[Story]Shadowrunning

[Dartz]

Jana sat with her legs crossed on the workbench, steadily growing more and more uneasy as Daisuke lowered the doughnut shaped scanner over her head. Cables ran from access ports on the back of her skull and a pair of specialised jacks at the base of her neck.

It wasn't the cyberpunk milieu that frightened her. She liked to think she'd gotten used to that at least. It'd been six months since she came to after the surgery and freaked out at the reflection... she could still remember the doctors saying the handwavium had failed, that she must've already had a previously undetected mod. She could remember them telling her that she could spend the rest of her life as a bedridden potato at best, or she could try cybernetics.

It seemed like a no brainer, didn't it?

Of course, as is the way with cybernetics, it's not just a case of bolting the new parts in and giving it a whirl. Eventually, once you take all the subsystems into account and the ability of the remaining biology to support it reliably, it ends up being easier to just go the full body conversion route.

A burst of data entered her mind, filtered through digital coprocessors and analysed before being presented to her human side as a simple system scan, Do you wish to allow? her hardware asked.

"Say yes," Daisuke instructed her, peering up from his console for a moment.

"Yes," Jana said.

The hardware picked up on her true intention and allowed the connection anyway. She could feel the diagnostics running inside her mind, rifling through her thoughts. The...unnaturalness...of it made her artificial stomach turn.

Jana focused on her breathing. Just another fact of life when you've become something other than human. She could at least understand why some games included a "˜humanity' stat for cyber'd PC's.... it really did wear on the soul sometimes.

"That should be it," Daisuke said, before reaching over to route the output to the main monitor.

"Jana," Jet said, "Now, start from the beginning. What do you remember?" The Engel leader leaned back against the wall. She was trying her best to look compassionate, but she looked just as bothered by this as Jana felt.

That didn't make her feel better.

"Everything you can," Alita added. The gruppe leader crossed her arms, seeming a lot more interrogative.

Jana nodded, and swallowed a lump. "Alright. I left the mine with Vanko at 13:23:37. We travelled according to standard procedure. Vanko rode on the lead truck, while I was on the following. I made standard reconnaissance flights at least once an hour, but spotted nothing of interest,"

On the monitor behind her, the firing of Jana's neurons was displayed in real time, along with the state of the onboard microprocessors, digital memory access. File pointers. Chemical memory pointers. Waves of sparkling yellow and red pixels flashing across the screen. It was possible to watch memories being read and written simultaneously as neurons fired, mingled with function calls across the neural gates.

What was onscreen was Jana. It was her mind working.

She continued, her voice trembling a little. "We stopped for the night at Melas overlook, about 100 (112.5 her systems told her) kilometres from the Southern Cross. Vanko and I established a perimeter using 10 scanner drones, and set up alternating watch schedules."

"What timetable did you use?" Jet asked.

A wave of yellow pixels flashed across the neural map as Jana recalled the information.

"Standard plus 27 minutes. Vanko took odd. I took evens."

"In between watches, what did you do?"

"I meditated ," Jana answered.

"Why?" Alita said. "Why didn't you sleep?"

"Drei suggested I meditate after my last sparring. I didn't feel tired enough to sleep, and my biosystems didn't say they needed it."

A ripple across the map matched a ripple of discomfort running through Jana's body.

"What was the weather like?" Jet pulled the question from her notepad app. "On the first day."

"Hazy at first," Jana answered, "Most of the dust was low to the ground, below 100 meters in altitude. Wind was light. Even in the haze visibility was approximately 300 metres. There was no interference to radar or radio. By nightfall, the wind had dropped and the haze was clear. Visibility was to the horizon. We could see the lights of New Adelaide."

"Where there any dustclouds in the distance, any other vehicles nearby?" Alita asked.

Daisuke hummed to himself at something interesting in the results. Jana glanced uneasily at him for a moment. "None" she answered. She rifled through her memories to be double certain... something about what Dai was doing made her want to be certain. "No, I didn't see any sign of ground traffic."

"You're sure," Jet pushed.

"Yeah," she affirmed.

Daisuke sent a text message to Alita and Jet using his dataglove. Both shared a glance and nodded.

"Alright, onto day two" Jet said.

"We started at 5:03:27 MST" She cringed at the inhuman accuracy. "Visibility was clear with little wind. We reached Southern Cross 3 hours, 25 minutes and 33 seconds later and began our descent to the the Valles floor. We made good progress throughout the morning. I was on the lead truck. Vanko was on the following."

"When did you first see signs you were being approached?"Alita asked.

The patterns on the monitor swirled and flowed smoothly.... naturally.

"Vanko spotted a dustcloud 10 kilometres behind us at 15:37:17. I took off to investigate."

"And what did you find?"

The patterns on the monitor dashed around an obstruction, looking like a wave meeting a rock in the centre.

"I can't remember finding anything," Jana answered.

"Where they civilian? What sort of vehicles were they?" Jet pushed.

Jana's mind locked up. "There.... " she paused. the picture on the monitor became more and more chaotic as Jana racked her mind for answers. She knew there should've been something there. "There was a warning about a system error. That's when I woke up in the dirt, an hour and 17 minutes later."

Daisuke got conspicuously busy. She felt him dive into her system logs, pulling through files at the edge of her awareness.

Jet spoke next. "What about the convoy? Did you make it back to the convoy?"

Jana closed her eyes "I think I did. I talked to Vanko about something

"What time was this?" the Engel leader asked. She was trying to hide the concern in her voice, but Jana could tell just how badly this was bothering her. That just made her feel worse.

"15:45:13" she answered, before catching herself. "But... I was down I..."

Trying to grasp at the memory was trying to grasp at smoke. She could see it, smell it, but just couldn't touch it and make it real. There was something there....

"Go on," Jet said softly.

"Vanko was worried about something, then he just dropped to the ground. Like he was turned off. I..." she paused again. "There was the error happened." she confirmed "Then I came to in the dirt. The drivers were dead, and the shipment was gone. Both our helmets had been tampered with... but they didn't get them off."

Daisuke sent Alita and Jet another message.

"We know what happened afterwards," Jet said. "Just... keep focusing on that moment."

Jana spoke slowly "Vanko was annoyed. I don't know what he said but he was pissed. I told him I saw nothing...and..." she screwed her eyes shut. "They can't think we did it, can they?"

"No," Alita reassured her. Something about the firmness of the cyborg's voice made it seem all the more believable. As if by her stating it, it became fact, rather than already being fact.

"Patrol says they used 9mm luger. We don't use anything below .357 Magnum." Jet added. "Your smartgun systems said they hadn't been fired or reloaded since they were checked out."

That's about all the patrol were saying to them at this point.

"I think I've got everything," Daisuke said, fumbling with some cabling. "Everything this gear will give me. You can disconnect yourself Jana,"

The cyborg yanked the cabling out, getting a few creepy error messages for her trouble. She shook her head to clear her mind of the alien messages.

"What did they do to me?" she asked, her voice shrinking down into her body.

She didn't even try to hide how frightened she was. Something about it just felt...dirty. A violation of the self far more than the technology which kept her alive.

"We're not really sure yet," Jet told her. She was telling the truth.

"I have to get these results properly analysed," Daisuke added. He deliberately didn't go any further.

"Jana, I'll meet you in the friedliche raum in a few minutes." Jet said, giving all the impression of a doctor about to give a terminal diagnosis.

Jana stood up, automatically scrunching toes she didn't really have anymore on the tile'd floor. Metal scratched on ceramic. She took a deep breath, synthesised now, before exhaling slowly.

"Yes, Krieger" she saluted her trainer.

"Lehrling," Jet saluted back.

The worst part for Jana, she could tell how much this troubled the others. If it troubled some of the most experienced? Still, there was something comforting in the regimentation of master and apprentice. The idea that if she didn't know the answer, the others most likely would. But if this was worrying them?

And thus the cycle started all over.

She pulled the workshop door shut behind her, sealing the others in. Daisuke finished tidying his equipment, while the two cybers in the room silently considered what they'd just witnessed.

"So it's definitely a hack then, is it?" Jet asked, her voice sombre.

"As far as I can tell." Daisuke answered. "At least three separate times."

"How did they do this?" Alita demanded.

"I am not a computer expert, Acchan." he said, looking a little self ashamed. "Not computer security. But it seems they used an unpatched buffer overrun within the SSC radio plugin. They could not have owned her hardware, since the war there're safeties for that, they could only get the individual process. They used that process to erase her short term memory."

"Biological memory, on the wetware?" Jet asked. "Using a digital process?"

"Yup," Daisuke nodded.

Jet killed her natural response, taking a deep breath. She leaned down against the worktop, gripping her hands on the edge of the workshop. There was only one conclusion she could draw. "That's not possible. I know you can send nonsense signals and stuff, but nothing dangerous, not direct memory access like this."

"That is what most scientist say, until somebody does something." Daisuke responded, calmly. "It appears somebody has figured out how. They can already erase and write catgirls."

There was only one more question on Alita's mind "Who, Dai? Who did this?"

Daisuke shrugged. "Someone with a lot more skill in cybernetics than me. The exploit used was mentioned on the Confederation builders list a few weeks back. We decided to keep it quiet, until we had a working patch for the module."

"Someone in the Confederation?"

"I hope not," Dai sighed. "There is no reason somebody could not have found this on their own. But it still take a lot of effort, and a lot of knowledge about the interactions between these modules that is not easy to come by. I can think of several with the skill,"

"We can take AC and Winry out of that, " Jet said. It was obvious they'd be 1 and 2. It was also obvious that neither of them would be involved in anything like this.

"And I trust the others," Dai added. "They have all held OGJ clearances. That is the problem."

Alita rested her chin on her knuckles, sitting on the bench, thinking. "The Professor," she suggested.

"If it was him, it probably wasn't malicious," said Jet. "Y'know what he's like with his "˜not my department'. Might've done it, forgotten about it, then gave it away without thinking. Bloody dangerous bugger."

"It is possible but very unlikely."

"Asmodeus Grey?" Jet tried, grasping at straws a little. "Though he's more of a biotech. He invented the catgirl process, and I think he has a grudge against us."

Daisuke shrugged. "It is really not possible to tell more. Not with this equipment. I'll post my results to the list. Vanko scans also, though he was only hit once. I will see what the others say. It might be good idea to send Jana and Vanko to specialists. Independent confirmation."

"Yoko agreed to that?" Alita asked.

"She suggested it."

"I'm not sure about Jana," Jet said, quietly. "I don't know about Vanko, but Jana's still half in transition, she's only just beginning to integrate her new systems properly into her self. This is going to set her back a couple of months at least"

Jet sat back down on the workbench, listening to it creak under her own weight. Her legs crossed themselves, and she folded her arms. How best to state her opinion?

Attacking the mind. All the hardware in a cyber's body changed so many things. It changed their whole perception of the world and their place in it. But even so, it still didn't change who they were. Jet knew she was still the same person he was the night before he picked the wrong bottle. Lazily cosplaying as hardsuit-Sylia at the post-war celebrations then belting out surprisingly good Bubblegum Crisis karaoke proved that. She still didn't know what that trekkie drink had been, beyond that it was green....

It was the little things like that defined a person. Who we are is the sum of all our experiences after all... especially the goofball ones. An alteration in those experiences was an alteration in the self, an alteration of the person. Cybernetics may alter the perception of the "˜now', but that long chain of recollections was still intact. Losing an arm didn't change the person, why should gaining a new one?

Biomodding muddied the waters a little, but it was essentially the same. The self gained new elements, but still remained whole. There was no subtraction.

It was of course, possible to alter your memory without hacking. Brainwashing was the traditional way of doing it. Advertisers did it all the time. The human mind was so malleable that you could convince it that anything was true, with enough reinforcement. As that Soviet AI put it so scornfully, humans have terrible memory protection.

She'd seen the berserkers, humans who'd had their entire memory wiped clean out, then drugged into blank insanity. They were effectively dead as persons, their souls erased like data on a disk. Or the catgirls. That one had been tested before a court. A catgirling machine operator put himself through the machine rather than get arrested. The resulting bewildered catgirl was quickly ruled to be a completely different person. Destroy the memory, and you destroy the person. You destroy everything they were and were going to be as surely as if you shot them dead.

That the self could be erased was frightening enough. It was nightmare fuel.

But this... hacking and manipulation of a mind, this was beyond frightening. It was insidious. It was almost undetectable by the victim. You could change everything about a person, and they might never even realise it. The raiders could've erased Jana's mind entirely and left her wandering the Martian desert blank and bewildered. Or worse.

Maybe that's why they didn't, they were afraid of the worse... what a panicked human brain would do when stripped of all the brakes the self added to it. Jet had gone up against the result of that more times than she bothered keeping track of.

And if they could delete memory, there wasn't much preventing them from adding to it, was there? It could already be done to catgirls.

It was beyond a violation of the body, it was a violation of the very mind, of the makeup of the person. That someone could do this remotely through a software glitch without her even realising it was being done? A lingering paranoia begged to know if she was still herself. Perhaps Jet herself had been hacked without realising it?

A whole person could be subverted as easily as a home computer. Zombie people like zombie computers.

All of this distilled down into one uneasy sentence.

"This Ghost in the Shell stuff fucking scares me."

Alita looked at her, her lips pursed. "Ghost in the Shell? An animé?"

"Before your accident, Acchan." Daisuke said. "It was about cyborgs. Hacking a persons brain and altering memory was a common plot,"

"Oh," she brought a finger to her lips. "How did they stop it?"

"They did not really." Daisuke said with a slight sigh, "But they could use," he screwed his eyes shut, trying to remember, "Um... autism mode. Cut off all wireless communication. It is impossible to hack a computer through an interface that is turned off."

"We...can't cut our comm's?" Jet said, looking uncomfortably at Alita, a little unsure of what exactly she was saying. A choice between risking an attack on the self, and cutting off all that connectivity that was just so useful.

"It is a good workaround," Daisuke told her, with all the solemnity of a doctor telling a patient her arm had to be amputated. "Standard OGJ comms will have to do,"

"Dai, How many of us?" Alita asked.

"Everyone." he answered. "Everyone uses the same hardware because it's so functional, and the encryption is OGJ compatible. Only the AR's use a different plugin because they're artificial."

Alita had had her original systems replaced. Jet ran the same system since a .50BMG round destroyed her original radio. Anyone cyberised after June 2013 was built with the SSC wireless plugin.

"Overspecialisation breeds weakness." Daisuke finished.

Jet thought for a few seconds, "What about our whitelist? We're already configured to reject connections from anything except trusted IP's. Can we use that?"

"No," Daisuke shook his head, "This is a vulnerability in the basic system. Drivers gets the data from the chip, and the driver sends the data to the firewall. The exploit happens before the firewall even sees the incoming packets. That is what makes this so dangerous."

"I understand," Jet said. More or less, she didn't add.

"I'm calling a meeting," Alita said. "We need to decide what we"˜re going to do about this."

"This is not something you can beat by force of will alone, Alita," Daisuke warned.

Jet looked at him for a moment, "Will disabling the module help?"

"Sure." he nodded, as if it was the most obvious thing. "Cannot hack through an interface that is turned off completely,"

----

Jana found a quiet corner of the friedliche raum. The evening sun streamed in through the windows, throwing long shafts of light across the reinforced wooden floor. This late in the evening, the room was empty. The lights on the rock ceiling far above were dipped low, angled towards a beautiful image of valles marineris painted along one wall. Opposite it, were the awards the Kunstler had earned during the war and a memorial to those who hadn't survived it. A set of blades, a photograph and a name.

Jana ran through her Ausbildung Stil training forms... what eastern martial arts called kata. She could feel herself loosing herself in the rhythms of the form, how effortless complex movements became. To anyone watching, it looked almost like ballet, Jana's armoured body dancing with surprising delicateness across the floor.

This feeling, this was why she'd stayed with the Gruppe. The feeling of unity within herself the forms gave her, how she could feel herself flowing out of the biologic and across the divide into the technology, she could feel herself filling the void of machinery inside her body. Synapse flowed into semiconductor to control linear actuators with enough strength to flip a car and enough finesse to throw an egg ten yards in the air and catch it safely in one hand.

It was a graceful ballet of traded energy between velocity, rotation and striking power, using the least effort possible to bring herself smoothly through each form, assaulting a non-existing opponent while dodging around non-existent blows. Rather than loose energy, she pirouetted on steel toes to control her speed, turning forward velocity into a rotation capable of bringing an imagined blade down through an enemy before pulling herself up and out of it into a defensive position.

