[Story]Shadowrunning, Part 2

[Dartz]

Well, now it's getting interesting.

Jet's stressing more now that she's worried about Ford, frightened about the depth of the plan, getting cabin fever and is missing the simplicity of action during the Boskone war. Cally and Teela's reactions will make sense. And I know we're going for a false sort of tension here by not showing what happens to Cally or her reaction to Teela.... but well, there're a lot of things happening simultaneously now. There's more hints about what Quattro is, and where she's spent all her CP's.

All will make sense. We're accelerating towards endgame.

Hopefully things come across as sane.... though I might want to adjust the final part.

Cally was getting sick of staring at the bottom of her truck. She was sick of the frame rails, sick of the brake lines that seemed to be leaking far more fluid than had ever been in the, and sick of a CV Joint-come-power conduit that just wouldn’t goddamned move no matter how hard she tried. Mars dust had baked on like rust, fusing into a solid red ceramic.

Cally swore, “Fucking thing.” She glared at it for a few seconds “Where’d I put that hammer?”

She started to roll back out from under the truck. A hand offered a hammer to her.

“This one?” a familiar voice asked her

Cally pulled herself out from under to see Naoko standing over her. Her face was stern.

“What?”

Dare she ask.

“Teela was found down in the restricted area of the base,”

“Shit,”

----

Teela came too. She wished she hadn’t. Her head was split in two. She felt that she was laying in a constricted space, was she still inside this damned airduct? But the light trickling through her closed eyes said otherwise.

Teela slowly sat up and blinked multiple times as she tried to become used to the bright light coming from above.

Her sleeping place proved to be a dark tube, less than a meter in diameter and about two meters high. The material looked quite fragile, but a punch proved that it was resistant enough to hold her in. In the darkness outside the tube Teela could see a few blinking lights.

“Finally my labcat has awoken...”

It was an awfully familiar voice said. It was chased with a breezy chuckle that chilled her to the bone. Teela felt her hair stand on end. She peered into the darkness, barely able to distinguish a female silhouette through the gloom.

The lights came up,

Quattro was smiling at her. It wasn’t a nice smile.

“I was almost about to wake you.”

Teela snarled. “What do you want with me?”

“Nothing much.” Quattro reassured her “Just to answer a few questions for me.”

“No! I won’t!”

Quattro just smiled at her. Now for the fun part. “Non-cooperation is bad. Non-coopoeration will be punished.”

She giggled gleefully. Teela pushed herself back against the rear wall of the tube, her heart racing. She clawed at the smooth surface, scratching for an opening. Quattro pushed a button on a remote.

Teela heard the electric hum a moment before the shock bit her in both feet at once. It blazed it’s way up through her body. It squeezed the breath out of her lungs, forcing her to scream wordlessly. Her muscles spasmed and jerked and stiffened, pressing against the tube walls. She gasped desperately for breath, her chest burning with fire, squeezing tighter.

“Stop!” she screamed. She tried to scream. What came out was an amorphous cry of pain than rang off walls of her prison.

The current shut off. Teela slumped against the wall of the tube, gasping for air. She grasped at sheer plastic, pawing to drag herself back to her feet.

“As I said” Quattro repeated with a dry smile, “you will answer my questions.”

Teela whimpered. “Cally will come for me.”

“She’s been taken care of,” Quattro stated, “permanently.”

“You lie!” Teela cried.

“Then how come she hasn’t come looking for you, even though you don’t have your collar on?”

Teelas hands snapped up to her neck, and met only bare fur. No... that wasn’t possible. She scratched and clawed, but could find nothing. Never did she think she’d want to feel that collar.

Quattro just smiled at her. Chipper and cheery behind her glasses. The cat playing with the mouse.

“So you will answer my questions, ne?”

----

In the darkness, there was only Jet.

No Destiny Nova. No Kunstler. No Nehallenia. No Quattro. No Noah Scott. No body around her. No hardware signals. Just her raw naked self, free and clear in the void of her mind.

A peaceful, calm place to be spend an hour every minute. Meditation helped her sleep. An hour a day keeps the nightmares away. Shadows of bad memories danced around the edges of her mind.

Little demons put back in their box one at a time. The box was bursting at the seams.

Something at the edge of her mind was beeping. Her self grimaced, distracted by the intrusion.

