-
An addendum to Rule 3 regarding fan-translated works of things such as Web Novels has been made. Please see here for details.
-
We've issued a clarification on our policy on AI-generated work.
-
Our mod selection process has completed. Please welcome our new moderators.
-
Due to issues with external spam filters, QQ is currently unable to send any mail to Microsoft E-mail addresses. This includes any account at live.com, hotmail.com or msn.com. Signing up to the forum with one of these addresses will result in your verification E-mail never arriving. For best results, please use a different E-mail provider for your QQ address.
-
The rules regarding NSFW links have been updated. See here for details.
Lucid Lunacy
Seeking the Threshold
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2018
- Messages
- 6,038
The context makes this typo funny.
Prince Chrom
Experienced.
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2018
- Messages
- 4,056
I'm not sure it's a typo. Cliff does sometimes use puns.The context makes this typo funny.
Lucid Lunacy
Seeking the Threshold
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2018
- Messages
- 6,038
*shrugs* Either way, it's still funny.
BigBad
Not too sore, are you?
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2017
- Messages
- 382
Alright, new story from one of my favorite authors. Not terrible familiar with the ins and outs of Shadowrun beyond the basics and the first few arcs from your unconquerable fic, so I'm looking forward to some fresh stuff instead of settings I've seen rehashed a thousand times.
UnAwakened Human is probably the most boring possible choice for an MC when there's dwarves and wizards and shit, but so far it's been engaging and the main character is likeable enough. And it does provide a contrast to your last character in this setting who was an invincible god mode martial artist, gunner, and wizard all at once.
Anyway, I've quite enjoyed it so far and am looking forward to more. Glad you're writing again.
UnAwakened Human is probably the most boring possible choice for an MC when there's dwarves and wizards and shit, but so far it's been engaging and the main character is likeable enough. And it does provide a contrast to your last character in this setting who was an invincible god mode martial artist, gunner, and wizard all at once.
Anyway, I've quite enjoyed it so far and am looking forward to more. Glad you're writing again.
Chapter 4
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2017
- Messages
- 18,121
Chicago Containment Zone, UCAS
February 22, 2058
Whenever they did a big battle scene in the action sims they opened with a radio voice-over of a whole lot of guys frantically yelling over each other on some wide-open frequency in the clear. Callouts from units under fire simultaneous with other guys yelling for air support with some other guy calling away a Mayday, everybody overlapping. It was the standard cinematic trick for getting across to the audience that war was chaos. Even the Desert Wars live wargame broadcasts on The Battle Channel put together an audio track of that stuff and dubbed it in during post-production, because the audience was expecting it and would have complained about the 'lack of realism' if they didn't get it.
But in reality, that didn't happen. Even a second-rate national army could afford basic dataflow management software for their comm links, which ensured that even if everybody was transmitting all simultaneously on the same frequency band the encrypted packet addressing ensured that even if everybody else's receiver was getting it, none of the units on the net were actually hearing it unless it was addressed to them. It was like how a local area network had functioned for computers even back in the earliest days of the Internet, the primitive precursor to today's Matrix. You could still get crosstalk if multiple people from the same squad or platoon were trying to talk at once - even with modern gear, radio discipline was still important - but your team/squad/platoon/whatever network only passed through what was tagged for you to pay attention to, and likewise anything you passed up the line was only distributed to where it was. The guys in the field HQs still got all the traffic, of course, because that's where all the lines of communications converged. But that's why the tac-ops guys running the consoles for the big brass had things like neural interfaces, computer-assisted tracking and analysis modules, and specialized multi-tasking headware.
So the worst thing about waiting during a large-scale operation like this was the silence. You sat around, with nothing but your own pulse to echo inside your helmet because there was nothing your unit needed to say to each other and nobody else's comm traffic was reaching you. You could still hear the gunfire in the distance, the hissing sounds of rockets and missiles coming down off the gunships and drones and the lower, louder thudding of the tube artillery and even naval gunfire from the pair of guided missile destroyers sitting out in Lake Michigan, the shriek of jet engines as the fast-movers came in and dropped their loads and then zoomed on back to base to refuel and rearm, and you knew that men were fighting and dying in a thousand battles and skirmishes all over town, but nobody was telling you anything. Just the occasional terse update from Command over the general announcements channel, whenever the high brass decided it was time to remind the troops that hey, we hadn't lost yet. Sometimes you wished for the war movie radio chaos to be real just so that the primitive part of your brain could try to sense how things were going, to pick up subliminal impressions from the tempo and the cadence and the tone of voice. But war was digital now, not analog. And so here we were, sitting in a tent at a forward assembly point waiting for our personal silence to break.
The several days in-between the initial briefing and our jump-off had of course been occupied by more briefings. We weren't going to get the entire battle plan for an operation this large-scale explained for us in a single lecture from a guy in an auditorium. The initial briefing was just to impress on all of us how serious this was and how high up the chain it had really come from. After we'd been walked through the bare outline we were dismissed to individual unit briefings, as all the troops here broke down by battalion, company, and finally platoon to get more detailed prep on what their part of the op would be. And of course there was making sure we had all our supplies laid in and loaded, making sure our gear was all fixed up and ready to go, etc, etc. But Bravo Company's pre-mission briefing had largely been a very broad overview of the battle plan and not much else, because we didn't have a pre-set mission ahead of time.
The closest analogy to Knight Errant's Rapid-Response Troopers in national service was both the UCAS/CAS Airborne Rangers and the quick-reaction forces that almost any battalion-level task force or greater kept handy in the field. The Ranger mission was short, high-intensity operations in hostile or sensitive areas - in-and-out raids, seizing or destroying key strongpoints in advance of a general attack, combat search-and-rescue, or bag-and-drag. Quick-reaction forces were a designated sub-unit of a military task force kept on short-notice readiness to respond to unscheduled events and emergencies - going to the assistance of other units caught by a surprise attack, reinforcing areas under particular threat, responding to intrusions, et cetera, et cetera. Even police departments had QRFs - that's what units like SWAT were for, to come in if the regular patrol units ran into something beyond their capability.
And RRT's job in Knight Errant encompassed all of the above and more. So in all the while the team had been here they'd been kept fairly busy - there were always places or targets in the CZ that needed a quick search-and-destroy for one reason or another, as well as things like the emergency extraction we'd done for that black ops team back on my first night here. But it also meant that when a large-scale battle like this was going on our job was largely to hang back and stay out of the way of the line grunts and the heavies while they went in for what they did best - ground and pound, clearing all hostiles out of a particular area and then securing that zone before continuing the advance. Which is why over thirty thousand men were now slugging it out toe-to-toe versus the bugs, while more men like us or the UCAS spec-ops guys were busy sitting and waiting for someone to find us a target needing our particular attention, or to get in trouble and need a bail-out.
So yeah, despite us all being professionals and combat vets we were still getting a little wired. Not knowing what you were going to drop into or when, but knowing that it would come and you'd have to improv like hell when it did... it wasn't fun at all. And that was when you were fighting a normal enemy, let alone these.
"All stations, this is Kingpin." the voice of General Welles, the UCAS Army four-star whose normal billet was as the theater commander for Special Operations Command and who'd put himself in as the top soldier for the entire Operation Extermination wingding. "Phase One is complete, I say again, Phase One is complete. All forward command posts are now released for Phase Two timeline at your discretion." The announcement that things were still on schedule with no snags major enough to be worth mentioning on the general channel brought a sigh of relief throughout the platoon.
The UCAS had tried this once before, in the first few months after the Wall had went up. Not on this scale, of course, but they'd moved in a reinforced regimental combat team of armor and mech infantry down into the North Side, trying to sweep out the bugs enough to push the Wall's borders in for a couple miles with some eye towards eventually retaking the city piece-by-piece. They'd lasted two days - just long enough to make it maybe halfway to the Loop before whatever sense of coordination the bugs usually didn't have kicked in and got them absolutely swarmed by bugs coming from all over the Zone to chow down. They'd already taken almost fifteen percent losses just on the initial push, but when the situation had gone totally bughouse the sun had practically been blacked out by all the wasp, fly, and mosquito flesh-forms coming in to chow down, and the less said about what had boiled up out of the Chicago Underground and the sewers the better. The approximately forty percent survivors of that regiment had survived only because the bugs had mostly stopped pursuing after the Army had started running.
They even made sure to show you some of the helmet-cam footage from that late 2055 expedition during the initial pre-deployment prep before you were assigned to the Containment Zone. Just to make sure you approached the job with a proper amount of caution. Brrrr.
So yeah, there was a reason that the military had mostly sat outside the wall and let the poor bastards trapped in the CZ stay trapped after that. Trying large-scale conventional land warfare against the bugs was suicide, especially given that even after they figured out how bug spirits actually reproduced there were still only the roughest possible estimates for how many bugs there were. And now here was Task Force Extermination, trying it again.
To say that the troops were worried about this whole thing turning into another and larger repeat of the first ratfuck was an understatement. Of course, high command had reassured us that this time around there was an entirely new factor in play. Some type of secret-weapon that was referred to only as code-name "Beta", it was supposed to be a wide-area incapacitating agent of some kind that would weaken the bugs just like they'd found out that industrial-strength pesticide could weaken them, only it wasn't a lethal nerve agent and you didn't need level-4 NBC gear to survive being in it. Stuff was supposed to be absolutely harmless to people, invisible and odorless too, but it would absolutely rip the hell out of the bugs. They even showed us some footage of lab tests where a couple of captured bugs, and a sampling of other dangerous paracritters like hell hounds and devil rats, had been rendered so weak they could barely stand-up. Hell, picking up a devil rat with your bare hand was normally a way to get that sucker bitten off at the wrist, but we saw trid footage of one of the scientists juggling the damn thing and it barely whimpered.
Of course, given that a simple desktop video editing suite would let you deepfake a scene of President Dunkelzahn supposedly eating a baby on live trid out of a few minutes of stock footage, that still didn't prove anything. It's not like they let us digitally analyze the briefing footage, and technology had long since advanced to where the naked eye wasn't going to tell the difference even if the CGI was basic enough that even a budget analysis program could spot the pixelization. So despite all of their assurances that this time around they wanted the bugs to come out and concentrate in huge-ass swarms so they could dust them and be done with it, there was that nagging fear that no, they were just bullshitting us for morale purposes and this was going to be the worst military strategy ever since invading Russia during the winter.
But the Phase One benchmarks for the two advancing columns were practically on the borders of the downtown area, and yet the expedition had reached them in the early afternoon. That was actually an hour ahead of the anticipated schedule. In addition, nobody had yet sighted a mature queen or a major swarm, just individual nests and targets of opportunity. So whatever this 'Beta' thing was it looked to be real, and it damn sure looked like it was working.
"All stations this is Kingpin, we are revising the op schedule. Refugee concentrations are fleeing the inner city and heading closer to the Wall. Phase Two timeline is now on hold, we'll give the civvies time to make it through our lines and clear our fields of fire. We haven't drawn any of the large-area insect response that we've been anticipating, so recon teams are going in to get more intel on conditions in the Core before we resume Phase Two. Kingpin out." the general announcement came.
"If anyone needs a bathroom break, I'd suggest you go right now." Sergeant Sinclair observed.
