As the metro crossed over the river, I brushed my hand over the holstered gun hidden beneath my zip-up hoodie.
I’d dressed for what I hoped was discretion, wearing the nondescript hoodie over a white tank top and a pair of jeans, with the baggy outer garment concealing the shape of the submachine gun in its shoulder holster. Hopefully, I’d look like any other university shut-in.
I’d had to hike almost a kilometre to find a bus stop, then wait about forty minutes for it to actually arrive. Suburbia still worshipped the car, relegating all forms of public transport to a barely tolerated imposition. To that end, the only other people on the bus were a few night cleaners and one working girl, all of them returning to the city from their shifts in paradise.
The bus had taken me back into the city limits, to a terminal where I’d been able to switch over to the metro. From there, I’d lingered on the periphery of a few groups of students who’d finally dragged themselves out of bed and were making their way from their rented accommodation to the campus.
I was stuck by how carefree they all seemed. These were the children of the comfortably middle class; the ones who’d probably had an awareness of money instilled in them by their parents, but who’d never had to worry about going short. They were the children of managers and skilled professionals, afforded a lifestyle that allowed them to spend a few years in easy street as they put a half-hearted effort into studying for their degree.
I told myself that I was being uncharitable; that I only thought that way because I’d once aspired to go to university myself. Mom had been a professor, which meant she’d clearly seen some value in academia. In fact, New Brockton University had been her own institution; I had fond memories of playing on the floor of her office in the English Literature department.
Out the window, the elevated rail line was dwarfed by the high rise skyline of the Towers, a tiered neighbourhood of decently well-off residential megabuildings that was sandwiched between the river and the lower slopes of Captain’s Hill. The towers themselves were airy buildings with wide pedestrian walkways connecting them to one another, to the point where you could probably cross the whole neighbourhood without ever touching the ground.
The New Brockton University campus was to the north of the Towers, built in tiers against the side of Captain’s Hill. There was a metro station within a few hundred metres of the entrance, and as I disembarked among the crowd of students I focused on my connection to Theo’s commlink, pulling up the live location data.
According to a map of the campus I’d found online, Theo was in the Draco Foundation library, right where Calvert had guessed he might be. I picked up the pace a little, hoping it would come across as a troll’s naturally longer gait rather than a panicked rush as I approached the gates of the campus.
Unfortunately, the flow of students had only increased and I found myself standing in a slowly-moving crowd of children in their late teens and early twenties, passing through a security checkpoint that looked like it had been heavily reinforced in the last few weeks. Certainly, a lot of the students around me were complaining about how much of a hassle getting onto campus had become lately, though very few of them actually said the words ‘gang war’ out loud.
I reached out in the matrix, taking stock of every feature of the security system. The main safeguard was a facial recognition scanner that matched each student’s features to their national or corporate System Identification Number, then compared that against the numbers on the enrolment list.
I couldn’t tweak my SIN on the fly, but I could send out a woodlouse to chew its way into the second stage of the check. As I slowly moved forwards, it dug a backdoor into the enrolment list, allowing me to add my number to the system.
There were more physical elements to the building’s security as well. A pair of Knight Errant officers were standing to one side, no doubt there to reassure the university even if their job seemed to just be looking tough while the campus security – all of them employees of Eagle Security – did the real work of running the checkpoint.
There was a straightforward metal detector, which I hacked myself to pass the time, and every now and then a student was pulled aside for a random pat down. Unlike my experiences at the Dopadrine plant – a lifetime ago now – this seemed to be truly random, driven by a number generator in the Eagle Security network.
I had no idea how I’d explain the submachine gun under my hoodie, but a quick resonance spike directed at the random number generator meant I wouldn’t have to. Instead, I emerged out onto a grand if narrow plaza that fronted onto what had to be the main university building; a tall structure with walls of deep blue glass that was probably meant to evoke the scales of President Dunkelzahn, who’d left money in his will to found the university.
With the GPS point at the forefront of my mind, I pushed past the crowd of students flowing into the main building, making my way along a wide pedestrianised walkway that followed the curving slope of the hill, with other academic buildings rising up on either side of me. If I looked to my left, I could see the rest of the campus climbing up in tiers, with the university’s on-campus accommodation on the slopes above the academic buildings.
