“Something isn’t right,” I said, as we moved at a brisk walk through the corridors.
“What is it?” Grue asked, concerned.
“Garcia’s SIN. If a company brings in someone from outside, they’ll give them a limited corporate SIN. It’s like a work visa, basically. But Garcia’s got a full corporate SIN. Even in a company the size of Medhall, that’s usually limited to people who were born in the corp, grew up in corp houses, went to corp schools. Not some guy off the street, no matter who they killed.”
“Is it something we need to be worried about?” Grue responded.
I thought it over for a few moments, as we passed another custodial crew coming the other way, and shrugged my shoulders.
“It means whoever let Garcia into the corp is a lot more influential than I thought. We might be stepping on someone’s toes, here.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they’d be totally cool with us snatching some other wageslave,” Regent snarked.
“He’s got a point,” Grue said, diplomatically. “We’re always going to piss someone off. The thing that the really dangerous ones are also the ones most likely to take it on the chin. They might hate it when Shadowrunners hit them, but if they start taking revenge on ‘runner teams – or shutting down places like Palanquin or Somer’s Rock – then they’d lose out on their own access to deniable assets. Everyone’s got their hand in the pot.”
“If you say so…” I answered, uncertainly, falling silent as we reached Garcia’s door. It was white and glossy, with the words ‘Duty Manager - Distribution’ on a metal plate and a small digital screen below it displaying ‘Andrew Garcia’ in red text, ready to be swapped out for whoever might occupy the office after him.
Grue held the bag in one hand as he unzipped it with the other, reaching in to pass me my submachine gun before pulling out his rifle. Regent, of course, didn’t need a gun to be dangerous.
“Just follow my lead, Bug,” Grue said as he took up a position next to the door. “Come in behind me and keep your gun trained on Garcia until Regent has him. Got it?”
I nodded, my heart pounding in my chest, and moved behind Grue as Regent mirrored him on the other side of the door. I watched the muscles in Grue’s back shifting as he tensed his grip on his rifle, before he reached out and, in a single fluid motion, swung the door open and stepped through into the office, his rifle perfectly level even as he held it with one arm.
There was a sudden intake of breath from inside the office, and the sound of a chair scraping against the floor. Regent rushed in after him, and I followed, with my submachine gun raised over his head.
Garcia’s back was pressed against a window that overlooked the shop floor. He was wearing a crisp white shirt and black slacks, with his ID badge clipped to the shirt pocket. His hair had been styled with a little too much gel, and his belt buckle looked more trashy than expensive; a stylised silver eagle on a heavy metal plate.
His face was locked in a rictus of terror until Regent hit him with a stunbolt and he slid to the ground, his hair leaving a trail on the window like a human snail. Only once he’d hit the ground did I take my eyes off him and look around the office.
In his seven years hiding under Medhall’s wing, Garcia hadn’t done much with his life – or, if he had, he’d kept it firmly at home. There was clutter in the office, but it was the kind of clutter work generates. Personalised coffee mugs, pictures of workplace gatherings, a spare shirt hanging up on the back of the door. No pictures of any spouses or children, no signs of the man behind the nameplate on his desk.
Garcia’s personality had slipped into the office in only one respect; the flag that hung on his wall, right where he could see it from his desk.
Grue noticed it as well, even as he moved to cover the door while Regent began worming his magic into Garcia’s body.
“I count fifty,” he observed.
Sure enough, he was right. The flag looked like it could have been printed yesterday, but it was antiquated all the same. Downright historic, in fact. The UCAS hadn’t used the old stars and stripes in thirteen years, and there hadn’t been fifty stars on it since the end of the Ghost Dance War in twenty-eighteen. Over half a century ago.
The picture it painted was troubling indeed, because the last time I’d seen that flag with my own eyes was six years ago. It was being waved by the terrorists who stormed city hall in the name of their New Revolution, in a display of force that was mirrored across all the nations of the former United States of America. The President was captured, many others were assassinated, government buildings were bombed, and militias and hired mercenaries seized control of key locations across North America.
The current President, Angela Colloton, made her name as the general that regained control of DeeCee, though the then-President was killed during a botched rescue mission. She paraded the ringleader – some Senator – on national television, and that turned the tide against the terrorists.
But what I remembered most about that time was huddling up in our apartment, almost half-mad thanks to the Matrix’s sudden intrusion in my skull, and unintentionally eavesdropping on Mom and Dad as they both made call after call, while the streets below were filled with shouts, gunfire and explosions as the Chosen and New Revolution’s thugs rioted across the city.