"Huh?" Jeffers blurted.
"The bugs are going off-script and the brass doesn't like it, so they're tossing out the playbook they had prepped for the second half and are getting ready to start calling some audibles." I explained to him. "But that means they have to know what the fuck the bugs in the inner city are actually doing, and that means they need guys like us to go in there and poke the hive to see what they're hiding."
That prompted us to all take Sinclair's advice and go make our final pit stops and grab a cold drink, because only a few minutes after that observation was received confirmation that we'd guessed right.
"Here comes the Lieutenant, first time he's left the HQ tent all morning." Rebecca said wisely, looking across the parking lot where they'd set up the brigade field HQ we were currently attached to. "We just got a call."
"All magically active personnel, fall out!" was the first order Lt. Menendez gave when he reached us. The two wagemages and the one physical adept we had in the platoon did so, and our initial thought that some kind of all-magic squad was being put together was instantly dashed when he told them to report to the reserve detachments for further duties as assigned. That meant they were being benched in the rear with the gear, while the rest of us were going...?
"The mission for Bravo Company is a reconaissance-in-force, of Union Park and the surrounding area! We'll have air and drone support available if we need it, but the reason they're sending us is because the intel they need isn't visible from the air. We're going to have to search buildings and basements for this one because the bugs aren't coming out like they should, not after we took down the first waves! So it's up to the tip of the spear to find and make the opening before the main body comes in to deal the killing blow, and that means us!" Lt. Menendez barked.
"You nailed it, brother." Jeffers whispered to me.
"Skies are too full of bugs and the tac-air, so our infil route will be on the ground. We'll mount up in our Roadmasters and enter along Interstate 90, then take Ogden Avenue southwest. Company command will set up a post and in the park, then we'll spread out by sector. 1st Platoon's role in the reconaissance will be the eastern side, in towards the Core, so stay sharp! Everybody understand the mission?"
"Yes sir!" we chorused.
"Everybody know where we're going?" he continued.
"Yes sir!" we repeated.
"Is everybody ready?!?" he shouted.
"YES SIR!" we roared.
"THEN MOVE OUT!" he finished, and we all stood to, grabbed our gear, and double-timed out in column to get in our Roadmasters - the modern Ares equivalent of the old US Army Humvee, although more heavily armored and NBC sealed - and away we went.
As we headed down the expressway into the city we immediately noticed the differences between this and our last trip in overland. The ongoing rumble of explosions and the multiple cracks of small-arms fire still echoed in the background despite the regular formations having held in place, as a dozen ongoing skirmishes and more continued around the city. A pair of A-42 Falcon ground-attack fighters rattled our ears hard as they streaked low overhead from the left, then peeled out in a sharp turn shortly after overflying the expressway. The sudden eruption a block away to our right of the fiery plume off a pair of napalm clusters announced that another bunch of bugs had just become stir-fry.
One of the things that the government had done as part of the initial CZ lockdown was a phony VITAS outbreak announcement so they could invoke CDC quarantine protocols, to minimize the number of people trying to flee the Zone before they could finish bulldozing the isolation strip and building the Wall. As part of those protocols Chicago's GridGuide system had been set to allow emergency services and essential vehicles only. Millions of people had been restricted to either staying in their homes or trying to hoof it on foot, because their cars wouldn't move a foot without official permission - and if they took their cars off the GridGuide circuit and tried to run them in manual mode, any moving vehicle on the street without a validated GridGuide link would have been immediately pinpointed by the traffic camera network and intercepted by Eagle Security before they'd gotten three blocks. The finest in modern technology had done its best to ensure that Chicago's urban population would remain where the powers-that-be wanted them to remain, widespread panic or not.
Which is why we had clear running down an expressway you'd normally expect to be full of abandoned and stalled vehicles that would inevitably clog the roads after a failed evacuation attempt. So it was less than ten minutes' drive before we'd gotten to our exit.
As we were heading down Ogden Avenue the lead vehicle called away that they were taking incoming fire, but the Lieutenant ordered us to keep weapons tight so I just pulled my head down out of the turret - it was my turn on the minigun - and let the insignificant spattering of small arms fire bounce off our armored vehicle as we drove by. The rest of the time was packed into the Roadmaster with me, as we were riding five to a vehicle.
"Locals are panicking." I said. "They don't know who the enemy is, just that the cold war's suddenly gone hot and is now on their doorstep."
"But why would they think we're the enemy?" Sinclair asked from where he had shotgun. "Whoever we are, we're clearly human."
"For a lot of the people who lived here, the megacorps were the enemy even before the Wall went up." Rebecca explained softly as the incoming fire trailed off behind us.
"Coming up on rally point." Adamson chimed in from where he was driving. "Now we wait to find out what the Lieutenant wants us to do."
"Man the turret." Sinclair ordered me, and I got back up on the mount. Our little convoy pulled into Union Park, and the Lieutenant kept two fire teams with him as a central reserve while our platoon's other four teams were each sent off in one of the cardinal directions.
"OK, I've got the Wandjina talking to me." Rebecca said as she closed her eyes and jacked into her console from where she was sitting. "No changes in what Command had on the feeds before we got here."
"Any large heat concentrations?" Sinclair asked. "I want to skip any buildings with substantial human occupancy."
"It's harder to spot fine details during the day, too much reflecting off the roofs." she replied. "But no, nothing big."
"Why didn't they let us bring the mages in? One of them goes astral, he could just sweep right through all these buildings." Jeffers said.
"That wouldn't work even if they hadn't been stood down." Rebecca explained. "Inspect spirits are dual-natured, permanently present on both the physical and astral planes. They could reach out and touch an astrally projecting magician as if he were solid, rip him in half just like one of them could rip you in half if he caught you out on the street. Astral scouting's always been of limited utility in the Zone."
"Jeffers, Adamson, with me." Sinclair said. "We'll dismount and explore that building." he pointed, as near as I could tell at random. "Stone, stick with the vehicle and cover Mierson."
"On it." I acknowledged, and I stayed on the minigun and kept a wary eye all around as our three teammates went in to do a look-and-listen and Rebecca stayed jacked into the drone and kept a watch on our outer perimeter as I did the inner.
"What do you think Command is even having us look for?" Rebecca asked me after several minutes had passed, her eyes still closed as she interfaced. Nothing was coming over our team comm net except routine callouts from Sinclair and the guys as they methodically started checking and clearing.
"Well the original plan was to provoke another bughouse swarm like the one that ate the first expedition, then shred them with our superior firepower and after they were already weakened by Beta." I started to analyze out loud. "Except the bugs must be feeling sick and weak enough from the Beta that they don't even want to expose themselves, so-" I trailed off. "And that's as far as I'm getting."
"Statistical sampling, you think?" she answered. "Obviously we can't do a room-by-room search of the entire city, but if enough of the recon teams stir up bugs then they can start putting dots on a map and at least guess which regions of the city the bugs in the periphery fled to rather than engaging."
"Assuming that the periphery teams didn't just roll over a bunch of bug-filled basements and they're waiting for nightfall to come out behind us." I shivered.
"Holy shit!" Jeffers screamed, and a short burst of automatic weapons fire came over the channel as I shot bolt upright and started the minigun barrels spinning. The fire immediately cut off midway through the first burst, and our hearts leapt into our-
"Sorry boss, I wasted ammo on a dead one." Jeffers said sheepishly, and we both relaxed. "A lot of dead ones." he continued, awestruck. "There's a pile of dead beetles in here the size of a truck!"
"Dead or just comatose?" Adamson asked intelligently.
"Set a long delay on one of the thermobarics and toss it in there, then we fall back." Sinclair ordered. "Dead or dying will become an irrelevant distinction after we torch the whole basement."
"Roast bugs, comin' right up." Jeffers cheerfully acknowledged, and within a minute the team came briskly out of the nearby storefront just as the fuel-air explosion detonated in the basement behind them. Sinclair got on the command net and reported the contact and the dead bugs, and after uploading his helmet-cam footage and a brief pause the Lieutenant passed the word down from up the line that they wanted us to move a block east and check out the upper floors of a fifteen-story office tower there.
"Great, now we do fifteen flights up and down while wearing full armor." I cursed. "I'm gonna need metal knees if they keep this up all day."
"And we have to all leave the vehicle and hope it doesn't get eaten by some giant ant or something while we're all inside." Adamson agreed. "Command is sure they can't just insert another team in and off the roof?"
"Beta seems to have missed a lot of the wasp spirits up on the taller skyscrapers." Sinclair said. "Between that and all the warbirds doing ground-attack in the zone, the skies are way too crowded today for the transports."
"That is one hell of a way to run a monorail." Adamson groused, and given that he was the biggest and heaviest of us all and this would be killing his knees worse than anyone I did not blame him in the slightest.
Rebecca unjacked from the drone, because we certainly couldn't leave her unattended in the vehicle while the rest of us spent however long it took clearing that damned tall building, and came in with us. Sadly, our first thought - to see if we could reactivate the building power enough for her to jack into what was left of the security systems and just use the internal cameras to check for us instead of having to climb all that way and check ourselves - didn't pan out, although she did manage to pull the fire-escape plan out of the non-volatile memory in the receptionist's deskcomp. So at least we had a basic floor layout.
And so, checking our corners and advancing by bounding overwatch and checking six at every step, we methodically went up fourteen flights of stairs, stopping to catch our breath several times along the way - hey, climbing stairs in heavy armor and a full ammo load was not easy, even if you had muscles enhanced with nanoscopic carbon fiber - and arrived on the top floor to finish our sweep.
"Floor plans says we've got an executive dining room taking up a third of the top floor, adjacent kitchen, and then the rest is offices - including one big corner office for the grand high poobah and an adjacent conference room." Rebecca put it all on our HUDs. "So, which one first?"
"Dining room." Sinclair said. "Adamson, Jeffers, hold the hallway. Everybody else on me."
We moved slowly up to the big double doors leading into the dining room and stacked up. "Okay, on three, two, one..."
Our boots hit both doors simultaneously and swung them open. The brightly lit interior of the executive dining room greeted us, along with the fresh crisp air of winter-
"Something's been through there, boss!" I cautioned, indicating the gaping remnants of the dining room's panoramic windows with my rifle barrel. Now those windows could have been smashed through at any time in the past couple of years, but-
"Everyone close up on me now, we might have-" Sinclair began, before an absolutely deafening high-pitched buzzing burst out of nowhere to horrify us.
"Wasps!" we all yelled at the same time, and before we could blink they were upon us.
Wasp spirits were perhaps the deadliest kind of bugs next to the mantids. Just like their smaller mundane analogues, they were aggressive as all hell. Most insects only attacked when their territory was directly violated or they were hungry, but even on a good day wasps would go out and pre-emptively strike at anyone within a highly variable distance they called "in range". They didn't mass nearly as much as mantids did but a five-foot psychotic hornet was still strong enough to knock a grown man on his ass, they had stingers sharp enough to pierce through steel plate and which injected enough deadly neurotoxin to drop an elephant, and they were fast.
