[Driving Along the Outside Housing and Commercial Commons]
[Jüterbog, Allied German States]
CURRENT TIME: 21 July 2081, 2145 hours
They had a plan.
A plan that, if it worked, would be smooth sailing and totally crystal all the way up to the front doors of the rendezvous point. But it did rely on two important factors: word of their movements not getting out too soon, and switching the all-too-recognizable Rhino for a more suitable mode of transport. All they had to do was race against the clock of their own lies, having told Matthias they would meet him at a different destination, but instead flying fast and straight into the protective arms—both kinds—of Tanzo’s organized crime-slash-governmental-office family. It was a classic bait and switch, and all it would take is being recognized too early to fall completely to pieces.
Considering the first factor might already have been made a bit flimsy by the eavesdropper hearing Tanzo’s name and then saying it again when snoop programs were listening, the second factor was all the more vital now.
The team rolled up to the edges of Jüterbog, one of the last self-standing suburb cities before hitting the Neo-Berlin mega-territory. Janus learned a lot about the busy little town just from a cursory grid sweep. It had deep history dealing with pre-Awakening wars and a still-standing religious landmark, the Zinna Abbey, near the center of town. It was primarily a satellite city, sending most of its working populace into the megaplex to find lasting work. It was mostly spared during the Corporate Wars that ravaged so much of the AGS, but some of the ReadMe splash-sheet sites claimed this was due to a local superstition. Apparently, if you asked the right generation, Jüterbog was protected by the same fallen faithful who had protected the Abbey from numerous threats over the years.
“We’re on the clock now, chums.” Janus squinted against the darkness outside the windows. “The faster we find the pieces to our little shell game, the bigger head start we’ll have. Let’s just try to avoid any security corps, okay? All hunters would be watching the feeds.”
“It won’t be badges that give us grief, not here. The Abbey is so well protected because of the Iron Templars,” Tanzo explained to everyone in the slow-rolling Rhino. While he was reading off fun facts about the town, they were each looking for a good replacement vehicle.
“What’s an Iron Templar?” Hollywood asked, his sharp eyes scanning the driveways and parking lots for a large cargo machine, a mini-bus, or even a luxury wall-to-waller if it was big enough.
“Aren’t they a footy team out of Malta? Real rough ’n tumblers, too.” Faust was scrolling through the local for-sale advertisement sites, swiping the entries away one by one with their fingertip above the ExCal-II’s softly glowing AR viewscreen. “Although we can all attest…if they’re not Mank, they’re wank, right?” They waited for a moment for anyone on the team to agree, and when no one agreed, gave a single puff of a laugh. “Yeah, you bloody well know.”
“You’re wrong, but even if you weren’t, Malta’s dead rock these days.” Gute Fee was looking out the back window for signs of the right kind of wheels, but also making sure they hadn’t picked up a tail or worse since they emerged from the wilds and got back into civilization. “Blackouts opened it up to the Outsiders, and they razed the place. There’s no football being played there anymore.”
“You’re all wrong.” Tanzo continued to read. “The Iron Templars are a paramilitary unit sponsored by old Vatican-1 himself. There’s only like thirty of them, but they’re crackin’ hard cases. Looking at some of these pics…I’d say each one is one or two more surgeries away from being more metal than meat.”
“Then let’s keep it frosty and not run into any of them, okay?” Janus commented from behind the wheel. “We want this rideshare to be as quiet and painless as possible. The less noise, the less chatter. The less chatter, the better our chances that this goes exactly as planned. Which we’re all hoping for, right?”
“Most definitely,” Tanzo answered. “I don’t think we’d want to tangle with these guys anyway. I’m reading their screamsheets, and to say they’re prime is giving the other primes a leg up.” He whistled. “One of these guys punched open an APC in the corpo dust-ups.”
“So can I,” Fee muttered, sounding like she was the last picked for a Little League team.
“Well, yeah,” Tanzo shrugged. “But this guy isn’t even a meta! Just a bunch of nuyen wrapped in titanium and plugged into a little bit of soldier.”