My own destination was on the next tier up, which meant taking a staircase two steps at a time as I brushed past a number of significantly more languid students before emerging onto another, significantly smaller plaza built around a surprisingly healthy-looking tree, with a whole host of passive and active monitoring devices dug into the bark to help it survive the urban air.
There were fewer students on this level, though a café on the other side of the plaza had a decent amount of customers nursing coffees, most of them sitting on their own as they worked away at physical or augmented reality laptops. In the plaza itself, there were a few people crossing through on their way from their accommodation blocks to their lectures or seminars, a small group who looked like they were part of some kind of yoga session and a tall blonde human who’d just hung up her comm and was calling out to a friend.
I didn’t spare any of them more than a moment’s glance – just long enough, I hoped, to identify if any of them were Trickster, Sundancer or Neith – as I consulted my map again and left the plaza onto a walkway that would take me directly to the Draco Foundation library.
“Hey!”
I wheeled around, my hand instinctively flinching towards my gun before I stilled it at the sight of the blonde woman striding towards me, one hand raised in a wave. For a brief moment I wondered if mages could change their face, but I quickly quashed the idea. It was only when I noticed just how familiar her commlink felt that I finally recognised Victoria Dallon, this time dressed in a leather jacket and jeans rather than a business suit.
“I knew it was you!” she said, grinning. “What are the chances, huh? I can’t believe I never ran into you before!”
“Yeah I, uh,” I stammered, wrongfooted. “Listen, Ms Johnson-”
“Oh yeah,” she grinned a little sheepishly, before holding out her hand as if we were meeting for the first time.
“Victoria Dallon.”
“I uh… I know,” I said. I had no idea why, but I took her hand in my own. “Look…” I began, but Victoria’s eyes had widened at the feeling of my cybernetic hand on her own.
“Oh you don’t have to worry,” she said, ploughing through her momentary discomfort and completely steamrolling any attempt I might have launched to regain control, “I won’t tell if you won’t. I’ve gotta say, though, it’s a pretty badass way to pay for college.”
For fuck’s sake, I thought, exasperatedly. At least my cover’s holding.
“Listen, Vic, it’s been wild running into you but I’ve got an appointment in the Draco library I can’t miss.”
“Awesome,” she said, in a way that heralded bad news, “I’m headed that way myself!”
“Sure, whatever,” I said, quickly surrendering to the inevitable, “I can walk and talk.”
This was the second last thing I wanted, but so long as I was still moving in the right direction it was still better than the alternative.
“Listen,” Victoria began, fractionally more hesitantly, “I never got the chance to thank you and your team for what you did. With Nathan Gilbert.”
“You paid us,” I pointed out.
“C’mon, it’s more than that. I’m sure you figured it out when you saw the news stories, but it really meant a lot to me. You made a difference.”
Yeah, that’s the problem, I thought.
“Sure, that time, maybe. But that’s on you, not us.”
“No, I don’t buy it,” she said, easily keeping pace with me in spite of my longer legs. “I know… shadowrunners” – she said the word in a stage whisper – “get to choose what jobs they take and what they turn down. You helped correct an injustice, and you get to be proud of that.”
“Alright, fine,” I said, conceding the point to hurry her along, rather than because I actually believed it. “I am glad he’s in prison.”
Even if it was the paydata I sold from that job that first lured us into Calvert’s sphere.
“So, the arm’s new,” Victoria began, bludgeoning through any sense of propriety. “You mind me asking if it was a choice or a necessity?”
“It was Chosen,” I answered, emphasising the name.
“Fucking steelheads,” Victoria said, scowling. We were nearing the library; I could actually see it at the end of the road. “Hopefully K-E will sort them out soon; they launched a big raid on a megatower in the North End the night before last. Snatched up some pretty important targets, from what I hear.”
“You’re well informed,” I remarked.
“I’m majoring in Psychology and Criminology,” she said, though that didn’t explain why she was getting the gossip on active investigations. “I’m hoping to join the FBI someday.”
“How does that track with hiring shadowrunners?”