Beep-beep.

She tried to block it out.

The alarm insisted. Beep-beep.

Fuck off alarm.

Beep beep.

Jet spat a curse as she crashed out of Friede. The world came back with a bang, flooding her mind for a few brief moments before she got herself under control. A light on the comm panel was blinking in time with the beeb.

It snapped off under Jet’s finger. “Jet. What is it?”

“Hello Jet, Cortana here. There is a burst transmission from Operation Great Justice Headquarter for you.”

The AI was frustratingly chipper.

Jet snapped at her.“Could you not have waited another ten minutes?”

“Verdammt nochmal, noch so jemand deren Welt untergeht, wenn sie nicht ausschlafen kann.” Cortana murmured, then she focused on Jet again. “It is marked ‘Gamma 1 SuperNova’, And it is ‘Mission commander only’, so I do not think this can wait.”

Jet cursed under her breath. Databurst. Mission Commander only.

“I’ll take it on the bridge. Jet out.”

Jet could’ve taken it raw, but she just didn’t want to feel like she’d spent the last three days getting smashed drunk at a party she couldn’t remember attending.

Most of the Nova’s crew were busy doing nothing. With the ship facing Nehallenia on minimal power, most were either resting, sleeping, or had grabbed a book to read. Desmond had gone into a low-power self-maintenance mode, cleaning out cruft in his filesystem and rearranging a few things so there was a bit more contiguous free space on his disks.

The lights were low. The air was thick despite the pressure having dropped to the bare minimum. It must’ve been near pure oxygen. Less air held less heat. Static scrubbers must’ve been near full, and the powered ones had been shut down.

Jets shoulder brushed against a bulkhead and she felt an uncomfortable shiver build inside her. The Nova was a small ship and gradually getting smaller. Squeezing in around her. Jets body just wanted to Go!. Get out there and fly, not be stuck inside a tin can.

Meditation also helped keep that quirk from getting too distracting.

One of the Senshi, Linda, was reading something on a datapad, giggling away to herself. She peered over the top of it, noting Jet opening the hatch.

“Maybe you should get some sleep, Jet” she suggested, jovially. “You look like hell,”

“Just woke up,” Jet half-lied with a hand held up. “Cortana piped through a message for me,”

“Comms panel.” Linda indicated with the tablet stylus. “I didn’t look at it.” Her eyes lit up, hunting for gossip “So what is it?”

“Secret stuff.” Jet answered, dismissively. “I don’t know yet.” She had more than an inkling.

“Fine,” Linda huffed, “ It’s freaking boring stuck here in this tin can,”

Jet demurred. “Tell me about it,” Jet didn’t even look at her

The data came up onscreen. Not just raw data, but analysed and annotated with sections specifically highlighted for her attention. Jet felt a chill run through her body as she got deeper in. Noahs appraisal of Quattro was repeated, then confirmed with some experimental details.

Typical Boskonian madgirl stuff. Science without obligation. Or violence without cause. Jet decided not to bother with the Jedi philosophy stuff for the time being.

Linda kept poking away at her tablet. Jet’s expression was darkening like an oncoming storm. Standing on the deck, stopped over the console putting most of her weight through her arms. Jets grip on the console tightened, metal creaking and buckling.

Jets skin, what Linda could see of it, had gone pale. The cyber swallowed. Jet brought a hand up to cover her mouth, before slowly lowering it back down again. She watched her mouth slowly open, hanging for a few seconds, gaping like a fish. Jet’s eyes widened, and she quickly scrolled back up. Jet stared at the screen, Linda would swear her eyes zoomed in.

Just making sure that, yes, she really had just read that. She’d gone right through anger, passed fury and was heading straight for horror at what she was reading.

Linda felt her skin go clammy.

Jet pushed back from the screen, staring. “Good God!”

Jet closed her eyes, inhaling a long deep breath through nose. She held it for a few seconds, before silently allowing it to dissipate through her life support systems.

“How bad?” Linda asked.

Jets expression hardened, her eyes fixed on the screen. “Worse than you think,” Jet said. “It’s worse than we thought,”

For a few moments, Linda thought it might’ve been just hyperbole, but the momentary fear she saw in Jets eyes was very real. It was gone in a flash, followed up by a palpable anger that seemed to electrify the air around her.

“What is it?”

