The quiet of the abandoned laboratory was broken by the sound of chalk being dragged across concrete as Regent sketched out the outline of a magical circle. Once we’d returned from our scouting mission and caught what sleep we could in the loft, he disappeared shortly after we’d breakfasted on rolls Grue had bought from a nearby food truck, with fried slices of bacon-flavoured tofu and eggs. Regent returned hours later with a nondescript black shopping bag of obscure herbs, powders, dusts and crystals; magical reagents to fuel his spells.
The powder joined the chalk in the circle, using it as guidelines to create a mathematically perfect shape. Where imperfections did form, Regent took a small metal knife from his pocket and scraped the powder back into place. It was a methodical, exacting process that seemed to me to be completely at odds with who Regent was, and yet he went about the task with single-minded focus and a sort of rote perfection in his motions. It was very much the product of his father’s teachings.
I watched him work with a sort of baffled curiosity. I knew next to nothing about magic; it simply wasn’t something that had played a large part in my life. There were one or two kids at high school who’d been discovered in the tests in the last months of freshmen year, enjoying a fame and infamy that eclipsed even that of the football team for a few brief months only to flee Winslow before their sophomore year for corporate-run schools that specialised in developing magical talent and instilling that talent with loyalty to the corp.
If there were other classmates in my childhood who awakened, I never heard of them. Most magicians lived secluded lives, integrated into corporate or governmental circles that they rarely left. It was an understandable choice to make with an undeniable quality of life increase, a chance to escape the reach of magophobia and, maybe most importantly of all, the opportunity to live among people who interacted with the world the same way they did.
I wondered if technomancers would ever reach that same status, flipping from a terrifying unknown to an asset to be courted?
If they do, I don’t want any part of it.
Of course, there were others who weren’t so lucky – or unlucky, depending on how you thought of it. People like Lisa, who’d slipped through the cracks in all the structures designed to catch and funnel magicians into set paths. I’d grown up around working professionals, who worked within the system even as they advocated against its structures in their own ways, which meant my only experience of those mages was walking past unassuming stalls in the Market selling mysterious trinkets, or advertising potions, poultices, spirit healing and fortune telling. It was rumours of kids being snatched off the street by gangs desperate for a magical edge, or hearing whispers in the halls that this or that student was totally a witch.
Watching a real magician at work was a lot less impressive than trideo would have had me believe. It was clear he was putting a lot of effort into the circle, but the concrete floor of the old laboratory was no substitute for a dark cellar filled with gothic candles and obscure symbols daubed on the walls. Instead, Regent simply stepped back from the circle and swept a hand forwards, sending out a short burst of flame that caught on the powder, igniting it in an entirely mundane-looking flash of magnesium.
Except the flash didn’t dissipate. At first I thought it was just the after-image, but the incandescent flame still flickered on the floor even though the powder had been entirely burned up. It shifted, spreading out to the centre of the circle as the fire changed from white to blue to flickering oranges and yellows. It crackled and spat in a way that put me in mind of the sort of flames you got from a burning tenement; full to the point of bursting with insulation, electrics and whatever chemical residue the last acid rainstorm left on the roof.
It wasn’t the comforting fire of a warm hearth or an old fashioned stove, the sort of fire I’d only ever seen on trideo or in period-piece simsense recordings. It was the violent, aggressive fire that followed washing lines as it crept from building to building, sending people fleeing into the smoke-filled halls of their cheap-built apartments.
It rose into a thick pillar, spitting out sparks that drifted in the air before inevitably being drawn back into the mass of flames. Regent was muttering to himself, holding out a talisman in front him as he stared at the roiling spirit with a dispassionate expression on his face.
I knew enough to know that trideo only focused on the sort of magic that could be seen. The chip truth was that real magic was rarely visible to the unawakened. Looming spirits or someone slinging fire made for an impressive visual on a screen – albeit one that had to be almost completely remastered by post-processing to smooth out the camera’s inability to properly capture something so unnatural – but real magic was a quiet, invisible thing to people like me.
It was kind of like how the matrix couldn’t be seen without wearing the proper hardware, or my resonance-given workaround.
Whatever Regent did, I could see its effect on the spirit. Abruptly, the fire shrunk back on itself, suddenly constraining against bonds of invisible force as it seemed to grow angrier and angrier, spitting out embers in greater volume only for them to hit against a wall of force within centimetres of the mass of flames.
That wall closed in, constricting the flames until they looked like a solid mass of fire beneath a pane of glass. Then, it was as if they merged – or one subsumed the other – and the glass disappeared, leaving flames that held their shape without outside pressures as they began to shift into a humanoid form.
Not just humanoid; female, with the shape of her hands and feet obscured by gouts of fire as she hovered in the circle, as if they sat at the very edge of Regent’s control. Her face was featureless except for sunken eye sockets that glowed like the sun, with two trails of pinpricks of light flowing down from them to where her mouth would be. Something about them reminded me of cigarette burns, and everything about the spirit seemed to be silently screaming with contained rage.
Beside me, Tattletale was looking at the spirit with an expression that seemed to be somewhere between nausea and disgust, before she smoothed her features back into her constant mask.
