Imp kicked off the bronze plate, letting out more of the line as she swung out over open space. She drew her pistol, holding it out in front of her as she swung towards the flat expanse of a floor to ceiling window. I couldn’t hear the shot over the rushing wind, but I saw the reinforced glass fracture as Imp’s single armour-piercing round hurtled through it, sending out a spiderweb of cracks across the whole pane before she hurtled forwards and drove her right knee directly into the bullet hole.
The glass splintered around her as she disengaged her tether and fired two shots at the closest guard before her foot had even made contact with the ground. Some of the guards in the room were still stupefied by the sudden attack, but at least one had cybernetic reaction enhancers; his heavy pistol was already drawn and aimed at the window.
Imp kicked off the floor, leaping left to avoid a pair of shots and running along the wall to keep her momentum going. The first guard was spasming under the force of the Sitck-n-Shock rounds embedded into his torso, but he still had enough motor control to bring his own pistol around to track Imp. She responded with a third shot aimed just above the collar of his suit, where it dug into the side of his neck and delivered its static payload directly to his spine.
I didn’t see his spasms; Imp was already turning, the glowing blue iron sights of her pistol tracked by ballistic processors within her mask as she levelled it another guard, firing a trio of rounds that shattered his dark glasses and embedded themselves into the reinforced synthskin of his brow.
I watched his body stiffen as the shock was carried through poorly-insulated subdermal armour, even as Imp kicked off the wall and used her momentum to swing her foot around into the guard’s head, sending him tumbling to the ground as the current finally reached his nervous system and he descended into twitching spasms.
Imp was already raising her pistol again, ducking low as a burst of automatic shots whizzed over her head before she returned fire on a woman with an unmodified version of my own Ares-made submachine gun, with a rapidly disassembled attaché case discarded at her feet. The extra firepower didn’t help her; Imp moved like liquid, landing a shot on the woman’s right arm before closing the gap in two preternaturally fast strides and driving the edge of her left hand into the back of her target’s neck in a magically-imbued blow that left her slumped over like a puppet with her strings cut.
The last guard hadn’t drawn his gun. Instead the sleeves of his jacket had been split open by a pair of cyberspurs that emerged from his forearms, the straight blades extending out a foot and a half past his wrists. He moved with the force of a turbine, driven by cybernetic legs and what had to be an invasive wired reflex system pushing his mind to think as fast as his artificial limbs could move, never mind the long-term effects it would have on his neural system.
The momentum of the conflict changed in an instant, forcing Imp onto the backfoot as she ducked under a swinging blade, then rolled to the side as the guard brought down a foot in a boneshaking stamp. I caught a glimpse of steel talons pushing their way through his disposable shoes before Imp swept out her own leg in a kick that caught the descending limb in the back of the knee, sending the cyborg staggering one step forward before he regained control.
It was just the window Imp needed to leap backwards, springing off the ground and emptying the rest of her magazine on full automatic before momentum carried her body around a hundred and eighty degrees. She caught the ground with her free hand, then kicked her legs out and almost rolled to her feet with the rapid grace of a gymnast finishing her routine.
The cyborg was spasming under the effects of eight different Stick-n-Shock rounds embedded into his torso; I could see them sparking off his dermal plating through the rips in his jacket. One of them was embedded in his eye; the force of the impact had shattered the cosmetic shell over the cybernetic optic.
None of it was enough to stop him. I could feel him through the matrix, sending out an SOS even as he charged towards Imp once more. Like plucking a string, I reached out and bound the outgoing transmission in strands of resonance, holding it in place as I flooded it with junk data and frayed it into nothing.
When he lunged forwards again, though, it seemed that Imp had used the momentary pause to assess her opponent. Instead of backpedalling away from him, she closed the gap and jerked left at the very last second to avoid a stab that would have run her through. With her free hand she grabbed the cyborg’s upper arm, then drove her right elbow into his.
It shouldn’t have worked. It was a contest between bone and steel, and if Imp were any other ork then she’d have shattered her elbow with a hit like that. But in a contest between engineering and awakened magic, sometimes carefully applied force can exert a disproportionate outcome.
The arm didn’t shatter, but some internal mechanism broke beneath the force of her blow. It froze in place, servos within the elbow grinding against themselves as the shock of the blow sent synaptic feedback up the arm to the cyborg’s nervous system. His lips parted, teeth gritted together in a momentary flash of pain. He’d recover in an instant if Imp gave him the chance.
Instead she released the spent magazine from her gun and flicked another switch to send the slide forwards before driving the barrel into the cyborg’s throat like a truncheon. His throat was reinforced, of course, but Imp’s carefully aimed blow struck it in just the right place to dismount the subdermal plate, crushing the cyborg’s throat beneath his own armour.