She could remember herself, a little ballerina aged 8, dancing on stage before a cheering crowd. As she grew up, she lost a little of her flexibility, but kept it up for fitness sakes. Even after boosting to space, she kept dancing.

She traced through her own memories, checking them all off one by one. The awkwardness of her high school romances... the immediacy of skin-to-skin contact. The softness of grass and the feel of a cool breeze against her skin. How the world back then didn't have the glow that near infra-red eyes gave it now. When it took her something ten minutes to work through a math problem, instead of putting the numbers into her digital side and letting it do it in a tenth of a second. All the little aspects of humanity, gone. Taken by some bloody idiot in a Fencar not paying attention to traffic controls around Stellvia.

She remembered waking up in the infirmary, completely numb, with the doctor telling her they'd tried damn near everything, even biomodding. The "˜wave didn't take, she must already had an undetected mod. Only a neural inductor hooked up to speech synthesiser allowed her to ask what had happened.

They told her about cybernetics, how she could have the full range of human motion. She was shown videos of the Panzer Kunst Gruppe, of them training, of them flying through a canyon on Mars trailing transonic shockwaves. She chose this body... a stronger, space-going type, convinced by something she'd read about experiencing the vastness of the universe in a way impossible from a spaceship.

She woke up on the workbench to the feeling of data running through her mind. Ping-ack from a network server nearby, followed by a flood of information entering her mind as the connection was established. She felt the black void of her body for the first time, cold and vast. A HUD playing across her vision telling her where she was, while systems status updates crawled through her awareness.

And she could follow them all at once, aware of what was correct, and what wasn't. It was followed by that first digital Hello World, a text message send through her digital systems, bursting into her awareness. The AI databursts were worse.... every neuron in her brain firing at once as comprehension of the message was enforced.

It was utterly alien, utterly inhuman, and utterly terrifying. It was then she knew she'd made a mistake... when she saw the reflection of her fact in that mirror and knew it wasn't her own. Sure it looked the same... but it was just a biomimetic on top of an artificial framework. They'd replaced everything.

It had been her choice. She had no-one to blame but herself.

Most of all, she could remember her stardancing, how her heart would race as she pitched and tumbled through the air. The feeling of her heart pumping deep in her chest, digitally precise. Powered fingers with the pressure of a vice. The whine of an overstrained actuator, or the rush of a simulated breath.

Still she wondered, had anyone tried to compete with these martial forms? A dance of death, she thought. They had an elegant, austere beauty all of their own.

A flash of bytes intruded into her mind.

[PrivMsg From: Jet Jaguar] "Nice work You've really improved."

The shock of it interrupted her flow. Her mind struggled to catch up to her position in the manoeuvre and she felt herself slowly begin to fall towards the ground. She scrambled to catch herself, but managed only to land hard on her ass.

[PrivMsg From: Jet Jaguar]" A simple text message shouldn't distract. We need to keep communications in action, even while fighting ."

"I know," she grunted, looking up at her trainer standing in the door, "I didn't hear you come in."

"Text please" Jet messaged, smiling calmly as she crossed the floor.

"You know I hate using this, " she glared.

"I know, but you still have to get used to it ," Jet responded in a flash. "It is a part of you now"

The speed of it, that was the worst. Just think and bang! Message sent. Words at least gave you more time to consider what you were saying. Jet crossed the floor, on the way pausing the salute the memorial for a moment.

"I know," Jana answered back, her frustration showing on her face.

Jet took a deep breath and turned to face her. The Engel leader didn't look altogether that comfortable with what she was about to do.

"We need to talk about earlier."

Jana nodded, unnerved. "Yes" she messaged back.

The pair sat down on a reinforced bench, a girder heavy enough to support a building with a wooden seat on it, while Jet repeated most of what Daisuke had told her. How they'd gotten into her mind, and erased her memory. How they'd done it to her three times, twice when she'd overflown their vehicle and a third time when they'd mounted their raid.

They'd come inside her mind and erased her memories.

It took a long time for either of them to say anything.

"I feel sick," Jana finally said, putting a hand to where her stomach used to be. It had to be psychosomatic, all she had was a wasteless bioreactor and it didn't take more than a quick thought to tell her it wasn't building up for a purge cycle.

Jet appeared to be listening with compassion. Truthfully, Jet had no idea what she was supposed to say.

"I learned that, despite all this armour," she held up her lacquered metal hand, "All this tech they wrapped my brain in, all these new abilities and systems," and she said that word with as much distaste as she could mange," Inside all this wrapping, there was still myself. This was all just a shell and that no matter what I did with the shell, my self would remain intact." She lowered her head, looking at intakes on the sides of her calves. "We train to integrate all this hardware into ourselves, to make it a part of me?"

Jet nodded.

"But, now they can take parts of me away, and I can't get them back can I?"

"We don't know yet," Jet answered. "There's only so much we can do here. We really need to get you to someone with more specialised gear."

Jana looked dubious.

"More people messing in my head. I never should've agreed to this,"

"What?"

"This" she knocked on her metal chest. The vent panels on the side of her breasts rattled a little.

"Why did you get cybered?" Jet asked her, not sure really what else to say.

"I like stardancing," she answered. "After my accident, the chance to be able to do it again, out among real stars, seemed to good to pass up," She wore a rueful smile. "I didn't think it would be this hard.." She started to gently rub at her eyes with her hands. "You've made this day a special day, by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you " a pause. "I don't think Mister Rogers ever thought of situations like this."

Jet looked right at her, dead straight in the eyes.

"Mister Rogers?"

Jana looked stunned. "You can't not know that?"

Jet shook her head. "Signal's too bad in here,"

"He was a decent human being," Jana explained, after a moment's thought. "Mister Rogers Neighbourhood, It was on PBS when I was a kid. He treated children like they were equals, talked to them and told them how they were unique, special and really worth something."

"Oh, Kid's TV,"

"Yeah...uh.." Jana stopped, suddenly realising something. "Signal?" she raised an eyebrow, "So that's how you guys did so well at the quiz last con."

"Guilty as charged," And showing zero remorse. "They never turned the wireless off. Most A.I.'s were too polite, good and honest to take advantage of it."

"Humph," Jana laughed softly, "I wouldn't have thought of doing that. I wouldn't have thought I even could,"

"That's what the training's for," Jet told her. "So you don't just think about doing these things, but do them without thinking."

Her expression darkened. "Adding all the new hardware to my self so using all these new features is as natural and easy as breathing, I know!." She snorted. "But that's damned hard when you look in the mirror and don't even see yourself anymore." A pause. She grimaced.

"You can change that," said Jet. "The body is just a shell over the self after all. That's the beauty of cybertech," she gave a light smile, knocking on her chest. "With a biomod, you get one roll of the dice and then you're stuck, barring expensive surgery. No matter what happens with cybernetics, you can always change. You can change everything... almost everything." she corrected.

Jana looked thoughtful.

"Your body can be an reflection of who you really are, the you that you want to show to the world, rather than just a replica of who you were before cyberisation."

"I'm not sure," said Jana, softly.

"Well. In my case, 4 years ago I didn't look like this. You probably know, I used to be ordinary and a bit more... male," she smiled, a little cheekily, "Shit happened, this happened," she knocked on her bust again,"I was told once that if I wanted to look more masculine, it wouldn't be hard to do. Or, I could get the whole body completely replaced." She held up one of her legs, showing the intakes running down into the turbine assemble. " I decided to get these thrusters fitted instead."

"Why?" Jana asked. "Well, I told you why I got this done. It's only fair"

"Because I like flying," Jet answered. "S much that I can't imagine not being able to fly anymore."

Jana nodded, understanding that part at least.

"I kept my figure." Jet wasn't quite sure what other term to use, "because I think it's less intimidating than a more masculine frame' like robocop. It's so people aren't scared and tense around me... I don't want that. And it helped keep me sane during the war to see this face in the mirror". She pointed an armoured finger at her nose.

Jet's blue eyes did have a certain gentle earnestness to them. Jana fell silent for a few moments... a few of the motorballers bladed across the floor, coming in from a practice game. The motors in their running wheels whined while they bragged about hard hits and close calls.

Choose the body to reflect the self, she wondered, watching one of them trundle forwards. Crouched low, almost like an aerodynamic scarab beetle, it took her a while to make the connection that whoever they where, they'd chosen that body specifically. It did have a certain cool to it, but it really wasn't something she wanted to try personally.

She looked at Jet, apparently female, and doing a respectable job of holding up the illusion despite her best efforts. She sat with her legs crossed, and those high-heeled feet at the end of long legs gave her a very feminine stride. At the same time, the amount of time's she'd heard Jet refer to herself as a "˜Guy', or similar.

She looked at Jet, then down at her own body. She clenched her hand into a fist, nerve impulses responding with the correct sensations. Tightening her grip she could hear the micro-actuators straining and whining, her metal palms creaking as the force increased.

They had her crush a stone once. A sold lump of rock. It was the first thing they ever asked her to do. A rock... and it split in her hand. A demonstration of how dangerous her body was. If she could do that to a rock, what could she do to a human being?

The way that Alita Replica had spoken to her on her first day, it made her feel like she was something other than human. The training just wired that in further... that with all the hardware, she had gone beyond humanity.

"You've been doing well," Jet filled the silence.

"It's not that," Jana blurted out. "I mean... it's not that it doesn't look like me in the mirror it's just... it just..." she screwed her eyes shut. Forcing herself to think. "I feel.... disconnected from the image. Like I'm just a ghost in this shell rather than the real Jana. The line between me and who I am now has been cut."

Jet looked at her, then looked at the wall for a moment, thinking.

"It's.... this just makes it feel worse. If who I am is the sum of my experiences... and someone removes some of those experiences, do they change who I am?" Jana finished, looking hopefully at Jet.

For a few moments at least, Jet didn't say a word. Her first instinct had been to answer with a reassuring "˜No', but somehow she felt that would be far more hollow and obvious. Truth was, despite all the training she'd had to deal with situations like this, she just wasn't sure what to say.

Max would've known what to say.

But it was still important to at least sound like she did

"How's your meditation been since you got back?" she asked.

"Tough. It still takes me a while to get Friede. It's still hard to be that still."

"And your practice,"

"It's alright," Jana answered. "When I'm running through those exercises I feel a lot more... connected. It feels like dancing.... it feels like me, Just a little bit."

Or maybe it might just be that simple, Jet pondered. There was though, something bothering her about what Jana had said earlier. It wasn't something she could quite put a finger on, but something the Lehrling had said rung a bell.

She took a few moments to note down exactly what Jana had said while it was still fresh in her mind, in case she forgot.

"I'll try and adjust your training a little then," said Jet. "We'll see if that helps. As it is right now," She checked the schedule just to be sure, "You've got flight training at 5 O'clock. Get back to your team, and prepare a flightplan through the Labyrinth that should take an hour to complete."

They both stood up. Jana saluted. "Yes, Krieger," The heel of her foot cracked loud on the wooden floor.

Jet returned. "Lehrling,"

They both left the friedlich Raum through different exits, both heading in different directions. Jana went back to her quarters, still feeling a little confused. She did her best to focus on the training exercise ahead.... but something still niggled frustratingly.

Am I still Jana? Am I still myself?

Jet had seemed to dodge the question. She hadn't asked directly, but what she'd really wanted was for Jet to reassure her that yes, she really was herself still.

Jet headed straight for her office knowing she probably could've done better.

================

Jet closed the door behind her and sealed it gas-tight before allowing herself to take a deep breath. The familiar smell of lilac was reassuring. It wasn't a large office... and like most of Grunthal was cut straight from the rockface, but it was still Jet's own.

It was her private, personal space, a reflection of herself. In one glass case where her awards from the Boskone War. Jet had accrued more than a few... from SerenityCon, Steelyard, Boskone Prime. Underneath, where the remains of her original blades and a smashed older version of one of her foot engines.

Kicking Boskonian missiles out of the sky might've seemed like a stupid idea... but it ain't stupid if it works. And they were desperate. It wasn't half as dangerous as the citation made out. Do it right, and g-forces ripped the missile apart safely enough. Max had just been unlucky. He caught it right as it went off.

There were her Panzer Kunst qualifications, her troubleshooter certificate and a few other odds and ends. All were made out in the name of Jet Jaguar.

Jet the warrior. Jet the martial arts master. Jet the troubleshooter. Jet the cyber trainer. Jet the flyer..... Jet the famous enough to get a high quality figure made of her. That went into her collection of BNF figurines she'd picked up for her own amusement. And finally, as one drunken gearhead had put it, Jet the freaking robot bitch...

Which had been a hell of a lot more startling than she'd expected.

Or maybe the person she became was just a natural result of the train of experiences since then. She couldn't quite put a finger on when the changes happened... it was only with the benefit of hindsight that she even noticed they had.

There was a picture of Sierra, and beside it a picture of Jet herself belting out Konya wa Hurricane at the last con. Some others of the Panzer Kunst on the set of Cameron's Battle Angel wearing mo-cap gear hung on the wall.

All of it was Jet Jaguar. She'd left his identity behind erdeside by necessity. The name Jet Jaguar started as a radio callsign to keep the GUBU's off. Something she'd thought of off-the-cuff, having only just watched Godzilla versus Megalon an hour before. It became her name by choice when she was picked up in orbit. Everything she'd done since, had been done by Jet Jaguar.

Anytime anyone thought of her, they thought of nothing but Jet Jaguar. And when you got right down to it, Jet Jaguar today was a very different person to the man who'd picked a stupid place to store some high-octane handwavium. But still the same in a Greek ship-thing sort of way. There was no one moment where he'd ceased to exist, and Jet Jaguar'd come into being.

The continuity was there.

A few other things had changed. She hadn't even noticed them.... it had felt almost natural to slip into this sort of role, like a character finding their own niche in the plot. Given the tone of the previous conversation, she began to wonder if maybe she'd gotten more from her biomod than just the Knight Saber's appearance.

That wasn't a scary thought. If anything, they rounded out her character.

Her desk was an unorganised bombsite of assorted paperwork, including a brochure for an OV-200 series shuttle and an invoice from Stellvia that was due for payment, while her battered circuit-rider gear had been stowed for at least 2 weeks on a couch normally used for the odd visitor. A few other little nik-naks crowded around an older terminal computer... animé figurines, a few magazines and a GURPS "˜Fenspace' sourcebook with pen corrections on her profile.

Some prototypes of an Engel Gruppe figure series sat beside the little cyclopean Kimji camera drone she'd built herself....and used exactly twice before it broke down...stared at her.

She sat at her desk and booted the old terminal, configuring it as a network bridge for her hardware, then set it about digging up through some of the cyber-psych notes from that Confederation course, looking for something.

Jet took the time to satisfy another curiosity of hers. Using her own built in phone connection, she dialled Erwin Lee, leader of the Tuned Gruppe, and currently working with the Space Patrol.

It rang three times

"Hello," Lee's drawling accent answered. "Jet,"

"Howya man," she tried to put a smile into her voice, "I'm assuming you've heard about the robbery and what happened,"

"Hey I'm sorry Jet," he answered quickly, "But that's a Patrol matter, not Great Justice. I can't tell you anything about it,"

Aside from the hacking, it was still just a minor robbery, a Patrol matter.

"I'm not wearing my troubleshooting hat," she responded. Honestly. "This is strictly us Panzer Kunst. Daisuke's trying to figure out what exactly happened to Vanko and Jana. I figured if we had some more information about the case, it'd help us deal with this,"

"Hmmm," he paused, considering. "But you called me using your personal number. You don't want this recorded,"

"No, I don't."

"And you know the risks to us if this does get out that I gave you this stuff?"

"I do." she nodded, despite him not ever being able to see it "But if it can help Jana and Vanko. I'll owe you a big one."

There was a pause of another few moments.

"Alright," he relented "I'll have the case files couriered to you by Radi-KS. You should get them tomorrow,"

"Thanks man," she beamed, "I'll really owe you one,"

"Yeah, a big one. See y'round Jet,"

The line went dead. It was technically against the rules, but then the first rule was to never be afraid to use your own judgement to do what was right. She did see herself as being genuine in her intentions at least. Any information could be used to help Jana.

And if Daisuke's hunch was right and there was a leak in the Confederation passing technical information to Zwilniks then this did become a Great Justice matter.... and a damned serious one at that.

It was something she kept at the back of her mind, just in case, but not something to bring to the others until Daisuke had more than a hunch to go on.

