Vega: Cyber P.I.

*Case File: 04-17-2190*

*April 18, 2190 | 05:05 PST*

*Pura Grid — Lower Ward, Sector 4 Canals*

Rain has a peculiar way of making Pura Grid look almost respectable.

It washes the blood off the sidewalks, sweeps the discarded stim-caps into the drains, and paints everything in enough reflected neon to make even the ugliest corporate slum look like a postcard.

Almost.

The trouble with this city is that the rain never stops long enough to finish the job.

I'd spent the better part of the night prowling the narrow alleys behind the Lower Ward transit market, listening to the usual assortment of desperate people trying to sell things nobody should be buying.

A man with a malfunctioning optical implant sold me a paper cup of black coffee for twenty geminis. It tasted like somebody had boiled a circuit board in motor oil, but it was hot, and I wasn't in a position to be choosy.

The market was buzzing about a corporate security crackdown.

Corporate retrieval teams had been spotted in the upper sectors, shaking down independent data brokers and hunting for unauthorized archive access keys. Nobody knew what those keys opened, which probably meant whatever was behind those doors was worth considerably more than the lives of the people looking for them.

Corporate mathematics. Always straightforward.

I finished my coffee, pulled the collar of my trench coat higher, and headed for the industrial canals.

Warehouse 135 was waiting.

I'd surveyed the place the previous evening. A dead manufacturing complex surrounded by skeletal data farms, rusting security fences, and drainage canals full of substances that probably qualified as chemical weapons.

I'd planted a few perimeter sensors, checked the municipal drone patrols, and marked the blind spots around the loading bays.

Everything had been quiet.

Too quiet.

Then Ravyn called.

Or Tony, as my phone stubbornly insisted on identifying him.

I still hadn't changed his contact name.

Perhaps I was sentimental.

Perhaps I simply couldn't be bothered.

The phone vibrated against my thigh as I sat in my parked car overlooking the warehouse perimeter.

**TONY:** *Where the hell are you? Been waiting in Warehouse 135 for the last 10 minutes! I said to meet me here. Respond!*

I smiled despite myself.

Ten minutes.

The man had apparently decided that arranging a clandestine meeting in a derelict industrial district entitled him to punctual service.

I tapped out a reply.

**VEGA:** *Patience, Ravyn. A good P.I. never arrives on schedule. She makes sure she isn't walking into a firing squad.*

I started the engine.

**VEGA:** *I'm right outside. Don't blow up the archive keys just yet.*

The car rolled through the rain, its headlights illuminating a rusted service entrance and the remains of a security fence that had given up defending corporate property sometime during the previous decade.

My sensors were still green.

Fresh footprints marked the grime near the entrance.

And the reinforced loading doors looked as though somebody had attacked them with the surface of the sun.

Well.

That was new.

I killed the engine, checked my sidearm, and stepped into the dark.

"About fucking time."

The voice came from somewhere beyond the ruined doors.

A tiny orange ember glowed in the darkness.

Then came the smell of cigarette smoke.

I closed my eyes for a moment.

Of course.

Of all the things a man could do to announce his presence during a potentially dangerous clandestine meeting, Ravyn had chosen to illuminate his own face with a burning tobacco product.

"You know," I called into the gloom, "for a guy trying to reinvent himself as a shadow-dwelling phantom, your stage lighting needs work."

The ember moved.

A cloud of smoke drifted through the darkness.

"The cigarette is kind of a dead giveaway, Tony. Or are we pretending we're in some old noir holo-drama?"

"Ravyn."

"Whatever."

He emerged from the shadows with the measured, deliberate footsteps of a man who believed his entrance deserved its own soundtrack.

"Your three o'clock," he said.

I turned.

"Those doors. Blaster burns. Someone was in a goddamn hurry to get inside."

I examined the reinforced metal panels.

One door was still attached to its hinges. The other lay twisted on the concrete, its edges burned and partially liquefied. The surrounding wall had suffered a similar indignity.

Several overlapping impact scars covered the metal, each surrounded by irregular patterns of fused material.

Not laser damage.

Not conventional explosives.

Something far nastier.

I crouched beside the fallen door, allowing my amber ocular augmentation to map the thermal deformation and impact distribution.

"Well, shit."

Ravyn sounded pleased with himself.

"Recognize it?"

I ran a gloved finger along the ruined metal.

"Pyre-Cluster Emitter."

He nodded.

"Street calls it the Sunshower."

"Or the Pyre," I said.

The name wasn't especially poetic, but street terminology rarely was. Criminals tended to name weapons after whatever they did to the poor bastards standing at the wrong end of them.

