“Resident felines disregard table boundaries, privacy fields, and guest preferences without exception. Their affection cannot be reserved, scheduled, or purchased.”— NekiNeko Café, House Policy
The Schwarzstahl pulled out of New Clearwater exactly on schedule.
I took a seat by the window as the platform fell away, and glanced outside at the river holding the last of the light as we were approaching evening. I had the op mostly assembled in my head by then, and a short list of errands queued on the band.
Sadly, my mind was trying to sabotage me, because as I opened Pulse and found Erika’s thread, I sat there with the cursor blinking. I wasn’t trying to invite her on a date, but… No, not today.
Everything I typed read either too casual or too much like a man arranging an alibi.
Me: hey, you free later? — deleted.
Me: need to ask you something — deleted immediately, because that felt like the opening of a breakup
In the end, I went with the truth, more or less.
Me: Going to Ashford. You around tonight? Got something to run by you, in person. Shouldn’t via Pulse.
I read it back once, winced at the last line, and sent it anyway. Telling Erika over Pulse that I had something I couldn’t say over Pulse was the exact flavor of sloppy Natalya would have cooked my earpiece for.
The reply arrived before I’d finished talking myself out of it.
Erika: sure!! im training few stops from there anyway. give me an hour?Erika: nekineko on forty? been wanting to try it
NekiNeko. A cat café, if the name meant what I thought, which meant that careful conversation was going to happen somewhere with a paw print on the door. I considered suggesting a place with fewer witnesses and decided a man who’d just broadcast ‘not a Pulse thing’ over Pulse had surrendered the right to be picky.
Me: Works. See you there.
Erika: !!
She sent, and then a small cartoon cat, and I set the band face-down on my knee before I could read anything into the punctuation.
Natalya had sent the van requirements while I was still at the Guild, and I’d put off reading them, which turned out to be a mistake, because the message ran long and she did not believe in greetings.
Natty69: Dashi. Van specs, since Naiche says you pay. Here.
Natty69: Sealed power delivery, isolated draw, zero brownouts. If the rig dips mid-op because the heater kicked on, we all go to gulag, kotě.
Natty69: Real cooling, not a fan and a prayer. Rigs run hot, the van runs hotter, I run hottest.
Natty69: Shielded shell. The thing cannot leak signal, or we are a minimap marker parked on their street.
Natty69: Deployable mast, or a roof dish I can aim. I have to be in range and on-axis, or the skill fizzles.
Natty69: Boring on the outside, don’t wanna people knockin’. HAVE PTSD from murals, and chrome trim that their cousin customized. NOT THAT ONE.
Most of it I could have guessed, easy items like power, cooling, shielding, that was a workshop on wheels. Then I reached the bottom of the list, where the tone changed.
Natty69: Last thing, non-negotiable: a real chair. Lumbar. I am in it for hours, and I work best supported.
Natty69: And the light inside is NOT white. White light is for hospitals and for losers. Magenta if the rental stocks it. I will bring my own strip otherwise, but I should not have to.
I read the chair clause twice to confirm that the most particular netrunner on the Guild board had listed ergonomic seating directly beneath we all go to gulag. She had. I added both lines to the report untouched because arguing furniture with Natalya?
No, thanks.
I bundled her spec into a procurement request, and that second line gave me trouble. I had never hired a getaway driver and had no idea what one cost, and I didn’t want to think too hard about who I was budgeting for, because I hadn’t asked her yet. So I put down two hundred and sent it to William.
Then I sent the rest separately: a short note on the badge cloner, nothing exotic, and a much vaguer note on the chemicals; vague because I didn’t yet know what I was buying, only that the seedlings had to drink it and grow wrong. I flagged it pending and sent it anyway.
Eddy would narrow it down.
William called with Ashford a few stops out, his name blooming on the band.
“Dash. Good news, and I’ll keep it short, since I gather you’re in transit. The van first. Standard rig conversion, more standard than you’d think; half the gray-market runners in Tago want the same six boxes ticked. The average comes in at around six hundred. I’d authorize up to a thousand, which buys a clean shell and a mast that deploys without a wrench. Stay near the average if the rental’s decent.”
“That tracks.”
“The driver, though.” His tone shifted. “You put down two hundred. Dash, two hundred is what you pay someone to help you move a couch. For a wheel job with no expected contact, sit, wait, drive once, leave clean, the Tago market sits closer to three-fifty. I’d set the ceiling at seven, if you find you need someone who can shoot back, but I’m reading your plan as a quiet one.”
