Shadowrun

by Dylan Birtolo

  “I just don’t like risking tipping them off,” Yu said.

  Emu snorted. “You’re thinking ’bout it wrong.” She glanced back. “Zip?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How many times you think someone’s hit this place in the Matrix tonight?”

  Zip looked up at the building, eyes unfocused, thinking. “Off-site, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  Zip shrugged. “Ballpark it around fifteen or twenty times since midday. Serious ones that demand attention, at least. Not just kids lobbing data spikes at the firewalls and running away from the trackers.”

  Yu looked back and forth between them. “You’re joking.”

  “Whole world’s on the Matrix,” Zip reminded him. “And we ain’t the only runners.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “No buts.” Emu pointed out the window. “There’s a good chance there’s a whole other team out there tonight, doing their own run right now. That’s if your rented idiots show up and can even get through the fence.”

  “Maybe not here,” Zip interjected.

  “Still,” Emu said. “Point is, we’re not priming the trap, doing this. Places like this get hit all the time. Security is always chasing something. And besides—” she grinned, “—could be these morons show us something we didn’t think of.”

  “Speaking of,” Zip said, holding up one end of a cable. “Your babies done yet?”

  “Just,” Emu said after a second of communing with her drones. “Try it now.”

  Zip plugged the cable into her deck and waited for a telltale to glow green. When it did, she smiled and leaned back into her chair. She had a connection to the main data trunk that served the building. That would give her an excellent access point for the portal into the factory’s systems. One of Emu’s drones had run the other end of the cable out and spliced it in.

  A nice piece of work. Not that Zip would ever admit it to Emu.

  “Any real chance these blokes aren’t Renraku?” Emu asked.

  “Not really,” Yu said. “There’s no paperwork we can find, but they make deck components. Not commlinks—decks. That too much money, too much tech, too much risk for Renraku to let too far outside the family.”

  “Didn’t figure so,” Emu said.

  Zipfile opened her mouth to contribute, but a shitty little Nissan pulled past them and continued down the street. It was a ubiquitous choice, as invisible as the Americar they were waiting in. A dozen just like in varying paint jobs were parked along the street. Several had driven by, but this one was different.

  This one pulled over—on the same side of the street as the factory—and stopped near one of the guard towers.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Emu said.

  Zip blinked as an AR ping popped up. On-site.

  “That’s them.”

  “Smooth,” Yu said.

  Zip leaned forward, one hand on each of the seats in front of her, trying to see. Two men stepped out of the car, in full view of guards, God, and radar. One was short, dressed all in black, and carrying a small case. The other was taller, bulkier, wearing a large black leather duster. The handle of something jutted up over his shoulder.

  “Is that a sword?” Yu asked.

  “I think so,” Emu said. She squinted. “Is that jacket red, or are my eyes barmy?”

  “It’s red,” Zipfile told them.

  “Does he think he’s a Red Samurai?” Emu scoffed.

  “I think he does,” Zip said. The three of them shared a look. “They weren’t expensive,” she said to Emu.

  The rigger shook her head and laughed.

  If you ignored the sword, the two looked like they were taking a nonchalant stroll down a sidewalk. They walked along until they were beneath the concrete buttress of the guard tower, then stopped.

  “They’re doing it there,” Emu said, sotto voce.

  Zip just watched.

  The ersatz Samurai pulled a pistol out of his jacket and looked up. They were beneath the lip of the platform atop the tower, which meant if it was manned they were out of sight. Zip knew from her initial recon the towers weren’t manned. They were there for intimidation and to host sensors. One decker in the building could monitor a whole wall of cameras for a lot less investment than a platoon of security strung out along the wall.

  The big guy fired. Dust chipped off the wall near a camera. The small guy cowered and held his case over his head.

  “Missed,” Yu muttered.

  The big guy fired again, this time fragging the camera that looked down on them.

  The little guy—Dieter—sat down and opened his case.

  Right there.

  On the sidewalk.

  “Dunkelzahn’s balls,” Zip muttered. She sat back. “They’re really doing it right there.” She put her deck in her lap and wriggled to get a good dent in the Americar’s cheap upholstery. “Be right back.”

  She didn’t wait to see if Yu and Emu answered through their laughter.

  A millisecond later, she was looking at the portal to AVR through the cable Emu’s drone had placed. She slid closer, readying the custom SIN she’d ginned up across the afternoon. It would be good enough to get her into the AVR network.

  She exhaled. The AVR host showed itself as a guardpost where she had to swipe a card. She did so, trying not to hold her breath. This was an easy hack, one she’d done a thousand times, just as she had to get Yu through the door into Telestrian a few days ago on Denny Way. But she never lost that thrill.

  The door panel clicked green.

  Got ya, she thought with a grin.

  She patted the wall outside the portal and a small camera appeared: a repeater feed that would show her the portal wherever she was, through her deck.

  She entered the AVR host and stopped to look around. The host presented itself as the inside of the factory. A lot of corps did that, on the theory that it made the Matrix presence of a facility as easy to navigate as the live one. Personas walked the halls as if they were people, going about the Matrix tasks of any business. Still, there were differences.