A Pyre-Cluster Emitter was an exceptionally unpleasant example.

Unlike precision energy weapons, a Pyre didn't fire a focused beam. It discharged an unguided, expanding spray of superheated plasma pellets.

A single burst could turn a narrow corridor into an industrial furnace, burning through armor, flesh, and anything unfortunate enough to be standing behind either.

Street mercenaries called it the Walking Furnace.

The underworld had another name for it.

The Delete Button.

Illegal in civilian hands, notoriously unstable when modified, and sufficiently destructive that even corporate security contractors generally considered it excessive.

Generally.

"These burns are consistent with a Pyre," I said. "Wide discharge pattern. Multiple thermal impacts. Whoever fired it wasn't interested in precision."

"Could be mercenaries."

"Could be."

"Could be a government operative."

I stood.

"Someone authorized to carry hardware like that?"

"Exactly."

He took another drag from his cigarette.

"Artemis."

I stopped smiling.

That name had a habit of ruining otherwise perfectly miserable mornings.

Artemis.

Six feet of engineered muscle, cybernetic plating, and government-funded lethality. The sort of operative deployed when conventional security forces had exhausted their options and the authorities wanted something removed rather than arrested.

I'd heard stories.

Everyone in my line of work had.

"You think Artemis did this?"

"Could be."

"Artemis doesn't usually make house calls for ordinary criminals."

"That's what I'm saying."

He began walking toward me, apparently pleased that the conversation had finally reached a suitably dramatic point.

Then his boot caught on a raised section of concrete.

He stumbled.

Flung an arm outward.

Nearly collided with a steel support.

And somehow recovered without actually falling.

I watched the entire performance.

He straightened his coat.

"Goddamn dark."

I stared at him.

He stared back.

"Not a word."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

He attempted another dignified drag from his cigarette.

Unfortunately, his lungs had apparently decided to file a formal complaint.

He coughed.

Then coughed again.

Then bent forward, hacking so violently that I began wondering whether I should call emergency medical services or simply allow natural selection to finish its administrative work.

I caught him by the elbow.

"For fuck's sake, Tony."

He waved me away.

"I'm fine."

More coughing.

"Perfectly—"

Another cough.

"—fine."

I folded my arms.

"When was the last time you smoked?"

"Seven years ago."

I looked at the cigarette.

Then at him.

"Seven years clean, and you decided to start again tonight?"

He shrugged.

"Seemed appropriate."

"For what? A theatrical production?"

He offered an unconvincing smile.

I looked down at the glowing cigarette.

Then back at his face.

"Oh, don't tell me."

"What?"

"You're trying to impress me."

He said nothing.

I laughed.

"Tony. Sweetheart. Next time, just buy me a drink."

That shut him up.

Immediately.

Interesting.

For several seconds, he stood staring at me with an expression I couldn't quite place.

And then I remembered why.

Three years.

We'd spent three years together, once upon a time.

Back when the two of us still worked the dangerous caravan routes outside Hoshihara-shi. Back when I thought that being in love with somebody meant you could trust them to keep their tongue inside their own mouth.

Sable had been my best friend.

We'd guarded convoys together, shared miserable assignments, slept in the same filthy roadside shelters, and laughed ourselves stupid over things nobody else would have found remotely amusing.

I'd trusted her.

I'd trusted him, too.

Then came that particular evening.

The drinking.

The restaurant.

And the ladies' restroom.

I could still remember opening the toilet cubicle door.

Two familiar faces.

One extraordinarily unfamiliar arrangement of lips.

"**Sable?**"

She froze.

"**What the FUCK are your lips doing on my boyfriend's lips?**"

Tony, displaying the survival instincts of a concussed laboratory rat, immediately attempted to intervene.

"Vega, it's not what you think."

I stared at him.

"There's a good explanation."

"Oh, really?"

I could feel tears threatening to rise, which only made me angrier.

"What explanation could you POSSIBLY have?"

He hesitated.

Looked at Sable.

Looked back at me.

And delivered what remains, to this day, possibly the single worst defense ever attempted by a member of the human species.

"Her lips were itchy."

Silence.

I remember the silence.

A profoundly stupid silence.

"Her... lips?"

"Yeah."

"Were itchy?"

He nodded.

I looked at Sable.

She had apparently lost the ability to speak.

I turned back to Tony.

"Oh. I understand now."

He seemed relieved.

Astonishingly, genuinely relieved.

"So you were scratching my best friend's itchy lips with your FUCKING LIPS?"

The last thing I clearly remember is my fist connecting with his face.