To find that flag here, now, with every irregularity I’d found around Andrew Garcia… I didn’t know what to think, and I guess Grue would tell me not to bother. After all, I hadn’t seen that flag in years because I was a shut in. It was a lot less common after sixty-four, but that didn’t change the massive media presence it had in any film before then, didn’t change the old glory types who’d hang it from a flagpole in their front lawn come what may, didn’t change how common the design was in clothing, and how half the world probably still linked it to the UCAS. It didn’t necessarily mean anything.
But still, I looked away and opened myself up to the Matrix, letting meatspace fade somewhat as I brought the digital world to the forefront of my vision. I smiled, and walked around Garcia’s desk to find his computer open and logged in.
“Mind if I look through Garcia’s computer?” I asked Grue, as Garcia lurched to his feet like a marionette puppet. Regent frowned, muttering something about being ‘out of practice’, and began methodically twitching his puppet’s muscles.
“What for?” Grue asked, keeping his eye on the door.
“Might be something we can sell,” I answered, even as I was already starting to trawl through his files. “I doubt there are any patents on here, but you’d be surprised what people are prepared to pay for. I’ve seen all sorts being sold; truck schedules, shift rotas, who’s getting what bonus. Even how much dopadrine the factory makes in a day might be useful to a rival business.”
It wasn’t just the money motivating me, but I wasn’t sure Grue would’ve accepted ‘curiosity’ as an answer. Something was going on here, and I wanted to find out what.
“Make it quick,” Grue decided, as I was rummaging through Garcia’s emails. He’d accumulated dozens of regular communications, but they all seemed normal enough. Unless some of the innocuous terms held double meanings, but it wasn’t like I’d be able to tell that.
“Speed of thought, promise,” I told Grue half-heartedly, my attention drifting further away from meatspace.
Since Garcia was logged onto his computer when we nabbed him, I didn’t have to brute force past any security measures. So long as no Medhall Patrol IC decided to – or, more accurately, was driven by its guiding algorithm to take a closer look at me, I could piggyback off his credentials to act unopposed.
It wasn’t just surface level access, either. I discarded Garcia’s email and timetable in favour of diving deep into the spreadsheets and documents directly related to the running of the factory.
It was there, hidden amongst the distribution orders, that I found what I was looking for. Every week, the factory produced tens of millions of dopadrine pills. They were collated together in bottles of various amounts, packaged up on-site and sent off in distribution trucks to match orders around the world.
There was an easy pattern to the orders. Medhall didn’t deal with individual pharmacies directly, but they did have contracts with several large pharmaceutical companies to supply them with bulk orders for normal expected consumption. Those numbers were present week after week, year after year, stretching back as long as the factory had been operating. Orders might drop out or appear occasionally as contracts changed hands, but by and large those deliveries were short term, and together they accounted for seventy nine percent of the factory’s total output.
Most of the remaining twenty one percent left the factory sporadically, in quick bursts making use of spare capacity. They were often assigned at the last minute, and their destinations were many and varied. I knew for a fact that if I cross-referenced those destinations with local newsfeeds I’d find shortages, natural disasters, wars and any other short-term factor that might cause a temporary spike in demand.
It all seemed perfectly legitimate, but there was a single number that stood out. Nestled among the long-term orders, with a date stretching right back to the factory’s opening date ten years ago, was order number C-20. Unlike every other long-term order, it was comparatively tiny – amounting for zero point zero five percent of the factory’s total output.
In every ten thousand pills, five had been assigned to that order from day one. It wasn’t just the scale or the longevity of the order that struck me as suspicious, it was the number itself. Zero point zero five was far too regular, far too round. It was like someone had elected to skim a fraction of the pills, and their metahuman brain picked a metahuman-friendly number. It felt deliberate.
I didn’t have all the pieces, but I had enough to put things together. We’d stumbled across a long-term con. Someone in Medhall’s management, probably the factory’s General Manager, had set up a false order to skim off a miniscule fraction of the pills and sell them on to the Chosen and who knows else? The amount being skimmed was too little for corporate to notice, but the factory’s duty managers dealt with those numbers every day. They’d notice.
Enter Andrew Garcia, and others like him. I was sure that if I dug into the backgrounds of the other managers here, I’d find the same debts, secrets and kompromat that made for the perfect accomplice.
There was no point smiling in the matrix – it was a cosmetic affectation, the same as any other physical movement – but I felt the twisted and esoteric code that made up my persona almost singing in satisfaction.
Right before I was dragged back to Earth as Regent clapped a hand on my shoulder and loudly exclaimed “got him!”
I jolted, blinking away spots as I took in the harsh halogen glow of the office lights. Garcia was standing by the window, as still as a statue but with eyes that were still full of life, and maybe full of fear.