“It’s quiet,” I said. “Or it’s meant to be.”
“Then three-fifty, seven at the absolute ceiling, and most drivers worth hiring will quote you inside that band and call it a favor besides.” An amusement crept into his voice. “The cloner’s nothing—low-tier badge duplication is a commodity. Anything up to fifty is fair, and I wouldn’t clear past a hundred unless someone’s trying to sell you the high-end unit, which for a single staff badge you do not need. Fifty buys what you’ve described twice over.”
“And the chemicals?”
“The chemicals are where you’ve left me holding air.” Something moved on his end; a chair pushed back. Hm, William liked to stand. “We’re an accounting department, not a laboratory. You’ve sent me ‘something the plants drink and grow wrong from,’ which is a feeling, not a purchase order. Bring me a compound, a quantity, and a vendor or a service, and I’ll price it to the milliliter. Until then, it’s a placeholder.”
“Working on it. That’s the next stop, actually.”
“Good.” I heard him sitting back into his chair. “And for what it’s worth, accounting does not, as a rule, comment on operational design, but the plan is sound. Tightly thought.”
“Thanks. I had help.”
“Most good plans do. Send the compound when you have it. And Dash—three-fifty on the driver. Don’t insult them with two.”
The call cut, and the band went dark against my palm as the train slid the last stretch toward Ashford.
NekiNeko showed up on floor forty as a square of warm light in a corridor that hadn’t earned it.
Ashford ran gray and functional this high up, all corporate neutral, and then the café just sat there in the middle of it, throwing pink and cream neon onto the floor like it had decided the corridor could be nicer if somebody bothered.
A cat lived in the window.
Not a real one, a holo fitted to the glass, a fat tortoiseshell that stretched, yawned, and resettled on a cushion that wasn’t there, blinking out at the foot traffic.
Below it, in soft hard-light script:
Live animals on the premises. Please mind the door.
Through the glass, the real ones moved. A gray tabby crossed the back of a sofa; a white something flowed off a shelf and out of frame; a black one sat in the middle of the floor doing nothing at all.
“There you are.”
Erika had come up the corridor behind me, out of her training gear and into civilian clothes, hair still damp at the edges, and she stopped beside me to look at the window cat with open delight before we went in.
Inside, the noise of the concourse cut to nothing the moment the door sealed, the murmur of a dozen quiet conversations that didn’t carry.
People sat in ones and twos at tables and along a padded bench under the windows, and most of them sat inside the faint shimmer of a privacy field, each party sealed in its own soft-edged pocket of hush.
It should have felt lonely, a room full of people paying to be near each other without having to be near each other.
It didn’t, because the cats did not believe in the fields. A ginger tom walked straight through a businessman’s bubble, across his table, and out the other side, untroubled, and the field let him. A calico had claimed a stranger’s lap two tables over, and the stranger had simply stopped working to allow it.
Erika made directly for the bench under the windows, and I followed.
Floor forty put us above most of the surrounding low towers and the city ran out from the window in every direction; towers stacked in tiers of light, ad-holos drifting between them in slow rotation, the rain that was always falling somewhere in West Corporate catching the neon and throwing it back up in a haze of magenta and gold and sickly green.
It should have been ugly. From up here, in the warm dark, with a cute girl across a table, it landed as something close to beautiful.
A cat was already on the ledge. It had folded into the warm strip of bench where the window’s heat pooled, a long-haired gray thing with its paws tucked under, and when Erika sat down beside it, it opened one eye, decided she was acceptable, and closed it again. She put a hand on its back without a word, and it began, faintly, to rumble.
I took the chair across from her.
The table woke as I sat. A small holographic cat unfolded out of the surface, sat up, wrapped its tail around its feet, and looked at me, expectant, while a menu bloomed in the air beside it in soft pastel type. When I didn’t do anything, the holo cat tilted its head, lifted a paw, and batted at the first category to show me how it worked.
The menu was a minefield.
Everything had ears.
There was a Maunchkin Mocha and a Purrccino and something called a Whisker Whip that came, per the little animation, with a tail.
I scrolled until I found the one item that had been allowed to keep its dignity, House Tom, a long black coffee, no tail, and tapped it before the holo cat could talk me out of it.
