Born to Run

by Stephen Kenson

  "Still with me, Kellan?"

  She started at the sound of Jackie's voice, seemingly coming out of nowhere.

  "Yeah," she said, "yeah. Where are you?"

  "Right here." the decker said with a laugh, and Kellan looked down to see one of her own hands waving. Then she realized: it wasn't her hand, it was Jackie's hand, or rather, the hand of Jackie's Matrix persona. The software in the cyberdeck created the illusion of a virtual world. It translated the information from the Matrix into neural impulses, sending them into the user's brain. That included the appearance of a “physical" self. It was like Kellan and Jackie were inhabiting the same virtual body, except Jackie was in control. Kellan was just along for the ride.

  "Okay, hang on." Jackie said. She turned and stepped onto one of the glowing lines stretching toward the horizon.

  It was like being on a roller coaster. Kellan felt as if she'd left her stomach behind as she suddenly zoomed along a silvery tunnel. Hundreds of other packets and bits of data flew back and forth in either direction, like a kind of digital rush hour. She changed direction, zooming this way and then that way.

  Before Kellan even had a chance to get her bearings, it was over. The world snapped back into still focus and she stood out in front of a towering building. At least it looked like a building. The walls were of reddish stone, with inset windows of mirrored glass, tinted a coppery color.

  "Welcome to the Ares Macrotechnology Seattle host system." Jackie said, imitating the stereotypical nasal monotone of a tour guide. "Ahead you'll see what passes for security at a secondary Ares site like this one."

  Kellan could see the main doors of the building. Curled up on the wide stone landing in front of them was a massive black hound, as big as a troll. It had three heads, all lying on its folded paws, eyes closed. It was breathing slowly and deeply and appeared to be sleeping. Spiked iron collars around its necks were connected to a heavy chain bolted into the stone wall behind it.

  "Standard Ares Cerberus ice." Jackie said. "Not terribly imaginative, but then, what can you expect?"

  "Uh-huh." Kellan replied softly.

  She'd heard of ice, decker slang for IC or Intrusion Countermeasures. Ice programs protected Matrix hosts from unauthorized intrusion, safeguarding the valuable data and systems within those hosts. Deckers specialized in finding various ways past ice to access that same data. The most sensitive data was protected by sophisticated ice. Most ice programs simply knocked a decker offline or denied her access to the host system, but Kellan knew there were ice programs that could trace a decker's location in the physical world, sending the information to the authorities or corporate security. Ice programs could damage a decker's cyberdeck, corrupting software-or even frying the hardware. Then there was the legendary black ice, which could drive an intruder insane, or even kill a decker, inducing seizures or sending a lethal charge of electricity directly into the decker's brain. Kellan suddenly wished she'd asked Jackie how much protection the trode net afforded her.

  "You don't have to whisper." the decker said in her mind. "It's not like anyone else can hear us."

  "Oh, okay." Kellan said, somewhat sheepishly, in her normal tone of voice.

  "Now, let's take care of Fido here." The slim, silvery-white hand of Jackie's persona reached out and plucked a large soup bone from the air with a flourish, like a magician producing a bouquet of flowers. She ran her other hand along its length and suddenly the bone split and there were three of them, held fanned between her hands.

  "The triple-redundancy of the Cerberus ice is what makes it such a fraggin' pain." Jackie said. "But once you know about that, it's pretty easy to handle." She took a few steps closer to the sleeping hound and the middle head opened one eye to look at her. It snorted and all six eyes opened, its three heads rising up to look directly at her.

  Jackie tossed the bones at the hound. They flipped end over end through the air, and the Cerberus neatly caught one in each of its mouths.

  “There you go, boy." she said. The Cerberus immediately began gnawing on the virtual bones, hunkering down on the landing, its heads lowered. Kellan heard the sound of the dog's teeth grinding against the bones and shuddered a bit, but Jackie seemed pleased.

