Cyberpunk: Whispers of the Blackwall

The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:

Operative CrazyGaming.

Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.

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"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."

- Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

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The matte-black Militech storage brick, about the size of a book, with its serial plate scraped down to bare metal, sat on the desk, riddled with bullet holes.

Padre picked up the brick and turned it over in his hands, raising an eyebrow in amusement before setting it down on the scarred oak table. It was older than anyone in the back office of the San Judas Tadeo parish hall on the edge of Vista del Rey. The archdiocese had closed the place back in 2058, and Padre had bought it in 2061 for less than the price of a used Quadra, and he had never bothered to take the crucifix off the wall behind his chair.

V leaned against the doorframe, eating a bag of synthetic chicharrones she had stolen from a vending machine in a hallway. Maine had been standing since every chair in the office had been built for people roughly half his size, and he had already tested one and bent one of its legs. Santi was sitting in the chair nearest the desk with dried blood cracking across his face every time he moved his jaw, his white hair crusted into stiff red and black spikes, his left side screaming in pain with every breath.

"Parece que escapaste del infierno, mijo," Padre said as he gestured to Santi. "And Señor Thumbart?"

"Thumbart's head is somewhere in a parking lot in Arroyo," V said, crunching. "The rest of him is also in the parking lot... Just, you know... kinda spread the fuck out."

"And the data I needed?" Padre asked. "Because this..."

Santi flicked his fingers toward the desk terminal, and his eyes flashed as he transferred the data. "Every file he had on the grid. Turret placements, sensor maps, response protocols, the budget memos where the city decided fixing the holes wasn't worth the eddies. The brick is the original, but given its unforeseen demise, I was right to have copied it. What I just sent you is the copy I pulled off his core rack."

Padre watched the files populate across his terminal's display and nodded slowly, as if he was in prayer.

"And Thumbart's personnel file," Santi added. "The one that says he was Militech for the past fourteen years. I take it your client knew that."

"It is true that my client kept their secrets," Padre said as he folded his hands on the desk. "But I thank God for giving me such a skilled runner that reveals to me what the world hides. I'll be sending you each your cut."

Everyone got their money almost instantly, making V whistle and Maine nod approvingly.

"Grassy-ass, Padre," V said, balling up the empty bag and tossing it into the trash can in the corner, where it missed. "Next time, give us something with less screaming. My ears are still ringing from that Thumbart guy. Man squealed like somebody was stepping on a piglet."

"To be fair, a certain somebody was stepping on a piglet," Maine said.

"More like he was dicing a piglet," V corrected, and glanced at Santi. "Hey, Ghost. Wash your hair before you go home. You look like the devil decided to take a stroll through Night City."

"Thanks, V," Santi said, rolling his eyes.

"I mean it, bud." V shrugged. "What if your mom sees you like that? I know mine would've had a heart attack if she were still alive."

"Ghost," Padre said before Santi could come up with an answer to V's comment. "Why won't you stay a moment? I would like to speak with you."

V raised an eyebrow, and Maine looked at Padre, then at Santi, then at Padre again.

"Sure," Santi said.

V pushed off the doorframe. "Alright. Don't let the old man bore you to death with his sermons. See you around, and don't be a stranger, Ghost."

Maine ducked under the doorframe on his way out, and paused in the hall with one massive chrome hand on the frame.

"Kid," he said.

"Yeah?" Santi asked.

Maine held his eyes for a long second. Whatever he had been about to say, he seemed to decide against it.

"Get your ass to a ripper and get your ribs looked at," he said instead, and left.

Their footsteps faded down the corridor, followed by the sound of a door opening and shutting, and then there was only the rain against the office window and Padre's and Santi's breathing.

Padre stood up and gestured for Santi to follow him.

"Walk with me," he said.

The hallway outside the office had once been a school corridor, back when the parish ran a school. Dented lockers lined one wall, painted over in a faded green, and pale rectangles marked the plaster where framed photographs of graduating classes had hung for decades before someone took them down. At the end of the hall, in an alcove where a statue of the Virgin Mary had probably stood, a single devotional candle burned in a red glass jar that had the figure of a skeleton in a bridal gown holding a scythe painted on it.

Padre walked slowly, and Santi matched his pace, which meant shortening his stride and prolonging the pain from the shots he had taken to the chest.

"May I call you Santiago?" Padre asked.

"Well, it was only a matter of time before you figured out my real name," Santi said, shrugging.

