Moving, twisting, flipping and finally closing the map, Mack broke one of his own rules—using verbal communication during a run. Usually he preferred everything be communicated via one of Blackwater’s texting protocols, but he didn’t have time to text
Instead, his commlink picked up his lowered voice. “What the hell’s going on in there?”
Several seconds passed before Blackwater answered. Mack tapped a small grid icon in the lower left of his vision, bringing the map back up. He overlaid it onto his view of the building. “I got company—fucker was already in there getting the fucking file. Had to cap a security guard.”
Mack swore under his breath. “Cole—you and Maria—”
“I’m on it—I can see where he is. I’ll get the shit from him.”
Swearing again, Mack swiped the map aside and a keyboard appeared in the air, projected by his AR. He typed in a few directory commands for the building’s security system, and was able to tap a few of the cameras. “Visual’s still up. Only a few cameras out. Why isn’t Maria’s spell working?”
There was an uncomfortable pause.
The hairs on the back of Mack’s neck stood up. “Cole—where is Maria?”
“She’s moving just ahead of me. I’ll call when I get the bastard—”
“No, you get out of there now,” Mack interrupted. “If you’ve tripped something, those guards will already have called KE—and I do not want to tangle with them.” And if GOD showed up—that wasn’t a level of trouble he needed. When Blackwater didn’t answer, Mack switched channels. “Shayla, you been monitoring?”
“No sweat,” she said, perky as always—which never really fit the way she looked. Shayla was a changeling, a partial transformation into a troll. And she was the best rigger he’d ever hired. On his best friend’s recommendation, of course. “GMC’s already in position. Got a bead on the Knight Errant boys—about two minutes out.”
“Any sign of GOD?”
“Not yet. Might not have caught their attention.”
Yet. Mack refocused his attention on the physical world. He started jogging down the street. The GMC Shayla usually used for runs should be parked just outside the exit for a quick dive and squeal. He’d worn his soft shoes tonight—no noise on the concrete.
As he reached the block corner, he glanced down the street and saw the GMC parked inconspicuously along the opposite street, complete with a legal parking pass and record. All he, Maria, and Blackwater had to do was run to the van and get in.
Mack took in a deep breath, looked both ways, and crossed the road in a leisurely jog. To any passerby, he would look like any other middle-aged human working on his health.
Only he was doing it at night—in a not-so-friendly area of town.
Mack stopped halfway across the intersection as the GMC’s horn began squawking and its lights blinked on and off. What the—
“Boss!” Shayla’s voice was loud and unhappy over his link. “Someone’s hacked my RCC.”
What? Still in the street, Mack closed the distance to the annex’s corner. “Shayla—you’re telling me you were hacked?”
“My deck was. Gotta be someone in here with me. I can’t—drek—it’s gonna take me a few to reboot—”
“Shayla—what are you saying?”
“I’m saying KE’s less than two minutes away, and I don’t have control of the GMC.”
Mack moved away from the squawking van. Damn thing was going to draw attention. “Shayla, you gotta shut that thing down!”
“I’m trying—but I have to wait for the RCC to reboot. Gimme a minute!”
Mack stood halfway down the side of the building’s wall. Fuck. He took off toward the GMC. If she couldn’t do it remotely, he’d do it physically.
Chapter Five
Contagion Games
Main Game Host, Login Welcome Center
Thursday Evening
HipOldGuy read through the game rules as his living persona paced inside the Welcome Center. The environment alone made him uneasy. Whoever designed the landing platform had thought it would be a great idea to create an invisible floor and then surround the whole thing with a constantly swirling iridescent coiling of white and silver.
This is not what the Realms look like, he thought to himself as he glanced down between his boots. Not having a visible floor…don’t like that.
“Oh. Wow. This is awesome.”
Hip glanced over at the new player as they rezzed on the platform. Young female—or the persona was female, at least. No telling what the Matrix user was. Didn’t matter to him. She was shapely, with great legs, white hair, bright blue eyes and ample breasts. She was dressed in camo shorts, combat boots, and a tight-fitting top. She had some serious artillery strapped to her hips and what looked like goggles perched on her forehead. He didn’t say anything, and went back to reading the rules.
“Hey mister…does this game really make you feel like a technomancer?”
Was that a trick question? Hip looked back at her again. “How would I know?”
“Just askin’. So, how do we start?”
“You read the rules.”
“I hate rules.”
“Don’t we all.” But he continued to read and sort of watched her out of the corner of his eye. She grabbed the booklet with the game rules and sort of skipped through them. But she wasn’t actually looking at them. Finally she skipped ahead to character creation and he watched her make a technomancer street samurai (Seriously?) and buy up all her points in gear.
“Miss,” he said, and she turned to stare blankly at him. “If you’re a technomancer, you don’t need all that gear.”
“Oh please, Mister. Technomancers are just couch potatoes. Can’t actually fight. And I’m not gonna get ganked my first hour out. I want the gear.” She finished and jumped on the pad to teleport her into the game host.
