Incorporated with DeepSeek
**The Falcon Road**
Rain on Marseille tastes of rust and cold diesel. Mael the fixer sits across from me with a smile that hasn’t reached his chromed eyes. The old cyberdeck on the table between us is still plugged into my right wrist, fibre-optic cable coiled like a noose.
“I want the Dark Falcons,” he says. “All eleven hulls, the design files, the printer code, the Suez corridor rights, the Sahel sand strips. The consortium is prepared to pay.”
“I don’t sell boats to men who think a route is just coordinates.”
“You call them boats.”
“I printed them. I can call them coffins if I like.”
I light a cigarette. The flame shows the scars on my knuckles. Outside, the Med hammers the pier.
My family were Travellers from before Dublin sold its soul to glass and tax law. We worked horse fairs at Smithfield, mended tin, read palms, moved goods along the Royal Canal on barges. Grandfather had merchant hands. He bought land when the city was only a port, and when the banks came he said: *never own shares, only debt and roads.* He saw the rot early.
When the European order cracked, when nations walked into fire and the money froze, the old man’s ledgers turned to gold. We had options on quays, water rights, freehold under what became the IFSC. The lawyers sold to the last solvent funds in Zurich. I woke one morning with a sum that could buy a small navy or a very large lie.
I bought six 6-axis robot arms from a dead auto plant in Cologne. A marine turbine from a ferry rotting in Cork. Carbon-fibre filament spooled from a Norwegian aerospace line. A cyberdeck stripped from a dead decker in a Rotterdam flophouse. Then I rented a disused railway shed on the Shannon and started printing.
The design was mine: a ground-effect catamaran, 50 metres long, 25 wide. A flying-wing body, black as a B2, with twin hulls to trap the cushion. The internal frame was a Kelvin lattice—open cells drawn along Bézier curves so the load spread like water. The six printer arms moved for 137 days, laying carbon at six hundred degrees, singing the same low note as my deck’s cooling fan. I slept on a cot beside the machine. I called her *Dark Falcon* before she ever left the ground.
Power came from a hybrid drive: the turbine burned anything I could pour into it, feeding a bank of batteries and capacitors. Four electric engines, two pairs, one set tilting, gave her VTOL empty and STOL loaded. Empty, she could lift off water like a curse. Loaded, she needed two hundred metres and nerve. The first time I opened the throttles over the Shannon estuary, she rose at nine metres and held. The boat screamed like a hawk.
Europe was burning then. Not only with gunfire, but with data. Nations collapsed into corporate cantons. Borders closed. Money became a rumour. The old order didn’t fall—it rotted from the inside.
I printed one Dark Falcon after another. Black hulls, black wings, black cargo holds. I traded: medicine to Marseille, refugees out of Barcelona, gold from Lagos, guns to Tripoli, corp executives to Zurich, data packets to anyone with a clean SIN. No questions. Cash or barter. The Dark Falcons ran low over the water, under radar, past blockade drones, through storms that would snap a plane and swells that would swallow a ship.
Then came the Suez strip. I didn’t fly over the canal—I built a flyway beside it. A 193-kilometre ribbon of compacted desert, two hundred metres wide, marked with solar beacons. The Egyptian generals took a cut. Ships below crept at eight knots; my boats crossed in thirty minutes at four hundred. Then the Trans-Sahel: Massawa in Eritrea, through a mountain pass where I fitted the boats with glider extensions and lifted them out of ground effect, down to Khartoum, then west along the sand—five thousand kilometres to Dakar. I landed on Teflon skids on sand strips my crews carved with graders. The Sahara was my highway. The Dark Falcons owned the low sky.
I stubbed the cigarette into the table. “So you understand, Mael. You don’t buy that from me.”
Mael didn’t blink. He slid a photo across the wet wood. A woman with my eyes and a corporate lanyard. Aisling. My granddaughter. My heir.
“Aisling signed the transfer this morning. The board seat was too good. She gave us the original hull registration and the printer firmware key.”
