Chương 83: To Build a Mustang IV

The next morning, Sasha went home since she had a gig lined up for later in the day. While she was gone, Judy came in with her toolbox and a bag of jerky and found the cabin split into two halves, with the junk rear sectioned into feedstock-sized pieces by the scrap-fab. She stopped dead in her tracks and stared at what used to be the frame of the car before glancing towards Santi and setting her toolbox down on the bench beside the projector.

"Well, it looks like you've been busy since I left yesterday," she said.

"Can't stop, won't stop," Santi said as he chugged down a cherry-flavored can of NiCola. He was running on sugar and caffeine, and his focus had put him into something approaching a flow state.

"I need to make the junction box housings for the last," Judy said.

"I was hoping I'd be able to use the CNC machine for a couple hours today."

"Go for it," Santi said.

"I'm not going to be using it today anyway." The two of them worked in parallel. Judy fed her own polymer stock into the CNC and machined the junction boxes for the firetruck with extreme focus, pulling each finished part off the machine and holding it up to the light with pride. With her skills, she had essentially improved the original design while reproducing it.

At the same time, Santi was running the salvageable front-end segments through the gear cutter, trimming them to precise dimensions that would allow them to nest inside the new chromoly space-frame as a laminated layer. Between cutting sessions, he fed the junk metal into the scrap-fab. The machine accepted the corroded panels and rusted members, heated the material, purified it, and extruded it as clean and usable steel billets that Santi racked beside the raw materials Orsen had delivered.

Judy ran her own scrap through the machine whenever Santi declared he wasn't going to be using it for the time being, feeding the copper stock and polymer blanks she needed for the firetruck's electrical system through the same processing cycle and pulling out material that was cleaner and more consistent than anything she had been able to source. The rebuild of the firetruck that had been bottlenecked for months on parts she couldn't quite get her hands on was rolling smoothly now.

Being able to use the CNC machine to cut her junction box housings to the original NCFD spec in a fraction of the time her hand tools would have taken allowed her to speed up the process significantly. It had also allowed her to thicken the wall section at the stress riser that had caused the factory originals to crack after a decade of thermal cycling.

"Aaannnd that is housing number fourteen," Judy said as she pulled the last one off the CNC and held it up to the overhead lights with pride.

"Cast from recycled polymer, machined to spec, and better than the originals because let's be honest, I'm smarter than the gonks who designed them in 2043."

"And quite humble as well," Santi said from under the car.

"Mhmm," Judy nodded. She set the housing in her crate with the others and came over to look at the cut lines he was making on the front subframe.

"You know, when I first saw this car, I thought you were insane. But now I think you're insane and also possibly a genius, which is worse because it means that now I have another O. T on my hands and you might actually pull this off."

"I appreciate the vote of confidence," Santi said.

"You're welcome," Judy said as she watched him guide the plasma cutter along a lateral cut.

"At the pace I'm going, I'd say the firetruck's going to be done in about two weeks, maybe less if the last batch of housings fits right. Then I'm going to take that baby for a spin around the city."

"Nice! Just don't get arrested or anything. Those pigs will make up any excuse to fuck with someone who doesn't have the ddies to do anything about it," Santi said.

"But once you're done with it, I could use a second pair of hands on the body panels. When the frame's together, I'm going to need to shape the new exterior from flat stock on the English wheel I have coming in. It's a two-person job."

"English wheel?" Judy asked with interest.

"You know how to run one of those?"

"It's not hard to learn," Santi said.

"What're you gonna do, watch a ton of BDs?" Judy asked with sarcasm.

"Yyyyyyuuuuuppppp," Santi confirmed.

"Welp, I guess they're useful for more things than just entertainment," Judy said.

"I wouldn't mind helping." Sasha dropped by later that same day, after she had finished her gig and Judy had gone home. She put on some music and made sure not to get in Santi's way, sitting on the couch while scrolling through the net and disappearing into her own tasks. She eventually fell asleep on the couch and woke up at two in the morning to find Santi at the welding bench, hunched over a practice joint with the TIG torch in one hand and a filler rod in the other.

A spent respirator cartridge sat beside a pile of tests that all looked almost the same. He had been running BD skill-transfers he had bought from Muamar Reyes every night in his bed, riding recordings made by master fabricators, acquiring data on the filler rod feed rate and the experience that allowed him to read the weld puddle and adjust in real time.

Through the use of the BDs, Santi had basically become an expert at welding, but he still wanted to experiment before he actually started welding anything together, so he was putting in the hours. Stolen story; please report.

"That looks clean," Sasha said as she put on a pair of welding goggles.

"That looks like the BD you showed me."

"I, uh, I don't think I'm quite there yet," Santi said without looking up.

"The guy in the BD had better heat control than I do and was better at reading this puddle bullshit."

"You were working on this when I got here at nine, and it's now two in the morning," Sasha said.

"You've been at this for five hours."

"Actually, I've only been at this for four hours and forty minutes," Santi said as he killed the arc and flipped up his mask.