“I don’t care if they’re proof that angels exist and fight to keep the world spinning,” Janus interjected. “We’re going to keep this quiet and deal with the vehicle swap like a team of professionals so Tanzo’s bionic superheroes will never even know we were here.”
Once we find a damned set of wheels, that is. This HAS to work. We’ve come too far to let this all fall apart because the German populace is too good at protecting their rides.
They drove slowly—but not slow enough to attract any automated traffic monitors or hangers-on—through the edges of town, with Janus being sure not to overlap too much or go over the same place more than twice.
He was treating the city like peeling an onion. When the outermost layer came up empty, it was discarded, and they dug in one layer deeper. It was going to take a while if they didn’t come up with something soon, because they were almost out of the industrial zone of Jüterbog, and the next few layers were mostly residential.
In Janus’ opinion, stealing someone’s personal vehicle was at least twice as hard to go unnoticed as taking a slot out of a lot or corporate yard. It also had far more of a chance to get ugly. Corpo or site security will rarely want to go head-to-head with a team of runners caught in the act; they simply weren’t paid enough, and it wasn’t their stuff getting nabbed. But if Johnny Wageslave saw someone taking his day-to-day transportation and two years’ worth of salary getting ready to roll out of the driveway, he’d grab whatever home protection he had and put his career health insurance to the test to keep his hard-earned ride.
“I think I’ve got one. Well… two. SUVs. Nice ones, and perfect for our needs.” Faust was smiling, but there was something behind their expression that unnerved Janus—at least more so than the mystic’s smiles normally did. “But you might not like it.”
Everyone waited outside the local AG-Sec impound lot, ducked down behind the grassy hillock between its back fence and the roadway where Hollywood had dropped them off. He and Tanzo were the only ones not present, as Hollywood was adamant he was well-practiced at making any hot vehicle vanish seamlessly, and Tanzo went with him to help wipe the Rhino down with Sani-Prox from the first aid kit. It wasn’t 100 percent foolproof, but Janus only knew a few sleuths who could bio-match anything once it was sanitized with that foamy, sticky mess.
Jüterbog wasn’t big enough to need or afford an epic impound lot, but this location was still big enough to make for a rough scan for three people.
Janus tapped into the local grid and bounced his “eyes” from surveillance suite to surveillance suite, looking for guards, squatters, beetles, and anyone else who might be a problem. Gute Fee was already searching the perimeter fence for a place she could open up in a hurry, and Faust was ready with their Narcojet—the least lethal and most silent weapon on the entire team—just in case someone appeared in the mix.
It took them an hour to find their targets: a pair of rig-linked Stratus SUVs kitted out for general urban safety. These were wired up to be remote-driven, even though they would not be, had light armor under their orange and blue chassis, and would be able to hold Fee in the back with no trouble. Faust saw the arrest records for the owners and knew the vehicles were perfect. A crew of low-grade drug runners and BTL recorders traveling from Paris. They’d managed to get busted behind the wheel, got their rides locked up, and then were deported a few days ago—leaving their SUVs behind to be processed by the AGS.
Thank you for the delays of governmental red tape.
“We ready?” Janus asked, receiving affirming nods. He scanned the network and made note of the only two guards on staff. One was in the office, likely watching the feed, and the other was walking the yard nearly on the other end of the whole lot. If there was a window for this, it was that moment. “Fee…you’re up.”
“On my way.” She loped forward across the hillock, her body surprisingly low to the ground for someone so big and bulky. She moved like a wolf, fast and quiet, keeping to the shadowy parts of the yard, and in seconds she was up against the fence.
Still all clear. “Go,” said Janus.
Where Gute Fee was a wolf, Faust was a snake. They sprinted the distance in no time, becoming a shadow itself for the dozen or so meters. They rolled up next to the readied troll, holding their sidearm steady and adjusting their SmartGun eyepiece to seek out any potential targets.
Still good. Janus checked the guard locations based on the AR SIN-tag in their badges and the wireless signals in their handguns. Office and perimeter; the window was still open.
