Chapter 3

[Castle Stockhausen]

[The Greater German Allied States]

CURRENT TIME: 15 July 2081, 1530 hours

“Whoa.” Faust pressed their face against the glass of the town car like a spellbound child seeing the Disneyplex for the first time. “I kind of thought you were bloody kidding, mate. That’s a full-on castle!”

“Wait until you see the inside.” Gute Fee was obviously uncomfortably squished into the back of the town car. “It’s like something out of a storybook mixed with half the Triple-A catalog.”

“You’ve been here before?” Janus raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve worked for the old man twice,” the troll answered with a smile. “I broke a strike for the Stockhausens last year, and rode haul security all last winter. He pays well, even if he is a bit…traditional.” Janus heard the troll linger on that last thought, made note of it, and let her continue. “You just have to make sure to stay on his good side…like me.” Fee’s smile was wide and exaggerated, her teeth standing like a row of ivory pickets between indigo-painted lips.

“It really is something, though.” Hollywood whistled. “An honest castle. Hope you guys have visit-pic cards I can send back home. Squid will never believe it.”

“There will be time enough for sightseeing once Herr Stockhausen has discussed the job particulars with you, I’m sure.” Abraham steered the town car up the long, twisting drive, pausing momentarily at a gatehouse arch in a 5-meter-tall stone wall that wrapped around the entire Castle Stockhausen. A quick AR tag swipe at the podium, and the heavy alloy doors swung open. The car drew nearer to the main entrance of the castle itself.

Janus was just as impressed as his teammates, but in a much different way. Having a university background in archival history, especially the constructions that have lasted through the centuries, he looked upon monuments to the Old World like a critic poring over a new piece of art. He would take mental notes on things, quickly tapping them into his cyberdeck for details to ooh and ahh over in the same way as sightseers did for the image itself. This place was no different, but the Matrix held little information aside from broad brush strokes—almost as if it had been professionally scrubbed.

Castle Stockhausen was built according to traditional Germanic construction, but with a definite 21st-century spin. The stone that made up most of its foundation was cut directly from the nearby mountains, but laced with layers of advanced polymers and reinforcing fiber pylons. Each of the building’s five corners were topped with a gorgeous, jagged parapet. The rooftops were all layered in acrylic scale-shingling. Every window was made from smoked bulletproof fiberglass. In an old-world touch, several banners and pennants bearing the heraldry of the Stockhausen original clan—Stokhaus, in the old tongue—hung from several places and flapped in the afternoon wind. The red and black shield with the silver moon and bear emblazoned upon it was bright and vibrant.

“That is something that is missing for so many of us in the States,” Janus thought out loud, pointing out the symbols. “Real history. I can’t think of the last time I felt any real traditionalism in anyone running out of Seattle. Except maybe the Tír elves.”

“The Ork Underground is reaching back to their roots and getting pretty tribal these days,” Hollywood pointed out. “And let’s not talk about the factions growing out of the Bug City DMZ. It’s like anything else, Janus—we’re all making new traditions for the next generation.”

“Let’s just keep all that “new age tradition” talk to ourselves around Herr Stockhausen, if you please?” Abraham cut the car’s engine and unlocked the doors. “Or perhaps just stay focused on the mission, yes?”

“It’s better that way,” Janus agreed, stepping out into the gravel parking area and looking up at the castle, a slight shine of awe in his cybereye—it was hard, even for him, to ignore the size and scope of it this close. “The gig always comes first.”

For it being such a large structure, there seemed to be only drones and the occasional hired hand taking care of the place on the inside. Like a naval vessel with a skeleton crew, Castle Stockhausen had several areas that were shut out and locked away, but the common areas were all spotless and well-maintained. The windows were not just tinted on the outside; they were legitimately shaded, the grey dimness combining with the place’s selective vacancy to create a truly eerie backdrop.

That’s interesting, Janus mused as he unfurled his link cable and jacked in. His fingers danced over the deck in his satchel, and the local cyberscape of the Matrix rolled into view as an overlay. It was always a little distracting to watch the physical world with a Matrix shadow laid across it, but it let him see programs running, wireless signals on the broadcast, and clusters of secure code—like the network of security nodes and camera suites nestled in the more well-travelled areas of the castle.

He also saw a number of strategically placed IC traps and logic-bombs protecting private corporate file storages, personnel records, and several encrypted locations with limited outside access due to how far they were from the closest GOD hub or routing spiral. Janus noted a delay on the signals coming to and going off the intranet web. They were nice higher tech additions to the place, and made him feel better knowing he wasn’t actually off the grid. At least he had the option of tooling around in the rest of the Allied German States’ Matrix—with the aforementioned delay—if he wanted to.

Abraham led everyone to a large boardroom. A massive oaken table stretched through center of the room, ringed by high-backed chairs of different sizes and shapes to be most accommodating to their guests. The middle of the table bore a relief carving of the Stokhaus crest, and on either side of it stood pitchers of water and fruit juice circled by crystal tumblers.

“Please take any seats you like.” Abraham gestured to the table. “Before I go and fetch your host, I must ask you to please keep your minds open and remember you are guests here. Any of your preconceived notions about Herr Sto—”

“No need to explain things to such wise and worldly folk, Harkon.” The voice was deep and rich, like an expensive bourbon, and left a residual tingle in Janus’ ears like Faust’s could. “The master of the house is here, and has been eagerly awaiting your arrival.”

“Mister Stockhausen—” Hollywood began to address their host, but was cut off.

“Please, call me Matthias.” Stockhausen chuckled as he emerged from the darkest corner of the boardroom—oddly, even shadowed to Janus’ enhanced cyber-vision. “Some informal nomenclature between myself and the agents who will be saving my family’s legacy is a small price to pay.”

Are you fragging kidding me!? Janus’ mind recoiled at first sight of his new employer, and every muscle in his body tensed.