While he clutched at his neck with his one functional arm, Imp quickly struck at other pressure points across his cybernetic body, quickly and efficiently disabling his limbs even as he struggled for breath.
Between crashing through the window and delivering a final kick to the cyborg’s chest, less than a minute had elapsed. Out in the corridor, I finally disengaged the electronic lock and allowed the door to slide open before Grue and I rushed into the room.
Grue had been tense the whole time Imp was fighting. I couldn’t open the door without breaking the soundproofing – which would have left the halls of the hotel echoing with gunshots. Even after the fighting was done I still had to slam the door shut behind us to cut off the howling wind, though a moment later I was able to find the controls for the acid rain shutters hidden beneath the bronze ribs on the building’s exterior.
With the world sealed away, we were left alone among a silent scene of carnage, with four wounded and incapacitated guards twitching on the floor as Imp went between them one by one, delivering swift paralysing strikes to the pure humans and sticking the cyborgs with shots of Narcojet she’d bought from a contact of hers. Grue was looking at the scene with something like his old concern and I thought for a moment he was going to say something before I opened the door again to admit Regent, Tattletale and our willing victim.
Kayden Anders took one look at the four comatose human guards, two orks and a troll and rolled her eyes.
“Oh for fuck’s sake. Is this a test or just Calvert waving his dick around to make sure I know my place?”
“How big is his dick?” Imp asked, conversationally. “And like, what does it… you know.”
“As far as I’m aware, we’re the only team of Shadowrunners our client has in the city,” I told Kayden. “And I’ll ask you not to mention his name until we’ve got you back to the safehouse.”
“You’re verbose,” she remarked. “Fine, let’s get this over with.”
She moved over to the door to the suite’s bedroom, where Aster Anders and her nanny were still waiting.
“She’s been trying to call for help,” I remarked, with a little satisfaction. “I haven’t been letting her.”
Kayden tapped her knuckles against the door.
“Aileen? It’s me. It’s safe now.” She turned to look at us “Get those,” she hissed, gesturing at the four unconscious guards, “out of sight, now.”
Grue shrugged his shoulders and looked around the room, before throwing open the sliding doors of a long cabinet. Between Grue, Imp and I it was the work of a moment to drag Imp’s victims in, piling them on top of each other before sliding the door shut.
“I’m coming in, Aileen,” Kayden said, before opening the door to the bedroom.
‘Aileen’ was a redheaded human girl who looked to be around Imp’s age, with a classic cheerleader’s build that was undercut by the evident terror on her face. For a moment I wondered what had led her to take this job at that age. Maybe she was from a lower middle class family, and working as a nanny for a year was a way to pay her way through university? Either way, she was clearly regretting that decision.
“Mrs Anders, what’s…” she began, before trailing off as she saw us.
“I’m leaving Max,” Kayden explained. “Aster and I.”
“And you couldn’t just walk out? Who are these people? Where are the guards? What happened to the window?”
“You’re young, and you’re not… well, you’re not rich. I hope you never understand, Aileen, but I do need you to do something for me.”
She reached into her dress and pulled out a folded piece of what looked like real paper that had been wedged between the fabric and her skin.
“When you see Max, give this to him.”
Abruptly, Tattletale sent a silent stunbolt flying at the au pair, then rushed forwards to arrest her fall as she slumped into unconsciousness. Once the girl was safely propped against the wall, Tattletale straightened up and snatched the note from Kayden’s hands.
“I’m not implicating your boss,” Kayden said, her tone venomous. “This isn’t the first time I’ve threatened to leave Max, so I’ve put together a list of the old arguments to throw him off the scent. I don’t want him to realise what I’m actually doing.”
“It looks innocent enough,” Tattletale conceded as she turned the paper over, her tone suggesting that she was doing Kayden an immense favour by even considering her request. “Go in and get your daughter. I’ll leave this in sleeping beauty’s pocket.”
We eyed each other in silence as Kayden went into the other room. I was still tracking her through both her commlink and the suite’s ambient sensors, of course, and I was sure Tattletale was doing the same astrally. We weren’t going to leave anything to chance, but we also knew that the four year old kid would be much more cooperative if she saw her mother before the armed mercenaries.
Kayden reemerged a few minutes later with her daughter trailing at her heels, the little girl wearing a blue dress and Velcro shoes, looking more like a dress up doll than anything I’d ever seen a kid wearing. The moment she saw me, her eyes trailing up and up my impressive height before reaching my horns, her face twisted in fear as she rushed to hide behind her mother.