Thinking on Jana, Jet checked that the information she'd been looking for had come up. Bingo! She started to browse through it, while pulling up her notes from her conversation with Jana.

"Not that. Doesn't look like me in the mirror. I feel disconnected from the image. Like I'm just a ghost in this shell rather than the real Jana. The line between me and who I am now has been cut."

She started to read through her information... some course notes on post cyberisation psychology, mostly focusing on the symptoms of what was dryly called "Cybernetically induced depersonalisation disorder,". At Grunthal, it was usually just called "˜transition syndrome', because it almost always passed. The human brain was nothing if not adaptable.

Getting fully cyberised was a trauma in and of itself, usually coming hot on the heels of another major trauma which had required getting cyberised in the first place. The still-biologic brain was suddenly cut off from almost every chemical response it had taken it’s life getting to know, then had them replaced with artificial facsimiles, along with any number of new additional system. Even parts of the brain itself were replaced.

Jet called up Jana’s file. She’d had it especially bad, being something of a prototype for a full hardtech cyberisation. Surviving that accident alone had been a 1 in a million. The damaged areas of her brain had to be replaced with artificial parts. Jana had nearly as much silicon in her skull as Jet did, but without the benefit of handwavium to fudge the gap.

It was a part of Panzer Kunst training. To understand that the body was a shell of the self, that adding or taking away parts didn’t change who you fundamentally where. It was about being able to switch out hardware as easy as switching gears in a car. Of course, the self remained, and the self was always changing.

Existentialism was for the birds and the Eva fans to worry about, anyway. She put her feet up on the desk, absent-mindedly spooling her engines on their starter motors the same way normal people might rock their feet.

Jana had been getting better.... and now this happened. An attack on the self within the shell.

She compared her notes against some of the checklists. Trouble meditating, trouble finding peace within herself. Improves when physically active. She had been a stardancer beforehand.

The obvious answer was to put her on a more physical training path, then see if that helped her pick up. If it didn’t, Jet was a little lost. It would be almost back to square one.

Chances were it was just the standard transition syndrome anyway, just made worse by this attack. She confirmed that with herself.

But something about this really bothered her.

Something she was having a hard time framing exactly in her mind. She glanced out the window into the canyon... for a few seconds watching some of the AR’s teaching some unfortunate Anfanger the dangers of being cocky in the red soil below.

Nobody would argue that when someone came out of a mind-wiping catgirl machine, they were a completely different person than had gone in. Everything was erased. The berserkers were similar. Humans wiped of everything that made them human.

Punching up rm -rf /* on an AI’s memory banks was considered murder. It destroyed a person.

That it could be done just as easy to her now was bloody chilling. A few quick keystrokes... and poof... gone.

But if you erased a person’s memories one at a time... such that they never realised that anything had changed until everything they were was gone... when did they stop being that person?

The obvious answer was when their own friends couldn’t recognise their behaviour.

She looked around her office. If all but the last 3 years of her memory were ever erased, just how much of a difference would it make?

Would anyone notice? Would she notice?

Jet before the wave had been a spark, capable of hacking together a railgun in a shed using a box of scraps. He built a coilgun. He rigged an old turbocharger up to make a jet powered snowblower during that insanely cold winter. He built the first hardsuit, the one that became part of her body.

Jet afterwards... hadn’t done anything sparky in years. The kimji staring back at her seemed offended. Well... nothing big and sparky, just a few slight glimmerings to prove it hadn’t gone out entirely. She still had ideas.... but lacked the spark to go out and fulfil them.

Still, she lingered on that thought for far longer than she wanted.

“It’s for the birds,” she said to herself. Right now it didn’t matter. There was training to be done.

----

Cathy did not liked to be bored...

Of course, she had just helped the rest of the Fen to fight and win a serious war against the Boskonians and both the final fights and the victory party had been something that would become a legend on its own in the next decades...

But now the war was over and going back to moving tourists around the solar system and beyond to show them the wonders of space did not sounded as much fun as it had been for a while.

“Maybe we could really do our trip to Starbase 2 Cortana” she said, laying on the driver seat of the Stargazer and looking into the black sky beyond the crafts large windows. “Our communication problem is solved and the war is over, doing something for fun doesn’t sound that bad... but I have to admit that it just looks like another long journey, interesting to do but nothing that will take the rest of our life...”

“I know what you mean” answered Cortana, “after saving the world flying to Alpha Centauri does not sound as exciting as before. I have a lot of friends online and maybe some of them will continue to support the rest of OGJ and the Space Patrol, but... but we still need a plan what to do next... how to move forward.

Maybe we should start working on the plans of this mobile hideout we talked about during the war. We just start small and see where we will be going... what do you think ?”

Cathy nodded, but did not seemed to be convinced. “I don’t think we have enough resources for finishing this project, we need some source of income, something that pays better than tourist guide. I would like to tinker again with some waved stuff, but even for this we need a solid place to work and some starting money... and I don’t want to join one of the larger factions at the moment. We need a new plan, something great and interesting and exciting... and crazy !”

“Yes, we do” said Cortana, “but do you know where to start looking for it ? Maybe you can ask the Senshi if you borrow one of their labs for a few weeks Cathy ? You built some pretty nice toys during the war, I think there might be someone else interested in them.”

Cathy shook her head.

“The idea was not bad, but the QEDs are not really mass producible, they are difficult to built and tend to malfunction pretty quickly. I am not sure we can really make much money with them, only if we find someone really in need for them.”

“Okay Cathy, then lets get online and look what is going on at the moment, maybe we get an idea while looking through some chats and forums... maybe we can raid some mailing lists too!”

“Oh oh, are you really sure you are subscribed to all this info lists you have access to ? One day they will send a headhunter after you because you broke into the wrong one.”

“Hey, I am not that bad... and they are all public news mailing lists, if they want a private one they should apply a better encryption. I always have respected the right for privacy, but then people will have to respect my right to have some fun with their bad communication security.”

Cathy shook her head again and grinned. She had discovered a long time ago that discussing this kind of things with Cortana were futile. There were some ‘well encrypted and protected’ signals in Fenspace, but most of them were ‘pretty nifty number changing game’ in Cortanas description.

“Just make sure they do not get you Cortana, I would really miss you...”

“Sure Cathy... I am always careful...”

----

The Dead Bang! shooting range at Marsbase Sara was almost unique in that it allowed practice with live, real-steel weapons. Buried underground, it was a hundred meter long alleyway hewn straight from the Martian bedrock.

In a laneway towards the end, Ford Sierra adjusted her shooting glasses, reloading her customised Beretta. The walnut grips were moulded for her hands.

Behind her, Jet was busy adjusting her own smartgun systems. “...she actually called me a bitch.”

“You’ll get used to it.” Ford assured her with a mischievous grin. “Soon you’ll even start carrying a handbag. ”

Jet scowled, before pouting, then switching to a strange grin. “It’s not that....” she paused, then held up her hand “Well, mostly not that. It’s just, the first thing I thought.... ” she sniggered. “I just couldn’t stop laughing.”

Ford raised an eyebrow, “What was it.?”

Jet inhaled a deep breath. “Do ah look like, ah Bitch,”

Ford smirked. “That’s Southern hick, not Samual L Jackson,”

Jet shrugged, “Well you know what I mean. Anyway....” she trailed off. She plugged the receiver for the gunsight into the socket under her ear, taking a deep breath as the drivers loaded. She blinked, checked the signal was good, then smiled.

Ford brushed a few strands of hair off her brow. Her hair always reminded Jet of Bourneville chocolate with it’s burnt brown colour and high sheen. It was too bad she never let it get any longer. Ear protection was unnecessary thanks to a set of artificial ear drums

Still, with a pair of shades on, Ford projected an aura of almost effortless cool. With her Beretta gripped firmly in both hands... left on grip, artificial right for support. She used her right leg to brace herself and took aim through the sights.

Exhale slowly, and squeeze.

The gun snapped 5 shots downrange, with a pause between each for a breath. Ford smirked at her partner as the score came up on the board above.

“Now beat that,”

Jet raised her handcannon of a pistol in one swift motion. An electronic crosshair pinpointed the exact impact point of the bullet before she fired. Target in the centre, pull the switch.

Jet’s pistol fired like a bomb going off, Smoke and flame and destruction and dust flying with every shot. The ranges computer totted up the score.

“Heh, not a problem,” she shrugged laconically, making the pistol safe. The slide had locked back, thick smoke rising from the chamber.

Ford planted her hands on her hips, glaring up at her partner.

“Cheater,”

“It’s not cheating. It’s hardware,” stated Jet.

“What, you afraid of a fair contest then?”

Jet’s expression soured. “For me, a fair game is pretty bloody unfair,”

“Hah!” Sierra snorted. “Because you know you’ll never beat me over iron sights.”

Judging by Jet’s expression, that was exactly it. Ford decided to sweeten the deal a little.

“Tell you what. You win, and I buy you a custom KoFen avatar... and let you spec it. I win, I buy you a custom KoFen avatar...” her grin widened. “...and I spec it. And you have to use it publicly,” And finally, the cherry on top, “I’ll even use your gun,”

Jet looked dubious at first, wondering just what her partner had in mind. The first thought was something pink and frilly, but that sort of Senshi candy just didn’t suit Sierra...unless she really wanted to make Jet suffer.

Still.... she’d be using Jets gun. That put her at the disadvantage.

“It’s a bet,” Jet extended her hand.

Sierra gripped it hard with her artificial hand.

Getting the targeting system off Jet’s pistol wasn’t hard. It really was little more than a camera gunsight, a laser rangefinder, a lightweight processor and a transmitter, clamped to the top of the barrel were a scope normally went. Adjusting the original iron sights was a little trickier with some of the radiator fins on the barrel getting in the way, but Sierra could do it.

The hardest part was just holding the damn thing steady. Even using her mechanical arm to brace it didn’t give much benefit. The trigger pull was so high, it actually hurt her finger.

The first shot she fired, she swore that somehow she’d shot herself. She felt the gun go off rather than heard it, recoil nearly tearing her arms from their sockets. Gritting her teeth, she let it fall back on target. The next was that little bit easier, followed by another, then another, then on until she’d emptied the magazine.

“Phew,” she exhaled as she put the gun down, feeling all tingly all over. The score came up on the board above.

87 points

“Do I see a little excitement?” Jet snickered, looking down.

Ford crossed her arms with a scowl. “Just take your shots Jet,”

Jet took her pistol from the bench and slipped a new magazine home before releasing the slide to chamber the first round. Line target up in the sights and squeeze the trigger. Lather, rinse repeat. Jet’s powered actuators made it seem effortless, her shooting that modified Deagle like Ford might shoot an airsoft gas gun.

“Easy,” she smirked.

The scoreboard had other ideas. ‘82’, it declared

Jet’s expression said it all. How the hell did that?

Ford beamed. “Well, technology is no replacement for sheer skill, is it?”

Jet looked down at her, wearing a bitter pout. “But I had it dead on,”

“But you didn’t adjust them right for your eye,” Sierra told her. “I know your eyesight’s so much sharper than a normal humans, I bet you didn’t compensate for that, did you?”

“Never fired with iron sights before,” Jet defended.

“Well don’t feel bad,” Ford soothed. “I learned from the best. My aunt Irene could shoot the hammer off a gun at 50 yards with a pistol like this.” She held up her own Beretta.

The cyborg looked dubiously at her partner.

Sierra just smiled victoriously, “See, What did I tell you? Going shooting is the perfect way to relax after a tough day. It’s the great American pastime,”

Jet could only answer with a wistful sigh.

----

“Ow!” Daisuke yelped, “Too tight,”

“Sorry,” Alita backed off.

The tech rubbed at his shoulders where his girlfirend had been leaning.

“You know, you wouldn’t have this problem if you got cybered,” She said, wearing a playful pout. Her breath tickled his ear as she leaned in, smelling of steel and oil, her faux-leather bodysuit and whatever it had been that she’d had for dinner. “The AR-13 body doesn’t have an AI yet...”

“I like meat. Makes me soft to hug,” he smiled. Alita pursed her lips. Daisuke seized the moment and pecked her right on the lips... just a quick surprise kiss. “And because you would kill me if I did that in a cyborg body,” he added with a goofball grin.

Her purse deepened into full blown octopus lips, those ruby eyes glaring right into him for half a second. Those lips were the reason Daisuke built her in the first place. In her daily body, she was achingly cute. Lethal, but cute.

“And that’s why I hope I don’t forget you when I get my memory back,” she smiled at him, bright and wide.

“I would not worry about that,” Dai responded flatly, looking away at his work.

“Well, I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, “G’night Dai,”

“‘night, Achan,”

Alita closed the workshop door behind her, Daisuke heard it clang shut followed by the hiss of its safety bladders pressurising. He was alone in the workshop, surrounded by his equipment. Most of it was salvaged from a dumpster somewhere, refurbished, enhanced and then pressed back into service.

Most of it wasn’t pretty.

But, he felt far more proud of it than he did of some of the newer gear thay’d bought after Battle Angel. Daisuke prided himself on being able to do a lot with very little. Grunthal had started as a bunch shipping crates concreted in under an overhang in the rock, before the new parts were tunnelled out during the war. He built the AR’s using scrap parts... a production series of AI gynoids, each of them capable of sharing parts.

Sure they weren’t anywhere near as elegant or ‘advanced’ as the other builders....but they were robust and could be fixed by anyone with a decent working knowledge of mechatronics. They were also damned fun and interesting people to be around....

He smiled on that thought, tinkering with an arm ripped off of Zwolf during a sparring match earlier in the day. Zwolf still managed to win. Thinking about it filled him with an odd paternal pride.

Another part of his mind was trying to picture what it would be like if it was his arm. To have a body like that... he’d be lying if there wasn’t something of an allure to it. Who was it again that said an un-cyber’d cyber-tech is like a mechanic without a drivers license?

Daisuke didn’t care. He had his reasons for remaining fully human. He’d gained an extra one seeing how bothered some of the others were by this hack.

His computer terminal chirruped.

Speak of the devil.

The analysis was done. And about time too. Even Grunthal’s computers were top-of-the-skip models. They really should’ve replaced the lot, rather than order that shuttle. But, Daisuke’d been outvoted on that one.

Oh well.

He collated the data, and started to type.

----

To: “Cybernet.tech” (undisclosed recipients)
From: “Dai-kunV” (edo.daisuke@zalem.grunthal.fen)
Subj: SCC Radio plugin vulnerability exploited in wild. ‘Ghost Hack’
Time

Hi all

I assume you have all heard about the robbery a few days ago here on Mars. 2 Kunstler involved were remotely disabled using a hack of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s software radio plugin. Hardware logs attached do confirm this.

It appears that they used the vulnerability discovered a couple of weeks ago in the chip driver. It meant the system was hacked even before their protection software had a chance to act.

More disturbing however, is the hack was used to erase their biological memories. I did not believe it myself at first but neural map scans show a strong discontinuity when the Kunstler involve are asked about events surrounding the raid. The timing of the raid maps up to the damaged memory.

One, Jana Hall, was hacked on three separate occasions. Twice on overflights of the attacking convoy and during the attack. Jana did not notice the first two. After the attack, she believed it to be a head injury until the Patrol investigated and found no injuries.

Also, it can be seen in the attached data that Vankos scans at the time of the attack show the exact same patterns. A penetration using the radio driver, which is somehow used to erase the memory.

I am sorry our analysis cannot go any deeper, our equipment is quite old. We cannot tell how the erasure was performed, just that it was. We cannot tell if it can be reversed either.

A good number of us are very worried about this. And we need a patch for the SSC plugin fast.

Kind Regards
--Daisuke Edo

--------------------------------------------
Mk 1 Homo Sapiens. Just because it is old. Do not throw it away.

The response to his mail was pretty much exactly what he expected. Grabbing a can of Red Bull, he settled in for a long night.

----

Jana’s quarters were in the older part of Grunthal, in the original welded shipping containers. Four steel walls, with some storage space for her few personal items that’d been recovered after the crash, a desk with a few workbooks and a porthole which looked out into the canyon.

There was no bed... just an upright rack where Jana was supposed to sleep.

She longed for a bed. She longed for the feel of soft downy sheets brushing against skin she didn’t have anymore. There were sensory pickups on the metal, but they just weren’t the same. There was no caress of a cool breeze, no tingle from a hot sun, just an electric tingle of information which informed her that something was touching her arm.