He had to pull his attention out of the surveillance network so he could pay attention to what needed to be done. Five steps toward the fence, and he was already spinning up his slice programs to break into the rigging suites of the two SUVs.
Unfortunately, the impound lot had remarkable firewall systems and clouding programs to keep people out of the vehicles. Janus was concerned about using his higher-grade programs so close after a run-in with a GOD sentry. When he got to the fence and his partners, he still hadn’t broken through and realized he might not. At least, not unless he could jack into the SUVs’ rigs directly.
“Step two?” Fee asked.
Now or never. We need those wheels. He nodded to the troll.
She barely even strained her arms as she pulled the fence apart like opening a shower curtain, tucking the broken points into themselves to create a small portal in the fence. “Punch a tank. Pshh. Amateur hour.”
“Quit bein’ jealous,” Faust soothed her, their voice low and still somehow infinitely charismatic. “Those church-bots ain’t got nothin’ on you, mate.”
“And I will love you both if we get these Strats and get to Hollywood and Tanzo without anyone trying to kill us,” Janus said. “So, can we?”
Faust disappeared through the fence into the impound, followed by Janus, and then Fee stooped carefully in. She unrolled the fence and pinched a few of the wires together. It wasn’t a great mending, but it would surely pass a cursory glance by a night-tired guard’s scrutiny.
They jogged quickly through the lot to where the SUVs were sitting, side-by-side. The team tucked in between the two large vehicles, and Janus took a moment to check surveillance once more. It was risky dipping back into the local network when he was about to go to war with a private driving rig, but he had to be sure.
The patrol guard looked like he might have turned back toward the building, but the one in the office still hadn’t moved. At all.
You asleep, plasti-badge? Janus thought it was weird, but he had no way of devoting bandwidth, even if he had any extra, to figure out why. Instead, he went at the security systems of the two Stratus like a plastic surgeon.
A lot of deckers simply rammed through a firewall, shattered security programs, and melted IC with all the might of their cyberdeck’s host collection. While effective, Janus only played that way if the goal was a battlefield hack, or if he was trying to fully brick something.
If the target was something he needed afterward, it was easier to bend around and avoid basic security software than it was to have to replace the programs. Janus ticked all the right boxes and massaged the lines of code with his own skills, shaping everything in his way to the vehicle rigging suites like sculpting clay.
“Best part of twin-rigged vehicles like this,” he said quietly, “one hack, two scores.”
“The patrol was on the northeast side, right mate?” Faust sniffed the air, their mystic senses picking up on something.
“Yeah, 150 meters, maybe more.”
“Then you might want to hurry up a bit,” they suggested. “Because there’s another somethin’ coming from the other direction. Smells like mustard, too.”
And we’re…
“In!” Janus finished his thought out loud. The side doors on both SUVs made that welcoming pop-hiss sound of sliding open, and the inner cabin lights began to build up their glow.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Janus darkened the cabins again with a quick keystroke to the rigging module. “Last thing we want is for these to be nightlights the guards see from half the lot away.” Not until we’re ready, at least.
All three got into one of the Stratuses, and Janus was glad to see he was right: it would be a perfect fit. Gute Fee with Hollywood driving, and the other three team members in the sister ride. Fee was able to stretch out on the back bench, and it had secondary safety belts designed specifically for larger framed metahumans.
“Part one, done.” Janus mixed around some of his program loads and started in on figuring out the best way to slave one SUV to the other, at least until they could get to Hollywood and have him drive the other.
“Hey, boss.” Gute Fee pressed her face against the thankfully heavily tinted window. “Somebody’s headed this way.”
“Frag!” Faust barked. “I hate being right.”
“Sort it out,” Janus ordered them. “Quietly. I need to get this ready quick, or we aren’t going to make it off this lot.”
Faust nodded, smoothed out the frizzes in their hair with a single pass of their hand, and exhaled slowly. Their skin flushed, their lips became a party-shade of blue, and motes of sparkling aether gathered to fill the irises of their eyes. After checking the ammo for their special “happy nap” cocktail, Faust tucked the needle gun under their arm and slipped out into the night.