Apart from that, there wasn’t any sign of the spell Regent had cast. To be fair, I wasn’t sure what sort of sign I was expecting. After all, if the spell had caused his eyes to glow, or something, then this exfiltration wouldn’t stay covert for long.
“He looks a little… spaced out,” I observed.
“So did you, ten seconds ago,” Regent snarked back. “I’m in control of his body right now, I’m just not doing anything with it.”
As he spoke, Garcia seemed to stand much more naturally as Regent pulled on his muscles to create the microexpressions that I wouldn’t have noticed if it weren’t for his unnatural stillness before.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“And where’s Garcia while you’re in control?” I asked, not entirely sure I wanted to know.
“Oh, he’s in there,” Regent almost purred as he sauntered up to Garcia, standing inches away from the taller man’s face and looking him right in the eyes. “The body is mine, but the brain is still his. He’s looking out of those eyes, straining to break free. But he can’t, because deep down he’s just a weak-willed little-”
Garcia’s face twisted into a furious rictus, his arm spasming up as he knocked Regent aside before he charged right at me. I moved almost without thinking, a massive grey hand wrapping around his neck before I lifted and slammed him against the wall, holding him a foot off the ground with one arm as he kicked futilely against my legs, his hands wrapped around my forearm as he struggled for breath.
And, just as quickly, he slumped over like a puppet with its strings cut.
“Holy shit, Bug” – Regent chuckled as he pulled himself off the floor, sounding completely unharmed – “right for the throat? And here I thought you were a dork!”
I let Garcia go, but Regent made sure he landed on his feet rather than falling to the floor. I didn’t care; I was already storming towards Regent, ready to repeat my display on the puppetmaster, when Grue stepped in between us, his hand outstretched to block me even as his eyes were focused on Regent.
“There’s a time and a place,” he said, with a calm sort of fury, “and this isn’t either. You like to take it easy, Regent, and I tolerate that because there’s a good mage behind your bullshit. But it stays at home.”
“Want me to apologise?” Regent drawled, crossing his arms and staring Grue down in spite of the frankly absurd difference in height.
“Would you mean it? I haven’t heard an honest apology since I met you, and believe me an insincere apology from you would only piss me off more right now. Just sharpen the fuck up; we’ve got a job to do.”
Regent held Grue’s gaze for another few moments before wavering, his eyes darting down Grue’s body before he stepped away, throwing two pairs of hands in the air.
“Câlice, fine. New girl gets a pass. I know how it goes; don’t want to step on your patch.”
I took another half step forwards, only to feel Grue’s hand digging in deeper. He turned, looked me dead in the eyes, and moved his mouth in silent speech.
‘They’re just words.’
It took me a moment to get his meaning, but after a moment I relaxed the death-grip I had on my submachine gun. Regent backed down, but his pride wouldn’t let him go without a parting shot. So I just nodded; I could be the bigger person in more ways than just physically.
Grue was satisfied, and slid his gun back into the duffel bag, as I did the same a moment later. With a bit of luck, we wouldn’t need them from here. Grue slung the strap back onto his left shoulder, but left the bag itself open so he could reach in and snatch his gun if he needed to.
At the same time, I reached out to Bitch through the Matrix.
“We’re about to move out; the target’s under control,” I reported with a sideways glance at Regent, who seemed to be acting like nothing had happened. “Get ready to pick us up at the delivery exit.”
“Not the way we came in?” Grue asked as we stepped out into the corridor, with Garcia ‘leading’ the way like a good little middle-manager.
“That brings us past the admin block,” I explained. “There’s more of a chance we’ll run into someone who outranks Garcia.”
“Good call,” he nodded. “Let’s go.”
We moved as quickly as could reasonably be expected through the halls, as Regent controlled Garcia’s body with scarily natural ease. If I didn’t know he was the one doing it, I’d never have been able to tell; it was worlds away from the halting control he’d shown over the guard at the Yakuza freight warehouse, but maybe that was the difference made by time and the lack of gunfire.
My route paid dividends; the only people who passed us were dressed in the white clean suits of factory floor workers – who either nodded respectfully to our target or just didn’t make eye contact – and custodial workers in grey – some of whom actually looked away, no doubt worried they’d be snatched up for some shit task like they presumed we had been.
It wasn’t until we were two corridors away from freedom that the penny dropped. Two people stepped into view, one a man in an expensive suit and another in a business blouse. After a moment, I placed them; we’d passed them while we were waiting for Bitch to reach their servers.
To my horror, the suit smiled as he saw our target – a slick expression that didn’t reach his eyes – and he called out down the corridor.
