“Why are we in the Shell?” Whippoorwill whispered. A quartet of mercenaries from the 3445 surrounded them, their APEX suits polished and gleaming. On either side a pair of armored cars paced Kat and Whip, corporate security guards working frantically to monitor the situation and keep area defense security systems active.
Turrets swiveled on the outside of the cars, sweeping their squat hybrid tech muzzles over the crumbling and half destroyed buildings of the shell even as the vehicles’ electronic warfare suites spat out enough interference to make Kat’s teeth tingle and the air smell like burnt ozone.
“We’re here to meet a friend,” Kat replied, walking down the center of the street. She could feel the eyes of Shell denizens peeking at her from window frames of the bombed out buildings. None of her observers made a serious effort to interact with her, but Kat could almost smell the fear, jealousy, greed coming off of them. It was the potpourri of the Shell.
She took in a deep breath, wallowing in the aroma. Her sharpened senses picked up the faint chemical scent of street drugs, oil from poorly maintained street cybernetics, rotting food, and the faint scent of blood lingering over all of it. The Shell was exactly as she remembered it. It was anarchy, but it was also her home.
“Friend?” Whip asked, raising an eyebrow. “Unless you’re trying to buy drugs that will fry your nervous system in twenty minutes flat, there’s no reason to come back here. The Shell isn’t even connected to a real financial market so the underworld is disappointing. There’s only crime and desperation here. I don’t think there are any real samurai groups active in this area.”
Kat just smirked. Actuators whined in time with each thumping step from the APEX suits surrounding them. It was ironic really, unless something strange happened, she could take down all four sets of power armor on her own, but when the predators that lurked in the dark spaces of the Shell looked spied on her they saw weakness, a victim. Even if the hulking battle suits were mostly for decoration, they kept away annoyances and distractions.
The real contribution to their miniature convoy came from the armored cars. It had taken a while, but human researchers had finally managed to reproduce a crude copy of stallesp energy shields. The devices took a ruinous amount of power, enough that fielding them would have been impossible without the early generation fusion reactors and high capacity batteries that the techs had also developed, but the result was impressive.
Alien scanners could identify almost any attack, be it a gunshot, magic, or poison gas, and the shields would snap into place immediately. The car mounted deflectors could only operate for about fifteen minutes before their power supplies would run out, but that was more than enough time for the rapid reaction team on duty to swoop in with hover gunships and level an entire city block around her.
The end result was that Kat could saunter down the street in what was more or less an active warzone, confident that snipers, assassins, and artillery couldn’t touch her. It was still safer for her to stay in the fortified compound that she’d built around the wreckage of the stallesp spaceship, but the other shareholders were watching and an occasional show of arrogance and force would keep the vultures guessing.
“Are you sure we don’t have any friends here?” Kat asked rhetorically. “The two of us lived in the area for a long time, it would only make sense if we still had some connections in the Shell, even if we haven’t talked in a while.”
Her eyes went from window to window identifying each of the people hiding in the nearby buildings by shadows on the cement and the scuff of their shoes as they shuffled about. Nineteen watchers. Mentally she honed in on them with her tower enhanced senses, trying to identify which of the observers were spies for her rivals and which were just ordinary thugs.
Some of the people barely moved. Kat only knew they were there by the one or two slip ups where they brushed against the floor or wall. Others made a racket, rocking back and forth while they mumbled nonsense phrases to themselves. It was a little hard to keep track of all of them at the same time, but that was what practice was for. Her enhanced senses were a perk that Kat had picked up three dungeons ago and she was still growing used to it, but for an infiltrator, it was like a ray of light shining down from heaven.
“No,” Whip’s dry answer was like a clap of thunder in Kat’s ears. Wincing, she dialed back the volume on her hearing.
“I don’t remember anyone from the area other than the ChromeDogs and a couple of the street urchins that I ran around with as a kid,” Whippoorwill continued. “They’re either dead, addicted to something, or have moved on to another city. Not really any pleasant memories that I’m excited to relive.”
Kat winked at her. A second later her eyes flickered, activating her smartpanel. After calling up the image she was looking for, Kat stopped.
“This is it,” she called out, pointing at a building that was better maintained than the other. In another life it had been a two story office building, but now the windows were covered in steel plates and the glittering red eyes of cameras and motion sensors glowed from its cracks and crevices.
Actuators whined on either side of her as the power suit stomped to a halt, and Kat beckoned for Whippoorwill to follow her as she approached the building’s front door. She looked a little closer as she approached the building. The ground floor was practically impenetrable with makeshift armor made from steel and cement covering up the decaying brick facade. About five paces up, downward-facing spikes thwarted climbers, and Kat could find a couple other spots where blades and intentionally sharpened edges would make things difficult for an infiltrator.
It wasn’t quite a fortress, there weren’t any gun turrets or armed guards patrolling the roof after all. Still, it was more than enough to scare off any toughs from the Shell that might try and make trouble for the occupant.
