Stranger Souls

by Jak Koke

  Axler, Grind, and McFaren stood in the small white-walled room with two other people—clinic techs who were performing a preliminary scan on Axler and Grind to see what 'ware they already had. Jane had fabricated identities for them, and she had bribed a series of people to get this interview. Ostensibly to schedule cybermantic surgery.

  Axler was large for a human, though nicely proportioned—long legs, narrow waist, and square shoulders. Very attractive with wavy blonde hair, doe-brown eyes, and a nice smile. Very deceptive. She liked to lull her opposition into a sense of over-confidence by using her demure physical appearance. All of Axler's chrome was discreet and extremely well-hidden. Just like any emotions she might once have had. Despite her appearance, Axler was hard and remote—an ice queen, cold and frosty at all times. Her vitals indicated she was cool and collected, not nervous at all that the clinic technician was examining her.

  Grind was the other samurai. A dwarf with enough testosterone for a troll, Grind's heart raced as he waited next to Axler. Waited like a racehorse in the gate for the technician to finish up. Grind had chocolate-brown skin, scarred from too much combat, and tightly curled black hair on his head and neck. His huge muscles were augmented with synthetic materials, and Jane could swear that his male ego was bioware-enhanced. Unlike Axler, Grind's cybernetics were obvious and designed to stand out. Especially his metal arms and the articulated limb in his chest, which acted like a third arm. It was all designed to intimidate.

  Both Axler and Grind already had as much chrome as they could cram into their bodies without losing their spirits, or whatever the mages called it. Jane didn't know the ins and outs of the magical mumbo jumbo, but the experts said that too much chrome could kill you. They said that a body without enough original flesh could lose the ability to hold on to its spirit.

  Until cybermancy came along that was. Some delta clinics hired mages who, for the right amount of nuyen, could perform rituals that allowed the installation of machinery and metal beyond the natural limits of flesh. Beyond the pale.

  This facility was reportedly one of those clinics, and Jane had managed to convince the admissions subsystem that these two had the need and the credit to undergo the procedure. A ruse to get inside.

  According to their System Identification Numbers, the two samurais, Axler and Grind, were working as proactive security for Pyramid Operations, Aztechnology's California alias. Jane had found it easy to tweak the data in the California operation. Communication between it and the central megacorp was often delayed because Aztechnology couldn't legally do biz in California. Thus the transfer of data between the two went through a series of data-laundering hosts located in Malaysia and the Cayman Islands.

  McFaren held the SIN for their supervisor. He was the team mage, a human with a dimpled smile and wispy blond hair that was thinning on top. McFaren was a quiet man, but a brilliant mage with a number of unique spells he'd created for himself. He seemed to be at peace with the universe as he watched the labcoats scan Axler. Jane didn't have any vital statistics on him, because he refused to wear electrodes, but she did have a jittery video feed that came through a micro-camera on his vest; he didn't have any cyberware.

  The final member of her team was Terr Dhin, the ork rigger who waited outside the delta clinic. Dhin was an ork of uncommon tactical skill; an excellent pilot of almost any sort of vehicle, and an uncanny mechanic. The feed that Jane got from him was actually from the helicopter he was rigging. She got the distorted reality through the Northrup Yellowjacket's sensors and cameras. Showing nominal activity on the small airstrip outside the electrified perimeter fencing.

  This was the best team Jane had ever worked with, and she'd been with them since Dunkelzahn had hired her—over five years, an eternity in the biz of covert ops and shadow-runs. They operated under the legal identity of Assets, Incorporated—a real corporation secretly owned by Dunkelzahn. They were extremely competent, and Jane trusted them to get the job done. They responded to her direction even though she wasn't with them in the flesh.

  Most shadowrunning teams didn't understand that Jane often had a clearer picture of their situation than they did.

  That when data from the entire team was combined in her command center, she had a better conception of the reality of the environment than any one of her team. Virtual could be more real than real.