He probably remembers considerably less.

Our relationship ended shortly afterward.

And eventually, I left Hoshihara behind.

Pura Grid offered plenty of opportunities to start over. It also offered a reassuring number of people who couldn't recognize me, ask about Tony, or mention Sable without risking serious dental damage.

Which was nice.

Now, years later, there he stood.

In an abandoned warehouse.

Smoking a cigarette.

Trying to impress me.

Again.

I exhaled.

"Unbelievable."

"What?"

"Nothing."

He shifted awkwardly.

Then said something that made me wish I'd let him choke.

"Sable says hi."

The warehouse suddenly felt much colder.

I turned toward him.

"Excuse me?"

"Sable. She says hi."

I stared at him.

My ocular augmentation registered a slight increase in pulse rate.

"That's not what she said."

He looked away.

"Yes, it is."

"Tony."

"What?"

"What did she actually say?"

He sighed.

Then, with the resigned expression of a man willingly stepping onto a landmine, he delivered the message.

"Sable told me that when I see you, to tell you to go fuck yourself."

I didn't move.

Not immediately.

My right hand curled into a fist.

Somewhere inside my head, a particularly unhelpful part of my memory replayed the sensation of punching him all those years ago.

It had been remarkably satisfying.

"You really love living dangerously, don't you?"

He took a cautious step backward.

"Sable's words. Not mine."

"Tell that manipulative, double-crossing corporate rat that if she ever sets foot in Pura Grid, I'll introduce a high-caliber round to her favorite neural port."

"Message received."

"And as for you—"

"Vega."

"What?"

"Can we please concentrate on the actual investigation?"

I glared at him.

He gestured toward the ruined loading doors.

I considered punching him anyway.

Then professionalism, regrettably, prevailed.

"Fine."

He gave me an irritating little smile.

"Follow me."

We walked deeper into the warehouse.

I kept my hand near my holster.

Partly because we might have company.

Mostly because Tony was still within punching distance.

We reached a narrow corridor leading toward the main storage area.

He stopped beside an electrical panel.

Then flipped a switch.

Overhead lights flickered.

Buzzed.

And came alive.

The entire warehouse filled with a warm, industrial glow.

I blinked.

Looked around.

Looked at him.

"The lights work?"

"Yep."

"You had working lights this whole time?"

"Yep."

I stared at him for several seconds.

"Why the hell were we standing in the dark?"

He shrugged.

"The dark made me look cool."

I closed my eyes.

Counted to three.

Opened them.

"Tony, one of these days, I'm going to murder you."

He smiled.

"You've been saying that for years."

"Practice makes perfect."

We continued walking.

The main storage bay was enormous.

Towering ISO shipping containers stood along both sides of the chamber, stacked beneath rusting gantry cranes and suspended cargo rails. Dormant robotic forklifts occupied charging stations against the far wall.

Rainwater dripped steadily through gaps in the ceiling, collecting in shallow pools that reflected the overhead lights.

And in the middle of the warehouse floor lay something that didn't belong.

A leather jacket.

Or what remained of one.

It had been burned almost beyond recognition.

The material was blackened and brittle, its edges curled inward where extreme heat had reduced the synthetic fabric to carbon.

No body.

No visible remains.

Just the jacket.

I crouched beside it.

"Jesus."

Ravyn stood behind me.

"Found it like that."

I examined the scorched material.

There were several ways a Pyre-Cluster discharge could do this kind of damage. A direct hit would be catastrophic. A partial exposure, especially at the edge of the pellet spread, might destroy clothing without necessarily killing whoever had worn it.

Assuming they got out of the way quickly enough.

Very quickly.

"Whoever owned this was lucky," I said.

"Or clever."

I looked up at him.

"Explain."

"Look at the jacket."

"I'm looking."

"No. Really look."

I examined the shoulders.

The waist.

The sleeves.

The proportions of what remained.

Narrow shoulders. Tapered cut. A relatively small frame.

A woman's jacket.

Most likely.

"Five-seven," I murmured.

"Maybe five-eight," Ravyn added.

I nodded.

"Approximately."

He pointed toward the jacket.

"Now remind me how tall Artemis is."

"Six feet."

"Exactly."

I looked back at the burned garment.

And began to understand where he was going.

If Artemis had been the one firing the Pyre-Cluster, the wearer of this jacket was likely the target.

Someone considerably smaller.

Someone who had apparently survived.

"There's no guarantee the owner was actually wearing it when it burned," I said.

"True."

"And we don't know whether Artemis fired the weapon."

"Also true."

"But you think she did."

