Othala always found the city beautiful when viewed from above. All the imperfections that clogged the streets faded into insignificance. All that was left was the glittering street lights of the sprawl, the towering skyscrapers rising up like beacons, and Richard Anders’ intricately designed roadway network. All of it packed with cars moving in perfectly-ordered harmony, their movements guided by the city’s governing GridLink AI even as their headlamps turned the roads into rivers of light.
The air was cleaner, too. Especially when it was blowing through the open doorway of a Nissan Hound, pushed into the cabin by the downdraft of the immense rotor blades as the helicopter glided over the city at a sedate sixty miles an hour. Othala grabbed onto the handle at the top of the hatch and leant out into open space, looking down at the grid of streets a staggering two kilometres below her. Any sense of vertigo had been worn away by long experience, but staring down a drop of that size without even a cord keeping her in the helicopter was still a singularly unique sensation.
Satisfied, she leant back into the helicopter and gripped the webbing lining the roof as she manoeuvred herself back into her seat, where the rest of High Threat Response team Brunhilda were strapped in as they waited for the green light. Behind them, in the expansive rear of the helicopter, a small triage station had been set up, full of all the equipment an aerial ambulance might need to keep patients alive on their way to the hospital, manned by a pair of paramedics in pristine red jumpsuits.
Apart from them, the helicopter was crewed by a pilot and a co-pilot in the armoured front, viewing the city through a reinforced glass canopy, and a loadmaster by the doors, trained and ready to operate the winch in case there wasn’t enough space to actually land the helicopter. But nobody’s eyes were on them; HTR Brunhilda was built around the four women sitting in the jump seats. The Valkyries.
Opposite Othala sat the twins, Fenja and Menja. Both wore custom-made suits of close-fitting power armour, sculpted to evoke ancient Germanic warrior-knights with red plates of metal etched with silver feathers and wings. Their helmets were more like masks than anything else; covering the top half of their faces while leaving their mouths and chins open to the air, with fake blonde hair streaming out of the back to create the impression of an open rear.
Fenja had a shield mag-locked to one hand and a sword in the other – still in its scabbard, which could be locked to her waist once she was away from the tightly-packed confines of the helicopter. Menja, as the team leader, sat closest to the doorway. Her telescoping spear was folded down to a third of its height, and her attention was firmly fixed on the city below. Both of them wore vivid red lipstick that seemed to glisten in the carefully-positioned cabin lights.
Beside Othala sat the newest member of the team, brought in to replace Dis when she was bumped down to a lower-profile role. But rather than dwell on that incident, Othala focused on the beaming grin on Rune’s face, her own make-up subtler, more youthful. She was significantly less armoured as well; her attire more shamanic than knightly with robes formed from strips of reinforced red syn-leather that left her arms bare, a black fur collar at her neck and a hood that covered her hair but not her face, leaving the eagerness in her eyes clearly visible.
Othala was only four years older than Rune – at twenty three to her nineteen – but she knew that her own features were too hard for that sort of genuine excitement; it was inevitable that even the most thrilling job would become routine after a while. She still enjoyed her work, but the anticipation of a potential chase wasn’t enough on its own anymore.
Unconsciously, she found her eyes darting to the cameras nestled in key points around the helicopter, or to the drones resting in their rack beside the open hatch, before she looked away from the fourth wall. Still, long training had her picturing how she must look through those lenses, and she straightened her posture ever so slightly until she was the very picture of refined elegance.
What the cameras saw was a woman in her early twenties, dressed in a skin-tight red taksuit that hugged her every curve. While half of the twins’ faces were concealed and Rune wore a hood that intermittently cast her face into shadow, Othala’s outfit was completely bare above the neck. She, more than anyone else, was the face of the Valkyries, and that face needed to be seen. It was why she wore her blonde hair back in a ponytail, apart from the side-swept bang that hung over the eyepatch that covered her right eye socket – only partially concealing it from view to create an air of mystique.
She could have had it replaced years ago, but when you’ve been raised from childhood to cast spells you cling to every single part of your essence. The eye may have been gone, but its phantom limb remained an intrinsic part of her soul. To swap it out with a replacement – even a bioware model – would be to change an intrinsic part of herself. So she made do, using her latent magical talent to completely nullify her lack of depth perception.