I said nothing. The deck on the table pinged. A small red light.
“So we have the boats,” Mael said. “We have the files. We have the corridors. What we need is the old code in your deck. The original route maps. The safe landing coordinates. The back doors.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you die in this bar, and she keeps the company.”
I looked at my deck. Old, scarred, still linked to the printer arms by fibre-optic nerve. I put my hand on it. The deck recognised my palm print, my heartbeat, my blood. I didn’t open the route maps.
I opened a different file. The one labelled **OPEN SOURCE**.
“Here’s the thing, Mael. I never kept a back door. I kept a front door.”
I hit send.
The deck’s fans screamed. Every design file, every lattice curve, every engine map, every sand-strip coordinate, every Suez beacon frequency—it all went out to the open matrix. Pirate nodes, free ports, BBS dead drops, every low-orbit relay from Lagos to Vladivostok. The Dark Falcon became public domain in eleven seconds.
Mael’s eyes went wide. He reached for his gun.
I was already out the side door.
The old prototype sat on the slip outside, under rain. The first Dark Falcon. The one I’d printed in that railway shed. I clambered into the pilot seat, jacked my deck into her old nervous system, and spun the four engines to life. The turbines coughed, then roared.
She lifted off the water at nine metres, black wing barely above the waves. The consortium’s drones came off the rooftops, red lights blinking. I pushed the throttles. The sea blurred. The old boat screamed.
South. Into the dark. Over the Med, toward the Sahel.
They followed me for two hundred kilometres. Missiles went wide, thrown by the ground effect. Bullets tore holes in the starboard hull. Smoke filled the cabin.
I brought her down hard on a sandbar off the coast of Libya. The Teflon skids burned. The boat slid, turned, and stopped with her nose in the surf. I killed the engines. The silence was worse than the alarms.
I stood on the sand, rain mixing with oil and blood, and watched the first Dark Falcon burn.
They thought they could take it. But the Dark Falcons were never mine. They belonged to the road.
Now they belong to everyone.
I lit another cigarette. The Med crawled up the sand, black as carbon fibre.
Somewhere inland, a new printer arms itself.
I lit another cigarette. The smoke wasn’t tobacco. THC folded over my synapses like warm black water, slowing the pain in my ribs, sharpening the fury into something cold and geometric. I sat on the wet sand with the burning Falcon behind me and the Mediterranean licking at my boots.
And I thought: *No one knows they can dive.*
The world saw a ground-effect boat. A low-flying cargo bird. A black wing screaming over the Suez sand. The consortium bought the design files, the printer code, the route maps. They saw the surface.
But I built the first hull in an Irish railway shed with six robot arms and a dead decker’s cyberdeck. I never told the investors, the pilots, the buyers. I never told Aisling.
The Dark Falcons were not just WIG craft.
The twin catamaran hulls were sealed. The Kelvin lattice wasn’t only for lift; it was a pressure vessel. The hybrid turbine could close its intakes and run on battery. The cockpit had oxygen scrubbers, ballast tanks, and a periscope mast buried under the avionics. A ground-effect craft that could also *dive*. A black wing that could settle on the water, flood its tanks, and slide beneath the waves at twenty metres, silent as a shark.
The consortium didn’t know. Mael didn’t know. No one knew. It was the last door I never opened.
Now I opened it.
I pulled the deck from my wrist, ignoring the blood, and called up an old encrypted file. Not the open-source route maps. Not the public beacon frequencies. The private ledger. The names, addresses, security rotations, and family coordinates of the consortium board. I had carried it for years, not because I planned to use it, but because men like Mael always make you keep a knife.
They lived in luxury compounds, just as the user said. Not in Zurich towers or Geneva penthouses. The real decision-makers had moved their families to the warm edges of the new order: gated golf resorts on the North African coast, the Sinai Riviera, Cypriot headlands, Aegean coves. Places with private beaches, helipads, biometric gates, drone patrols, and a fatal flaw.