Matthias Stockhausen, clad in a burgundy smoking jacket and suit combination and a pair of authentic red drakeskin slippers—an ensemble that Janus could only guess cost upward of 10,000 nuyen—strode into view like an ashen grey ghost. His hair, the exact color of coal that has just gone from smolder to char, was tied back in a loose tail banded with a gold clasp. His facial features were cut from marble, and beneath an aquiline nose was a meticulously trimmed and waxed moustache that rose on either side to thin, sharp spikes of sooty black whiskers. The lips were darker, almost a sandalwood, but when they parted to allow the Germanic aristocrat to speak, a row of parchment-yellow fangs, like those of a tiger shark, could be seen.

He’s a godsdamned vampire! Everything inside Janus told him to call up the most powerful, world-upheaving chaos field spell he could and use everyone as a distraction so he could blast open the window and leap down the two stories to deck-hack the town car.

But he didn’t. Janus had seen victims of the Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus before; he’d even had to kill a few carriers a few years ago.

But those were slavering beasts. Matthias was different. His slender fingers ended in black-rooted talons, but didn’t bear the ruddy stains of constant bloodshed. He spoke clearly, succinctly, and without the slightest hint of losing control in this room full of fresh blood and life energy. He honestly is in control.

“Whoa!” Hollywood swept his duster to one side, and a shelf-like drawer popped open in his ribcage. A modified compact Ares leaped out of his body to clack into the magnet array in his awaiting hand, the weapon leveled instantly against the multi-millionaire about to explain the mission to them.

Gute Fee was the first to react to Hollywood’s outburst. While Abraham’s jaw went slack and he almost spilled the drink he was pouring, the troll had her mace out, cocked back, and ready to bash Hollywood. Faust stood wide-eyed and utterly caught off guard, their skin already flushing with mystic protective pheromones.

Janus, still plugged in to his deck, was lining up coding spikes at Hollywood’s gun, at the watchful security suite in the chandelier, and—just in case—the 1.5-million-nuyen-enhanced spine inside his teammate. Poised and ready to descend like adamantine icepicks; one blink and any or all of those devices would cease to function.

Hollywood stood his ground. “Nobody said nothin’ about workin’ for a leech.”

“Hollywood, mate.” Faust started to turn on their charms to defuse the situation, but Janus could already see the elf’s Type-A filtration pockets firing up to protect against them. “Don’t do something you’ll regret.”

“It’s all right.” Matthias opened his hands wide, exposing himself in a deliberate show of non-hostility. “Our friend here has every right to be upset. The derivative descendants of my kind—those affected with the more recent evolutions of my illness—have caused him discomfort and loss in past years. Hollywood…” He gestured with his elegant taloned hand toward the chair nearest his own. “Please, if I could pluck the threads from the tapestry of horrors that my kind have imposed upon others since the Awakening, I would. The virus—” A sneer of contempt curled his lip. “—mutated when the world changed. Hell, it has mutated multiple times since then.”

Abraham pulled the head chair out for Matthias, who slid into the thronelike carpentry as a hand slipped into a silken glove. “Herr Stockhausen here,” said Abraham, “is one of the original strain of his kind, not some degenerate monster that skulks about in the alleys, gorging themselves on the homeless and the unfortunate.”

“Harkon, please.” Matthias grinned, and it was disarmingly soft, despite the deadly blades hiding behind those lips. “We have invited these people, these experts in their fields, into our home to discuss the job for which we need them for…not my long and convoluted history.”

“How long?” Janus blurted, curiosity shoving anticipation out of the driver’s seat. “Just how long is your history?”

“Well…” the vampire tilted his head slightly in thought. “This next February, on the day of Saint Valentine, I will be saying goodbye to my 192nd year and hello to my 193rd.”

“Damn.” Hollywood closed his hidden body compartment and set down his pistol on the table as he took the offered seat. “You really are different from them, aren’t you?”

“Herr Stockhausen has always been a perfect gentleman with me,” Gute Fee added, sitting across the table from the elf. Her mace thudded to the floor with a heavy clunk. “Not one bite, not even once. And I gave him ample chances and opportunities…”

“You flirt!” Faust laughed, plopping down in the chair next to her and pouring themselves a glass of juice. “I will expect more dish on this later on.” They looked at the rest of the table, focusing on Janus. “Assuming we are all still on for a later on?”

Sure thing. We’re just now swallowing this pill and hoping not to choke, but yeah…let’s play nice.

For now.

“Let’s hear about the job before making any dinner rezzes, okay?” Janus finally recalled the code spikes from Hollywood—but left the one hanging in cyberspace at the security cam-rig just in case. If this goes sour, at least there’ll be no record of it to ruin our rep.

He turned to the head of the table. “We already talked compensation with Abraham, so now all we need are the specifics as to the job and how you want it done.”

“I’m glad to see my contacts amongst the Lodges were correct about you, Janus.” There was a ruby glint in the vampire’s eyes. “You really are the kind of operative that becomes the mortar in any construction, aren’t you? Meeting you now, in the flesh, I cannot believe you nearly threw it all away and burned yourself over some EvoCorp asset mismanagement?”

“‘Asset mismanagement’?” Janus fought the color rising to his cheeks. “Those bastards were experimentally gene-splicing and nano-surging low-renters and coffin-sleepers all throughout the Barrens. Everybody has to have a line. Everybody. Sometimes it’s worth burning a bridge if you never want to cross that river again.”

“Drek, chum!” Hollywood cocked his head, taking his eye off Matthias for the first time since he appeared in order to look awestruck at Janus. “That Evo block party? That was you?”

“And a few others,” Janus admitted, sighing deeply. “Can we get back to the job? Or are you about to tell me this was secretly an Evo setup?” Because if it is… he felt the surge of magical energy within him churn to life along with his emotion and adrenaline, …I’m about to find out how tough this bloodsucker really is.