Nick's assault cannon splashed one of the wasps that had burst out of a doorway down the hall behind us all over the rug. The wasp that burst out of the hole it had chewed through the ceiling panels of the dining room in front of us caught my underbarrel-launched grenade straight in the face and hit the floor as a headless corpse. Sinclair put a long burst straight into the skull - the thinnest part - of the wasp that had crawled around right behind it, my having bottlenecked the hole with the corpse of its buddy having slowed it enough for him to call his shot. Rebecca blasted a grenade into the far corner of the dining room at something I couldn't see, and Jeffers-
"OH SHI-!" he screamed as the giant wasp, so large that I was surprised it could still move so quickly down the hallway, came around the other corner of the hallway from somewhere towards the executive suite, took six of his APDS rounds right into the torso but still finshed its charge and twisted around in mid-leap to impale its stinger directly through his armor's faceplate.
"Queen! That's a queen!" Adamson shouted as he sent it staggering backwards off of Jeffers' corpse with a pair of assault cannon hits, but even though he managed to cripple a wing the fucking thing was still getting back up.
"Into the dining room!" Sinclair called as we retreated from the queen wasp into the room we'd just kicked the doors of. And yeah, normally advancing into uncleared territory was a bad idea, especially with your back turned, but there was no way we could fight that thing toe-to-toe, or to get out of here past it. We had to draw it in where we could surround it-
"Rebecca, rear flank!" I shouted to her as I pushed my augmented reflexes to the limit frantically reloading another grenade into my rifle's launcher, while desperately wishing that I'd had the anti-vehicle rifle equipped today. APDS assault rifle rounds weren't going to do more than tickle that thing.
Sinclair, Adamson and I immediately split to draw the queen's attention along multiple axes, the big guy instinctively going with Sinclair while Rebecca partnered with me. She kept an eye out behind and around us for more wasps, like I'd called, while the remaining three of us kept chipping the queen bitch with everything we had.
"I think somebody missed her Beta bus!" Adamson said with gallows humor as his assault cannon clicked empty and the queen swung around to face him the instant his fire stopped. My rifle grenade was set for anti-vehicle, the same APC-busting plasma spike config that I'd splattered that mantis spirit with, but with superhuman speed the queen stepped aside at the last instant just as I fired and the grenade deflected and skidded off its crippled wing to explode harmlessly off the floor beneath it. Sinclair put his own grenade directly into its flank- and nothing happened, because the queen's sidestep had put it just within minimum safe arming distance of his grenade. All of this happened in barely over a second as Adamson struggled to reload his cannon in time.
"No!" Sinclair yelled, and the crazy sonofabitch desperately leapt at the queen with his bare hands to try and wrap around her tail, desperately hoping to take her stinger out of play without getting himself stuck like a bug long enough for Nick to finish-
And despite my own voice yelling in my mental ear at what a colossal dumbass I was being, before I knew it I was letting my own rifle fall out of my hands while I charged in just like I was still starting varsity cornerback in high school, doing my best to cut the offense off and get in the flying tackle.
Sinclair hit first, then I did, and our combined weight and momentum got wrapped up with what felt like a whole bucket full of hydraulically-powered snakes as the queen got to grappling with both of us. The world turned upside down and then a sudden explosion nearby made the world go fuzzy and quiet, and there was a sense of us falling-
I refocused what had to be only a second or two later as the trauma damper kicked in, looking up at a hole in the ceilling. The floor must have been weakened from two years of exposure to the elements and structural damage, and the wrestling match with Queenie here and someone else's HE round along with my own grenade in the floor had sent us down through the hole. I tried to move, look around, and find my weapon all simultaneously, and just as I realized that something heavy was pinning down my legs a gunshot off to my immediate right made me look over to see Sinclair, lying half-prone on the ground right next to me, firing his sidearm straight up as a last act of defiance as the wounded wasp queen finished rising to its feet, and with an evil hiss reared up on four of its legs and bent almost double as it drew back its stinger, preparatory to slamming it right into the Sergeant's throat-
"Brace!" I yelled frantically to Sinclair as I leaned over as far as I could and whipped out my right arm - the arm that had been wholly mechanical from halfway between the elbow and the shoulder ever since that DUI that had killed my battle buddy in the CAS Rangers and crippled me - and put it between Sinclair's larynx and the incoming stinger just in the nick of time. With his reflexes boosted as high as mine he was able to let go of the pistol and get both of his palms up under my cyberarm just in time. And while the descending stinger punched directly through-and-through my hardsuit and the plasteel and carbon-fiber of my arm, the combined force of Sinclair's upper-body strength and my mechanical arm-curl stopped its deadly lunge just enough that the tip blunted on his armor's gorget instead of penetrating.
The queen shrieked in rage and tried to pull its stinger out, but I clenched my fist hard, deliberately overriding all the safety governors, so that the carbon-fiber and hydraulics of my forearm muscles hit maximum flex and trapped that stinger in there like we'd put it in a shop vise. As the deadly tug-of-war continued and we both mentally caught up enough to start going Okay, now what the hell do we do?, a sudden fierce cry of "Incoming!" made us both look up to see Rebecca coming straight down the hole in a full kamikaze leap, her rifle out in front of her and with a monofilament-edged bayonet mounted solidly in the lug. Over 160 lbs. of woman, armor, and gear coming down in at least a six-foot drop put its force behind her falling lunge and gave the queen wasp her own taste of what it was like to be impaled, as she spiked it directly through the junction between the thorax and the abdomen and cut its spine in half.
Which didn't kill the queen, or stop it from sending Rebecca bouncing off the nearby ceiling as it reared up in spastic agony, my arm shorting out and going limp as the queen's final convulsions yanked the stinger free despite the best I could do. But its suddenly becoming an insect paraplegic did manage to keep it from killing any more of us before Nick finally got a clear shot at its helpless, thrashing body from his vantage point above and gave it two in the head to make sure it was dead - and then sent a few more rounds downrange to keep them company.
"That... was the most Hollywood bullshit I have ever even heard of, let alone participated in.. during my entire career." I gasped as I just laid there and took a breather while my friends helped move the rubble off my legs.
"Not... exactly... standard operating procedure." Sinclair agreed with me, as he heavily got to his feet and then started checking my armor's bio-readouts. "Okay, vitals are stable. Are you in pain?"
"Nah." I said. "Sensory cutoffs in the arm kicked in just like they were supposed to. I'm dead from the elbow down, though."
"I found your rifles." Adamson said before carefully tossing them down one at a time to Rebecca, who'd just finished picking herself up from where that damned bug had knocked her galley-west. Then he doubled a rope around a nearby pillar and slid down it to join us, before pulling one end of the rope free and then coiling and stowing his climbing gear. Rebecca finished checking Sinclair out after he'd finished checking me, and I slung my rifle and got my pistol out as I embarked on my new, temporary career as a one-handed shooter. Fortunately, modern smartlink technology meant that I didn't need to bother with things such as ejecting magazines or chambering new rounds manually.
"Bravo One-Actual, this is Three-One. We have had contact with wasp spirits in the target building, Jeffers is KIA and Stone needs medevac. Team Three is withdrawing to rally point." Sinclair got on the platoon net and checked in with the Lieutenant.
"Three-One, advise condition on Three-Five."
"Stable, but he's only got one working arm and a hole clean through his suit. We'll need an armorer and a cybertechnician to get him back in action." the Sergeant explained.
"Negative, Team Three, medevac is restricted to immediate priority only. Continue your sweep." the Lieutenant said dispassionately.
"Bravo One, I am down to three and a half, I say again three and a half effectives. We need to swap out with one of the reserve teams!" Sinclair insisted.
"Then don't enter any more tall buildings, but I want at least the surface sweep done as far east as Halstead before you return." the Lieutenant pushed, and after acknowledging the order we all swore viciously.
"The fuck is wrong with that asshole?" Adamson cursed viciously, and even Sinclair didn't raise an eyebrow at his badmouthing an officer as we bagged Jeffers and carried him back down to the Roadmaster. Since I'd had at least the basic familiarization training even if I was nowhere near the expert that she was, Rebecca gave me the drone console while she took my turn on the minigun as that was a job I could still do one-handed. Our surface sweep - aka 'drive around and look for any obvious bug spoor on the street that might show what buliding they're hiding in' - did indeed turn up a classic 'knock the small building down and pile the rubble up' of an ant nest underneath the elevated monorail crossing a side street a block north of the double-wide east-west that was Randolph Street, and as we finally finished the sweep and headed back towards Union Park I heard Rebecca say "Hey, look at that."
I put the drone interface on standby and opened my eyes as we were turning the corner onto Randolph to head back west to Union Park, and saw us go right past the remains of a pair of vehicles. One of them had an Ares Citymaster APC that had been hit hard enough to crumple in the side and deadline the engine, and the GM utility van next to it that had been flipped clean over and had the roof chewed off by bugs. The dust and rust piled up around the wrecked vehicles meant that they had to have been here for several years.
"Huh, leftovers from the first big push they tried back in '55." Adamson said as we left them behind in our rearview mirror. "Poor bastards. They never had a chance."
"Neither did we, almost." I sighed.
"Well, according to the general freq things are still going entirely on-schedule. Heck, the General was so chuffed that he put out an announcement that the Navy managed to smear three queens in Grant Park when somebody kicked loose a bughouse swarm there and the spotters could call in naval gunfire." Rebecca explained.
"Bravo Company, this is Prophet." the Ares command frequency rang out to all of us. "Secure your sweeps and RTB, today's recon is done."
"Just in time for dinner." Sinclair tried to cheer us up, as Adamson pushed the pedal down and we hurried back to link up with the rest of the platoon. "I guess we all gathered enough intel to let them come up with a revised Phase Two."
"Busy day tomorrow." Rebecca agreed.
"But not for all of us." Sinclair sighed, and we all mourned silently for our fallen teammate as the sun began to touch the horizon ahead of us.
Author's Note: And so ends the first day of Operation Extermination, and not without loss. But as David Weber said, 'Any war story where the main cast suffers no personal losses is not military fiction, it's military pornography.'
As for the mysterious 'Beta', that is indeed a canon phenomenon and the old Shadowrun hands in-thread already know exactly what it is. The rest of you will find out at the same speed the viewpoint character does. *g*
And yes, the MC has a cyberarm. I mentioned it in chapter 1.
February 22, 2058
Whenever they did a big battle scene in the action sims they opened with a radio voice-over of a whole lot of guys frantically yelling over each other on some wide-open frequency in the clear. Callouts from units under fire simultaneous with other guys yelling for air support with some other guy calling away a Mayday, everybody overlapping. It was the standard cinematic trick for getting across to the audience that war was chaos. Even the Desert Wars live wargame broadcasts on The Battle Channel put together an audio track of that stuff and dubbed it in during post-production, because the audience was expecting it and would have complained about the 'lack of realism' if they didn't get it.
But in reality, that didn't happen. Even a second-rate national army could afford basic dataflow management software for their comm links, which ensured that even if everybody was transmitting all simultaneously on the same frequency band the encrypted packet addressing ensured that even if everybody else's receiver was getting it, none of the units on the net were actually hearing it unless it was addressed to them. It was like how a local area network had functioned for computers even back in the earliest days of the Internet, the primitive precursor to today's Matrix. You could still get crosstalk if multiple people from the same squad or platoon were trying to talk at once - even with modern gear, radio discipline was still important - but your team/squad/platoon/whatever network only passed through what was tagged for you to pay attention to, and likewise anything you passed up the line was only distributed to where it was. The guys in the field HQs still got all the traffic, of course, because that's where all the lines of communications converged. But that's why the tac-ops guys running the consoles for the big brass had things like neural interfaces, computer-assisted tracking and analysis modules, and specialized multi-tasking headware.