Jet held up her hand. Give me time to think. She seemed to glance down at the floor, then over at the screen, then stared straight out the window for a few seconds. Another breath.

“Change of plans,” Jet answered. Her voice was cold and certain.

It was one thing to be able to stick to the letter of a plan, and quite another to know when it needed to be changed up to fit new information.

----

Teela was just staring at Quattro. Panic prickled through her body.

“But what do you want?” she whimpered, “You did not even ask a question... I can tell you a lot about Callys truck, I have been with her a lot when she worked on it.”

Quattro smiled thinly for a brief moment.

“Very good, keep this attitude and you might skip a few small shocks. Lets start with a simple question... what is your real name and what were you doing in the restricted area?”

Teela shivered and took a deep breath... “I am called Teela... I just was curious and walked around to see more of the...” Teela stopped. Capacitors beneath her whined as they began to charge. Her eyes widened.

“Nein, nein... warte! Es ist wahr...” she screamed. The rest was drowned out by the crackle of electricity.

“You could at least lie consistently” Quattro sneered. “Stand up, unless you want another one!”

Teela want to just lay on the ground of her prison for good. A small pin lay on the floor. She quietly grabbed it and pushed herself upwards, still feeling the cramps lingering from the last shock..

“How...” She panted. “if... if you know the truth already, why are you hurting me?” she stuttered as she got upright again.

There was a small lock keeping the tube closed. Maybe with her new tool, she could open it?

“Maybe because I am much too clever to not see through your lies... maybe because your friend Cally has already talked... or maybe its just fun to do.” Quattro giggled. The final one, definitely the final one.

She walked over to one of her lockers against the far wall. She pulled the open, the door clanging against the rock walls, stabbing at Teela’s ears, and started rooting through to contest.

“But what... but what if I don’t know the truth... maybe if you ask the right questions... maybe.” The catgirl whimpered. Teelas mind was running at lightspeed as she inspected the latch. Someone had already been tinkering with it a little bit, but she couldn’t open it just with the pin. If she had a power source like a battery, maybe an electric pulse might do the trick?

Teela began to shiver again. She had an idea. She could smell singed fur. ‘Insane, that’s just insane’ she thought.

Quattro was was busy with her terminal, doing what Teela couldn’t tell. A holographic display came up around her, a strange sort of piano keyboard. Screens came up around her her, each displaying a wall of text, shooting passed faster than it’d ever be possible for a human to read.

She stared at a screen. Something on it appeared to catch her eye. She paused, muttering a curse to herself, before rewinding, then parsing through at a slower pace.

Her expression blackened.

Her coat swished as she turned on her heel, stomping across the lab. Teela stifled a yelp behind her hands as Quattro pulled the door of her server rack open. The lock just bent apart. Quattro turned to her wearing a savage grin.

“Finally you tell me something useful... “

“You will get nothing you bitch! I will...”

Capacitors began to whine. She stopped.

“Good kitty.” said Quattro, “Now lets see what’s inside my server.”

Teela swallowed a lump. The fur on her body stood on end. It prickled with nervous static. Why was this so wrong? What was in that panel?

Quattro, opened the door, before turned towards her, still wearing that awful smirk. “I see. Well, I’ll deal with this little thing first. Go to sleep.”

Teela yelped. “Bitt...” The rest of that sentence was lost in another scream. Merciful oblivion claimed her moments later.

Quattro removed her glasses, folding them before storing them safely in her coat pocket. The others were just inferior, compared to her, and she basked in that each time she saw her reflection without those stupid glasses.

Another sigh. That catgirl would be out for at least an hour, most likely longer. She could wait until this intruder had been dealt with. Quattro’s first instinct was to just trash the box, then figure out how it worked.

But then she’d lose any chance of finding out who the attacker was. She’d lose any chance.of attacking them back. Working with an inhuman speed, she quickly walled off the intruder, calmly chrooting the intruder into it’s own private jail from where it could do no more harm. She populated the jail with false data, just to maintain the illusion.

Poor thing probably wouldn’t even notice until it was much too late. She’d get to it in good time, just finish some quick compartmentalisation in case this little puppy was cleverer than it seemed. She doubted it, this hacker was still happily gobbling up the encrypted garbage she was sending them. It was little more than mid-beta, at best.