“You think the FBI doesn’t? Basically every non-Federal police force in the country is run by contractors. There’s some stuff you just can’t trust to corporations, but you still need boots on the ground. But what about you?”
“Artificial Intelligence,” I said, thinking on the spot.
“I figured it’d be something like that, but you’re on the wrong end of campus for Computer Science, aren’t you?” she asked, and for a moment I wondered just how far Psychology and Criminology book smarts could take a person.
“I’m meeting a friend,” I lied.
“Another member of your team?”
“No, they don’t… go here. Just a friend.”
“They got a name? Maybe I know them.”
As I turned to look at her, I saw clear suspicion in her eyes. I don’t know what I’d said to give the game away, but it was clear that I’d been made.
“Something to say?” I asked.
“Only that you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”
I heard gunshots from up ahead, followed by screams.
“Motherfucker!” I shouted, pointing angrily towards the source of the screams. “That reason enough!?”
I pulled down the zip of my hoodie and drew the submachine gun, racking back the slide as I sprinted down the street. It took me a moment to notice the second set of pounding feet, their tempo faster than my own as they compensated for their shorter length. Victoria was keeping pace with me, her hand reaching for her commlink. Her face was a strange mix of fear, anger and eager anticipation.
“Call the campus rent-a-cops if you want,” I snapped. “I’m sure someone already has, but they can’t do shit against a full team of runners.”
“Not your team?” Victoria asked.
“Assassins,” I said, not seeing any point in hiding it. “Here for Theo Anders.”
The sound of gunfire had increased, mingled with the crackle of spellfire. I could see magical flames flickering behind the windows on the first floor of the library before I sprinted into the lobby, with the would-be-hero still doggedly following at my heels.
The few students in the lobby took one look at the charging troll with a submachine gun and fled screaming, scattering as I vaulted over a waist-high barrier connected to another SIN scanner, my weapon already raised and pointing down the corridor as I advanced.
Beyond the terrified students sheltering in place, there was no outward sign of anything wrong until I reached the first floor, emerging from a stairwell only to be confronted by two dead bodyguards in ballistic-fabric suits that hadn’t done anything to protect them from the magical blows that had decapitated one and burned the other’s head to a crisp.
Victoria rushed ahead of me, very pointedly not looking at the desecrated heads as she snatched up one of the guards’ heavy pistols, checking it was loaded and ready with a practiced hand before fishing a couple of spare magazines out of the guard’s jacket and tucking them between her belt and her pants.
“You know how to use that?” I asked.
“I’m a twenty-one year old woman, of course I know how to shoot a gun.”
“Theory’s a bit different to practice,” I said. “If you’re doing this, follow my lead and stay out of my field of fire.”
Theo’s commlink was close enough that I could almost touch it, moving fast on the other side of the building. I sprinted down the corridors, slowing at the corners to stop myself from walking into a firefight. The halls here bore obvious signs of magical damage, with chunks carved out of the walls and still-smouldering patches where magical fire had scored into the concrete walls. I was glad the library didn’t contain any paper books; quite aside from fighting through an inferno, it would have been a terrible loss.
There were more dead bodies, too; a couple of young men at the end of the hall, both of them sliced almost in half. Interestingly, both corpses were still clutching holdout pistols, and I could pick up the signal from two earpieces. It seemed Max Anders had secreted a number of covert guards into the university, to protect his son without constraining him. It was a good sign; the more bodies Medhall could throw at the other Shadowrunners, the more likely it was that Theo would still be alive when I reached him.
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As we hit the other side of the building, I finally saw the second team in action. Trickster and Sundancer were both fighting in the loading bay behind the library, throwing spells at a great glowing bird that seemed to be formed from semi-solidified mist. It fought back against the assassins with razor-sharp gusts of air that tore through dumpsters, vehicles and walls with equal ease. Sundancer was retaliating with whipcord streams of fire that sprang from her arms, while her body was wreathed in a cloak of yellow-red flames.
