“Do the Sewer Saints have anything to do with why half the city wants Moreau dead?” I asked as traffic came to a grinding halt. As much as I hated my last interaction with the doctor, her words were still fresh. “She’d sent a drone to spy on my fight, and kind of implied ‘the rats’ were related to her whole mess.”

  I didn’t want to share too much, especially when I didn’t know the level of the Saint’s involvement.

  “Pff, as if we’d be that important. We’re a fourth-district gang, choom.”

  Isia was too relaxed in her response. I was no mind-reader, but my gut told me she was telling the truth, which… either the Saints had nothing to do with it, or Isia didn’t know. Had they done something that might have facilitated Moreau’s efforts? If there was one thing I was sure of, it was that Moreau wouldn’t have told them anything they didn’t need to know. “What sort of jobs do you do for the doctor anyway?”

  “Few as far as I know. Most of it is just getting a random call to pick up a package somewhere and drop it somewhere else, no questions asked.” She shook her head. “It’s pity work, really. Tell the little gangers they’re useful and toss some charity cheese. I think the only reason she even knows we exist is Quinn, they-” Isia clamped her mouth shut.

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry.” She shook her head emphatically, glowing hair whipping every which way. “It’s Quinn’s… thing. You’ll have to ask them about it. Not my secret to share. But it’s definitely got nothing to do with the doc’s shit-show, if it had, we would’ve been swarmed by every corpo in NF by now.”

  “That’s… fair.” Maybe it was something else? There was the prospect of Moreau having been lying all along, but it wouldn’t make sense for that to be the case. Or maybe she was deranged.

  I sighed.

  “For someone that survived a meguca, you sound really bummed out.” Isia nudged me on the shoulder. “Don’t have any epic details to share? New scars maybe?”

  My hand rubbed the center of my chest, the spot where shadow had managed to sink her sword through. “I… don’t think I have a scar?” I glanced down my shirt to confirm there was indeed a scar, a pale little bundle barely the size of a thumbnail. “Huh, guess I did get one.”

  “This I gotta see. Shirt off!” The driver declared, gesturing emphatically at me. “Come on! Let’s go!”

  “That is sexual harassment.” I proclaimed smugly in a half-chuckle, easily fending off her attempts to reach over. “

  “Not for a choom!”

  “How about you lend me some internet tethering?” I offered. “I’ll be able to dig a little deeper and get some work done before we get to the internet place.”

  “You’re seriously going to just lock yourself up in some musty computer room all day like Quinn, huh?”

  Staring down at the tablet for a moment, an idea formed. “Nope, WE are going to be spending the day locked up in a computer room.” I cheerily declared. “I’ll teach you the basics, but I’m really going to need some help in wrangling through low-level AI’s. Whoever set up the scam unfortunately didn’t just leave their address somewhere easily accessible.”

  Isia hesitated. “And… if I can’t help? Like, if maybe I’ve got other important stuff to do?”

  “It’s not so hard once you get the hang of it.” I lied. “Think of it like social engineering but for machines. Besides, is whatever it is you got to do more important than Vesper potentially finding out?” I asked, a vindictive little smile playing across my lips when she stared at me in horror. “Better make a stop for some snacks, it’s going to be a long day ahead.”

  “AAAAAGGGGGGHHHHH! I HAAAATE YOUUUUUU!”

  The muffled shouts and banging noises on the paper-thin walls jostled me out of my seat. I was surrounded by the spoils of dozens of snack bags and beverages, and with my tablet on my lap so I could keep notes of all our progress. Briefly, I wondered whether we might need to cover for damages or something, but after a minute of silence, I figured Isia had gone back to work.

  There was something remarkably enjoyable about knowing someone else was suffering through the same ordeal. I made a mental note to check-up on her more properly in an hour during the break. We’d go through what we’ve found, road-blocks, and see if we could figure out a way ahead from there.

  “In summary, we don’t know shit.” Isia hissed, angrily biting down on a protein pretzel. “And we just wasted a full day.”

  “That’s not true.” I replied as I kept eyeing the documents we’d assembled together, typing away at the AI-chat bot. “We now know that the server hosting the scam site was not corporate owned. They didn’t just hire a company to run their servers, they bought them.”

  She leaned over my shoulder. “What’re you doing?”

  “I don’t know how credit-processing and storage works, so I’m asking the AI assistants for details.” I muttered, focused on the text chat. “By the looks of it, you need specialized hardware and software, not just any old server can work as a safety deposit box for credits.” Cocking my head a moment, I began scribbling down. “That narrows down the search possibilities. We’re looking for someone that bought credit-compatible servers…” I fished around. “It… no, seems it’s not a viable option for us, the list is too large. Could you text JackGab? Ask how he found out about the service in the first place?”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “We have the credit transaction handshake codes,” I said. “If we make a transaction with someone and it has the same code, then it’s our target. I’m betting these scammers have set up dozens of potential scam-sites waiting for people to bite.”

  “And if nothing matches?”

  “It would either mean they’ve gone dark, or are changing their handshake codes.” I poked at the screen to show the relevant lines of text. “But I doubt it’s the latter, scammers typically rely more on the volume of victims and their ignorance.”

  Isia’s brows furrowed. “You trust that thing too much.”

  “Even with this low quality variant, so long as I account for the mistakes and work around them, then it effectively lets me have a baseline of minimum skill and knowledge in all fields.” I replied in a deadpan. “One I’d need years to achieve otherwise. How would you expect me to remain competitive if I can’t even use the tools that are available to me?”