Suddenly, the helicopter lurched as it dropped from the sky, autorotating down in a spiral towards the spires of the city centre. Half a second later, dispatch’s professional tone came through the receivers Rune and Othala wore in their ears, and that were integrated into Fenja and Menja’s helmets.
“Client is a platinum customer whose biomonitor has activated automatically in response to trauma consistent with multiple gunshot wounds. The client is not on extraterritorial land; no proscriptions on entry or the use of force apply. Transferring their medical history now. No further information is available at this time.”
Othala’s AR-linked contact lenses lit up with a layer of information nanometers above her pupil, outlining the prescient details of the client’s biometrics and medical history. Beside her, she knew that Rune’s contacts and the twins’ visors were displaying the same information.
It was mostly irrelevant to Othala – typically, gunshot wounds were not a pre-existing condition – but it was of vital importance to the two paramedics in the back of the helicopter, determining exactly what drugs they could and could not use on the patient’s physiology, their body mass index to determine the correct doses and what pre-existing medication they were already on, to prevent any adverse reactions.
“Location data has come through,” Menja said. “The client is in an office building in Japantown, near the docks. He’s on the fifth floor, near the east side window. The building registry suggests it’s currently unoccupied, but other floors of the building are in use as office space. Entry and exfil is via the roof. Fenja, Othala, with me down the stairs. Rune, synchronise entry through the window. Understood?”
“Understood,” Othala repeated alongside the other two Valkyries. She closed her eye, centring herself as she focused on the swaying motion of the helicopter as it swooped down into the city. Slowly, she closed her hand, teasing at an invisible force as she gathered staticky energy, before pushing it into herself. She felt a sense of rigidity enter her body, her skin – unchanged in texture or appearance – nevertheless feeling like marble to her mind.
With her armour in place, she opened her eye and took in the available information of the client, watching the readout of his biomonitor with a professional’s attention. Her gaze wandered only occasionally to the less immediately relevant information, taking in the client’s metatype with a brief glance before forcing herself to look at the details of his policy. He was a high-level employee with Maersk, given platinum status as part of the extraterritorial shipping company’s employee welfare package in the city.
“Thirty seconds to touchdown,” the pilot’s voice came through Othala’s earpiece, as the four Valkyries stood, gripping onto the webbed roof of the helicopter as they turned to face the exits. The loadmaster had stepped back towards the pilots’ compartment, and Othala didn’t even glance at the drone as it caught the shot of them turning as one. She did glance at Menja out of the corner of her eye, seeing her grip on her spear tighten.
The helicopter landed smoothly on the flat roof of the old office block, the rotors still fiercely spinning to put as little of the aircraft’s weight on the wheels – and the roof – as possible. The moment it touched down, the twins leapt out, their heads lowered and false blonde hair buffeted wildly by the downdraft. Simultaneously, the drone dismounted from its hatch and followed immediately after them, joining the two drones that had been mounted on the helicopter’s exterior before they moved into position to capture the landing.
Othala left the helicopter half a second after the drone, bent double as her ponytail flailed wildly behind her, just low enough that it posed no risk of getting tangled in the rotorblades. She was overtaken a moment later by Rune, her hood having flown back from her head as she sprinted over to the edge of the roof, the wide leather strips of her robe flowing back behind her waist.
By the time Othala reached the doorway, Fenja was already kicking it down with her sword raised and shield held up in front of her. She strode into the tightly-packed stairwell, ignoring the palm-sized drone that darted in over her head, lowering the shield once she was certain the stairwell was clear.
Othala followed behind Menja, who had her spear extended and ready to stab past her sister in the narrow confines of the stairwell, as the three of them made their way briskly down the stairs. The two paramedics followed several metres behind them, an invisible safety net with stretcher in hand.
“Breaching!” Menja shouted into the radio mere moments before Fenja’s foot splintered the lock on the fifth floor door, pushing the rest of it down with her shield. She sprinted over the wreckage, her head down and shield raised as Menja followed her out with her spear in hand.
As Othala followed them into the room, she immediately scanned the sparse expanse of the empty floor, with only a few pillars obstructing the line of sight between her and the windows. The client was propped up against one of the pillars, his hand clutching at his stomach as he blinked slowly, staring out at his surroundings with the purposeless gaze of someone who was already deep into shock.
Beyond the client, there were two dead suits on the floor, both still clutching their handguns – no doubt the Maersk exec’s corporate security escort – but it was the living that most drew Othala’s eye.
