“No fucking way.”
“Come on, Bitch, be serious.”
“She’s not touching my drones!”
The Shadowrunners weren’t in their shared apartment. I knew that much from the sprite I’d had follow Grue after I first met him. Instead, they were in an empty warehouse about a mile away from the one where the Yakuza were keeping their stolen containers.
I’d been brought here by a message from Grue, saying that they were preparing to launch the raid. Apparently what that meant was that Tattletale was scouting out the site in the astral plane, while the other three members of the team were engaged in more mundane preparations. Like linking me into their cameras to prevent me from getting surprised by another troll. Which was where the problems had started.
“Listen, uh, Bitch,” I began, awkwardly trying to find a way to make her handle sound a little less insulting. “I can’t help out if I can’t see, and I can’t guarantee there’ll be CCTV cameras to look through.”
“So what?” she snapped back. “Don’t need a Decker anyway.”
A datastream grabbed my attention, as Grue’s cybereyes yielded to my request for access. He, at least, had no trouble letting me piggyback off his optics, and I saw the remaining members of the Undersiders for the first time.
Inevitably, Bitch drew my eye. She was standing protectively near her drones, arrayed in various stages of assembly in front of the same grey van she’d used to rescue Tattletale from the hotel. She’d laid out a case of tools in front of them, and each piece of each drone had been meticulously set out on a stained sheet of cloth that kept them off the dusty warehouse floor.
Bitch herself seemed almost as mechanical as her drones. She was probably more cybered-up than Brian, and unlike him her cybernetics didn’t even try to mimic organic limbs. Her arms – what little of them I could see – were entirely mechanical, without any syn-flesh coating. They were gunmetal grey, and as far as I could tell they were meticulously well-maintained. Her eyes were similarly inhuman, with featureless camera optics set directly into her skull.
They looked like they’d been cheap when she bought them – most obvious cyberware is, for obvious reasons – but she’d clearly modified them since then.
Her outfit was about as practical as it came, and similarly looked like something she’d very carefully pieced together from whatever she could find. Her jacket was grey, military surplus, and had clearly originally belonged to someone taller than her. She’d rolled the sleeves up past her elbows, exposing her cybernetic arms, and the front was open, revealing an old Lone Star ballistic vest she wore over a black tank top. There were patches on the vest where she’d fixed up old bullet holes.
Her face was squarish and blunt featured, with auburn hair and a downright ferocious expression. She looked terrifying.
“Let her in,” Brian said, forcefully. “We need her for the job, and she needs to see.”
“What’s wrong with her eyes?” Bitch snapped back.
I wished Lisa was aware right now, rather than sitting cross-legged in a ritual circle while she scouted out the site through some magic astral projection nonsense. She’d swapped the dress I’d last seen her in for hard-wearing pants and a black and purple shirt underneath a long trench coat, armoured and laden with obscure magical items. Yet she still somehow managed to make it all look sleek and expensive.
“My eyes are miles away,” I answered. “Listen, they might have Deckers of their own. I can protect your drones?” I could tell it was the wrong thing to say the moment I said it.
“I don’t need protection from you.” There was venom in her words, but to be fair she did have a point. The wireless connection between her implanted control rig and its pairs in her drones was about as rock-solid as a wireless network could get.
“Bitch, you’re being ridiculous!” Brian said exasperatedly, while I looked closer at her network.
It was solid, sure. Good enough to keep out almost anyone. So I worked at it from another angle – focusing my attentions solely on the ancillary systems. Bitch had paid the most attention to the joints, optics and weapons, because those were the most vulnerable and the parts she used the most.
She doesn’t want to play ball? Well, fuck her. She can’t shoot me while I’m halfway across the city.
I let go of my hold on Brian’s optics, minimising the window while I reached out and grasped at the resonance around me. In and amongst the warehouses of this district, wireless networks were a lot sparser than elsewhere, but it was still on the public grid, still in the city. So I drew together datastreams and spun them together, as another sprite took shape. One I’d never made before.
I’d used sprites to slowly and methodically strip away security, but what I needed now was something a lot less subtle. Something that would hurt, and show that Bitch needed me. I wasn’t about to lose out on this job because she was living up to her name… and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t invested enough to want to see this through.
So I taught my sprite to attack, quickly and violently, and its form took shape with manoeuvrable wings and a needle-sharp stinger ready to stab malware straight into anything I sent it at. A hunter-killer, in the shape of a wasp.