Synthetic skin just wasn’t robust enough for vacuum operation.

The picture of her... of who she was... wearing that leotard in zero-g gear with streamers trailing behind her... it brought tears to her eyes. She swallowed a lump in her throat... at least that felt real, trying to remember what it felt like to wear that leotard... how tight it was against her skin.

“Dammit,” she whimpered. Her fist clenched, her breathing hard and rapid. “God Dammit!” she screamed, driving her fist through the table.

It offered as much resistance as a piece of tissue paper might. The chipboard just burst apart, dumping the contents on the floor. Her breath caught in her throat as she stared at her fist, at electromechanical joints.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. In through the nose, slow out through the mouth, blowing air across her lips. She could feel her spit vapourise, just a gentle cooling that seemed to sooth. Close her eyes... take deep breaths. Isolate the self from the machine. Go right back and feel that inner core, then slowly add each and every system to it. Integrate them into herself.

Open her eyes again.

She could see the heat radiating off of where the sun had been shining all day.

A few more tears tickled as they fell down her cheeks. She padded them away with tissue paper, shaking her head to clear it. She could feel the mass of her hair moving, brushing against the back of her neck...

There was something reassuring about that.

Always remember Jana, this was your choice, she thought. And just when I thought I was getting over it, this happened.

She stiffened her lip.

“I am still Jana Hall,” she reassured herself. “I am still Jana Hall,”

She still felt wide awake, but her power cells were in the red. She stepped back into the alcove, feeling docking ports on her back, arms, legs and neck come open. She felt them dock, connectors sliding into place.

Systems called out green in her mind as power and data began to flow. Actuators shut down, inerting themselves for safety reasons while the alcove began to interrogate her hardware. Diagnostic cycles began automatically, ensuring her charging circuits were functional.

The power turned on, warm and flowing through her core. It made her smile unwittingly. It might not have been a weighty duvet, but there was still something deeply satisfying about that feeling... despite it’s unnaturalism.

She had to admit... there were things she enjoyed about this. The training... the training really helped, even if her trainer was far better at handling the action side of things than she was at the psychology.

Being out in space was all she hoped it would be. It was just the price seemed that bit too high.

However she figured if she could hold onto that, she’d get through this eventually. She had no choice really but to.

With that thought, she allowed the sleep inducers to kick in, gently pushing the biological parts of her mind into restful unnatural sleep.

She dreamed of her last competition, of the cheering crowd.

----

Jets morning started with breakfast. She wasn’t really the best at it. The one time Jet’d tried to do something more complex than pancakes, she set the building’s fire suppression off.

Fed and cleaned up, her morning commute involved a quick boost up to orbit, a spin around the planet, followed by a skipping re-entry down to Grunthal. While she had quarters at the base, it was worth the extra effort to spend time with Ford.

And USB-powered devices with decent bioskin sensory feedback made things fun. Bzzzzt... snigger. There were advantages to plug and play hardware... with a bit of effort, you could really make up for the deficiencies.

Still, skimming through the canyons of Noctis, she knew today was going to be one of those days. The courier was due from the White Tower sometime this morning... she checked her planner to be sure.

Useful thing, having an iPod in her head. It let her fake being smarter than she was. That GURPS profile proved it. At least it had it’s own wireless and cellular systems, so she could make do without the SCC plugin even if flying in crowded space without radar was just a little bit hairy. The usual morning commute gave her a chance to make a few quick changes to Jana’s training schedule, read some coursework and go through the details of that joint training exercise planned with the Soviets.

The morning mist clung to the valley, Jet skipping above it just to see where she was going, banking right over the training grounds and the motorball track. Grunthal had changed in the last few years, hadn’t it?

There was one new hanger, housing the Destiny Nova, while another was being built for the shuttle they’d ordered. There was more building work in the walls of the canyon, expanding the base, while two yellow digger trucks trundled across the canyon floor with a load of rubble. The construction company was made up of mundanes just up to make money.

Jet landed at the front door, coming into range of the wireless transmitters inside. She pulled her email off the server as she keyed in the entry code. She was already reading them before she reached her office.

A quick text search on the stuff coming in off the SMoF list didn’t pull up her name. Since nobody was specifically trying to contact her, she just ignored the lot. Jet got involved in the politics surrounding a convention exactly once, years before Jet became Jet. That had been once too many times.

She muttered her daily curse at whoever had decided to sign her up to that waste of bytes, leaving the whole lot on the server to archive just in case it was important later on.

Next, she sent a message to Jana, letting her know what her new schedule would be. Jana herself answered a few minutes later with an affirmative. That was good, the more she used her internal systems the better for her getting used to having them.

Jet made sure she was scheduled alongside Francoise Arnoul in the Kammers. Francoise was a dancer too. She might be able to help. Jet let Yoko, the Kammer’s leader, know about it.

Next item on her morning agenda was an email to the Soviet Airforce, suggesting a date for that proposed exercise at Gagarin. Afterwards, she saw to the rest of the Engel Gruppe. She ran through a few gruppe exercises, checked maintenance and downtime requirements, and set meditation and practice schedules for 5 other upcoming trainees.

Jet wasn’t only responsible for Jana.

Finally, she saw to her own practice. Keeping her own edge was just as important.

She was with the trainees in one of the practice halls when the Radi-KS courier arrived on her speed-drive-equipped skateboard, decked out in day-glo re-entry gear with a few sponsored logos from Fencorps....to go with the fandom.

“Just thumb on the dotted line,” the courier smiled, helmet underarm while she handed a pad to Jet.

Jet grimaced as she tapped her metallic fingers on the touchscreen, “Got a pen?”

“Ew,” the courier winced “Metal lady likes the old fashioned way. Viki can dig that, Viki got a pen.” She clicked it and offered it to Jet. “Well, electric stylus but it does the same,”

Jet took it and signed on the pad, the glass creaking a little. Behind the dark shades, the courier was obviously some fenkinder, maybe only 14 years old or so. “There y’go,” she handed the pad back,

“Viki says thank you for using Radi-KS. The fastest, the securest, the most radical courier service there is out of Serenity Valley,”

“Thanks,” Jet forced a smile, hoping it’d be enough since she had no money on her to offer a tip. Honestly, where was she supposed to carry her wallet?

The girl left with a zoom, leaving Jet holding the package. Just a simple jump drive. She plugged it into on of her USB ports and skimmed through some of the files inside. ID’s on suspects, images of vehicles, a few possible leads, but not much that was immediately useful. Nothing technical at any rate. Disappointing

Still, with a quick thought she fired it off to Daisuke in case he might find something useful, along with the warning against doing anything which might let anyone know they had it. Then finally got back to the 5 trainees who’d been watching the whole time. Jana was there, doing her best.

“Sorry about that,” she apologised. “Now back to where we were. You see me now.” Unarmed, clean face with an earnest smile and bright eyes. “Now watch this.”

She picked her blades up from table where they’d been placed, locking them into place on her forearms. The marbled metal shone in the overhead lights, keen edge appearing like a glowing silver river running up to a bright spark at the tip. Jet dipped her fingers into a small tub of red dye, before drawing two red lines across her cheeks.

The trainees watched as she closed her eyes and inhaled a deep breath, her whole body appearing to relax as she exhaled slowly. When she opened them again.

“You see the difference?” She looked at them all. They nodded. “You can see that I’m a threat. Everything about me screams ‘danger’. Would you want to fight me now?”

“No,” one of the trainees answers. Of course not, his tone adds. They all share the same sentiment.

“Right,” Jet nodded. “Remember, supreme excellence is not winning every battle.... it’s winning without having to fight. If I can intimidate an enemy to surrender, or threaten a mugger into leaving me alone... we both win. We both get out alive. If I get into a fight, I’m almost guaranteed to kill him but.” she held up one finger on her hand, “If I fight him, that gives him a chance to kill me. A small chance, but still a chance. It’s always better not to take that chance.”

A couple to the trainees looked a little dubious.

“When you get in a fight, nothing is guaranteed. You can always lose. If you can intimidate an enemy into giving up without fighting, you always win. If my enemy surrenders, he might have info I need, a lead on an investigation or even a code for a door. Dead men don’t talk, except in your nightmares.”

Jet took a moment to let that sink in.

“It might go against your own nature to threaten and intimidate. But trust me, it’s better than alternative. The threat of force is far more effective than the force itself. People know...” she stopped dead as something interrupted her.

She held up her hand, her attention more focused on the message she’d just received.

“Sorry guys. Duty just called,” she apologised with a smile, “Pair off for sparring. I’ll ask one of the AR’s to come down and help,”

Nobody ordered an AR around, not unless they wanted to be made a fool of. If there was one thing the Alita Replicas wouldn’t tolerate, it was somebody telling them what to do.

Drei agreed to take over. By the time Jet got the message, she was halfway to Daisuke’s workshop and storming through the corridors with a purpose. She damn near pulled the workshop door off getting it open, before slamming it behind her.

Daisuke jumped out of his chair, sending empty cans of energy drink clattering to the floor. The cybertech adjusted his glasses, staring bleary eyed at the armoured figure standing in the glare of the lights.

“Jesus Christ man, you’ve been awake all night,” the cyborg realised.

“Lie, Lie,” Daisuke slurred, “Daijoubu, daijoubu,” he shook his head. “I am okay,”

“You sure?”

“Not first time I pull all-nighter,” Dai smiled, trying to keep a yawn in “Not last. All I need is Red Bull and Sailor Moon image songs to keep my batteries charged.”

Jet sucked on her lower lip for a moment, “So, what was so urgent? Find something interesting?”

“Oh yes,” Daisuke nodded, wearing a cat like smirk. “The entire mailing list was working on it, even Attim was in. The scan data will take some time to analyse, another day at least before everyone has results, so we worked on patching the vulnerability.”

“Damn,” Jet murmured under her breath. She’d been hoping for an answer to give to Jana.

“No. We found something. In the driver.” There was a gleam in Daisuke’s eye. He was clearly having fun being the important one. “We audited the code, going line by line through it to where we thought the problem was.”

“And...”

“Look for yourself,” A quick flurry of keystrokes sent the source file to Jet, with a few lines highlighted. It took the cyborg a few moments to parse through it, then another few seconds wondering what the problem was, some more time to check, then doublecheck it before she realised something.

“It looks okay,” she said, looking a little confused.

“Exactly!” Daisuke damn near jumped down her throat. He really was wired like a power station. “There is nothing wrong with it. Step through it in the debugger and it runs fine. It makes all proper bounds checks.”

“But...” Jet began.

“It does not work when compiled into a binary. Running on the actual system. It performs the bounds check, but with certain inputs, does not report the correct answer. It tells the program that the input is correct even thought it is not.”

“Compiler bug?” Jet assumed the obvious.

“What we assumed. But...” Daisuke looked away at his screen. “Read the logs. They knew exactly where to look and exactly what to do.”

Jet sucked a breath through her lips. “Fuck.”

One word which summed up both of their feelings. Somebody on the mailing list had leaked the information.

“It is worse than that,” Daisuke said, his voice flattening. The tech almost seemed to be disappointed by what he’d found. He clicked his mouse and brought something new up on screen. “We decided to take a look at the compiler itself to see if it was a bug, or not. A few of us, playing our cards close to our chest. What we found...” he clicked and sent it to Jet.

Again, the relevant section was highlighted and commented. It still took her more than a few seconds to figure her way through it. Daisuke could see the moment Jet worked it out, that flash of anger followed by an almost pained grimace.

“Who’ve you told?” she asked him.

“Just a few. Nobody from Sirius Cybernetics. Or any of their associates.”

Jet nodded, exhaling a long sigh as she buried her face in her hands for a moment. Her blades glinted menacingly.

“Right,” she said, trying to catch up with her own thoughts. “Right so, this just became a Troubleshooter matter.”

Jet didn’t bother flashing her warrant card. Daisuke looked up at her, then at his own screen allowing himself a small smirk of satisfaction. He may not have been cyber-enhanced like many of the others, he might not have been a great fighter but he could still make himself invaluable. It’s not the hardware, but how you used it.

“Why didn’t anyone spot this?” Jet asked, after a few moments silence.

“It is a special compiler for a special hardware chip,” Daisuke answered. “Only four people work on it. ”

“And you can tell who committed these changes to the code?”

Like all open-sourced projects, they kept careful logs of who’d committed what changes to what code, and when.

“I did it. Just before I messaged you.”

Jet smiled at him. “Nice one,”

“The least I can do,” He checked his screen, “Roland Foster. Comm’s specialist. Committed the bug April 13th last year. It has been in every build since.”

“Is Roland on the ML?”

“Unh,.” Daisuke nodded, “Yes he is. But once it became obvious that the problem was not accidental, we have been keeping it private,”

Jet nodded “Keep this secret for the time being. If he thinks we’re on to him, he could go to ground, or ‘vanish’.” She thought for a moment, “What does Roland normally work on? What’s his expertise?”

“Communications, like I said.”

“Hardware, software, wetware?”

“Software mostly, some hardware. I do not know about wetware.... probably not. Sirius themselves provide hardware plugins only, which only ever interface with existing hardware.”

The conclusion to be drawn there was obvious enough.

“So, he couldn’t have pulled off this hack alone,” Jet leaned down on Daisuke’s desk, thinking. It started to buckle.

Daisuke exhaled a long breath, “In Japan, we would call this situation ‘Fukushima’,”

Jet raised an eyebrow.

“Just keeps getting worse and worse,” he explained. “And might shit everywhere if we’re not careful,”

“Send everything you can on him to the terminal in my office,” A pause. “And when can you get a patch for the radio?”

“Now that I know what is wrong, an hour.”

“Great,” the cyborg smiled. “Don’t make it public. Keep it quiet, to people we trust. We can’t let Roland know we’re onto him yet. If he goes to ground, we lose whoever he’s working with,”

Arresting Roland would be the easy part, Jet figured.

“We are already doing it,” he said, with a proud smirk on his face. “And feeding Roland false information, making him believe we found a different error,”

Jet looked almost ashamed. “I should’ve assumed. If you need me, I’ll be in my office,”

The first thing she needed to do was make sure somebody filled in for her gruppe training duties while she was busy, the next was that she needed to find out where in Fenspace Roland Foster was. Where he normally lived anyway.

It wouldn’t make sense for her to take the mission if he was clear across the solar system. Someone else might be in a better position than her. It also paid to let other troubleshooters know what she was doing... so two people didn’t end up working the same mission. Next, she messaged Erwin, letting him know that she really hadn’t intended to do this when she asked for the info, while trading back what details she had.

The robbery was still a Space Patrol crime. Deliberately adding a back door to software that was used as a physical part of someone, then giving that information away to Zwilniks was a Great Justice matter.

It left a lingering sense of....violation, running through her body. Jet pushed it to the back of her mind.

It didn’t take too long for her to get an answer back on her search. A physical shipping address, just around the planet, in Helium. The temptation was to just grab Roland as soon as possible, and get answers using the Gene Hunt method.

Something about the idea was deeply satisfying.

Nab him off the street, and get the information out of him before somebody realises he was missing. It might even be possible to seat someone else at his email inbox and have them take his place.

Jet pondered it over a cup of black coffee. It could work, but it just wouldn’t be Jet’s style. The other option was to just let Roland deliver his associates himself, without even realising it.

Jet dialled out using her onboard phone. It was night on the other side of the planet, so she didn’t expect a quick answer. She scratched at the “Hunter-Warrior” badge engraved on her shoulder while it rang.

It was plated in gold leaf, varnished in place. It’d been a pig to get done, the handwavium metal-ceramic tearing through tools.

“Hey, uh Jet.” the voice on the other end slurred. “Y’know what time it is?”

“Ford,” she smiled. “We’ve got a job,”

“Great.... now let me sleep. We can’t all recharge from a power socket,”

“I’ll see you in the morning,”

“Yeah... late in the morning.”

Ford yawned as she hung up. Jet finished her coffee with her feet up on the desk. The next matter to worry about was Jana.

----

Installing the patch wasn’t hard. kextunload, followed by kextload, a deep breath and kextstat to check to see if it loaded properly. She sprung out her wings, listening in on all the radio chatter going on around her for a few moments followed by a quick radar scan of the room.

Dense objects and hard edges gave bright returns amidst the noise coming off the walls and furniture. She could close her eyes and still see where she was going.

She scanned through a few channels, listening in on different programs for a few moments before moving on. It was comforting to have it back online, even as she retracted her wings and dropped her reception ability back to normal.