"That is true," Padre nodded, his hands clasped behind his back. "A name is a door, mijo. A man should knock before he walks through another man's door."

Santi shrugged, and regretted it immediately as pain spiked through him. "Yeah. Sure. Santiago's fine."

"Your friends call you Santi, I imagine," Padre said.

"For the most part," Santi nodded.

"And your mother calls you Santiago when you have done something she will not forgive you for until at least the next morning," Padre said, smiling.

Santi snorted. "Something like that."

"Mothers are the same in every language," Padre said, stopping by the candle and looking at the painted skeleton on the glass for a moment. "I want to tell you about a man."

"Is this the sermon V warned me about?" Santi asked.

"No. V has never heard this one," Padre said as he started walking again. "In the forties, there was a man in Santo Domingo who tended the Altar a Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte. You know it?"

"Is it the shrine by the old coolant plant?" Santi asked. "The one with all the candles and the skulls."

"Sí. But it was much smaller then, with fewer candles and more faith, I think, though the people who come now would argue with me," Padre said, deliberately slowing the pace of his words as if he was reading from a book he had memorized a long time ago. "This man wore the collar and the black. He heard confessions, counseled widows, and blessed the babies of people who could not afford the fees the real churches charged. The people of Santo Domingo called him Padre, and they respected him as they would respect any priest."

"But he wasn't one," Santi said.

"He was never ordained, no. There wasn't a single sane bishop that would ever lay hands on him, and therefore Rome never signed his paper," Padre said, his mouth morphing into something that was almost a smile. "However, nobody in Santo Domingo cared. A man who listens is a priest whether the Vatican approves or not. That is what he told himself, anyway."

They passed an open classroom where desks were stacked against the far wall, and a chalkboard still had some multiplication table that nobody had bothered to erase.

"Soon after," Padre continued, "this man joined the Valentinos."

Santi glanced at him.

"Can you blame him? The Valentinos valued him," Padre said. "He had family in Juárez. A wife, a son, cousins, uncles, a godfather, and also ties to the cartel that made certain shipments move and certain problems disappear. He became very useful very quickly, and he wore his usefulness on his skin. Every piece of work he did for them, he had inked into his body. By the end, there was not a square inch of him that was not covered in tattoos. He was a church wall painted by a drunk saint."

Santi's eyes went to Padre's collar, to the edge of dark ink that disappeared beneath it, a line of script he had seen a dozen times and never thought about.

"Sangre por sangre," Padre said. "That is what the Valentinos promise each other. Blood for blood. Family for family. You bleed for them, they bleed for you. The man had believed it and had bled for them for years until a fateful day in a little place called Moto Cielo."

"The bike shop in Heywood?" Santi asked.

"It was a bar then. A place where people came to drink and watch the fights on the big screens," Padre said before he stopped walking. "This man walked into Moto Cielo one night with a shotgun and a list of names, and when he walked out, there was nobody left inside who could say they had seen him. He had killed twenty-seven people, some of them were on the list, and some of them were only in the room."

Padre looked at his own hands, turning them over slowly in the dim light of the corridor. "It was a bloodbath. One carried it out himself on their orders."

Santi raised his eyebrows as he asked, "And?"

"And the NCPD caught him before the blood was dry. And the Valentinos and the Juarez Cartel, the brothers who had promised blood for blood, did not so much as send him a message or a pack of cigarettes to his cell," Padre said dejectedly as he lowered his hands. "He spent years in prison for the family that swore it would never abandon him, and ended up losing the real family he had. His wife and son were killed while he was locked up, and in that cell, he did a great deal of thinking. Mostly about revenge and about his hands. About what they could do. About how they had been used, and by whom. In the end, he understood that someone would use his hands for the rest of his life, one way or another. The only choice he had left was who."

Padre pushed open a door at the end of the hall.

"So when they let him out, and he converted," Padre said. "He knew his wife had always disapproved of his violent background, but without her around, and without his son, the man couldn't help but slip back into his tendencies. Over the course of about a year, after he had taken revenge with his own hands, the man decided to put down the gun and do what he considered a more noble calling."

Santi followed him into the room, which was empty. It appeared to have been a former sacristy, maybe, or a storage room for the chapel. Bare concrete floor, patched plaster walls, a single overhead light panel flickering every once in a while. There was one high window that let in the orange bleed of the street lamps outside and the sound of the rain.

Santi looked around, then looked at Padre, and the pieces clicked together.