It dove at Bitch’s GM-Nissan Doberman in a frenzied attack, slamming into her firewalls with brute force. I watched Bitch’s firewall respond along predictable patterns, the systems around the most vital areas coiling tighter and tighter in an attempt to keep out the wasp’s sting, even as other systems became exposed in the process.
I hit those myself, digging away at the drone’s autopilot. It had to be aware of its surroundings, but it also had to be aware of the locations of the other drones, and that was my way in; the wireless link between her network, one that was far from the systems her control rig touched but integral to the drone’s systems. A backdoor.
Bitch noticed, of course, but she was too slow to assert control of the drones. I’d already tagged the autopilot’s optical senses, and a second window opened up in front of me showing the view from the Doberman’s gun-mounted camera.
She wasn’t a Decker. All she had was whatever firewall she’d put on her drones. It didn’t matter how good that firewall was; one it was gone, it was gone, and there was only one option left to her. A moment later, the Doberman disappeared from the matrix as Bitch did what any luddite does when they come across malfunctioning tech. She turned it off.
“You fucking-” Bitch began, before I cut her off – kicking up the volume of the earpieces I was talking through.
“I fucking what? That could have been any Decker, and we already know the Yakuza has a good one on call.” Bitch’s drone finished rebooting, reappearing on the matrix with its firewalls reset. “How long was that? Ten seconds? That’s a long time in a fight, I’m sure.”
Bitch didn’t respond. She just stood there, scowling at Brian since she couldn’t scowl at me. His eyes were all over the place, darting between her and the drone. He knew something had just happened, but there wasn’t any visual tell.
“Now, ask yourself, do you want it to happen again?”
Her scowl deepened, and I pushed the issue by sending her control rig a datastream requesting access to the drone’s sensors. She didn’t say anything, but a second later I had a quintet of camera feeds at my disposal.
The three drones and the dashcam in her van were expected, but she’d also given me the feed from her own cybereyes. It seemed like the sort of thing she’d want to keep private, and I didn’t ask for it, but I wasn’t about to try psychoanalysing someone who was more than a little bit psycho.
“You know, digital catfights aren’t as fun to watch as real ones,” the last member of the team piped up from behind Brian, and as Bitch’s eyes snapped to him I saw him clearly for the first time.
He was human, like her, but that was where the similarities ended. Tattletale, at least, had dressed to fit her environment, but Regent could have been on his way to a club, with a silver shirt, white blazer and tailored black pants. The blazer was maybe a little stiffer than it should be, which suggested it had some hidden armoured fabric, but most of his gear seemed to consist of talismans worn around his neck. Unlike the more wild nature of Lisa’s magic accessories, there was a formal elegance to Regent’s gear.
Maybe they trained in different traditions?
Brain turned around, ready to say something to the obvious mage, but the sound of Lisa pulling herself to her feet drew him right back.
“Well?” he asked.
“They’re in the A2B Freight warehouse,” Tattletale confirmed. “Bug’s intel was right on the money.”
She dropped to one knee, dragging her gloved finger through the dusty warehouse floor as she sketched out a map. I could see the open main floor of the warehouse, with rows of shipping containers marked out, as well as several rooms to the side that were revealed as offices as Tattletale started marking out desks, tables and other obstacles.
“There aren’t any wageslaves on site,” she began, “but the company is legit, if small. They probably slip out the stolen containers along with legitimate freight. The employees must have gone home for the evening, which leaves ten guards on the premises.”
“More than usual, for a warehouse.” I could see Brian frown through the camera of one of Bitch’s drones – an Aztechnology Crawler made for snooping around on walls and ceilings.
“Noticeably more,” Tattletale nodded. “There’s something else, too. Six of the guards were patrolling the site, with two in what I think is the security office with the tag jammer, two on the grounds and two doing the rounds on the warehouse floor, but there’s something off about the other four. They’re all here” – she tapped a random spot on the map, right on the end of one of the rows of containers – “and they’re not moving.”
“It could be a break room,” I offered, but Tattletale shook her head.
“That’s not it. There’s something about them. It’s hard to put into words, but something is wrong with them. Astrally, I mean.”
“We have two mages, and a lot of firepower,” Brian said, confidently. “If there is something weird going on, we can handle it.”
“It’ll be harder to hack their systems while the RFID tag jammer is active,” I said, “and downright impossible to track the case.”