[Paid: ¢19]
Erika took longer. She scrolled with the focus she usually saved for incursion maps, made a small pleased sound, and turned the menu so I could see. “Calico Cloud,” she said. It was the most elaborate thing on the page: a three-layer latte with a cat sculpted out of milk foam riding the top, two wafer ears, and a cup the animation showed changing color as it cooled.
“That’s a lot of a cat.”
“It’s perfect, and I’m getting it.” She tapped it before I’d finished the sentence, then reached over and pressed something at the corner of the table, and the surrounding air went soft.
The room’s low murmur dropped another notch, the cups and the cats and the businessman’s bubble all sliding behind a faint shimmer, and it was just the two of us and the gray cat, sealed in.
“Okay.” She settled back, still petting. “First—thank you for this. I needed it more than I want to admit. Shirogane’s been on me about my baselines; says my conditioning’s lagging and it’s capping my attributes, wants me putting in real fitness hours on top of everything else. Which, fine, he’s right, he’s always right, it’s infuriating—but it means more hours, and I came off the orbital telling you to rest and then went straight back to not resting. So.” She shrugged, a little sheepish. “Y’know.”
She’d spent our whole afternoon on the asteroid coaching me through the reaching for a sword that wasn’t there, the rest mandates, all of it.
I let her have the irony without comment.
“Anyway. Shirogane keeps saying conditioning’s the cheap fix. If I want my attributes to actually do anything, I have to bring the body up first, because—”
Somewhere around ‘bring the body up’, my attention, which had been doing fine, did something stupid. I was looking at her, the damp hair, the loose sprawl, like she’d handed the day over to someone else, and I stopped processing words.
Heat climbed my neck.
She stopped. “What?”
“Nothing.” Too fast. “Sorry. I, uh—” The dignified exit didn’t exist, so I took the other one. “I don’t know how attributes work. At all.”
She blinked. Then she laughed, the gray cat lifting its chin in mild offense, and the sound of it did nothing to help the situation on my neck. “Oh—sorry, sorry.” She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, still grinning. “That’s adorable. You got a Standard System and nobody sat you down with the numbers?”
“I’ve been busy,” I said with dignity I did not possess. “There was an incursion. Several things I needed to solve. I’ve got academy track planned, but that’s months away.”
“Okay. Short version.” She turned on the bench to face me, one leg folding up, the cat resettling against her hip with a put-upon sigh. “Attributes aren’t a flat bonus. They don’t add a number on top of you, they multiply what you’ve already got. What and how exactly they multiply depends on the subsystem; that’s the part that changes. Mine looks at where my body actually is, as a fraction of where it could be if I trained it to the ceiling, and the attribute scales that.” She held up two hands, palms apart. “Say someone’s unfit. Sitting at ten percent of their real potential. They dump points in and pull a fifty-percent boost out of it.” She raised one hand a little. “Ten, times one and a half. Fifteen. They went up five percent.”
“That’s... not a lot.”
“That’s the trap.” She brought the other hand up. “So the body isn’t the boring part you do before the real training. The body’s the multiplier. If I’m soft, my attributes are dragging a soft number and I’m wasting them. Which is why I’m running stairs at six in the morning while you’re asleep.”
“Huh,” I said. “That reframes some things.”
She softened. “You’re welcome.”
The field shimmered, and a server stepped through it, the murmur of the room rushed back the second she stood inside with us.
She wore the costume the place evidently required, trim apron, a headband with two felt ears, a tail I sincerely hoped clipped on, and she set the cups down.
Mine first, plain black in a plain white cup, a single cat-shaped chocolate on the saucer.
Then Erika’s. The Calico Cloud arrived in a tall glass that showed all three layers, cream over caramel over dark, a foam cat sitting upright on top with two crisp wafer ears stuck at angles, and the glaze on the outside of the cup was already blooming color where her hand warmed it. A paw-print biscuit balanced on the rim.
“Enjoy,” the server said, and stepped back out through the field, and the hush closed over us again.
Erika lifted the glass with both hands as if it might bolt, took a sip that left a faint foam mustache she dealt with before I could enjoy it, and went back to scratching the gray cat’s ears. “Okay. That’s the small talk.” She set the glass down, the foam cat wobbling. “Now tell me the part that couldn’t go through Pulse.”
I turned my own cup a quarter on its saucer, which bought me nothing. “Right. So. I’m running an op. It’s a family thing. I can’t get into the why here, but it’s real, it’s on the books, it’s not me freelancing into trouble. And because I need a netrunner—”
Erika put up a hand, already laughing. “Dash, no. I can’t netrun. I can barely keep my own band patched.”
