Chương 57: Snowballing II

It had taken nine days for the house to be sold, a speed Santi hadn't expected. He had assumed the house would sit on the market for weeks, possibly months, given that the neighborhood wasn't worth the money it cost to live in and the municipal infrastructure in Santo Domingo was deteriorating faster than the city council could pretend to maintain it.

A 6th Street stash house had been raided a block away from them just two nights before the listing went live, and the gunfire had rattled Julia's kitchen windows hard enough to knock the salt shaker off the counter. But with the help of Regina Jones, they found a buyer so fast that Santi suspected she had already had one waiting before he even made the call.

The buyer was a mid-level fixer from Heywood who needed a discreet, off-the-books property to use as an intermittent safehouse, somewhere forgettable and somewhere that nobody would think to check when the heat came calling. The Rancho house, with its decaying facade, its pothole-riddled street, and its absence from any corporate surveillance grid, fit the brief like a glove. The negotiations were short.

The fixer offered a hundred and twenty thousand eddies, paid through a crypto-washed escrow account that Santi verified line by line before authorizing the transfer. Regina took her standard ten percent commission of twelve thousand eddies, leaving Santi and Julia with a hundred and eight thousand in additional eddies. The move itself took just over three weeks, spread across the final days of June and the first two weeks of July. There wasn't much to bring with them.

Eight years of living in Santo Domingo had taught them how the poor lived. You owned what you needed, and you needed what kept you alive. The furniture was cheap and largely disposable. The appliances were outdated and wouldn't survive the transit. And the memories attached to the walls, the good ones and the terrible ones, those would travel with them regardless of what they packed. Julia insisted on bringing the small wooden dining table.

It was the same table where Santi had eaten dry kibble as a ten-year-old, waiting for her to come home from the liquor store. The same table where she had slammed the cred-chip down and confronted him about the vending machine daemon. The same table where they had sat drinking real coffee three weeks ago while Santi explained how he had spent every eddie to his name.

They loaded the table onto the top of the Galena, along with three suitcases, two boxes of personal belongings, and the sealed Militech hardcase containing the Higurashi 20-13 Mantis Blades that Santi still couldn't install. The last thing Julia carried out of the house was a small, cheap metal urn that had been sitting on the shelf above the kitchen sink for the past six years.

She held it against her chest with both hands as she walked down the cracked front path for the final time, and Santi didn't say a word about it. He just opened the passenger door and waited for her to sit down before closing it gently behind her. Julia held the urn containing Alejandro's ashes in her lap for the entire drive to Watson. Once they arrived, they settled in quickly. Julia took the corner bedroom and spent the first three days arranging her few possessions with meticulous care.

She hung a small wooden crucifix above her bed, placed the metal urn on the windowsill where it would catch the morning light, and positioned the wooden dining table in the common area, pushing it against the south-facing window so they could eat with the Northside skyline stretching out before them. Santi took the bedroom nearest to the stairwell. He had chosen it for tactical reasons that he didn't bother explaining to Julia.

If anyone breached the third floor, they would have to get through his door before reaching hers. He set up a compact workstation against the wall, synced his Paraline Mk. 1 to the building's central security subnet through a hardline connection routed directly from the second-floor server room, and spent the first week fine-tuning the ICE architecture until the local network was locked down tighter than most mid-tier corporate facilities.

The third bedroom was the smallest, and it sat empty, its door closed and its purpose yet undefined. Julia had looked at it once during the first week, tilting her head at the bare walls and the sealed windows, before turning to Santi with an expression that communicated something he refused to engage with.

"Don't," Santi had said.

"I didn't say anything," Julia had replied, smiling.

"You were thinking it," Santi muttered.

"A mother is allowed to think," Julia said, walking away with a satisfaction that bordered on malicious. By the time the last of the unpacking was finished and the building genuinely felt like a home, the situation in the former United States had escalated further. The Unification War had been building pressure for months, but the dam finally and irreversibly broke in the first week of July.

President Rosalind Myers, operating from the heavily fortified NUSA command center in the Virginia Congressional Bunker, authorized what the official government broadcasts euphemistically called "Operation Liberty Shield."

The sanitized name was printed across every corporate news ticker and government holoscreen in the country, accompanied by patriotic imagery, stirring orchestral scores, and the cold and calculating smile of a woman who had spent years running the most powerful private military on the planet before she seized the presidency. It was pretty much a nicer, yet more fucked up version of what had been announced at the beginning of the year. A new declaration of a total continental military offensive.

The former Free States of Southern California and Utah, both of which had been quietly negotiating reunification terms with the NUSA for months while things had begun kicking off in the East, formally declared alignment with the federal government and opened their borders to Militech ground forces. They made an announcement that was broadcast on every major news network simultaneously, delivered by the governors of both states in matching, scripted statements.

Militech, which had officially been redesignated as the New United States Armed Forces under a classified executive order Myers had signed three months prior, began pouring through Southern California and Utah like water through a broken dam.

Armored convoys stretched for miles along the I-15 and I-40 corridors, and the satellite feeds that independent journalists managed to intercept before the government scrubbed them showed column after column of matte-grey Militech Basilisks, Behemoths, Hellhounds, and other military vehicles rolling, their turrets tracking the empty desert horizon. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The initial battles of the year had been a way for the NUSA to test the waters, which meant that things were different this time around, and the Free States mounted their resistance. Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, and Arizona declared a mutual defense pact within hours of the Southern California and Utah announcements, pooling their limited military resources and militia forces into a loose, desperate coalition.

Nevada and Northern California, both of which bordered the newly hostile territories, followed suit the same day, formally rejecting the NUSA's unification demands and fortifying their borders with whatever they could scrape together. Washington, Oregon, and Idaho watched the dominoes fall from behind the Cascades and collectively decided they wanted no part of the bloodbath.