“Mr Garcia! Just who I was looking for; I need to pick your brains about the next quarter’s production targets.” I couldn’t be sure, but I felt like there was a particular emphasis on those last words.
Is this the guy running the scam?
Grue and I shared a sideways glance. We both knew that we couldn’t afford to stay and chat. Regent clearly thought the same; I saw an almost imperceptible shiver pass through Garcia, like an actor struggling when forced to improvise.
So I took a step to the side – putting me shoulder to shoulder with Grue – reached into the duffel bag and pulled out my submachine gun. I raised it in a single motion, pointing it squarely at the corpo’s head and hoping he didn’t notice the way my aim was wavering.
Half a second later, Grue did the same with his assault rifle while Regent and Garcia both dropped down to give us a clear line of fire.
“Put your hands up!” Grue shouted as he moved out in front of the two humans. I followed, sticking just close enough to Grue that part of my body was hidden behind his. Instinctively, I let my attention drift into the matrix as I started pulling sprites together, but I was too slow.
“Shit!” I exclaimed. “He’s fucking wired!”
Whatever cyberware the suit had in his skull, he’d just used it to trigger a facility-wide silent alarm.
“Bad move,” Grue growled, raising his gun.
“Try me,” the suit stared back with the kind of confidence that could silence a boardroom. “I’ve got a platinum Valkyrie card. You do so much as break the skin and a High Threat Response team will fill you full of holes before you can say ‘clusterfuck’, tusker.”
I’d had about enough of this, and sent a wasp flying through the Matrix. It latched onto his brainware, with its open connection to the Medhall network, and flooded it with paradoxical junk code, overwhelming its processor and sending an impressive burst of sparks out the side of his head. He dropped to his knees, bombarded by sound and light that only he could see.
“You’re dead!” the suit snarled, his voice dripping with pain. “I’ll remember your faces!”
“I burned out your hard drive,” I said, feeding the audio into his chip to make sure he heard it. “Without it, I doubt you can tell one tusker from another. And there’s a lot of us.”
I raised my gun again, pointing it directly at the woman in the business blouse. She got the message, scrambling backwards in fear.
“Slot and run!” Regent shouted. “Let’s fucking go!”
We sprinted down the corridors like there was a dragon at our back, as the silent alarm turned loud and the doors around us started automatically locking as the building’s lockdown systems enacted their active shooter protocols. I took the panicked code of the alarm and spun it into sprites that flew beside us, invisible to everyone but me even as they chewed through locks and overrode others to keep away pursuers.
It wasn’t enough to get everyone, however; a pair of Minutemen rounded the corner with pistols raised. I found myself staring down two pistol barrels, knowing for a fact that I was too slow to react in time. Grue was faster, however, and their shots went wide as a burst from his assault rifle rippled across them, a diagonal line of impacts ripping through their uniforms with the last shot tearing a chunk out of the neck of the one on the right.
At the same time, one of my sprites alerted me to movement behind us. I wheeled around to see a Minuteman in cheap-looking armour raising a submachine gun at us, her finger frantically pulling on the trigger. One of my sprites was resting on the barrel of the weapon, having burned out its smartlink.
I grinned, raising my submachine gun, and watched as the rent-a-cop turned tail and sprinted away.
When we emerged into the loading bay, we came out fighting on all fronts. I’d already hacked the bay’s security camera and used it to mark the five guards who’d taken up positions to stop us, and Regent had made Garcia pick up a gun from the fallen guards. He led the way, his shots inaccurate. Clearly Regent didn’t have much skill with a gun.
Accuracy wasn’t the point, though. What mattered was that the hired guards weren’t prepared to fire into one of the managers of the building they were supposed to protect. It was a bit of a gamble, but it was one that paid off.
Grue was the one who was doing the most damage – firing brief, accurate bursts of gunfire that killed two of the guards.
I didn’t fire at all; I was keeping only the barest fraction of my attention on meatspace, guiding my body more through the CCTV feed than what I could see with my own eyes. Instead I focused on corralling sprites as I bricked smart weapons and suppressed any outgoing communications.
Inevitably, such blatant action drew the eye of Medhall’s security systems, and security IC began to manifest around us. There were too many of them for me to fight alone, so I drew a cloak of resonance around myself and set my sprites to attack anything nearby that was connected to the matrix, essentially tricking the simple programmes into thinking they were the priority target.
With the guards either dead or pinned down, we were able to sprint out of the loading bay and back into the rain, every footfall splashing through puddles as we ran towards the road. Ahead of us, Bitch’s van rounded the corner at full speed before slamming to a halt with the side door already open.