  "That'll keep him busy for a while." she said, and then calmly slipped past the guardian hound.

  "What did you do?"

  "Modified a loop program that has it distracted." Jackie said. "I just had to make sure to take the redundancy of the ice into account. Now it'll be busy gnawing on that program for a while before it realizes there's nothing really there. I thought the bone was a nice touch, don't you?"

  At the door of the building Jackie produced a key from somewhere in the folds of the flowing white dress her persona wore. She fit it into the lock and turned it to the right, and the door opened, allowing them to enter.

  Inside the door was a foyer done in reddish marble and bronze, with a maze of corridors leading off from it in all directions. Jackie seemed to know where she was going, gliding along the corridors until they reached a certain doorway. The key granted them admittance once more, this time into a room filled with floating silvery spheres, row upon row of them. There were easily hundreds, if not thousands, arranged in perfect order.

  "Personnel files." Jackie said, sliding along the rows. "Let's see what they have about our Mr. Brickman. Ah! Here he is." She stopped at one sphere and pressed her hand against it. Her hand sank into the surface of the sphere with a ripple like quicksilver.

  Suddenly images unfolded before Kellan's eyes, displays with words and pictures scrolling down them. Jackie seemed to scan quickly through descriptions of Brickman's education and work background, skipping over pages of history to more recent entries in the file.

  "Promotion to junior director of external resources and relations." she read out loud.

  "Which means?" Kellan asked.

  "It means that our Mr. Brickman is a professional Mr. Johnson. He handles shadow ops for Knight Errant, and he's up-and-coming, too, from the look of it. So it's not unusual for him to be hiring shadowrunners. He's not just a corporate suit playing a little game on the side. He works with runners a lot. Of course, that doesn't mean he isn't playing a little something on the side, but it makes it harder to tell.

  "It might also be how the Street Deacon knows him." Jackie continued. She gestured and the file collapsed back into a sphere. With a wave of her hand, she brushed the sphere into the open mouth of a bag she held in her other hand.

  "We'll just download this for future reference." she said to Kellan. The gesture told the host system to transfer the data to her cyberdeck's memory.

  "Now what?" Kellan asked. "That didn't tell us much."

  "I didn't think it would, but it's good to check out the basics. Targets rarely leave the good stuff just lying around where it's easy to find, but that first level of information is sometimes more revealing than it's intended to be. Most of the time, though, it's like diving for sunken treasure: it's a big ocean, so it helps if you know where to start looking, and you've got to watch out for sharks."

  They stepped out of the room containing the personnel files and zoomed through the corridors. Kellan had no idea how Jackie knew where she was going. She certainly seemed familiar with the layout and defenses.

  "Have you been here before?" she asked.

  "Let's just say I know my way around the Ares system." Jackie replied, and Kellan left it at that.

  They stopped just inside the entrance to a gigantic room. The ceiling was shrouded in darkness high above them, and on the floor below was laid out a collection of trucks, train cars, planes and even boats, all moving in complex patterns along a network of lines. Figures wearing plain coveralls marked with the helmeted Greek warrior of the Ares logo moved here and there, carrying boxes and crates, some of them impossibly large.

  "Let's see what the shipping department has to tell us." Jackie said.

  They approached one of the uniformed figures. Kellan saw that his badge indicated
he was the foreman. He was ticking off items on a clipboard as other workers moved past him.

  "I need information on a shipping route." Jackie requested, and the foreman didn't even look up from his work.

  "Authorization?" he asked.

  Jackie's persona reached into the folds of her gown, then opened her hand and blew a puff of glittering faerie dust over the foreman. It sparkled in the air for a moment and the foreman looked up from his clipboard, eyes wide, a silly smile fixed on his face.

  "Works every time." Jackie said to Kellan.

  "What did you do?"

  "Used a spoof program that has the system convinced that we have executive access, for the time being." Then she withdrew a small, white business card and passed it to the foreman as her cyberdeck uploaded the search request to the host system. The foreman flipped through pages on his clipboard, then withdrew a similar card and passed it back to Jackie, who took it, downloading information to her deck.