Hip sighed and finished reading the rules. But what she said bugged him. Yeah, it was becoming common knowledge that technomancers were weak physically—but wouldn’t that be true of anyone who spent too much time in the Matrix and not enough in physical life? So why couldn’t a Matrix user also be healthy? There wasn’t a law against it. Then he thought about his own old and plump body kicked back in his recliner. Not moving. Not exercising.
Yeah, well…stereotypes be damned.
The game wasn’t that far off from present day—the player could choose to be a shadowrunner, a wageslave, though the game called them corporate executives. The point of the game was to slip in and become part of the roleplay. Submersive playing. He’d seen this type of game before—and he’d also known players who forgot to leave this kind of game to tend to the meat suit, and either died while online or got really sick. He pulled up a timer on his AR and set it to remind him to pull out in one hour. Should be enough time for him to at least look around the host, map it out, and see if he could use the information Rox sent him on where the deaths took place.
Of course, no one else but he and Rox knew there were deaths—the media was still reporting them as blackouts. Even the boards said Bellex had come out and apologized for the host crashing—and taking out nearby ones as well. But closer digging by Shyammo had revealed an interoffice memo at Lone Star about the deaths during that blackout. Twenty-seven of them. And not all on the Contagion host, but on the other crashed hosts. Hip was out to get more intel so they could upload the truth to GiTm0.
Hip made his character a KE Agent, complete with the latest commlink, and chose his apps carefully. Before he became a technomancer, he’d been a pretty damn good hacker, so even after he found he didn’t need all the gear, he still kept up with the latest versions and bug fixes. Still gave verisimilitude to his continued work as a hacker.
Once he had the map downloaded and the NPC players, group leaders, and storytellers per faction, he jumped on the landing pad and teleported to the host.
Though the Welcome Center hadn’t impressed him, the build overcompensated to a point where Hip ha
d to double check where he was. It was the most detailed duplication of Denver he’d ever seen. Down to the latest street name changes. Hip walked around for a bit, his OOC (out of character) tag on so as not to interfere with any ongoing game play. And again, the immersion was incredible, down to the smell. He was actually smelling Denver at street level. Hip had only been there once as a boy, but he remembered. “Profound” was the word he used later in life.
He took a detour to Genesee Park and stood outside the park’s fence. He pulled up the information on his AR, double checked his encryption and then checked the deaths again, each of them showing up as red dots. A cluster of three dots showed several meters ahead of him.
With a quick glance around, he moved to the left and entered the park, then continued to follow the red dots—
“Help! Someone!”
He and two other players nearby stopped and moved out of character as they looked at each other. Hip was pretty sure the others were thinking the same thing he was—is that a real cry for help, or part of the game?
“Somebodeeeee!”
The voice sounded familiar.
Hip and one of the other players, an ork, took off in the direction of the voice—straight ahead. Right where the dots had shown up on his AR. This couldn’t be a coincidence.
He recognized the technomancer samurai from the welcome center. What he didn’t recognize was what she was half-submerged in. It looked like one of the old tar pits—but this stuff wasn’t just thick and viscous. It looked like it, or something inside it, was…moving.
“Mister!” She reached out to him. “Pull me out of this!”
“Oh wow. That is some messed up code,” the other player who ran with Hip said as he moved past him to offer her a hand. “I swear, this game’s got one glitch after the other.”
Messed up code? Hip looked from the kid to the black tar, and then grabbed the kid’s shoulder. “Tell me what you see.”
“Where? Hey look, we need to pull her out.”
“I know—but tell me what you see.”
“I see a hot chick stuck in pixelated lag. It’s a glitch. Haven’t you been watching the vids? This host’s been having all kinds of trouble.” He pulled his hand away. “I say we get her out and then leave before it goes down again. I was here when it went out last time, and I still have a headache.” He leaned forward to help her out.
Everything in Hip’s head said LEAVE! Everything. “You don’t see her stuck in a tar pit?”
The guy shook his head as he reached out to grab her hand. “Naw, man. I see bad resolution.”
If I see one thing, and he sees something else—
Realization dawned on Hip just a second too late as he watched in horror. Something resembling an oily, dark tentacle slid out of that blackness and wrapped around the kid’s arm. He yelled as it dragged him forward, his feet pushing grass and dirt up in an attempt to stop himself.
“Hey, old man!” came another voice behind him. “Why’re you just standing there?”
Another player, also an ork, ran past him and tried to help them out as well—but more of those tentacles lashed out and wrapped around him. He drew a sword and hacked at it, cutting it off, but more came and wrapped around the ork’s waist, hips, arms, neck, and face. Hip watched as those same tentacles encircled the girl and the first boy who’d come to her rescue.
Their screams brought more attention, and more would-be rescuers.
Hip took several steps back. He had no experience to compare—no way of knowing what it was he was seeing. He broke his own protocol, compiled a recording sprite and told it to record everything in front of him. Every person that tried to help was pulled into that pit of thick black ichor. He watched as their mouths filled with it, blocking their screams, suffocating them until—
Someone put a hand on his shoulder. He assumed it was another player, giving him shit about not helping. But when he turned to face them—
The man was tall, with pale skin. He wore a shiny black trench coat and a skirt that puddled on the ground like the ichor. On his face he wore a gas mask that looked fused to his skin. The moving ichor of his skirt slid up his body, down his arm and over his hand onto Hip’s shoulder.