I couldn’t hide the flash of anger that crossed my features, and the feeling only deepened at the sight of Kayden’s knowing smirk, as if this was what she’d expected from me all along.
“Maybe I’m not the one being tested,” she remarked.
“You ready?” I asked. “Once we’re through that door, we keep moving no matter what. Understood?”
“Of course,” Kayden answered. “That’s why I’m wearing wedge heels.”
“We’ll follow close behind you,” Grue said. “Play it off like we’re your security detail. Won’t hold up for a second, I know, but it’ll do at a glance. Regent and Tattletale will go in front, putting on their drunk couple act.”
“Then it’s down the elevator to the parking lot, where we get you into our exit vehicle and drive you to the safehouse,” I said, picking up the thread.
Kayden crouched down and picked her daughter up, holding her in her arms as we moved over the door. Imp simply vanished, while Regent and Tattletale put on their social masks once again, becoming the picture of a transactional couple as I let them out into the hall and closed the door behind them, Grue and I following Kayden out five seconds later.
The march through the halls was tense; we could still hear the party echoing throughout the place and it seemed the noise had become even more manic than before. We couldn’t see any people, but somehow that only added to my paranoia. It was as if the staff had abandoned this floor entirely, choosing to beat a retreat before events got too rough.
“I hate these things,” Kayden remarked, apropos of nothing. “They seem so incredibly extravagant when you’re young, but now I look at the people in there and all I see are mindless idiots dancing to the strings of people like Max. They’re supposed to be better than that.”
“Why would they be?” I remarked. “When have they ever had to fight for anything?”
She let out a sharp bark of laughter. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
In spite of my fear, we reached the staff elevator without incident, the metal doors sliding shut a moment before we began our descent. I almost started to relax at that point; I was making sure we had a clear run to the basement, ready to smother any potential stops on other floors. But then I saw the look on Tattletale’s face, and saw the fear in her eyes.
“We’re being watched,” she said, simply, but her tone had Regent snap into full alertness.
“I see it,” he said. “A Water spirit. Christian Theurgy, definitely. I think… Westphalian.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, drawing my gun.
“It means Max Anders has interesting international connections,” Regent observed. “The Westphalian Theurgists are a German magical tradition. An Order, really. They hate Metahumans and non-Christian magic.”
He turned to look at Kayden.
“Left that one out, didn’t you? Didn’t say your huscle were packing cyberspurs either.”
“I had no idea,” Kayden snapped. “I never had a conversation with the grunts.”
“Has it made us?” I asked, alarmed. Grue hadn’t drawn his pistol, oddly enough, but he had clenched his hands into fists and was looking around the elevator like a boxer spoiling for a fight.
“Definitely,” Tattletale said. “But I don’t think it knows we know.”
I reached out to our SUV in the parking garage, discretely taking control of the cameras and switching its sensors from passive to active. As I feared, most of the security personnel had been moved on to elsewhere, with the dozen who remained – almost definitely Petrovski Security – taking up firing positions in front of the elevator. I was sure that if we’d tried to exit through the party we’d have found our path blocked by another detachment.
“They’re setting up in the garage,” I reported. “We’ll go with the alternate exit.”
I reached out to Bitch in the matrix, sending her the details of the situation along with instructions to take the car down a level. At the same time I exploited my access to the building’s system and spun together a trio of wasps from the resonance, dispatching them to launch a series of rapid cyberattacks on the different monitoring systems around the elevator, including the one that reported on its intended destination.
Tattletale was still staring off into the distance, keeping her breathing deliberately level as she centred herself.
“Spider,” she began, “I’ll drive the spirit off in astral space, but I’ll need you to carry me to the car.”
“Got it,” I said. I could see the logic in it; Grue was the better shot, and Regent was a twig with arms.
When Tattletale slumped over I caught her in my arms, wrapping one hand under her shoulders and the other under her knees as I picked her up. I couldn’t see her astral form, but I was able to see some signs of her flight from the way Regent’s eyes darted around as he followed the combat.
I turned my attention back to the garage, where Bitch had reassumed control of the TeufelsKatze. Petrovski either hadn’t realised the car was ours or they’d assumed we drove it in manually; they were facing away from the vehicle, taking cover behind a pair of their own marked patrol cars that they’d set up in a V shape in front of the elevator doors. I doubted they’d shoot first; I wasn’t sure if the spirit could tell the difference between a voluntary and involuntary kidnapping, but Max Anders would never risk putting his daughter in harm’s way.