They were all **close to the water**.
Close enough that the sea was their view. Close enough that the water hazards on the golf course were connected to the open Med by narrow channels. Close enough that at three a.m., with all lights off, a black wing could surface in a lagoon, open its cargo ramp, and release men who moved like shadows.
The consortium thought the Dark Falcons were a freight network. They were also a submarine infiltration system. Empty, the boats could VTOL. Loaded, they needed a runway. But submerged, they needed nothing except patience.
I smoked the cigarette down to my fingers. The THC made the plan feel less like revenge and more like geometry. I would not attack their data centres. I would not burn their offices. Those were replaceable. I would attack the soft tissue: the women and sons sitting at home in their rich, luxurious, golf-resort real estate, believing the border walls and private security kept the world out.
They were wrong.
The borders were lines drawn on maps. The sea had no border. The sand had no border. And the Dark Falcons could move between them like a rumour.
I stood, bones creaking, and looked inland. The first Falcon was a pyre behind me. But the ocean was dark and deep. Somewhere north, the consortium was already celebrating. They thought they had the company, the fleet, the corridors.
They didn’t know the boats could dive.
I walked away from the burning hull. The deck was still warm in my hand. It pinged once—an old contact, a Traveller from the old road, a man who moved things through the Greek islands without questions. I sent a single line:
*Meet me at the old boatyard near Benghazi. Bring the net-guns and the night crews. We’re going golfing.*
The rain stopped. Above, the clouds broke. Starlight touched the water.
I smiled, and it was not a nice smile.
The consortium wanted the Dark Falcons. I would give them the Dark Falcons—not as cargo carriers, not as freight lines, but as ghosts rising out of the water beside their children’s bedrooms, black wings shedding seawater, ramp lowering, men with quiet weapons stepping onto the manicured grass.
They would learn what my grandfather meant when he said the road always finds a way.
And no one would ever see them coming.
Because no one knows they can dive.
The fire burned for six hours. I sat on the sand and let it. The missiles had hit the cargo hold, not the structure. Carbon-fibre doesn’t burn at missile temperature. It wants a furnace, not a warhead. The cargo lit up like a signal flare, old crates of medicine and machine parts turning to ash and black smoke, but the hull only scarred. The Kelvin lattice held. The boat was a skeleton that had refused to die.
When the flames died, I walked back down to the waterline. The first Dark Falcon sat low in the surf, blackened, hissing, but whole. The electronics were fried. Every circuit board in the cockpit had cooked itself into glass. But electronics are replaceable. I had replacements. I had built her to survive more than the sea.
I made a call from a dead satellite phone. An old contact came with a barge. We towed the Falcon north, away from the shipping lanes, away from the drones. Then I sealed the hull, flooded the tanks, and dived.
The underwater town was one of the things I never put in any file.
Some things are better not seen.
It lay beneath the Libyan shelf, in water black as oil, hidden under a false seafloor of sensor-reflective mesh. I had printed it the same way I printed the boats: robot arms, carbon-fibre filament, Kelvin lattices, Bézier curves. A cluster of domes on the seabed, lit in red and green, with a moon pool like a submarine’s womb. Inside, the air smelled of ozone, rubber, and old coffee. There were bunks, a surgery, a server room, hydroponic racks, and a dry dock with three more hulls waiting like sleeping animals. Not a home. A fallback. One of several.
I stripped off the wet clothes and stood under a cold shower until the salt stopped stinging. I was alone. The bots hummed in their cradles. The servers blinked. No wife. No son. No granddaughter who had not sold my name. Aisling had been the last of the family I still loved, and she had signed the transfer with a smile.
Not many men can stand all alone, stripped like an orphan of all family. It breaks most. But for a Traveller, the road was always longer than the family. The road doesn’t care who shares your blood. It only asks if you can walk it.
I put on clean black clothes. I sat at the desk. I opened the deck.
And I began the war.