“No, no,” I shook my head fast. “That’s covered; she’s handled. But she’s, uh, particular about needing a specific van parked near the target while she works, and the van needs a driver.” I made myself say the rest. “I need a getaway driver. And you’re the best driver I know.”
Her eyes went round over the rim of the glass. She lowered it slowly, a grin starting at one corner of her mouth and spreading without permission. “Wait. You’re asking me to be your getaway driver.”
I gulped and nodded.
“Sweet!” She set the glass down hard enough to slop a little foam over the rim, scooped the gray cat off the bench, and hugged it to her chest; the cat went limp and allowed it. “I’ve always wanted to be a getaway driver. Always. What van am I driving?”
Last weekend she’d watched two hovers run an illegal course through Lutivex airspace and called it the best thing she’d seen all trip.
I should have seen this coming.
I flicked over what Natalya had sent me. “This is what she needs. Don’t ask me to explain half of it.”
Erika thumbed it open and read, and her face went on a small journey. “From what she wrote here,” she said, turning the band slightly, eyes still on it, “your netrunner is...”
“Unique,” I said. “Yeah. She’s unique. I can give you three hundred fifty for the drive.” I said it before I could second-guess the number William had drilled into me.
Erika whistled. “That’s a lot of money for sitting in a van.”
“We might need to drive fast.” I turned the cup again. “Possibly quick. With people behind us.”
“Oh, well. When you put it like that.” She did not sound deterred; she sounded delighted.
An orange cat the size of a small dog flowed out from under the table, considered my lap, and claimed it. I put a hand on it, because there was nothing else to do with a cat in your lap, and it set about kneading my thigh through the tactical fabric.
“Do you have a van yet?” Erika asked, scrolling back up. “One that hits all this?”
“Not yet.” I scratched the orange cat’s ears; it purred like a small engine. “It was going to come through my fixer’s channels, but—”
“I’ve got a guy.” She said it around the rim of her glass. “Buddy of mine. Rents rigs, no questions, clean paper. He’s already got everything on this list, except your netrunner’s lighting and her, uh—” she checked the band “—’real chair, lumbar.’ But he’ll source those. He likes a challenge.”
“That’d be—” I did the math against William’s ceiling. “I’d want to keep it around six hundred. I can stretch past a little if your guy needs it.”
“No need, Dashi.”
It took a full second, and I closed my eyes. “Fuck. I sent you the chat, didn’t I? Not the report. The whole chat.”
When I opened them, Erika’s grin had gone from wide to incandescent. “Sure did.” She took an unhurried sip of the Calico Cloud, the foam cat listing badly now. “Every message, Dashi. Like, I don’t know how to read it, but Kotě.” She set the glass down. “Interesting.”
I went for the only exit available. “Aren’t you interested in the op? You should probably know what you’re driving away from.”
“I don’t know, Dashi.” She propped her chin on her hand, enjoying herself far too much. “Do I need to be?”
“I’d tell you. If you wanted.” I meant it. “All of it.”
She thought about it, or pretended to, scratching under the gray cat’s chin where it had reclaimed her lap. “Let me see. I park somewhere quiet and wait. You go in and you steal the gold.” She nodded to herself. “Then I drive us away from Tago PD quickly, Dashi.”
I closed my eyes again. “Something like that. Yeah.”
We both laughed, and the op went back into its box, and we stayed.
She told me about Shirogane and the six-a.m. stairs and a junior cadet who’d thrown up during conditioning and earned a nickname for it.
I told her about the workshop and Comma’s ongoing campaign against the NullSit chair. The cups emptied. The cats rotated through our laps on a schedule of their own. Outside the glass, the city did its endless neon weather, and inside the little bubble of hush it was warm, and the coffee was good, and Erika laughed at the right things.
She would not have called it a date.
I decided, privately, holding a purring cat I had not asked for and did not want to put down, that I would.
Eddy’s shop felt the same: fried noodles, hot electronics, the particular smell of something that had been soldered too many times.
Eddy was halfway up the side wall on a step stool, both hands inside an open conduit panel, fiber and power lines spilling out around his wrists, and a thin curl of smoke rising off something he clearly wished wasn’t smoking.
“Lad. Don’t just stand there breathing my filtered air,” he said, not turning. “Either hand me the flux pen off the bench or tell me what you want.”