Time to do your magic. From the driver’s seat, Janus could see everything unfolding in the graveled spaces in front of the vehicles. He watched as the glowing cone from a flashlight bobbed up and down in the night toward them. It was still a walking pace, meaning the guard hadn’t seen anything yet.
“Hey!” Faust stepped out from behind the far SUV.
What the hell are they doing? Janus thought. What about that is “quietly?”
“Whoa! Bleiben Sie genau da stehen!” The patrolling guard drew closer, raising a flashlight to illuminate Faust—who dramatically acted like the light blinded them. The guard had no sidearm, holstered or otherwise. In fact, she had no tactical belt at all.
That has to be why her tag never moved on the scans! She took off her belt and left it in the office! I’m off my game. I’m never this sloppy. And now we’re going way off-script, too. Great!
“Thank all the gods above and below!” Faust’s normal cockney accent was gone, replaced by the steady cadence of a middle-American media star. They threw their hands in front of themselves, pressing in at the elbows to keep their dart pistol secreted away under their arm. “I’ve been wandering these streets all damned night, and no one, not a single person, would so much as open up their shutters to look out at a Cazzie like me in the middle of the night.” Faust exhaled dramatically. “So thank you!”
“Sprechen sie Deutsch?” the guard asked, trying to bridge the language gap.
“Only a tiny, ein kleines bisschen…a little bit?” Faust tried.
“In English, then.” The guard stepped closer, dropping the cone of light away from Faust’s face for just a moment.
But a moment was all they needed.
Those sparkling mystic eyes flashed, and it sent an instinctual flinch through all of the guard’s muscles. The flashlight dropped from her fingers. The illumination spun in the air, and in the split second where both of them were in darkness, Faust exploded into motion.
They struck the side of the guard’s neck, sending a rush of blood to her ear and brain, but also catching her wind in her throat. Up and over came Faust’s right hand, fingers bent into a knuckle-ram—avoiding the use of their cyber-razor claws—smashing into her underarm with all their strength and the added force of the guard pitching away from the first blow.
Finishing the flurry with a graceful and sweeping sidestep, Faust’s upper thigh slammed into her hip. All of these perfectly placed strikes took the guard completely by surprise; she fell to the ground as boneless as a ragdoll.
The cherry on top of this assault sundae was Faust’s needler, having been dislodged from their armpit during the second swing, now caught like a hacky sack on the bridge of their foot. With one last elegantly impressive maneuver, Faust lowered and then flipped up their foot, tossing the weapon back into the air, catching it and, firing a single injection flechette into the guard’s awkwardly raised hip. “Cheers, love. Enjoy the next eight hours. They’re going to be a right trip.”
Holy drek. Janus’ mouth stood slightly agape and his program cursor blinked ready several times before he came back to what he was doing. That was fragging art.
Faust practically skipped back into the SUV, happiness exuding from them in a way that subconsciously forced smiles to Janus and Fee’s lips, and caused tingles along their scalps. They plopped into the passenger seat, crossed their legs and arms triumphantly, and grinned.
“Reel it in, chummer.” Janus stifled a pheromone-induced giggle. “Even if that was one of the most prime takedowns I’ve ever peeped on. Like, action-vid kind of stuff.”
“And Hollywood wasn’t even here to see it!” Fee laughed, clapping her hands together with a meaty crack.
“That’s okay.” Faust snickered, leaned over, and flicked the tiny little micro-cam on the dashboard. “The Strat comes standard with road cams. Janus will just have to pull up the—”
“One of the first things I disabled, Fausty,” Janus said. “Can’t keep records of a run. That’s how you get plastered all over even more bounty screamsheets. Sorry.”
“Frag, really?”
“Uh…yeah, everybody knows that,” Fee chimed in, trying desperately to sound like she did, in fact, know that.
“Well damn.” Faust turned their head slowly from side to side. “At least you guys can tell him how bloody tip-top I was!”