“Not at all,” Matthias purred. “It is simply that, in my spare time, of which I have recently had more of, I have been doing a great deal of research on my would-be agents. Your collective histories are remarkable.” He pressed his fingertips together to form a little arch in front of his face. “Now, if you all are at ease with my condition, shall we begin?”

After a long, detailed explanation of the mission, Janus was surprised his team was being afforded all this pomp and circumstance. It was a simple grab-and-go of a physically-boxed “coding algorithm and all of its rooting spinnerets” where the current owners of the containing hardware would be waiting for pickup. A simple back-and-forth passphrase with the project lead, and they would be able to grab the package and get to stepping.

Really, it was the kind of thing a normal courier or secure postal service should be called in for. Matthias was only using shadowrunners for this because other corporate entities were interested in this algorithm, too.

Janus replayed the conversation in his feed, making sure he didn’t lose track of any small details. Even simple missions could turn into trash if the team missed a key element or failed to be prepared for the obvious or unexpected.

The package would be waiting for them in a small, un-advertised think-tank in the suburban block sprawl of nearby Leipzig. It was a middle-income area protected by the Kugelritter, highly organized local gangs that collectively kept the peace in exchange for free rein of the streets. Janus was happy to learn that Leipzig was well-known for its traditional breweries, a higher-than-average number of cyberdoc private practices for a community that size, and hundreds of listed Matrix-element contractors with ties to the megacorporations. It read like an ideal suburb to him, and he hoped it carried with it a similarly ideal level of easy-to-avoid obstacles.

The storage device for the code shouldn’t be much larger than a briefcase, Matthias explained. Extremely well-shielded, it was protected from both outside threats and Matrix intrusion. The team would retrieve the container and return it to Castle Stockhausen, where it would put Stockhausen Mining back on the map as one of the leading local corporations again. Whatever this program represented, it had been something in the making for quite a while, and Matthias was crystal clear: bring it back safely or don’t come back at all.

The think tank address was put into everyone’s commlink, and the remainder of the evening, the group spent discussing their pasts and telling some interesting shadowrunning stories—being careful to leave out anything sensitive, classified, or still under a statute of limitation. Matthias even shared a few indulgent interactions from when he “was younger and left the boardroom more,” without any overly vampiric scenes, but couldn’t help leaving a reminder to the team that he was much more than an average soul. By the end of the night, the team was at least well acquainted—if not downright friendly—with one another and their ancient employer.

After such an eventful day and evening, Janus made the call and called it a night for the team. He thought it would be best if they rested at least for a few hours before taking the town car into Leipzig in the early morning. If they were to catch the think tank just after it opened, he wasn’t going to let the team oversleep. Everyone was given plush quarters within the castle, and Janus seeded all of their commlinks with an 0300 wake-up call to make sure they were all ready to roll on time.

I’m working for a pre-Awakening vampire, Janus thought as he lay down on the opulent—if not just a touch musty from disuse—sheets. Yeah, I’m going to sleep just fine, sure.

As the team left long before sunrise, Matthias was able see them off himself as they left for Leipzig. He mentioned more than once that he would wait by the comm—or have Abraham do so—until they checked in to inform him of their success.

In the gloom of the night, their employer’s eyes shone like polished glass, and while there was no question how unsettling it was, the emotion behind them was all the clearer. Janus could see it plainly as they were loading the car—Matthias didn’t just want this code package, he needed it. Janus wasn’t sure exactly why, but he filed that fact away…just in case.

The drive to Leipzig was a lot like the broadcast portions of the Zug’s scenery, only closer. There were beautiful urban street sculptures and architecture that had to go back to before the Awakening, likely much earlier. In the glow of the street-LEDs, and later in the pinks and oranges of dawn, it was striking.

If there was one thing the street gangs and suburban organizations of the greater Berlin area excelled at, it was graffiti. The tags, mosaics, and murals not only beautified the otherwise grey, blasted-out landscape—but Janus’ experience in the slums of Seattle told him they also subtly displayed boundaries and territories. As the car zipped through the blocks, he saw imagery of stylized knights—many of which bore shields blatantly emblazoned with corporate logos—battling wizards and warriors. These grass-roots defenders were wielding tremendous spell effects and flying numerous pennants and flags that, upon a simple eye-to-Matrix image search, revealed them as belonging to a number of local city-states, ancient family lines, and even one group of monster hunters funded by Vatican City.

The anti-corporate stances out here are truly something to behold. Janus had heard that back in the ’50s, wearing megacorp colors out here was akin to marching with Humanis scum through the center of Redmond. Things had gotten really ugly in the ’60s and ’70s, but then someone went and uncorked a nanoweapon that tore through the blocks like wildfire and levelled the playing field. Now it seemed like a strange and messy stalemate between the people who live and work around the area and the powerhouses that owned it. Kind of nice to see the untouchables…touched…now and again.

Leipzig itself was no different. There was a slight Romani-Prussian feel to a lot of the architecture, and Janus noticed there were very few elves amongst the occasional small groups of pedestrians they drove by. He was good at noticing things, especially when he had nothing else to think about—except how to mute the grumblings between Faust and Gute Fee concerning her choice in “mission makeup” from the back seat.

“We’re coming up on our site waypoint,” Hollywood announced from behind the wheel. Abraham had said he’d programmed the car’s remote rig to go the whole way, but the gunslinger went on and on into an anecdote about a rigger gone wrong and a helicopter pilot falling into the Seattle Sound, and ultimately demanded to drive. “Looks…like…”

“The ugly brick thing with the focaccia-colored, speckle-patterned awnings?” Faust’s voice was the personification of incredulousness. “What a perfect shell to hide a multi-million-nuyen brainyard full of well-insured code junkies.” They laughed. “I’d never think to look…there.”