“Then that’s our first target,” Brian said. “We pick our moment and storm the office, then push onto the warehouse floor while Bug directs us to the right container. We do it hard and fast enough, and they won’t know what hit them. Any questions?”
Nobody spoke, and I watched through Brian’s eyes as he stepped back from the map.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Then let’s move.”
Bitch’s van was an armoured GMC Bulldog, easily large enough to fit the team along with the three drones she’d bought – the Crawler and the two Doberman’s, tucked away in compartments that, combined with the rest of her tools, took up the whole back third of the van. To my untrained eye, a lot of the gear seemed unnecessary. Like she could just take the van and drive off without leaving much of her life behind.
Grue and Regent were sitting in the middle third of the van, and the contrast between the burly ork in an armoured jacket and the waif-like mage in designer clothes was almost comical. There was a similar contrast in the front of the van, where Tattletale was leaning back in the passenger seat while Bitch focused on driving. She wasn’t using a steering wheel, instead piloting the vehicle directly using her control rig.
I saw through both her eyes and the dashcam as we drew up level with the gates of the freight yard. Bitch slowed for a moment, looking at the simple metal barrier, before gunning the engine and spinning the wheels left.
“Brace!” she shouted a moment before the van hit the gates, knocking them off their hinges even as the impact sent a juddering shock through the van. Something flew off the gates, hitting the Bulldog in the windscreen, but it didn’t even dent the glass.
Rather than slow down once she was clear of the broken gates, Bitch sped up, even as I heard gunfire pranging off the armoured sides of the van. In the back, Brian tightly gripped his rifle in one hand, with the other resting on the release buckle of his heavy-duty seatbelt.
The contest between a Rigger-customised, up-armoured van and the insulated sheet metal walls of an aging warehouse was an unfair one, and the wall practically disintegrated as the van slammed into it. Bitch hit the brakes, and the van came to a tyre-screeching halt in the middle of what might once have been a meeting room, if the half-shattered table that had been spread out across the opposite wall was any indication.
Bitch hit the door release automatically, and Grue was up in a heartbeat, throwing a grenade out the door even as he shouldered his rifle.
He wasn’t quite as fast as the Dobermans, however, which rolled out of the open doors of the van and out into the warehouse yard. I watched through the lead drone’s camera as Bitch guided its sights onto a uniformed security guard with tattooed arms, the crosshairs shaking with each shot as she pumped a burst rounds into him. The force of the shots jerked him backwards, and I looked away. With the perspective of the drone’s feed, it felt uncomfortably like I’d killed him myself.
Mere moments had passed, and Grue’s grenade had only just burst, filling the room with smoke. His optics cut through it like it was nothing, sounding out the edges of the room and marking them on his vision with a green overlay. It wasn’t perfect, and I did what I could to clean up the lines.
The others followed him, Bitch handing her drones over to the autopilot as her arm split open to reveal a hidden submachine gun. Her eyes were tapped into the same feed as Grue’s, with Regent and Tattletale’s AR glasses doing the same.
I watched through Grue’s eyes as a silhouette appeared in the doorway, with one arm raised. Grue didn’t even blink. He just strode forwards, raising his rifle and firing five rounds into the silhouette, his cybernetic arms automatically compensating for the recoil.
He stepped past the body without even looking down, even as Bitch left one Doberman to guard the back of the van and brought the other to her heel. Regent, for his part, almost lazily leaned out through the hole left by the van and, catching sight of the last remaining security guard outside, twisted his hands in a gesture that reminded me strangely of an old-fashioned puppeteer pulling strings.
I saw through his AR goggles as the guard fumbled, tripping, and a shot that might have hit the Doberman instead ricocheted off the ground. The drone’s simplistic programming latched onto the gunshot, tracked it back to its point of origin, and retorted with a sharp burst of gunfire that had the guard scrambling back towards cover, even as Regent kept causing her to stumble. It wasn’t enough to stop her completely, but it was enough to stop her from making it in time.
It almost looks like he’s toying with her; keeping her on the border between safety and death. It must be a limitation in the spell.
Lisa, on the other hand, was ignoring the battle entirely in favour of getting a closer look at the guard Brian had gunned down. Unlike the pair outside, this one wasn’t dressed in a uniform. Instead he was wearing the sort of padded red and green biker suit that was common among Lung’s Clan, with the arms knotted around his waist to leave bare a torso covered in tattoos.
“We’re in the right place,” Lisa said over the comm, with obvious satisfaction in her voice.