The Valkyries had stormed into a hostage situation, with a trio of gangers dressed like circus performers standing over the two surviving suits. Two orks and a human, they had been interrupted mid-argument. They had two hostages, but the cut of their suits was significantly less upmarket than the injured client – most likely estate agents there to sell the office space to the real money.
Othala took in the entire scene in a second, before she finally allowed herself to notice Rune levitating just beyond the window, surrounded by chunks of stone that glowed with an eldritch light. As the gangers reacted to the sudden intrusion – a shotgun and two submachine guns raised in trembling arms – she blew the windows out with a blast of magical force, sending rocks and shards of glass scattering into the hostage takers while steering the debris to avoid the hostages themselves.
The human was killed outright, his skull caved in from behind by a brick, and one of the orks fell to one knee with a lacerated hamstring, but the other remained standing, firing at Fenja as she sprinted towards him.
Moving with preternaturally fast reflexes, Fenja positioned her shield to protect her face from the gunfire even as her sister moved up behind her. She hit the ork like a freight train, knocking him back before bringing her sword across in a swing that severed his head from his body. Menja darted off the moment the target was neutralised, thrusting her spear into the throat of the second ork with enough force to knock him back and pin him to the floor, the spearpoint digging through the carpeted flooring like it was made of paper.
Othala only saw the brief burst of violence out of the corner of her eye as she sprinted across to the client with a razor-sharp focus. As Rune drifted leisurely into the building, setting her feet down on solid ground with a regal grace, Othala knelt before the client and rested a hand on his chest. She latched onto his essence, feeling the bullet wounds like vivid rents in his soul, the gradual weakening of his strength as life fled him.
She muttered an incantation under her breath, sending energy flowing through her hands and into his chest to stabilise the client before she moved her hand to the still-bleeding bullet wounds, carefully sending pulses of magic into the wound to trigger the healing process, pushing the bullets out with carefully-regrown flesh.
As she did, her eyes unconsciously darted upwards to the horns growing out of the troll’s head. They were gnarled, twisted things pushing out of his skull like cancerous growths, terminating in wicked points that practically oozed menace. Worse than that was the point where the horns pushed out of his skin, and how Othala’s magic meant she could feel how they were connected to the grotesquely giant skeleton that was more like stone than true-
Victor let out a mental sigh as he paused the simsense recording, opening the editing software and condensing the file down into a readable format with Othala’s recorded brainwaves rendered as audio, visual and emotional timelines. Where before he had been experiencing Othala’s thoughts as she had, Victor was now sitting in a facsimile of a palatial library, with sweeping windows that overlooked a landscape of immaculately maintained gardens – a virtual office space in which he could centre himself.
Other, lesser editors were also in the shared virtual space, tucked away in cosy alcoves that ran up the walls on mezzanine levels. Some of their personas sat idle as they directly ran the raw simsense recordings while others were similarly surrounded by bars and files as they edited the footage. One team of editors at the far end of the room were working through different files; mundane camera footage that would be cut together and embellished with commentary to create the trideo version of the show.
Ride with the Valkyries existed in two formats. The trideo show was the first, carried on streaming services and a local network ultimately owned by MCT, who got first rights to broadcast the show as part of a deal where they provided Medhall with the production expertise needed to put it all together.
The second medium was much more personal, licensed out to reputable simsense dens and available for streaming on a variety of different websites for those with a simrig of their own. Those viewers could experience another life, escaping their mundane office job to sling spells or swing blades alongside hardened commandos, saving lives in the bargain.
For the simsense editors, most of the work was a simple matter of smoothing out the imperfections and compensating for the technology’s inability to properly capture the sensation of Rune and Othala’s magic. The latter was achieved using an entirely digital facsimile that, according to the mages themselves, felt reasonably close to the real thing. It would never fool any mages, but for the average layman it was sufficient to let them believe that they were really touching magic. It certainly felt like magic to Victor.
The former, on the other hand, was largely achieved by repackaging thoughts from other points in the recording, or their archive of the raw footage from older episodes. In that way, the little moments where Othala had glanced at a camera or thought too hard about the trideo show could be smoothed out, as could the occasional thought that risked alienating their audience and driving away viewers.
Othala’s thoughts on the troll’s horns, however, were particularly pervasive. It wasn’t some stray thought, but something she had allowed herself to dwell on, and that meant it was infinitely harder to remove. For fifteen minutes of real time – and noticeably more in Matrix time – Victor tried to smooth out the sensation to something more palatable, but in the end all he could do was shift the feeling of disgust to the troll’s bullet wounds rather than his race.
