Chapter Text
“Okay, we’re a go. The window is short, though. Get a move on.”
“You heard the lady, let’s move.”
The trio moved into the compound through a cut open segment of fence. The cameras were frozen in place, status lights flickering as if struggling to remain lit against some outside force. They were. As they slipped past the makeshift guard house they noted the unconscious guard slumped over a chair. Hand twitching and an errant spark occasionally erupting from the ports in his neck.
“Alright, you’re about twenty meters from the target building. Intel and recon suggests upward of five inside at any time.”
“You don’t have a view into there?”
“No, no cameras looking into there of the ones I could grab. They either don’t keep any in there, or they’re on an isolated subnet. Either way, I’m not getting them.”
“Okay, we’re heading in without any eyes except our own. So keep them peeled. Doors and corners. That’s where they get you.”
Jonah placed a lock breaker over the keypad. The building was a fairly ordinary, unimposing standard modular frame. Easy up, easy down. Commonly used in encampments like these where permanent-but-not-really was the name of the game. He’d seen countless like them before. The lock breaker set to work. A combination of predictive wave-function collapse algorithms and old school TEMPEST readings delving into the secrets the keypad kept from all but those that knew the code. An eternal five seconds passed before the LED on the top of the breaker unit flashed green. Success. The deadbolt on the door withdrew with a taut metal-on-metal click.
“Like black fuckin’ magic that thing.”
Laker was an older gentleman, older as operators go anyway. The profession wasn’t exactly known for the life span of those in it. But that made him reliable. He’d seen enough, been through enough to know the intricacies of this kind of work. He might not be as quick on the draw as he was maybe 20 years ago, but he was experienced enough to not get himself in situations where he needed a quick reaction time in the first place.
“Like playing with cheat codes active.”
Mason was the youngest in the group. Barely 19, and mostly green. The worst kind of green. Not so green as to not know the basics. But too green to know that knowing the basics doesn’t make him hot shit. It’s not like the kid was even that bad, had a half decent head on his shoulders. But, 19 year old boys are the same the world over. A wash of testosterone and insecurity. A deadly combination.
“Alright, that’s enough, form up. On me.”
Jonah took point, a suppressed Liberty held across his chest in his right hand. He stood on the left side of the door. Laker had repositioned to the opposite side. He gently leaned across, and tried the handle. The door moved ajar. There was a brief moment, a single breath of time, where Jonah had tensed to hear some reaction to the door opening. A shout, an alarm. An explosive. Nothing came, just the silence of the night air.
Laker moved back to the right side of the doorway, eyes on Jonah, and gave a slight nod. A hand on Jonah’s left shoulder told him Mason was ready. In a singular, swift motion, Jonah silently pushed the door open and moved into the building. A foyer greeted them with two doors further down to the right. On the left, a staircase led up to the second floor. There lingered in the air the faint smell of cigarette smoke. In some part of Jonah’s brain he would sooner have left untouched, the small murmur of a craving made itself known.
“Hey, Alice, I’m seeing…”
“Yeah, I’m getting the pings off your cyberware. Majority of hostiles are concentrated downstairs, in what could be a mess hall. There’s just one upstairs. My guess is that what you need is upstairs. Boss’ office being up there makes the most sense.”
“Cameras?”
“Working on it.”
Laker had silently moved behind a vending machine against the right hand wall. Mason remained close to Jonah. A single grenade would plaster both of them on the ceiling. He still needs to work on his spacing. Jonah silently signalled to Laker to stay down here and keep watch. If things were to go loud, he’d be able to hold his own. He waved for Mason to get behind him. They made their way upstairs, Jonah’s gun trained ahead while Mason covered directly above.
As they crested the top of the stairs, they remained crouched behind the half wall around the stairway. Snoring could be heard, maybe twenty feet away. Jonah slowly peeked his head around to see the open plan office arrangement. An assortment of desks, chairs & terminals were arranged into groupings. On the end of one of the groups of tables, was a desk with a terminal on it. At it was a sleeping ganger, leant back on an office chair that looked like it was on the edge of being able to support his weight. Likely a sentry that drew the short straw to be posted upstairs to guard the boss’ office.
Jonah looked back to Mason and gave a nod, Mason nodded back. Jonah began a crouched approach to the sentry, but something immediately made his hair stand on end as he did. Instinctively he went back to cover.
“Alice, is there a camera up here?”
“Almost certainly, get me a visual and I can take care of it.”
