[Story]Shadowrunning.

[Dartz]

Jet Jaguar and Cathy have to get in, get the job done and get out in time.

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, the cybernetic Jet Jaguar stood and looked out over it, helmet in hand.

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

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.” Lynyrd Skynyrd was playing on the stereo, 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 newly-wealthy 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 hat 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 pressureglass.

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 murmered 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, some more cola 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 with her radios. 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. Skynyrd 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 CB 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

Since when had it stopped seeming so remarkable that such unremarkable-looking people could be behind something like the Ghost hacking tech the zwilniks were starting to use?

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 fire escape. The rubbish chute was much too small. There was only the balcony.

“Got it!” the catgirl announced. “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 sterring 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. It should've been obvious.

“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. The grin on her face was spreading.

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.

“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 said and smiled.

Jet flew on above, her adrenaline already cooling. That had been fun. This sort of thing was always exciting. She was already considering offering Cathy a permanent job. Every troubleshooter needed their own backup 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.

Potentially a part of something much longer that might end up being a followup to the Boskone war, filling in details of the Berserkers.... and being a bit of a thriller-style story, starting with a robbery of an opal shipment, where it turns out the two Panzer Kunst trainees guarding it have had their memories of the robbery erased through a systems hack...

Title comes from the simple remark about how you're supposed to play Shadowrun, compared to the Street Sam levelling the entire building, just to be sure.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?