“Is something wrong?” I asked in a low voice that Regent wouldn’t be able to hear.
“Nothing,” Tattletale sighed, shaking her head. “Songbird in a cage, that’s all. Hate to see it.”
“Remind you of yourself?” I asked.
She laughed – a sharp, angry sound.
“All that time alone’s left you with no filter at all, has it?” I winced. “No, it’s not that. Not just that,” she clarified, giving me a pointed look. “You don’t need to bind a spirit to get it to listen to you. He’s shooting himself in the foot in the long run.”
“So how would you handle it?” I asked. Tattletale hadn’t made any obvious preparations, as far as I could tell.
“I don’t use spirits, but for most mages it’s enough to just contract them. The spirit doesn’t hang around for long and they won’t do anything that’s guaranteed to harm them, but it’s more than enough for most people’s needs.”
“But there’s a cost?” I asked.
“Hardly,” Tattletale shook her head. “The current theory is that they feed off of a mage’s stray essence; like magical dead skin cells. No, when you bind a spirit, it’s more about convenience than cost. You want something that can’t leave, or say no.”
I didn’t say anything to that; I wasn’t sure there was anything I could say. They weren’t comparable, not really, but I certainly wouldn’t consider bargaining with my sprites. Maybe with spirits it was more like chaining up a wild animal, rather than earning its trust?
I sighed, shaking my head. Even that image didn’t feel right, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to figure out two unknowable cosmic forces – especially when the Resonance was much more relevant to my life.
“I just don’t get magic.”
Tattletale laughed.
“You and me both. Thaumaturges are just better at pretending they get it; packaging it up into universal rules that’ll be completely irrelevant in ten years.”
“And Shamans?” I asked.
“Embrace the chaos,” she answered. “Our mentor spirits are the one constant in the magical world and so long as we stick by them they’ll stick by us. It’s a partnership: give and take.”
Something Regent would never accept, I thought, as the mage himself looked at the spirit in front of him, raising his hand and watching as the burning woman mirrored the gesture.
On the other side of the room, Grue was walking over to us. He was dressed for war in full-body armour strapped over mil-surp fatigues, all of it black except for the ballistic mask built into his helmet. That was bone white, shaped into a tusked skull with tinted visors embedded in the eye sockets. I doubted anyone on the team besides Grue could have worn that getup without toppling over, never mind actually fighting in it.
It was a menacing image, even with the ballistic mask raised and his new assault rifle held by the handle in his left hand, rather than with his right on the trigger, but that was the point, I supposed. The Chosen were trained killers, and they outnumbered us massively. If we were going to have a chance, we had to terrify them, grab the van and get out before they came to their senses.
“Not long now,” he said. “You two good?”
Tattletale just grinned, while I nodded.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.”
My hand drifted to my belt, where eight magazines sat in four pouches, each one carrying thirty rounds. I’d always thought of fights as sudden things; quick bursts of violence that ended as fast as they came. The hours spent in the old laboratory had shattered that illusion as everyone worked on the painstaking preparations that were needed to make that brief moment of violence happen.
I’d never say it out loud, but part of me was still stuck in the trideo mindset where fights were as much spectacle as something real. I hadn’t considered that every bullet I might fire would have to be loaded into each magazine by hand, but Grue had shown up to the loft with a backpack full of ammunition, along with the rest of the gear our client had leased from Faultline.
I’d loaded magazines before, when I went shooting with Brian, and if everything went right, I wouldn’t even fire a shot tonight, but it felt so much stranger to be touching with my bare hands a bullet that was meant to kill. Stranger still to know that, for all the time and effort involved in loading them, each magazine would be emptied in seconds.
“Good,” Grue nodded. “We’ll be counting on you in there.”
“I won’t let you down,” I said, trying to put as much confidence as I could into my tone.
Grue looked at me for a few moments, with a weight to his gaze. We hadn’t talked about our time in the Palanquin. I told myself it was because we didn’t have any room in our heads for anything but the fight ahead, but I wasn’t sure if I was just putting it off.
Whatever Grue saw, he was apparently satisfied. He moved over to a half-boarded up window, lowing the skull mask over his face as he peered out into the street.
“I’m going to go check on Bitch,” I said to Tattletale, who was busy adjusting the ballistic vest she was wearing beneath her trenchcoat. “I’ll stay up with her when you go in, as well.”
“It’s good that you two are getting along,” Tattletale remarked. “Maybe not what I expected, especially this early on, but I guess your wireless insights helped.”
“It’s not that,” I shook my head. “Or… not just that. I understand how she thinks now.”
“How do you figure?” Tattletale asked, though I couldn’t help but wonder if she already knew.
“She values stability. When I first met her, before we hit the Yakuza, she lashed out at me because bringing me on meant changing things around; introducing some new uncertain variable. Not just into the team, but into her network. I was a threat to what she was comfortable with.”
I risked a glance over at Grue.
“I think he’s the same way. Not that he’s not ambitious – not that we all aren’t, except maybe Bitch – but he’s comfortable being a Shadowrunner. It’s where he fits into the world, and he’s happy there.”