It undercut Othala’s brand, but that wasn’t necessarily a tragedy. After all, Victor thought to himself, it’ll give the vultures on the forums something to pick at.
Satisfied that he had at least salvaged something out of the mess, Victor shut down his sim module and let himself drift out of cold-sim virtual reality, coming to his senses in his comfortably furnished office, with panelled walls, soft lighting and rich red carpeting covering the floor. While the room had an antique wooden desk, most of Victor’s work was done in virtual environments, and as such he was reclining in the luxury spider’s chair that took up one corner of the room, designed to minimise the irritation a stationary body experienced when its mind was occupied elsewhere for hours at a time.
“Heimdall,” Victor spoke as he stood. “Where is Cristina?”
“Othala and the remainder of HTR Brunhilda returned from their shift half an hour ago, sir,” Medhall’s company-wide virtual assistant answered. “They have just finished their debriefing, and are proceeding to their dressing room. Would you like me to send Mrs Meyer a message?”
“No,” Victor answered, shaking his head. “I’ll tell her myself.”
It was a sign of how intrinsic Ride with the Valkyries was to Valkyrie Paramedical’s overall market strategy that Victor and most of the production crew were based out of the same depot as the paramedics themselves, occupying an annex attached by an enclosed footbridge to the garages, barracks operations control and maintenance workshops that allowed the Medhall subsidiary to function almost freely throughout New England.
Overcoming that “almost” was one purpose of the show. Victor had seen the projected charts; Medhall Pharmaceuticals was on track to become a double-A ranked corporation by the end of the year, which meant true extraterritoriality. As it stood, Valkyrie Paramedical could only operate under arms in New Hampshire, where a deal with the State government gave them a blanket exemption from State laws, but the company already had the capacity to extend its armed services to the neighbouring states of Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine the moment its parent corporation grew large enough. Ride with the Valkyries was one part of Medhall’s asset diversification agenda, aimed at giving the corporation the final blitz of growth it needed.
If Medhall’s off-the-books projects were included in the total, we’d already be there, Victor thought to himself with wry amusement as he crossed over into the depot.
The footbridge put him out on the middle floor of the depot, below the reinforced landing pads on the roof for the corporation’s six helicopters and above the garage space of their fleet of vans. The personnel of Valkyrie Paramedical inhabited those floors, and as the focal point of the show HTR Brunhilda’s dressing room was located as close to the annex as possible, next to a service elevator that went right to their own personal helipad.
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Victor pressed his thumb against the keypad, not even bothering to knock as he pushed open the door the moment the sensor had matched his biometrics with his Medhall SIN. Inside, the dressing room was more expansive than the four members of HTR Brunhilda could ever need, with immaculately clean surfaces and the corporation’s logo occupying most of the floor: a white silhouette of an armoured, winged woman. There was a constant debate among the show’s fans over whether it was based on Fenja or Menja’s body.
A bench ran around the circumference of the room, interrupted in five spaces by four alcoves that held the Valkyries’ equipment and the entrance to the attached bathroom, with its showers and make-up mirrors. Steam was gently drifting through the entrance; three of the Valkyries had just left the shower, the fourth was still in there.
“What the hell, Victor?” Rune asked from where she was seated on a bench, hurriedly pulling down her silver and black crop-top. “Ever heard of knocking?”
“You’re a simsense star now, Tammi,” Victor answered, a grin on his face as he leant against the wall with his arms crossed. “You’ve let tens of thousands of people into your head. Better get used to being on display; your image is marketable, and it’s my job to put that image on as many bedroom walls as possible for the girls who want to be you and the guys who want to fuck you. You’ve got to learn to love the attention.”
Fenja and Menja didn’t even glance up at Victor as they continued getting dressed in more utilitarian outfits. They had been working for Valkyrie since the subsidiary’s foundation and took a much more military attitude to their privacy. Besides, it would have been foolish for them to have been shy about their bodies when Victor had been on the board that purchased them.
Where Othala and Rune represented the peak of magical ability, the twins’ model physiques were mere window dressing on the cyberware beneath their luxury synthskin. With wired reflexes they could think faster than any enemy, and their full suite of cyberlimbs meant they could move fast enough to keep up with their brains. It was another fantasy, one as common and as unreachable for most as magic.