“The guards outside are dead,” Regent reported matter-of-factly as he ducked back inside.
“Good,” Brian replied. “Bitch, keep watch out there. Bug, anything in the Matrix?”
“Uh,” I stammered, realising I’d been so caught up in the camera feed I’d forgotten to do what they were paying me for, “one sec.”
I stepped back from the camera feeds and focused on my surroundings. My persona had drifted along with them like it was tethered, and I found myself in the warehouse’s sparse grid. It had the barest possible presence in the matrix, but there was still enough data to delineate the physical structure of the building.
I tapped into the team’s cameras again, overlaying their position onto the Matrix. I could see Bitch’s presence clearly – a mirror of her physical body, chrome and all, and Grue’s cybereyes let me see him as well, but I had to manually add in Regent and Tattletale. It wasn’t as good as actually being there and seeing the augmented reality with my own eyes, but it had the upside of a much smaller risk of death by gunshot.
Grue was creeping towards a doorway, letting the smoke cover his advance, and I drifted ahead of him, ‘stepping’ through the wall like it wasn’t even there. There was a guard on the other side, visible in the Matrix by his commlink and a smartgun linked to a headset.
“Watch out,” I said to Grue, even as I edited his cybereyes to mark out the guard’s location. Grue nodded, bringing up his rifle and firing through the wall, but I was already drifting off to the office where we were supposed to find the RFID jammer.
While A2B might have been a legitimate freight company on paper, it quickly became clear this office was nothing more than a paper-thin smokescreen, and that if they ever managed to snag any genuine contracts it wasn’t because of any deliberate effort on the company’s part.
I’d seen corporate offices before – albeit rarely, and never for anything bigger than a local business – and each of them was a hub of neatly ordered Matrix devices as outsourced workers remotely interacted with domestic staff on shared documents that had to be supported from multiple computers at once. The warehouse might as well have been dead in comparison, with only the bare minimum needed to keep the lights on.
It meant that the room full of matrix-linked gear, emitting steady pulses of datastreams designed to soothe the twitchy programming of any number of RFID tags, stuck out like a sore thumb. This close, it was even affecting my presence. I could feel it draining away at my connection to the matrix, damping down the link between my body and my persona.
“Jammer’s here,” I said, marking the location in Grue’s optics, “but I can’t touch it remotely. You’ll have to shut it down manually.”
“Understood,” he said even as my attention was grabbed by a strange flow of data in the either.
“Look out!” I shouted, just as a heavily-armoured figure knocked down the door. I watched through Grue’s eyes as a samurai barrelled down on him, its arms playing host to integrated blades that slashed down at the ork. The matrix revealed the mechanical form beneath the exterior – a bipedal Ares Duelist drone.
Grue ducked beneath one blade and caught the other on his rifle – the monofilament edge cleaving through the gun before becoming lodged somewhere in the middle. With his free hand, Grue delivered a withering blow to the drone that had it staggering back, its gyroscopic subroutines struggling to keep it upright.
I abandoned the feed to face the drone in the Matrix, seeing the same samurai rendered in digital space by Ares programmers eager to get that brand recognition across. It had no eyes for me, of course. It was built for meatspace, and only had a matrix presence to allow it to be linked into a network.
It didn’t even react as I pulled together a web of resonance, collection it together into a spike that resonated with potential energy. As the drone moved to strike the now-unarmed Grue, I pounced, driving the spike into the machine’s matrix presence.
The effect was immediate, the drone’s leg seizing up as it struggled to cope with the damage I had done to its systems. Inside its chassis, fuses blew and circuit boards sparked, and Bitch seized on the opportunity, her Doberman finishing off what my spike couldn’t touch.
I saw a last datastream leave the drone, heading for another in the next room, out of the Shadowrunner’s sight.
“Got one more!” I reported.
“Mark it,” Grue said as he drew his smart pistol, pointing it squarely at the wall.
The drone was quickly wrapped in datastreams that broadcasted its position through walls, and Grue’s smartlink software latched onto that signal like a moth to a flame. His pistol was a bulky thing, and the crack of each shot was followed a microsecond later by the sound of microscopic jets lighting up on each bullet, guiding them effortlessly to the drone’s most vulnerable points.
Each shot hit with the force of an eighteen-wheeler, with the first shattering the drone’s kneecap and the second and third pulping the chestpiece and the vital control circuitry within.
“It’s down,” I confirmed, as Grue lowered his Ares Predator. “I can’t see any more drones.”