A faint whir alerted her to the camera on the second floor that was tracking her progress, but Kat didn’t pay it any mind, instead quietly mouthing the words to Arcane Armor. The second level protection spell was difficult to cast and maintain. Moreover, it wouldn’t completely stop a modern bullet. What it did was provide resistance to all kinetic attacks, enough to slow a blade or a pistol bullet enough that it would leave a blade but not kill her.
The reports didn’t say that there were any gun turrets or hidden snipers at the building, and the forcefield projectors from the armored cars should catch anything if someone were to try their luck, but there wasn’t any need to push it. She was here to look confident and domineering, a little extra secret assurance wouldn’t hurt anything.
“Oh good,” Whippoorwill said dryly, as she trotted after Kat, “we’re going to pay a visit to a slum king. Does this person have some intel we want or something? Even then, I’m pretty sure you have people to do this sort of thing for you.”
She cocked her head to the side, squinting in thought.
“Actually Kat,” she continued, her face brightening. “I’m pretty sure the people you use to gather information have people for this sort of thing. You’re a bit too important to get nostalgic about dead drops and selling intel as a runner.”
Kat flashed her girlfriend a quick smile.
“Things were simpler then weren’t they?” She asked. “I mean, they were simple because people were going to shoot me if I screwed up, so that part wasn’t great, but the actual jobs were straightforward. Pick up a datastick. Sneak it to a dead drop. Get the creds and return. I’d almost take a good old fashioned run over political theater, double crosses, and stallesp clones.”
“Is that what this is all about?” Whip questioned, an impish glint in her eyes. “Double crosses? Political Theater? You’re trying to get out of the conference call with Belle later aren’t you?”
Kat froze for a fraction of a second, a guilty look flashing across her face. Whippoorwill wasn’t entirely wrong. She was still going to make the call. After all, she needed help from Belle to solve the supply issue before it grew out of control. Despite that, she wasn’t exactly waiting for the starting pistol. Belle was a bit of a handful. Kat was getting better and better at dealing with the predatory woman, but she never walked away from one of their conversations knowing whether or not she’d truly gotten the upper hand.
“Maybe,” she replied, laughing lightly, “but first we have to meet up with an old friend. After all, it would be a shame not to say hi now that we’ve gone this far out of our way.”
She walked up to the door to the building. The fire door had been ripped out and replaced by something that looked like it had been taken out of a battleship. Thick steel armor glinted dully as Kat eyed the keypad. There was no way of knowing how heavy the door was, but it certainly looked like a rifle would barely scratch it.
Kat leaned forward, balling her hand up into a fist to knock on the armored door.
The slight fizzle of a crude circuit connecting was all the warning she got. Kat threw herself in front of Whippoorwill, Levitation buzzing into place just as the charges behind the door detonated.
It didn’t break or shatter into shrapnel. Fire blossomed around the outside of the door like a flower, lighting up the street as it launched the solid chunk of metal straight toward Whip.
Arcane Armor flashed with light as the door hit her like a freight train. Levitation left her as light as a kitten, so there wasn’t any resistance as the projectile picked her up off her feet and sent her flying away.
If Kat had tried to brace herself against it, the spell would have overloaded in a fizzle of sparks immediately. She’d seen it happen with attacks from larger monsters in the Tower. As is, Kad had earned herself a vital fraction of a second for her spell to bleed off kinetic energy.
Then, just as she slammed into Whippoorwill, the shield generators in the armored cars flicked on and a crackling web of energy grabbed hold of the door, halting its momentum immediately. The scorched steel disintegrated, ripping itself into dozens of pieces that hung, floating in the glowing net of power.
Kat rolled to the side, reaching down to pull Whip to her feet. She reached up to brush some of the dust and steel fragments from her face, the sound of heavy footfalls around the back of the building jolted her out of her stupor.
“Turn it off!” she yelled, barely noticing that her hand had come away from her face stained red with blood.
She took off at a sprint, the crackling field of light fizzling out just as she reached it. Shadow Step gulped down stamina, and Kat felt herself accelerate to borderline highway speeds as she blurred through the doorway and into the building beyond.
A bank of smart glass screens, some of them showing nothing but static, covered one of the walls just inside the entrance, but Kat didn’t bother to focus on them as she skipped through the entirety of the residence in an eyeblink.
Kat swerved around a corner and through the hallways and out into the alleyway behind. From the moment that she had taken off to her arrival in the trash strewn passage, maybe two seconds had passed.
More footsteps changed her direction, and Kat Leapt over a shipping container that someone had shoved into the narrow street. For the first time she caught sight of her quarry, a heavily built woman that was running toward a shed near where the alley opened up into the street beyond.
Dingy stone walls blurred past Kat as she caught up with her quarry in a second, just as the woman was pulling a tarp off of a heavily modified motorcycle that had been hiding in the shed underneath a pile of rubbish.
Her target took a step back, launching a hamaker that would take the average samurai’s head off.