“When we get inside,” Janus reminded everyone as Hollywood reversed into a too-small-but-he-was-gonna-try-anyway parking slot, “these wageslaves don’t know us from anyone else. For all they know, we’re the spaetzle delivery guys. They’re just supposed to ask us for the checkphrase—‘we are here for a slice of the rhubarb pie.’”

“The three, the point, or the one-four?” Hollywood shook his head at the numerical pun, narrowly missing the bumper of the old BMW in front by centimeters.

“And then they hand over the package,” Gute Fee grunted as she finished applying her sparkling yellow eyeshadow and pinched her compact closed with a klack. “All set. I’ll take point.” The car’s suspension bucked upward with her exit, and she immediately began looking around for trouble. “All clear. Let’s go.”

So far, so good.

“I still don’t know why all the fuss if this is just a handoff.” Faust clicked their tongue as they stepped out of the car and onto the sidewalk. “I understand wanting our talents for the escort back, but it just seems like putting up a few shell games and Chuckle decoys would have been far cheaper.”

“What’re you complaining about, doll?” Hollywood brushed back his spiky hair under his wide-brimmed hat and then tipped the front at the mystic. “Easy money’s better than the alternative, right?”

“Come on. Game faces, folks.” Janus opened his mind up to the aether and let the astral world flood into his eyes.

There was a little spiritual activity around the block, a couple of people zooming this way and that, but mostly just effect residue from someone who had come through recently with some kind of charm or foci at full blast. It was like when a socialite walks past and leaves a wake of overpowering perfume everywhere they go, only magical.

Reassured there were no spying spirits or awaiting hangers-on ready to leap into action once they grabbed the package, Janus returned his senses to normal. “Let’s go pick up our pie.”

The lobby-landing of the building in question did not match the exterior. Polished alloy surfaces dominated the place, a trio of faux plants in mirrored pots broke up the empty space of the room, and a half-circle reception desk stood empty between them and the glossy black elevator access doors.

“Helloooo?” Hollywood leaned over the front of the desk, almost comically looking for the receptionist below the polished surface as if she could have been shrunk or hidden. “Anybody home?”

“This is weird.” Gute Fee scanned the room, her mace dangling loosely from her wrist by the strap. “A rent-out like this should have a clerk, a runabout, and some buy-a-badge folks.”

“I agree.” Janus narrowed his eyes. “And I don’t like ‘weird’ on a run.”

“Wait…” Faust sniffed the air delicately, their nostrils flaring dramatically. “I’m getting something. Chemical. Stringent. Bleachy.” They looked at Janus with a cocked eyebrow. “Somebody scrubbed this place down, and recently.”

“Anything else?”

“Over here.” Faust strode over to the elevator and struck an odd pose, putting their nose a few centimeters away from the crease between the doors, and drawing in breath. The mystic closed their eyes like a sommelier trying to decipher the subtle notes in a fine wine. “Yeah…that’s cordite. Real faint. Somebody was popping off small arms here not too long ago.”

“That’s enough for me.” Janus pulled his pistol and started spooling up his anti-intrusion programs just in case. “Let’s get hot.”

Gute Fee spun her mace up into her hand and unsnapped the holster on her sidearm. Faust spun on their heel to one side of the elevator, long-barreled narcojet gun drawn. Hollywood’s revolver was already in his hand; he’d anticipated Janus’ orders and had taken a position where all of the lobby and the elevator itself was in his line of fire.

This four-ring circus might make a pretty prime team after all, thought Janus.

“Here we go…” Faust used the butt of their pistol to press the elevator button—but it didn’t illuminate. They clicked on it a few times repeatedly, achieving the same lack of result. “Aw, c’mon, mate. Why doesn’t the simple stuff ever bloody work when you need it to?”

“Stay frosty.” Janus extended his deck-cable and popped it into his temple, muscle memory leaving him enough slack for mobility. “I got this. Gimme a tick.” Spooling up his slicing programs to get into the local network, Janus was stopped cold in his digital tracks—but not for the regular reasons.

Matrix-clogging hackers, IC-styled countermeasures, GOD monitors, and even just an accumulation of bandwidth-eating banter traffic like at that hotel convention—those were all reasons Janus would normally pull up Matrix defenses, firewall his deck, and tread carefully.

This wasn’t that.

There was no noise on the local network, and a suspiciously low amount of external traffic for a VR hub of this size at a supposed think-tank facility. Places like this were normally the equivalent of a beehive in Augmented Reality, but right now, it was eerily silent.

Way too easy, Janus thought. There was no resistance, not even a transient industrial firewall left for safety’s sake.

His fingers danced across the multi-keys of his deck with the grace and elegance of a concert pianist, moving bits and bytes of code expertly. He sent a resounding ping across the network like a bat’s sonar clicking, seeing that the whole structure was little more than empty walls and awaiting outlets. The only exit pathways for data at all came together in a big clump in the second sub-basement, obviously where the think-tank must be physically located. Unless anywhere else in this place was set up as a shell of plastiboard, drywall, and ready-fit junction boxes, that’s where they needed to go.

Like a chef mixes and arranges ingredients to make a pleasing dish to all senses, Janus mixed up the signals and surges to make the desired meal—the simplicity of the elevator being akin to a basic street kebob in lieu of a gourmet experience. If unveiling a bricked vehicle or a shattered IC barrier was like lifting the chrome cloche on a perfectly poached whitefish fillet, this hack was like tearing the greasy plastic wrap off a microwave Stuffer Shack Supr-Stuft Burrito^TM.

Ding! The elevator doors slid open, and Faust cringed dramatically. Their reaction was understandable, considering even Janus’ un-augmented nose stung at the stink of disinfectant fumes that rushed out. Everyone packed in, not leaving a lot of room under the flickering fluorescent bar lights, and Janus flipped the internal codes to drop the elevator down the two levels to the only floor of any note in this shell of a building.