“Whatever, asshole,” Rune said as she flipped Victor off, before putting on a conscious air of nonchalance as she turned her back on the public relations executive and began to shrug on a pair of forest green sweatpants.
Victor lingered for just a moment longer before making his way through the archway into the bathroom. His wife stood under the communal showers at the far end of the room, her palms planted flat against the wall as she let the scoldingly hot water run down her back. It pressed her hair flat against her body, though not so much that Victor could see the lattice of gossamer-thin neural readers stamped into her scalp like a tattoo – an elegant solution to the loss of essence caused by simsense recording cyberware and the aesthetic loss caused by worn recording equipment.
Victor’s smile was more genuine as he looked at Cristina, hesitant to step in and ruin the view by interrupting her. He certainly believed he loved her, even if he wasn’t originally supposed to marry her.
Eight years before, when Max Anders had first conceived of Valkyrie Paramedical and ordered a focus group put together to determine how to implement it, Cristina Herren had been earmarked as a potential candidate for the company’s flagship team. Though she was only fifteen at the time, the girl who would become Othala had already awakened to her magical powers and demonstrated an exceptional aptitude; Medhall’s employee management algorithm had already singled her out for a fast track scheme.
Both Cristina and Tammi came from an extensive lineage of mages in service to the company. Before the Awakening, the Herren Clan had been an extended family of white supremacists in rural New England, who worshipped a bastardised form of Norse Paganism. In defiance of the odds, the family’s bloodline turned out to have magical potential, and the clan became host to an exceptionally high number of mages as their belief system morphed into a magical tradition.
They existed in isolation for some time until Max Anders’ grandfather discovered them. He made a deal with the patriarchs of the clan, bringing them firmly under the aegis of Medhall. As the corporation grew, the Herren Clan became more deeply intertwined with its structures. Their children attended the first Medhall-owned schools as the power of their patriarchs was slowly supplanted by the hierarchy of the corporation.
As Medhall employees were filed by algorithms into the workplaces in which they would be most productive, the Herren Clan’s bloodline was governed and directed by those same algorithms to fill the corporation’s requirements. There was no question that their children would work for Medhall; the company was their entire life. They grew up in Medhall schools, living in Medhall housing, had their further education paid for by company scholarships. The corporation was the reason they were born.
When Victor had successfully won a spot on a Medhall fast track scheme for potential executives, he was inducted into the company with a SIN and a full round of genetic screening. It was on the basis of this screening that he was encouraged to court Cristina’s cousin, and they had been engaged to be married when she was killed in a Shadowrun against the company that turned into a bloodbath.
Cristina was seventeen at the time, far younger than her cousin and deep into her training to become the face of the Valkyries. The death of her cousin changed the course of her entire life, and not just because she found herself marrying Victor shortly after her nineteenth birthday; her time with the Valkyries became limited, with four years of extended maternity leave awaiting her when she turned twenty eight. Afterwards, if she had retained the same level of skill and fitness, she would return to one of the non-televised High Threat Response teams. If she had not, another role would be found for her. Either way, the corporation gained the maximum possible return from its investment.
Cristina’s eyes widened as she turned her head and caught sight of her husband, before she smiled and stepped away from the showerhead, a sensor cutting the water off automatically.
“Couldn’t wait for me to come to you?” she asked as she wrapped a towel around herself.
“I’ve got the meeting to get to,” Victor shook his head, “but I needed to talk to you. I’ve just finished reviewing the recordings from last night. You slipped up again.”
Cristina sighed, leaning against the granite countertop of the sinks.
“I know. It’s just… I forget sometimes.” She scowled. “You know what they’re like, and it’s actually worse once you get past skin deep.”
“I do know,” Victor nodded, “but we’re trying to sell trideo here. I get how you feel, but you need to remember that you weren’t just trained to be a good mage; you were trained to be the face of the Valkyries. It’s about mental discipline as much as physical. You can’t let your feelings interfere with the company’s needs.”
Cristina frowned. Victor didn’t like pushing that particular button, but long experience had demonstrated its effectiveness. He was loyal to Medhall and he wanted to see the corporation thrive, but he’d come into the company from the outside. It meant his loyalty was as much enlightened self-interest as it was ideological; Medhall’s prosperity was what would ensure his own. Cristina’s loyalty was different, more fundamental. All the Herrens’ were. That dedication to something greater than themselves was what had brought Tammi back to Medhall, even after her parents tried to escape its reach.