It’s what I like about him, I thought. I’m not a stranger in the shadows anymore, but he fits so naturally he might have been born in them.
“He is,” Tattletale nodded. “As for ambition, Bitch isn’t the only one without it.”
For a moment I thought she might be talking about herself, but her eyes darted over to Regent.
“You sure?” I asked. “He certainly seems like someone who wants to be in control.”
He was raised that way, I thought.
“He does,” Tattletale conceded. “But not of the team, or some black magic cabal. Regent wants to be in control of his own life. To do what he wants without worrying about costs or consequences. So long as he’s making enough that he never has to check his cred, he’s content.”
I nodded, slowly. It made sense with what I knew of him; with how he’d been raised, how he left and my guess as to what he might do afterwards. Like Tattletale, he came from tainted luxury. Maybe his idea of an ideal life is to have all the pleasures he had back then without any of the pain?
“And you?” I asked. “Are you ambitious?”
Tattletale chuckled.
“More than you could know, even with all your insights. Because you’re right; I was a songbird in a cage. But the life I’ve built since, the life I’m still building? That’s mine. It might not be as rich or as privileged, but at least the food doesn’t taste like ash in my mouth.”
She paused, her head cocked as she looked me up and down.
“And you? Where do you fit on the scale of comfort and ambition?”
I sighed. “I’m not sure yet. Good luck out there, Tattletale.”
“You too, Bug,” she answered, and I winced.
“I’m really not sure about that name, anymore…” I murmured.
“The window’s closing fast,” she warned, good-naturedly. “If you’re gonna change, you’d better do it before people start whispering about us in dive bars.”
I just shook my head, leaving her to prepare as I made my way up to the second floor.
Bitch had set up in a corridor that ran the length of the laboratory, with windows running down the left side. Back in the old loading bay, we’d scattered a few glowsticks to offer enough light to work by, but Bitch’s optics meant she was quite comfortable standing there in the dark, with only a little light-bleed from the streetlamps. With my eyes, I could see the heat of her still-remaining organic parts; how it was dispersed across her entire mass rather than concentrated in certain components like in her cyberware.
Beside her, two long-barrelled guns had been set against the wall. The first was a sniper rifle that our client had rented from Faultline; a weighty, Saeder-Krupp model with more than enough armour-piercing ammunition to make a mockery of the warehouse walls and – hopefully – whatever was behind them. The second was Bitch’s own weapon; a semi-automatic shotgun she’d acquired with the payout from the last job, and perhaps a little of the payout from this one as well.
Bitch had taken a long table from one of the labs and set it up in front of a window, creating a firing position from which she could provide overwatch to the others as they advanced. She could see into the offices that capped off one side of our target across the street, but not into the actual warehouse beyond. My job was to spot for her, and let the AP rounds do the rest.
“Everything good?” I asked, as Bitch finished organising a stack of magazines on her firing position, each one full of oversized ammunition.
“The Crawler’s in the warehouse, moving into the rafters,” she answered. “Nothing but a skeleton crew there right now, waiting around on the warehouse floor.”
I pulled up the feed from the surveillance drone, watching as it clambered silently along the beams that ran the width of the warehouse, its optics focused on a small group of policlub staffers on the floor below.
Her other drones – the two Dobermans and the predatory bulk of the Steel Lynx – were also on the network, stowed behind a pair of dumpsters off to the side of our temporary hideout. It kept them out of sight, but also meant they could be rolled into action at a moment’s notice.
“They’re ready downstairs,” I said, as I allowed meatspace to fade away, replaced by the brilliant expanse of the matrix, with the blinding lights of the city centre merged into a great pyramidal mass in the distance.
Our surroundings were quiet; there were businesses around us, but it was well beyond business hours. What few networks were still active were ticking along on reserve bandwidth for the night, and the few exceptions – like the laboratory across the street that’d left a sampler to run overnight – weren’t straining the local matrix overmuch. In spite of that, it wasn’t a dead zone; during working hours, a business park like this would exert a great deal of pressure on the local matrix, which in turn meant a great deal of bandwidth was needed to handle the traffic.
That bandwidth wasn’t being utilised, but the capacity was still there. It would carry my complex forms like copper carrying electricity, but the same could be said of any programmes the Chosen managed to bring to bear.
The quiet only made the intermittent traffic all the more noticeable. It was nearing closer to eleven at night, but no city – no modern city – ever truly slept. The occasional truck made its way through the park, as late-night couriers took advantage of the quieter streets to make their way into normally gridlocked areas. Then, in the morning, they’d make the same deliveries to the city’s nocturnal industries.
My mind jumped, slightly, at the sight of a Knight Errant patrol car smoothly cruising down a street a couple of blocks away, swinging through the warehouses in search of optimistic thieves. Judging by its IFF, the car had a crew of two and was accompanied by a drone that skimmed over the rooftops, peering into back alleys as it fed video back to the operator in the passenger seat. The car was heading away from us – our business park was in decline, which likely meant the landowners didn’t have enough capital to pay for that sort of bespoke anti-burglary patrol – but it was still a worrying sign.
