“Wait,” Slamm-0! objected. “I should be the one to get her out of there.”
Renault shook his head. “You’re controlling the host. I need you to follow the yellow line to the office with me. Preacher isn’t tied to the Matrix, and his magic is more than enough to get Netcat out safely. He’s the better choice.”
On the practical level, he knew Renault was right. And he was a cop—storming in and extracting were part of his job. But he wasn’t clear on something. “Why are we going in to arrest Powell in his office? Why not just wait and grab him with the rest?”
“It’s not just arresting him. I suspect there’s a tertiary host in there—I don’t know for sure, but it’s something we need to check out.”
“Why would he have have an extra host in there?”
Renault licked his lips. “Just a theory I have. We need to go. Are you ready?”
Everyone nodded.
Slamm-0! opened the door for them. Renault and he hung back to allow Silk to go in first, then Preacher, and then he followed last and locked the door again. On second thought, he unlocked the door, but sent the locked signal to the host—just in case they needed a fast exit—and then turned to follow the yellow line.
Chapter Fifty-One
Powell’s Office
Powell watched the fight from the host’s control, a simple riser he’d created a few hours before the meet ’n greet. Caliban returned, still puppeting his Bellex persona to oversee the final extraction, as he put it—wanting to see Soldat removed first hand as the dissonance overwhelmed him, as well as the white technomancer that had come with him. Having the extra was just icing on the cake, and put the AI in a good mood.
He liked it when Caliban was in a good mood. Less worry of another blackout. He and the other dissonant technomancers were afraid another one might garner the attention of the Grid Overwatch Division. Especially if enough Matrix denizens complained about illegal practices such as false subscriptions.
Powell had warned Caliban about such attention, but the AI didn’t seem to care. Since Powell had been chosen to head up this endeavor—at a substantial pay rate—Caliban’s interest had been centered on a host he’d chosen years before, when he discovered it rested in the path of a Resonance Stream. Not that the AI could actually see it, but he listened and watched as technomancers were drawn to it. Stood by as they disappeared for a time, then returned rejuvenated and empowered with gifts.
He’d told Caliban he hated not being able to see what he believed was Heaven in the Matrix, and when he first attempted the TechnoHack game demo and saw their rendition of a resonance stream, touting that it was created from the minds of technomancers who had seen them, Caliban was lost to his own desires. He returned to the game host again and again to watch the colors move. And somehow he came up the idea that if he could reach that stream on the backs of the minds of technomancers, he could touch the Resonance as well.
To Powell, it was ridiculous. And personally, he didn’t care. He had fulfilled his dream, which was so similar to his pet AI’s, and now controlled the very company his old friends once held. Now he stood on their backs as he took everything they had. And Powell had given them a much, much worse punishment at the hands of Caliban.
Everything had gone according to Caliban’s plan for nearly two years. The game brought in the occasional technomancer and trapped them, and the program told him where to pick them up. Until a few weeks before the Dragon war, when a shaman player in the game had actually given a prophecy.
“The Tempest will come and bring the destruction of the Sycorax child. The Soldier will come with weapons of truth, and Dark Resonance shall fall beneath the love of knowledge.”
Powell remembered the look on Caliban’s puppet. Sycorax was the key for him—the name of the mother of Caliban in the Shakespeare play, The Tempest. No amount of protesting could convince Caliban the prophecy was just something in the game. Not once he heard that name.
Then one night, while watching one of the lesser-known magic talk-trideos, a shaman had given the same prophecy. The Tempest shall bring the destruction of the Sycorax child.
Caliban had hunted that shaman down and killed her while trying to wring more information from her. And lo and behold, Powell had heard the second line of the prophecy himself while performing blood magic on a dead shaman’s blood.
Data bearing the name Caliban had been archived inside of it, flagged during Shax’s searches on the Matrix. Tetsu had showed up and claimed the data—that was bad enough. Then he’d escaped Powell’s plan, and that new recruit had mentioned Soldat.
Soldier.
And the AI had gone nuts again.
Now, with the technomancer within their grasp and the data not far behind, Caliban should find some peace, and Powell’s world should go back to the way it was.
“What the hell did he do?”
The declaration brought Powell out of his reverie. He stepped up beside Bellex and looked at the host’s grid. He slammed his hands on the console. How… Seconds ago the dissonance had Tetsu in its grasp and the tracer began.
And then—
“Powell!” Bellex turned to him, but pointed at the grid projected in the air. The starry night sky of the grid made a frightening backdrop to Bellex’s rage. “Did Tetsu just rewrite the code?”
“No…not that…I don’t think he can do that. Technomancers are susceptible to Shax and his people’s dark resonance. There’s no way he could have gotten out of it.”
“Well, he just did. Look at the grid!”
Powell did, but he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing. He flipped the screen back several seconds to take a closer look at what Tetsu did in order to free himself. And what he found both baffled him and intrigued him.
“Well?” Bellex said.