So the worst thing about waiting during a large-scale operation like this was the silence. You sat around, with nothing but your own pulse to echo inside your helmet because there was nothing your unit needed to say to each other and nobody else's comm traffic was reaching you. You could still hear the gunfire in the distance, the hissing sounds of rockets and missiles coming down off the gunships and drones and the lower, louder thudding of the tube artillery and even naval gunfire from the pair of guided missile destroyers sitting out in Lake Michigan, the shriek of jet engines as the fast-movers came in and dropped their loads and then zoomed on back to base to refuel and rearm, and you knew that men were fighting and dying in a thousand battles and skirmishes all over town, but nobody was telling you anything. Just the occasional terse update from Command over the general announcements channel, whenever the high brass decided it was time to remind the troops that hey, we hadn't lost yet. Sometimes you wished for the war movie radio chaos to be real just so that the primitive part of your brain could try to sense how things were going, to pick up subliminal impressions from the tempo and the cadence and the tone of voice. But war was digital now, not analog. And so here we were, sitting in a tent at a forward assembly point waiting for our personal silence to break.
The several days in-between the initial briefing and our jump-off had of course been occupied by more briefings. We weren't going to get the entire battle plan for an operation this large-scale explained for us in a single lecture from a guy in an auditorium. The initial briefing was just to impress on all of us how serious this was and how high up the chain it had really come from. After we'd been walked through the bare outline we were dismissed to individual unit briefings, as all the troops here broke down by battalion, company, and finally platoon to get more detailed prep on what their part of the op would be. And of course there was making sure we had all our supplies laid in and loaded, making sure our gear was all fixed up and ready to go, etc, etc. But Bravo Company's pre-mission briefing had largely been a very broad overview of the battle plan and not much else, because we didn't have a pre-set mission ahead of time.
The closest analogy to Knight Errant's Rapid-Response Troopers in national service was both the UCAS/CAS Airborne Rangers and the quick-reaction forces that almost any battalion-level task force or greater kept handy in the field. The Ranger mission was short, high-intensity operations in hostile or sensitive areas - in-and-out raids, seizing or destroying key strongpoints in advance of a general attack, combat search-and-rescue, or bag-and-drag. Quick-reaction forces were a designated sub-unit of a military task force kept on short-notice readiness to respond to unscheduled events and emergencies - going to the assistance of other units caught by a surprise attack, reinforcing areas under particular threat, responding to intrusions, et cetera, et cetera. Even police departments had QRFs - that's what units like SWAT were for, to come in if the regular patrol units ran into something beyond their capability.
And RRT's job in Knight Errant encompassed all of the above and more. So in all the while the team had been here they'd been kept fairly busy - there were always places or targets in the CZ that needed a quick search-and-destroy for one reason or another, as well as things like the emergency extraction we'd done for that black ops team back on my first night here. But it also meant that when a large-scale battle like this was going on our job was largely to hang back and stay out of the way of the line grunts and the heavies while they went in for what they did best - ground and pound, clearing all hostiles out of a particular area and then securing that zone before continuing the advance. Which is why over thirty thousand men were now slugging it out toe-to-toe versus the bugs, while more men like us or the UCAS spec-ops guys were busy sitting and waiting for someone to find us a target needing our particular attention, or to get in trouble and need a bail-out.
So yeah, despite us all being professionals and combat vets we were still getting a little wired. Not knowing what you were going to drop into or when, but knowing that it would come and you'd have to improv like hell when it did... it wasn't fun at all. And that was when you were fighting a normal enemy, let alone these.
"All stations, this is Kingpin." the voice of General Welles, the UCAS Army four-star whose normal billet was as the theater commander for Special Operations Command and who'd put himself in as the top soldier for the entire Operation Extermination wingding. "Phase One is complete, I say again, Phase One is complete. All forward command posts are now released for Phase Two timeline at your discretion." The announcement that things were still on schedule with no snags major enough to be worth mentioning on the general channel brought a sigh of relief throughout the platoon.
The UCAS had tried this once before, in the first few months after the Wall had went up. Not on this scale, of course, but they'd moved in a reinforced regimental combat team of armor and mech infantry down into the North Side, trying to sweep out the bugs enough to push the Wall's borders in for a couple miles with some eye towards eventually retaking the city piece-by-piece. They'd lasted two days - just long enough to make it maybe halfway to the Loop before whatever sense of coordination the bugs usually didn't have kicked in and got them absolutely swarmed by bugs coming from all over the Zone to chow down. They'd already taken almost fifteen percent losses just on the initial push, but when the situation had gone totally bughouse the sun had practically been blacked out by all the wasp, fly, and mosquito flesh-forms coming in to chow down, and the less said about what had boiled up out of the Chicago Underground and the sewers the better. The approximately forty percent survivors of that regiment had survived only because the bugs had mostly stopped pursuing after the Army had started running.
They even made sure to show you some of the helmet-cam footage from that late 2055 expedition during the initial pre-deployment prep before you were assigned to the Containment Zone. Just to make sure you approached the job with a proper amount of caution. Brrrr.
So yeah, there was a reason that the military had mostly sat outside the wall and let the poor bastards trapped in the CZ stay trapped after that. Trying large-scale conventional land warfare against the bugs was suicide, especially given that even after they figured out how bug spirits actually reproduced there were still only the roughest possible estimates for how many bugs there were. And now here was Task Force Extermination, trying it again.
To say that the troops were worried about this whole thing turning into another and larger repeat of the first ratfuck was an understatement. Of course, high command had reassured us that this time around there was an entirely new factor in play. Some type of secret-weapon that was referred to only as code-name "Beta", it was supposed to be a wide-area incapacitating agent of some kind that would weaken the bugs just like they'd found out that industrial-strength pesticide could weaken them, only it wasn't a lethal nerve agent and you didn't need level-4 NBC gear to survive being in it. Stuff was supposed to be absolutely harmless to people, invisible and odorless too, but it would absolutely rip the hell out of the bugs. They even showed us some footage of lab tests where a couple of captured bugs, and a sampling of other dangerous paracritters like hell hounds and devil rats, had been rendered so weak they could barely stand-up. Hell, picking up a devil rat with your bare hand was normally a way to get that sucker bitten off at the wrist, but we saw trid footage of one of the scientists juggling the damn thing and it barely whimpered.
Of course, given that a simple desktop video editing suite would let you deepfake a scene of President Dunkelzahn supposedly eating a baby on live trid out of a few minutes of stock footage, that still didn't prove anything. It's not like they let us digitally analyze the briefing footage, and technology had long since advanced to where the naked eye wasn't going to tell the difference even if the CGI was basic enough that even a budget analysis program could spot the pixelization. So despite all of their assurances that this time around they wanted the bugs to come out and concentrate in huge-ass swarms so they could dust them and be done with it, there was that nagging fear that no, they were just bullshitting us for morale purposes and this was going to be the worst military strategy ever since invading Russia during the winter.
But the Phase One benchmarks for the two advancing columns were practically on the borders of the downtown area, and yet the expedition had reached them in the early afternoon. That was actually an hour ahead of the anticipated schedule. In addition, nobody had yet sighted a mature queen or a major swarm, just individual nests and targets of opportunity. So whatever this 'Beta' thing was it looked to be real, and it damn sure looked like it was working.
"All stations this is Kingpin, we are revising the op schedule. Refugee concentrations are fleeing the inner city and heading closer to the Wall. Phase Two timeline is now on hold, we'll give the civvies time to make it through our lines and clear our fields of fire. We haven't drawn any of the large-area insect response that we've been anticipating, so recon teams are going in to get more intel on conditions in the Core before we resume Phase Two. Kingpin out." the general announcement came.
"If anyone needs a bathroom break, I'd suggest you go right now." Sergeant Sinclair observed.
"Huh?" Jeffers blurted.
"The bugs are going off-script and the brass doesn't like it, so they're tossing out the playbook they had prepped for the second half and are getting ready to start calling some audibles." I explained to him. "But that means they have to know what the fuck the bugs in the inner city are actually doing, and that means they need guys like us to go in there and poke the hive to see what they're hiding."
That prompted us to all take Sinclair's advice and go make our final pit stops and grab a cold drink, because only a few minutes after that observation was received confirmation that we'd guessed right.
"Here comes the Lieutenant, first time he's left the HQ tent all morning." Rebecca said wisely, looking across the parking lot where they'd set up the brigade field HQ we were currently attached to. "We just got a call."
"All magically active personnel, fall out!" was the first order Lt. Menendez gave when he reached us. The two wagemages and the one physical adept we had in the platoon did so, and our initial thought that some kind of all-magic squad was being put together was instantly dashed when he told them to report to the reserve detachments for further duties as assigned. That meant they were being benched in the rear with the gear, while the rest of us were going...?
"The mission for Bravo Company is a reconaissance-in-force, of Union Park and the surrounding area! We'll have air and drone support available if we need it, but the reason they're sending us is because the intel they need isn't visible from the air. We're going to have to search buildings and basements for this one because the bugs aren't coming out like they should, not after we took down the first waves! So it's up to the tip of the spear to find and make the opening before the main body comes in to deal the killing blow, and that means us!" Lt. Menendez barked.
"You nailed it, brother." Jeffers whispered to me.
"Skies are too full of bugs and the tac-air, so our infil route will be on the ground. We'll mount up in our Roadmasters and enter along Interstate 90, then take Ogden Avenue southwest. Company command will set up a post and in the park, then we'll spread out by sector. 1st Platoon's role in the reconaissance will be the eastern side, in towards the Core, so stay sharp! Everybody understand the mission?"
"Yes sir!" we chorused.
"Everybody know where we're going?" he continued.
"Yes sir!" we repeated.
"Is everybody ready?!?" he shouted.
"YES SIR!" we roared.
"THEN MOVE OUT!" he finished, and we all stood to, grabbed our gear, and double-timed out in column to get in our Roadmasters - the modern Ares equivalent of the old US Army Humvee, although more heavily armored and NBC sealed - and away we went.
As we headed down the expressway into the city we immediately noticed the differences between this and our last trip in overland. The ongoing rumble of explosions and the multiple cracks of small-arms fire still echoed in the background despite the regular formations having held in place, as a dozen ongoing skirmishes and more continued around the city. A pair of A-42 Falcon ground-attack fighters rattled our ears hard as they streaked low overhead from the left, then peeled out in a sharp turn shortly after overflying the expressway. The sudden eruption a block away to our right of the fiery plume off a pair of napalm clusters announced that another bunch of bugs had just become stir-fry.