“We’ve got movement,” I said over the team-wide comms as something on the edge of the district caught my eye. “Got a Hyundai sedan moving into the park. Alabaster’s comm is in the back. I’m going to get a closer look.”
I turned around, sitting down on the floor of the corridor with my back against the wall before letting my hold on my organic body slip away. Untethered, I sped through the quiet waters of the Matrix with ease, drifting through the ghostly after-images of buildings and inactive networks as I drew closer to the car, observing the tether between the vehicle and Gridlink, Alabaster’s comm in the backseat and the two personal area networks up in the front, linking biomonitors, comm systems and AR-linked tactical glasses.
I reached out to the two integrated commlinks and two pairs of wireless earbuds waiting back at the warehouse.
“Two security personnel with him.”
“Two less than we were expecting,” Grue observed.
“He wouldn’t fit four in a sedan,” Tattletale countered. “He seems like the sort of guy who wants the back all to himself. They’ll be with the truck.”
As the sedan made its way through the streets and turned into the AAO warehouse, I tested Tattletale’s hypothesis by casting my net wider.
“Got them,” I broadcasted about a minute later, as I kept half an eye on the Crawler’s feed, showing Alabaster being greeted by the AAO staffers on the warehouse floor. “Two more guards, driving a box truck. Has to be our target.”
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“Any sign of the Chosen?” Grue asked.
“Not yet. Box truck’s turning onto our street now; you should be able to see it through a window.”
I pulled up another feed, watching through Bitch’s cybereyes as she dropped down to the floor. She reached up and grabbed me by the shoulder of my jacket, her other hand supporting my head as she pulled me down below the window just before the truck’s headlights swept across the corridor.
She lay me down on my left side, tucking the back of my right hand under my head, before leaning back up to peer over the windowsill. Through her eyes, I was able to see the box truck as it pulled around the corner, heading for the now-open garage door of the warehouse. It was a leased vehicle with the name of the lease company on its sides.
It was refrigerated, to keep the chemical cocktails within at the proper temperature, and the weight of the refrigerator, plus the cargo itself, caused it to sit low to the ground. One of the guards was driving, but the truck had auto-navigation software built into it, which meant I might be able to slave it to Bitch’s cyberware and have her pilot it remotely, or at least have set it to follow the van.
A pair of AAO staffers waved the van through before hitting the button to lower the shutters, one of them – dressed in a padded coat to ward off the chill – ducking under at the last second to wait outside, presumably to watch for the Chosen’s arrival. Inside the warehouse, Alabaster watched with his arms crossed as another staffer opened up the rear of the truck. The Crawler didn’t have a good angle on the back of the truck, but I saw the wisps of refrigerated air spilling out towards the vampire.
Apparently satisfied with what he saw, he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture that had the staffer slamming the door shut again. Then Alabaster pulled back his sleeve, peering at his watch and frowning. There was a visible tension in the air between Alabaster and the staffers, and even Alabaster and his security team. I guessed the security team were wary of him because they knew what he was, and the staffers were wary of him because he was some nebulous authority in a suit who’d dragged them to a warehouse full of medical contraband to wait for a gang of psychopaths to come and pick it up.
“The security team are focusing on Alabaster,” I said. “They’re sticking close to him, rather than the van.”
“Good,” Grue said, “but we’ll need to take down at least one of them if we want to definitively pin the policlub on the scene. Otherwise they could just say the Chosen broke in.”
“It’d be easier to kill one of the staffers,” Regent pointed out. I would have winced if I was corporeal, even with who the staffers were and how they thought.
“When the Chosen arrive, we won’t have the luxury of wasting bullets on targets who aren’t shooting back,” Grue countered, lifting a minute weight from my shoulders. “But if any of them tries to play hero, put a firebolt through their skull.”
More movement drew my attention back to the matrix. Traffic was comparatively streaming into the business park; four vans of varying origins and states of disrepair, and a larger signal that I couldn’t make out because it was wrapped in layers of familiar network encryptions. Chosen encryptions.
In cyberspace, it appeared to me as a cluster of nodes hidden beneath a cosmetic layer that marked them out as a waste disposal crew, with their vehicle represented by a GMC Commercial D-Series – a bulky dump truck popular on the outskirts of the city. But most vehicles of that type didn’t have crews, relying on their pilot programmes and stowed drones to handle the work, with maybe a security guard in the cab to ward off scavengers.
“The Chosen are moving in,” I said. “Looks like Biter’s squad in one vehicle and some bottom-feeders in a bunch of vans.”
As Biter’s vehicle rounded the corner and into sight of Bitch’s optics, I was shocked to see that it was a dump truck – or, at least, it had once been one. It still had some of the original paint, though the logos on the flat sides had been sanded down to the bare metal, upon which a snarling red wolf’s head had been daubed on with spray paint and stencils. The open top and rear had been closed in by thick sheets of armour plate and what looked like the heavy metal doors of a secure transit truck.
The cab had been even more heavily modified, with more armour plate layered on top of the original’s bodywork. The windscreen had been removed entirely, leaving it with beetle-like optics mounted in yet more armour. I could tell there was someone behind that mass; most likely the rigger who drove the thing and operated the bipedal Ares Duelist drone that had taken the place of the industrial loader unit that would normally go in the alcove just behind the cabin.