Trickster was far more mobile than his fellow mage. He sprinted for a parked car, jumping up onto the roof then seemingly splitting into two copies of himself and leaping aside right as the spirit aimed a chilling breath that coated the car in a layer of iced condensate. Split between the two targets, the spirit took a gamble and struck at one of the Tricksters with its beak, only for the other to fling a coiled mass of magical energy that unfurled itself into an entangling net.
With the spirit momentarily pinned, Sundancer brought her hands together and fired a continuous beam of infernal energy that burned away at the bird’s core, causing parts of its body to fray apart as if it were returning to mist. For a moment it looked like they might have the upper hand; I was considering whether I should line up a shot on Sundancer to take one of the mages out of the battle when a marked Eagle Security car shot into the loading bay, its lights and sirens both off.
Four officers disembarked, dressed in light uniforms and carrying nothing but sidearms. These were supposed to be friendly campus police officers, not a High Threat Response team, so when confronted by a spirit that their guns could do nothing against – or perhaps prewarned by one of Medhall’s covert agents – they instead turned their guns on the two mages.
Trickster scrambled to respond, gesturing wildly as he shouted an incantation that materialised a wall of force between him and the officers right as they started shooting. Sundancer flinched at the sudden arrival of campus police, her stream of fire wavering as her attention was split for just a single instant.
It was all the time the spirit needed to rear up into the air, shattering the net into nothingness as it spread its glowing wings wide and let out a shriek of angry indignation that hit Sundancer like a wall of force, extinguishing her flames and hurling her back against a dumpster with enough force to dent the metal.
For a moment I thought she’d been rendered unconscious, but then she scrambled forward in blind terror, screaming “no!” again and again until her voice devolved into a wordless cry of pain and terror. The blood-red tattoos on her arm began to glow, then caught light again in a conflagration that clearly hurt Sundancer as though they were truly burning her. Deep sanguine flames leapt from her fingertips, coalescing in the air in front of her as a glowing red orb even as Sundancer – still mad with pain – threw herself to the floor before the manifestation in a gesture of horrifying obsequiousness.
The planar entity, the mentor spirit – I didn’t see how it could be anything else, though it seemed to have a far crueller hold on Sundancer than Snake did on Tattletale – was nothing less than a miniature sun, burning with a star’s heat as it drifted towards the great eagle. I could see the trail of molten asphalt it left in its wake, could have sworn Lisa’s pendant was trembling against my sternum.
I ran, leaving the two spirits to kill each other as I hurriedly checked Theo’s location. I’d been transfixed by the magic I’d seen, standing frozen for mere seconds – but they were seconds wasted. Already Theo had left the building, moving deeper into the campus.
I glanced out of a window, spotting the low roof of a coffee stall just below me, and drove my metal elbow into the glass before sweeping my hand along the frame to scatter the shards that remained. Without looking to see if Victoria would follow me, I clambered out of the window and dropped down to the sheet metal roof, landing with a resounding clang that left a sizeable dent before leaping down to the ground. A moment later, I heard the blonde following behind me.
“You know this kid or what?” I asked, even as I started sprinting.
“Doesn’t matter,” she answered. “Besides,” she continued, a little breathlessly. “‘Kid?’ Pretty sure you’re the same age.”
That might be true, I thought. But I feel like I’ve gone through another ten years’ worth of living.
“His commlink’s still moving,” I said, as I drove a resonance spike into the electronic lock of a general workspace building full of pop-up lecture halls and smaller spaces for seminars. “Means he’s still alive.”
“Where’s his evac?” Victoria asked. “Kids that rich have threat response on speed dial.”
It was a good point. I reached for my tap on his comm, following the line back to Calvert’s headquarters. The snake was blocking all outgoing signals using the backdoor I’d given him, and I was sure he was using his own in-house decker to do the same to Theo’s security detail. If help was coming, it would be from Eagle Security escalating the threat to Knight Errant, which would take time I didn’t have.
I could attack Calvert’s systems from within, but it would be immediately clear that I was the one doing it. At the moment I was still anonymous; nobody knew I was here, none of the other Shadowrunners knew my face and Victoria’s uninvited presence might even help further obfuscate my identity until Calvert could get actual footage of who attacked him.
It wouldn’t last, and I was more than ready to burn my anonymity if I had to, but I had to choose my moment carefully, for the others’ sake.