  The card in her hand expanded to become a floating window in the air in front of them. A map of the

  Seattle area appeared on it, with routes traced out in different colors. Jackie and Kellan studied them for a moment.

  “That shipping route Brickman gave us wasn't the original route for the shipment we nailed." Kellan stated. “It was changed."

  "By Brickman, I imagine." Jackie replied, scrolling through the information on the various shipments.

  "Look at this." the decker said. "There's an upcoming shipment that uses the same route." She traced the red line on the map with a virtual finger.

  "In another couple of days." Kellan said. "What's in it?"

  "Let's find out, shall we?" Jackie passed another information request to the foreman and he obediently complied, shuffling through his papers before passing a data card back to Jackie.

  "Guns." Jackie and Kellan said simultaneously, after glancing at the cargo manifest.

  "A lot of guns." Kellan added.

  "It's a shipment for Knight Errant," Jackie said, "along with more run-of-the-mill stuff for Weapon World outlets in the plex. Now this would be something worth jacking."

  "Hey," Kellan said, "G-Dogg said something about the Spikes having new weapons they obviously got from somewhere. Do you think there could be a connection?"

  "Like?"

  "Like maybe Brickman is setting up gangs in the plex with stolen Ares guns."

  "Interesting thought." Jackie replied. "I'll do one more search, and then we should get going. I don't want to hang out any longer than we have to." She passed another data card to the foreman and Kellan felt an almost electric tension from Jackie's concern. Though the decker remained cool and calm, her desire to not linger in the Ares system made Kellan realize the potential danger.

  The foreman shook his head. "Further authorization required." he said flatly.

  "Damn." Jackie said. "The information is restricted."

  "Can you get it?"

  "Of course I can get it." Jackie replied, a bit peevishly. "It's just going to take a little longer." Suddenly, a glowing cloud of symbols appeared in the air between the outstretched hands of Jackie's persona, who began manipulating the symbols as if she were assembling a virtual jigsaw puzzle.

  Kellan kept silent as the decker worked. She could imagine Jackie's fingers playing the keys of the cyberdeck like a musical instrument. The collection of symbols began to coalesce into a complex, multidimensional sigil. The sigil collapsed into the shape of a tiny data card, which Jackie passed to the foreman.

  He glanced at it, nodded, and began looking through the papers on his clipboard.

  A sound from the shadows high above the shipping area caught Kellan's attention. Jackie heard it, too. She glanced up, and Kellan could see a dark, winged shape come flying out of the shadows directly toward them.

  "Jackie!" she said.

  "I see it, I see it." the decker replied. She gestured, and suddenly her persona was covered in articulated metallic armor of chrome and ivory, from fine gauntlets to a helmet that Kellan could feel around her head, its widevisor allowing almost full normal vision. A slender silver sword appeared just as suddenly in the persona's hand.

  The thing swooping down from above was a hideous mix of human and bat, with black, leathery wings stretched between narrow fingerlike bones, a black-furred body, whiplike tail, and a face that looked vaguely human but distorted with rage and hatred. Kellan had seen pictures of creatures like this: it was a harpy, or at least a virtual representation of one.

  Jackie dodged to the side, narrowly evading the harpy's slashing claws as a hideous shriek filled the air. She slashed with her sword, but just missed the creature as it flew past, banking around for another pass at them. Jackie glanced at the foreman, who stood calmly shuffling his papers, as if nothing unusual was going on, then focused her attention on the harpy as it closed in for another attack.

  “Ha!" she cried, slashing at the black monstrosity, but her battle cry turned into a yelp of pain as the harpy's claws raked across her left arm.

  "Ow!" Kellan said as Jackie cursed. She felt that! It was as if a real harpy had cut her arm. Burning pain throbbed along Kellan's upper arm and shoulder. She tried to turn her head to see how bad it was, but it wasn't her head, and she couldn't move it. Jackie was in control of the persona and she was keeping track of the harpy.