"But who's counting?"

"I am, apparently," she said as she grabbed one of the test welds that was scattered across the bench and studied it, running her thumb along the weld bead.

"I think you should go to bed, Santi. It's not like you're going to finish this in one night. The car will still be in pieces in the morning."

"Yeah," Santi sighed softly.

"You're right. You should also just stay over as well. Gangers are up in arms tonight, and MaxTac has been deployed to three different sites since eleven."

"I will," Sasha said, blushing a bit, and they both went to bed. Another two days went by, and as they did, Santi noticed that his mother had been changing for a bit now. Julia was going out more. It seemed as if the reunion with her old Militech friends had reactivated a social life that had been dormant for as long as Santi could remember. She was filling her calendar with lunches and dinners and errands that ran late and the occasional evening she described only as "plans."

Santi didn't ask her for any details, though he suspected that his mother had found herself an input and just didn't think about what she was getting up to during her outings. He'd transferred enough eddies into her account that she never had to think about money, and watching her spend it on herself, on friends, and on a life that belonged to her rather than being chained down by poverty was one of the few unambiguously good things in his life. And she was also smiling more and differently.

Her smile was brighter now and unperformed, as if she was remembering that she was allowed to enjoy her own life, that widowhood and the long grinding years of survival in Night City had not permanently disqualified her from happiness. Santi had caught her humming in the kitchen and laughing at things on her tablet. And when she came home late, she would look pleased rather than tired.

Unlike his mother, he didn't tease her about anything, especially not when she came home at eleven that night with a smile she was trying and failing to suppress. Finally, after a full week of prep work, the CNC began producing the first structural members of the new frame. Santi had spent two nights programming the machine, translating the space-frame schematic into the CNC's G-code format line-by-line.

The schematic itself was a piece of "engineering" that Santi had been working on since he had gotten his hands on the Mustang, refining it and re-refining it through simulations and stress analysis tests. Every tube, gusset, and mounting point had been designed to carry its share of the seventy-five hundred pounds and to distribute the recoil of a roof-mounted M2067 Defender through the cage and into the frame rails without causing any flex on the body panels.

The chromoly tubing stock went in raw with a two-inch outer diameter and 0. 120-inch wall thickness made from 4130 alloy. The CNC's cutting head went to work, releasing a sustained high-pitched whine that vibrated the air. After some time, the first piece to come off the machine was a front frame rail section, 38 inches long and mitered at both ends to accept the gusset plates that would tie it into the main hoop of the roll cage.

Santi pulled it from the fixture, held it in both hands, and turned it under the overhead lights, inspecting it and ensuring that the cut surfaces were clean and that the miters were accurate. He set it on the assembly table beside the lamination segments from the original car, and ran his hand across both pieces. The old metal was rough and pitted, carrying the texture of its century, while the new metal was smooth.

"Looks like you finally made the first piece," Judy said from across the floor, where she was packing her finished junction boxes into a crate to move them all together to the firetruck that was basically parked right outside.

"You should frame it."

"It's a frame rail," Santi said.

"Exactly," Judy said with a shit-eating grin at her own joke. Santi chuckled and shook his head, and Judy left to work outside on the firetruck. He kept on working, making the second rail section, the third, the fourth, and the main hoop components, which were the primary arch that would span the cabin from rocker to rocker and tie into the A-pillars at the front and the C-pillars at the rear. He then made the cross-members that would brace the floor plane and distribute lateral loads during cornering.

Gusset plates that would be welded at every major node to prevent joints from rotating under stress, suspension mounting brackets were machined to the tight tolerances demanded by the hydropneumatic suspension system, and an X-bracing that would be placed under the floor of the cabin.

Each piece came off the machine in the sequence Santi had programmed, each one measured against the schematic and confirmed within spec, and by the end of the day, the assembly table held the beginnings of a space frame that would become the skeleton of a machine unlike anything Night City had ever seen. On the following day, Santi was ready to begin welding them together. He set up the jig on the ground floor.

It was a fabricated steel table with adjustable clamps and reference points that held the frame components in their correct spatial relationship while he tacked them into position. Once everything was in place, he lit up the TIG torch, and the first bead he laid on the first joint of the new frame was the best weld he had ever produced, and probably would ever produce.

All of those hours spent rewatching BDs and training on his own with the scrap, all of it converged in a single structural bead that joined two pieces of chromoly tubing into the beginning of the Widowmaker's front subframe. Sasha arrived as he did, and took a seat on the workbench with her synthi-caf in hand, watching the sparks cascade across the jig. The space-frame grew, the welds held, and the music played all the while a certain NUSA commander was making ground on his way toward the paused Pacifica project.

Making and welding the rest of the frame together would probably take Santi another two weeks, maybe three, and building the engine and transmission would take about the same time, if not longer. This project will probably take him a couple of months, but with every weld he made, every rail he joined, every part of the frame that grew, the Widowmaker came closer and closer to being made.