Quattro looked bored at the computer displays, she had hoped for more of a challenge. Maybe it was a good time to take a break and see if Naoko was finally willing to show some sense. She put her glasses back on, switching like a lightbulb back to her persona. She pushed a key. A few seconds later, Sato’s face appeared beside her.

“What is it Quattro?”

“Naoko-chan,” Quattro cooed. “I found something in my computer systems.”

“What?” Sato asked, wearily. Humans and their ideas of sleep.

“A piece of hacking hardware. Someone on the station must’ve planted it within the last two days.”

She smiled daintily.

Sato seemed to wake up immediately “Planted it?”

“Well, there are two obvious candidates,” Quattro said.”You know what you have to do,”

She could see Naoko go pale just that little bit. Sato swallowed a lump “No... I want to be certain before I do it, there’re 275 people on this station.”

“What more evidence do you need?”

“More than the fact that they just arrived on-station. It’s bad for business to murder clients based on little more than a suspicion. Get me some proper evidence, then I’ll take care of things,”

Quattro scowled at the image onscreen. “This isn’t a Senshi court,”

“And I did not get my reputation by being an insane psycho by murdering people for the slight hint. I don’t loose good employees just to maintain my rep as a psychotic killer to be feared. Get real evidence instead of bothering me with guesses. Sato out.”

The image disappeared.

“Idiot,” Quattro spat.

Well, evidence she could get. First, she just had to tweak the catgirl a little. Three times. Three different stories so far, but she could cross reference them and get the truth that way. Once more maybe. It’d take a few minutes to set the hardware up

And while the catgirl was coming out of it for the fourth time, she could take care of her little friend in the system.
----

The Kunstler had filled up the galley, along with ship’s Captain Mari, and Desmond and Cortana watching through a closed circuit camera. A map of Nehallenia was projected onto a pull-down screen covering the forward windows. The little pull-string was dangling in the sink, wicking up grey water.

“Right,” Jet started. She stifled a yawn. “Well, I called yous down her because we have to make a few quick changes to what we planned. We’ve our first batch of intel coming back from Nehallenia. It’s worse than we expected.”

Jet let it hang for a few seconds. How could it be worse?

“To cut a long story short,the robbery was just a test, the tip of the iceberg,” Jet said, trying to keep her voice even. “It was a test of whether they could access our mind through our hardware. Their actual plan was to track one of our couriers on a run to Stellvia, and use a specially crafted burst transmission to implant new memories in their mind.”

The air went cold. Some of the Engels exchanged paranoid glances. Lenneth shifted position in her chair, recrossing her legs.

“What new memories?” she asked.

“Instead of just delivering a message,” Jet said, before pausing. “They might be compelled to attack the station, most..” she stumbled a little “...most likely attacking the Scott family directly.”

There was sharp intake of breath.

“Mein Gott,” Tiegel whispered. “But we would know it had been done, yes? Like, being given different orders or...something...”

“I’m afraid not,” Jet shook her head, keeping her voice soft. “Jana and Vanko had no idea what happened to them until the shipment and the raiders were gone. The brain just brushes over any inconsistencies and fudges things together to make something that works.” she exhaled a breath, trying to keep herself centred. “The real nightmare is, it could be done to any of us,” she looked down at Tiegel, then at Lenneth, then to the others. She looked right at each of them in turn. “The first you’d know something is wrong is when you’re covered in blood, with Stellvian security pointing guns at you, and you can’t remember why,”

A sick silence followed. Nobody dared day anything.

Lenneth broke the silence. “And there’s no way to defend against it?”

Jet sighed. “For the duration of this mission, on board radio and wireless systems are to be disabled. No radar, no wifi, no radio, nothing. You can’t hack through an interface that’s turned off. We’ll use those old wrist-coms to communicate.”

The irony of that, Jet noted, was that she’d initially laughed at the desk pilot on Arisia who’d sent them out during the closing stages of the war. Didn’t the idiot know they had their own built-in communications gear? They’d gathered dust aboard the Nova since then.

Jet brushed a few strands of hair off her face. “Now, onto who’s responsible for developing this shit.” She pushed a button on a remote. The projector clicked over to the next image, doing its best imitation of an old slide-show carousel. An animé face appeared. Round glasses, golden eyes, golden hair in two straight handlebar pigtails, a predators grin all on top of a blue bodysuit.