“Goin’ down,” Hollywood joked as the metal box closed and magnetically dropped two stories. “Welcome to sub-basement level 2. Lightly used sporting goods, archival snack foods, pangender lingerie, and…”

Ding! The doors hissed into their recesses.

“…dead brainboy salsa. Extra spicy.” Hollywood said flatly as the scene opened up before them.

It was an absolute bloodbath.

More than a dozen people, some metas, were splattered all across a windowless, dreary, cubicle crop. The motion-tracking LED illuminator rods flickered to life as the team cautiously stepped out of the elevator, some of the light a weird pinkish hue from being filtered through splashed gore. Megacorp-rated Matrix jack access points populated the entire floor, some of which were contained in cushy chairs; others dangled from haptic bodysleeve hammocks, and a couple old-schoolers like Janus had decks and terminals in their cubes. But everything was pockmarked with bullet impacts and covered in the viscera and blood of all the nerd-farmed coders.

Worst of all, it was the nightmare version of some kind of celebration. Janus saw party hats, streamers, a half-eaten cake with glow-icing kanji for We Did It! scrawled across the top, liquor and champagne bottles in various states of emptiness—those that weren’t broken and shattered, of course.

They had been celebrating some kind of accomplishment, and then were gunned down in mid-hooray.

Codeslingers like these would have been plugged in more than they wouldn’t be, he thought, and even half-vacant meat shells would have shouted out on the SecuraLine screamsheets at the first sign of trouble. Why didn’t they call for help? Janus weighed the quiet and open network hub for this floor, then realized—they couldn’t!

“This was one hell of a high-caliber response to some software jockeys,” Hollywood pressed his fingertip into one of the craters in a cubicle wall. “Caseless, impact detonation rounds. Really expensive stuff. The kind Triple-A wetwork teams use to make sure forensic sniffers can’t track. Hell, most of these shots were probably drone-aimed, or at least smartgun coded per individual round. Someone made sure anyone leaving this room was gonna go out in a bag.” He grimaced at a particularly nasty heap of remains. “Or a bucket.”

“A simple coding escort, my fine Welsh arse. I’m calling this in.” Faust went to tap open a line on their comms, but Janus caught them by the wrist.

“No! Wait!” He zoomed back, like looking at the local Matrix through both a magnifying and panoramic lens. The lines out were hanging wide open, like highways with no autos on them, just begging for someone to hop onto the codified route and put their cyberdeck or rig’s figurative pedal to the floor. Which is when they’d hit…that.

There it was. Sliding like an oil spill across the superhighway for outgoing data transmissions—a Matrix-mucous program whose sticky threads and strings reached out like liquid tripwires all across the only transit paths outgoing calls for help would follow.

If digital presence broke one of those filaments, a dozen well-hidden deconstruction charges would go off on sub-level one in meatspace—bringing the whole damn building down into this room.

“No outgoing transmissions—the building’s rigged to blow.” Janus plucked his deckline like a guitar string. “The Matrix hub is trapped and modded so the whole place will fold if you send out. Team comms only.”

“What do you mean, fold?” Gute Fee looked slightly comical as she tip-toed into the room, trying to avoid the piles and puddles that had been the think-tank programmers.

“He means blammo. We call home to check on the babysitter, and…” Faust made an explosion sound with their mouth and mimicked the same with their hands. “No more us.”

“Fraggin’ hell.” The troll may have said it plainly, but it reflected Janus’ opinion pretty well.

“So, boss man.” Hollywood used the barrel of his revolver to push up the brim of his hat, “What do we do now? Just pack up and go home?”

“No way,” Janus replied, already starting to calculate the situation from a dozen different viewpoints. “I don’t know about you, but my rep is worth at least looking around and trying to figure out what happened here.” He nodded to a row of high-security lockers on the far wall, many of which had been forcibly pried open—likely by a cyber limb or some kind of pneumatic emergency tool. “Seems our wetworkers weren’t just mad about not being invited to the celebration, they were after our package, I’d wager.”

Inspecting the lockers, Faust tapped an alloy-reinforced fingernail against the mangled locking mechanism of the first storage bin. It was a bloom of rent metal from where a round had struck it perfectly mid-center. “Looks like they had to use bullet-shaped keys to get these things to pop.”

“Wait a minute.” Hollywood squinted at the blast-opened lockers. “None of this is close-up, either. Our bad guys…can I call them bad guys? Well, our bad guys hit those locks without drift, during a full-on firefight, all the way from over here? Frag it, man.” He let out a long whistle. “I might not even be able to do that, and I’ve shot other Chuckles’ bullets out of mid-air.”

Did they get the package, though? Janus thought, carefully scanning the scene to try and understand how a massacre like this went unnoticed…unless it had been done by another shadowrunner team working for a rival. But even then, with the hardware and the unfathomable level of force they came in using—and the demolition Matrix traps? It just seemed unlikely for good ’runners to want to play that way. Even the Blackout Boyz, a shadowrunner union of sorts that went real dark when the power went out in Seattle, wouldn’t take a nasty mess of a gig like this.

“Cake’s good, at least,” Gute Fee snorted, shoving two fingers of icing between her tusks.

“Gross, Fee!” Hollywood shook his head with slow, paternal disapproval. “You don’t know what could be on that.”

“Good call, Hollywood.” Janus nodded, gesturing to the scene. “From what little bit of forensic study I have learned, this looks to have happened within the last day or so. That cake has to have some of…them…on it.”

“Yeah, that too.” The elf smirked, revealing just how far that was from the reasoning of his callout to the troll. “I mean, what if that was poisoned or laced with some pharm or something?”

Of course the bloodbath didn’t bother you. Janus rubbed his temple. Why would a bunch of wageslaves actually matter, right? Sometimes he hated how nonchalant shadowrunners could be to the deaths of “mundanes and normals.”