“We’re close,” I said, slowing my pace. I didn’t have to say it; we could both hear gunfire coming from up ahead. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Shut up,” Victoria snapped at me. “I don’t care why they’re here and I don’t really care why you’re here. He doesn’t deserve to die.”
She pushed ahead of me, holding her pistol in a professional two-handed grip as she strode cautiously towards the sound of the gunfire and the signal from Theo’s commlink.
Once we reached the end of the hall, we were close enough to hear them. Theo was breathing heavily, and he sounded like he was on the verge of hyperventilating, while I could see three more earpieces in the matrix. Three more guards.
“Control, this is Epsilon Sixteen,” one of them – a woman – was saying as she tried in vain to get a signal through Calvert’s interference. “We’re taking fire in the Rosalind building. Control, do you read?”
I heard a sharp crack, followed almost instantaneously by the sound of brickwork shattering under the force of a high-power sniper round. A moment later, one of the commlinks moved as a guard stood up just long enough to return fire with a burst of shots from a machine pistol, before a second crack rang out and I heard a body hit the floor. From the cry of pain, it sounded like the guard had been wounded, not killed.
“Sir, we need to move,” another guard said, his voice wavering. “This wall won’t stand up to those rounds. I’ll see if I can draw his fire, but you need to start crawling. Understood?”
“Y-yeah,” Theo said, forcing the words out.
“Okay, on three.”
They didn’t get the chance. Something smashed through a window with the roar of rotor blades, before I heard a machine gun open fire. Throwing caution to the wind, I rounded the corner and aimed my submachine gun at the first thing I could see, unloading an entire magazine into the MCT-Nissan Roto-Drone that had forced its way into the hall.
The drone’s fuselage sparked under the shots, its semi-armoured body splintering while other shots sheared through the three rotor assemblies. The drone crashed to the ground, its inbuilt assault rifle waving futilely at the wall. Theo had his back to the drone as he hurried down the corridor at a crawl, while the three guards had reacted remarkably quickly and interposed themselves between their client and the threat.
Consequently, two of them were now dead, while the third – probably the one who’d been hit by the sniper – had her hand pressed against a nasty wound on her right shoulder. She looked up at us as we crawled past, her eyes unfocused as she tried to fight through the pain. She seemed torn between grabbing her gun and keeping pressure on the wound.
“It’s okay,” Victoria said. “We’re here to help. You just focus on staying alive; we’ll save your client.”
I ignored the guard, crawling past her in my haste to reach the end of the corridor only to freeze as the sniper – undoubtedly Ballistic, unless Genesis had another drone somewhere – put a shot through the wall in front of me. After a second shot went through five metres ahead of me I kept crawling, gambling that he had no idea where I was – or even if Theo was still in the corridor – and was just hoping he got lucky.
Once we’d scrambled out of the sniper’s field of fire, I stood up on shaking legs, turned the corridor and finally found myself face to face with Theo Anders for the first time. In the flesh, at least. My online snooping had made me more than familiar with his features; like his father’s but on a softer face.
Inevitably, when confronted by an armed giant of a troll, Theo’s face twisted into a rictus of fear. But then something unexpected happened; instead of screaming or begging for his life, Theo’s features suddenly tightened as he stood and stared me down, greeting what he had to believe was his imminent death with the impassivity of stone.
“Relax,” I said, lowering my gun. “I’m here to get you out.”
His eyes widened at that, his mask faltering as his mouth dropped.
“There’s no way my father sent you,” he said, with none of the emphasis his step-mother always put on the word ‘you.’
“Of course not,” I acknowledged. “This is… competing interests, I guess. They want you dead, I don’t.”
“Is that…” he paused, looking behind me with a hopelessly lost expression, like the world had stopped making sense a long time ago and he’d resigned himself to the insanity. “You’re Victoria Dallon, aren’t you? Dean Stansfield’s girlfriend?”
“Hello!” Victoria said, with seemingly genuine cheer. “I’m not with her, by the way. Just a concerned citizen.”
“My father’s men…” Theo began.
“Most of them are dead,” I said, bluntly, “and your comms are actively being jammed. If there are any survivors they’re either looking for you or trying to get clear of the jamming and call for backup.”