Getting it back made her realised just how much she’d missed having it there. It made her feel oddly complete. The dirty violated module was deleted, and Jet felt clean and pure again.

She gave her blades a thin coating of oil before placing them back in their case, placing the case under her desk. She cleaned her face up while checking in on the others. 2 of the Engels were out at the Watchtower, Gant was taking a training course on Atalante. Make sure everyone’s got the patch, then spread it out to a few contacts.

While waiting for a few responses, she started going through Roland Foster’s biography. Nothing especially noteworthy over the last couple of years, just quietly plugging away for Sirius. Nobody special. No listed biomods. Just moved into a new apartment in one of Helium’s more upmarket Towers. Somehow managed to get himself a Mig-25 dirtside and launch. First fen. A few notable accomplishments back before the Fenspace convention really existed...including some early pre-Islandcon interwave stuff, but nothing since. One hit wonder really.

But damn he’d been around a long time, why’d he go bad now?

7 years doing the same thing, it might just be sheer ennui and boredom.

Jet could empathise with at lest. She took the troubleshooters job to keep the variety in her life. Another example of how much she’d changed. Had things been different and certain mistakes not been made, maybe she could’ve been the one stuck in a rut.

There was a knock on her door.

“Its Me Jana,”, a digital message announced.

“Yeah,” she called out, sitting herself upright.

The door opened, Jana stepping in carefully, “You wanted to see me?”

Jet nodded, putting on a warm smile. “Yeah. Come in. You can sit on the couch, just put the gear on the floor or something,”

Jana looked around for a few moments, realising that this was the first time she’d ever actually been inside Jet’s office. It was just as disorganised and messy as she’d expected, something which made her feel comfortable. It was a very human place. She sat herself on th

“I just wanted to see how you were doing today,” said Jet, with a deliberate softness in her voice.

“A little better,” Jana answered.

“Good.” The Engel leader waited a moment. “Better how?”

Jana shrugged, “I spent most of the morning with Acht, training. We started talking, about how I felt “ She gave Jet a guilty smile, “I ask her how she kept her identity, being just a copy of Alita,”

Jet looked surprised, “You’re still alive,”

Jana rubbed at her shoulder. “She told me she wasn’t just a copy. Then she kicked my ass.” She forced a laugh. “It.... didn’t hurt as much. Daisuke patched me up,”

She just radiated discomfort, pulling at her arm.

“She ripped your arm off?”

Jana nodded once. “It didn’t hurt.” Not like it was supposed to. “It was....annoying She picked me up, and picked up the arm, some of the power lines were sparking.... I could feel it. She looked at me and asked me if I was still Jana Hall.”

“And,” Jet pressed.

“Well,.... yeah. She said What made me Jana Hall,” she paused. “I couldn’t answer her. She just did that lip pursing thing all the AR’s do and said that ‘I know I’m Acht. I know I’m a different person and not just a copy. We start the same, but from the first millisecond we become different people. And I know what makes me different from my sisters, what makes me Acht, and not just an Alita Replica. So she asked me again what made me Jana?”

“Sounds like Acht alright”

The AR’s might’ve scored low on AI intelligence tests, but sometimes they could be far sharper than even the supposedly super-intelligent AI’s. Then again, most of those tests where biased towards AI rationality... how ironic. The AR’s just didn’t have the processor cycles to run through full complex decisions based on utility and advantage.... so they cheated.

The AR’s were combat droids, and in combat sometimes it was better to make a wrong decision and run with the consequences, than make no decision at all. The testing tended to penalise wrong answers far more than late or non-answers. Not knowing this... the AR’s always tried to answer. Which meant they got it wrong more often.

And Jet had great fun making them even more wrong.

“What made me Jana before I had that accident? Was I any less Jana now that she had pulled my arm completely off?” She sighed, looking at the floor “I said, no. So she said, so why should replacing both arms, or both legs.... or a torso. If an arms makes no difference, or a leg, adding any number of zeroes is still zero,” She stopped, thinking about it for a moment. Jet just sat back, waiting for her to keep going.

“I...” Jana paused again, holding her hand out in front. “It makes sense rationally. But.... I don’t feel it. I know it’s true, I know I’m me.... but I can’t shake the feeling. They were inside my head”, she pointed to her ear, “First replacing parts of my brain, then...got inside my mind. I’m...supposed to be me, but....” she swallowed a little, trying to think it through. “It just feels wrong. I think...”

She stopped, looking up at Jet for a moment, then at her own arm, flashing a set of vents at herself.

“When did you stop being whoever you were, and become Jet Jaguar? When did you know? What did that feel like?”

Jet looked like she’d sat on a live sparkplug.

“I didn’t,” Jet answered, looking down at the Jet figure on her desk, “I picked this name off the top of my head to answer an air traffic controller, so they wouldn’t know who I really was.” She looked strangely ashamed. “I just grew into the name, for want of a better phrase. Why, is that how you think you feel?”

“Maybe...” Jana answered quietly. “Maybe not. I feel better than yesterday,” she forced a smile, “I saw my arm torn off and Acht was right, I wasn’t any less Jana than with it. But... I was less human, and Jana is human?”

“You don’t feel human anymore?”

“No,” Jana confirmed.

Jet made a note of it in Jana’s file. “That’s good,” she said.

Jana looked confused.“But... I thought...”

Jet’s smiled warmed up, “It’s important for you to understand that you really aren’t human anymore.” She leaned forward again, resting herself on her desk. “You’ve gone beyond humanity and become something different, You see...”

Jet paused to collect her thoughts for a moment.

“This isn’t Cyberpunk 2020. Cybernetics don’t eat your soul,” She hated referencing that site, but sometimes it said things better. “That’s just something game designers made up to keep munchkins from going crazy. Your self isn’t harmed by this,” she knocked against her own body. “You don’t have to be human to be a person. Your body doesn’t determine who you are, it’s just a shell that lets you do stuff and experience things, and lets the world do stuff with you.”

“So whats make me me then?” Jana asked, looking hopefully at Jet.

“I’m not really a philosopher,” Jet demurred. Jana’s expression was insistent, however. “Well,” Jet looked at her terminal screen for a moment. “Your actions determine your existence. What you do, what people do to you...what you enjoy doing, what you hate. What did you enjoy doing six months ago?”

“Stardancing,” Jana answered quickly.

“And,” Jet pushed.

“I liked performing. I like being in front of a crowd and listening to them cheer. I liked the smell of pancake breakfast in the morning. I liked... the view out the window from my home on Central.” She paused, realising something, “I know where this is going to go... you’re going to say that I still like all those things, and so on... so I’m still the same person,”

Jet gave a gallic shrug. ”It’s cliché but true. But it’s important to understand that being human isn’t needed to be Jana. Human is just a label for a type of body really. You don’t have to be human to be a person. The very....” she stopped for a moment to think “ … the very essence of who you are is still there. Your body can be whatever you want it to be....”

“It’s easy to understand that rationally. A different thing to feel it,”

“The feeling is something that just takes time,” Jet reassured her. “It helps if you do things that you enjoy, or things that you associate with yourself. Things that make you feel complete... like what you said yesterday.”

Jana was quiet, turning it over in her mind. Take a deep breath to heave a sigh. Feel how alien and wrong it is. It’s okay to feel not-human, she told herself... because your not. Look down at the intakes on the sides of her legs.... and it just feels completely and utterly wrong. She curled her toes up, then spun the turbine on it’s starter motor for a second, feeling it wind up inside her leg. It was just a gentle torque on her knee.

Jet look startled for a moment, wondering just what she was doing.

“It might be okay not to be human,” Jana said, carefully choosing her words. “But, can I still lose my....um.... humanity?”

It took Jet a few moments to figure out.

“You mean decency, common empathy and just being a Good Person type thing?”

In fairness, Jet had no idea what word to use for it other than ‘humanity’ either. Jana just nodded.

“Cybernetics doesn’t take that away either” answered Jet. “You can trust me on that too. And the things that will... they affect squishies just as easily. I’ve seen plenty of ordinary humans without a shred of humanity in them.” she closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. It was something that had the weight of experience behind it. She decided not to go into details, preferring to let those experiences fade back into the background.

“It’s good that you’re worried about that too,” This was something Jet had saved, she couldn’t remember from exactly where.... it might’ve been from an old fic, but it had always struck her as rather profound. “Let me try an analogy. You know what the difference is between a truly good, religious person and a fanatic is?”

Jana shook her head.

“The fanatic will never - CAN never - question himself. Their faith is brittle and cannot stand up to scrutiny. The good person will admit to themselves doubts, and work through them. Sometimes the doubt remains, but it doesn't cripple their belief. It's the same with us. The surest way to know if you still have your humanity is to be able to doubt whether you do." She paused to let her thoughts catch up. “It shows that being a good, decent person is still important to you. So long as that matters, you won’t lose it. It’s when it stops mattering that you have the problem,”

Jana was still looking at her feet, spinning her engine up. She took another breath....another reminder of what she was.

“There are things I’m going to miss too.” Jana said. “And I guess, if I were to magically get my old self back, there’re things I’d miss about this body too.”

“Me too,” Jet assured. “We’ve all gone through this.”

Jana focused on the floor. Do things you enjoy, do things you associate with yourself. Where had she been going when that bloody idiot crashed into her? Bang and darkness.... She shook off that memory.

“Jet...” she started. “I’m going to Jeanne’s Dance this year,” she stated with firm conviction and a stare in her eyes that might almost have been channeling Alita’s determination. “I’m going to enter using Panzer Kunst,” she grinned. “It’s got an austere beauty to it.”

Jet looked perplexed for a moment, working through the idea. “That’s.... that’s actually a good idea. It’ll fit with your training.” It was perfect... she didn’t have to change her planning or scheduling any more, while a direct goal would be good for Jana to work towards.

It was still going to take her time to work through, and Jet wondered if she’d be ready for Zenith. She started to twirl a few strands of hair through her fingers, mulling it over. Doing it without ripping clumps out took a surprising amount of concentration.

“So, how are you feeling?” Jet repeated her question from earlier.

“Better,” Jana saw no reason to change her answer. She sure wasn’t over it, not within an asses roar of being over it. She didn’t feel comfortable... even breathing still felt wrong, never mind the thermal glow everything seemed to have.

She could trace the underfloor heating, if she wanted to. She could still look in a mirror and see an alien face, even though her friends recognised her immediately. It still felt wrong on so many levels that someone had been inside her mind.

But....

Take a deep breath. Close her eyes. Open them again.

It did seem... surmountable. With time and effort.... it would pass. She could believe that at least. Jet looked at her, then checked her own notes.

“One last thing,” the Engel leader said, “I’m going to be away on duty for a while. The others will still be here to help. If you really need me, message me... but It’ll be a while before I can answer,”

“Yeah,” Jana replied. “I’ll try with Acht, she offered to help me if I need it,” Jet raised an eyebrow. Jana grinned a little. “I guess, I must’ve impressed her.,”

Jet wasn’t sure whether Jana was proud of whatever had impressed Acht, or ashamed. She figured it must’ve been equal parts both, and set a reminder to ask Acht what exactly happened. Impressing the AR’s was hard...

The meeting came to and end with a promise from Jet to check up on Jana at the end of the week, and a promise from Jana to keep working.

A few more little administrative loose ends needed to be tied up. She started idly spooling her engines over as she worked, just taking care of a few last things before she left for Marsbase Sara.

She was already formulating her own mission plan.

Step one: Quick surveillance of Foster’s apartment. Note anyone going in/out. Laser bug it. See if there’s a way to gain into his computer remotely. If not, see if there’s a way in.

Step two: Depends on step one.

-----------

A green F-250 superduty was approaching the runway at Burroughs Spaceport. Ford Sierra downshifted as she lined the truck up with the centre line, approaching at a speed somewhere north of 250 kph. The old powerstroke rumbled and grumbled, coughing black smoke.

Jet sat beside her, with her feet stretched through the space where the original passenger seat would’ve been. She watched the ground approach with an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Dragon Wagon, final approach,” Sierra radioed. “Crossing runway threshold,”

Landing a vehicle which was never intended to fly wasn’t the easiest trick to pull off. There were plenty of divots and trenches dug out either side of the runway which testified to that. A big Peacemaker thundered off into the sky from the OGJ base at the other end of the port, trailing a dark cloud of smoke as it climbed.

Controls that’d originally been intended solely to alter the pitch of the steering wheel where now being used to guide the pickup truck down to something of a landing. Up a little... down a little. Sierra fought against aerodynamics not well suited to flight and a vicious headwind which kept trying to lift the front up.

The rear wheels hit first with a screech of burning rubber, pressed down into the dirt by the weight of the towing gear in the back. With a jolt, the front came down, the truck lurching to the side a little. Sierra swore as she tried to correct it, stepping hard on the brakes.

Quickly, she reached down to the gearstick and flicked a switch, locking the truck back into land mode. The engine backfired, belching smoke and flame as it pushed against the brakes and transmission for a few moments before it finally started to come under control.

The speedometer needle flicked around with a mind of it’s own, before finally figuring out that it was supposed to read groundspeed. It then promptly decided it should read off-scale high, pointing to a non-existent number somewhere before zero.

It quickly dropped, Jet bracing herself with her leg to keep from flying forward against the dashboard. There was a dent in the floorpan where she’d managed to nearly put her foot through the sheet steel.

“Phew!” Sierra wiped her brow with the back of her driving glove. “No problemo,”

The radio crackled “Dragon Wagon. Welcome to Burroughs. Taxi Route 3 Left onto main.”

“Wilco,” Ford broadcast.

The truck was still hammering down the runway at a speed north of 160. Sierra kept her foot in, brakes starting to overheat a little. It took another few seconds for the speed to drop to a value sensible enough to try make a sharp turn.

Tyres squealed and Jet clung on as the truck pitched around, threatening to roll over. At the far end of the runway behind them, a white twin-engined fighter jet was beginning it’s take-off roll.

Jeddaks tower glistened in the evening sun, throwing a long black shadow in the direction of Hellas Basin. Lights were starting to come on in Jeddara tower, while the newer, smaller triplets Gathol, Thark and Zor were still mostly lit by sunlight.

The white jet took off behind them with a roar, powering into the sky. Behind it, a Blackbird was already angling in to land.

Unlike the aircraft-based fencraft which had to be parked up at the hangers, Ford could just drive her truck straight out the main gate, joining the track heading towards the main city. The pair filled the cabin with idle conversation, mostly about the proper way to shoot a gun.

Jet itched to get out the door and onto the red soil beyond. It was so different to Noctis. Sierra made sure she had her own personal breather to hand, just in case.

“So, where is the Mark again,”

“Thark Tower, Llana building,” Jet said.

“Usual deal,”

“Yea, surveillance first.”

There was a whole crate full of gear hidden under the Tonneau cover beside the usual towing harness and mechanic’s tools.

-----------

The sun had gone down by the time they’d driven through the airlock, into the tower proper. The city’s lights were ablaze, crystal windows shining like diamonds set in glistening steel frames. Rivetted steel ribs supported arching bridges between local spires and towers, forming a network of roads which ran through, over and around the individual structures. The main routes climbed through the core of the tower, before fanning out radially to local street levels.

Sierra eased the truck up the roadway, low buildings on outside allowing most of the inner apartments a better view of Hellas basin while mounting the main support beams for the dome. Cranes danced between building in the upper levels, bearing names of contractors Jet had once recognised from her hometown.

The city was going up like a rocket. People were flooding in from both Fenspace, and from that little blue dot sitting in the sky, lost among the lights reflecting from inside. Helium was genuine boomtown. Even if half the newcomers didn’t even want to know what a Barsoom was.

A bar they passed was playing that Cosmonaut’s rock song...Jet couldn’t recall the name, and didn’t care to look it up again.

Jet wasn’t quite sure how, but Helium always seemed far more light and airy than the Crystal Cities on Venus. Even the breeze coming through the truck’s open window seemed cooler, helping assuage the claustrophobia of the cabin a little. There were green areas, small playing fields or picnic areas built on the rooves of some buildings that filled the air with the scent of cut grass.

Ford just grumbled about traffic, and some moron on a Vespa using his own biomod bioluminescence as a brakelight.

the too-cheerful navigator adivsed.

It could navigate you anywhere in Fenspace. It would do so in an irritating cornball accident. The truck swung round the bend, passing a shop offering the latest in skintight pressure suits. It’s name was yet another variation on the “Have Spacesuit....” theme.