The problem was that neither would Kayden. If this went south she might just hand herself over and try and play this off as a dramatic divorce attempt. We couldn’t give her that choice.
In the garage, Bitch switched the engine on and revved the throttle, filling the car park with a throaty roar that had almost all of the guards whipping round in panic.
That was when she triggered one of the vehicle’s security measures, activating the FlashTech bulbs mounted next to the headlights. They went off like a flashbang, filling the room with a light so blinding the SUV’s cameras had to automatically shift their exposure all the way down to compensate. It didn’t get all of the guards, but it got enough for Bitch to roll the vehicle out of the bay and tear off without catching any gunfire.
The ramp down to the next level was blocked off by shutters, but I had enough control over the building now to force them open as Bitch closed in, just barely fast enough to avoid scraping the roof. In the elevator, we sped past the floor with the broken ambush and descended to the next level down, where Bitch had come to a screeching halt immediately in front of the doors.
Grue drew his gun, aiming it at the ramp up as he circled around the vehicle to the driver’s seat while Regent opened up the rear door to allow Imp’s invisible form to clamber into one of the two rear facing seats where the boot would be in a normal SUV.
Kayden and Aster went in the middle, with Regent on one side and Tattletale on the other. She came back to her body right as I was buckling her in, drawing a violent inrush of breath before flashing me a victorious grin.
I clambered into the front passenger seat, the last to get in, and Bitch didn’t even wait for me to close the door before speeding back towards the ramp.
‘Shadow us as best you can,’ I signalled to her. ‘We might need to change vehicles.’
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
She sent back an affirmative even as she gunned it back up to the next level, where a Petrovski gunline of barely-recovered guards was waiting for us. I watched through the windshield as they approached, my hands fumbling with my seatbelt even as my mind noted Bitch activating the SUV’s crowd control system.
Just below the grill, two nozzles extended from discreet panels. They sent out a spray of fine misted liquid, before a circuit beneath the nozzles sparked and ignited the fluid, turning the cloud into a veritable firestorm. All along the length of the chassis, channels doused the vehicle in inflammable liquid, then ignited it to wreathe us in a cloak of flames that blocked out all view of the outside world. Through the sensors, I could see the impromptu firing line scattering to either side, some of them dropping to the floor as they tried to put out their burning clothes.
The most insane thing was that this wasn’t a modification we’d made, but a standard feature on the stock model from BMW. They made it the central feature of their marketing, with slick videos showing a burning vehicle screaming away from a gang of scavengers, then tearing down the highway towards the distant skyline of the Rhine-Ruhr Megaplex.
Our own ascent was no less photogenic, as Bitch swerved us around rows of parked cars and drifted around the gently curving ramps leading up to the ground floor. I was too close to vomiting to appreciate the spectacle, but I was needed in the matrix, not meatspace, so I was able to avoid succumbing to motion sickness as I focused my attention on the slowly-closing blast door between us and the exit.
I threw restraint to the wind, burning every careful backdoor I’d dug into their system as I sought to overwhelm them with different vectors of attack. We weren’t coming back here and Petrovski’s mandate to pursue ended at the limits of their property. I didn’t think Max Anders would call Knight Errant, given his feud with Ares, which meant all I had to do was lift one damn door.
It was meant to be closed. I had to fight against gravity, deadbolts and fire suppression systems as I hauled the slab upwards, straining the mechanism with the sudden change in direction and almost overloading its processing power as my orders contradicted with the security lockdown procedure. I was winning, though, because this wasn’t a full lockdown. Even from down here I could tell that the party was continuing unabated. Max Anders would have definitely been alerted, as would Nathan Gilbert, but for everyone else it seemed the show would go on.
As we cleared the building and shot out onto the street I drew my attention away from the Raleigh Building, shocked back into full consciousness by the echoing roar of the engine as Bitch gunned it towards downtown. Aster chose that moment to start crying, and we all awkwardly ignored Kayden as she pulled her daughter into a hug.
Instead I turned my attention outwards. Bitch had disabled the crowd control system, the last of the burning fluid dripping off the rear bumper, and she’d started to slow down to something closer to the speed limit. I, in turn, cycled the SUV’s GridLink ID in case someone at the Raleigh Building had filed a report.
I wasn’t foolish enough to think we were out of the woods yet. In fact, I was all but certain we were still in danger. Max Anders might not call the cops, but he had plenty of resources of his own he could call upon.
“We’re changing vehicles,” I said. “Let’s get the package out of the firing line. Bitch, are you ready to set it up?”
‘Ready,’ came her response.
Grue reached into his boot and drew a short knife, which he passed back to Tattletale.
