.

"It means the passes don't matter when everyone's been talking about the passes like they're some kind of natural fortress. The fucker just doesn't care about the passes since he's aiming for Highway 99 and the rail corridor through Bakersfield. If he takes those, then he can control the agricultural supply chain for the entire western seaboard, and Night City's food imports would drop by forty percent overnight, forcing us to join the war."

Sasha glanced at him, her eyes catching the mid-morning light in a way that made them look almost iridescent.

"You think about this a lot."

"Well, somebody has to," Santi said while scratching the back of his head. They walked through the Kabuki roundabout, weaving between food vendors, secondhand chrome dealers, and a man selling counterfeit Arasaka jackets from a folding table. If it had been before the war, wearing an Arasaka jacket would've gotten you shot in the open market.

But with the way the NUSA was moving, and the slow understanding of who was funding the free states' defense, it had become a fashion statement for teens who thought rebellion came with a brand. They cut through Jig-Jig Street without lingering, passed through the commercial corridor behind the Kabuki Market's main drag, and stopped at a coffee vendor that Sasha swore served the best iced synthi-caf in Watson, which turned out to be a reasonable claim, since it was the first iced coffee Santi had ever consumed.

They sat on a bench overlooking the harbor, watching a cargo hauler crawl across the bay toward the Northside docks, and Sasha told him about a subnet breach she had pulled the previous week against a mid-tier Biotechnica subsidiary that had been running unlicensed human trials of a neural-stabilization compound at its Rancho facility.

The data had been sent to an independent journalist who had published the findings on a darknet clearinghouse, and the facility had been shut down within forty-eight hours by an NCPD task force that had received the information through channels that could not be traced to any individual netrunner.

They walked some more, and talked about the Net, about a new ICE architecture that Militech had deployed across their western subnet infrastructure that was reportedly burning through netrunner rigs at an unprecedented rate, and about whether synthetic tonkotsu would ever taste like the real thing, which Sasha insisted it would not, based on a childhood memory of actual pork broth that Santi wasn't sure she had invented or not.

Between their sentences, Sasha's shoulder would brush against his arm, and Santi's hand would find the back of his own neck every time she looked up at him with those impossible eyes. It was very clear that the two felt something for each other, and it had only grown the more they hung out and chatted. But neither ever took the step to confess their feelings for the other.

Santi never did so because he lived with the thought that the war was getting closer by the day, and Sasha never made a move because she had long since come to terms with the fact that there were no happy endings in Night City, and her superstitions drove her to think of the worst. So they walked together. Sometimes talking, sometimes in silence. But it was peaceful, bringing a sense of calm and security to the two of them that neither could put into words.