> The navigator beamed

Jet looked up. “That’s the place,”

“They got a carpark ?” Sierra wondered aloud, glancing around.

A sign on the wall pointed towards an under-street hangar bay instead.

“Will that do?”

“Sure... Hanger bay? I wonder if it’s got direct access to the outside?,”

Ford steered the truck down. For a spacecraft, it was small. For a fencar, it was pretty big and unwieldy. Still, it seemed to be happy to at least be running in an oxygen atmosphere once more.

She crawled through the carpark, parking up close to the airlock at the far end. It was a big space... running right under the street above. Centimeter’s thick windows in the floor gave spectacular views of the streets and buildings below.... to those who had a head for heights anyway.

Three other vehicles were parked down there.... one a rather nice DeLorean with flight mods that made Jet jealous. If you absolutely had to travel in a car.... might as well be something with a little style after all.

Jet was the first out of the truck, practically jumping out as soon as it had stopped. The cyborg stretched and spread her wings. She was easily recognised as Jet Jaguar... there was little chance of her hiding who she was outside of wearing an oversized trench-coat.

It didn’t matter, however. The only people who knew Jet Jaguar as a troubleshooter, were other troubleshooters. It also helped that people often assumed that the five publicly acknowledged troubleshooters were the only troubleshooters.

Nobody even blinked as herself and Ford pulled their crate of gear from the back of the truck. Jet was taking structural notes, counting columns and comparing them to blueprints she’d accessed from the Helium City planning office.

One ran straight up through the target’s apartment. Good.

Jet strapped some gear to her back, and launched clean up through the entrance with a turbine howl. Ford strapped her tools and gear to her belt, and set off up through the building, with The Seatbelts on her headphones.

Not one person gave her a second glance.

She rode the lift to the tenth floor, timing it as she went. 45 seconds, she noted. She timed her walk to Roland’s door. That took about 15 seconds at an easy pace.

Her toolbelt rattled as she walked, and she couldn’t help but note how opulent everything was, compared to her garage home. Carpet was soft underneath her booted feet. There was wallpaper on the walls. Lights and fittings were milled from brass.

It was a high class place.

She took note of the type of lock on the doors, before breaking out her toolkit and setting to work on the light exactly opposite. A woman walked passed with her kids, not even noticing her prying the light off.

She was in mechanics overalls, working with clean tools, looked like she knew exactly what she was doing, and was acting like she had every right to be doing what she was doing.

People just made the natural conclusion. Someone had been called in to fix the light. Even though it wasn’t broken.

Mounting the camera was simple enough. Wire it into the light’s own power supply, connect the antennae to the metal casing and make a small modification to the light cover. Try not to dance to the music. Try not to touch the live metal... getting zapped unconscious halfway through installing a spy camera just outside his door might just make the target suspicious.

She smirked to herself.

Right until she heard the door open behind her. A cold draft came out, running down her spine. She forced herself not to look around, instead burying her thoughts in the job. A lump rose up the back of her throat as she made sure she still had her pistol inside her jacket.

It’s familiar weight pressing on her chest reassured her.

“Goddamit.” the man behind her spat. She winced. “I report that broken light three times and when someone finally does show up, they fix the wrong light,”

He even threw in the exasperated sigh, raising his arms to the heavens as if he expected the God’s themselves to give him strength to deal with such incompetence.

Ford slowly turned her head around. Roland Foster was glaring up at her through his glasses, as if he was the Great Dalmuti himself, and she was just a greater Peon. He had these weird broad cheeks and eyes which hinted at a face that was designed to be cheerful, but hadn’t been for a very long time.

Something about him made her think of a sour jellybaby.

“That one, down there.” Roland pointed, “That’s the one,”

She looked at it, flickering away happily to itself, then looked at him trying her damnedest not to smile.

“Not my job,” she said with a dismissive shrug. “I was told to fix this light. I fix this light,” Ford knocked on the case.

“Goddamn mundanes,” Roland spat.

“Take it up with the union,” she drawled, layering her Chicago accent on as thick as she could. “I got my workorder, I can’t go against that,”

Foster sneered at her, huffed, turned on his heel and marched towards the elevator.

Sierra got back to work, trying her damnedest not to start laughing. Finishing up was easy enough, just refit the cover and check it was transmitting a good signal. A good picture came up on the monitor of her datapad.

She packed up and left, not really feeling very hurried, strolling to the elevator. Coming up, she met some electrician carrying a toolbox.

The hardest thing was to keep a straight face as she watched him through the closing doors.

She took a few private moments in the elevator to cool off. For just one instant, she’d been certain Roland was going to figure out what she’d been doing.

But he didn’t.

Amen, Hallelujah, Big Mac.

Far above her, lost in the shadows among the trusses supporting the the outer dome, Jet was busy adjusting an infra-red laser to point directly at Roland’s window in such a way that it wouldn’t bake his eyeballs out of their sockets, but still get a decent return signal.

It was a small device out of the standard troubleshooter toolkit, about the size of a pringles tin and covered in a chameleon material which matched the colour of whatever it was mounted to. A waved power supply to give it the output needed for a useful resolution. With that set, Jet moved to another truss and set up a camera, facing straight at the window, getting a full view of the apartment in visible and infra-red spectra.

Now for the fun part. She routed the infra-red signal through her own hardware to check the laser’s alignment. It came up as a bright spot on the reflective glass. She switched it over to a specialised signal processor and listened in.

She heard the door slam, followed by a man’s voice grumbling about incompetent electricians and how the city was getting worse the more people move in. She heard his footsteps cross the floor, and something hitting the bed before he sat down to work at his computer.

Hmm... she thought with mild surprise, this laser eavesdropper thing really works. It wasn’t crystal clear, sounding a little like an AM radio that wasn’t tuned in exactly right, but it was clear enough. There was a nasty crunching on the signal though...

A quick glance at the visual output showed Roland sitting at his computer... munching on cheetos.

She hooked it into the local cellular network, and from then on to the main satellite systems, where it was relayed simultaneously to Jet’s own workstation, and Ford’s mechanic’s shop. A quick check to see if things where being received.

Then jump off and rocket away into the night.

There was a bar nearby they’d both been meaning to try out.

-------

Roland booted his workstation, waiting for it to log in. He was wringing his hands together waiting for it to boot up. Instinct made him glance out the window to his left...

Nothing but lights twinkling on the outer dome.

The computer came up and he swallowed his fears, chasing them down with a mouthful of cheetos. There was something soothing in the crunch. It was just paranoia. He reassured himself by pulling the latest messages from the cyber’s list.

They’d patched the driver sure... but nobody seemed to be looking at the compiler.. A wave of almost euphoric giddiness was running through his body.

They hadn’t spotted it!

Nobody would think to look in the compiler. They’d spent most of the last 2 weeks pouring over the driver code trying to find the problem a single random bit on a fuzzing test had thrown up.

They’d failed.

And sure enough, even though they rushed through a patch with the simple expedient of disabling that particular feature, there were still at least three other little glitches in there.

He thought about just who he was beating. Some of the greatest minds in Fenspace. It helped that only 4 people knew how that compiler was supposed to work. With so few eyes, all bugs were hidden deep.

That was how it had started. He’d intended just to leave everyone stumped then come riding in with the solution a few weeks later. It had been about being skilled.... about being useful.... about showing how good he really was.... about being noticed as something more than ‘that radio guy’.

A message dropped into his encrypted inbox.

Had been....

He clicked it open. No bullshit inside, it was all business. Job well done was a job well rewarded. Test was a success. Money was in that number account. Everything was just tickety-boo.

A few more little glitches like that and he’d be set, the messenger assured him.

A roar of a jet engine dragged his attention outside, something flashing away into the distance. He wondered what it was for a moment, a sudden glimmer of fear rising deep inside him.

Was someone watching?

He stared outside, shivering just a little. Nothing seemed amiss. He stared... Lights flickered on the glass dome.

Just a few more ‘glitches’ and he could stop. Nobody need ever know. Just to reassure himself, he browsed through the server logs, checking to see who’d been downloading what.

Nothing. Server logs were gone for the last 3 weeks.

“Sorry Man, I accidentally zapped ‘em,” read the message in his inbox. “Meant to clear the old ones, Nailed ‘em all. opps “

If it had been the first time it happened, it might’ve been suspicious. He set a few things compiling, submitted a genuine patch for a bug in a control module, and amused himself for a few hours trawling through the Roughriders ship catalogue.

Pull this off right, he’d have enough for his own Blackbird. Enough to actually do something. Everyone else seemed to be having fun out there...

-------

The next few days were dull.

Roland Foster was a dull subject, working mostly from home, spending time browsing through the Roughrider’s sales site.... or occasionally the Soviets. The pair took it in shifts to watch the apartment... over video feed of course... split up by their own daily routines. Ford still had to see to customers downstairs, Jet still had to keep an eye on the Engel’s training.... and keep her own edge in.

Three hours a day.

Adjust for operational concerns.

It was time to think. Time not to think. Time to focus on reaction and form. Time to allow herself to fill out into her body, to merge with the hardware and fuse it to herself. Time to wonder if.... had things been only a little different.... she wouldn’t be sitting in Roland’s place?

A matter of picking a different bottle, and the interventions of fate.

Jet could understand. Jet could sympathise. There was a big difference between understanding and forgiveness, however. Jet promised herself she’d make him pay for what he did to Jana. She threw a punch so hard, it nearly spun her around...

She stopped for a few moments to regain her centre. It’d been over a year since the war ended, and that was still giving her trouble.

Jet didn’t laugh at all that warsie talk about the Dark Side any more. Those months after SerenityCon had proven it was a very real danger. She’d seen others fall to it. She felt it inside herself, gnawing away.

Looking at the video feed of Roland, fixing a lightbulb, she knew what she could do. She knew a hundred visceral ways to make sure he paid....

And knew she could still put the brakes on it hard when needed.

Jet finished her routine, and spent the next few hours idly doodling her thoughts, before handing over to Ford.

Ford Sierra took the time to balance her books, and take care of all that paperwork that always caught up on her. O2 use, gas releases into Sara’s atmosphere. Import, export. Biomass use and re-use. Waste extraction. Parts expected to come up from the ‘danelaw. Sure Jet’d suggested she use an Irish-registered shell corporation for it.... after the Dublin agreement the taxes were a great deal less than Oz.... but all the extra paperwork the Irish authorities demanded was a pain.

Add on top of that leafing through the reports she’d managed to get from the HPD. Did he make contact with any of the bounties believed to be in the city?

She glanced up every now and then... watching Foster go about his routine. She noted a few things down in the logbook, before noticing that she might as well have been gundecking them. It was frustrating. It was weirdly fascinating.

How could someone have a daily routine, set down to the minute?

She really just wanted to see him break it. Or do something crazy. Not be an apparently mild mannered computer geek. He didn’t do anything weird... he just worked from home a lot, popping out for a morning run around the city, or to get something to eat.

She didn’t blame him for it. As condo’s in Fenspace went, his was a palace. Better than her cluster of shipping containers at any rate.

She noted down a video Foster was watching, flipping over the page because the last one had finished. What she found, were some pen doodles.

Motorcycles, transforming into a flying robot, with Jet in the middle. Something that looked like a linear electric motor....

No wonder Jet had seemed bothered.

She made a mental note of it, and got back to watching Roland. Then started sketching up ideas for an avatar for Jet. Something suitably embarrassing, but not excessively painful. Her aunt’s old friend...perhaps. Who barely came up to Jet’s chest...

After a few days of watching and gathering....along with a few quick probes at Roland’s computer using some simple scripted tools and some discussion over breakfast, they had their answer.

“The computer,” Jet said. “What we want is on there.”

Sierra mumbled her assent through a mouthful of ersatz-bacon... made from flavoured tofu. “How we get it?”

“Usual way, probably,” the cyborg said.

Jet’s usual way was a good bit different from most troubleshooters.

“He’s not out of his apartment for long enough,” Sierra pointed out the flaw. “Maybe we could trick him into downloading something. I got a virus on my laptop that way once, which stole my mail accounts. He spends a lot of time on the Roughriders site... And you know they’d help bait him.”

“Maybe...” she started to tap her finger table.

“Hire a real hacker to write the virus,” Because that was way beyond Jet’s skill level. “Should be a total no problemo.”

“Still a lot of chance in that.”

“Chance in everything,” she smirked. “But it works enough that I know about it.... and I know as much about computers as you’d know about guns,”

Jet nodded, still thinking it over. Jet knew enough to know what was reasonably possible to do, if not how to do it. Most of Jet’s hacking tools were just that.... tools designed for inexpert use. designed by someone with far more skill. Plug them in, and they did the work.

Still, spear phishing might a good idea, especially if they could get the Roughriders to help.

“It’d also take a while,” she said. “But...” she stopped for a second. A light went on behind her eyes as Jet found a way to get back to her original plan. “If we could get someone who’s got field experience.... then we can have the virus idea as a fallback if they can’t do it fast enough.

Sierra shrugged her shoulders. “Sometimes, I think you just like B and E’”

Jet chuckled with a savage grin, It was fun. And she’d already planned her way in.

“But it seems fine. And if that don’t work...” Use more gun. They nab Roland, bring him in and have a friendly little chat. But that’s came with its own troubles.

Jet put the request in through headquarters, asking for a hacker who was able to get inside a building without getting noticed, and who could be out at Marsbase Sara within a day. Jet was almost certain that’d leave out who she really wanted, but they’d probably be busy anyway.

Jet also needed to keep this as quiet as possible. Any hint that Great Justice were investigating the link between Roland and the robbery, and the link would break. That meant going around Haruhi, while making sure Haruhi didn’t know you were going around her.

Like most troubleshooters, Jet had long since learned how the secret. The secret was known by those who knew it as ‘Haruhi Snacks’.

Just enough information to make her bite and go along with it. Not enough for her to want to get involved and blow the op. She’d pass it over to someone who could really do the work, and who’d understand that the issued request was far more complex.

Now it was just a matter of waiting, and seeing who they sent back.

-----------

The red phone rang. Noah hated when the red phone rang - four times out of five, someone he didn't want to talk to was on the other end. "Scott here."

"Noah, it's Mikuru."

It was Noah's lucky day - this was the other one time out of five - although he suspected his luck wouldn't last. "Hello, Mikuru. I assume this isn't a social call?"

"You assume correctly, unfortunately. A few days ago, a convoy that was being escorted by the Panzer Kunst Gruppe was robbed."

"I already know about that," interrupted Noah.

"You do??"

"Takami brought it to my attention, along with some emails she received because she's on the Cybernet.tech mailing list."

"This is that big?" Both of them knew just how good Takami was at spotting patterns, and at ignoring false matches. They also knew that she didn't like bothering her employer with matters that didn't directly affect his business... unless the matters were very important. "That helps explain why the Panzer Kunst Gruppe wanted a top troubleshooter. They didn't want to provide their reasons over an unsecured channel." Mikuru sighed - everyone knew that anything that made its way to Haruhi counted as "unsecured".

Noah echoed the sigh. "If Takami is right, then this is very big, and not something to discuss over a secure channel, either. Whichever troubleshooters get assigned to this will have to see them face-to-face. And before you ask, Katz and I aren't the right troubleshooters to solve it. A.C., maybe, if she's not busy ..."

"She is."

"... but none of the free OF-8s have the necessary skills. You want to put an OF-6 or OF-7 on this one. Have whoever you pick contact Takami; I'll have her send the files she thinks are relevant."

"Thanks, Noah. When are you going to stop by Arisia Station and say hello to everyone?"

Noah grimaced. He didn't want to tell Mikuru "when Hell freezes over", but he didn't want to lie to her, either... "I'm very busy here, sorry. In fact, I'm going to have to let you go now; my assistant just came in with more paperwork."

"All right. I'll talk to you later." And the connection went silent.

Great, he thought. I've pissed her off. And she's the only one in that group that I can tolerate enough to work with. It's never a good day when that damned phone rings.

--------

Cathy was lounging on the driver seat of the Stargazer, happily soaking up the sunlight flooding in through the transparent ceiling of the spacecraft.

Some strange ringing tone was disrupting her cat nap.

“Cathy, you have got a phone call...” Cortana said, sounding amused.“I think you should take it...”

Cathy yawned and rolled onto her other side on her seat of the Stargazer. “Just a few more minutes... its most likely not important... we never get important calls anymore.”

Now that the victory parties of the end of the war were long over, everything was getting very normal again.... as normal as Fenspace got. Technically she was still on the active roster, in the same way that the HMS Victory was still perpetually commissioned. She still wasn’t expected to actually do anything.