“Tell him yourself.” Janus smiled in satisfaction. “Because we…are…” Both SUV engines thrummed to life. “…rolling. Faust, grab the wheel until we’re on the GridGuide lanes. I need to do a little door-opening and set up a proper distraction.”
“What do I do?” Fee leaned up and in between the two seats.
“My dear,” Janus laughed, “sit back, get comfy, and enjoy the show.”
Janus mentally thumbed through some of his greatest hits in the software files, finding an old favorite—discotek ’67. Cleaning any signature of his own use from it, he splashed it out onto the local grid with one goal—to splinter and reproduce into all the other cars in the lot and even parked nearby.
All at once, in a technological cacophony of light and sound, each infected vehicle started blaring their horn, sounding their alarms, and flashing every light they had—all in synch with their overmax’d speaker systems playing a selection loop of deafening neo-ork club techno.
“Now we can go.”
The two SUVs simply rolled out the front gate—once Janus triggered it open by a simple switch code—the second following every motion of the first. The vehicle rigging system was a good one, but Janus was no rigger. It took a lot of concentration to make sure they didn’t bump into anything unexpected. Meanwhile, the other guard was trying frantically to understand why all of their lot inventory was suddenly turned into nightclub accoutrements.
As they rolled out onto the roadway, Janus did a fast sweep of the local surveillance hubs, and found that only now were people starting to report the commotion. With one guard lost in a chemically induced hallucinatory coma, the other frantically trying to get someone on the radio to warn them about this, and Janus yanking any mention of them from the lot records, the SUVs wouldn’t even be noticed as missing for days.
“Let’s go get our boys.” Janus was pleased.
If tomorrow goes half that well, we might just make it out of this.
Picking up Hollywood and Tanzo took less than an hour; Hollywood swore no one would ever know the Rhino was the same one as theirs, and a wide-eyed Tanzo agreed with an almost enchanted appreciation for the gunslinger’s supposed skill.
After a short ride to put a little distance between the lot and the team, they stopped at one of the many Autoplex shopping and rest stations along the route. Janus could have clouded any surveillance here, but the general graffiti and other misspent-youth-modifications done to the electronics at the Autoplex meant no one was watching anyway.
A place like that was used for only a few things: grabbing supplies from a number of poorly stocked auto-vendors, fulfilling nature’s needs in a cheap rent-a-toilet or CashCrash coffin cabin, or meeting up with someone for illicit reasons.
Two painted up, junk-armored thugs—a dwarf and a human—gave the team a slightly predatory glance as the two SUVs pulled up.
“I’ll go get road eats!” Gute Fee was the first to hop out, and the thugs immediately went back to their business.
“Don’t take long,” Janus reminded her. “This is just a shuffle.”
“And a pit stop,” Tanzo chimed in, heading off toward the restroom boxes nearby.
“I’ll go with him.” Hollywood seemed to have taken to the coder. “Make sure nobody tries nothing.”
Janus nodded, turning his attention to Faust while the others scattered to get their rest stop needs taken care of. “I want you driving the second Stratus.”
“Holly’s going to be pissed.”
“No, he’ll be fine. I want his trigger fingers free in case our gambit’s been made.” Janus had told everyone about the eavesdropper on the grid and the search programs picking up on Tanzo’s name during the drive. It did nothing for their nerves, but he’d learned a long time ago not to keep intel from his team.
Information was as useful and potentially deadly as a bullet, and he wasn’t about to withhold any of it. His team had proven to be just as skilled and trustworthy as anyone else he had worked with, and for shadowrunners, that was more valuable than any rider on a contract.
“Our borrowed wheels are rated against low-level street drek,” he said, “but if someone with real teeth comes out of the dark at us, we’ll want that goofy gunslinger behind the crosshairs, not a driver’s wheel.” He smiled reassuringly. “Besides, you showed us some diamond class moves back at the lot. Figured you’d want to show us some more.”
“I am pretty damned amazing,” Faust laughed. “So Holly’s riding shotgun with me.”