“It…it looks like he sacrificed a sprite to the dissonance by coding it to…” Powell rubbed at his chin. “You’re right. He changed the dissonance. Actually created a program—compiled a sprite—made from resonance that would attack dissonance in order to remove it.”
When Bellex didn’t answer, he looked at the AI’s persona and saw the dawn of understanding behind that face of dark rage. “He…cleaned up the code…”
“Looks like it. I’ve never seen a technomancer do that. They always succumb to the dissonance first, get buried in it and can’t move. But he—”
Powell didn’t see the strike coming until he was hanging off the edge of the platform. He quickly severed his connection and woke with a start, safely tucked into his desk chair, his deck in his lap. He yanked the wires from his datajack and took several deep breaths.
It seemed the logical thing to do before: correcting the code. Basic job for a programmer. To the non-technomancer, that was all dissonance was. Bad code. Go in and fix it. But the technomancer’s emotions seemed to be tied to resonance, so that the corruption was real and horrific.
He pushed himself forward in his chair to grab a bottled water on his desk and glanced at the camera feeds. The image jumped in a few of them—like a glitch in an old video—
Powell called up his AR, logged into his own personal security feed, and found himself locked out. Someone else had control of his host.
With a curse, the dwarf slapped his hand down on a big, red button to the right of his chair. An alarm klaxon blared throughout the warehouse.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Med-Bay
Second Club
Mack blinked as he reached up to grab the sides of his head. What the— Why am I out of the Matrix?
He squinted around at the med room, the one he’d set up for Shayla so she could learn how to treat their injuries. He had three beds and a used auto-doc. Kazuma lay still on the bed to his left, Delaney on the right, and beyond her, MoonShine. They were still under, Kazuma with no visible cyberware, and Delaney hooked up to a cyberdeck.
Their vitals were fine—but his own skull was an echo chamber of pain. He staggered out of bed and over to the room’s control pa
nel. Bringing up his diagnostic log, he found he’d been severed by an outside source.
“How…?”
His commlink buzzed, and he blinked to activate his cybereyes. Hestaby’s window came forward with a missive.
A demiGOD? Why…and how would she know this? He moved to the club’s access panel in his AR and connected, tapped into the security, and saw Slamm-0!’s added utilities, including a Sneak program. This would conceal their location from the demiGOD, but from the looks of things, the Club’s host had taken a few IC hits.
He called up to Bryce, the manager, who told him the lights had gone out twice already, and he’d given the patrons free drinks to keep them there. Making it seem like business as usual. No need to draw attention to a club that happened to lose power or grid access at the same time a demiGOD was delivering damage.
Mack wasn’t sure how long it would keep at it, either. He told Bryce to carry on and moved back to his AR.
He rolled his eyes at her attempt to hide Tetsu’s name.
He narrowed his his eyes.
She ended her connection, and he straightened up. His head pounded from the loss of connection, and he tried to remember if he’d actually hit Clockwork or not. After checking on the club and queuing up alerts to his AR, he contacted Slamm-0!
Several seconds passed before Slamm-0! responded.
Mack lost connection with the team. The only thing in his AR was a huge red triangle with an exclamation point in the center.
“This is so going south.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
Unknown Location
Netcat peeked out from underneath a fallen piece of tin when the world shook around her. The sky near the Resonance Stream turned from orange to black, and the stars in the sky burst into flames that rained down on the technomancers below.
People screamed and ran as everything turned in on itself. Netcat watched with a combination of terror and fascination as the huge image of a bearded, old man appeared in the sky. He leaned back and screamed.
She put her paws over her ears to protect her against the old man’s scream as well as those around her. Netcat shook with terror as she saw several half-formed personas rise into the sky, and get caught in a sudden funnel that formed in front of the bearded monster.
Abruptly, the air turned toxic and she started coughing and hacking. A man in a tattered suit and tie spotted her as he ran by and picked her up. She didn’t know whether to scratch his eyes out, or let him take her.
“Relax!” he yelled as he tucked her into his side like a football. “Caliban’s mad.”
“Mad?”
“Yeah. He’s done this twice. You don’t want to be seen while it’s going on.” As if to emphasize this, he and a few others pushed themselves into a ditch beneath the warehouse, beneath the horror that lived inside it. Netcat buried her face in the man’s shoulder and kept as quiet as she could as the world outside destroyed itself.
“He’s really…really mad this time,” said a voice from the darkness.
“Shh,” said the man holding her. “Keep quiet.”
“I wonder what happened.”
But Netcat didn’t care. She just wanted it to stop.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Contagion UV Host
Kazuma turned as Clockwork shot off another burst of bullets. He blocked three with his katana, and dodged the last one as Delaney fired at the drone. Unfortunately, it was small and annoyingly fast. He kept an eye on the fight between MoonShine and Blackwater—and so far Blackwater was in worse shape.
Finally, the ronin persona went down and stayed down.
But Kazuma’s relief was short-lived when another persona rezzed in just behind MoonShine. His shock registered with Moon when Kazuma yelled, “Look out!”
