A flood of pink and red light broke over Sam, tearing him out of his simple dreams of wealth, power and the ability to make a change in the world. Moaning, he turned around and buried his face in the pillow. Yesterday it seemed like a good idea to program his shutters so that they wake him up early by letting light in. There was a lot to do and he had to get the most out of this day. But now he cursed himself, the shutters and the sun for waking him up.
How high was the risk for him if he just stayed put? Too high. Unambiguous. The Aizutachi were notorious for expecting the best from their members. But sleeping late and not worrying about his tasks is probably not the best he can muster. And he had seven waiting programs in his inbox that he was supposed to check for one of the cybermancing teams before he had to continue preparing for his mission at Digital Grave.
With a loud grumble, Sam heaved himself out of his insanely fluffy bed, which had never seemed so infinitely comfortable. The floor was at the perfect temperature thanks to underfloor heating and helped him to come to terms with being awake.
Sam still had two days of waiting ahead of him. During this time, he had to do minor work on programs again and again, but hardly complex enough to protect him from his thoughts. With each passing day, his concern grew. He was neither a spy nor an infiltrator, just a cybermancer with questionable decisions in his life.
Lazily, Sam shuffled through the room towards his cyberdeck and opened some windows on it. He did not do a deep dive, he was able to complete his tasks without much effort and work on his own projects on the side.
News about the city, results of car races and his program with which he worked on daemons he used in active duty popped up.
Most of these daemons, however, were more gimmicks than actual tools. For example, he was currently working on a small program that allowed him to rewrite casino software to reverse the winning algorithms. He couldn't wait to spread a bit of chaos with it and if he himself made a little money, all the better. But it would be some time before that happened, he was still in the early stages of the project.
Instead of continuing to work on his casino exploit, he opened another file. A small program with which he was able to keep an eye on the police and traffic density at the same time. So he could always get a quick picture of how things were in the city. Green for little police, yellow for clear police presence and red for hotspots with active operations. In addition, the lines, white for open roads, blue for moderately busy roads and black for crowded roads.
Celestia was not green for once. Strange. Otherwise, it was probably the safest part of the city, perhaps only behind the ultra-rich district of Berlin Ehrfeld. The streets were also all completely black. Something big must have happened. Sam looked at the window with the news and immediately realized what had happened. Apparently, a paramilitary or possibly CorpoSec unit was about to attack a monastery. The few available images brought hardly any information, presumably a lot of data stream was blocked to avoid mass panic. Well, then he would have to get the information differently.
He spun in his office chair and activated his neural implant to access his integrated cyberdeck. He didn't trust the Aizutachi even remotely enough to use his complex programs on the Cyberdeck provided to him.
It took less than five minutes for Sam to hack into N54's servers with a small backdoor worm and have access to all drones on site from there. Less than expected. Normally, there should be dozens, but only three actually showed Bild. Was there an active sturgeon field on site?
To test this, he subtly began to bring the drones closer and closer to the monastery. He was kicked out of the first drone when it lost all connection to the server. So this was really a sturgeon field. These things were insanely expensive if they had to cover such a large area. He was finally able to keep an eye on the attackers via the remaining two drones. No symbolism to identify them, so probably really CorpoSec, would not be the first time this has happened. Also explained the expensive misery. The weapons didn't look cheap either.
Sam watched the attack for a while while while trying to gain access to other drones when he saw a young nun dragging herself across the courtyard of the convent. She was badly battered, but disappeared from the camera too quickly for Sam to be able to tell what exactly her injuries were.
But after a few minutes, he saw her running across the yard back to the destroyed building, still full of blood, but on the one hand she didn't drag her leg anymore and on the other hand, she was quite agile for someone who looked like she had just stepped on a landmine. Again, she was out of the picture too quickly, but Sam could swear that the previously destroyed leg was glowing slightly.
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Over the next few minutes, he used all his attention to hack all relevant news stations and make their drones his own as well. He saw how nuns and priests engaged in violent firefights with the attackers and how special units were supported in some places by Corposec and the police. It was incredible how well the Saints were able to hold their own. Sam knew that the church that lived there had its own security force, but he always thought that it was a few automated turrets and drones, not a trained war unit made up of clergymen wearing habits.