The night crews I sent to the golf resorts did not come with guns. That would have been too simple. The consortium would have called it terrorism, rallied the corporate courts, bought more drones, printed more lawyers. I didn’t want them angry. I wanted them afraid.
The crews came with cameras, union cards, and a single printed photograph of the house where the wife slept and the son did his e-learning. No note. No threat. Just the photograph, left on the kitchen island beside the imported fruit. The next morning, the families started calling Zurich. That was the first crack.
The second crack was economic.
I didn’t need to fight the consortium. I only needed to make their world stop being comfortable. The others—the small shipyards in Mombasa, in Vigo, in Tema, in Surabaya—had downloaded the open-source files. They had the printer code, the lattice maps, the engine schematics. Now they signed ridiculous cheap sales contracts for what they built. They didn’t need the consortium. They could print their own Dark Falcons, shabbier, slower, uglier, but real. Within a year, the consortium’s monopoly on the low sky was gone. The sea routes filled with black-winged knock-offs. The Suez flyway tolls dropped. The Sahel sand strips became a common road. The consortium’s share price went down like a drowned man.
The third crack was inside.
I bought the cleaning company that serviced the consortium’s Marseille tower. Not with my name. Through a shell in Lagos, then another in Accra, then a foundation in Vaduz. The first thing I did was give the cleaners a rise. Not a small one. A rise that made them look up from their vacuums and wonder who the new owner was.
Then I brought in a new line of managers. Not my people. Worse. Efficiency experts. Actuaries. Men with no taste and no fear. They began cutting privileges. The executive dining room closed. The private lift was locked. The reserved parking went to whoever arrived first. The helicopter budget was zeroed. The golf club memberships were cancelled. The wives and sons at the luxury resorts suddenly found their cards declined. The household staff were let go. The private tutors were told to invoice in advance.
It was more brutal than any communist would ever dare. They didn’t redistribute wealth; they simply removed it from the people who thought they owned it. The managers called it “cost discipline.” The board called it “the new reality.” The cleaners called it “about time.”
The wives called their husbands. The sons came home from the resorts, confused, angry, wearing last season’s clothes. The men on the board started blaming each other. A German logistics baron sold his shares in a panic. A Saudi financier tried to leverage his stake to buy a new golf property and was refused. A French heiress threatened to call the gendarmes. The gendarmes asked if she had a valid address.
I watched from the underwater town, through a dozen screens, smoking THC cigarettes and feeding the fire with small decisions. I didn’t need to burn their homes. I only needed to make their homes feel unsafe, and their privileges feel gone, and their sons ask why their friends no longer wanted to play golf with them.
Then the consortium began to sign.
They didn’t call it surrender. They called it “restructuring.” But the papers were the same. Assets sold for pennies. Contracts assigned. Routes transferred. The Suez flyway went to a workers’ cooperative in Port Said. The Sahel strips went to a consortium of Nigerian and Sudanese builders. The Marseille tower was converted into social housing, with the old executive floor turned into a crèche. The cleaners kept their jobs and got shares.
And Aisling?
She called me once, from a borrowed phone. Her voice was small. She said the board seat was gone. The apartment in Nice had been seized. She was living with a woman who had once vacuumed her office floor.
“Grandda,” she said, “it wasn’t supposed to go like this.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t. But the road always finds a way.”
I cut the line. I didn’t tell her where I was. I didn’t tell anyone.
The underwater town hummed around me. The first Dark Falcon, repaired and freshly printed with new electronics, waited in the dry dock like a black saint. Outside, the sea pressed against the walls, cold and silent.
I lit another cigarette. The smoke curled into the red-lit dark.
The consortium had wanted the boats. I had given them the boats. But the boats could dive, and the men who flew them could disappear, and the road beneath the sea led to places no radar could see.
Some things are better not seen.
I smiled, and it was not a nice smile.
The cleaners got a rise.
The managers learned what equality felt like.
And the road, black and endless, stretched on beneath the water.
#cyberpunkcoltoure