Having her on the ground on these ops would be so much easier, but she insists on running remotely. Won’t touch the field, was a redline item for her. But Jonah tended not to care, she was better remote than most other runners were in the field. For that reason, Jonah was willing to do the extra work so she could do what she did at her calibre. Jonah slowly began visually scanning the room, protruding his head only as much as he needed, making no sharp movements that might attract the motion sensors on a camera. There, a small one, opposite wall at about a 40ft distance.
“Alice, you got that?”
“Yep. One sec.”
It never did sit quite right with Jonah that a runner could use his own optics, see through his own eyes. It seemed like a sort of trust relationship skewed very heavily in one direction. The camera began twitching on its axis of rotation, like the arm of an old vinyl record player skipping on a disk. Another brief moment later, it began moving as normal. Slowly scanning the whole floor as it was before.
“Uh, Alice? There a problem?”
“No problem, camera’s looking and acting fine but I’m looping the internal buffer in its I/O. Whoever might be watching will just be seeing the same 3 seconds of nothing happening.”
“Great work, thanks.”
She never failed to impress him at the cleverness of her solutions. They always held an elegance, an attention to detail that he very much appreciated. How she operated had given him pause for thought, where did she learn to run like this? Was she simply prodigiously talented, was she part of some corpo netrunner team? A mix of the two? His mind had gone to corpo as her methods lacked the kind of brazen chaoticness that non-corpo runners tended to exhibit. Where they would be flying by wire, Alice was flying with full instrumentation. Jonah wasn’t 100% on the avionics metaphor, he filed a mental note to revisit it. Still, it’s not like he was complaining, or concerned. Never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Going past a sleeping individual was always a tense experience, as you never quite knew just how heavy or light a sleeper they were. There were certainly things you could infer just from a visual inspection of the person in question - size, weight, age, etc. This particular ganger had characteristics that suggested it would take something substantial to wake him. If they could get by with no confrontation, Jonah was happy to let a sleeping dog lie. No unnecessary violence. In the far corner of the upper floor was a partitioned office, presumably for someone that held greater rank than the bullpen it looked out onto.
Humans are the same the world over, always has to be a hierarchy.
The door was left unlocked. Shitty OpSec, but to be expected. Illegal loggers weren’t exactly Arasaka. They were barely more organized than Scavs. With an impulse of his will, Jonah activated the scanner in his optics, and he began surveying the room. The scanner didn’t pick up anything untoward or interesting in the office, just the terminal at the desk. There were a few cupboards and drawers that could be rifled through, but that only added time, noise, and complication. He motioned to Mason to keep watch, and then approached the terminal. Scanning the desk, there didn’t immediately appear to be anything useful or valuable. Clean desk policy? Unlikely given what Jonah could infer about this place’s OpSec from the unlocked door. Clean desk by accident.
“About to jack in, Alice. Ready?”
“Go ahead.”
Jonah pulled the commwire out of the compartment in his neck and pressed it into the comm port in the back of the terminal. It slotted in with a mild “click”. His optics began displaying the communication between his cyberdeck and the terminal, handshake protocols, transmission protocols, all the things computers had to do just to be able to talk to each other. If Jonah were to ever pay attention to it, it would be dizzying to even try to comprehend. The stream of logs detailing the cyberdeck’s communication to the terminal eventually came to a stop, the terminal was now asking for authentication.
“You’re up, Alice.”
“Okay, gimme a sec.”
Toward the bottom middle of his field of perception, Jonah’s optics displayed an upload status bar rising. It was the dataspike Alice had crafted for the op to break past authentication measures on the terminal, and slip past further security. Jonah got that same feeling he got before when thinking about Alice being able to see through his eyes. Alice exerting her will, her actions, through him and into this terminal was creepy in a way. Just as he shook the thought from his mind, the upload completed, and the authentication prompt disappeared not too long after that.
“We’re in. Scanning for target information.”
“Anything and everything related to the illegal logging ring. This is just one base, our client believes there to be more.”
A peel of laughter erupted downstairs, muffled through the floor. The guards were distracted, tonight was a lucky break.
“Right. Found an encrypted folder here where the rest of the system’s fairly open. Let’s take a look-see.”
“Got an ETA on breaking the folder’s encryption?”
“30 seconds.”
30 seconds was a long time for Jonah to wait. Every second jacked into the terminal on a hostile network is a second a counter-runner that they hadn’t accounted for could fry him from the inside out. And that’s before any of the other possibilities that the op could go south at any given moment. Sleeping beauty waking up, a shift change, the unconscious sentry being found. While he waited, Jonah sent a wordless check-in request to Mason and Laker. Both the small upward facing arrows that represented his teammates in his cyberware’s interface lit up green, indicating no problem at this time. The eternal 30 seconds finally passed, Jonah felt like he had watched paint dry quicker.