What took the truck from an absurd red flag to a blatant slap in the face of the law was the cannon mounted just behind the cab, at the very forefront of the bed. It was a General Electric Vindicator; a multi-barrelled nightmare of a minigun with an ammunition belt that descended through a slot in the armour plated roof, articulated on a gimballed mount and loaded with a pilot programme slaved to the rigger in the driver’s seat.
“What the fuck is that thing?” I asked, struck dumb.
“They call them ‘scrapyard tacticals,’” Grue answered in a muted tone. “Up-armoured heavy goods vehicles brought out in full-scale gang warfare, or when a police crackdown gets past the surface level and takes out something the gang can’t afford to lose.”
“What’s it doing here?” I asked. “I thought this was supposed to be clandestine?”
“Right now, everything the Chosen needs to keep their immune systems functional for the next month is in a single truck,” Grue explained. “Once they’re loaded into those vans, they’ll be driven to different caches across the city and one point of failure will become half a dozen.”
“Great. So we have to kill a tank,” Regent drawled.
“Or cripple it,” I countered. “I’m starting my attack. Slow and quiet, so they don’t notice.”
“Got it,” Grue answered. “We’ll move into position. Bitch, stay down for now in case they put an observer in the offices.”
I turned my focus away from their network, drifting unseen towards the warehouse where the makeshift armoured transport had pulled in ahead of the parade of vans, disgorging Biter’s squad. I saw them not through the Crawler’s camera, but as icons in the matrix; generic crash dummies dressed in the uniforms of a garbage disposal crew.
I’d seen the Chosen’s network before – what little of it I could sense through Bitch’s wireless connection, as well as my up-close look at Biter’s cranium – but the squad were running on their own private network, visible as datastreams tying together each member of the squad, and each piece of equipment they’d brought with them from smart-linked rifles to their transport.
Momentarily, I split my focus to check the camera feed. Alabaster was looking up at the APC with his head cocked, as he exchanged words with Biter. The Chosen lieutenant hadn’t changed much from when Bitch had her intimate moment with him. To my surprise, he still wasn’t wearing a shirt, and I could see his muscles shifting with the movements of his dull metal cyberarms and each flap of his oversized artificial jaw revealed metal teeth filed down into points. He was holding a lengthy rifle by the stock, resting the barrel on his shoulder, with a pistol strapped to his thigh and magazines and grenades strapped to the harness that crossed over his chest.
Barker was gesturing at a couple of AAO staffers to open up the truck, his own misshapen teeth still jutting through the flesh of his cheeks. Unlike Biter, he was still wearing a ballistic vest, and the optics in his sunken eye sockets whirred as they scanned the room. In the half-lit warehouse, his skull face tattoo, dead optics and grotesque teeth seemed even more ghoulish than it had in the Chosen’s compound. Each gesture was accented by the assault rifle in his hands, and once by a flex of the blade hidden in the cyberarm Bitch had stitched onto him.
The other four members of Biter’s squad were dressed in a similar hybrid of tactical and gang aesthetics. Each of them was as individual in their style as their leader and his second, which made it easy to make guesses at how they fit into the squad. The man and the woman carrying assault rifles, both dressed in body armour patterned in red and black, were obviously there to fill out the gunline, but the other two were more specialised.
The rigger was easy enough to spot from the way she was wandering around the APC, checking diagnostic readouts on a tablet as she inspected one of the Ares Duelists. A pulse travelled between the control rig implanted and the drones, the bipedal, bladed robots stepping out of their niches as they moved off in a patrol pattern. Their faux-samurai armour had been spray-painted in Chosen colours, while the rigger herself wore black coveralls distorted in spots by inlaid armour plates, with her hair standing tall on her head in a daring red mohawk.
The last member of the squad hadn’t even left the truck, but they worried me more than any of their others. Even from the outside, I could see the architecture of the comms network. Biter was the squad commander, constantly receiving data from his subordinates and capable of utilising overrides and universal permissions to send data to them. Different datastreams connected the rigger to the drones and the truck, giving her near-universal authority over them.
The person in the centre of the truck was connected to every device on the network, from the processors in Biter’s head to the smart-link in the riflewoman’s weapon. As I watched, their icon – another anonymous garbageman – drifted away from their body, passing through the roof of the truck in a way that was impossible for anyone bound by physical laws.
I couldn’t see the decker’s body behind the enclosed cabin of the APC, but I didn’t need to. It was insignificant next to the persona drifting around the matrix with the comfortable ease of someone who spent almost as much time in it as out. My one saving grace was that I doubted Biter would let his decker escape the same meatspace drills he’d clearly put the rest of his squad though. When it came to being terminally online, I had the dubious advantage. All I had to do was turn it into leverage.
“Go dark, now,” I said to the others, as the decker scanned their surroundings. Every matrix-connected device we had was immediately switched offline, from Bitch’s drones to Tattletale’s AR glasses. It was camouflage by brute force, with everything that couldn’t be switched back on by hand set to reconnect in five minutes. The only exception to the shutdown order was the Crawler, which continued to stream its camera feed to me even as it was cut off from Bitch. I camouflaged that myself, wrapping both it and my persona in a heavy veil of resonance.