“You think it might be? Drugged, that is.” Faust’s eyebrows raised and they took a step toward the frosted confection with a laugh. “Anything expensive?”

“Doubtful. Likely just pseudo-sacc and refined syrup.” Janus got closer to the lockers, but a noise from the small kitchenette to the rear of the room drew his attention. It was like a steady knock or thumping. “You hear that?”

“I do now.” Hollywood leveled his revolver in that direction, his other hand a steady, flat plane above the cocked hammer, ready to fan out a cloud of deadly rounds.

“On it.” Gute Fee crossed the distance in three long strides. Her ears were perked, and she homed in on the rhythmic beat. It was coming from a cooler storage pantry, the door slick with the splatter pattern and a red arch of rainbow-like smear from a young woman’s grisly slide to one side, ending as a meaty heap on the kitchenette floor. The magnetically assisted pantry door was being held in the locked position by the dead body, meaning whatever was thumping against the other side couldn’t trigger the door open enough to get it to unlock and release its seal.

“Let me give you a hand. Or rather, move one.” Faust slinked forward, grabbed the locker-blocking corpse by the wrist, and prepared to pull it out of the way. Gripping her mace tightly, the troll nodded as she cocked back the weapon. Faust yanked the remains to the side and Fee pulled the pantry door open with enough strength that it nearly came off the hinges.

“Oh!” A blood-smeared, sour-smelling late-20s man tumbled out, sprawling across the kitchenette floor. Unable to get any kind of purchase on the gore-slick tile, he just flopped over onto his back, throwing his arms up in front of his face in a meager defense against whatever he thought was coming. “No! Stop! Don’t!”

“Who are you?” Fee growled, her mace still raised menacingly. “Why are you in storage?”

“T-Tanzo! I’m Tanzo Nakajima, Coder First Class.” The poor man was wide-eyed, glancing around the room at the remains of his co-workers, the color quickly leaving his cheeks.

“You’re a coder?” Janus asked, noticing a wad of bloodstained fabric wound tightly around the man’s arm. He knew he had to keep this Tanzo focused on him, or he could lose him to shock. “Hey, hey! We aren’t here to hurt you. In fact, Mister Nakajima, I think you might be able to help us. You’re wounded. Faust, help our new chum out.”

“I got you…Tanzo, was it?” Faust breathed out a cloud of calming invisible motes down onto the coder, suppressing his anxieties and replacing them with honest clarity. “Let’s take a look at that arm of yours while you tell us…no, just me…what happened in here, and how you ended up stuck inside that stuffy ol’ larder.”

“We were celebrating,” Tanzo began as Faust unwound the cloth to reveal several shrapnel-style lacerations along his forearm. “The K-Code project was a success, and the corporate sponsors told us to get ready for the couriers to come pick up the cylinders.”

“Hardware?” Janus chimed in.

“Yeah, the K-Code is big. Really big. It can’t just be transferred over the hub or across a Spider’s line. So they get moved around in a linked sixpack of quad-encrypted selenium storage cylinders.”

“That’s…wild.” Janus had seen some code in his career. He’d seen shades of technomantic sprites and megacorps program catalogs that needed less space than that.

“Wild or not, that’s how they were supposed to come pick it up.” Tanzo winced at Faust’s application of the antiseptic swab. “But before they got here…I got this call on a hardline. Some mystery Ralph or Betsy on the other end, telling me to start a partition on the Code, and then find someplace to hide. I thought it was just someone from the project messing around, but considering it came through using the emergency routing numbers, I went ahead and started the process.” He looked around at the massacre and tears welled up in his eyes. “The cylinders were halfway broken into the safety partitions when the elevator doors opened…”

“The couriers?” Janus inquired, thinking we’re supposed to be the couriers.

“Yes and no,” Tanzo nodded. “It was a handful of drones. Rigged up and piloted offsite, I’m sure. They weren’t in the room for more than five seconds, did some kind of scan, then they just opened fire. It was so loud. A nightmare. I didn’t know what to do, but I remember the voice told me to hide. So I hid.” He looked around for a moment, and then pointed to a lanyard hanging from a devastated piece of electronics Janus didn’t immediately recognize. “I made a grab for my ID so I could lock myself in the clean room, but it was still inside the reader that was partitioning the cylinders. A bullet—if you can even call those mini-rockets bullets—hit the reader and blew up.” He gestured to his lacerated arm. “The cylinders could survive a Bug City sweeper bomb, but my ID was fragged—so I ducked into the closest thing that had a door.”

“No one came and searched for you?” Hollywood raised an eyebrow. “How long have you been in there?”

“That was…yesterday, I think? You guys are the first to come through. When I got into the storage pantry, I could still hear their screams—which didn’t last long. Then it was just the ruckus of those floating death discs ransacking the whole office. I’m guessing they were after the cylinders…” Tanzo pointed to the empty partitioning platform on the broken device. “Not that it will do them much good.”

“Why not?” Fee asked innocently.

“The stupid rejexx blasted the partitioner before it was done.” The software savant laughed. “Useless!”

That sailed above even my braincase, Janus thought. “And why is that?”

“Because that means the baseline is going to be all over the place!” Tanzo huffed, Faust’s pheromones tugging away at any reluctance to talk. “Without the routing pathways mapped out, it would be like…like mixing fifty different two-sided fractal jigsaw puzzles together and hoping to still make fifty distinct finished pictures…after they’ve all been painted blue. Impossible without a coder from our team.”

“Your team…” Hollywood looked around the blood-soaked scene. “Of which you are the last surviving member. Which I’m still not sure as to why. A wetwork contract, even a cowardly faceless drone hit, would’ve put down the whole employment list.” He smirked devilishly. “I always did.”

