Freezing Shadows, Chapter 50

Chapter 50: Quiet Escape

In the end, all four of the extra technomancers decided to take their chances in the Barrens. The human man was from Detroit, and the Troll woman was from Chicago, so they were confident in their ability to find friends in the area. Ork woman went with the troll. Dwarf man was from Toronto, which also wasn’t too far away. They were all adults, and knew about how to spoof their trail. Their getaway was on them.

Twilight took care of getting them on their way. She called several autocabs, including one troll-sized one, paid 100 nucred up front to each, and sent the technomancers off, with destinations in four different directions. Once the cabs were on their way, the technomancers could reprogram the destinations as they saw fit, but, this way, they were no longer our problem.

Boomer spends 1 point of Edge.

Boomer’s Demolitions test: 9d6 = 6 Hits, 1 Miss

Base Explosive Damage: 10P

Boomer set up her devices in several areas. Four were set up against the stand-alone server, ensuring that the device would be thoroughly destroyed. The other sixteen kilos of explosives found their way around the facility, and she deliberately opened the gas valves in the labs, ensuring that the explosion would cause a fire. Thankfully, the exploder she was using had enough range that no one needed to be down in the antechamber. Once the last person was up, Boomer pulled the trigger.

There wasn’t a sound, that we could hear. Too much material between us for that. But I could have sworn that I felt a small shudder in the ground when the button was pushed. I definitely noticed the lights in the garage flicker, and then change to emergency lighting.

Twilight, still in the system, cursed. “Explosion tripped some breakers, caused the building to go into emergency protocols. I’m still editing the feeds here, so the vehicles don’t show up on cameras, but security is moving into high alert, physical and Matrix. They’re going to start calling different posts to figure out what happened, and when our supposedly alive guards don’t answer…”

“Right,” I nodded. “Time to go. Everybody load up, and let’s get out of here!” No one argued, and we loaded up into the vehicles, with one more person than we arrived with. Just as planned.

Unlike in the trid shows and movies, we didn’t peel out, or burn rubber trying to race to the exit. That was stupid. Yes, there was a time for it, but, right now, we were still being edited out of feeds, and our vehicles looked like NETworks corporate security vehicles. We would get a lot further, a lot faster, by driving normally, rather than doing something that drew attention to us.

The gate on the parking garage was locked in the upright position. Normal emergency procedures for when the building went to backup power. Oh, it wasn’t so that employees could try to evacuate, but rather so that any corporate response team didn’t have to waste time hacking or destroying the barrier in order to access the garage, and so valuable prototypes and research data could be safely removed from the premises. The fact that they could spin it as a ‘we care about our people’ thing to the press was just a nice bonus.

As we turned the corner, passing out of sight from the Nightelligence Solutions building, we triggered the spoof chips, morphing license plates, and chameleon coatings on the vehicles. One moment, we were NETworks corporate security, and the next we were Mars Industries corpsec. Practically invisible in the megacorp’s hometown.

We cycled the settings three more times before we got to the airfield. At some point, Twilight had logged off from the building’s systems, after making sure that our vans weren’t recorded exiting the garage. As a bit of extra subterfuge, she’d ensured that the four autocabs from earlier all appeared on the cameras as they drove off in different directions. That would give the corpsec a bit of a tailchaser, and muddy the waters. Hopefully, it would keep them from looking for us until after we were out of the sprawl.

Whisper nodded as we rolled up to his airship. Babydoll had called ahead, letting him know of our ETA, so he already had the airship ready and waiting. “I don’t see police lights, but the news is already talking about an explosion at the Nightelligence Solutions building. Right now, there’s no information out there about who, how, or why.”

I chuckled, and said, “We try to be professionals about things, Whisper, as I’m sure you can understand. And part of that is making sure that the corpsec doesn’t come straight to your door.”

“Good. Load up the vehicles, and we’ll be off.”

It took half an hour to load the vans up and properly lock them down. You couldn’t just roll up into a cargo bay, and put them in park, after all. Well, you could, but that was categorically stupid. Sure, vans weren’t as likely to shift around when an airship hit turbulence as pallets of supplies, but if they did start shifting? Well, that got really bad, really fast. So, we did the job right.

The thirty-six-hour flight back to Seattle passed slowly, as expected. Along the way, we passed a couple contact numbers to Boomer. Alisha, obviously, was the first introduction we gave her. Basilisk probably gave her the number as well, but that wasn’t my problem. Shadowgirl also gave her the number for a street doc named Shanks, who operated out of the Puyallup Barrens. Which was fortunate, since Basilisk had apparently arranged a den for her out there.