“Okay, this is interesting.”
“Good interesting or bad interesting?”
“Well.. both I suppose. Good news is, by the filenames, this is what we’re after.”
“And the bad news?”
“There’s a secondary per-file encryption scheme being used within the folder. File contents are scrambled with what looks like an ephemeral quantum superposition cipher. It will take longer than we’d like to crack this right now, and there’s no guarantee of success.”
“So, fastdump it and hand it off to the client and see what they say?”
“That would be my suggestion.”
Jonah pulled out the fastdump device and slotted into another comm port on the terminal. A download bar appeared in his perception, his optics tracking the download progress of the files. Estimated time to complete, another 30 seconds.
What is it with half minute increments today?
“Ready to bug out, 30 seconds.”
A wordless ACK came back to Jonah through his cyberware from both Laker and Mason. The sleeping ganger stirred and shifted in his chair. For a brief moment, Jonah’s blood ran cold that they’d be caught out and wouldn’t be able to get to him in time before he alerted the others downstairs. Jonah had gone totally still, eyes trained on the ganger. He didn’t seem to wake, but had just shifted his weight onto another side. Another eternal 30 seconds and the fastdump device blinked green, indicating the download is complete. The download bar vanished from Jonah’s field of perception. He placed the fastdump in a pocket and rose from his crouched position.
“Alright, we’re leaving.”
Mason and Jonah slinked past the sleeping ganger, a bead of drool on the right side of his mouth now slowly losing its fight against gravity down his cheek. They proceeded down the stairs and regrouped with Laker. He hadn’t moved from his position behind the vending machine. He held his position, keeping vigil, until Jonah and Mason were just about to clear the doorway to the outside, and then he followed them. They all re-surveyed their surroundings, looking for changes - patrols, errant gangers, anything that could complicate an exfil. Nothing, this was the quiet part of the camp, out of the way of the main area of activity. The trek to approach from the right angle was more than what they may have wanted, but Jonah wanted no precautions spared.
The trio moved swiftly across the small yard they had initially traversed to enter the compound. Always an experience that brought the hairs on the back of your neck up. The difference between a quiet yard like this, and a killing zone, was a single atom wide. The traversal happened without incident, and they took cover behind various large objects, a dumpster, some scattered pallets, and some trash, to reassess their surroundings. The night air remained impossibly still, particularly for the Alaskan climate where you can always reasonably expect a wind. With a collective nod, the trio proceeded through the opening in the fence which had first admitted them to the compound. The last out, Mason took the cut-out segment and placed it over the gap it had once filled. Making it a little bit more difficult to spot the sign of an intruder. Jonah did appreciate Mason’s thought process on this, even though there were plenty of other signs the gangers could use to reach the same conclusion that they had been breached.
“Alice, we’re clear of the AO.”
“Alright, see you back in town.”
“See you back in town”, for Alice, meant a lot less than a traditional interpretation of the term might convey. She was an excellent runner, but not that much of a social butterfly. That wasn’t particularly surprising, runners do tend to be of a certain type. This had been the fourth or fifth op she had been on with Jonah, and he still knew precious little about her. Celebrating a job well done was common, a critical part of bonding between operators, particularly among those that worked together routinely. However, Alice had rarely accepted the invitations. In fact, it was only once before that she did, and she may as well have not been there. Aloof is the softest possible way of describing her; frankly he had always seen her more as disdainful, contemptuous. And that was before her threatening to set Laker’s cyberware on fire for a poorly timed joke. There were obviously things going on in her own life that have made her that way, so he gave her a wide berth. He reached out at the appropriate times, extending invitations, and never pressed more than that. He had never got the impression she held him in high regard, but there was still mutual respect between them.
“Princess gonna celebrate with us tonight or is her dance card all full up again?” Laker asked, his tone dripping with sarcasm.
Laker was an anachronism, to put it simply. One of the things he liked in life was very old movies, from a century or more ago. Back when they didn’t even have the ability to record in full color. Heavens knows how many Eddies he’d spent on acquiring those things and getting the media transferred to a more modern playback device. But in watching so many of them, he had taken on some of the mannerisms and phrases from that time. “Dance card” was one of them. The best Jonah could surmise on the phrase was that it was a reference to a person’s social calendar. He had been hesitant to ask, for fear he might start talking like that, too.