He smiled.

I hated that smile.

It usually meant he was about to say something annoyingly intelligent.

"There's more."

He pointed past my shoulder.

"Five meters behind you."

I turned.

The concrete floor was marked by a peculiar black ring.

Not the broad thermal scarring of a Pyre-Cluster.

Something much more localized.

I approached it, switched on my tactical light, and crouched.

A faint circle of carbon residue stained the otherwise smooth surface.

No shattered casing.

No fragmentation marks.

No obvious blast crater.

I studied it for several seconds.

"Interesting."

"Thought you'd like that."

"Don't flatter yourself."

I ran my gloved finger along the darkened edge.

"A flash device. Possibly a specialized optical-disruption charge."

"That's what I thought."

"High-output, low fragmentation. Designed to overwhelm visual sensors rather than tear somebody apart."

I stood.

And glanced back toward the destroyed jacket.

A Pyre-Cluster discharge.

A smaller target.

A flash device.

No body.

I could almost see the sequence unfolding.

A government operative corners a target inside an abandoned warehouse.

The target moves.

The Pyre fires.

A broad spray of superheated plasma pellets consumes the space where the target was standing.

The jacket burns.

Then a flash.

An overwhelming burst of light, perhaps engineered specifically to disrupt augmented optics.

For a few critical moments, the hunter loses sight of her prey.

And the prey disappears.

"An escape maneuver," I said.

Ravyn nodded.

"That's my guess."

I glanced toward the upper catwalks.

A dozen potential exits.

Maintenance shafts.

Cargo passages.

Access points leading toward the canals.

If the target knew the warehouse, there were plenty of ways to vanish.

But surviving a Pyre-Cluster attack was one thing.

Escaping Artemis herself?

That required something considerably more impressive than luck.

"Whoever this woman was," I said, "she knew exactly what she was doing."

"Yup."

"She escaped a weapon that could turn a small room into an incinerator."

"Yup."

"And apparently had enough time to deploy a flash device while Artemis was still trying to acquire her."

"Yup."

I turned toward him.

"Would you PLEASE stop saying yup?"

"Sure."

Silence.

Then he spoke.

"Something else bothers me."

"Oh?"

He gestured around the storage bay.

"Where's Artemis?"

I frowned.

"What do you mean?"

"Look around."

I did.

"See any body parts?"

"No."

"Cybernetic limbs?"

"No."

"Bits of armor? Mechanical wreckage? Anything that looks like somebody dismantled a six-foot government cyborg?"

I slowly surveyed the room again.

Nothing.

Only the destroyed jacket and the blackened circle.

"Suppose," he continued, "that flash device really did blind Artemis."

"Go on."

"Suppose the woman who deployed it was close enough to take advantage."

I said nothing.

"An operative like Artemis is dangerous because she can see you coming. Her sensors, her target acquisition systems, all that expensive government hardware."

He gestured at the blackened floor.

"But take away her vision, even for a few seconds, and suddenly she's just a very powerful machine trying to figure out where the fuck everybody went."

"Not exactly defenseless," I corrected.

"No."

He nodded.

"But vulnerable."

I looked toward the empty cargo aisles.

He had a point.

And I was beginning to dislike where that point was leading.

"You're suggesting the target had a chance to finish her."

"Possibly."

"Yet there's no indication that happened."

"Exactly."

I crossed my arms.

"Maybe she didn't have the chance."

"Maybe."

"Maybe Artemis recovered too quickly."

"Could be."

"Maybe whoever escaped simply wanted to get the hell out of here."

Ravyn nodded.

"All reasonable explanations."

He paused.

Then looked directly at me.

"Or maybe killing Artemis wasn't part of the job."

I held his gaze.

Something about the way he said it bothered me.

Not because the idea was ridiculous.

Because it wasn't.

Most criminals running from Artemis would kill her if given the opportunity.

Survival tended to override professional courtesy.

But a very specific kind of killer might behave differently.

Someone who didn't kill indiscriminately.

Someone who regarded violence as a contractual obligation rather than a recreational activity.

Someone with an unnervingly strict definition of who deserved to die.

"You're talking about a professional assassin," I said.

"Not just any assassin."

"Someone with rules."

"Exactly."

I glanced once more at the jacket.

The burned leather.

The flash residue.

The empty warehouse.

Then Ravyn said something that made the hairs along the back of my neck rise.

"Know those urban legends they keep telling stories about?"

I looked at him.

He continued.

"Someone who lives in the shadows. Someone almost impossible to track down."

The rain continued beating against the roof.

"An assassin who kills the target."

