Memento Mori

1.8 - PROMISE

THE VENTS is a nocturnal society. During the day, when half the labor force is at work in the overcity and the entire overcity is at their jobs, every kind of business takes the chance to rest, clean, and prepare for the next night's onslaught. Even the criminal ones.

Dynasty is no exception. Though the syndicate only started seriously expanding into the Vents in recent years, the Orange, their main base of operations, has exploded in popularity since its inception. I've only ever seen it from a distance. It's in a prime layer close to the surface crust, just close enough to one of the most popular clusters of descension lifts, and run by foreign bastards who don't give a second thought to churning through Venter bodies like butcher meat. The whole place is a giant orange-tinted brothel. Styled after the traditional villages outside the capital, it stole their paper-wood architecture, their pre-era red-light districts, their pre-era culture, and perverted it into a product. It established itself as the place to go for all the degrading shit people think of when they hear the word Vents. From lap dances to personalized orgies to cages where you can see the prices of indentured sex slaves change in real time according to market value. The usual. And for the real rich fucks, there's a hell of a lot worse that goes on behind closed doors.

Crossing into their territory is like stepping into a different world, one that's at least a few centuries out of date. Robe-sporting enforcers in black and orange cover the major bridgeways, fleecing tourists to make sure no weapons come into the block. Huge, tattooed beasts who break bones on Dynasty's dime. Next are the rows of popular electroclubs- surface level stuff for the squeamish and the partiers who came down with their bosses or uni peers. Then the lantern-lit brothels where lithe silhouettes fuck and moan behind paper walls. Rickshaw carts pulled by workers with rice hats and bowed heads.

It's all an illusion, as fake as it gets. A hyper-optimized fairy tale everyone who enters willingly plays along with. And it's a perfect cover for the syndicate's true operations.

Even before my most recent stunt, Sarah and I have caused the syndicate enough trouble that walking under their tori gates to visit the clubs would see our heads plated on silver platters in about five minutes, give or take. We also can't just walk around the blocks near the Orange. Like every block of the Vents, a chasm to the Abyss surrounds it on all sides, and Dynasty keeps the bridges covered at all hours of the day. Informants, street rats, and other local businesses in the nearby layers are all on their payroll, feeding a constant trickle of information back to the nest. Like little lights attached to the syndicate lamprey.

Traveling anywhere near the Orange on foot would be bad news. Which is why I'm curled up almost a mile away, high in the rafters of a well-lit bay where a constant stream of hovertransports from the overcity ferry foodstuffs and designer liquor to their undercity middlemen. I've been working on my coffee from the earlier breakfast trip over an hours-long stakeout. Watching heavyset men and women mingle, crack jokes, grunt, lift heavy things, smoke, drink, laze off, smoke again, and sign paperwork. All while transports flow in and out on a clockwork schedule.

I stifle a yawn as I double-check the stolen binder. Though Dynasty keeps their biggest illicit dealings in house, basic economics has them running their mundane supplies through the usual Venter routes. Their clubs aren't exactly exclusive, either. They keep a tight guard on the stuff that regular people don't see. But not even the syndicate is going to bother running deepscans on every middle-of-the-afternoon drink shipment for the front-façade clubs.

Hard part's gonna be getting from those clubs to wherever it is the real action is going down.

My finger traces the manifest of the shipment that's running to our target dock today, double-checking it against the completely normal transport that's just started loading down in the bay. I pull out my JOY and have it enhance a view of the individual crates, beaming it on a discrete projection close to my face. Everything's lining up. Twenty bottles of Nirvalian blue, five bottles of Gage's Virtue, fifty kilos of A2 cube steaks, thirty kilos of caviar, and a laundry list of other things I don't need to read. It's the one. Firing off a last message to Krey, I open a link to Sarah and connect it to my earcom, then pocket my JOY and start working my way down the maze of ladders.