“Heh, no point even askin’. She does a good enough job, but don’t care ‘bout nothin’ but the Eds. And that’s fair play. But clear as fuckin’ day she don’t want shit to do with us outsida the ops.” Mason had replied. Jonah was surprised at the level of insight in what Mason said. Boys of his age are typically much more full of the kinds of things Jonah had come to hate in his maturity. Casual misogyny, bigotry, and so on.
Nevertheless, the conversation had irked Jonah, and he had refused to engage in it. Despite the insight, and the surprising amount of forbearance, Mason’s assessment was still a harsh one. One that didn’t pay enough attention to what one’s past can do to one’s present, and future. The damage it can cause. The doors it can close. Something Jonah had his own experience with. He willed a blank text message up in his vision, and set the recipient to Alice.
“Celebratory drinks on me as always, usual place.”
He willed it to send, and the message flew off to the ether. Transmitting the invitation for human contact over electrical impulses and electromagnetic waves. He waited a few minutes, lost in consideration sparked by the irritating conversation he was unwillingly privy to. He willed another message into existence, Alice once again the recipient.
“I’ll stop asking if it ain’t your scene. No judgement, no questions asked. I just regard you highly, as a colleague. And I never want to leave a colleague out.”
He willed the next message to send, and it was sent. Almost immediately after he sent it, he began to wonder if he should have. Words weren’t his thing, and his heavy handedness could easily come across as condescending if she wasn’t feeling particularly merciful. A fact he was always conscious of, given that she could access his cyberware remotely if she wanted. The message was sent, however. It wasn’t going to be taken back. Whatever her reply will be, will be. But in the back of his head, he feared she might no longer wish to be a colleague, if this were to take the worst path. And that would just be a pain in the ass. Finding a good runner was always an arduous task.
A few minutes on the road had passed, the conversation in the car had shifted onto something else, though Jonah was tuned out of it. Then, a message came through to his cyberware. He willed it open to the left side of his visual field, and initiated audio talkback in his cyberware’s best recreation of Alice’s voice based on what it had heard from her prior.
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
Jonah felt a wave of relief ripple through him. He still has a runner, the best one he’s ever worked with. And he gets the possibility of talking to someone else when Laker, four drinks in, starts to talk ad nauseum about some old show he had recently procured. That would be a most welcome luxury. Nervous anticipation now grasped at him, he was unsure how exactly the night would go, how awkward it might be. He remembered that he ought to let the other two know of the fourth guest that will be joining them.
“Just messaged her as always, this time she said she’d be there.” Jonah said, cutting over the conversation of the other two.
“Well I’ll be goddamned!” Laker had uttered with a chuckle. "Think she's coming back to finish the job?".
Laker had balled his hands into a fist, put it against his temple, and then moved it away while outstretching his hand, making it look like something exploding out of his head.
"Yeah we should be so fucking lucky!" Mason had quipped back. Laker had laughed. Mason then turned back to Jonah.
“Shit, boss, what did you have to do for that? Pay her your cut of the job too?” Mason said, a joking tone putting some joviality into his otherwise sardonic question.
He had to admit, that was kind of funny. Jonah let out a smile. Though in reality he got the impression that if Alice didn’t want to do something, no amount of Eddies could persuade her otherwise.
“Nope, just my usual invite. Don’t know what’s changed from last time. Not going to turn a fourth down. Never know, she might hustle all of you at the pool table.” Jonah had replied, his eyes not deviating from the road. He did know what had changed from last time, the second message, but it felt too awkward to explain it. Plus, he didn’t know if his second message actually had any effect on Alice’s decision to show up. But in the back of his mind, he believed it had. His comment about the pool table had elicited a laugh from the other two.
Mason let out an overly dramatic sigh, “Who knows the ways of women?”. His tone matching the overly dramatic nature of his sigh to give the impression of mockery.
“Definitely not you, kid.” Laker had replied, without missing a beat. He topped off the zinger by rustling Mason’s hair, like a father would do with a young child. Mason batted his hand away like a petulant teenager embarrassed to be shown up by his parents. He most likely was a petulant teenager not too long ago.
Jonah was chuckling along with them. This crew wasn’t exactly the caliber of the Edgerunners of Night City, the storied legends that live forever in infamy. Silverhand, Blackhand, Rogue, Murphy, Shaitan, the one known only as V. He’d heard all the stories in his time. But this crew, they clicked, and they got the job done. That’s all he could really ask for. Tonight would be interesting, if nothing else. He didn’t know exactly how much he was looking forward to it, if at all. But perhaps the mystery of Alice would come a little clearer by the end of the night.