Cortana sighed mentally, Cats were always difficult to rouse... especially when they were just taking a short nap. She cut power to Cathys ‘comfort blanket’ and chuckled. There were always ways to get her cat’s attention.

She changed to a nice and innocent sounding voice. “Shall I take the call and tell someone at the Headquarter of Operation Great Justice that you were just taking a nap and will call back later ?”

“Wait, what?” Cathy suddenly jumped up and had her eyes wide open... “No, wait, I....” She took a deep breath to calm down. Damn, that much adrenalin was nasty when you just were on the edge of sleeping in.

“Activate the call... Here is Cathy, who is calling ?”

An unknown voice came out of the speaker of the radio.

“Good morning Cathy, this is Mr Johnson.” The voice was obviously artificial. “Identity is Imaginos.” Her blood chilled cold. She checked the digital signatures. She checked the encryption. All matched.

The voice continued. “We have a mission that requires your skills. You are proceed to the coordinates transmitted as an attachment and meet there with a Miss Stingray. Do not talk with anyone else about the mission before you meet.”

Cathy looked suspiciously at the radio system, checking the digital signature and encryption of the incoming call a second time,. Nothing had changed since the first time. No one would use a signature like this for a joke...

“Understood... we are currently near L5 of Earth, we should get there within an hour. Cathy out...”

Cortana deactivated the radio and Cathy shook her head.

“Without the signature I would bet its a joke from some of the Senshis back on Venus. “ she said, leaning back onto into the driver’s seat.

“I have received a databurst of mission details.” Cortana told her. Cortana had read it through in the half second it’d taken her to announce that “It looks like fun,”

Cathy sighed. “Anything is better than staying bored. Lets fire up the engine and get out of here... the next adventure is waiting... or at least some action of any kind, I don’t care.”

The engine field of the Stargazer peaked, the waved Skoda accelerating hard out into open space.

----

Despite the progress of the last year, Mars’ average population still hovered somewhere around 0 per square kilometre. Maybe in the future you’d have to call a tower and request landing coordinates, but the sky over Mars was still empty enough that you could just dive straight in, so long as you kept an eye on where you were going. Outside some controlled areas VFR was the rule.

The Stargazer had passed by Phobos and was now entering the upper atmosphere of the planet, it speed low enough to keeping from stressing the shield . After a few rough rough minutes they dropped subsonic, their vision clearing as the flames of reentry died back. The digitized map on the display already showed the icon of Marsbase Sara directly in front of them, only a few hundred kilometres away.

Cathy carefully merged her spacecraft into the traffic streams towards the base, still thinking about the mysterious call. She would have never thought that Operation Great Justice HQ would call people with such a ‘cloak and dagger’ style... or should she say ‘Runner and Johnson’? Someone had a lot of fun with the Cyberpunk references.

They touched down at a public landing strip, before pulling into a pressurised hanger, alongside a bipedal mecha whith a big autocannon and a big V engine on it’s back.

Cathy stepped out of her car into an atmosphere laced with engine fumes and oil vapours.

She stretched, exhaling a long breath. “Marsbase Sara, here we are.... Cortana, do you have already tracked down the place with the coordinates?”

“I am still looking for details Cathy.” the AI answered through a remote on her sleve “I have three slightly conflicting maps from different servers and I am not sure which is the right one.” The monitor highlighted the conflicts, pointing them out in a mix of Red, yellow and green. “But its definitely somewhere down in the Bunker levels, not in the new surface level dome. We can get a parking slot at the entrance, but you will have to go down yourself, looking for the exact place. The inertial tracking system in you suits phone should do fine.”

She thought about keeping her normal shirt and trousers, but this was maybe the start of an official mission, so it always paid to be prepared for trouble. She fetched her skinsuit from the backseat and reentered the car to get into it, then put shirt and trousers above the suit. Then she grabbed her gyrojet pistol from the glove compartment and put it into the holster.

That was a lesson she’d learned long ago, “don’t go unarmed if possible.”

“Okay, make sure that no one borrows the Stargazer Cortana” she said with a big grin, “I will see what Mrs. Stingray wants from us. If someone else from OGJ calls us, take the call and send me a text message if its important.”

She left the hanger and headed for the long ramp downwards into the bunker area. The coordinates appeared be on the second or third floor underground. A cyborg on the entrance looked over to her and nodded. Poor guy.... cool tail, though.

“First time here in Marsbase Sara?” he asked, eyeing Cathy carefully.

“Yes, first visit here... I will most likely stay a few hours, nothing more” Cathy replied with a smile.

The cyborg pointed at the pistol in the holster. “Expecting trouble ?”

“No... just a six shot Gyrojet pistol. Enough for self defense.” Cathy explained.

The cyborg seemed to be amused. “Armor piercing shots for self defense? Don’t you think..:”

Cathy shook her head. “Be reasonable, if I used a normal gun I could just take a few stones and throw them, most likely your cleaner would be to heavily armored to even notice the normal bullets!”

The cyborg laughed and nodded again. “Yeah, good point... and welcome to Marsbase Sara.”

Cathy left the small checkpoint at the entrance behind and began to descent into the depths of the base, looking onto the coordinate display of the suits computer every few minutes.

The first thing that struck her about the base was the heat. The deeper she went, the hotter it got. The air was humid with ozone and the myriad smells of mechanics. Electric ozone mingled with oilsmoke and the unique scents of hundreds of individuals... a number of anthromorphs, and some huge guy riding in the back of a six-legged construction vehicle, which held girders in it’s manipulator arms.

It trundled forward, skirting around her. The driver flipped her the bird

One of those Avatar walkers stomped past, waving a friendly hi. She smiled back at the pilot.

Finally she was standing in front of a small bar three levels below the surface.

“Okay, here should it be... The Heavy Gear... strange name for a bar...lets see Mrs Stingray, what you have to offer” she murmured and entered the bar.

There were several round tables and a bar, well populated by a mixture of pilots in flight gear, one or two cyborgs, a few mechanics clustered in the corning bragging about who had the best colour electoos

The bar was sparsely lighted and some invisible speakers were playing some techno music mix from a neon jukebox. A roaring laugh rose up from the midst of the mechanics.... it didn’t seem to concern her, so she ignored it.

Cathy sauntered over to the counter to order herself a drink, then headed towards one of the corners of the bar, sitting down at an empty table. She checked her navigator. ‘Okay, that’s it... down to the meter if these coordinates are exact’ Cathy thought and leaned back, slowly looking through the bar.

‘I am already looking forward to be out of here again’ she whispered to herself.

She was on her second drink when she saw another obvious mechanic walk in. If the overalls under her jacket hadn’t given it away, she could smell the engine oil and.... gunsmoke. She could see the tell-tale bulge of a handgun holster under her coat, just to the side of her bust. ‘Biomod?’ Cathy wondered.

She had dusky skin, and darker hair with bright brown eyes that scanned the room, specifically noting her presence before deliberately not paying her any attention. A flash of light glinted off metal fingers on her right hand... a cyber too?

Cathy watched her order a drink... a bottle of Half Acre ale, and nurse it for a few moments before inconspicuously making her way over to her table.

“Seat’s free?” the mechanic asked, in a strong American accident.

“Yes” Cathy replied and nodded. The woman sat down, placing the bottle on the table. Some suds crawled over the bottle’s mouth. “Miss Stingray?” Cathy presumed

“She’s outside waiting,” the woman told her. “Call me Misty,” she said pleasantly. “I’m Stingrays partner. In both senses of the word.” she winked.

This really was getting Cyberpunk 2020.

“Can we go now?”

“After we have a beer.” Misty assured her, leaning forward onto the table “So, tell me about yourself Cathy,”

Cathy shrank back a little. This was strange. Were they just being careful? “I run a tour business out of my fencraft with Cortana, my AI friend,” she said. “I spent the war with the Senshi Armed Militia.”

“Specialising in...?”

“Communications, computers.” Cathy was being careful. No need to go into details without getting an okay from the other Senshis.

“Great. That’s perfect.” she beamed, taking a large slug from her bottle.

The catgirl narrowed her eyes, starting to get annoyed.

“Is there a point to this?”

“It’s a sin to waste expensive beer, especially when you pay to import it specially.”

Cathy sighed. She would get one of those PC’s.

It took only a few minutes for them to finish up, filled by small-talk mostly. Misty was from Chicago, was one of the early Fen, and had lost her arm in an accident. And her leg. And her hearing.

Misty seemed especially interested in autobahns.... she claimed to have accrued enough speeding tickets to have a State warrant for her arrest active. And that was one thing the Kandor treaty didn’t pardon.

“So, let’s go,” Misty finally said, standing up.

Cathy bit back on her annoyance, following her out of the front door, then around into the darkness of the side alley. She double checked her Gyrojet, feeling just that little bit uneasy. She glanced back to the light of the main concourse.... wondering if she could make a run for it.

She smelled something like car wax mixed with lilac, and became aware of something very heavy lurking in the shadows. Somebody tall and bulky was standing beside her.

She ducked and sprang back, one hand on her pistol holster as soon as she was standing firmly again. The armour took one heavy step forward, coming half into the light. Blue and white sparks reflected off the edges, paint slightly pearlescent and glinting in the light.

“I’m Stingray,” it said in a woman’s voice, slightly husky but nowhere near as threatening as the faceless helmet staring at her was.

“Cathy,” she managed to get out.

“Told you we should have done this in the ladies room,” Misty whispered.

Stingray seemed to glare at her for a second... at least, if Cathy had judged her body language right she was glaring. But, it was strangely playful...

“I need you for a job.” Stingray said, still sounding calm.

Cathy drew herself up to her full height, tail curling defensively up behind her. “I’m from Operation Great Justice. Someone from the Panzer Kunst Gruppe called for assistance, and I was told to meet you here.”

Stingray nodded. “I need to know how good you are. Assuming you had physical access to a computer, how long would it take you to crack it, and set it up so that it would be possible to any information on the harddisk from a remote source”

Cathy thought, “With a connection to Cortana.... an AI“ she did some quick Maths in her head, drawing on her experience. “Five to ten minutes, depending on the hardware. Its not Cortana’s speciality... but she knows a lot about networking and cyber security.”

Misty smiled at her.

“Right so,” Stingray continued in a strange accent Cathy knew wasn’t American... nor Australian, or even British, but somehow a little of all three. It was weird. “How good are you in the field, at getting in and out a places without being seen or drawing any attention to yourself?

“’I have done it before,” Cathy said, now a little suspicious. “A few times.”

“Sounds perfect,” The cyber concluded.

“Yepperoni,” Misty concluded.

The cyber pulled something from a pouch on her hip with one armoured hand, while fumbling with what appeared to be a helmet. With a hiss of escaping gas, the visor lifted up, revealing a smiling woman’s face with cheery blue eyes framed by unnaturally red hair. It matched the picture on the Great Justice warrant card offered to her, along with an offer of a handshake.

“Jet Jaguar. Panzer Kunst Gruppe troubleshooter. This is my partner, Ford Sierra,”

“In all meanings of the word,” Ford added, nudging up beside the cyber. “I do things Jet can’t. Jet does things I can’t.”

Cathy went wide-eyed for a moment, both at the warrant card, just how big Jet was in her armour, how strong her grip was and how cold the armour was.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Back to the garage to plan,” Ford told her.

-----

The first thing that struck Cathy was the smell.

“Is something burning?” the catgirl asked.

“Jet’s cooking,” Ford answered, completely unbothered. “Don’t worry, I’ve knocked off the fire suppression,”

“That bad?”

She took a calm sip from her coffee. “Normally we just order from Ninjaburger, or Samurai Pizza Catgirls... whichever’s closer,”

“It’s because this yoke’s in bloody Fahrenheit,” Jet yelled in.

“I wonder if the US guys will first liberalize Handwavium or go to Metric system” she commented Jets yell. Cathy sat sideways in the chair, feeling uncomfortably bemused. She was sitting in what might’ve been part of an old ship, converted into a living room with space for a couch, a decent television and a selection of movies. Someone liked Bubblegum Crisis, and it wasn’t hard to guess who... There was a collection of old westerns, with A Fistful of Dollars orphaned from it’s case.

The kitchen was through an airtight door propped open with what seemed to be some random piece of mechanical detritus, maybe a suspension arm. A life support monitor was bolted to a wall, giving readouts of atmospheric contents. Beside it, a well-used dustmask and some pressure gear that seemed to be stained eternally red by martian dust. Above that, a bookshelf.

Of all things, it reminded her most of the Botany Bay, of Start Trek II fame. When was Khan going to appear?

Jet emerged from the kitchen with three steaming plates balanced on her arms. It actually smelled okay. Jet slipped all three into place on top off the coffee table...made from an engine block. There was one for each of them.

“Spag-bol,” the cyber smiled, “Even if the mince is just flavoured protein replacements, and the sauce came from a jar, it should be okay.”

Cathy looked dubiously at it, poking at it with a worn spork. How did she burn the ends of the spaghetti? Ford seemed to be tucking right into it, it’d be rude not to. She took a bite.

How Jet had managed to make the pasta simultaneously al-dente and al-carbonised she didn’t know. But.... it wasn’t bad.

“So,” Jet started, in between mouthfuls, “I supposed it’s time to tell you what the job is.

Cathy nodded, eating half out of politeness, and half because she was just that damned hungry. Jet started from the top, with a warning that this was classified above her grade, letting her know just how dangerous it would be if this got out. Then, she started with the robbery.

When she was done...

Cathy was listening silently to the whole explanation, absorbing the information Jet had just released. Jet could see thoughts racing through her head, it took more than 30 seconds until Cathy finally responded.

“Even if this gets cleaned up it could become a mayor social explosion for Fenspace... hacking a mind... hacking it remotely? This might become a mayor backlash against the whole Cyber Confederation... and maybe more.”

Jet held up her hand. “I think then, you know why this has to be kept quiet. Why we have to find who’s responsible, and why we have to keep them from spreading it.”

Cathy nodded. “We need time... time to find a countermeasure before someone else reinvent it.”

Ford looked up at Jet, “We’ve got a plan for handling Roland. What we want to do is get you into his apartment, and get you access to his computer. If we get you in there, can you get us the stuff on it? We’ve got a window of about ten minutes, give or take.”

She thought for s second. “Should be possible to penetrate in this time... unless he is a real desktop hardware expert and really paranoid.”

“Without dropping hints that we were there?”

“There are machines you just cannot interface without leaving marks... not without more time... but should be possible” Cathy answered.

“One last thing,” said Jet. “We’re doing this tonight, Helium time. That gives us about 8 hours.”

Cathy looked at him for a few seconds, then she took a deep breath. “Give me everything you know about his computer... we have no time to waste.”

Jet and Ford shared a grin.

----

The evening sun began to set, throwing long black shadows. A cool breeze blew through the glass and steel towers that made up the Martian City of Helium. Whatever programming governing the cities environmental system had decided that tonight was going to be a cold night, with a 55% probability of rain later, before clearing up to a warm and cheerful morning.

On the roof, beside the emergency air supply tanks, Jet Jaguar stood and looked out over it, helmet in hand.

“White to all units. Status?” she broadcast.

A green Ford F-250 was parked on the street, twenty stories below her, nestling up beside a flying steel buttress supporting the first floor balconies. It was one of many, distinguished only by a smashed taillight.

“Green here,” Ford Sierra answered from the cabin, before taking a sup from an oversized coke “In position. No problems.” Zager and Evans were making predictions of mankinds future, while an evening’s traffic flew past.Most people walked, but a few drove Fencars of varying strangeness.

“Blue here”, Cortana added from the underground car park., “Everything fine, nothing unusual on the waves.” The AI sat in her Skoda, listening to the radio spectrum. Some low rank Con Security were patrolling nearby, and there were reports of a barfight, but nothing major.

Deep inside the building, crouched in the dark space on top of a lift car, Cathy waited. Beneath her, she heard the doors open. Someone stepped in. The catgirl could smell his aftershave... and his lack of a morning shower. Grabbing a girder, she pulled herself up off the carriage as it began to drop underneath her, pulling a parching draft of dry air down with it.

Opening the doors again was just a matter of pushing a small maintenance button on the inside, after you disconnected it from the local security system of course. the doors rumbled open, and Cathy flipped through, landing on her feet on the carpeted floor. It was a high class building, as befitted a wealthy cyber tech.