Kat ducked under the punch. Immediately noticing that the woman’s left hand was going for a holster while she tried to distract Kat with the barehanded attack.
A quick jab knocked the other woman’s hand away from the holster. Kat spun, reaching up to grab the arm that was still extended from the woman’s punch. It was like her target was moving in slow motion. Twenty agility and sixteen reactions would do that. It wasn’t enough that she could dodge bullets yet, but against an ordinary samurai, it felt like they were moving at roughly half speed.
She gripped the woman’s wrist, yanking it downward to pull her off balance and into Kat’s back. Her target grunted as Levitation took hold an eyeblink before Kat pushed off the ground, rotating her body while still clutching onto the arm to send the woman flying.
Her target slammed into the concrete edifice a half floor above Kat with enough force to send a spiderweb of cracks through the grumbling structure. She hopped back, switching Levitate with Gravity’s Grasp on the woman. Weightlessness transformed instantly into almost 3Gs of gravity, yanking her toward the ground with bone rattling force.
Kat crossed her arms, fixing the groaning body with a disapproving glare.
“The bomb was a bit much Nora,” she said sternly. “I was just stopping by to say hi and see if you wanted some work.”
Bricks and concrete clattered as the woman shifted, groaning in pain. “Who in the blazes-”
“Kat?” Nora asked, incredulous. “Shareholder Katherine Debs?”
“Yes,” Kat replied, rolling her eyes. “I suppose I’m here both as Shareholder Debs and Erinyes today.”
“What’s wrong with you girl?” Nora groaned. “You’re a success story, and a key part of success is not to be in the Shell. This place is miserable. Shouldn’t you be out robbing a bank or giving a speech in a boardroom somewhere?”
Footsteps from in the house, both the soft steps of tennis shoes and the heavy tromping of armored APEX boots, announced the arrival of Whippoorwill and Kat’s security detail.
“I’m still waiting for an explanation for you bombing your own door,” Kat pressed, arms still crossed. “That was more than a little rude.”
Nora snorted, brushing some of the rubble off of herself as she struggled to her feet. “It wasn’t meant to be rude Kat, it was meant to kill you. How do you think I was supposed to react when a small army showed up at my front door? I made a lot of enemies as a samurai, and not all of them care that I’m retired. I just figured you were someone showing up to collect on a marker from the bad old days.”
“Kat!” Whip yelled, climbing on top of the shipping container. “You jumped right into that explosion! What is wrong with you!”
“I couldn’t let it hit you,” Kat said sheepishly. “I saw that you were in the path from the blast and my body just acted on its own.”
“And you let it hit you instead,” Whippoorwill replied sharply. “For all of your fancy attributes, reflexes, and magic, your nose is bleeding. The explosion almost got you. I need you to look before you leap. The shield probably would have stopped the door before it reached me.”
“But what if it didn’t?” Kat pressed back. “I don’t want to spend a week sitting by your side in the hospital just because I got selfish.”
Nora coughed once, drawing both of their attention.
“Kat and Whippoorwill,” the woman said with a laugh, shaking her head slightly. “Who would’ve thought that I’d see the two of you again, and here you are, quarreling like lovers.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Whippoorwill snapped, pointing an accusing finger at the former leader of the ChromeDogs. “You just tried to blow my girlfriend up. Don’t think that you’re going to off easy just because we have some history. Once I’m done yelling at Kat, you’re next on the list.”
“I suppose I deserve that,” Nora said with a shrug that ended in a wince. “Blazes Kat. I knew you’d done some serious leveling in the Tower. Pretty much everyone knows who Erinyes is at this point. Still, I didn’t expect you to be so fast. It was like I was trying to spar with one of those fancy motorcycles that the rich corpos drive.”
“Errrr.” Nora mumbled. “No offense. I knida forgot that you’re the queen of the corpos or something. Still, you’re the first suit that’s used a shoulder throw to fling me a story into the air. That’s a pretty big point in your favor.”
“None taken,” Kat replied. “Next time, please don’t greet me with shaped charges. I’d prefer it if our reunions weren’t quite so energetic.”
“Sure thing,” Nora responded, apparently eager to put her explosive faux pas behind her. “Now why was it that the two of you tracked me down anyway? I doubt it was just to chat about old times.”
A cloud seemed to pass over her face.
“Specially because old times didn’t end so great,” she finished, her voice flat.
“Don’t just ignore me!” Whippoorwill yelled, jumping down from the top of the shipping container. “I’m not done chastising you yet Kat! You know that Heather is going to get all mopey when she found out that you managed to get hurt again.”
Kat put Whip’s complaints aside, knowing full well that her girlfriend could easily bother her about her risky behavior for days on end.
“Well Nora,” Kat said with a smile. “I find myself in need of a fighting force that belongs to me. One that’s loyal and that no one knows is connected to my interests. I can provide funding, equipment, facilities, or anything else you might need.”
“So,” she continued, walking toward Nora and extending a hand. “What do you say? Are you ready to come out of retirement and give this whole samurai business another shot?”
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