“Real sloppy, too,” Faust chimed in, putting the first aid kit back into their satchel. “Why risk icing the very thing you’re here to take? They had precision—but only at the think-tankers and their locks?”

“Oh, frag.” Janus suddenly understood, and probed a local node point—careful not to even come close to the hub triplines—and found the think-tank’s employment records. Grabbing the list, he did a sweep for their AR signatures, which would be everywhere at a full-time, high security corporate gig like this.

Zero pings. Nothing. Nada. Just like I thought.

“You got lucky, Tanzo,” he explained to the coder. “Those hit-drones were programmed to aim at the employees’ AR sigs. Your locks. Only the fact your tag was in the partitioner and not hanging around your neck is why we’re able to have this chat.”

“Pre-programmed, homing fragmentation rounds fired by paramil-drones driven by offsite riggers?” Hollywood shook his head. “That’s a seven-figure house cleaning, Mister Nakajima. You should be proud to have someone want you and all your friends toes-up so badly.”

“Holly! He’s standing in a room painted with in modern art paté made from his friends and co-workers. Have a little respect.” Gute Fee’s tone was part-scolding parent, part-caring friend, and part-nightmare monster that splintered bone with her bare hands. “He’s the last member of his whole team.”

That means the knowledge of the code in his head makes Tanzo here more important than the cylinders, Janus surmised, and the new definition of our package. “That also makes him the last connection to all of this.” he added, knowing the world of code and programs as well as he did. “And the most important person in this room.”

“I don’t know, there’s a few triple-A moguls and a Mafia don or two that might argue my worth.” Hollywood put on his playful grin. “But I guess I can take silver to this guy’s gold for now.”

“Change of plans, chums,” Janus ignored his teammates’ joking, staying focused on adapting the mission to the new status quo. “Now we have to get Tanzo to Stockhausen.”

“Our original evac plans barely have room for four,” Faust pointed out. “And if they came that hard for an unarmed code-circus like this, excuse me for saying so, but this bullet magnet is not riding with me.”

“Damn,” Hollywood chuckled, “that’s glacial, Faust.”

“And not too far off the mark, either.” Janus sighed. “This was a prime job that took down your group, Tanzo. I guarantee they have sniffers all around the sector just waiting for one of the tags from your team to ping off something. The town car is corp-owned. It auto-scans passengers for bans and travel restrictions.”

“Blindfold for the ret-scan?” For being a hulking mass of murder and muscle, Fee could really sound innocent and naïve sometimes.

“Wouldn’t work,” Hollywood said. “Service cars go into lockdown if the body-to-SIN-tag ratio is off. Keeps you from loading them up with dead meat and sending them to a rival runner’s clientele pool party you were purposely not invited to.”

Everyone stared blankly at him.

“What?” He laughed and shrugged. “Things get competitive in the NAN.”

“Anyway,” Janus continued, “we need to figure out how to get out of this mousetrap and somewhere a little more Panic Roomed. Not to mention, get word to Stockhausen about all of this.”

“Can’t expect the button to work down here anymore than it did from the lobby.” Faust pointed their pistol at the elevator doors.

“No, and we can’t signal-spin up the elevator again, not from in here.” Janus quickly mimicked an explosion with his hands.

“And our team signed off on sealing the stairs for security’s sake,” Tanzo added with a nervous chuckle. “All of us knew how important our work was.”

“There’s probably a ladder inside the lift shaft,” Faust said. “We just have to get through code blocked safety-alloy doors and a few inches of the layered plasticene walls or ceiling of the box itself. No worries, right?”

“Yeah, okay.” Gute Fee sucked air through her teeth, rolled her shoulders, and dropped her mace through the leather loop on her hip. “I got this.”

“Fee, baby.” Faust holstered the slivergun and laughed loudly. “I was just joshin’! We’ll figure something out, love. Somethin’ that doesn’t involve—”

“What?” The troll strode across the room toward the elevator. Along the way, she scooped up one of the office chairs, a stout metal alloy one. With a grunt and the kind of twisting a child does with modelling clay, Gute Fee turned the chair into a braided wedge of jagged metal.

“She isn’t going to—” Tanzo whispered.

“She is,” answered everyone else, aside from Gute Fee, in unison.

“I am,” she said proudly, ramming the metal tool into the crease between the doors, turning it against the curl of its braid like a half-meter corkscrew opening the weirdest bottle of Shiraz Janus had ever seen. There was a groan of metal fighting against the bindings of the door tracks, but sure enough, the doors gave way to her applied strength and buckled to either side. Another grunt and twist later, and the doors slid into the walls just as if they were triggered normally—except they stopped a few inches from disappearing altogether because of the slightly puckered metal where the chair had slipped or lost ground.

Sure enough, just as promised, the elevator was open. “Part one—” Gute Fee tossed the chair-chisel aside unceremoniously, “—all done. Next up, cracking the walnut.” She popped her knuckles and sighed before heading inside the lift cube. “Just give me a few minutes alone with this thing, guys.”

“Do you need to get anything before we take to heels?” Janus asked Tanzo, raising his voice slightly over the sounds of exertion coming from inside the elevator.

“No, not really,” Tanzo sighed, pointing to a draped piece of fabric covered and soaked in an incomprehensible amount of viscera. “That was my favorite jacket. I’m pretty sure everything else is just as slagged.”

“Al…most…” Gute Fee’s growl inside the gaping elevator was loud enough to convey her exertion.

Hollywood pulled Janus aside and whispered. “You sure you want to do this? Bring him all the way back to our friendly neighborhood fanger? Could be a lot of heat.”

“Stockhausen said the package would be the priority, and that the escort back could get messy.” Janus nodded slightly. “The gig changes a little, but we still balance the ledger.”

“That’s bloody damned professional of you, mate. Downright inspirational.” Faust clicked their tongue. “Because I was seventy-thirty out the door before I knew you were stayin’ the course.”