One of the things that the government had done as part of the initial CZ lockdown was a phony VITAS outbreak announcement so they could invoke CDC quarantine protocols, to minimize the number of people trying to flee the Zone before they could finish bulldozing the isolation strip and building the Wall. As part of those protocols Chicago's GridGuide system had been set to allow emergency services and essential vehicles only. Millions of people had been restricted to either staying in their homes or trying to hoof it on foot, because their cars wouldn't move a foot without official permission - and if they took their cars off the GridGuide circuit and tried to run them in manual mode, any moving vehicle on the street without a validated GridGuide link would have been immediately pinpointed by the traffic camera network and intercepted by Eagle Security before they'd gotten three blocks. The finest in modern technology had done its best to ensure that Chicago's urban population would remain where the powers-that-be wanted them to remain, widespread panic or not.
Which is why we had clear running down an expressway you'd normally expect to be full of abandoned and stalled vehicles that would inevitably clog the roads after a failed evacuation attempt. So it was less than ten minutes' drive before we'd gotten to our exit.
As we were heading down Ogden Avenue the lead vehicle called away that they were taking incoming fire, but the Lieutenant ordered us to keep weapons tight so I just pulled my head down out of the turret - it was my turn on the minigun - and let the insignificant spattering of small arms fire bounce off our armored vehicle as we drove by. The rest of the time was packed into the Roadmaster with me, as we were riding five to a vehicle.
"Locals are panicking." I said. "They don't know who the enemy is, just that the cold war's suddenly gone hot and is now on their doorstep."
"But why would they think we're the enemy?" Sinclair asked from where he had shotgun. "Whoever we are, we're clearly human."
"For a lot of the people who lived here, the megacorps were the enemy even before the Wall went up." Rebecca explained softly as the incoming fire trailed off behind us.
"Coming up on rally point." Adamson chimed in from where he was driving. "Now we wait to find out what the Lieutenant wants us to do."
"Man the turret." Sinclair ordered me, and I got back up on the mount. Our little convoy pulled into Union Park, and the Lieutenant kept two fire teams with him as a central reserve while our platoon's other four teams were each sent off in one of the cardinal directions.
"OK, I've got the Wandjina talking to me." Rebecca said as she closed her eyes and jacked into her console from where she was sitting. "No changes in what Command had on the feeds before we got here."
"Any large heat concentrations?" Sinclair asked. "I want to skip any buildings with substantial human occupancy."
"It's harder to spot fine details during the day, too much reflecting off the roofs." she replied. "But no, nothing big."
"Why didn't they let us bring the mages in? One of them goes astral, he could just sweep right through all these buildings." Jeffers said.
"That wouldn't work even if they hadn't been stood down." Rebecca explained. "Inspect spirits are dual-natured, permanently present on both the physical and astral planes. They could reach out and touch an astrally projecting magician as if he were solid, rip him in half just like one of them could rip you in half if he caught you out on the street. Astral scouting's always been of limited utility in the Zone."
"Jeffers, Adamson, with me." Sinclair said. "We'll dismount and explore that building." he pointed, as near as I could tell at random. "Stone, stick with the vehicle and cover Mierson."
"On it." I acknowledged, and I stayed on the minigun and kept a wary eye all around as our three teammates went in to do a look-and-listen and Rebecca stayed jacked into the drone and kept a watch on our outer perimeter as I did the inner.
"What do you think Command is even having us look for?" Rebecca asked me after several minutes had passed, her eyes still closed as she interfaced. Nothing was coming over our team comm net except routine callouts from Sinclair and the guys as they methodically started checking and clearing.
"Well the original plan was to provoke another bughouse swarm like the one that ate the first expedition, then shred them with our superior firepower and after they were already weakened by Beta." I started to analyze out loud. "Except the bugs must be feeling sick and weak enough from the Beta that they don't even want to expose themselves, so-" I trailed off. "And that's as far as I'm getting."
"Statistical sampling, you think?" she answered. "Obviously we can't do a room-by-room search of the entire city, but if enough of the recon teams stir up bugs then they can start putting dots on a map and at least guess which regions of the city the bugs in the periphery fled to rather than engaging."
"Assuming that the periphery teams didn't just roll over a bunch of bug-filled basements and they're waiting for nightfall to come out behind us." I shivered.
"Holy shit!" Jeffers screamed, and a short burst of automatic weapons fire came over the channel as I shot bolt upright and started the minigun barrels spinning. The fire immediately cut off midway through the first burst, and our hearts leapt into our-
"Sorry boss, I wasted ammo on a dead one." Jeffers said sheepishly, and we both relaxed. "A lot of dead ones." he continued, awestruck. "There's a pile of dead beetles in here the size of a truck!"
"Dead or just comatose?" Adamson asked intelligently.
"Set a long delay on one of the thermobarics and toss it in there, then we fall back." Sinclair ordered. "Dead or dying will become an irrelevant distinction after we torch the whole basement."
"Roast bugs, comin' right up." Jeffers cheerfully acknowledged, and within a minute the team came briskly out of the nearby storefront just as the fuel-air explosion detonated in the basement behind them. Sinclair got on the command net and reported the contact and the dead bugs, and after uploading his helmet-cam footage and a brief pause the Lieutenant passed the word down from up the line that they wanted us to move a block east and check out the upper floors of a fifteen-story office tower there.
"Great, now we do fifteen flights up and down while wearing full armor." I cursed. "I'm gonna need metal knees if they keep this up all day."
"And we have to all leave the vehicle and hope it doesn't get eaten by some giant ant or something while we're all inside." Adamson agreed. "Command is sure they can't just insert another team in and off the roof?"
"Beta seems to have missed a lot of the wasp spirits up on the taller skyscrapers." Sinclair said. "Between that and all the warbirds doing ground-attack in the zone, the skies are way too crowded today for the transports."
"That is one hell of a way to run a monorail." Adamson groused, and given that he was the biggest and heaviest of us all and this would be killing his knees worse than anyone I did not blame him in the slightest.
Rebecca unjacked from the drone, because we certainly couldn't leave her unattended in the vehicle while the rest of us spent however long it took clearing that damned tall building, and came in with us. Sadly, our first thought - to see if we could reactivate the building power enough for her to jack into what was left of the security systems and just use the internal cameras to check for us instead of having to climb all that way and check ourselves - didn't pan out, although she did manage to pull the fire-escape plan out of the non-volatile memory in the receptionist's deskcomp. So at least we had a basic floor layout.
And so, checking our corners and advancing by bounding overwatch and checking six at every step, we methodically went up fourteen flights of stairs, stopping to catch our breath several times along the way - hey, climbing stairs in heavy armor and a full ammo load was not easy, even if you had muscles enhanced with nanoscopic carbon fiber - and arrived on the top floor to finish our sweep.
"Floor plans says we've got an executive dining room taking up a third of the top floor, adjacent kitchen, and then the rest is offices - including one big corner office for the grand high poobah and an adjacent conference room." Rebecca put it all on our HUDs. "So, which one first?"
"Dining room." Sinclair said. "Adamson, Jeffers, hold the hallway. Everybody else on me."
We moved slowly up to the big double doors leading into the dining room and stacked up. "Okay, on three, two, one..."
Our boots hit both doors simultaneously and swung them open. The brightly lit interior of the executive dining room greeted us, along with the fresh crisp air of winter-
"Something's been through there, boss!" I cautioned, indicating the gaping remnants of the dining room's panoramic windows with my rifle barrel. Now those windows could have been smashed through at any time in the past couple of years, but-
"Everyone close up on me now, we might have-" Sinclair began, before an absolutely deafening high-pitched buzzing burst out of nowhere to horrify us.
"Wasps!" we all yelled at the same time, and before we could blink they were upon us.
Wasp spirits were perhaps the deadliest kind of bugs next to the mantids. Just like their smaller mundane analogues, they were aggressive as all hell. Most insects only attacked when their territory was directly violated or they were hungry, but even on a good day wasps would go out and pre-emptively strike at anyone within a highly variable distance they called "in range". They didn't mass nearly as much as mantids did but a five-foot psychotic hornet was still strong enough to knock a grown man on his ass, they had stingers sharp enough to pierce through steel plate and which injected enough deadly neurotoxin to drop an elephant, and they were fast.
Nick's assault cannon splashed one of the wasps that had burst out of a doorway down the hall behind us all over the rug. The wasp that burst out of the hole it had chewed through the ceiling panels of the dining room in front of us caught my underbarrel-launched grenade straight in the face and hit the floor as a headless corpse. Sinclair put a long burst straight into the skull - the thinnest part - of the wasp that had crawled around right behind it, my having bottlenecked the hole with the corpse of its buddy having slowed it enough for him to call his shot. Rebecca blasted a grenade into the far corner of the dining room at something I couldn't see, and Jeffers-
"OH SHI-!" he screamed as the giant wasp, so large that I was surprised it could still move so quickly down the hallway, came around the other corner of the hallway from somewhere towards the executive suite, took six of his APDS rounds right into the torso but still finshed its charge and twisted around in mid-leap to impale its stinger directly through his armor's faceplate.
"Queen! That's a queen!" Adamson shouted as he sent it staggering backwards off of Jeffers' corpse with a pair of assault cannon hits, but even though he managed to cripple a wing the fucking thing was still getting back up.
"Into the dining room!" Sinclair called as we retreated from the queen wasp into the room we'd just kicked the doors of. And yeah, normally advancing into uncleared territory was a bad idea, especially with your back turned, but there was no way we could fight that thing toe-to-toe, or to get out of here past it. We had to draw it in where we could surround it-
"Rebecca, rear flank!" I shouted to her as I pushed my augmented reflexes to the limit frantically reloading another grenade into my rifle's launcher, while desperately wishing that I'd had the anti-vehicle rifle equipped today. APDS assault rifle rounds weren't going to do more than tickle that thing.
Sinclair, Adamson and I immediately split to draw the queen's attention along multiple axes, the big guy instinctively going with Sinclair while Rebecca partnered with me. She kept an eye out behind and around us for more wasps, like I'd called, while the remaining three of us kept chipping the queen bitch with everything we had.
"I think somebody missed her Beta bus!" Adamson said with gallows humor as his assault cannon clicked empty and the queen swung around to face him the instant his fire stopped. My rifle grenade was set for anti-vehicle, the same APC-busting plasma spike config that I'd splattered that mantis spirit with, but with superhuman speed the queen stepped aside at the last instant just as I fired and the grenade deflected and skidded off its crippled wing to explode harmlessly off the floor beneath it. Sinclair put his own grenade directly into its flank- and nothing happened, because the queen's sidestep had put it just within minimum safe arming distance of his grenade. All of this happened in barely over a second as Adamson struggled to reload his cannon in time.
"No!" Sinclair yelled, and the crazy sonofabitch desperately leapt at the queen with his bare hands to try and wrap around her tail, desperately hoping to take her stinger out of play without getting himself stuck like a bug long enough for Nick to finish-
And despite my own voice yelling in my mental ear at what a colossal dumbass I was being, before I knew it I was letting my own rifle fall out of my hands while I charged in just like I was still starting varsity cornerback in high school, doing my best to cut the offense off and get in the flying tackle.