As the decker swept the room, I focused my attention on the clearest piece of data available to me; the Crawler nestled next to my digital chest. The Chosen rank and file were beginning to unload plastic crates from the back of the truck, carrying them back to the waiting vans. There were eight of them in total, all of them noticeably less augmented than Biter’s crew. Their wireless presence flimsier as well; they were looped into what must have been a broader Chosen-wide network, but they were excluded from the squad’s TacNet. Their matrix discipline was noticeably weaker, with their minds open to social media and streaming services ranging from radio stations to film, tv and at least four different porn sites.
As they worked under Alabaster’s watchful eye, Biter’s squad moved out to secure the perimeter. The two Duelist drones were deployed, marching off to just outside the exterior doors, no doubt as an early warning system, while Biter, Barker and the riflewoman took up positions on the other side. The rigger remained close to the APC and the decker didn’t leave the cabin, but the remaining rifleman made his way deeper into the building, disappearing from the Crawler’s view as he passed through the abandoned offices and up onto the second floor, where he took up a position overlooking the street.
Five minutes had passed. Almost simultaneously, the team came back online.
“They’ve started loading the vans,” I said. “If you’re going, go now. One of Biter’s squad is on the second floor of the offices, overlooking the road. They have a drone on either side of the warehouse watching the streets, but the rest of the squad, AAO's security and the Chosen rank and file are all in the warehouse itself. Marking them now.”
Spinning together datastreams, I was able to tweak the team’s heads-up-displays with digital markers showing the location of everyone in the warehouse, distinguished using a simple key that showed their faction and speciality, if it was obvious. I marked Alabaster out using a blue symbol, rather than red; it was more than he deserved, but our client might be annoyed if we shot him. I did, however, give his icon fangs.
It was a deceptively taxing piece of homespun software. The simplest option would have been to place the markers in the matrix itself, mapped as augmented reality objects on the targets’ actual positions, but that sort of cyber-graffiti would have been easily spotted by the Chosen’s decker. Instead, I had to cross-reference what I could see with what the Crawler was recording, then use the relative positions of each member of the team to triangulate where each ganger was standing from their perspective. All this across wildly differing software, from a homemade cybernetic optics suite to designer sunglasses.
There’s no way I’ll be able to keep it up when the digital shooting starts, I thought.
“Okay…” Grue’s tone was contemplative as he surveyed his options. “The offices are still the obvious entry point. Tattletale, bring down the spotter. Bitch, hold your drones in position for now but be ready with the rifle. Regent, start moving your spirit into position.”
“Finally,” Regent sighed. “I’ve been waiting all day for this.”
I watched through Grue’s cyebreyes as Tattletale moved up to the door of our hideout, peering through the grime-covered window across the street, to where the Chosen rifleman was surveying the road with professional disinterest.
I drifted in close to him, peering at the tightly-woven shell of his persona. I couldn’t risk a full-scale assault on the network without alerting the decker to our attack, but it wasn’t the time for that. Instead, I focused my efforts solely on the device in front of me; the biomonitor tucked into the base of the gunman’s skull, with sensors spread out across his entire body.
Moving with painstaking slowness, I teased at the streams of data passing between the biomonitor and the rest of the network, feeding strands of resonance in with incoming data from the rest of the squad until I had a hold on the biomonitor itself. I could see the readout; his heart rate was slightly low, his breathing rate normal and there were monitoring systems in his kidneys tracking the build up of excessive white blood cells, as well as an auto-injector loaded with medication that I was sure could be found in abundance in the truck.
I locked the data in place right as Tattletale brought her hand up to her pendant, then her mouth, before sending a spell flying across the street. I couldn’t see it in the matrix, of course – couldn’t even see if it smashed the windows between Tattletale and the sentry or just passed intangibly through them – but I could see the effect the spell had as it hit.
Beneath my carefully-masked signals, the Chosen’s pulse plummeted, his breathing slowing as his EEG readings shifted into the kind of activity only normally seen during REM sleep. There was an auto-injector nestled beneath his fused sternum that would have given him a shot of adrenaline in response to that activity, if I hadn’t already disarmed its trigger.
“Move,” Grue said in a short, sharp whisper. On the second floor of our hideout, Bitch grabbed the rifle from where it had been lying on the floor and got into a firing position on top of the table she’d set up, with her left leg straight and her right almost at ninety degrees.
Through her optics, I watched as Grue, Tattletale and Regent sprinted across the road, almost throwing themselves down below the ground floor windows of the empty offices. Grue’s faceplate was down, and his impassive skull looked at Regent for a moment before nodding.
Behind the warehouse, the sky momentarily lit up with fire as the spirit soared across the roof of the warehouse and dove in through the window. I watched through the Crawler as the explosion of fire and glass shards scattered across the rafters of the warehouse. The spirit emerged from the mass, her flame-wreathed form seeming subtly wrong through the cold optics of the Crawler, like a glitch in the fabric of reality.