I found the flux pen between a drawer of mismatched connectors and a mug that was dirtier than oil, and put it in his waiting hand. “I’m working a job. Bhavsar, one of their vertical farms here in Tago.”
“Are you now?” He did something inside the panel, and the smoke gave up. “And what are you doing to a Bhavsar farm, lad?”
“Tainting a seedling batch. Something in the nutrient feed that lets the crop grow but grow wrong, so they have to torch the whole germination cycle and start clean. Costs them a few days.” I set my elbow on the counter. “That’s the job.”
Eddy backed down off the stool, wiped his hands on a rag that redistributed grime more than removed it, and looked at me with both eyebrows up. “Look at you. Sabotaging agribusiness. Moving up in the world.”
“It’s not like that. It’s for Kallum, sanctioned, on the books.”
Eddy set the rag down, and the warmth in his face stayed, but something under it went level.
“Lad. A sanctioned sabotage job against a Sol Fortune 15 is still a sabotage job against a Sol Fortune 15. Bhavsar doesn’t read your paperwork before it decides how upset to be.” He pointed at me. “Whoever’s holding the leash upstairs, if it goes sideways out there, it goes sideways on you, on a farm, alone.” Then he shrugged, and the level thing folded back under, and he was just Eddy again. “Anyway. You didn’t walk past forty shops for a lecture. A job like that needs three things—a clean way past their door badges, something to put in the feed that doesn’t trip sensors as poison, and a van to sit your runner in close by. Which am I chasing?”
Damn, he’s good.
“The first two. Van’s already handled.”
“Good.” He tossed the rag onto the counter and pushed through the curtain into the back. I listened to the scrape of a bin and the clatter of him digging, and then he came out, turning something over in his fingers, and set it down in front of me.
It was a blank.
A flat white rectangle the size of a staff badge, a smooth white face that looked less like a tool than like a card that hadn’t been told what it was yet.
“Cloner,” Eddy said. “Reads a target badge contactless and copies it; you walk past someone, it pulls the credential clean off them. Or, lad, if you’ve got the issue spec ahead of time, and for a low-tier Bhavsar staff card, you will, you walk in already holding the right one.” He pressed a thumb to the white face, and a random logo ghosted up out of the surface, held for a moment, then sank away. “Lutivex paper layer. Near-zero power, reads as a real laminated card under a guard’s thumb and a guard’s scanner both. The display’s the expensive part.”
“How much?”
“Seventy new, off a catalogue.” He slid it an inch toward me. “From me, fifty. It’s been on the shelf a while and it isn’t getting younger.”
Fifty was exactly on the number William had drilled into me. “Done. Fifty.”
“Lad, that’s the easy half.” Eddy leaned both forearms on the counter. “The feed additive is the hard one. You can’t just buy a thing that makes a plant grow wrong on command and still reads clean to a nutrient sensor; the people who mix to order don’t advertise. I know one who can. Fast, too; he’ll turn a batch quicker than anyone else I’d put my name to. He is also expensive, and he will not get cheaper because you ask him nicely.”
“It’s a Kallum job. There’s a budget and a man whose entire purpose in life is approving numbers like this one, and he needs to know what we’re working with first.”
Eddy made a face like he’d bitten foil. “A bean counter. I hate bean counters. They drain the joy out of a thing.” He sighed and dragged his terminal toward him anyway. “But fine. Your bean counter wants a spec and a price, he’ll get a spec and a price. I’ll talk to my guy, pin down the compound, the volume, and what he’s asking, and send the lot to your band. You pass it up the chain and let the suit count.”
“Thanks, Eddy. That helps.” I sent the transfer for the cloner and watched his terminal chime.
[Paid: ¢50]
He nudged the white blank across the counter, and I pocketed it. “Tell your bean counter the markup on honesty is criminal,” he said, already turning back toward the step stool and the conduit. “And don’t get cornered out there, lad. Plants can’t call for help. Neither can you, in a place like that.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
The doorbell gave its tired beep as I stepped out into the concourse, and I threaded back through the crowd toward the stairs down to the transit level. I’d made it halfway down the first flight when my band buzzed.
Erika: got you a van. clean, hits the whole list, my guy even found her a chair
Then, before I’d finished reading the first one:
Erika: wanna see it?
A little cartoon cat followed it, ears up, tail a question mark.
I stopped on the stairs, one hand on the rail, and let myself look at it a second longer than it deserved.
Me: on my way.