“No, Fee will. I don’t want her trapped in the rear in the case of a chase.”
They both looked over at the troll at the vending stalls. As if she was subconsciously acting out what Janus was saying, Gute Fee yelled some German obscenities at one of the machines before giving it a stiff, open-handed slap that rocked it on its once-bolted concrete foundation. Although Janus couldn’t hear what she said next, he assumed she was politely thanking the machine as she bent over and scooped out a half-dozen travel meal boxes, coming up with a huge, satisfied grin surrounding her tusks.
“You’ll be driving lead, then?” asked Faust.
“Yeah. I can focus on manipulating the GridGuide and the traffic routers easy enough while I’m driving, and we obviously don’t want Tanzo at the wheel.” Janus thought of the time he’d mapped out a takedown involving the driver taking a precision sniper’s round. “I’d feel better if he was in the back, behind the thicker-plated windows and walls.”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine, mate.” Faust rolled their neck. “We’re almost there. Almost.”
“Here’s to that.” Hollywood and Tanzo strolled up, the elf tilting back a sip from a gold-plated flask.
“Where’d you get that?” Faust held their hand out for a drink.
“Those nice lads by the dump stumps had it.” He smirked and handed it over. “You’d be surprised what a few nuyen will buy when you keep your swipesticks next to your sidearm.”
“Dammit, Hollywood.” Janus frowned as he scolded the gunslinger. “We’re trying to be low visibility. Those spuds are going to go tell their friends, those spuds might tell someone else, and all it takes is for a ganger or a huntsman to overhear details about the late-night shenanigans of an elven-American cowboy, and we’ll be up to your pointy ears in cash-in cadets before we ever even get downtown.”
“What did you do now, mein Kleiner?” Gute Fee entered the conversation just as Janus finished his statement, bumping Hollywood lightly with her hip as she passed.
“Nothing.” Hollywood took back then offered Fee his flask. “Papa Janus is just worrying unnecessarily.”
“I haven’t gotten as far as I have by taking it easy.” Janus narrowed his eyes and shook his head. “Tanzo is almost safe, and we’re almost clear and paid. I just don’t want Hollywood’s antics to put this thing on zeroes.”
“If this run goes to frag…” Hollywood pulled the brim of his hat down and flicked it. “I’ve got a C-stick, a sharp 100 nuyen, with your SIN on it, boss man.”
Janus took one of the meal packs from Fee’s folded arms. “This is one instance where I’ll be happy to be wrong and pay up.”
“Me, too,” Tanzo added.
“Let’s lock down our rides and grab a few shut-down hours in the Strats. Tomorrow’s going to be a stresser, and we still have a lot of driving ahead of us. Just gear up before you get comfy, and we’ll be ready to roll as soon as we can in the morning.”
Janus knew he’d have to tweak his sleep reg a bit in order to keep his own advice, especially now, knowing how sloppy they’d been. Not only did some curious dabbler on the network have loose lips about their protected package (and who knew what might have clocked them on the drive this far), but now Hollywood was playing scare trader with some locals.
It was times like this when he wished he believed in a higher power. Instead, he took another mythological being’s advice and looked inward.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the broken chain link Desirah had given him. He turned it over in his palm, rolled it in his fingers, and occasionally rubbed it like a cold iron worry stone.
Listen up, magical self. Janus felt foolish acting like his inner power-dichotomy was really listening, but the gargoyle matron had left an impression on him. There’s a real good chance I’m going to need you more than I’ve asked out of you in a long time. I know I’ve been leaning a lot lately on all that cold, lifeless metal I’ve given you as a roommate… but I haven’t forgotten about you. Just let’s please be careful this time. Too much has gone wrong already. He held up the chain link and looked at the moon through it like a crude, broken monocle.
“I hope you’re right, Desi,” Janus muttered.
“Wha…?” Tanzo mumbled from under his jacket-turned-blanket.
“Nothing, chum.” Janus dialed in his sleeper, and the chemicals quickly began to take hold. “Get some rest.”
You too, magical self.