“There you are,” he said as the spreading gunk wrapped itself around Hip’s head. It blanked out his eyes and filled his mouth so he couldn’t see or speak. Icy fingers pinned his arms to his body as the ichor traveled down his back to his legs, until he was completely trapped in a cocoon of ice and darkness.
His last coherent thought—just as his AR alarm went off—was to tell the sprite to find Soldat.
And then, despite the black ooze filling his mouth, he screamed.
Chapter Six
Horizon Archive Annex
Kazuma was able to get the basement door closed and locked. But that wasn’t going to stop the wolf-hacker, just delay him and annoy the hell out of him at the same time. Before he could get far enough away, the wolf-hacker started shooting at the door from the other side. Making a lot of noise and large bullet holes. Whatever this guy was shooting with was actually coming through the door.
Kazuma stumbled backward, only barely aware he could see again without the need for the camera link. The spell was finished. With his bag securely draped around his neck and shoulder, he pressed himself up against the opposite wall, his breathing fast, his heart beating even faster.
Shit…
Boss?
Closing his eyes for a second, Kazuma blinked a few times to try and clear the fog that threatened to pull him down before mentally reaching out to retrieve the grid again. He was fading fast. A red line appeared over the blueprints, starting from where he was and leading to the south end and then through the closest exit. He tried to steady his breathing even as he reached around and put pressure against his right side, just below his ribcage.
Boss? What happened? Your vitals are dropping.
Kazuma’s mouth tightened to a thin line as he dared to move his hand to look down. It was hard to see the blood against the black KE uniform, but he knew it was there. And if he wasn’t careful, he’d start leaving blood drops all over the floor. A DNA trail to find. “I’m hit…I think it’s just a graze.”
Boss!
“I’m fine, Ponsu. I just need to use a slap-patch.”
Boss—those things are dangerous.
“I don’t have a choice—just make sure to get my ass out of here. Got that?” Kazuma managed to keep himself upright as he reached into his bag and pulled out a homemade slap-patch. It was a stimulant mostly used by runners, but he’d managed to learn the technology after reading ShadowSea and created a small set of them.
He peeled the backing away, grunting as he shoved the plastic into his pants pocket, and then hissed as he opened up his shirt and slapped the patch on his bare skin. Instantly the stimulant, absorbed through his pores, sent a burst of energy into his nervous system.
He was up with no dizziness. But it wouldn’t last. When the drugs faded—
So would he.
Orienting himself with the grid and where he was, as well as checking the position of the other security guards, he turned and ran down the corridor. But even as he headed to the corridor’s end, he heard the thunder of footsteps and stopped, pressing his back against the wall on the corner. “Ponsu—”
I see them. Recalculating.
“Ponsu—this slap-patch is only gonna last eight more minutes before I fall on my ass.”
Even as he spoke, the grid on the map shifted several times, Ponsu doing calculations faster than he could blink. The grid reappeared, the route glowing bright white this time.
Take this path. I calculate you should get there with one minute to spare—starting—now!
Kazuma pulled the Fichetti Security 600 from the concealed holster at his back. He checked the chamber. Loaded. Holding it in his left hand, barrel pointed down, he followed the grid overlay to the right and then down a corridor, another abrupt turn right and then—
H
e’d been so fixated on the route and the timer in the upper left of his AR window that he hadn’t been watching in front of him. He tripped spectacularly over something solid and unforgiving. Kazuma landed squarely on his right hip, jarring his wound so hard he saw stars through the stimulant’s effects. The Fichetti and his bag skittered across the dingy tile floor, the bag popping open and spilling his gear everywhere.
Cursing, he righted himself, taking in air through gritted teeth, and opened his eyes—
A pair of sightless, dark brown eyes met his.
With a sharp hiss he realized he was on the floor, face to face with a dead body.
She had a bullet hole between her open, staring eyes.
Kazuma scrambled back, grunting at the fire in his side, pushing himself along the dusty floor, leaving a smeared trail of blood behind. Using the heels of his shoes, he distanced himself from the body. He could see it was a female. Human. Dark hair, dark eyes, skirts and shawls. There were tattoos on her upper arms and along her neck.
Shaman? Mage?
He didn’t know enough about magic to know which—he only knew that sometimes tattoos could be the effect of magic. But had he read that somewhere?
But magic hadn’t put that bullet into her head. Had it been the security guards? A look around, and he spotted two more bodies—the two guards he’d spoken to before. The ork and the human. Both lay in pools of blood.
What the hell? Had the wolf-hacker done this? Was he insane? This kind of body count was going to draw a lot of attention!
Kazuma’s vision tunneled, and he braced himself against the floor, willing himself to stay conscious. What had he been thinking? For months he’d been so careful, using his abilities to just search here and there. Three submersions to coincide with his vacations. Refining his abilities. And everything brought him to this host. He didn’t think it was a setup—no one knew who he was. Not in the living world. In the Matrix, his name had gained a bit of notoriety among the other technomancers, primarily because of the information he brought them.
Shadowrun: Dark Resonance Page 3