Sinclair hit first, then I did, and our combined weight and momentum got wrapped up with what felt like a whole bucket full of hydraulically-powered snakes as the queen got to grappling with both of us. The world turned upside down and then a sudden explosion nearby made the world go fuzzy and quiet, and there was a sense of us falling-
I refocused what had to be only a second or two later as the trauma damper kicked in, looking up at a hole in the ceilling. The floor must have been weakened from two years of exposure to the elements and structural damage, and the wrestling match with Queenie here and someone else's HE round along with my own grenade in the floor had sent us down through the hole. I tried to move, look around, and find my weapon all simultaneously, and just as I realized that something heavy was pinning down my legs a gunshot off to my immediate right made me look over to see Sinclair, lying half-prone on the ground right next to me, firing his sidearm straight up as a last act of defiance as the wounded wasp queen finished rising to its feet, and with an evil hiss reared up on four of its legs and bent almost double as it drew back its stinger, preparatory to slamming it right into the Sergeant's throat-
"Brace!" I yelled frantically to Sinclair as I leaned over as far as I could and whipped out my right arm - the arm that had been wholly mechanical from halfway between the elbow and the shoulder ever since that DUI that had killed my battle buddy in the CAS Rangers and crippled me - and put it between Sinclair's larynx and the incoming stinger just in the nick of time. With his reflexes boosted as high as mine he was able to let go of the pistol and get both of his palms up under my cyberarm just in time. And while the descending stinger punched directly through-and-through my hardsuit and the plasteel and carbon-fiber of my arm, the combined force of Sinclair's upper-body strength and my mechanical arm-curl stopped its deadly lunge just enough that the tip blunted on his armor's gorget instead of penetrating.
The queen shrieked in rage and tried to pull its stinger out, but I clenched my fist hard, deliberately overriding all the safety governors, so that the carbon-fiber and hydraulics of my forearm muscles hit maximum flex and trapped that stinger in there like we'd put it in a shop vise. As the deadly tug-of-war continued and we both mentally caught up enough to start going Okay, now what the hell do we do?, a sudden fierce cry of "Incoming!" made us both look up to see Rebecca coming straight down the hole in a full kamikaze leap, her rifle out in front of her and with a monofilament-edged bayonet mounted solidly in the lug. Over 160 lbs. of woman, armor, and gear coming down in at least a six-foot drop put its force behind her falling lunge and gave the queen wasp her own taste of what it was like to be impaled, as she spiked it directly through the junction between the thorax and the abdomen and cut its spine in half.
Which didn't kill the queen, or stop it from sending Rebecca bouncing off the nearby ceiling as it reared up in spastic agony, my arm shorting out and going limp as the queen's final convulsions yanked the stinger free despite the best I could do. But its suddenly becoming an insect paraplegic did manage to keep it from killing any more of us before Nick finally got a clear shot at its helpless, thrashing body from his vantage point above and gave it two in the head to make sure it was dead - and then sent a few more rounds downrange to keep them company.
"That... was the most Hollywood bullshit I have ever even heard of, let alone participated in.. during my entire career." I gasped as I just laid there and took a breather while my friends helped move the rubble off my legs.
"Not... exactly... standard operating procedure." Sinclair agreed with me, as he heavily got to his feet and then started checking my armor's bio-readouts. "Okay, vitals are stable. Are you in pain?"
"Nah." I said. "Sensory cutoffs in the arm kicked in just like they were supposed to. I'm dead from the elbow down, though."
"I found your rifles." Adamson said before carefully tossing them down one at a time to Rebecca, who'd just finished picking herself up from where that damned bug had knocked her galley-west. Then he doubled a rope around a nearby pillar and slid down it to join us, before pulling one end of the rope free and then coiling and stowing his climbing gear. Rebecca finished checking Sinclair out after he'd finished checking me, and I slung my rifle and got my pistol out as I embarked on my new, temporary career as a one-handed shooter. Fortunately, modern smartlink technology meant that I didn't need to bother with things such as ejecting magazines or chambering new rounds manually.
"Bravo One-Actual, this is Three-One. We have had contact with wasp spirits in the target building, Jeffers is KIA and Stone needs medevac. Team Three is withdrawing to rally point." Sinclair got on the platoon net and checked in with the Lieutenant.
"Three-One, advise condition on Three-Five."
"Stable, but he's only got one working arm and a hole clean through his suit. We'll need an armorer and a cybertechnician to get him back in action." the Sergeant explained.
"Negative, Team Three, medevac is restricted to immediate priority only. Continue your sweep." the Lieutenant said dispassionately.
"Bravo One, I am down to three and a half, I say again three and a half effectives. We need to swap out with one of the reserve teams!" Sinclair insisted.
"Then don't enter any more tall buildings, but I want at least the surface sweep done as far east as Halstead before you return." the Lieutenant pushed, and after acknowledging the order we all swore viciously.
"The fuck is wrong with that asshole?" Adamson cursed viciously, and even Sinclair didn't raise an eyebrow at his badmouthing an officer as we bagged Jeffers and carried him back down to the Roadmaster. Since I'd had at least the basic familiarization training even if I was nowhere near the expert that she was, Rebecca gave me the drone console while she took my turn on the minigun as that was a job I could still do one-handed. Our surface sweep - aka 'drive around and look for any obvious bug spoor on the street that might show what buliding they're hiding in' - did indeed turn up a classic 'knock the small building down and pile the rubble up' of an ant nest underneath the elevated monorail crossing a side street a block north of the double-wide east-west that was Randolph Street, and as we finally finished the sweep and headed back towards Union Park I heard Rebecca say "Hey, look at that."
I put the drone interface on standby and opened my eyes as we were turning the corner onto Randolph to head back west to Union Park, and saw us go right past the remains of a pair of vehicles. One of them had an Ares Citymaster APC that had been hit hard enough to crumple in the side and deadline the engine, and the GM utility van next to it that had been flipped clean over and had the roof chewed off by bugs. The dust and rust piled up around the wrecked vehicles meant that they had to have been here for several years.
"Huh, leftovers from the first big push they tried back in '55." Adamson said as we left them behind in our rearview mirror. "Poor bastards. They never had a chance."
"Neither did we, almost." I sighed.
"Well, according to the general freq things are still going entirely on-schedule. Heck, the General was so chuffed that he put out an announcement that the Navy managed to smear three queens in Grant Park when somebody kicked loose a bughouse swarm there and the spotters could call in naval gunfire." Rebecca explained.
"Bravo Company, this is Prophet." the Ares command frequency rang out to all of us. "Secure your sweeps and RTB, today's recon is done."
"Just in time for dinner." Sinclair tried to cheer us up, as Adamson pushed the pedal down and we hurried back to link up with the rest of the platoon. "I guess we all gathered enough intel to let them come up with a revised Phase Two."
"Busy day tomorrow." Rebecca agreed.
"But not for all of us." Sinclair sighed, and we all mourned silently for our fallen teammate as the sun began to touch the horizon ahead of us.
Author's Note: And so ends the first day of Operation Extermination, and not without loss. But as David Weber said, 'Any war story where the main cast suffers no personal losses is not military fiction, it's military pornography.'
As for the mysterious 'Beta', that is indeed a canon phenomenon and the old Shadowrun hands in-thread already know exactly what it is. The rest of you will find out at the same speed the viewpoint character does. *g*
And yes, the MC has a cyberarm. I mentioned it in chapter 1.
Last edited:
kraryal
Not too sore, are you?
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2015
- Messages
- 313
That opening really showed a sense of the whole cyberpunk war. The "hurry up and wait" nature was shown very well too.
Queen wasps are ridiculously scary too. Great opening chapter for the battle, makes me worried for how much worse it is going to get.
Queen wasps are ridiculously scary too. Great opening chapter for the battle, makes me worried for how much worse it is going to get.
D King Hecht
Know what you're doing yet?
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2018
- Messages
- 174
Stone doing his best interpretation of Anakin Skywalker.
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2017
- Messages
- 18,121
Dunkelzahn does not return in canon. His assassination was in August 2057, several months before the start of this story.
heralding_bubble
Liar and Hypocrite
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2015
- Messages
- 5,217
I mean, first line of the first chapter's A/N
Vrenze
Search Girls in your city for night
- Joined
- Nov 10, 2017
- Messages
- 1,418
Well I'm just a big Ole idiot then.I mean, first line of the first chapter's A/N
Lucid Lunacy
Seeking the Threshold
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2018
- Messages
- 6,038
*winces* Do I even wanna know how much kit they're carrying?
That is awesome, but how is it supposed to work? is there an attached device that swaps mags for you?
I had a feelin' Jeffers would be the first to go. Had him labelled as "Carmine" in my head.
Corvus 501
Know what you're doing yet?
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2016
- Messages
- 108
You dump the mag like normal, then probably use a holster mounted autoloader to slot in a new magazine. Smart link guns canonical include round counters and auto ejection systems, so it makes sense that they would go for Equilibrium style autoloaders.
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2017
- Messages
- 18,121
More simply he uses his dead arm to hold the pistol between the forearm and his body, then uses his free hand to slap in the fresh magazine. The real problem would be trying to simultaneously hold the weapon and chamber the slide with only one working hand, but in the cyberpunk future he's got a neural link and a mechanical actuator built into the weapon to do that.
Placeholdername
Know what you're doing yet?
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2015
- Messages
- 175
Jarudazuigu
Sealed, for now
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2015
- Messages
- 20,193
And watched. I like your Shadyrun, Cliff.
*looks sadly at Unconquerable's not-canonicity and best D's lack of one liners*
Sadly, Canon of S-run sucks monkey balls like canon Cyberpunk.
Or more, because I sincerely doubt locals can run into space, like in Cyberpunk's semi-official continuation into Mecha genre, before Horrors come with new visit.
*looks sadly at Unconquerable's not-canonicity and best D's lack of one liners*
Sadly, Canon of S-run sucks monkey balls like canon Cyberpunk.
Or more, because I sincerely doubt locals can run into space, like in Cyberpunk's semi-official continuation into Mecha genre, before Horrors come with new visit.
StillReflections
Not too sore, are you?
- Joined
- Jan 21, 2016
- Messages
- 394
This looks really interesting, and a refreshing change of perspective from most of the Cyberpunk genre. Also, it's Cliff, so quality writing is the standard, which is great. Looking forward to seeing where this one goes.
Chapter 5
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2017
- Messages
- 18,121
Chicago Containment Zone, UCAS
February 22, 2058
"Did he have a family?" I asked the team as we sat outside our tent in the dark of late evening,
It had taken the repair techs only a couple of hours to replace the power supply and control chip that had shorted out, as well as swap out the severed carbon-fiber bundles in my arm. I'd still have to go get an overhaul done later, but the field repairs got my arm back up over 90% functionality and that was enough for now. The armorers swapped out and fitted a new forearm section to my hardsuit, restoring my NBC-seal integrity from the hole that the queen wasp had punched right through it. So I'd be ready to go right back out the next morning.
"According to his file, no." Sinclair sighed. "He was from Redding in California Free State - the northernmost city by the border with Tir Tairngire?" Sinclair kept explaining, referring to the high-tech elven separatist nation that had splintered away from the Native American Nations shortly after their own secession from the United States. "After the Tir's attempted invasion in 2053, he quit his city militia to go sign up with Ares instead. Never took home leave there, never wanted to speak about it. I guess he must have lost them."
"Christ, is there even anywhere to bury him?" I asked meaningfully.
"Orders are that all corpses reclaimed from the city are to be cremated." the Sergeant replied. "They'll send the ashes to whoever he designated they be sent to - if he designated anyone at all."