“You’re right,” Cristina nodded. “I’ll get back in touch with my psychological trainer. Meditation usually works, plus a few mantras before a shift. Maybe I just need a refresher.”
“Good,” Victor smiled. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help. And if you need motivation, just remember that every nuyen we drag out of some trog’s pockets goes straight into human hands.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Cristina grinned, as she stepped away from the countertop. She paused on the way to the changing room to rest her hand on Victor’s shoulder and kiss him on the cheek. “Now go on, you’ve got your meeting to get to. You can’t spend all day skulking around changing rooms, and you certainly can’t keep them waiting.”
“More’s the pity,” Victor sighed, before leaving his wife to get dressed in peace. He briefly ducked back into his office, throwing on the dark grey jacket of his suit over his burgundy shirt, before making his way down the executive lift to the lobby of the studio. Outside, a car and a driver were waiting for him.
As he was driven through the streets of Chemical Row, Victor found his eyes drawn to the heavy goods vehicles he was sharing the road with, the lion’s share of which bore Medhall’s logo on their side. There were many within the corporation who believed its heart lay in this district, rather than its headquarters Downtown, and Victor could understand the sentiment. There were blocks within Chemical Row where every single building was owned by Medhall, and the corporation employed tens of thousands of people within the district as a whole.
But Victor disagreed with that sentiment. As his car weaved its way through the industrial traffic and onto one of Richard Anders’ elevated freeways, carrying him onwards in the direction of the towering skyscrapers of Downtown, he couldn’t help but think that no matter how large a body was, or where its muscles were concentrated, it was useless without the guidance of the head.
Victor sometimes suspected that Richard Anders had built this freeway in particular to provide grand scenic views of Medhall’s head office; a spindly glass skyscraper with the corporation’s logo displayed proudly near the top. It was certainly one he would have travelled on regularly; shuttled between his office, the factories of Chemical Row and the Medhall operations centre on the coast.
Whatever the case, the road carried him quickly and efficiently to his destination, the driver letting the car’s in-built connection to the GridLink system guide it smoothly through the traffic. Victor’s journey didn’t end at Medhall tower, however, but at a nondescript administrative building a few blocks away, occupied by scraps of different departments that had overflowed their designated spaces.
At the door, a uniformed security guard ran Victor’s corporate SIN before letting him into the building, bypassing the metal detectors the lower-ranked employees went through as he was immediately directed to a staffer who escorted him through the building to a seemingly insignificant conference room in the basement.
It was not somewhere Victor had been before. The location of this monthly meeting changed every time, to ensure that nobody could pin down its nature by observing any one of its participants. Victor was not the first of those participants to arrive, but nor was he the last. There were six other men in suits seated around the boardroom table, having come in from management suites and high-tech laboratories. Victor took a seat alongside them, completing the representatives of the company’s clandestine operations.
When the door next opened, it was to admit the first representative of Medhall’s unofficial subsidiaries. Justin Hammond looked as he always did, with a slick smile on his face and an earnest look in his eyes, though the two didn’t necessarily match up with each other. Victor had access to his psychological files, and knew that Hammond preferred to see himself as a soldier in the trenches, doing the work that really made a difference while leaving his superiors in their distant towers to handle the busywork.
It was a naïve view, but one that suited his role. It made him more approachable; he could speak to people on their level, and present himself as their ally against whatever manifestation of authority their feared. The same could not be said of the albino freak who was shadowing him.
If it wasn’t for the personafix chip running in Victor’s head, regulating his emotions and guiding his actions, he wouldn’t have been able to suppress a shudder at the sight of Zachary Hunter’s pallid complexion. Victor’s one consolation was that he knew that no matter how much he hated what the vampire was, it paled into insignificance when compared to the hatred Alabaster had for himself.
So Victor nodded cordially to the pair of them as they took their seats opposite him. Nobody in the room spoke; there was too much of a gulf between them. Even the Medhall delegation were scientific directors and corporate executives from wildly different fields, linked only in their utility to Medhall’s covert operations.
More men arrived from other external divisions – policlubs, criminal organisations and the liaisons between the corporation and their preferred fixers – before a palpable shudder passed through Hammond and Hunter’s shoulders as their Awakened senses reacted to Hookwolf’s entry into the room.