“I’m going to need a hair sample,” the mage told an increasingly worried-looking Kayden. “From your daughter, too. I’m going to make my astral signature look like yours. It won’t hold up under active scrutiny, but it might throw any pursuers off the scent.”
Kayden looked deeply reluctant. I couldn’t blame her; I’d heard plenty of schoolyard rumours about what a mage could do with some hair or a bit of blood. Eventually, though, she seemed to find her nerve once again.
“Fine. Give me the knife.”
Tattletale shrugged, flipping the knife and catching it by the blade before passing it to Kayden, who proceeded to slice of a lock of hair from herself and her daughter. Tattletale wound most of the hair through the chain of her pendant, then brought the metal serpent up to her mouth and touched it to her lips before placing the remaining strands on her tongue.
“That’s disgusting,” Kayden remarked, as Tattletale swallowed. For her part, she weathered the corporate queen’s disgust with total indifference as she began muttering an incantation under her breath.
Bitch had been weaving us on a diagonal path from block to block, heading for a specific road where the street had been turned into a tunnel by a megabuilding that had spread itself across several blocks. At the side of the road, parked against a yellow curb with her freshly-added beacons and hazard lights strobing in bright orange patterns, was Bitch.
She mounted the curb with the SUV, lining up Regent’s door with the door on the side of her van, which she’d already opened. The changeover was quick and efficient, with Regent following Kayden and Aster into the van and buckling them in to their seats. He stayed with them to provide magical support if needed, while the rest of us played the role of a bait car as Bitch drove us back off into the city streets, her mind showing absolutely no strain as she guided two vehicles around the edge of Downtown.
I kept my eyes on the matrix, watching the GridLink for any unexpected vehicles cutting through the grid’s flow and keeping an eye on the SUV’s sensors as Bitch weaved her way through the late night traffic. I thought I’d covered all the angles, until something pushed against a sensor on the roof.
“They’re above us!” I shouted, right as an immense helicopter swept into view, its downdraft buffeting the road with dust. I couldn’t imagine what sort of pilot would willingly bring an aircraft down that low, but its red livery and white trim were unmistakable.
I’d fucked up. I’d been looking for Shadowrunners or off the books corp-sec, whose irregular movements would have bludgeoned through GridLink’s carefully balanced traffic management system, but Valkyrie Paramedical’s aircraft and ambulances were plugged into that system. It was designed to work around them as an emergency service, but there was nothing stopping Max Anders from using them as his own private army.
The helicopter spun on its axis once it hit the junction, presenting its flank to us. There was a decal on the side; an armoured, winged woman outlined in white on the red fuselage. She held a spear in one hand while the other was outstretched in a beckoning gesture. To the left of her, written in white capital letters on the cabin door, was a name. Brunhilda.
Bitch hit the handbrake, spinning us on a dime with the squeal of tyre smoke. In the rear view mirror I saw Imp move fast enough to break her stealth as she pressed her masked face against the back window and watched as the helicopter’s cabin door slid open.
I caught a brief, distant glimpse of four female silhouettes against the red interior lights of the cabin before we spun around a corner and the helicopter fell out of view. Beside me, Brian had ejected his magazine of Stick-n-Shock rounds and was loading another with live ammunition. I did the same with my submachine gun, even as I reached out in the matrix and tried to track the helicopter’s location.
It was hard. Harder than I felt it should have been, like the helicopter wasn’t just trying to prevent attacks but was actively putting out digital chaff to make it harder for me to operate. Whatever connections it had to Valkyrie Paramedical’s command and control centre, they’d been frayed down almost to the point of nothingness.
But I could still roughly track its position. I wound down my window, leaning out and aiming my pistol one-handed behind us, trusting in my cybernetic arm to keep my aim stable as I tracked the helicopter’s movements.
When it emerged from the other side of a skyscraper I squeezed the trigger, servos and synthetic muscle holding my arm completely steady as I emptied a whole magazine of ammunition, while the gun’s built in rangefinder broadcast the estimated effects of bullet drop at that distance. I didn’t get a chance to see if the shots landed before Grue grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back in.
“Save your ammo!” he shouted over the wind rushing through my open window – which I noted Bitch was already closing. “That’s thing’s milspec! Small arms fire isn’t going to cut it, but at least they can’t shoot us either!”
Until they realise Kayden and Aster aren’t with us.
The helicopter had climbed up above the level of the buildings, skipping across blocks as it followed our progress. It seemed to be more active in the matrix, sending out hurried signals that I couldn’t quite track at that distance. At the same time, it started to track us.