"Larry was not a 'plan ahead' type of guy." Nick agreed. "Heck, it took him almost as long to make Trooper First Class as you took to make sergeant. I think his life plan was to retire as a corporal."
"Hell, I don't even know where I'd have you send my ashes." I suddenly realized. "I mean, by default they'd go back home, but the only thing my dad would do with them would probably be to piss on 'em before dumping 'em in the landfill."
"Well, you can at least put in a note to have them sent to a CAS veteran's cemetery or something." Sinclair said helpfully. "And there's a monument in Detroit to all Knight Errant troopers killed in the line of duty. Jeffers' name will be recorded there, at least."
"Yeah, but the only ceremony he's going to get is the one we're having right now." Nick said mournfully, as he reached for the lone six-pack of beer that Rebecca had managed to scrounge somewhere.
"To Larry Jeffers." Sinclair said, raising his can. "And to all absent comrades."
"Absent comrades." we all clinked our cans together, and drank.
We spent a little while all telling our favorite funny story about the man - well, not me, as I'd only known him a few weeks - and then our informal wake filed an unspoken motion to adjourn. The Sergeant still had admin work to finish up, and Nick wanted to go try and get some Matrix time in the public-access tent to call his wife and kids, so Rebecca and I were left trying to find something to get our minds off recent events. So we took a stroll outside the Ares compound over to the nearest UCAS Army mess tent to find some guys to mingle with, both to see if we could score some late-evening rations and to pick up on the grapevine.
The hot topic of conversation in the mess tent was, of course, about the 'Beta' weapon that had let us so effectively rip the guts out of the bugs. Because whatever it had been, it was clearly a runaway success, but there still wasn't the slightest bit of official guidance as to what the heck it was. So speculation was flying fast and furious, and we pitched our thoughts into the bull session as readily as ayone else.
Given that a lot of bugs had clearly been exposed to it but there were still the occasional full-strength holdouts like the wasp queen we'd run into, it visibly wasn't some kind of wide-area ritual magic because that would have globally covered everywhere in the Zone without exception. And a magical working with that kind of power and area coverage was entirely possible, as the entire world had learned when the combined power of what had to have been every shaman in the Native American tribes had fired up the Great Ghost Dance back in 2017 and smashed the US Army, at that time still the most powerful military force in the world, so hard that most of the western half of this continent was now called the 'Native American Nations' and the old United States had balkanized harder than the old Soviet Union right after the Cold War. Heck, my home nation of the CAS hadn't even seceded from the UCAS until shortly after the NAN had broken away.
Be that as it may, the lead competing theory that it was some kind of chemical agent that somehow suppressed magic and/or weakened magical creatures not only was against everything commonly understood about science and magic, but also potentially very worrying in a general sense. After all, if they'd come up with something that could weaken or kill all the mages and spirits and whatever in an area without touching anyone else, then I could think of a whole lot of people who would gladly dust every city on the continent with it and call it a job well done. Hell, I'd grown up in a town full of them.
I really, really hoped that this stuff was only insect-spirit specific, and/or that Ares was keeping a tighter lock on the supply of whatever-this-was than they already kept on the nuclear warheads. But at least the metahuman troops in the city were staying as healthy as everybody else was, even if actual practitioners of magic were being ordered to keep clear.
At least we had that.
Chicago Containment Zone, UCAS
February 24, 2058
They didn't need any more strategic recon on D Plus One, so the Rapid-Response teams had spent that day being retasked to ride along on the medevac choppers instead. The airspace was relatively clear after the massive bombing campaigns of the first day of ops and a whole lot of dead wasps, so the helos were back in action.
Not that any of us were medtechs, but we did have basic combat lifesaver training and could slap on a trauma patch and stabilize someone long enough to get him back to an aid station. And while there weren't too many other units getting stuck in deeply enough to need people like us to come get them out, there were always a few unlucky bastards who drew the low card even during the most one-sided war. We'd found that for ourselves on the first day.
So this morning, at the start of D Plus Two of Operation Extermination, our mission profile changed yet again. The full-on "bughouse swarm" that Command had been hoping to provoke had finally happened late yesterday, but by that point Beta had visibly ripped the guts out of them. Many of them were already staggering as they emerged, half-dead before they even took a single bullet. Even the larger queens were going down to levels of firepower that they'd have contemptuously ignored so much as a week ago. Whatever Beta was it was apparently heavier-than-air, because the wasp nests up high in the tall buildings were exposed less and so they were the toughest holdouts. However, wasps trying to fight out in the open air above the city were also vulnerable to aircraft, and so the Dragon gunships - both ours and the UCAS' - had moved in with homing missiles and rotary autocannons to shred the buzzing bastards on the wing. The bugs had finally come out for series of large set-piece battles in the open, on our terms and with our secret weapon having already critically weakened them. And so they'd died... well, like bugs.
So now came the tedious part - with the vast majority of the bugs did, it was time to smoke out the few that had decided to try going to ground and waiting it out, with an entire abandoned city for them to be hiding in. Rumor drifting down from the field HQ was that a lot of the Ares contingent was already preparing to pack up and move out to new contracts in a week or two, because soon enough the parts of the operation that needed high-priced specialists like us would be done and the tons of routine, boring spadework would be up to the UCAS military to finish. So the Army guys were already looking forwards to weeks of tedious house-to-house clearing procedures, while we were found new taskings intended to maximize the use they could get out of us as we drew to the end of our tour here. Such as today's mission, which was a clear-recapture-and-secure of a specific high-value structure that had been lost to hostile action over two years ago.
The entirety of Bravo Company was rolling on this, so Lt. Menendez' role was reduced to passing down orders from the Captain as he called the shots from a headquarters track parked out in front in the street. The op schedule for this one was a literal flowchart, fully detailed and with lists of specific objectives, resources, and intel caches that they hoped to find and recover.
"Right now they're busy liberating an entire city from the bugs, and we're sent here to do industrial espionage." Rebecca swore disgustedly.
"To be fair, recapturing potentially compromised structures is a valid Rapid-Response mission. And our contract with the UCAS allows us full discretion to enter and secure any insect-compromised structure in the Containment Zone not actively in the possession of friendly forces, which this is." The Sergeant tried to be reasonable, though my sentiments were more with Rebecca.
When the Alamos 20k terrorists had destroyed the old Sears Tower back in 2039, the old downtown Loop had been devastated. The several-block area the Sears Tower had collapsed onto were now known as the Shattergraves, and they'd been infamous as a haunted area full of hostile spirits and the worst sorts of urban predators - both two-legged and otherwise - even before the arrival of the bugs. Even the parts of the onetime Chicago Loop had been abandoned as being too close to the Shattergraves and had been verging on becoming as lawless and devastated a territory as the famous Seattle Barrens, while the financial and corporate center of Chicago had moved south across the Chicago River into what had at onetime been the northernmost part of the old South Side and was now simply referred to as the Core.
And standing at the very heart of the Core was the 200+ stories of the Truman Tower, the tallest structure in Chicago. Truman Technologies had been 'only' a single-A megacorporation, not even extraterritorial, but they'd still been the foremost power in Chicago prior to the eruption of the Bug City crisis. When Artificial Sensory Induction Systems Technology, or ASIST, had been invented back in 2018 it had been in the R&D lab of a Truman subsidiary and they'd had full ownership of the rights since the beginning. ASIST allowed sensory impressions to be directly streamed into a computer even as they were simultaneously experienced by a metahuman's nervous system, where they could then be digitally recorded, or even edited, and then played back into another metahuman's brain where he would experience a full-sensory hallucination or waking dream of everything the original subject had perceived. It was the core technology underlaying both simsense entertainment and all forms of direct mind-machine neural interface, from cyberdecks to smartgun links to skillwires and datajacks.
And even though a AAA megacorp like Ares or Fuchi could have bought and sold a dozen subsidiaries the size of Truman Technologies before breakfast every day and twice on Sundays, even after their patent expired their historical advantage and proprietary refinements had still kept them at the leading edge of ASIST research. While they didn't dare to directly compete with any of the megas, they'd still made a very good thing at licensing their applications and refinements to larger megacorps for incorporation into their own product lines. They'd also had their homegrown media-entertainment empire via their founding and ownership of several of the leading simsense production studios, even to the point of having created their own little 'Hollywood East' among the Chicago Westside.
But the coming of the Bug City crisis had wrecked all that. While old Daniel Truman and most of his family had successfully evacuated the city immediately after the Cermak Blast and days before the Wall first went up, most of the Truman facilities and personnel in the city had been left behind. The old Hollywood had gotten a revival as new simsense production giants arose there out of old studios, their onetime rivals having been gone, and all of Truman's R&D facilities in Chicago had lain open for the taking. One of the most prosperous source of contracts for shadowrunners willing to slip the Wall and brave the Containment Zone had been for in-and-out raids on Truman research sites, hoping to score a new prototype or an R&D data cache for either Truman's own recovery or for the benefit of any number of corporate rivals.
And then Operation Extermination had launched and the UCAS had hired Knight Errant to support its own efforts at clearing the CZ, meaning that we could now breach and clear any building in the Containment Zone not currently being actively occupied by its legitimate owners or their designated agents - and to do so legally. Meaning that instead of hiring 'runners to try and slip the CZ to steal the paydata in Truman's corporate databanks, Ares could now just boot the door and go in to take it. Well, technically it was still illegal for Knight Errant to actually loot the building while we were in the process of saving it... but it's not as if there were anyone else riding along today to actually see us doing it.
So Bravo Company, 6th Rapid Response Battalion, was now taking time out in the early days of the grand and glorious effort to recapture a fallen city from extradimensional insect monsters to instead clear out enough of another corporation's HQ building from said monsters to allow the "retrieval teams" we were clearing the way for to come in and swipe anything still worth stealing. While the UCAS government, and by extension Truman Technologies, was actually paying us for the privilege of our doing it.
Yeah, even the Sergeant - who was as loyal a company man as you could ever find - couldn't make himself sound entirely sincere when he talked about the legitimacy and necessity of our mission today.
Given the height of the Truman Tower, and the fact that the elevators weren't entirely trustworthy yet, 1st Platoon had been set up for a helicopter insertion on old man Truman's personal landing pad while the rest of Bravo Company was busy waiting for us to finish up before moving in to secure the ground floors. Our mission was to clear out any remaining wasp nests - the bastards loved the tops of high towers - and then secure the CEO's penthouse and the high-end executive offices, and hopefully find any still-working computer systems or data caches that would give us the security overrides for what automated tower defense systems were still working. We had a pair of Dragon gunships escorting our Skyhawks that had already used their nose turrets to take out the air-defense emplacements around the Truman Tower's top floors from stand-off distance, because while they clearly didn't have any of the operators left in the building to use them the automated point-defense mode might still have been working and it was simpler to just autocannon the gun mounts from outside their automatic engagement range than find out the hard way.
There had indeed been a fairly large wasp nest set up in the spacious living atrium of the penthouse suite, but they'd apparently been exposed to Beta because all we had to do in the way of clean-up was push their corpses off of the balcony. After finishing a careful sweep for any dormant bugs, as well as any still-working security systems that had somehow survived the intervening several years and the wasps tearing their way in the side of the building to set up a nest here, we then split up into teams and began the search.