  Where a meatspace building would have metahuman security, the Matrix had intrusion countermeasures. Shining black spiders stood in artificially large corners bent counter to the laws of physics so they fit. Floating eyes of tracker IC meandered along the hallways. Because she knew what to look for, Zip felt the presence of even more dangerous IC floating behind the walls.

  A few seconds inside, and already she knew her plan had been smart.

  There was some heavyweight security inside AVR.

  Still, lots left to learn.

  “Map,” she said, and one appeared in front of her. Her hacked persona had the right permissions for a basic map. It wouldn’t show her the really meaty parts of the building. She hadn’t set up that senior of an AVR employee. But it would show her departments. That was enough.

  No corp manager wanted their wageslaves to have trouble getting to where their work needed to be done. Maps were usually available. Eish, Zipfile had spent many a quiet morning hacking into the public maps of little corps all across Seattle, changing map destinations and reassigning offices just for fun. The time she’d put corporate new hire training in the CEO’s private washroom still made her laugh. And wonder why the CEO had a camera in his water closet.

  Besides. This map was more than she had before she came in.

  This run already had a little paydata.

  She blinked, and the map disappeared, ingested into her AR and persona. She thought about security and felt the right way to go, so she went. The office she wanted was two floors up in the same quadrant of the building.

  Grinning, she focused on that.

  And she was there.

  Stairs were for meatspace.

  Two spiders hulked outside the glowing portal for the main security office. She ignored them and turned down the hallway, looking for an empty office. Empty offices were everywhere in the Matrix.

  A cube warrior in the real could
have a corner office in the Matrix. And corps had a lot of work that could only be done while jacked in, corps that worked with AAAs like Renraku more than most. It didn’t cost the corp any more to have a wageslave with a cubic meter of meatspace workspace have as much in the Matrix as they wanted.

  And just like in the real, one of the perks of having an office was ducking out of it.

  The third door she tried was open—her persona was keyed to recognize locked doors as occupied rooms—and she went in. It was a pretty basic Matrix workspace: the apparent size of a football field, opulent beyond belief, and completely impossible in the real.

  Zipfile sighed.

  This was the kind of nonsense the system produced. This was why the system had to go.

  But not today.

  Today she walked over to the wall and wiped it with her sleeve. The wall flickered, but stayed opaque. Frowning, Zipfile wiped it again. This time a window appeared, showing her the office on the other side.

  The security office.

  An endless wall of monitors stretched off as far as she could see. Row after row of blank personas watched them as if their silicon gods were going to appear through them: agents, designed to notice anything untoward in the camera feed.

  Zipfile lowered her arm and tapped her finger against the wall. The office scene shimmered and reformed as if she were looking over one of the persona’s shoulders.

  she commed Yu.

 

 

  Zipfile’s fingertips danced. She flickered between a dozen views before realizing how stupid she was being. There was no need to go looking at every view. The idiot samurai wannabe had already shot out a camera.

  Her thumb tapped her index finger. The image steadied on a persona waving its arm. Static filled the screen in front of it.

  Zip snapped her fingers.

  Suddenly the window had sound.

  “Report,” a woman’s voice said.

  “Camera East Bravo Seven nonresponsive,” the agent replied.

  “Show me the nearest feeds,” the troubleshooter said.

  Zipfile rubbed her ring finger against her pinky. The image of a shaven-headed ork with silver-tipped tusks appeared. The troubleshooter sat inside a ring of panels, her hand resting on the giant eyeball of a tracker IC as if it were a pet. It was all Zipfile could do not to laugh at the image.

  A panoramic view appeared in front of the ork. It showed the tower from a distance—the next guard tower, obviously—and Zip could barely make out the shapes of the two men squatting near it.

  Yu sent.

  “Good,” Zipfile murmured. She touched her middle-finger to her thumb; her deck began recording every feed into it. Then she winked her left eye. A new window opened in her vision, fed from her deck from the camera she’d left outside the portal.

  A persona stood there in blacked-out ninja attire. He held the chains of a kusarigama loosely in his hands.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Zip muttered.

  The ninja stalked forward, swinging the chain-sickle. He swung it around just like the heroes did in the trid shows that were so popular.

  “Don’t…” Zipfile said.

  He struck the scanner with his weapon.

  “Drekhead,” she murmured.

  The box sparked and sputtered, but the light turned green and the ninja stalked through the portal, into AVR proper.

  Zip sent.

  Yu replied.

  she ordered.

  the rigger said

  Zipfile looked back at the window into the security office. The troubleshooter ork was leaning forward, looking at a new screen. It showed the ninja in the same digital lobby Zipfile had come through.

  “Not very smart,” the ork said.

  “Get him,” she ordered, and her voice echoed through the entire Matrix building.

  A third window opened up in front of Zipfile; a view of the real world, showing a camera feed from one of Emu’s drones. The wannabe hacker, Dieter, sat slumped against the side of the building. The big guy in the coat stood in front of him, slowly looking back and forth up and down the sidewalk. They couldn’t be any more obvious if they tried.