The three states issued a joint declaration of armed neutrality, stating that they would defend their own borders but would neither aid the NUSA nor the Free State coalition. It was a bet that the mountains and the distance would keep them out of the crosshairs long enough for the fighting to burn itself out, though anyone with a basic understanding of geography could see that this neutrality would only last as long as it took Militech to secure the West. And then there was Texas.

The Lone Star Republic, as it had taken to calling itself since the fracturing of the nation in the early 2000s, told both sides to go fuck themselves with as much diplomatic eloquence as it could manage. Governor Santiago Aldecaldo, the great-nephew of the legendary nomad family's matriarch, broadcast a two-minute address from the steps of the Austin Capitol building, flanked by a wall of heavily armed Texas Rangers and Aldecaldo clan veterans wearing the distinctive dust-stained leathers of the Badlands.

The address was simple. Texas wanted its freedom and opposed the NUSA's authoritarian consolidation, while also opposing the Free State coalition's willingness to accept corporate poisoned money. If either side set foot on Texan soil, they would be met with the combined firepower of six million armed citizens and the largest independent military force outside of the federal government.

The broadcast ended with the governor holstering a massive, pearl-handled Malorian Arms revolver, and every major network cut to commercial within four seconds. What nobody outside of the intelligence community knew, but what Santi had known for months thanks to the shard he had pulled from the dead Corpo in Northside, was that the Free States' resistance was being artificially sustained by the very corporation that had nearly been the cause of the destruction of Night City half a century ago.

Arasaka's shadow operations had scaled dramatically since the start of hostilities. The conversation logs Santi had decrypted on that February night painted a picture of local proxy funding, but the truth was unfolding on the ground as something far more ambitious and coldly strategic than a few weapons and cash drops to local gangoons.

The Japanese megacorp, still officially banned from operating on North American soil under the post-Fourth Corporate War sanctions, was funneling billions of untraceable eddies into the Free State coalition through a labyrinth of shell companies, offshore banking satellites, and cryptocurrency exchanges. The money bought them hardware, and the hardware was flowing across the borders in unmarked cargo containers and repurposed commercial transports.

It included Arasaka-manufactured assault rifles, smart munitions, powered exoskeletons, combat cyberware, and anti-armor missile systems, all of it stripped of its corporate branding and repackaged under fictional manufacturer designations to maintain plausible deniability. But Arasaka wasn't just selling weapons. They had decided to try to take full advantage of things and also sell expertise.

Embedded within the Free State military commands, operating under fabricated identities and civilian cover stories, were dozens of Arasaka Corporate Security advisors. These were veteran operators with decades of combined experience in asymmetric warfare, counterinsurgency, and urban combat, and they were teaching the Free State militia commanders how to fight a conventional military force that outnumbered and outgunned them by a factor of ten.

It was a strategy that every great empire in human history had eventually fallen victim to. Arasaka didn't need to fight Militech directly to win. They just needed to keep the Free States fighting long enough to bleed the NUSA dry, exhaust their supply lines, drain their treasury, and fracture their political will. And when the dust finally settled and the federal government was too weak to enforce its own borders, Arasaka would simply walk back through the front door.

It was corporate warfare at its purest, most unfiltered, and devastatingly efficient form. And the people dying in the desert were just the cost of doing business. But despite the advisors, the money, and the steady flow of advanced weaponry, the Free States were starting to rapidly lose. The NUSA's Militech-backed forces were simply too large and well-supplied for the loosely organized Free State coalition to withstand in a conventional fight.

The steamrolling offensive began with Colorado, whose state militia held the mountain passes along the I-70 corridor for eleven days before Militech's air superiority turned the defensive positions into craters. Denver fell on the twelfth day, and the governor surrendered on the thirteenth after Militech armored divisions encircled the city and cut the water supply. New Mexico lasted eight days. Wyoming lasted six.

Montana, with its open terrain and minimal infrastructure, was functionally occupied in under a week by a single Militech mechanized brigade that rolled up the I-90 at will, meeting so little resistance that the operation was classified as a "peacekeeping deployment" in the official federal reports.

Arizona held out for sixteen days, largely because the Sonoran desert itself was a more formidable opponent than the state's exhausted militia, and Militech logistics struggled to keep their armored columns supplied across the waterless terrain. In the span of three weeks, the NUSA had conquered five states and absorbed their populations, their resources, and their infrastructure into the federal machine. Each conquest followed the same chilling and depressingly efficient pattern.

Militech's armored spearhead would breach the border, overwhelm the defensive positions with combined-arms superiority, seize the state capital, arrest or execute the political leadership, and immediately install a federally appointed governor backed by a permanent garrison of Militech security forces. The corporate news networks covered each "liberation" with the same script, the same patriotic graphics, and the same focus-grouped soundbites about national unity and shared prosperity.

N54 News ran a twenty-four-hour victory crawl across the bottom of every broadcast, updating the real-time territorial gains of "our brave men and women in uniform" as if the systematic conquest of sovereign states were a sports scoreboard. Santi watched the coverage from the common area of the third floor, his feet propped on the wooden dining table. Beyond the windows, the Northside skyline shone with a perpetual neon glow, as if the city was desperately trying to pretend the world wasn't ending.

His Kiroshis painted data overlays across the broadcast footage, pulling metadata from the corporate news feeds and cross-referencing them against the independent journalist reports that were still leaking through the censorship nets. The official casualty figures were a fraction of the real ones. The "peaceful transitions of authority" involved mass arrests, forced relocations, and the systematic dismantling of civilian communication networks.

And the "Militech security forces" maintaining order in the occupied territories were, in many cases, the exact same private military contractors that had been running illegal black sites across the Southwest for the past decade, now wearing federal uniforms instead of corporate ones.