He paled at that, his eyes widening a little more as he started to sway on his feet.
“Hey, Theo, listen to me,” Victoria said, putting one hand on his shoulder and grabbing Theo’s hand with her other, squeezing his palm between her thumb and forefingers. “You need to stay with us, okay. We have to keep moving.”
“Are you with Ares?” he asked, which made Victoria look at me with renewed interest.
“No,” I said. “This is… well, this is a clusterfuck, but that’s beside the point. Come on; it’s move or die.”
Theo seemed to gather himself at that; he almost looked confident as he took a step forwards as Victoria let go. Certainly, he was no longer paralysed with fear, just scared enough to run. I led them through the halls without any idea of where I was going, passing through an unlit area of the building which had clearly been mothballed until some specific course grew popular enough to need extra space.
All the while, I was listening intently for the sound of pounding footsteps, waiting on tenterhooks for the touch of stellar heat and scanning the matrix around me for any sign of more drones.
There was one signal from the corridor opposite; a wheeled GMC Sandal delivery drone that was typically used to deliver parcels throughout the sprawl, or as part of an internal mailing system. From the way that it was purposefully roaming the halls, its sensors sweeping over each room it passed, I guessed that each parcel compartment contained at least one grenade.
“Hold up,” I said to the others, even as I let my hold on my body loosen, “I need to fix our drone problem.”
I leant against the wall and left my body behind, flying at the drone like a banshee as I gathered a resonance spike and drove it into the Sandal’s commercial-grade firewalls. They hadn’t even been upgraded; this was just a stock drone with rudimentary protection meant to dissuade script-kiddies from hacking the thing and ramming people with it. I tore it open like a crab shell, leaving the persona within exposed and vulnerable. Then I formed another spike and drove it directly into Genesis.
She screamed in real agony, instinctively letting her control of the drone slip. Whatever she may be, she wasn’t a decker and she clearly had no idea how to even begin installing shop-bought anti-virus software on an uploaded brainscan. She was just some rank amateur who’d probably turned her experience in full-immersion video games into a marketable skill by piloting one drone at a time. Her other drones were no doubt set on automatic paths or running under stock agents, like a mobile inventory she could pick and choose from to suit the situation.
It was clear these Shadowrunners had some terrifyingly powerful magic resources, but in every other respect they were distinctly lopsided. I was amazed they’d managed to kill Max’s sister without being detected, but maybe they’d just had Genesis roll in there with the right drone and an overdose in a hypodermic needle.
Either way, it was clear that Genesis was the least of them, except for maybe Neith and her mysterious illness. She was a perpetual outcast, and I could exploit that.
“I can see you, little thing,” I said, giving my words an entirely cosmetic reverberating emphasis as I drew an enveloping fog of resonance around us. “A fly stuck in a Spider’s web.”
She tried to run away, but I spun together a wasp and sent it to circle around her, blocking her escape.
“You’ve already died once,” I said, gambling on my guess about her nature. “Do you think it’ll hurt more the second time around?”
“What are you?” Genesis stammered out, her voice full of pain as her persona backed away with her hands raised – both inescapably physical reactions to a non-physical threat.
“I’m in your way,” I said, “and you’re in my domain. I’m sure you’ve been through a lot together; you and Trickster, Ballistic, Sundancer and Neith, but you need to decide right here and now if they’re worth dying for. Because in this place, you’re just another file to be deleted.”
She didn’t take long to decide. A moment or two’s hesitation, in which her attention shifted back to the broken drone, before she disappeared as she fled through the matrix as quickly as she could manage. Maybe she’d try and reconnect with her team later, or maybe I’d driven her away forever. In the end it didn’t matter; she was out of the fight.
One down, four to go.
I returned to meatspace with a jolt, as my physical senses rushed back into my consciousness. It had only taken a few seconds to drive off Genesis, but Victoria had still dropped to one knee beside me, an expression of interested concern on her face as she looked me over.
“Come on,” I said. “The drones are down, but that gunman’s still out there and I doubt that guardian spirit will be able to hold down the two mages forever.”