  Axler and team understood that; they trusted Jane. It was an arrangement that gave them the ability to accomplish runs that would otherwise require a much larger, a much more unwieldy, task force.

  Jane took a deep breath. Her team was in position; it was time to scan the opposition. "Three minutes to stage one," she said to them, the encrypted electronic pulses of her voice piggybacking on telecom calls to their Local Telecommunications Grid. Then, after she'd confirmed that they'd each received her message, she dove into the Matrix.

  Sliding from her riveted steel box into her persona as she fell, sensation of weightlessness for an instant. Then popping into solidity as her persona hardened around her—a blonde woman with exaggerated feminine features. Tight red leather pants and matching jacket stretched across her skin. The image was obviously designed to give other deckers the wrong impression. What shadowrunner with any sort of rep would have a corporate biff for a persona?

  Jane mentally punched herself from Dunkelzahn's private LTG through the fiber-optic conduits into the Tenochtitlan Regional Telecommunications Grid, breathing in the crisp digital air of the Aztlan Matrix. Most of the RTG followed the standard iconology of UMS—Universal Matrix Specifications. Planar constructs and semi-transparent geometries glowed with smatterings of neon and chrome, a digitally precise reflection of the real-world computer systems.

  Pyramidal structures littered the Tenochtitlan electronic datascape, but two were much larger than the others—giant step-pyramid constructs. Jane knew them well and avoided even passing close. One was the Aztechnology headquarters and was protected with the sort of Intrusion Counter-measures befitting the paranoid megacorporation. IC also protected the other—the Great Temple of Quetzalcoatl. Fortunately, neither was her current destination.

  Jane mentally held her breath for three beats as she triggered a hidden System Access Node. A "vanishing SAN," in decker parlance. Her code worked like a fragging voodoo charm and the node materialized. It looked like a giant hand, shimmering against the black fabric of electronic space, palm outward, fingers spread wide.

  Time to burn some code, Jane thought. Then she rocketed toward the giant hand. At the last second, just before connecting with the massive palm, she activated a small smart-frame—a morsel of programming that would remain on this side of the vanishing SAN and trigger it after three hundred seconds if her jamming code failed to keep the hand open long enough for her to get back out. Then she was through, logging on to the SAN and blasting down the private dataline to the host's location in Panama. Chill as snow.

  From the outside, the host system looked like a human body, an intricately detailed man with white skin, brown eyes, and curly hair. The man wore a tailored corporate suit that shifted colors as she circled it. Going from iridescent blue to green to shimmering red. Jane had come here once before to scan the system for Dunkelzahn, but she hadn't tried to log on.

  An eerie sensation crawled across her just then. A faint burning along her skin as though she were being watched.

  She spun around, attack programs at ready. But nothing was there. She probed the whole grid, but came up empty. Nothing but the cold emptiness of Matrix space.

  And still the sensation stuck to her like a tingling. Like all the hairs on her skin stood straight up. She tried to shake it away, with no luck. Must be paranoia, she thought. There is no such thing as a ghost in the machine.

  Jane engaged her masking utility, and her persona assumed the guise of the sculpted system, transforming from sexy biff to a large white blood cell. She watched data-packets change from the UMS octahedron into red blood cells or tiny plasma particles as the host imposed its metap
horic representation onto her deck. The data particles formed precision lines, flowing like blood into the host through holes in the wrists of the giant man.

  Jane stepped into the flow and entered the body, logging on as a routine Aztechnology request for security status. The surface ice scanned her code, looking like a huge, trisected blood valve in front of her. Then it opened and let her in.

  The whole process took less than half a second. Null strain.

  Inside the host, the sculpted imagery continued with the body theme, but with a twist. Organs seemed to float in a soup of sanguine fluid, haphazardly connected. A massive heart pumped data packets through artery lines to all the organs. Kidneys, liver, and brain hung in the surrounding space. No lungs.

