Jak Koke - Stranger souls

Grind was the other samurai. A dwarf with enough testosterone for a troll, Grind's heart raced as he waited next to Axler. Waited like a racehorse in the gate for the technician to finish up. Grind had chocolate-brown skin, scarred from too much combat, and tightly curled black hair on his head and neck. His huge muscles were augmented with synthetic materials, and Jane could swear that his male ego was bioware-enhanced. Unlike Axler, Grind's cybernetics were obvious and designed to stand out. Especially his metal arms and the articulated limb in his chest, which acted like a third arm. It was all designed to intimidate.

Both Axler and Grind already had as much chrome as they could cram into their bodies without losing their spirits, or whatever the mages called it. Jane didn't know the ins and outs of the magical mumbo jumbo, but the experts said that too much chrome could kill you. They said that a body without enough original flesh could lose the ability to hold on to its spirit.

Until cybermancy came along that was. Some delta clinics hired mages who, for the right amount of nuyen, could perform rituals that allowed the installation of machinery and metal beyond the natural limits of flesh. Beyond the pale.

This facility was reportedly one of those clinics, and Jane had managed to convince the admissions subsystem that these two had the need and the credit to undergo the procedure. A ruse to get inside.

According to their System Identification Numbers, the two samurais, Axler and Grind, were working as proactive security for Pyramid Operations, Aztechnology's California alias. Jane had found it easy to tweak the data in the California operation. Communication between it and the central megacorp was often delayed because Aztechnology couldn't legally do biz in California. Thus the transfer of data between the two went through a series of data-laundering hosts located in Malaysia and the Caymen Islands.

McFaren held the SIN for their supervisor. He was the team mage, a human with a dimpled smile and wispy blond hair that was thinning on top. McFaren was a quiet man, but a brilliant mage with a number of unique spells he'd created for himself. He seemed to be at peace with the universe as he watched the labcoats scan Axler. Jane didn't have any vital statistics on him, because he refused to wear electrodes, but she did have a jittery video feed that came through a micro-camera on his vest; he didn't have any cyberware.

The final member of her team was Terr Dhin, the ork rigger who waited outside the delta clinic. Dhin was an ork of uncommon tactical skill; an excellent pilot of almost any sort of vehicle, and an uncanny mechanic. The feed that Jane got from him was actually from the helicopter he was rigging. She got the distorted reality through the Northrup Yellowjacket's sensors and cameras. Showing nominal activity on the small airstrip outside the electrified perimeter fencing.

This was the best team Jane had ever worked with, and she'd been with them since Dunkelzahn had hired her-over five years, an eternity in the biz of covert ops and shadow-runs. They operated under the legal identity of Assets, Incorporated-a real corporation secretly owned by Dunkelzahn. They were extremely competent, and Jane trusted them to get the job done. They responded to her direction even though she wasn't with them in the flesh.

Most shadowrunning teams didn't understand that Jane often had a clearer picture of their situation than they did.

That when data from the entire team was combined in her command center, she had a better conception of the reality of the environment than any one of her team. Virtual could be more real than real.

Axler and team understood that; they trusted Jane. It was an arrangement that gave them the ability to accomplish runs that would otherwise require a much larger, a much more unwieldy, task force.

Jane took a deep breath. Her team was in position; it was time to scan the opposition. "Three minutes to stage one," she said to them, the encrypted electronic pulses of her voice piggybacking on telecom calls to their Local Telecommunications Grid. Then, after she'd confirmed that they'd each received her message, she dove into the Matrix.

Sliding from her riveted steel box into her persona as she fell, sensation of weightlessness for an instant. Then popping into solidity as her persona hardened around her-a blonde woman with exaggerated feminine features. Tight red leather pants and matching jacket stretched across her skin. The image was obviously designed to give other deckers the wrong impression. What shadowrunner with any sort of rep would have a corporate biff for a persona?

Jane mentally punched herself from Dunkelzahn's private LTG through the fiber-optic conduits into the Tenochtitlan Regional Telecommunications Grid, breathing in the crisp digital air of the Aztlan Matrix. Most of the RTG followed the standard iconology of UMS-Universal Matrix Specifications. Planar constructs and semi-transparent geometries glowed with smatterings of neon and chrome, a digitally precise reflection of the real-world computer systems.

Pyramidal structures littered the Tenochtitlan electronic datascape, but two were much larger than the others-giant step-pyramid constructs. Jane knew them well and avoided even passing close. One was the Aztechnology headquarters and was protected with the sort of Intrusion Counter-measures befitting the paranoid megacorporation. IC also protected the other-the Great Temple of Quetzalcoatl. Fortunately, neither was her current destination.

Jane mentally held her breath for three beats as she triggered a hidden System Access Node. A "vanishing SAN," in decker parlance. Her code worked like a fragging voodoo

charm and the node materialized. It looked like a giant hand, shimmering against the black fabric of electronic space, palm outward, fingers spread wide.

Time to burn some code, Jane thought. Then she rocketed toward the giant hand. At the last second, just before connecting with the massive palm, she activated a small smart-frame-a morsel of programming that would remain on this side of the vanishing SAN and trigger it after three hundred seconds if her jamming code failed to keep the hand open long enough for her to get back out. Then she was through, logging on to the SAN and blasting down the private dataline to the host's location in Panama. Chill as snow.

From the outside, the host system looked like a human body, an intricately detailed man with white skin, brown eyes, and curly hair. The man wore a tailored corporate suit that shifted colors as she circled it. Going from iridescent blue to green to shimmering red. Jane had come here once before to scan the system for Dunkelzahn, but she hadn't tried to log on.

An eerie sensation crawled across her just then. A faint burning along her skin as though she were being watched.

She spun around, attack programs at ready. But nothing was there. She probed the whole grid, but came up empty. Nothing but the cold emptiness of Matrix space.

And still the sensation stuck to her like a tingling. Like all the hairs on her skin stood straight up. She tried to shake it away, with no luck. Must be paranoia, she thought. There is no such thing as a ghost in the machine.

Jane engaged her masking utility, and her persona assumed the guise of the sculpted system, transforming from sexy biff to a large white blood cell. She watched data-packets change from the UMS octahedron into red blood cells or tiny plasma particles as the host imposed its metaphoric representation onto her deck. The data particles formed precision lines, flowing like blood into the host through holes in the wrists of the giant man.

Jane stepped into the flow and entered the body, logging on as a routine Aztechnology request for security status. The surface ice scanned her code, looking like a huge, trisected blood valve in front of her. Then it opened and let her in.