I could feel electronic warfare systems lighting up on the fuselage as inbuilt programmes latched onto the connection between the SUV and Bitch’s control rig. They didn’t have a decker up there, but the helicopter was loaded with Agent programmes tailor-made to disable vehicles and break open barriers, presumably for this exact sort of situation where a client of theirs has been kidnapped.
I slipped into the matrix, abandoning meatspace for a battlefield on which I might make a difference. Immersed in hot-sim VR, I could see the helicopter a little more clearly. It was a Nissan Hornet, its GridLink serial number registered to Medhall Pharmaceuticals, with a subtag connecting it to Valkyrie Paramedical’s High Threat Response permit.
Some self-congratulatory Nissan cyberwarfare programmer had given its Agents a matching hornet skin; six of them had flown from the e-war broadcaster just below the cockpit, honing in on the bright tight-beam transmission making its way into our SUV’s receiver.
I leapt from my body, planting the ‘feet’ of my persona on the roof as I glared up at the descending mockeries of my own sprites. My own wasps came when called, spun together out of the resonance and flung up towards the hornets to delay their approach, even as I sharpened my persona’s claws into elongated spikes.
The hornets were frighteningly good. My sprites were capable in acting in unpredictable ways that coded creations often struggled to rationalise, but the hornets were single-minded monsters who struck with brute force. What’s more, while the e-war system couldn’t think as fast as a decker, it was still smart enough to detail only two Agents to hold down my chaff, while the remaining four beelined for the SUV with mindless determination.
Behind them, I saw one of the hornets land a hit on a wasp, flooding the sprite with enough viral code that it unravelled into nothingness in an instant. I tensed up, mentally adjusting my stance in a pointlessly biological instinct even as my mind raced for solutions. I wasn’t sure I could hold them back on my own, but maybe I could split the swarm a second time?
I gathered together resonance, directing it not into the world but down the familiar pathways of my neurons, creating a duplicate web that I separated from myself as an identical copy of my persona. With a thought I directed it to soar up and away from the SUV, while still remaining close enough to pose a threat. As I hoped, two of the hornets split off to attack it, leaving the remaining two to close in on me.
I met them with unrestrained fury, sending a whip of resonance at the first and landing a hit that left a score of alien code across its body which spread to entangle its processes, making its movements sluggish enough that it fell behind the other.
When I tried to drive a spike of resonance into its thorax, however, my claws skittered off its rudimentary firewalls without affect. I’d split my attention too much, allowed myself to get distracted by the battlefield around me, and I paid the price as the hornet drove its stinger into my chest.
In meatspace my body jolted as my heart skipped a beat, while a torrent of toxic code flooded into my persona. It was all I could do to harness the pain into an echo, sending back a feedback arc that tore down the connection the hornet itself had forced into being. It wasn’t enough to kill the Agent, but it was enough that my next spike found purchase, cutting off the torrent of pain as the hornet splintered into fragments of code.
Already the hornets had torn through most of my wasps, while my duplicate had been found out and destroyed. I was used to having the strongest cards to play in almost every fight I’d been through, but this reminded me of Renraku in the worst ways. They’d tried to drown me in a sea of agents, but this was a bare-knuckle brawl with a single opponent twice my weight. One I couldn’t flee from, with Bitch’s connection active.
Desperate times, I thought, as I felt fireflies gathering beneath my carapace.
‘Grue, take the wheel in three!’ I broadcast directly into his cyberware, then let out a horrific scream that filled the whole street with a swarm of chittering fireflies, the noise multiplying exponentially as it became too dense for Bitch’s link to function.
Cut off from their target, the Agents hovered in place for a few milliseconds before fighting their way through the swarm as they tried to find their way back to the e-war box. The helicopter also rose to escape the swarm of interference; they were only able to fly that low with GridLink giving them the exact positions of the buildings on either side.
I left the matrix behind, but kept the swarm going for as long as I could. Back in meatspace, Grue’s fists were clenching the wheel as he navigated the streets with nothing like the expertise Bitch had shown.
“I know these fuckers!” Imp shouted from the backseat. “They’re the fucking trideo stars! Bunch of barbie doll bastards cutting people up for pay-per-view!”
“They won’t be running the cameras now,” Tattletale remarked. “Anders won’t want to turn this into a media event.”
“They want us bad,” I said. “I can hold back their trackers, but there’s nothing stopping them from looking out the cockpit, or from tracking your spoofed aura.
Out the windshield I could see the helicopter pulling ahead of us and spinning on its axis at the end of the block to present its flank to us once again. The cabin door was still open, and I could still see the distant silhouettes of the High Threat Response team looking down on us.