The spirit swept an arm downwards, a jet of fire sweeping out with the gesture before engulfing one of the Chosen’s vans – and the two gang members who were loading it. Biter’s squad reacted quickly, the APC’s turret spinning on its axis as it began firing a deafening stream of bullets at the spirit, which pirouetted around the room as it managed to stay just ahead of the turret’s maximum turning speed.
Outside the warehouse, Grue unceremoniously reversed his rifle and smashed the butt into the glass, sweeping it along the frame to remove any stray shards before vaulting over and into the offices, followed closely by the two mages. Behind the dumpsters next to our hideout, Bitch’s drones rolled out and into the street.
In the matrix, I attacked in full force. The datastreams around me were twisted; plucked like piano wire until they hummed with the ethereal noise of the resonance, becoming lures for half a dozen sprites. I’d never summoned so many at once before. The force of their intrusion sent ripples out through the matrix.
Three of them were wasps, darting directly for the central nodes of the tactical network. They drove their stingers into it, two of their attacks being countered by firewalls even as the third hit home and flooded the network with junk data, burning out some of the connections between the decker and the squad.
The decker knew they were under attack the moment my sprites first emerged, but they’d clearly never faced a technomancer before. They were used to fighting attacks from a single vector, focusing on protecting the most essential parts of the network even as my sprites attacked from multiple directions, corrupting lesser systems in an attempt to kill by a thousand cuts.
It gave me the breathing room to triangulate another angle, and place a mark right on the swivelling gun of the APC.
Lying prone on the table next to my body, Bitch squeezed the trigger of her rifle. The glass in front of her exploded outwards, as did the glass on the other side of the street. The shot sped through two walls, the force of its passage dragging burning plaster dust, steel shavings and fragmented bricks in its wake in a trail of sparks as it flew across the warehouse and sheared through the minigun in a shower of twisted metal.
It caught the chain of bullets being pushed up from the ammo well inside the APC, sparking off a cavalcade of wild, scattered shots before an automated safety feature sealed off the ammo belt from the outside world. With its pursuer disabled, the fire spirit swept an arm down and immolated an AAO staffer, who had been staring up at the spirit with her face twisted in mute terror.
It was at that point that the others stormed into the room, Grue firing his assault rifle into the mass of red and black-clad Chosen, who scattered behind whatever cover they could find even as two of them dropped, twitching on the floor as their bodies bled out and cyberware sparked.
Alabaster was being escorted out the back by the AAO security detail, two of them peeling off to draw away the spirit as it burned its way through the warehouse, either heedless of the fire it was taking or just pushing through it on Regent’s orders. I placed a mark on one of the men escorting Alabaster, and watched through the Crawler as the sniper round passed through his spine, jerking his head back as the force of the shot knocked him to the ground.
It was the closest I’d ever come to killing someone myself. Bitch was barely in her body, focused on guiding her drones around to the side entrance of the warehouse, where the Ares Duellist was turning as the Chosen’s own rigger called it back inside. She only moved in response to the pings I sent her, her arms shifting the rifle just enough to line up the shot before firing. It was like she was just an extension of the gun; my hand was the one on the trigger.
Through another camera feed, I saw as Bitch spun up the rotary gun mounted atop the Steel Lynx. She let off a burst of shots that ripped the Duelist apart, scouring a line of rents up its chest as bullet fragments and scraps of machinery sprayed against the wall of the warehouse. She accelerated the drone, swivelling the gun around to face the other way so that the barrel was clear of the shuttered door.
The building was old – pre-millennium old – and the fittings looked like they hadn’t been changed in all that time. The Steel Lynx might have been made from junkyard-salvaged components, but it was still more than a match for the brittle, aged steel that stood in its path. Through the Crawler, I saw as the shutters splintered like broken ribs, snapping free from their housings as the drone sped into the warehouse, its main gun spinning back around to fire even as the two Dobermans chased in at its heels like pups following their mother.
Then, the decker counterattacked, and I no longer had the bandwidth to pay attention to the cameras. One of my wasps winked out of existence as the decker drove a data spike through its thorax, but then they made a beeline straight for me. The resonance veil around me had been pierced; they could see me now.
Their attacks came as sharp stabs of data, trying to brute force their way past my barriers. I weathered the storm, even as I felt their carefully-constructed programs wreaking havoc on the wild resonance that formed my persona. My focus was still on my sprites, sending my two remaining wasps to attack even as I took advantage of the decker’s focus to seed the other three – woodlice one and all – onto the other members of Biter’s squad.
In meatspace, smart-weapons malfunctioned, shots that would have ripped through Regent’s spirit went wild, optics glitched and a homing grenade thrown by Barker hovered in midair for a moment, its tracking systems spasming, before detonating in a scatter of wild shrapnel.
Even that momentary glance away had cost me; the decker had slipped past my defences. I could feel their mark on me; an indelible part of their code embedded in my form, giving them a bridge down which they could send attacks. My wasps counterattacked, but the decker’s firewalls were too strong for them to break through. They reminded me of Grue; that single-minded determination as they launched one relentless attack after another, trusting their thick armour to absorb any and all blows.