Regent had been pushing Garcia’s body to its very limits, and he practically threw our target into the van head-first. We followed, leaping into the van with only a little more care before Bitch sped off into the night. I kept one eye on the matrix for signs of incoming pursuers, while Tattletale hit Garcia with a stunbolt so that Regent could let the spell drop.
After five minutes of driving with no signs of any Medhall kill squads, I finally let myself relax a little.
“I think we’re clear,” I said, sighing with relief.
“Well, thank fuck for that,” Regent drawled, his voice hoarse from both physical and magical exertion.
“I’ll call the client,” Grue said. “No reason to hold onto this hot potato any longer than we have to.”
As he sank into one of the van’s seats, I watched the datastream leave his commlink. It was simplicity itself to piggyback off the call without either him or our client knowing.
“Hello?” Her voice was clear, but there were others in the background I couldn’t make out.
“Ms Johnson,” Grue began, “I’m calling to let you know we have a parcel for delivery. We’re eager to hand it over.”
“Really?” she asked, with the kind of excitement that can’t be feigned. “That’s great news! Hold on a sec, I’ll arrange a dropoff and wire your funds to your fixer.”
What followed was about two minutes of tense waiting, as Bitch drove us nowhere in particular, before she came back on the line.
“Okay, they’re on-route and expecting you. I’ll send you the address.”
As luck would have it, the meeting point wasn’t too far away; on the edge of Midtown, in the shadow of the overpass that flew over the old city centre and into Downtown. It was a vacant lot – a rare thing in this part of the city – but it was sheltered from the rain. My boots crunched on gravel as I stepped out of the van, followed by Grue – who was holding Garcia up by his shoulders. He’d come to on the journey, but still hung in Grue’s grip like a ragdoll.
Bitch deployed a couple of drones that fanned out to cover our perimeter, but otherwise we just sat there and waited for something to happen.
About five minutes later, two vehicles turned the corner and drove onto the lot with the rumble of wheels on gravel; a car, followed by a truck. Both were armoured, with metal mesh covering the windows, and both had the same paint scheme of black accented with yellow. However, I almost didn’t notice those details as the lights on top of the two vehicles flicked on, covering the lot with alternating flashes of red and blue.
Everyone tensed as five Knight Errant beat cops stepped out of the two vehicles, each of them anonymous in black tacsuits trimmed with yellow and full-face helmets that hid their features behind opaque yellow lenses. Each of them was armed, too, apart from one officer near the edge who looked to be some sort of mage, his taksuit accented with a tabard that bore intricate mystical designs.
The squad’s suits were linked together in the matrix, each of them equipped with an IFF system that broadcast their badge number, but without any name attached. The fifth cop, the one who’d been sitting in the back of the car, had a rank attached to his tag and a plate carrier over his suit. He was a lieutenant.
“Is this him?” he asked Grue, his voice altered by the helmet.
“In the flesh,” Grue nodded.
“Delta four, delta five, take custody,” the lieutenant gestured, and the two cops from the truck moved forwards. Grue handed Garcia over to the pair of them, and they cuffed his arms behind his back.
The moment he was in Knight Errant’s hands, the life seemed to return to Garcia. He struggled against their grip, shouting at the lieutenant.
“You can’t do this to me! I’m a corporate citizen!”
The lieutenant didn’t respond verbally, instead opening a pouch on his plate carrier and pulling out a small black device that looked a little like an epi-pen. Sure enough, he stabbed it into Garcia’s shoulder and held it there until it beeped.
“Andrew Garcia,” he began, reading out the information that had just been relayed to him by Knight Errant’s SIN database. “Registered citizen of the United Canadian and American States. Wanted for the murder of Jess Montrose. Listed as a fugitive and a missing person. No recorded corporate affiliation.”
At that, Garcia descended into a tirade of profanity, kicking and screaming as the officers dragged him to a cage in the back of the van. The lieutenant watched as they locked him in, then turned back to us – his expression inscrutable behind his helmet.
“We’re done here,” he turned away, walking back to the car. “Let’s move.”
We watched them drive off into the night, taking a murderer with them. I felt satisfied that we’d completed the job, but what surprised me was that I didn’t particularly care that we’d put him away. There were thousands of other would-be race heroes just like him, but that wasn’t the reason.
I kept thinking back to what I’d uncovered over the course of this job, kept thinking over the operation that had been run out of that factory. It was clear that Garcia had just been a pawn in a larger scheme, and I felt like I was only scraping at the surface of something big.
But I couldn’t dig into every secret in the world, no matter how much I might want to. Maybe I needed to think less like Tattletale and more like Grue; we’d got the target out, fulfilled the client’s request and very soon I’d have some nuyen burning a hole in my bank account. This was a win, plain and simple.