  “All right, you want to play it that way." Jackie muttered. She grabbed the edge of the white cloak she now wore along with her armor, sweeping it up in front of her with a flourish. The harpy banked sharply as it swooped in for its next attack. Confused, it hesitated for a moment. Then Jackie dropped the cloak and lunged forward, stabbing the thing with her blade. It recoiled with a screech.

  Jackie spun and Kellan could see the foreman holding out a small data card. The decker lunged forward again and snatched the card from his hand, triggering a download to her cyberdeck.

  "Hang on, Kellan!" she said. "We're out of here!"

  They shot out of the room, and suddenly they were standing out in front of the building again. The Cerberus program got to its feet. The bones Jackie left it were nowhere to be seen. It bared its teeth and growled with all three heads, but Jackie just waved at it.

  "Sorry, Fido, maybe some other time." she said. Then everything went black.

  The light inside the sleep coffin was dim compared to the harsh silver and neon of the Matrix. Kellan blinked a few times and slowly moved her arms and legs, just getting used to the feeling of being able to move of her own volition again. She gingerly reached up and pulled off the trode net. On the other side of the cubical, Jackie sighed and opened her eyes. She reached up to pull the connector from her datajack, letting the inertial reel wind the cable back into the cyberdeck's housing.

  "What was that?" Kellan asked Jackie, dropping the trode net on the padding. She reached up and massaged her left arm, where she still felt a twinge of pain. She looked, but saw no sign of injury from the harpy's virtual claws.

  "I pushed things too far." the decker replied. "Put the system on internal alert and triggered an ice program. Nothing major, but I didn't want to hang around there and wait for it to get reinforcements."

  Kellan shuddered. If that was what Jackie considered minor, she'd hate to see a serious threat in the Matrix.

  “Will Ares know . . . ?" she began and Jackie shook her head.

  “Don't worry about it. It was just an internal alert. The host system initiated some error checking and security procedures, that's all. It happens a lot, especially with corporate systems, so it's nothing to be concerned about. The system didn't alert anyone on the outside, and I made sure to wipe out all traces of our session when we logged off. So unless somebody goes through the system with a fine-tooth comb, there's no chance Ares will even know we were there."

  "What did we get?" Kellan asked, recalling the data card Jackie grabbed right before they logged off.

  The decker rolled out the screen of the cyberdeck and tapped a few keys. She shifted to the other sid
e of the coffin so Kellan could see, too.

  “Information on one other Ares weapons shipment that got hijacked a few weeks ago." she said. “The incident has been classified internally, but it looks like it was reported to Lone Star."

  "That's weird." Kellan said. “Why report it to the cops and then classify it internally? Besides, I thought that Ares didn't like Lone Star?"

  Jackie smiled. “Nobody likes Lone Star," she said, "but you've got a point. Ares usually handles this stuff internally. The megacorps have extraterritorial status, which means they're like countries unto themselves, and they take that status very seriously. They like to make noises as if they're cooperating with the local authorities; it makes for good PR, and this might just be more of the same. Except . .

  "Except what?"

  "The person who classified the earlier theft is none other than our own Simon Brickman."

  "Again, why tell outsiders and then classify it internally?"

  Jackie shrugged. "Maybe he needs to avoid an investigation from Ares higher-ups."

  "Which means he's involved in the disappearance of those weapons."

  "Good bet." the decker said.

  "And that arms shipment went missing right before G-Dogg said the Spikes started showing up with new weapons." Kellan said, the pieces of the puzzle converging in her mind. "Brickman supplied them from the stolen shipment."

  "Could be." Jackie replied. "I think it's interesting that Orion's gang, the Ancients, is currently at war with the Spikes."

  "Which means Brickman is playing both sides of the street." Kellan said. "What does he hope to gain?"