  Her analyze utility recognized the different organs as subsystems on the host, supposedly in charge of different functions. She pulsed up to the brain, its ventriculated lobes looming a dull pinkish gray before her. She followed the flow of data packets and attempted to access the subsystem using her security request identity once again. No time to lose.

  Two heartbeats passed before she was inside. Too long, she thought. Might have tripped an event trigger.

  Once inside she searched for a datastore, and found it with her analyze program a moment later, hanging like a massive upside-down ganglion. She spooled out the dumbframe she had programmed, ordering it to scan for recent admissions to the clinic, while she swept over all the files by date. In less than ten seconds the dumbframe had come back with seven entries. None of them matched Ryan.

  Frag me raw. Jane still had no direct evidence that Ryan Mercury, aka Quicksilver, was inside the clinic. McFaren and two other mages who had worked with Dunkelzahn had used some of Ryan's tissue to locate him with ritual magic. McFaren was sure Ryan was inside, and Jane trusted him, but she still wanted visual proof. She wanted a camera image of him.

  Abruptly, she noticed something as she accessed the room logs. One of the rooms, D307, had been activated in the last day. The locks had been accessed, the machinery and sec cameras powered up. D307 had experienced a great deal of activity, but no official entry was made. That must be it. She decided to check the internal camera records.

  A huge macrophage-like construct swooped down upon her as she detached from the ganglionic databank, trying to sleaze her way out of the brain subsystem.

  "User Identify," it said.

  "Decoy," she told her dumbframe. Then as she turned to the ice in front of her, transferring her bogus security clearance, the dumbframe shot past, heading back toward the datastore.

  The ice moved to intercept the dumbframe. And Jane used the split-second to unleash a massive attack program against it. In the sculpted reality, her attack looked like a tapeworm, spooling out grotesquely from her persona. It coiled around the macrophage like a flattened python. And just as the ice destroyed her dumbframe, the tapeworm crushed it. The IC fragmented and disappeared.

  Then she was shooting into the security subsystem before more ice could pin her down. This subsystem looked like a cancerous mass at the base of the host's spine. And she quickly learned that it was on passive alert. She double-checked her best masking and armor before attempting to give the subprocessor the commands that would let her see the camera records. Everything proceeded without a hitch until she specifically requested the trideo records for room D307.

  Abruptly, a macrophage and two symbiote-looking constructs blipped into existence around her. The symbiotes looked like bacterial cells with reinforced walls and huge glycoprotein armament, and she didn't need her analyze utility to tell her that they were black ice. The utility only confirmed it, and mentioned that it was psychotropic in nature.

  Fragging wonderful. Black ice could kill by inducing lethal biofeedback in a decker's physical brain. Heart stopping, brain creasing to function as the victim convulses into a series of seizures. Jane had seen it happen once, and that had been one time too many. Psychotropic black ice could do far worse than kill. It planted subliminal fears into the decker's mind. These ranged from relatively harmless phobias like aversion to entering the Matrix all the way up to mania and paranoia, which could result in the decker jacking out and going berserk, killing everyone in the immediate vicinity. She did not want this ice to touch her.

  She had just the thing. One of her best attack programs. She launched it, watching the code materialize in front of her, looking like a small star, its light dim. She activated her armoring at the same time as she ran the sunscreen utility that protected her from the bomb. When it went off a microsecond later, brilliant shards of light erupted into the close space, radiating out from the lantern like a small sun.

  The macrophage simply vanished under the onslaught, and holes appeared in the reinforced cell wall of one of the symbiotes, but the other looked nearly unscathed by the attack.

  Some fragging robust armor on that code.

  The undamaged symbiote spooled out a tendril of DNA, which coiled in the space above it. The Matrix equivalent of monowire. It whipped toward her, its edge sharp as honed diamond. She had no time to dodge, and the DNA whip crashed into her armor. Pain shot through her shoulder, and that section of armor disintegrated.

  Two more symbiote ice constructs appeared. The system had bounced up to full alert. Drek! Three and a half against one is not great odds, she thought. Time to hide.