They were easily two hundred metres off the ground, but to my amazement one of the distant figures simply stepped out of the cabin and plummeted towards the road in freefall before she impossibly slowed her descent and hovered in place at the far end of the street.
Beside me, Grue swore and stamped on the accelerator as we started to drop in speed, the wheels even briefly spinning in place before they found traction again.
“She’s messing with our weight!” Tattletale exclaimed, alarmed. “Trying to make the car heavier than the engine can take!”
Sure enough the helicopter had started to descend and the three remaining silhouettes looked like they were getting ready to jump out. Grue swore again and abruptly jerked the steering wheel to the left, the tyres spinning uselessly for another half second before we slammed straight into the barrier of a condominium tower’s underground parking lot.
The barrier was armoured steel, but it was battered aside in a squeal of metal on metal by our magically enhanced momentum. The moment we left the mage’s line of sight we lurched forwards again as our extra weight dissipated. It was all Grue could do to keep us from slamming into a support pillar.
We were on the top floor of the lot, which meant we were surrounded by the luxury vehicles of those who could afford to pay a premium to shave a couple of minutes off their journey to and the garage. The garage was small, with only a hundred vehicles on this floor.
“What now?” I asked, as Brian drove us past a row of sports cars. “They’re blocking our exit.”
“Maybe not,” Tattletale said, gesturing to one of the walls, where D-1 was marked out in large letters. “This place isn’t large enough to go under the whole building. Where’s garage C?”
I blinked, peering out the windshield before dissipating my swarm and reaching out through the matrix instead, feeling for a second cluster of parked cars a hundred metres away and finding the row of matrix-linked elevators between them.
As I directed Grue to the passageway, I was distracted by the tactical network that entered the garage, linking together four sets of heavily-encrypted communications sets and at least two full-body cyberware suites. The HTR team were closing in.
Abruptly I was thrown against the seatbelt as Grue hit the brakes. He’d made it to the passageway, but there were thick concrete bollards in the entrance preventing cars from driving through the pedestrian area to the other side. Acting as one, we all threw off our seatbelts – except for Imp, who had never put hers on – and flung open the doors of the SUV, spilling out into the harsh halogen lighting of the car park.
As we ran I saw that Tattletale had left her heels behind, abandoning the impractical footwear in favour of sprinting barefoot down the hall, her dress stretching to its limit as she took long, loping strides that were still dwarfed by my own even if I couldn’t keep pace with Grue or Imp and their athletic physiques.
I reached down and wrapped my organic arm around Tattletale’s waist, hoisting her up over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes even as I sprinted forwards as fast as I could manage, ignoring her instinctive little scream of panic as I reached out into the matrix to draw my mind away from the pain in my legs.
With a mental flick I sent a resonance spike into a cluster of data above and behind me, a glitch burning through the motor of a set of metal shutters that slammed down behind us. The moment we entered car park C I did the same to the shutters at the other end of the passageway. It wouldn’t buy us much time, but I knew that every moment counted.
Ahead of me, Grue and Imp sprang up onto the hoods of a pair of parked cars, running over the windshield and roof as they tried to put some distance between them and the door. I followed as best I could, my foot almost going through the windshield of a sports car that was probably worth more than my organs.
When I heard the sound of a steel gate clattering to the floor behind me, I leapt over the bed of an unnecessarily large urban SUV and set Tattletale down on the floor, drawing my gun as she peered over the roof with an expression of fierce determination only slightly undercut by the lingering shock of her impromptu abduction.
A few cars down I could see Grue, his head ducked and his pistol gripped tightly in two hands, but Imp had vanished again. Grue lifted his head to look at me and mouthed three short words.
‘Find a car.’
As I reached out in the matrix, hunting for any vehicle with weak enough security that I could bypass it quickly, there was another crash as the HTR team entered the room. Their comms networks were hard to latch onto, protected as they were by the same military-grade encryption as their helicopter, but I could still roughly feel their presence through my awareness of the devices around me.
“They aren’t here,” one of them said, her tone frustrated. “Keep that pixie mage alive; she’s spoofing their aura.”
“Language, Othala,” another drawled in a sarcastic, preppy voice. “What would the network think?”
“Quiet,” a third snapped. One of the cyborgs. “Listen up!” she shouted. “Give us the woman and the kid and you might survive this!”
Beside me, Tattletale rolled her eyes and cupped her hands to her mouth, warming them with careful breaths until I could see flames roiling between her fingers. I held my gun ready, positioning my mechanical arm just below the window of the SUV as I tracked the approximate location of each target in the matrix. With quick gestures from my other hand, I relayed that location to Tattletale while overlaying it onto Grue’s optics.