“Sorry I missed them,” Tattletale said, hanging back behind Bitch’s drone and Grue. “Drones don’t have an astral presence, but I should have expected that.”
“Not your fault,” Grue replied as he moved up to the door. “That’s three guards down. Have the four unusual signatures moved at all?”
Tattletale paused for a moment, resting her palm against the wall. Grue’s cybereyes flickered for an instant, but not enough that he would notice.
“No,” Tattletale answered, sounding concerned. “Do you think…”
Regent snapped his fingers, grinning with the satisfaction of someone who’s solved a difficult puzzle with no effort at all.
“Bunraku dolls!” he exclaimed, and I felt physically sick. Sex workers implanted with tech that overwrites their mind, keeping them as unconscious puppets ready to be loaded with whatever software the ‘client’ wants.
“You can’t leave them there,” I exclaimed, and for the first time I actually wished I was anywhere other than my apartment right now. If I was there, I could open up their shipping container myself and set them free, rather than appealing to the morality of mercenaries.
Grue was hesitant, saying nothing, and my heart sank.
“There’s no harm in it,” Tattletale said to her boss. “We’re not hauling anything large away with us, and even if we don’t bring them in the van we can still send a tip-off to Knight Errant. It can’t hurt our reputation.”
“Fine,” Grue conceded, even as he kicked down a door, firing a pair of shots into a yakuza thug who’d been trying to sneak up with a shotgun. “But we take out the jammer first.”
The warehouse floor was a bare expanse of shipping containers, stacked two high in places. They bore the logos of dozens of different companies on the side, great and small, and some had been opened up already, though I couldn’t tell if they were being loaded or unloaded.
Inevitably, my eyes were drawn to the container I knew contained the dolls. The Shadowrunners paid them no mind, with Bitch taking position at the entrance to the warehouse’s small office while Grue prepared to lead the way in. He paused at the threshold, waiting for Tattletale to give the nod, before throwing his shoulder against the door and stepping in with his pistol raised.
The two Yakuza goons inside were clearly a cut above the hired goons outside, with one dressed in a pinstriped white suit and the other wearing mechanic’s overalls. Both had their hands up, but the mechanic had an implanted commlink. I took a closer look, peeling back the layers of his defensive.
“Grue, the mechanic sent an alert.”
“Unwise,” Grue growled, and despite not hearing what he was replying to the pair of them shrank in their seats, “but not unexpected. Tattletale, secure them.”
As Tattletale strode forward with a pair of zip-ties in her hand and a predatory grin on her face, Grue turned and fired a single shot into the signal jammer. In an instant, the matrix became filled with dozens of competing RFID tags, each sending off datastreams in seemingly every direction.
“The matrix just lit up like a Christmas tree,” I remarked, even as I picked out the needle in the haystack. “I have the right box, but there’s no way Knight Errant won’t respond to this.”
“Then we won’t have to call them for the girls,” Grue remarked, stepping out of the office.
I was about to respond when I was suddenly hit by a burst of crippling pain, feeling like my soul was being torn from my body. What’s worse was that I could feel my physical body suffering as well, as the biofeedback built into the programme piggybacked off my connection.
“I think you’ve got bigger problems to worry about,” a distorted voice spoke over the Runner’s comm network. My persona shrank in on itself, my digital presence flickering. Another persona drifted past me, virtual hands caressing my shoulder before she flew up into the centre of the space. She’d deliberately overlaid her persona onto the team’s optics, letting them see her as clear as if she were standing there in front of them, and her Decker handle was burned into every scrap of code. Bakuda.
“You’re fucking with my operation,” she said, and I looked up to see a figure wrapped in a cloak of living smoke, with a gas mask in place of a face. The lenses of her mask glowed with a baleful red light, and the matrix around her shimmered as she took control of the local network.
“I don’t think I can allow that.”
The doll’s shipping container was torn off its hinges as a quartet of metahumans lumbered out of it, each of them tied to Bakuda by leashes of data. There was a female ork, two male orks and a lumbering male troll, each one of their bodies split apart and held together by invasive cyberware.
“I suppose this is as good a time to test the prototypes as any,” the Decker gloated. “Honestly, sometimes I pity my peers. They see a device that can overwrite a subject’s mind, turning them into anything so long as it can be programmed and put on a chip, and what do they do? They use it to get their dicks wet.”
She sighed, shaking her head melodramatically before gesturing towards the team.
“Kill them.”