  “God, you sound like such a corpo tool.” Groaning, she playfully swatted my shoulder. “Come on, how useful is any of this out there in the field? It teaches you how to put a gun together? How to avoid a mugging?”

  “It’s…” I paused, rubbing my cheek. “I had to do a lot of self-teaching, and the academy’s exemplar program included a free subscription to some low-level AI-assistants.” At her blank expression, I sighed. “The exemplar program is this thing where they make your neuralink record everything you see, hear, and say. Then it’s periodically reviewed by an AI to confirm you’re… well…” My shoulders slumped. “Acting like a corpo tool.”

  Her expression stiffened, grimacing. “Oh geesh, corpo villages are a lot shittier than I thought. Did they not have some worse hell for you to jump into?”

  “What about you?” I asked, deflecting the question.

  “Me? Sorry, not much to tell. I just grew up in the BillBull’s factory over in fourth.” She gestured vaguely. “It’s kind of how I got interested in guns in the first place, what with having to help maintain the machines that built them and all that.”

  It was only now that I noticed the scars on her hands, dozens, maybe hundreds of them, all faint and faded. Her fingers were long, but also slightly crooked, broken at some point long ago.

  Isia continued as if it was nothing. “My lucky break was when the floor manager noticed me one day and promoted me to ergonomics and quality testing. It was basically taking out random rifles out of a batch, shooting them at a dummy, and writing down how awesome it felt to do it.” Her expression became distant. “Oh, ok, fatso sent the details, check-em out.”

  “Guess that means we go back to work.” I muttered, reading over the message she forwarded over. “The goal is to try and get access to as many suppliers as we can, and throw a credit in to verify the handshake.”

  “Don’t.”

  “What?”

  She shook her head. “It’d be weird if you just threw in one credit. And from what fatso pointed out, they ask for an in-person call first… I’ll do that part.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s gotta be less stupid than sifting through all this AI-bullshit, right?”

  I nodded. “Just keep in mind you have to pretend to be a gullible easy mark…” Taking a moment to glance at her, I gave a second nod. “Looks like you’ve got that covered already.”

  “I will remember this.” She glowered under her breath, turning to return to her own rented terminal.

  “We got a motherfucking match!” Isia barged into the room right as my notifications pinged with a message from her. “We got them! It was a front that’s been open for over a year, with barely any reviews. I bet they have a dozen others just laying around, waiting for some sucker.”

  “Great job.” I proclaimed, pulling up on the server and contact details. “Now we just need to figure out how to use this information to track them to a physical location.”

  The enthusiasm in her eyes died like a flare that’d been dipped into wet concrete. “We’ve been doing this shit for the whole day, how much longer do we have to do this?”

  “I… am not sure.” I muttered, shaking my head. “Look, the motel’s just a few blocks away and right now I don’t have anything better to do. I can walk back once I’m done or get too bored, I’ll send you an update message one way or the other.”

  Isia squirmed, glancing at my screen with dread then at the door as if salvation lay on the other side. After a long internal struggle, she let out a long, withered sigh. “This is my fuck-up and you’re helping me out. What do I need to do?”

  “We… need to verify the IP address data on that packet is valid, then check the traceroute…” I was reading the step-by-step instructions out of the terminal. Apparently this sort of process was so old it’d been standardized. Still, it was clearly entering into a higher realm of technical requirements than what I could handle. “Wait… I don’t think we need any of that.”

  “Really?” She brightened. “Cuz by now it sounds like we’d need to call Quinn in on this, and I definitely don’t want them having this sort of blackmail on me.”

  “We just need to figure out who their ISP is.” I explained, remembering the methodology I’d used to hunt down the smuggler’s hangar. “With that, we can cook up an information data-brokerage request.”

  The smile on her face stiffened. “How… much will that cost us?”

  “That’s the neat part, not a cent.” I grinned. “It will take a bit of a grind, though.”

  “The quoted cost for the information regarding this IP address is of thirty nine thousand credits.” The AI voice pipped up. “Would you wish to make this transaction?”

  “No, thanks, have a great… erm, night!” I replied, hanging up the call, and glancing over at Isia as she marked down the estimation on our list. She rubbed her eyes and stifled a yawn as she did so. It was very late. “Ok, so that’s… sixty-eight usable quotations.” I muttered, glancing over the available price ranges.

  It’d been a stroke of inspiration.

  We could easily find the IP addresses of known physical locations. Places such as restaurants, or stores, or factories. Sure, some of them had their servers set up in a different place, but there were enough places to pick from to get a very large sample-size.

  “So…” I glanced at the list, then pulled out the online 3D map of the city that had a distinct red line highlighting the area where this particular ISP provided internet. I proceeded to tag each area with a corresponding quotation cost from the list. “We have our price ranges mapped out… And our winner is…” I pulled out the original quotation. “Seventy two thousand.”

  With a click of a button, all the areas that had a relatively comparable price-range became further highlighted.

  “Shit.” Isia declared as she stared at the map intently. “I know who’s got our money.”

  I blinked at her, then at the map. The area we’d narrowed it down to a narrow section of 100 floors within 12 buildings in the 2nd district. “Really?”

  “Yeah.” She bit her lip. “That’s the Red-Panda’s territory. Even if they don’t run the thing themselves, there’s no way in hell anyone’s set-up shop there and they’re not getting a cut.”

  “Are they bad?”

  “Want to take a guess what the ‘Red’ stands for?” She asked.

  “Please say it’s salsa related.” I muttered.

  “It’s not.”

  I sighed. “Shit.”