Tattletale sprang up, throwing her hands in front of her as she simultaneously leapt to the side. A spray of fire jetted out towards the direction of the signals, all of them flinching back at the sudden gout of flames. At the same time I twisted my elbow joint the wrong direction and sent out a spray of gunfire towards the two closest signals, while Grue popped out of cover and squeezed out two shots from his Ares Predator before ducking back down and running hunched over towards me.
As he ran he tossed a grenade over the rows of cars towards the Valkyries, only for it to come flying right back towards us. I flung my consciousness into the matrix for a brief moment to avoid the worst of the flashbang’s shock, but when I returned to my body my ears were still ringing in pain and the air was filled with cloying smoke that stung my throat.
The signals were moving, two of them storming over the cars with the clang of power armour on metal while a third had raised herself up into the air. One of the armoured figures was closing in on me; I saw the roof of the SUV crumple as she landed on it before Imp suddenly appeared above me, swinging her tomahawk into the back of the Valkyrie’s knee.
Something in her armour snapped, locking the limb as she toppled onto the concrete. Up close, she was both more terrifying and more ridiculous. Her helmet revealed the lower half of her face, which had been made up with painstaking care and vibrant red lipstick, while fake blonde hair streamed out the back. Her knightly power armour had been sexualised almost to the point of being blatant, with the torso sculpted to emphasise her breasts and her feet clad in wedge-heel boots to add a little extra height.
In spite of that, the scowl on her face and the sword in her hand looked as deadly as anything I had ever seen. Her armour was equally deadly; I didn’t know whether she’d forced the joint using her cybernetic limb or if it had some rapid-acting damage control feature, but she rolled back on her feet in an instant and caught Imp’s next axe blow on a wide, round shield.
I scrambled back and raised my gun, forcing the Valkyrie to bring up her shield to protect her face from a hail of bullets. As my gun clicked empty, she was suddenly surrounded by a glowing dome of violet light, as Tattletale strained to keep her contained even as she leapt over the next row of cars.
I followed her, calling forth wasps and woodlice and directing them to attack every vehicle I could find, hoping for a single weak spot or outdated software I could exploit. A few cars away I could see Grue retreating from the other cyborg, almost scuttling backwards over a car as he fired shot after shot to force her to keep her face covered. Unlike her twin – and I realised that they were twins – she was carrying a spear that was as long as she was tall.
As I slammed another magazine into my submachine gun, I felt a sharp stab of pain-feedback in my cybernetic arm as a metal dagger tore through my elbow. My arm locked in place, the gun held uselessly in fingers that could no longer move as the levitating mage drifted into view, drifting down until her feet were touching the ground, with three more metal knives floating over her shoulders.
That was the moment when my luck finally turned. I felt a familiar set of axels and wheels appear in the corner of my mind and I hit the gas, sending a four door Hyundai Equus lurching forwards, its electric motor driving it into the mage with enough force to pin her legs between the hood and the back of the opposite vehicle. She let out a bone-curdling scream as the knives dropped from the sky, while I hurriedly reversed the car, spun it on its axis and flung all four doors open.
The others took the hint, even as I started to roll the car towards the exit ramp. Tattletale was the first in, leaping into the front passenger seat with unrestrained desperation even as she threw up another barrier between us and the Valkyries. Grue piled into the driver’s seat next to her, while I pulled my mechanical arm against the side and sprinted towards the rear door
The car wasn’t in any way troll-friendly, but I was just about able to leap across both seats, frantically tucking my legs in so I didn’t clip them on another car. Imp followed immediately after, throwing herself on top of me and shouting “fucking floor it!” at the top of her lungs.
I did as she asked, driving the car as fast as I could towards the ramp up. I was nowhere near as proficient as Grue, never mind Bitch; even with the sensors I misjudged the size of the vehicle and scraped the paintwork against a support pillar on the way out. But then we were clear, emerging into a submerged road where the megabuildings above had combined to block out the sky. I’d never been happier to see harsh halogen streetlights overhead instead of open sky.
As I handed control of the car over to Grue, I grabbed the knife with my organic hand and ripped it out of my arm before tossing it out of the window behind us. On top of me, Imp pulled off her mask and let out a sound that was half a scream, half a laugh as she wrapped an arm around my shoulder in something close to a hug. I sent out a transmission to Bitch, in plain text.
Her response only took a second, but it felt like an eternity.
I slumped back against the seat, my horns scraping against the door as I stared up at the roof with blurry eyes and a relieved grin on my face.
“We did it,” I said. “Holy shit, we did it.”