“Red here”, Cathy answered, speaking into her patrol watch headset. “In position, no problem.”

She walked calmly through the corridors, ears picking up the usual morning sounds from inside each apartment, before stopping just around the corner from the apartment of interest.

“Ali babas cave is clear” the catgirl spoke again into the small microphone.

“I copy,” answered Jet “Standby until we confirm POI is clear of the building and not going to come back for his keys.”

Jet called up her notes on the building, checking her position for a few seconds. Ten stories beneath her was her target, a single balcony. She took one last look at the city with her own eyes, watching the lights begin to flicker on before putting on her helmet.

Roland stood half asleep in the lift, absent-mindedly looking at his own reflection. Baggy trousers, green t-shirt. It was chased with a bitter pang of jealousy... it always was. The rumbling in his stomach quashed it. He checked his wallet... not that he really need to anymore. They’d seen he had enough cash to live comfortably at least, for quite a while. Roland hardly felt he deserved the term ‘Mad’.... he was angry, there was a difference between the two. But he’d show them... and he’d finally get the recognition he deserved. Millions-worth of recognition. The lift stopped at the lobby, and he got out. There was a dangerous smile on his face.

Sierra took another sip from her coke. A figure in cargo-pants and a green t-shirt stepped out into the street. She raised her binoculars to check, zooming in on the figure. She felt a giddy thrill run through her body as she keyed open a channel.

“Green here. Elvis has left the building,” she grinned. “Looks like he’s staying out this time too.”

“White Green, I copy. White to all, let’s roll.”

Jet closed the channel and stepped up onto the ledge, overlooking the street twenty stories below. She turned to face the emergency tanks, and backflipped out into free space.

Inside, Cathy casually walked forwards, not even meriting a second glance from the mundane businessman who was too busy complaining to himself about life the universe and everything to bother paying attention to another one of the local weirdos.

She stopped outside the front door, looking at the heavyweight electronic lock. She knew that, given good conditions, she could crack it in about ten minutes or so. She knew she didn’t have ten minutes to spare. Besides, there was an easier way in.

Jet Jaguar plummeted towards the ground, wind rushing passed her body. She continued her backflip until her feet were pointing dart-like right at her target. She could see her reflection in the building’s glass wall. A child looking out from inside saw her fall past. With a braking flash from her engines, landing on the metal surface of the balcony with a heavy clang.

Through the window, Jet could see the apartment was dark inside... and a little messy. It was small enough as a mundane apartment building went, but something of a palace in Fenspace. It seemed light and airy, being made mostly of moulded steels, sweeping plastics and pressure glass.

The cyborg pulled a device from the pouch on her hip and hooked it up to the balcony door lock with two wires. An OGJ skeleton key, it opened almost any electronic lock in Fenspace, given enough time. It was also powered by milk.

The lock on the balcony door was a standard model, and basic compared to the front door. The last thing the apartment’s designers expected was a troubleshooter breaking in through the balcony door.

“Come on you little bugger,” Jet murmured as the key worked. She glanced out into the street for a moment. With a metallic snikt the lock came open, a little green LED blinking. Inside the apartment, a buzzer on the alarm system began a countdown.

Thirty seconds to disarm. Jet set her own timer running.

The cyborg slid the door open and left the key hanging. She dashed inside, feeling a quick buzz of apprehension. If the alarm went off, the investigation was blown. She called up a notepad to her field of vision, listing the override codes. 25 seconds.

It was just a matter of punching them in in time, without punching through the keypad.

>>46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45
>>D8 09 23 EB 97 E4

Jet steadied her hand. No time for a mistake. The pitch from the alarms buzzer was rising to a painful squeal. Final sequence.

>>A4 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2
>>/etc/init.d/alarm stop

The keypad chirruped. A green LED began to flash. Jet breathed a sigh of relief. 4 seconds to go. Plenty of time.

Outside, Cathy stared at the lock. It couldn’t have been more than a minute but it felt a hell of a lot longer. She’d heard Jet running. She’s heard the warning tone... even through the door that’d been painfully loud. Part of her felt certain that she could’ve had the front door open by now.

As if it heard it, it opened.

“Open sesame,” the cyborg inside said. Cathy could hear the pleased grin on her face, despite the helmet.

“Great,” the catgirl breathed “... now lets see that we get in and out fast” she said and hurried through the door. Jet closed the door and re-locked it.

“Do you already have seen the computer of the guy?” Cathy asked, looking around for the device they wanted to infiltrate. Jet took a moment to translate.

“In the corner on the glass table. it’s off.”

“Good.” she grinned, baring fangs. Now it was the catgirl rigger’s time to shine. Cathy sat down in front of the computer and get a few electronic cables out of her pocket, connecting her suits communication unit with the switched off computer.

“Okay, lets see what we have got. Cortana, keep an eye on the connection, I will try to open a port for you. Might take a few moments...”

Cathy took out a small microtool and began opening the casing of the device. “We have an internal USB port, we will try to use this one Cortana” she said and put on small cable plugs on the mainboards pins. Working quickly, Cathy connected a few jumper cables to her PAN system. A press on the power button activated the computer, the BIOS coming up onscreen first. Instead of loading its normal software, it began to access the image provided through the new USB interface.

First thing’s first. Rootkitting the system. Not too hard really when you had direct access.

The computer began to boot. Cathy held her breath. She felt her fur begin to bristle. The rootkit would stay invisible for the original operation system, it just had to load fast enough that the kernel of the original system didn’t notice it was running in a virtual machine itself.

“Okay, remote boot in progress, we should be online within a minute or two... Cortana, as soon of the USB connection is online, connect to the unit and look for the files we are interested in. I see one harddrive... and a solid state disk I think. Blue pill for you my little friend, just down the rabbits hole.”

Cortana’s small remote on Cathys suit blinked and a small slider bar was moving from zero to one hundred percent, visualizing the upload of the image file. It jerked and juddered forward, moving apparently according to the will of the God’s, rather than any sense of representing how far along thing’s actually were.

Elsewhere, Roland was perusing through the biscuits in aisle four of his local Fenmart. He chuckled lightly to himself... why was he even worried about being able to afford something as simple as biscuits anymore? He snatched some cheeto’s, some guaranteed wave-free salsa and a sub from the deli.

The girl behind the counter seemed to take forever to get it together. Roland wasn’t sure why he was so impatient, but some little mental alarm demanded to hurry back to his apartment. He shrugged it off, and went to pay.

Cathy’s eyes narrowed. “We are in, access to the harddisk is online...” A pause. “Damn” she spat “Where the hell is the SSD ? Cortana, look through the harddisk for the files we need, I will see if I can get the flash up and running. I don’t understand why it is not up and running, I hope it doesn’t need a special driver software.”

Cathy looked over the small additional storage device, then looked back to Jet.

“This one has a hardware lock. Without a key we will not get the power active easily, and I don’t have enough time to open the casing of this thing.”

“Skeleton key,” Jet tossed the device to her. “It’ll do it.”

Cathy caught it, hooking it up. It took a few tense moments to work, before a small light flickered to life on the casing.

“Okay, we have access to the second one... Cortana, start looking through it, I will have to work on the system log.”

“I have found the files we were looking for, I am installing our special package at the moment” Cortana replied, “installation will be done soon... the interface is slower than I thought, so don’t expect it to over within a second.”

Jet watched, listening to the channels. Sure she could probably have done this all herself...eventually.... but getting a full rigger was worth it. The cyborg slipped through the room checking magazines, letters... a few tech journals which were open. It was a different sort of hacking, but sometimes it could pay off.

A certificate from the confederation hung on the wall, leaving Jet with a lingering bitter feeling. Quislings were always the worst jobs. She pulled a small button from her pouch, and mounted it high and out of sight on the steel girders overhead.

“Blue, this is white. Squealer in place. Signal check?”

“Blue here, signal is within acceptable limits” Cortana replied short, concentrating the majority of her processor time on the computer. The benefits of being a multi-tasking capable AI.

Down below Sierra was sitting calmly in her truck. Zager and Evans had given way to some Deep Purple, while she kept her mind occupied with a small screwdriver, adjusting a few little things in her arm. It tingled in a way that was always weirdly fascinating. She listened along, half paying attention to the lyrics, half paying attention to her arm, and half paying attention to what’s going on outside.

A man crossed the road ahead of her of her, munching away happily on a breadroll while carrying a bag full of food. For a few brief seconds, she didn’t consciously see him, her mind taking a few seconds to figure out that he was wearing the same green t-shirt and cargo pants.

“Son of a bitch!” she spat, reaching for the radio.

Above, Jet had managed to get the bedside safe unlocked, and was quickly rifling through some of the files inside. She didn’t bother reading them, she just waved a quick handscanner over them and stored them for later perusal. Most of them seemed like standard stuff, but some of the bank accounts might be handy. Tidying them up, she checked her onboard clock.

“How long?” the cyber asked, glancing over at Cathy still elbow deep in computer innards.

“Don’t know,” the catgirl answered, tersely. “It’s slow.”

“It’s been ten minutes,” Jet said, trying to sound calm.

“We’ve got it all. I just have to erase the logs and put this box back together.”

“Right,” Jet glared at the picture above the TV.

Since when had it stopped seeming so remarkable that such unremarkable-looking people could be behind things like this.

Jet’s onboard radio came to life. Sierra’s voice. “Green here, target is coming back, entering the Lobby now!”

“We’ve got a minute,” said the cyber. “Can you do it?”

Cathy held up her hand, still looking through some system logs on the computer. Suddenly, she cursed.

“Damn! It is a shutdown based hardware log... we cannot remove it now, it will be written when we switch off this thing. Let me see if I will find...” Cathy trailed off into her own thoughts, hyperfocused on the task ahead.

Jet grimaced. “A script the runs on the next boot?”

“My thoughts exactly. Just a few more moments, I might to trick it during a cleanup of the log when the guy use the computer the next time...”

The cyber grit her teeth, taking up position covering the front door. If the POI came through the door and they were still there..... Sure Jet could arrest him, but chances were she’d loose his zwilnik contacts along with any accomplices. It’d be a blown mission.

Or worse, they’d leave some trace behind if they left in a hurry, the POI would figure they’d been there, run to ground, and they’d lose him too.

“The lift is moving up again, please hurry you two” Cortanas voice came out of their comms. The AI sounded almost pleading.

Roland finished the last of his roll and yawned. The car rocked on it’s runners a little, and he just couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that something wasn’t quite right with things. It wasn’t something he could put a finger on. Maybe he was just getting paranoid about things. The sort of people he was dealing with now, the sort of people he was making enemies of.... it tended to breed paranoia. Well, he’d taken all sensible precautions, and some beyond. Chances were, if OGJ knew about him, he figured he’d know about it.

“45 seconds,” Jet said.

They probably weren’t going out the front door. Alternate escapes? Jet pulled up her map of the building. No ventilation ducting for Cathy to slip into. No alternate escape. Only the balcony.

“Got it!” the catgirl. “Just have to rebuild this thing.”

Watching Cathy work, Jet was glad she’d hired a proper rigger, rather than try to do the job herself. 37 seconds, he onboard timer warned. Plenty of time really, but she still half expected the target to come through the front door early.

In the carpark, Cortana could hear Cathy work, through comm-links and through the little squealer bug that was feeding data to the brick mounted to the girder behind her. She checked her time estimates against the lift’s position. About 36375 milliseconds, the AI estimated.

Waiting on the street, Sierra drummed her fingers on the steering wheel impatiently. She started the truck to be ready for a quick getaway. The waved V8 roared to life, before settling into a lumpy idle.

Cathy slipped the PC case back into position and gathered up her tools.

“Okay, everything fine again... lets get out of here” Cathy said and looked around for a possible exit. “How much time do we have left ?” She knew it couldn’t be much, but was not really aware how many seconds were left to get out.

20 seconds, Jet’s clock warned. If Cathy went out the front door, she’d be spotted leaving.

“18.5 seconds,” Jet said. “Get to the Balcony... quickly!” she barked.

Cathy stared at her for a moment and then hurried to the Balcony door to get out of sight of the apartments door. Jet made one last quick scan of the room. She winced, realising she’d forgotten the alarm. The cyborg darted inside, inhumanely fast. Arming the alarm was easy. One little green button.

The lift stopped at it’s selected floor, the doors rumbling open once more. Roland found himself wanting to run home, his whole body aching to just break out into a sprint. He forced himself not to... give paranoia an inch, and it’ll take a mile.

It chirruped and began a ten second countdown. Jet estimated it’d take only a few seconds longer for the target to arrive, but it’d be enough. 13 seconds.

Jet practically flew out onto the balcony, landing with a heavy clang on the checkerplate steel. Cathy steadied herself for a second, while Jet pulled the door shut behind them.

“This is Green.” Cortana broke in, “The lift has reached your floor. POI has gotten out.”

“And now ?” Cathy asked, unsure what to do next. Jumping down to the next balcony was a little bit far for her taste. The ground below was very, very hard looking.

“We jump,” Jet said.

“But it’s.... YEEeeeeeeeK!”

The catgirl had barely enough time to begin to speak, before two metal arms grabbed her from behind, gripping uncomfortably tight across her chest. She swore her ribs were going to break. Cathy felt herself begin to accelerate towards the ground, the buildings wall rushing by. She closed her eyes, and braced for the crunch.

Roland slipped his key into the lock, then input the correct code. It came open with a soft and reassuringly expensive click. Cautiously, he opened the door, scanning the room. The alarm gave it’s usual welcoming buzz. He cancelled it with the code. He glanced around again.

Something just didn’t feel right, the air seeming strangely chilled inside, as if somebody had left a window open. Yet everything seemed to be where as he’d left it. Nothing had been torn open, and he doubted he’d been gone long enough for anyone to sneak in. That door lock alone would take ten minutes to break. A quick scan with his dataglove detected no untoward radio signals from bugs. Everything was golden.

He exhaled a sigh of relief.

Far below, with a scream of straining turbines, Jet hit the ground hard enough to crack concrete, and send a jolt ringing through her frame. Cathy tumbled out of her arms, her reflexes being the only thing that kept her on two feet. Jet staggered a little, cursing herself for even having the idea that she could carry Cathy and her gear.

But if it’s stupid and it works, it’s not stupid.

“White to all. We’re clear,”

Cathy just stared at her, still in a daze. Her fur was standing on end.

“Next time I want a backup plan for getting out in a hurry...” Cathy forced out, still unsure what to do next.

Jet blinked. “That was it,” she stated.

Cathy took a deep breath and nodded. “Then lets get out of here.”

A green truck parked up beside them, it’s engine barking and growling like a mad dog. “Need a lift?” the driver called out in a distinctive Chicago accent. “Tailgate’s unlocked. Stow your gear in back.”

Cathy did not hesitate but jumped into the truck onto one of the seats mounted there. The adrenaline released all at once

“Wow... that was exciting... and fun... DAMNED, I never thought I would get caught up with my past as an rpg character that fast!” the catgirl blurted out, still shaking. Ford shrugged and kept driving.

“You get used to it,” she reassured her.

Jet flew on above, not wanting to be stuck in a car, already considering offering Cathy a permanent job. Every troubleshooter needed their own team, after all.

In the apartment, Roland booted his computer. It took a few milliseconds longer than usual to boot, but it was something beneath human notice. Seeing all was good, he set to work.

Deep in the underground carpark, a parked Skoda sat, the AI aboard happily slurping the data, while listening to him singing along with some filk about the white death and her blades.

------

On a station on an asteroid, millions of kilometres away, a face on a holographic screen was having an argument with a Senshi. She pushed her glasses up over her hazel eyes, before glancing offscreen for a moment at something which demanded her attention.

Those glasses, coupled with her pale brown hair, split into broad, straight, unbraided pigtails gave her an almost cutesy appearance which belied the malice in her eyes. Her blue bodysuit was half hidden by a white overcoat with grey fur collar.

“Those idiots left the Kunstler alive,” the hologram snarled. “Now they have evidence of my work.”

The Senshi winced a little before recovering herself, forcing herself to glare at the projected screen. “Roland’s not under suspicion yet. He’s still in the clear. You said yourself, his messages weren’t being intercepted.”

The hologram didn’t seem to be convinced. “The network was clear. Just because we have no evidence about them being suspicious doesn’t mean they are not. We might be loosing a sharp tool just because we were careless.”

The Senshi sighed dismissively. “Roland was never a sharp tool. We just have to move faster... soon it won’t matter how suspicious they are, they’ll have different problems.”

________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?