A five-person squad of these clergymen was making their way through a small battalion when a huge explosion shook the monastery. An explosion trap had killed all of the five fighting priests at once. This caused the clergy and police to switch to a more defensive strategy. It was not clear what the goal of the unknown persons was, perhaps it was enough to simply stop them long enough. In the corner of his eye, Sam saw the nun from earlier freeing a small group of civilians from the rubble and taking them to the police cars. She still looked bad, but didn't seem to be impressed by it, but as before, she disappeared too quickly. She never stayed in open spaces for long and stayed under cover whenever possible. So she was probably also one of the war nuns. Hehe. War Nun. Sam used to only know something like this from hologames or anime.
However, the battle seemed to be slowly setting in, while more and more of the armed mercenaries slowly fell back and regrouped. Sam opened another program in his HUD and thought he could see the reason. The Corposec army of the city of New Berlin was already on the march. A cooperation between the largest German corporations and the government, consisting of high-tech equipment and top tier warriors, was probably too much of a good thing for the attackers. Sam tried to chase some of the individual groups as they fled, but they seemed to have hidden vehicles with built-in jammers. Sam lost several drones and drew too much attention to himself. He noticed how some of the news stations began to lock him out of the system. He knew he couldn't defend himself on all fronts at the same time, so he let it happen and focused all his CPU power on completely disconnecting one of the drones from the system and overwriting it to himself. He ran this drone through several proxies because he could not establish a completely separate connection without having physical contact with the control unit on the drone.
His newfound surveillance drone flew slowly around the monastery to continue watching the whole event and recording everything, you never knew when you would need blackmail material. While he had not had the terrain in view, the situation seemed to have changed. The main building was more and more in ruins and the entire courtyard had developed into a large battlefield at this point. Several groups of attackers, more heavily armored and armed with massive shields, formed a single line and moved slowly toward the main building. They formed a kind of shield wall to provide protection for the lightly armored infantrymen while they fired at the saints of the church. The battle began to turn at that moment. Previously, the clergy were able to hold the lines thanks to the better armament and support of the police and corposec, but now they lost more and more space and had little more than the large main building under control. The Corposec units were pushed back to similar ones, but with significantly fewer losses, as they were able to retreat without being pushed against a wall. Sam opened another window and let it run next to the fight's live feed. There he followed the traffic situation of the city live, which gave him a good overview of the upcoming reinforcements. Three different "traffic jam situations" slowly moved towards Celestia. Two of them use the roads and had to fight their way through the heavy traffic of the city, which cost a lot of time. Meanwhile, the third group was able to use commercial airspace. The Hover vehicles were all stopped and the Corposec units could fly above and below to make fast progress. It wasn't clear what kind of reinforcement it was, but Sam was sure it would be able to repel the unknown attackers.
Their commanders and officers must be aware of that, Sam thought. But why then did they continue the fight? They had already suffered some casualties and would find themselves facing an overwhelming force in 30 minutes or less. But it did not seem as if preparations for withdrawal were being made. On the contrary, the attack was carried out by more and more soldiers, whom the battle line had now pushed into the monastery itself and had fought for a parameter around the entire terrain. Here now a stalemate took place with the existing security forces, which exchanged only isolated repressive fire, but for the most part stared down threateningly at each other.
Sam let his drone slide a little further back and tried to catch a glimpse through the damaged leaded glass windows. Inside the building he couldn't see much, but it seemed as if the defenses were collapsing more and more.
He tried to bring his drone a little closer to see more, but without warning, Sam lost connection and was left with a black image. It took him a few seconds to realize that a ricochet must have destroyed the drone.
A low, frustrated moan came deep from Sam's throat as he closed the window and focused on the rest of the information. The air reinforcements would probably arrive in five to ten minutes, with the ground troops twenty minutes later. Sam wished he could record those moments as well, but had to settle for the existing data.
He began to go through and analyze his material piece by piece. He had already noticed a lot during the recording, but now he could take a closer look at this one solo nun who had saved this group of people. He slowed down and stopped the recordings again and again and tried to recognize what this one saint was all about.
Who was she?
This is the end of Episode 1 of DEUS EX a Cyberpunk Story
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See you next time <3