Reading the game information on her new den was interesting. The place was a small, one-room shack that used to be a store, sometime in the past. The big windows on the front made it easy to look in on anyone inside, the network connection was trash, the power was strictly solar, there was a BTL ‘production house’ two doors down, and demon rats liked to invade the area. On the other hand, there was a nice escape tunnel for a naga to slither out through, the place was solidly built, so no worries about leaks or the like, and demon rats were just free-range food to a carnivorous naga. Oh, and because of how things worked out, the place was exactly 0 lifestyle points, which meant free monthly cost, which is why Basilisk went and bought it for her permanently. If she wanted anything better, she’d have to find it and pay for it herself, but she had a permanent place to sleep in Seattle, which was better than a lot of people had when moving to a new sprawl.

The old snake had also arranged transportation for her, which would be waiting at the airfield when they landed. Nothing terribly fancy, just a Bulldog Step-van with some concealed armor, adjustments for having a giant snake as the primary passenger, spoof chips, morphing license plate, solar panels, the interior being one big skinlink receptor, vehicle tag eraser, and a couple airtight smuggling compartments, meaning that chem-sniffers wouldn’t detect anything in them. Good for hauling explosives around.

Of course, that ‘generosity’ with the ride also came with some expectations. Basilisk had reached out to one of his contacts, Tolstoy Foma Ruslanovich, a ‘Shestiorka’ with the local Vory, and he’d promised a that Boomer would be available to do a couple jobs to pay off the debt. Tolstoy had already sent a message to Boomer’s comm address, detailing the first job. Something simple, and very much in a naga’s capabilities, but definitely outside a normal human’s sensibilities.

“Seriously?” Sexkitten asked. “They want you to eat someone, who is hooked up to a simrig, so that they can record the person getting digested? What the frak?”

“Not terribly surprised, actually,” I said. “It is the same idea as some of the stuff we saw at Rule #34. Some people are excited by the ‘hard’ kinks, but aren’t willing to go all the way, themselves. Rape fantasy, snuff, and vore have always enticed people, both as the one in power, and the one getting preyed upon. But so long as it is a fantasy, something they can experience virtually? That makes it ‘safe’.

“The performances at Rule #34 are just that, performances, with people who know that while they might feel everything, other than some dumpshock afterwards when their avatar is ‘killed’, they’ll be fine. And recordings of those performances, or ones like them, probably sell well. But they are still ‘fake’, still ‘safe’, not the ‘real deal’. Which means the real thing will sell for more.”

Babydoll nodded. “I remember covering a story about something like that, before the Crash. Some killers were hooking victims up to simrigs and then selling the recordings as they were killed in different ways. Things blew up, literally, when someone accidentally nabbed a Shadowman’s family as their next victim, and he went out for revenge. The syndicate responsible was wiped out, which destabilized the underworld and caused a small war between the crime families as they adjusted territories.”

Boomer sighed, and said, “Well, I knew having contactsss with the criminal world would not be brightnessssss and light, but I’ve never thought about jussst eating sssomeone before!”

I took a breath, and then asked, “So, the person they want you to eat, any backstory on them?”

“Ssseemsss like they have been racking up debtsss to cover a child’sss medical billsss. The child needed cccyberware after an accident blew off two limbsss. Corp he worked for laid him off for missssssing work to take hisss kid to the hossspital. The Vory are wiping the debtsss clean in return for hisss perfomanccce, with maybe sssome to go to hisss children, depending on how it sssellsss. I don’t like thisss, but for the guy it isss probably the only way hisss children don’t end up paying debtsss for the ressst of their lives.”

“The kids have any other family?”

“Mother and her grandparentsss. They’re Sssinlessssss, but own a sssmall pizza placcce in the Barensss.”

I nodded slowly. “The whole situation sucks, but this sounds like the guy is making the best play possible for his family. Depending on his health, even selling his body to those ghouls from Thanatos, the organlegging operation, wouldn’t make enough to clear the kid’s medical bills. If they have a family that can help take care of them, and a business that they can survive on, then you’re doing this man and his family a favor. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but you are. And that’s before we go into the fact that you have debts to them, thanks to the ride. So, best you can do is to not make it any worse than it has to be.”

Sexkitten frowned. “So, just down the hatch with him? That’s pretty cold, bossman.”

“The world’s a cold place, Kitten. But one thing you can do, Boomer, that’ll help the copy sell even more, and at least give him a bit of a gift on the way out, is to use that Orgasm spell of yours on him, and just sustain it until he’s no longer able to feel things. It will make the whole process messier, in a way, but it will play well with the fetishists, and make it so that he isn’t so bad off as he goes down. Only mercy you can give him. If you don’t eat him, they probably have something worse lined up for him, and maybe the wife and kids, too.”

Berzerker just shook her head. “Man, what a downer. Even when we have a run go off as close to perfect as it can get, and manage to get away clean to deliver the damsel in distress to the dragon, things still find a way to get fucked up.”

“That’s life,” Babydoll said. “We take the wins where we can, try to limit the losses, and just make sure that we keep our heads above water. But hey, once we get back to the sprawl, we should try and have some downtime before the next job. We’ve been pushing so fast that we’ve stored up some karma, and haven’t had a chance to use it.”