He had to duck to fit under the door, a metal hand gripping the frame so hard that it cracked under the pressure. He surveyed the room, cybernetic eyes mounted in pallid flesh looking over the meeting before settling on Victor, who looked back with a wry grin on his face.
“Mr Meadows,” Victor greeted the gang lord as he stepped into the room, followed by Stormtiger and Cricket, his two closest lieutenants.
“Victor,” Hookwolf returned the greeting, the word carrying the exact same tone and inflection as it had on every other occasion Victor and Bradley Meadows had crossed paths. In many ways, he was both Victor and Medhall’s proudest work. For a corporation of their size to have the delta-grade medical facilities and magical expertise to produce a cyberzombie was unheard of – doubly so because everything even tangentially related to the operation was a corporate secret – but with Hookwolf, Victor had achieved something more.
Victor had little understanding of the technological or thaumaturgical science that went into the creation of a cyberzombie, collectively known as cybermancy, except that it used magical binding rituals to allow a person to undergo cybernetic augmentation to a far greater extent that would normally be possible, preventing a person from dying even as they were pushed past the limits of the changes their essence could take.
The principle drawback of the procedure was the effect such a magically traumatic process had on the subject’s psyche. They were left in a state of aimlessness, often unwilling or unable to act independently and with a tendency to hyper fixate on random details of their environment. When Bradley Meadows agreed to become Medhall’s first willing test subject for the procedure, seeing it as the culmination of his transhumanist ideology, Victor was brought in to try and find a solution to that loss of self.
Inevitably, he leant on his expertise interpreting mental data. He was a skilled personafix and skillsoft programmer, experienced in creating software that overwrote the human mind to a greater or lesser degree, giving a person the skills to speak new languages, operate complicated machinery or overwrite their personality to suit their environment.
His solution was deceptively simple. The night before Bradley Meadows was due to undergo the procedure, Victor made a scan of his brain and turned it into a personafix chip that was installed once the procedure was concluded. It was a snapshot of Hookwolf as he had been, perfectly accurate but incapable of changing or adapting to experiences in the same way a healthy human mind would. For Hookwolf, who believed he was perfect in mind yet imperfect in body, it was an acceptable trade-off.
Hookwolf was much too large and heavy to take a seat at the table, instead looming behind Stormtiger and Cricket. The three of them could not have been a more drastic departure from the business suits of the rest of the room; neither of his lieutenants were even wearing a shirt. They revelled in their outcast status, sitting at the table with the easy confidence skilled killers often had in the company of men whose skills lay in less physical fields.
Three minutes after the meeting was due to start, the door opened for a final time and Victor stood up alongside the entire room as Max Anders walked through the door. In his early forties, Max was young for the CEO of a corporation that was the embodiment of old money, and in the finest physical health – with his luxury suit tailored around the kind of physique that only came with the aid of high-class personal trainers. His hair was perfectly styled, and his eyes were a brilliant blue that seemed to pierce right through those assembled to meet him. On his face was the friendly smile of an old patriarch; warm to those under his care, but with an undeniable sense of superiority.
James Fleischer followed him in; a tall, narrow man in a double-breasted Saville Row suit who seemed to blend into Max’s shadow. When Max took his seat at the head of the table – the room sitting down with him – Fleischer took the seat to his right, his hands resting on the desk even as Victor saw the reflection of AR feeds scrolling down his entirely cosmetic glasses.
“As always, thank you all for coming,” Max began, as if any of the people assembled there would have ever considered staying away. “We’ll begin, I think, with the elephant in the room. Mr Hunter; your report?”
“Yes sir,” Alabaster took a moment to straighten his tie before he began talking. “We’ve completed our investigation into the breach. Thanks to the efforts of hired matrix specialists and Shadowrunners” – here he nodded to one of the liaisons – “we have been able to build up a full picture of the circumstances surrounding Andrew Garcia’s arrest. Thanks to a source within Knight Errant, we now know that after Andrew Garcia was handed over to their officers by the Shadowrunners who infiltrated the Charter Hill Dopadrine plant, he was visited in an interrogation room by Victoria Dallon.”
Alabaster set his commlink down on the table, tapping away at a few buttons before a data file appeared in Victor’s AR-linked contact lenses. Inside was a picture of an attractive woman in a luxurious dress being escorted into a Knight Errant precinct.