I had more tricks up my sleeve than that. Just as I had done in the resonance realms, I spun a veil of energy around the decker, surrounding them in an esoteric fog that clung to their persona, slowing their reaction times and partially blinding them to the world around them.
It came too late for one of my woodlice, perched on Biter’s shoulder before it burst apart into fragments of code as the decker’s attack overwhelmed it. In Biter’s software, something clicked and he brought his long-barrelled rifle up to his shoulder, not even looking down the sights as a programme in his head calculated angles and vectors.
Counter-sniper software, I realised, moment’s before Bitch’s name shot through my head like a bullet.
There wasn’t time to warn her. I reached out in the matrix, opening my mouth and screaming out a storm of fireflies even as I seized control of Bitch’s cyberlimbs, twisting her arms and legs to throw her off the table just as a three-round burst of high-powered shots ripped through the table she’d made her sniper’s nest.
The effects of my scream were obvious, both in meatspace and the matrix. Where before my glitches had been deliberate, targeted, now they were indiscriminate. The local matrix, encompassing the entire warehouse, screamed with me, the vibrations throwing up buffering errors and visual tearing on every device with a matrix connection.
Bitch’s drones stuttered, tracks shifting erratically as guns flailed wildly off target. One of them – one of the Dobermans – was brought down by fire from some of the low-ranked Chosen, the ones who hadn’t managed to buy enough chrome to be hit. Other fresh initiates, the ones who’d bought a lot of cheap chrome, fell to the ground clutching their heads as the sound of a million chittering insects blared through inadequately-firewalled neural audio players.
It hurt to see how indiscriminate it was, how it was hurting my team as much as the Chosen, but I pushed through the guilt, even as I was aware of Bitch’s limbs spasming on the edge of my perception. I simply pushed forward, ignoring the pained chitter of noise that surrounded me, and stretched out the arachnid limbs of my persona to drive a quartet of resonance spikes into the decker.
Only two of them managed to pierce their defences, but they were enough to get marks of my own on their persona. I stopped screaming, the storm of pulsating insects leaving behind visibly-frayed rents in cyberspace, and pressed the attack.
It was child’s play to fill the decker’s senses with ghost images, pulling clones of myself and my sprites out into the matrix that obfuscated the real attack. Whatever cyberdeck they were using was tough, however, and they took the beating with the rugged determination of a trained boxer, hitting back with the same amount of force. We were both going all-out, the physical fight in the warehouse almost forgotten as we slugged it out in cyberspace.
And then, the very fabric of the matrix around us seemed to shake, as we felt a great presence turn its gaze on us. The datastreams around us, tattered and frayed by the force of our fight, had carried the sound of battle like piano wires, screaming our presence to all and sundry. We looked up in mutual, mute horror as the eye of GOD opened high above us, dwarfing even the monolithic Hosts that drifted overhead.
A short distance away from us, streams of data twisted suddenly into perfect angular shapes, coalescing together as they delivered a high-bandwidth package. It was a persona; a bookish, middle-aged blonde dwarf dressed in a white button-down shirt with a pair of thin spectacles over his eyes. Short blonde hair poked out from beneath a plain black fedora.
I screamed again, but this time there were words in it.
“DemiGOD! Go dark!”
Heedless of the danger to myself, of the vast gulf that separated me from the physical world, I took hold of the tether linking me to my body and pulled with all my might. Meatspace hit me like a bullet to the head. I jerked forwards like I’d been shot, my palm slamming into the floor moments before I violently threw up. I blinked, and bloody tears coated my eyelids in a film of red.
It was the bogeyman; a million teenage nightmares come back to haunt me. The Grid Overwatch Division, cutting me off from what made me… me. Their agents – their G-men – a source of primal terror for someone whose very existence was illegal. I told myself they weren’t targeting me specifically, told myself that we’d just made too much noise, drawn their eye, and that they wouldn’t send in a physical kill-team to break up a fight between criminals.
It didn’t help.
I pushed myself to my feet, standing unsteadily on trembling legs as my ears twitched at the sounds of gunfire and explosions still emanating from the warehouse. I’d left them alone, without support, and the knowledge that the Chosen decker had been similarly neutered was no comfort at all.
I reached beneath my jacket, pulling my Ares Executioner out of its holster. With shaking hands, I pulled back the bolt and looked at the dull ceramic casing of the bullet waiting at the top of the magazine. I let go, the bolt flying forwards as it shunted the bullet out of the magazine and into the breach. Beneath the surface, the motion had pressed the firing pin against the primer that capped off the cartridge. It was potential energy; needing only the electrical signal from the trigger to activate the explosives and fire the shot.
I jumped at the feeling of metal fingers on my upper arm, pressing through the reinforced fabric of my armoured syn-leather jacket. I blinked, the world around the gun resolving itself until I saw Bitch standing in front of me, her head craned back as her spider-like optics met my own organic eyes. She was holding her shotgun in her other hand, and there was an unspoken question in her gaze that was clear even with her inhuman eyes.
I released the bolt, nodded to Bitch, and vaulted over the windowsill. I was still trembling, but I no longer cared.