But it was too late. Standing behind MoonShine was the dissonant he’d fought with in his grannie’s house host. He recognized the black leather trench and the gas mask face and top hat. Kazuma parried another volley of fire as he watched Shax grab the back of the panther’s neck. The grass beneath them bubbled and spewed oil and ichor over the pair. Everywhere it struck MoonShadow’s hide it became black tentacles, pulling him into the pool of dissonance.
“Kaz, look out!”
He didn’t move as fast as he should have, and Clockwork’s blast hit him in the thigh. He felt the IC grab his leg, and realized too late it was White Ice. He cursed under his breath as Ponsu appeared.
Boss!
A Binder. It’s going to limit your evasion.
As if to prove the point, the drone fired again, and when he tried to evade, it was like moving through syrup. The fire grazed his upper arm and burned.
Delaney upped her game, starting a nonstop barrage of fire at the drone as he moved slowly toward a nearby tree. He made it in time to see MoonShine being dragged further into the dissonance. He was surprised to see MoonShine’s window pop up.
Kazuma resheathed his katana as Ponsu appeared again.
You got it, Boss!
He grabbed the small glowing ball of code as Ponsu tossed it to him. With a few taps and a squeeze he compiled a new sprite, this one as his own IC program, but this one wasn’t going to be simple White Ice. He gave the sprite the order, and it dove into the Wrapper. With a thought, the outer visual of the ball became something he’d seen only once, but Clockwork had seen several times.
Kazuma gave it the animation he’d seen it make before and when Delaney ducked behind another copse of gnarled trees, he tossed the now brown ball of fur into the melee and ordered it to go for the drone.
Clockwork stopped when the ball of fur, so much like his pet AI, came at him with its mouth open, as if happy to see its owner.
Too late, the hacker realized what it was, but the sprite inside detonated, and the drone was caught in the grey ice as it wrapped around his tiny machine persona. The program was like a hacker’s Gray Ice Blaster, but with a touch of technomancer. It would damage his persona as well as his cyberdeck, and show Clockwork a holographic image of Kazuma giving him a single finger salute.
The drone abruptly disappeared.
The reprieve gave Delaney the pause she needed. Kaz watch her fire at Shax, who wasn’t expecting it. He had some kind of shield up, but her bullets still distracted him.
Kazuma’s brain thundered inside his skull—compiling two sprites that close together, plus being hit with white ice, was taking its toll. But he took off at a slow run at Shax just as Delaney did the same.
One of her shots struck Shax’s head, and he fell backwards.
But MoonShine was still being pulled into the dissonance.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Warehouse Hangar
Silk halted just inside the hangar door and stopped herself from whistling. Wow. Four vehicles. A Shinobi, a Land Rover, a Honda
GM, and a Lockheed Strike vehicle.
Come to mama. She sized up the order of the rides from do-me-first to too bulky, and hit the Strike first. Disabling it took less than ten minutes. She’d just finished the Shinobi when the door to the hangar warned her of someone entering.
When her AR didn’t flag one of her own team, she ducked down in the cockpit a second before bullets tore a long line across the protective shield, shattering it. Covered in glass fragments, she made sure she was still joined to Slamm-0!’s PAN, and accessed the camera to the hangar.
It was the hobgoblin. He out of the Matrix, up and armed in the hangar.
Drek!
“I know you’re in there, bitch. I can see you…you know how?” He paused but she could hear him walking, breathing, and then laughing. “’Cause I got a purpose. I’m not only gonna sell that damn elf-bitch technomancer, but now I’ve got this Tetsu on my list. Seems he’s exactly what I’ve been saying technomancers are—dangerous. Untrustworthy. Did you know he actually managed to spoof my AI?” Clockwork’s voice echoed through the large hangar, making it harder for her to track without watching him on the cameras.
The problem was he knew where the cameras were, and avoided them. Silk typed a hurried message to Slamm-0!, which made it appear on the PAN to everyone.
No one answered her PAN broadcast, so Silk looked through the camera angles. She thought she saw something moving near the Shinobi, but when she ventured a look up, there was nothing there. Silk pulled the wires for her datajack from the side of her RCC and jammed them into her datajack, then pulled the connection up from under the dashboard and plugged them into her RCC. Even with the Shinobi turned off, she could see and feel the onboard mechanics, touch the datasphere connected to the engine.
“You see…I’m an observer,” the hobgoblin continued. “Not many know this about me. But I watch. I watch conversations. I watch people, even when they don’t know I am. And I like to watch their interactions. Now, I know the technomancer elf in the doc is Slamm-0!’s girlfriend. They even had devilspawn. A kid. And the moment that kid shows any sign of being like his mother—I’ll be after him as well. But I’m betting you, my sister-rigger, are Tetsu’s girlfriend. Yes, yes, it’s incredible that I deduced that, isn’t it? So I’m betting if I destroy you, I’ll destroy a little piece of him as well.”
Shadowrun: Dark Resonance Page 24