He paused.

"And nothing else."

I didn't speak.

I already had a horrible suspicion where this was going.

He watched my expression.

Then said the name.

"Sayaka-san."

For several seconds, the only sound in Warehouse 135 was the relentless tapping of rain against corrugated steel.

I stared at him.

"Sayaka-san?"

He nodded.

I looked toward the burned jacket.

Then back at him.

"No."

He raised an eyebrow.

"No?"

"You're telling me that the woman who walked out of a Pyre-Cluster attack, possibly blinded a government-grade combat cyborg, and disappeared without leaving a corpse behind..."

I gestured toward the warehouse floor.

"...might be the Ghost of Hoshihara-shi?"

He said nothing.

Which was infuriating.

Sayaka-san.

Every fixer in the lower districts knew the name.

Or claimed to.

Some described her as a myth invented to frighten inexperienced mercenaries.

Others insisted she was a corporate assassination program that had somehow escaped its handlers.

There were stories about impossible infiltrations, security teams that never saw their attacker, and targets eliminated inside facilities supposedly impenetrable even to government intelligence operatives.

Most of those stories were probably bullshit.

Some weren't.

And the most unsettling part was the consistency.

Sayaka didn't kill everyone who got in her way.

She killed whoever she'd been contracted to kill.

One target.

One completed assignment.

Everyone else was irrelevant unless they made themselves impossible to ignore.

"Artemis has been hunting her," I murmured.

Ravyn nodded.

"We know."

"That makes the situation considerably worse."

"How so?"

I gestured toward the ruined loading doors.

"Because if you're right, Artemis didn't just come here to retrieve some petty criminal. She came looking for one of the most elusive assassins in the entire region."

"And?"

"And apparently failed."

Ravyn smiled.

I shook my head.

"That would explain the flash device. The absence of casualties. The escape. Even the fact that Artemis appears to have survived."

"Exactly."

I looked back at the scorched jacket.

A strange feeling crept over me.

Not fear.

Not entirely.

Something closer to professional admiration.

Whoever had occupied this warehouse had faced one of the most dangerous government operatives alive.

And escaped.

Possibly without firing a lethal shot.

If that person really was Sayaka-san, the implications were extraordinary.

She hadn't necessarily defeated Artemis through superior firepower.

She'd survived by finding the weakness in a stronger opponent.

And exploited it.

I slowly exhaled.

"There's one thing I still don't understand."

"Only one?"

"Don't start."

I turned toward Ravyn.

"Why are we here?"

He looked at me.

I continued.

"Not why Sayaka might have been here. Not why Artemis might have followed her."

I took a step closer.

"Why are *we* here?"

He remained silent.

"You dragged me into an abandoned warehouse in the middle of a corporate security crackdown. Corporate retrieval teams are hunting unauthorized archive keys. You claim you've got information worth discussing in private."

I pointed toward the burned jacket.

"And now you're showing me what may be the aftermath of a confrontation between a legendary contract assassin and a government cybernetic operative."

His expression changed.

Just slightly.

But enough.

I knew that look.

Three years of romance will teach you certain things about a person.

Even when that person is a spectacularly unreliable boyfriend with a talent for finding creative uses for other women's lips.

"Tony."

He didn't answer.

I stepped closer.

"Whatever you pulled from that restricted archive..."

Silence.

"...whatever data packet you've been sitting on..."

I lowered my voice.

"...you think it connects to Sayaka-san, don't you?"

He looked toward the storage bay.

Then back at me.

I felt a cold sensation settle in my stomach.

The warehouse suddenly seemed much larger.

The shadows beneath the cargo containers much deeper.

And the absence of people considerably less reassuring.

I'd come here expecting a clandestine data exchange.

Perhaps a corporate security breach.

Maybe a few stolen access keys and a moderately suicidal informant.

Instead, I was standing in the apparent aftermath of an encounter involving two of the most dangerous women in the region.

One of them a government-sanctioned killing machine.

The other an assassin whose reputation was built on the simple, terrifying principle that she never needed to kill anyone except the person she'd come for.

And somewhere between those two women stood Ravyn.

My former boyfriend.

My occasional informant.

A man who apparently couldn't cross a dark warehouse without tripping over his own feet.

I looked him directly in the eye.

"Tony—Ravyn—tell me right now."

My hand settled beside my holster.

"**How deep into Sayaka's crosshairs have you dragged us?**"

He opened his mouth.

And for once in his miserable, theatrically mysterious life, I genuinely wanted to hear what he had to say.

*END OF EPISODE 01 — TO BE CONTINUED*