  She formed words in her mind and sent them off as data-packets. "Axler," she said, "it's highly likely that target is located in D-wing. Up one level. Room D307."

  Then she executed her escape sequence alpha. First, she retreated from the ice in a quick spurt, taking another hit from the DNA whip as she went. Second, she activated a barrier program, watching it form a transparent wall behind her. It wouldn't withstand more than one or two attacks, but it didn't need to. Its purpose was to shield and slow.

  She spooled a smartframe into being next to her. The frame's persona matched hers exactly, a dataclone, and it was outfitted with her best evasion algorithms. As a final bit of tinkering, she crossloaded her datatrail info so that the smartframe would be able to backtrack and escape the system. She didn't expect it to reach log-off, but at least the retreat would appear genuine. It might just fool the ice.

  And finally, she engaged a new masking utility that copied the surface sculpting of the data conduit and transformed her own persona into an exact replica of the wall. She pressed herself close and mentally crossed her fingers. If this didn't work, she was nearly out of options.

  The symbiotes crashed through the barrier just as her smartframe bludgeoned its way out of the security subsystem. Jane's pulse roared as the ice plowed past, not even hesitating, flowing by without so much as a pause to analyze her.

  Sweet fragging awesome! This was why she decked.

  Jane waited, doing nothing for six long seconds, an eternity in the Matrix. Then she carefully ran a medic utility to heal the damage dealt by the DNA whip. The utility repaired the damage to her persona and her armor. And when she was certain that the black ice was completely gone, she slid back into the subprocessor CPU of the security subsystem. The machine had canceled active alert, supposedly because the black ice had caught and decimated her smartframe decoy. This time in, Jane did not try to access the camera logs for room D307; they were likely still too hot. Instead she executed a control slave command on the clinic's general video feed.

  The CPU cranked through her request without a hiccup, and she was in, searching for her team on the security cameras. Axler, Grind, and McFaren were no longer in the examination room, and she didn't see them waiting in the large hall that served as a common area and cafeteria of sorts.

  Jane quickly searched the halls for her team, but came up with nothing. Which was good because it meant they were probably hidden under magic invisibility provided by McFaren. She just hoped they hadn't been caught. If they were being interrogated in one of the high-security areas, she wouldn't be able to locate them through these cameras.

  One more thing to do before lo
gging off. Her run counter indicated on-line time was up to 245 seconds. That cyber-combat took too many fragging cycles. It was unlikely that her jamming program would still be holding the vanishing SAN open, and she had fifty-five seconds before the smart-frame issued the trigger sequence again.

  She used the time to implant some data into the security banks. The retinal and print-scan data from her team members, complete with false identification. The next check against any sort of incremental backup protocol would wipe the new records, but until then, maybe Axler, Grind, and McFaren would have an easier time getting through security checkpoints.

  She was just about to log off the host when she froze, unable to move. She felt pressure then, a feeling like drowning. It was as though a huge bag of wet sand sat on her chest, growing heavier and heavier until she couldn't breathe.

  The blood vessel walls faded away, replaced by a conservative office-style room that materialized around her. Mahogany paneling, track lighting, classical music. The smell of wood oil and fresh-baked pastries drifted in.

  "Please sit down," came a deep voice.

  A chair faded into existence next to her, and she noticed that her masking no longer worked; she was in her corporate bimbo attire, wearing slick red leather pants and jacket. She probed the room with her analyze utility, but it told her nothing. Solid code, slick as teflon, dense as rock. Like hardware.

  "Relax," came the voice again. "You aren't going anywhere for a while."

  Jane didn't respond, and continued her search for an exit. There must be at least one.

  "My name is Thomas Roxborough. What is yours?"

  Roxborough? I'm fragged. Everyone knew that Thomas Roxborough was a vat case and a legend in the Matrix. Jane struggled to breathe against the invisible weight on her chest.

  "It pains me that you're so uncooperative," came Roxborough's voice. "Coercion really isn't my preferred modus operandi. But if you insist. . ."