  Zip touched the wall near her window and then swiped down at her waist, tethering the window to her persona. Then she thought about the lobby. This was going to be a show she didn’t want to miss.

  She got there just in time to see the first spider step off the wall and go toward the ninja. Several normal AVR personas were standing there like rubberneckers, pointing at the black-clad ninja and private-comming back and forth.

  “Sure,” she whispered. No one could hear her words. “just barge in like you own the place.” She snorted. “‘I know Renraku,’” she parroted.

  The ninja set his feet and spun his kusarigama.

  “Stupid,” Zipfile mutterered.

  The spider attacked, the host presenting its attack as actual bullets. It fired a burst that stitched across the ninja’s chest before he could unleash his own weapon. Zipfile concentrated on trying to watch three streams of actions at once.

  In front of her, the ninja flew backward, not dead but hurt. He crashed against the wall, arms wrapped around his chest. His chain-sickle lay on the floor near him.

  In the security room, the silver-toothed ork grinned.

  In the real, the slumped-over hacker’s meatspace body flinched as if it had been kicked.

  The spider was using hard biofeedback.

  This was black IC.

  Zipfile jacked out.

  “I’ve seen enough,” she said to Yu and Emu. A twisted thought brought the video feed from Emu’s drone up on her AR. The big guy was still looking both ways.

  While she watched, Dieter’s body flinched again.

  Harder.

  “How bad is it?” Yu asked.

  Zip sat forward. “Save it.” She slapped Emu on the shoulder. “Get us over there.” The rigger stared at her. “Now!”

  The ork didn’t hesitate; she turned around, put the Americar in gear, and stepped on the accelerator. The Ford wasn’t a sports car—it didn’t have much in the way of giddyup—but they were moving.

  “What are we doing?” Yu asked calmly.

  “He’s in over his head.”

  “Wasn’t that quite the point?”

  “Shut up.”

  The big fake Red Samurai saw them coming. He turned to face them, reaching up to pull the sword down from over his shoulder. He held it out in front of him as if it were a baseball bat.

  “A sword,” Emu said, laughing. “I don’t know whether to shake my head or give him kudos for balls.” She leaned over the steering wheel. “We’re in a car, mate!”

  Emu put the car half up on the curb in front of the duo. Zip slid over in her seat, closing the AR video feed, and triggering the window down. She leaned out as much as she could.

  Americars weren’t built for dwarfs.

  “Move along,” the fake samurai said menacingly, or tried to.

  Anyone who’d dealt with Rude when he was pissed off knew what menace was. This guy didn’t hold a candle to that.

  “Save it!” Zip shouted. “Get your friend out of there!”

  “We’re here on Renraku business,” the guy said. He was an ork, or pretending to be one. Zip didn’t want to look at his yellowed tusks too close. A lot of big guys pretended to be something they weren’t.

  “Hitting a Renraku building,” Yu said, rolling his window down. “Seriously.”

  “I said move along,” the protector said.

  For a moment Zipfile why he wasn’t brandishing the pistol he’d used to shoot the camera out.

  Behind him, the hacker flinched worse than before and fell over. His commlink fell off his lap. Zipfile stared at it; no wonder he hadn’t shown any finesse—he wasn’t even using a cyberdeck. />
  “Look at your buddy,” she said, pointing.

  “Like I’m gonna fall for that.”

  “Dragon’s blood,” Zipfile heard Emu mutter before the driver’s door opened. Emu stepped out. A thump on the roof had to be her elbow hitting the metal. The loose liner shook, and Zipfile felt particles of decayed adhesive fall on her shaved head.

  The ersatz samurai now had at least one pistol pointed at him.

  “Look at your mate,” Emu ordered, “or else I’ll pop you where you stand.”

  The big guy stared at her, then glanced over his shoulder.

  “Dieter!?” he lowered the sword and spun around, kneeling beside his friend. “You okay? Wake up!”

  Zip frowned. “Is he breathing?”

  “What?” The big guy looked up. Why wouldn’t he be breathing?”

  “He went up against a spider,” Zipfile said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “For frag’s sake, we’re your Johnson!” Yu shouted.

  “My what?”

  Emu sat down and closed the door. “Okay. I’m done. These yokels are on their own.”

  Behind the duo, a siren spun up on the main building.

  Zipfile resisted the urge to agree with Emu. Instead, she shouted to get the big guy’s attention. “Hold up his commlink,” she said, when she had his attention. He fumbled with it for a minute, then held it up.

  “So I can see the panel,” she told him patiently.

  He turned it. It was black. None of the telltales were lit, not even the power indicator. Zipfile probed for it in her AR and came up blank.

  “It’s a brick,” she said. “You need to run.”

  “I’m not leaving him.”

  “That’s nice and all, but he’s a vegetable,” she told him. “Best case, he dies before security gets here.” She shrugged. “Worst case, you’re still here when they do.”

  “Could be locals,” Yu put in. “Or it could be Knight Errant.” He lowered his voice. “They came after us a couple nights ago. We barely made it out.”

  The big guy looked at the elf, then back down at his friend, then at Zipfile. She nodded at him. “It hurts. But he wouldn’t want you to get caught.”