"Let me guess," Santi said. "That man's you."

"Sí," Padre said, nodding.

"A noble calling," Santi said as he let out a short laugh. "Being a fixer ain't really a noble calling."

"Nobler than killing twenty-seven people in a bar for men who threw me away," Padre said.

"That's a really low bar, Padre," Santi said, shaking his head.

"Well, it was the only bar I had," Padre said.

Santi leaned against the wall, taking some of the weight off his left side. "Okay. So why are you telling me this? Why the small talk?"

"This is no small talk, Santiago," Padre said as he turned to face him fully. "This is important shit."

It was the first time Santi had ever heard Padre curse, and it was strange to say the least.

"Important ho-" Santi was in the middle of asking a question when Padre moved.

He was sixty-something years old, but he moved with surprising swiftness, pulling a Burya from under his coat, and before Santi's brain finished registering the glint of the revolver's barrel, Padre's boot hooked the back of his left knee and drove it forward, forcing Santi's joint to fold.

Santi's reinforced tendons fired to catch his weight, but his knee was already on the floor, sending a jolt that shot straight up his spine and into his cracked rib.

Padre's hand closed on Santi's hair with a grip that an old man should not have, and wrenched Santi's head back and held it there while the Burya's cold muzzle pressed up under his jaw hard enough to push into the soft flesh behind his chin.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Santi snarled.

"Making sure this message gets through that dense skull of yours," Padre said. His voice was calm and level. "Look at me, mijo."

He tried to force Santi's head up, but instead Santi's cyberarms came up. He used his left arm to drive the back of his wrist into the inside of Padre's forearm, right where the tendons ran, and the right one punched upward into the underside of the Burya's frame while focibly moving his head out of the way.

Padre's arm went up with the Burya and the revolver went off, punchigng a hole through the ceiling and raining plaster dust down on both of them in a white cloud.

Santi twisted the Burya out of Padre's grip with his right hand, his chrome fingers wrapping around the barrel and cranking it sideways, forcing Padre to choose between a broken wrist and letting go.

Padre let go and Santi dropped his weight onto his hands and swept his right leg in an arc across the floor, catching Padre behind both ankles and taking his legs out from under him. Padre hit the concrete flat on his back with a grunt that knocked the air out of him and Santi came up on one knee, then onto his feet, and pointed the Burya at the middle of Padre's forehead.

"Give me one good reason," Santi said, his hand steady and his chest heaving, "why I shouldn't paint this floor with your brains right now."

As soon as he finished speaking, he felt something cold and heavy touched the back of his skull.

"I can give you one, pendejo," a female voice came from directly behind him.

Santi knew the weight of the thing pressed against his head without having to see it. It was a Malorian Arms 3516.

"You pull that trigger," Clarita Ibarra said, "I put one through the back of your head, and I watch your brains come out the front. And then I get in my car, and I drive to that pretty little warehouse of yours in Northside, and I walk up those stairs, and I find your mother in her kitchen, and I do her too. Slow."

Santi froze for a moment before activating his Kerenzikov, forcing the world to stretch out like taffy. The rain on the window slowed to individual drops sliding down the glass, and the dust in the air hung like falling snow. Padre was on the floor beneath him, eyes open, watching Santi with an expression that was neither afair nor angry, but rather, if anything, a little bit sad. And behind him was Clarita, a rather tall woman holding a gun that weighed as much as a newborn baby, with her weight shifted onto her left foot.

At this range, the 3516 would take his head apart. Nothing he had installed would stop a round like that from turning his skull into a bowl of soup. If he fired the Burya, she fired the 3516, and they both died, and Padre got up off the floor, and then Clarita, if she lived, drove to Northside and killed his mother.

Maybe the turrets would get her since Clarita wasn't on the IFF list. Two warnings, three seconds each, and then fourteen hundred rounds a minute would greet her.

But he couldn't count on it. He couldn't count on anything except the fact that her footing was a bit off and that the recoil on a 3516 kicked high and right, so a solo build like her would almost certainly run a Kerenzikov of her own. But hers would be factory-stock and situational. Built to fire when her nervous system read a dodge, a slide, an evasive twist. A man slowly setting down a revolver and raising his hands wouldn't trip it. And a man turning into a gun instead of away from it wasn't something the trigger was built to recognize at all. Plus, she'd have her wrist locked for it, which meant her arm was rigid, which meant the whole weapon was a lever, and levers moved...

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