“This is our primary objective,”

“Oh hell,” Jash murmured. Everyone looked at him. “That’s a character from an animé. Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS. Her name’s Quattro, she’s a real nasty bitch. And dangerous.”

“You watch magical girl animé?” Lenneth asked him with a smirk.

Mari found herself compelled to giggle slightly. A little levity always helped.

“I wanted to be a magical girl before I got cybered,” he answered sharply. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he waved it off. “But that’s a damn lucky biomod, or someone got creative with an AI,”

Jet carried on. “We think she’s a Scott-type AI, like the Stellvian girls.” The obvious question was why would Noah build Quattro? “She was probably built by Agatha Clay. Agatha was on Nehallenia up until a few months ago, but we’re certain now that she’s moved on” Another few moments. “Quattro is to be considered capture or kill. She is too dangerous to be allowed off Nehallenia alive and free.”

Jet’s voice matched her expression. Cold, hard and resolved. “We expect her to be in her lab here,” the projector clicked and the map returned, with the lab area highlighted. “I’m the troubleshooter, she’s the trouble, I’m going for the lab personally. If you see her outside her lab, make sure she doesn’t leave the station. If you see her, kill her.”

Capture or kill. No stated preference. Jet wanted nothing more than to tear that robot bitch apart. Jet warned herself about the difference between killing someone because it was her duty and murdering someone on a flash of hatred.

Hopefully Quattro would spare her that moral dilemma.

It seemed alien in a way no-one could quite place to hear Jet specifically order them to kill someone.

“What about the others on Nehallenia,” Lenneth asked, “The Senshi, Naoko Sato. What’s our rules of engagement?”

“They’re not considered an enemy, just criminals. Lethal force as a last resort. That means stop, identify, give them a chance to surrender. If they’re armed and actively trying to engage, defend yourself with the minimum force needed,”

Traditionally, minimum force needed was whatever it took to shut down any combat as quickly as possible. Politically, that level of force was just plain unacceptable when hitting petty criminals in goth fukus, even if they decided to fight back. The arguments for both sides were long and vociferous, enough to make an essay David Weber would call boring.

Jet tended to follow Tsun Tzu on the matter, to which the natural counter-argument was that they weren’t at ‘war’ anymore. The first inkling Jet had that there might be something wrong with her was when she said that she wished they still were.

“If they’re escaping, allow them to escape,” Jet continued. “Naoko Sato included. The Senshi want her treated as a criminal and brought to justice. Capture if you can, let her go if you have to, don’t harm her unless you have no other option.”

She was a secondary objective anyway. It’d be nice to bring her in, but it was far from a priority.

Primary objectives were to hit Quattro and her lab computer and the Nehallenia main computer system. Secure primary objectives, secure the station, knock out the defensive systems to keep Roughrider assault force from being shot out of the sky on the way in to take care of a big crowd of bewildered Dark Senshi. The usual deal. Missions like this were the Panzer Kunst stock-in-trade. They each knew how to handle their own objectives. They’d done it many times before.

“Now, how do we get to Nehallenia without being shot down?”

Desmond spoke up, still speaking through a wall-mounted speaker. “Pay attention everyone. I have forged a new transponder ID for us, after our last one was rumbled. For this mission we shall be the SS Wilhelm Canaris,” He seemed especially pleased with himself in his British accent.

Mari snickered. “I like it. I like the irony”

“Yes. Canaris was head of the German Abwehr while secretly working for MI6 during World War 2. As usual it’s an original Boskone Two - based key but they’re still in use. The variance from my presence in the system should be below the detection threshold. I would give it ten minutes if they’re suspicious of us enough to test it, fifteen at most.”

“We’re close enough that they’ll spot us as soon as the RF igniters fire.” Mari said. “But we have our usual response,”

The voice coming through the speaker changed. It was Cortana’s turn. “ I have planted a virus in their system. When an alert triggers in their system it will lock up and force a reset. Defense systems will be active but communications will go down.”

“Any edge.” Jet said. “Will you be able to tell me when you have finished downloading Quattro’s system?”

“Yes, I am one third complete so far. I should be finished within twelve hours.”

“Good. Instead of waiting for Ford and Cathy to be clear of Nehallenia we’ll be attacking as soon as the download is complete.”

----

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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?