“That’s Reginald Stansfield’s son,” Max Anders observed, as Victor’s gaze jumped from the girl to the sharply-dressed young man behind her.
“The two are dating,” Alabaster nodded, “but we don’t believe this was sanctioned by Ares. Andrew Garcia was first recruited to Medhall after he killed Jess Montrose, an anti-human journalist who was dating Victoria Dallon’s uncle. They were apparently close. As such, we believe this was a matter of revenge, entirely unrelated to Garcia’s minor role in our distribution network.”
“It makes sense,” Fleischer spoke. He’d learned to speak English in Britain, and it showed in his accent. “Dean Stansfield fronts the money and sets up the meeting with Ares’ usual underworld contacts. Perhaps he even let this girl take the lead on the negotiation, knowing he can swallow the costs. Andrew Garcia was a minor figure in a rival corporation; an acceptable target when balanced against a chance to impress the attractive blonde he’s sleeping with.” He smirked. “Nothing more than young lust.”
“And you’re certain the network remains intact?” Max asked, fixing Alabaster with a piercing glare.
“We’ve audited it from top to bottom; Garcia accepted a lawyer we funded in exchange for his silence and there have been no suspicious activities at any stage of the distribution process.”
Max looked to Hookwolf, Justin Hammond and one of the Medhall executives Victor didn’t know in turn, waiting for them to nod in confirmation of what Alabaster had just said.
“Good,” Max leant back in his seat. “Then all we have to do is wait for the present unrest to blow over. Mr Meyer, I trust you’ve already drawn up a public relations strategy to mitigate the damage this has caused?”
“Of course, sir,” Victor nodded. “I’ve distributed it to our media contacts, both on and off the books. They’ll emphasise the violence of the anti-human protestors and deflect any overexuberance from our side onto the Chosen.”
Stormtiger grinned at that, always eager to play the part of the bogeyman. The Chosen proved a useful scapegoat, and were regularly singled out for condemnation by other branches of Medhall’s unseen empire. Hammond regularly railed against their ‘un-American technofetishism’ in his speeches, and he even believed what he was saying.
“Then with urgent business concluded,” Max continued, “I’ll have your reports. Mr Hammond.”
“It’s green across the board,” Hammond said as he leant comfortably back in his seat. “We have a promising crop amongst the undergraduates this year. I’ve sent in dossiers on sixteen who I believe the company would be interested in putting on a graduate scheme, five who I’d prefer to direct towards roles in local politics and the municipal government, and three who have potential as sleeper operatives wherever you need them. Finally, the daughter of a Senator for Maine and Newfoundland has expressed an interest in joining, and I think she’d make a good candidate to groom for a job in DeeCee.”
“Less useful for us, once we have true extraterritoriality,” Max mused, before turning to look at Fleischer, “but your lot might find her access useful in twenty to thirty years. For a reasonable price, of course.”
Fleischer nodded, a contemplative look in his eyes.
“Speaking of,” Max continued, turning back to the group. “Mr Fleischer’s colleagues have some more work for us, and they’re paying generously for the privilege.”
He gestured for Fleischer to take over, which he did after polishing his glasses with a handkerchief he kept in the breast pocket of his suit.
“Thank you, Mr Anders.” He turned to look up at Hookwolf, who returned his gaze with a dead-eyed stare. “Our first requirement is for a team of soldiers to support a Flaming Sword operation in Toronto…”
Victor allowed himself to tune out of the meeting as Fleischer continued. Their allied organisation seldom had any requests involving his specialities of public relations and neural engineering. Their requirements were typically for Medhall’s medical expertise – whether for research purposes or genuine first aid – or the services of the trained cyber-commandoes the Chosen churned out on a regular basis.
Instead, Victor allowed his personafix chip to keep up the appearance of attentiveness, trusting the software to draw his attention back if it turned out he did have some relevance to the discussion, and pulled up the Valkyries’ simrig recordings, reaching out in the matrix to send off requests to the editors still working away in the annex of the depot After all, HTR Brunhilda would be back in the air at the end of the day, collecting more footage that would need to be edited into something broadcastable, and they needed to have a new episode put together by the end of the week.
Victor enjoyed the cut and thrust of corporate life, dancing on the edge of deadlines and the competing requirements of dozens of different departments. Men like Justin Hammond or Bradley Meadows could keep their trenches and their battles; Victor Meyer knew for a fact that he belonged in the halls of power, with his finger on the scales of real change.