Anthology - From the Street

Our Johnson was amazingly well-informed about the place she'd sent us to hit, so we had a pretty fair idea of where its defensive perimeter was. Yamatetsu had built the place in a little hollow between two hills-half inside the northernmost hill, to be exact. So we hunkered down just shy of the top of the southmost hill, and I called up a couple of Condors to go have a look-see.

You gotta love a Condor LDSD-23. Especially when it answers to a cranial remote deck. I got to try out almost all my new toys on this run… but I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyways, for those few of you who don't know, the Condor's damned near the ultimate stealth drone. It soars up on its little balloon and sleazes right by a whole mess of sensors and radar, and not one of them sniffs a thing. My remote deck let me see the world through the drone's eyes, giving me as clear a picture of the compound's perimeter defenses as if I'd walked straight up to the fence and stuck my nose through it. Better, actually. The naked meat eye doesn't give you thermo or infrared unless you're the right metatype, and the metahuman nose can't chemsniff half as well as the chemical sensors my Condor was packing.

The Condor showed me about what I'd've expected from a hush-hush R D compound-security was tight enough to safeguard the important drek inside, but nowhere near impossible. In a place like the Northern Crescent, if you're setting up secret shop and don't want to attract attention, you really can't afford to dress up the outside of your research playground with every single bell and whistle ever thunk up by Ares Macrotech and Knight-Errant and other purveyors of paranoiac pacifiers. You have to pick and choose, and layer your defenses. So I knew that getting the team through the perimeter was only going to be half the battle. Once I'd managed that, I'd have to take over the building's systems if I could-which meant going head-to-head with the security rigger we'd been told was there, probably. I was looking forward to it; things'd been kind of slow lately.

But first things first. The compound had a fence around the three sides that weren't under the hill, with tall skinny pillars spaced intermittently across it that I recognized as sensor posts. Motion and infrared, most likely. Through the fence I could also see Ferrets and Dobermans and even a couple of Guardians crawling along, patroling the perimeter a lot more tirelessly and efficiently than meat guards would've done. (Cheaper, too; a drone doesn't need pay or health benefits and never takes personal time.) There were also gun emplacements, on the two fence corners and lined up across the roofline of the building. Sentry guns; I could tell by the shape. Not the mobile kind on a track, though. Likely they'd reserved those and the Sentry IIs for inside.

So I had my work cut out for me. I had to take out the sensor posts, drones and Sentries all in one shot, so the rest of the team could get up to the fence and through it without getting cut down by a hail of lead. Also without being spotted. The sec-rigger would know something was going down the minute I started to muck with his system, especially considering the level of mucking that was clearly going to be necessary-but the longer we could keep the opposition from knowing exactly what they were up against, the more time we'd buy for ourselves. And our job wouldn't take us that long.

I called my eye-in-the-sky back and whistled up three more drones. These had special jobs to do. Two of them were remote-adapted Artemises loaded with Jabberwockies, primed and ready to fire. The third drone, which I sent in first, was my favorite new toy: a Hedgehog signal interceptor, the very latest in seeing-eye techno-beasts.

›

› Where in the name of the Great Ghost did you get a Hedgehog?! I thought the Azzies put a tight lock on distribution. They went to a lot of trouble to develop that puppy; they sure as drek don't want street scum like us getting ahold of them. What'd you do, sell your soul to Old Scratch or something?

› Nissan Barb

› Fell off the back of a t-bird, my fixer said. When somebody I trust offers me a new piece of wizbang tech, I don't ask too many questions. The important thing is, I got it, and I used it when I needed it. Now don't interrupt my story; I'm on a roll here, 'kay?

The Hedgehog's a terrific piece of equipment. No rigger who can afford one should be without it, I don't care who you have to frag over or go to bed with. What this pup does, it tells you the signal strength, protocols and encryption that a system is using. In other words, the Hedgehog gave me the key to the compound's entire electronic security system just by reading the kinds of signals flowing through those sensor posts. Giving me the shape and smell and taste of it, so to speak. (Not literally-but sometimes it's hard to put what a rigger gets from a drone into words that ordinary people can understand.) All this stuff was vital information that'd make the second half of my job-taking over the building system-that much quicker and easier.

Its job done, the Hedgehog crawled back. I shut it down and told the Artemises to fire their payload in ten seconds, then sent them soaring toward the fence. And braced myself against the hillside so I wouldn't fall over, because I knew I'd get it when the Jabberwockies hit. A Jabberwocky is a jammer missile, which disperses transponders instead of a warhead. The transponder signals frag up sensors, remote-control transmissions, you name it, for a fifty-yard or wider radius around the point of impact. So whatever disruption they caused, the Artemises they rode on would get nailed by it too. And since I was talking to the Artemises via remote deck, I knew I'd feel the backlash until I broke the link. But in the meantime, all those sensors and perimeter drones and even the seeing-eyes on the Sentry guns'd be blind and deaf and dumb. Which meant no security rigger was going to spot my team getting through the fence and inside.

›

› Jeez. Why not just walk up to the front gate and shout hello? You take out such a huge chunk of a rigged building's security systems, the rigger's gonna know the place is under attack. No way can you pass that off as a malfunction, or a hair-trigger sensor tripped by a high wind.

› Silent Running

› You missed a paragraph somewhere, didn't you? My team knew fragging well we were tipping corpsec off-but as long as they didn't know how big the threat was or exactly where it was coming from, all they could do was chase their tails. We figured to be in and gone before they twigged enough to matter. And we were right.

I counted down in my head, then watched the world turn black and go dizzy for a few seconds until I closed off the link with the Artemises. I felt the rest of the team run by me, over the hill and down. While the mage tended to the magical barriers and the sams chopped through the wire, I crawled backward just enough to be completely out of range of Jabberwocky spillover, then called up the rest of my drone network. Wandjinas with Vanquishers mounted on them, these were; fast and deadly, just the thing for taking out perimeter drones. And I had to do that, both to keep myself safe once I started monkeying with the sensor port's datalines and also to keep the drones from bothering my buds on their way back out. The Jabberwocky jamming'd only keep the drones blind and deaf for so long; once it started to wear off, all those Ferrets and Dobermans and Guardians with their little turret guns would pose quite the nasty problem. Unless my Wandjinas took care of them first.

It's a weird, weird feeling, seeing through the eyes of half a dozen drones at once. Kind of like what I imagine bug eyes must be like-all those facets showing you overlapping pictures. Except that in my case, the pictures were different instead of the same image from different angles. To run a network like that through a cranial remote deck-or any kind of wiring, for that matter-you've got to be good at multi-tasking. If you can't concentrate on a dozen things at one time before breakfast, then don't even try this stuff. You'll just make yourself sick trying to track everything, and somebody else'll have to risk her hoop bailing you out of trouble. I don't have a problem with it; but then, I was the kind of kid who liked looking at those crazy optical-illusion prints with the upside-down staircases and stuff. I sent my Wandjinas around the edges of the Jabberwockies' area of effect-couldn't send them through it, or they'd be as blind as the sec-drones they were hunting-and waited for a clear target.