“Is that all of them?” Victoria asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know. There’s one more in the team, but she looked like she could barely stand up straight.”
“But why are they here?” Theo asked, a little short of breath. “Why are they so determined to kill me? To hurt my father?”
“It’s not about you,” I said. “It’s about getting you out of the way. Like I said, you’re caught up in a clusterfuck.”
We pushed through a fire exit as I smothered the alarm, only to hear the sound of distant sirens as we spilled out into an alleyway between buildings.
“Knight Errant,” Victoria said. “Guess they’re treating this as an active shooter.”
“It means they’ll evacuate the students, at least,” Theo said. “I still can’t reach anyone on my commlink.”
“You’ve been hacked,” I remarked.
“You took out their Rigger, right?” Victoria asked. “Can’t you un-hack it?”
“No,” I quickly denied as I spun together a white lie. “The encryption’s too good. Actually, you should toss your link. The hacker can see your location. He hasn’t passed it on to the Shadowrunners yet because he wants to stay deniable, but he will if he thinks you’re going to get away.”
Theo took one last look at his commlink before tossing it down to the far end of the alleyway. We went in the opposite direction, crossing the open road at a sprint before we were able to duck between another pair of buildings. It seemed we’d left the public-facing part of the university behind; we were surrounded by facilities and infrastructure buildings, with a lot of parked vans bearing the university’s logo. There were a few people rushing down the roads, most of them uniformed estate staff in comfortable work pants and steel-toed boots, making for the designated shelters or evacuation routes.
“What about mine?” Victoria asked, pulling her own commlink out of her jacket. I could have kicked myself.
“Shit, that’ll work!” I said. “Theo, you know the number for Valkyrie?”
“I can look it up,” he said, taking the comm from Victoria.
“Faster if I do it,” I said, even as I turned my still-functional backdoor into Victoria’s comm into access permissions, then quickly skimmed through the matrix until I found the right number.
I couldn’t find the emergency line – their system worked through an app installed on a client’s comm – but the general enquiries one would have to do.
The pointlessness of that option became clear the moment we heard the automated greeter trying to take us through a numbered list of options. Theo immediately hung up, sighed and dialled a different number.
“Hey dad,” he said, “I’m in trouble.”
It was strange, but no matter how trivial it would have been to listen in on Max’s side of the conversation, I couldn’t manage it beyond the first few words. Like Kayden, I couldn’t match the paternal concern I heard in his tone to the ruthless callousness of his actions. I didn’t understand how a person could even function when their psyche was torn by that cognitive dissonance.
Max knew something was wrong at the campus, of course. His agents would have stopped checking in, and Valkyrie Paramedical’s status meant that it would be trivial to get the inside track on the emergency services’ GridLink. All Theo had to do was give his approximate location and Max relayed it directly to the Valkyrie Paramedical High Threat Response team that he’d already dispatched to the campus.
Of course, that was when I realised the other mistake I’d made. I’d had to tune Max out from two sources; Victoria’s commlink and my tap on Max’s own personal comm. A number that Calvert also had access to, which meant he’d heard that whole thing.
“We need to move, now!” I shouted, right as I heard a strange droning buzz from above my head.
I saw Victoria’s eyes widen in horror, before she raised her pistol and began firing shots at something behind me. I wheeled around, my gun raised and aimed upwards even as I frantically scanned the matrix for threats.
I was looking in the wrong plane. In front of me, gripping the wall of the building beside us, was a dog-sized wasp, its wings still buzzing as it peered down at us with lifeless, insectoid eyes. As Victoria’s bullets struck the creature, it flinched back as if struck, but I watched in dumbfounded astonishment as the bullets simply passed through the insect and struck the brickwork, leaving a spray of golden ichor that rapidly evaporated into nothingness.
Then, my astonishment turned to horror as a second insect spirit flew into the alleyway; another wasp bearing down on us. I fired a burst on full auto, my heavier calibre rounds wounding the wasps, but nowhere near as much as they should have.
“Run!” Victoria shouted, and I sprinted after her, my hand on Theo’s back as I pushed him forward. Behind us, the air filled with thrumming wingbeats as the insect spirits took flight.