“And…” The troll tossed a wadded-up roll of plastic and metallic walling material out of the elevator, followed by her smiling face leaning out. “Open sesame. I’ll go first and test the load on the ladder.”

“Remind me not to piss her—” Hollywood started.

“Only if you do the same for me,” Faust answered, grinning.

The five of them converged on the elevator, and Janus gasped slightly when he saw the trollish remodeling job. One elevator wall was completely peeled and rolled back like the top of a canned food tin, with the ceiling completely shorn off to expose the dark lift tube and thick ladder attached to its inner wall. A few meters up, slowly ascending that ladder, was Gute Fee, heading to the lobby one arm over the other.

“I’m next,” said Janus, “then Hollywood, then Tanzo, then Faust.” He re-spooled his datajack line and reached for the first rung.

Back in the lobby, the team spread out into loose defensive positions. Tanzo always kept only a few paces away from Faust, likely still feeling the charming effects of their mystic influence. It only took a minute or so, but it was apparent the group wasn’t being monitored just yet.

“I want to get a few blocks away from this deathtrap before we send word to Stockhausen.” Janus was already calculating what he needed to do. The network overlay is trap-coded here, but it can’t be too big a program catch outside the building, otherwise I would have seen it on the approach, and GOD would have surely locked it and the entire sector down by now. We need to put some space between here and him, and then ghost him back to Stockhausen. “And team? Mister Nakajima is priority number one. That’s the run.”

“I’ll protect him like he was one of my own boys.” Throwing his free arm over the coder’s shoulders, Hollywood holstered his revolver and swept the street with augmented eyes,.

“You have kids?” Faust inquired, genuine curiosity in their voice.

“Math and statistics being what they are,” the gunslinger replied, “chances are pretty good, yeah.”

Janus paused for a moment before pushing the manual bar on the fire exit, looking back at Tanzo with a forced smile. “Stay close, chum.”

Taking shelter down the way in a 25-nuyen-an-hour nap slab, the team watched as Janus whispered to a spirit that was invisible to the rest of them.

After he witnessed Abraham receive a call from Stockhausen at the Zug station, Janus knew the attaché was at least partially Awakened. Sending a regular comm message over the network would be faster and less taxing on him—summoning spirits was rougher on non-shamans, after all—but it could be swept for audio clues. If the megacorps were really hunting Tanzo, they couldn’t risk it. A summoned spiritual courier was the better bet.

“Go,” Janus’ astral self echoed to the spirit, “your services are ended when the message is conveyed.” Returning to his physical shell, he stood to his full height.

“Everything good?” Gute Fee leaned forward, steadying the man with one hand.

“You got a little…” Faust gestured to their own nose while pointing at Janus’.

Fragging spirit tax. Janus wiped away a trickle of dark blood from under his nostrils. “I’ll be fine.”

“How long before we hear back?” Tanzo asked. “I know nothing about Merlinisms.”

Ugh. Mundane slang. “Depends on how quickly it reaches Abraham, and how they decide to hand—”

The communication links were flowing on an encrypted line, but Janus noticed Abraham was still being careful with his terminology. He opened the speaker system so they could talk freely, but programmed it with a two-second delay so he could censor the broadcast if necessary. No need to frighten the coder more than he already is.

“We can’t take the car,” Janus told Abraham, “and although the train would get us into Berlin on the quick, it’s just too many stops, check-ins, and scanpoints.” He paused. “We need someplace low-tech to keep the package off the grid until they stop sniffing.”

“Or they stop looking for him,” Hollywood added.

“This is too important for anyone to simply forget about.” Abraham’s words hung in the air for a moment before being replaced by his next message. “And if they think you know about the package, they’ll redact you, too.”

“I’m sorry for all this,” Tanzo sighed, wringing his hands together to keep them from shaking uncontrollably.

There was a slight crackle in the connection. Just a moment, but it was audible—and enough to raise Janus’ hackles. His gut was rarely wrong, which meant it was time to relocate. “We have to go.”

“Where do we take the package now?” Faust jumped in, patting Tanzo between the shoulder blades.

“You need a low-tech option, yes? You are not too far from some very old and dear friends of the Stockhausen family who meet that requirement. I will send you the coordinates and the security codes in a minute or so. Then, as soon as possible, we will send help for you.”

Everyone stood around Janus, waiting on the information. Even Hollywood, who could never stand still completely, was a statue. Only Tanzo rocked back and forth slightly, which was totally excusable, considering what he had been through recently.

When everyone’s communications devices all received the message, a collective sigh passed through the tiny room.

“Low-tech is right…” Faust whistled, the first to say anything. “That looks like one hell of bloody jaunt.”

“That’s not even on the road grid,” Tanzo said, pursing his lips. “It’s way out past all the quarries and broken hills. It’d be a nightmare of a walk. A lot of that terrain is old, mined-out frack scarring. They used to take tours out there—go diving in the old mines, that sort of thing.” The coder shook his head. “But then a bunch of people got hurt. A few died. Now that whole stretch is industry personnel only.”

“Which is why it’s prime.” Janus tapped his finger against the flexible screen of the link. “But how do we get from here…” He pointed at Leipzig, sliding his digit over to where Abraham’s blinking dot flickered ominously. “…to there?”

“I have an idea, Herr Janus,” Gute Fee said politely. “If I may ask, is anyone against a little gambling? I know a place where you can make or lose a fortune on just about anything you can think of, and the right wager can open a lot more than just wallets.”

Janus tilted his head up at her, but his confusion was dispelled by her plain and friendly smile. “I’ve never been a fan of throwing nuyen away on bad bets, but somehow I think you might have a hunch or two I’d be fine to follow.”

“Klasse!” she exclaimed, turning toward the tiny room’s door. “Then follow me.”