"Team Three, you're still short a man so you hold here and secure the penthouse." the Lieutenant ordered us as he prepared to lead the other teams down to the executive office levels right beneath us.
"Do you want us to continue searching here for any of the secondary objectives, sir?" Sergeant Sinclair asked him.
"You are aware that while a certain amount of 'shrinkage' could be overlooked elsewhere in the building, Mr. Truman almost certainly remembers exactly what he left behind?" the Lieutenant curled his lip scornfully, and we all bristled at the implication.
"They were in a hurry, Lieutenant." Rebecca said tonelessly. "They may not have properly secured or purged their datasystems."
"I doubt that Mr. Truman or his staff were that careless, but yes, go ahead and look." he conceded, and then the rest of the platoon headed off and we got to work.
"Damn, so this is how the super rich live." Nick said wonderingly. Because now that we were stopping to actually look at the furniture, the Lieutenant's brief suspicion that we'd been thinking about a looting run didn't quite look so crazy. Every single piece here looked to cost more nuyen then the furniture in the house I'd grown up had cost when all put together, and a few of the richer items in here might well have been able to buy the house. Full-on Dir-X simsense, the uncompressed kind normally used only for studio masters, in every room's entertainment unit. Genuine Italian marble countertops and gold-plated faucets. Antique wood furniture, fancy paintings, precious sculptures - including one that Rebecca recognized as a unique treasure that had disappeared from the old Chicago Art Institute after the Alamos 20k incident had required the building to be abandoned. Even his daughter's bedroom had had tens of thousands of nuyen in designer clothes and personal electronics just tossed around carelessly, right next to her teeny-bopper holo-posters and stuffed animal collection. It was like a visit into another world, one that you normally only saw glimpses of in simsense entertainments about high-end corporate execs and their personal soap operas. We actually took some time out just to stand and wallow amongst it all, and even I was feeling a temptation to just say 'hell with it' and pocket a gold bracelet or something, before I shook it off and got back to work.
"All right, Mr. Truman himself will of course have a personal study but he almost certainly won't have done any actual work in it." Sinclair said thoughtfully. "His corporate office is only several floors below us, and if he has any real work to do he'd just take his personal elevator right down. When you're the CEO you get to set your own hours. So there almost certainly wouldn't be anything in the local buffers of his desk computer up here, because he would hardly ever need it. And that means we're looking for a smaller office, or possibly even just a desk in the corner, and its desk computer."
"His executive assistant's." I followed along. "Because that gal - or guy - is going to be expected to stay on top of the boss's inbox and email queue even in the late evening and on weekends, and Mr. Truman isn't going to wait for them to go all the way downstairs and find a work terminal to log into when he wants it checked now and not five minutes from now."
"Sounds like a plan." Rebecca agreed, and after a short search we did indeed find a small room, barely above cubicle sized, directly adjacent to Truman's study that had a notably less fancy (even if it was still very expensive by our standards) desk than the big antique mahogany showpiece the boss had used. Hanna Ujlkanen, Special Assistant to the CEO said the antique brass nameplate on her desk. Nodding at this confirmation of the Sergeant's reasoning Rebecca got out her deck, jacked herself into the secure cyberterminal built into the desktop, and got to work.
"Right, we've still got some battery power off the emergency reserves... okay, Truman didn't skimp on her desktop but nobody's been doing any security software patches on this unit since '55 so even a basic utility can crack that passcode now..." Rebecca muttered to herself. "This isn't a hot cyberdeck like a high-end 'runner or one of the Matrix Security specialists would have, just a basic field model, so I'm not even going to try pushing up from here to tickle the corporate datacores directly... plus, it doesn't feel like the downstairs crew has finished restoring power to the main server banks yet."
"Anything in the desktop unit itself?" Sinclair asked professionally.
"Secure file storage module, some fairly hefty encryption on it." she said. "Probably where the classified corporate documentation is hiding. Decrypt utility is working on it.." A corner of her lip curled scornfully. "Last active login on this terminal is October 10th, 2055."
"That's a week and a half since the Cermak Blast." I said. "Almost a full week since after the Wall went up. They left her behind in here? And she still kept coming to work for that long?"
"She was probably afraid to leave the Tower until the food started running out and she had to." Sinclair nodded grimly.
"There's a lot of routine email traffic, her appointments calendar, file notes, journal..." Rebecca said. "Should I be reviewing any of this stuff, or should we leave that for the S-2 guys?"
"Do a keyword search." Sinclair said after a brief pause for thought. "Anything related to insect spirits or Ares corporate business, things we can claim as relevant to our mission here."
"Okay- huh." Rebecca blinked. "And as soon as I put that in I got a whole cluster of hits. Get this, boss. Several days before that tacnuke went off in the Cermak hive and kick-started this whole mess, Mr Truman's son-" She chuckled briefly. "Who was also named Mitchell, as it happens."
"You'd think if I'd grown up in a place this fancy, I'd have bothered to remember it." I joshed back, to the brief chuckles of everyone.
"In any event, young Mitchell Truman was already doing the teenaged rebellion thing. Moving out of the Tower to set up his own place, partying, slotting chips, dating girls his parents didn't approve of, all the usual symptoms of affluenza." She shrugged. "About a week before the Cermak incident he up and vanished with his latest girl, a Linda Hayward. They didn't miss him until he didn't show up for his father's birthday party several days after he'd gone. several days' worth of unanswered messages in the queue, all that. Truman's corporate security people went through his son's apartment and found no signs of forced entry or abduction, but his not returning to the apartment for several days had them concerned for his welfare."
"Meaning they were afraid he'd gone into the wrong bar with his latest squeeze from off the streets and gotten himself geeked before his DocWagon bracelet could guide in a medevac, or else had fried his brains with a bad chip and was still comatose in the back of some crack house somewhere." I rolled my eyes.
"So after a couple more days' worth of effort by his security people turned up no traces, Mr. Truman had his assistant go and hire a high-end private investigator - a retired UCAS FBI agent and hermetic mage called Kyle Teller. And this is where the story gets weird, because there are two search terms all over the files that Ms. Ujlkanen had been keeping about the case." Rebecca opened her eyes and looked up at us gravely. "Apparently, Linda Hayward had actually been an insect spirit, a sleeper agent in human form. And they'd sent her as a honeypot to hook in Mitchell Truman and try to use him as a possession victim to infiltrate the most powerful and influential family in Chicago."
"Christ." Nick swore. "You're telling us that Truman's kid was bugged?"
"Let me tell it in order." Rebecca insisted. "Teller tried an attempt to locate Mitchell with ritual magic but it failed, as if Mitchell Truman had been hidden behind powerful astral warding. That definitely ramped up suspicions, but before Teller could do more than begin to trace the Hayward connection Mitchell Truman turned up in the emergency room of HW University hospital. At that time, all they'd known is that he'd been picked up by Eagle Security while wandering naked and delirious on the streets, and that something had almost entirely burned out his brain. Even astral scans didn't register anything. Daniel Truman had his son transferred to a private care facility and then gave Mr. Teller a new job - find out what had happened to Mitchell and who was responsible. So Teller got back to tracing the mysterious Linda Hayward, and soon enough her trail ran right back to remnants of the Universal Brotherhood. And that's when he found out about the attempted possession that Mitchell Truman had just barely escaped when their ritual glitched."
"The Universal Brotherhood? That big charity organization, like a privatized version of the old United Way, that came out of nowhere about ten years ago?" Sinclair asked to confirm. "And that had turned out to be a major front for insect spirits trying a slow, covert possession and infiltration strategy among all walks of life until the UCAS and Ares became aware of them in early '55?" It was typical of him that he'd make sure to recap all the relevant data rather than assume we already knew it, if it hadn't already been brought up specifically.
"The very same." Rebecca said, looking up at us interestingly. "And that's where we hit the second search term. Because according to the reports Teller was making to his client, when tracing the Hayward connection back to the Universal Brotherhood holdouts in Chicago he soon enough ran into a Knight Errant FireWatch team doing their own covert investigation back from UB traces elsewhere that had led them to Chicago." She looked at us meaningfully. "A team headed by a Captain Anne Ravenheart."
"Oh drek." I swore. "If those spooks wanted to make damn sure we had massive amnesia about anything Ravenheart might have told us just from bumping into her, what would they do if they knew we had this?"
"We have to turn this in." Sinclair insisted. "Knight Errant would already know that Captain Ravenheart worked with this Teller and who had hired him - this was before the Containment Zone went up, so she'd still have been making mission reports. And the Lieutenant knows we were searching here."
"Yeah, but he doesn't know if we found anything." I insisted. "Rebecca dumps that database, then frags the desktop, then we rip that computer's hard drive out and say that Truman's people must have taken it with them when they left. Security conscious and all that."
"I'm with him, Sergeant." Nick said. "Those spooks didn't seem like they were hoping we'd found something, but like they were really hoping we hadn't."
"But this could be-" Sinclair began, and stopped. Yeah, corporate loyalist or not, even he couldn't kid himself about how ruthless the counter-intel spooks had come across in our one brief encounter with them. "Rebecca, you said that you were decrypting a secure file storage partition on that system. Was that partition protected by a data bomb?"
"Yes." she nodded. "You want me to deliberately trip the failsafes?"
"Exactly." Sinclair said. "If we claim that that computer was gone when we got here, then forensic evidence could potentially prove us wrong. And the Lieutenant already knows we were searching the datasystems in the penthouse. So we tell them that we found this system and tried to crack it - which is the truth - but the security software was better than our technician was and the whole unit wiped itself before we could recover anything."
"Before you wipe it, was there anything else in there relevant to this whole mess? I know we don't want to get into this, but I also want to know if we're keeping ourselves oblivious to any immediate danger." I thought out loud.
"Not related to this." Rebecca replied. "The last report from Teller that Ms. Ujlkanen wrote is dated a couple days before the Cermak Blast. When Teller started getting close to the end of the string he apparently didn't have much time to report in regularly. And... okay." Rebecca trailed off, closing her eyes again. "Give me a minute to set this up as carefully as I can, so even a deep data recovery on the physical drive doesn't turn up any suspicious traces... and, done." The cyberterminal's display winked out and started displaying the red X that indicated a bricked unit. "System is fragged."
"Good." Sinclair exhaled in relief. "Then hopefully we can finally put this all behind us."
February 25, 2058
We spent the night in Truman Tower, but having confirmed that the building was mostly bug-free the next day they had us turn over our "recovery" mission to a dedicated salvage team and their own security detachments while they sent us back to more standard combat actions.
As it happened, First Platoon's new job today was to do cleanup on a group we'd run into before - the Nasty Grrls gang. Apparently they'd claimed about two square blocks of territory to the west of Goose Island. We could actually have hit their eastern edge with our sniper rifles from our rooftop vantage point when we'd did the anti-piracy op, not that we'd known it then. Which would mean that they'd been operating quite a ways away from their usual patch when we'd they'd hit us during that extraction op on my first night in the Zone, but as we'd seen at the time someone had been paying them very generously in gear and favors to do so.
So given how tough a fight those girls had given our fire team that night, as well as the prospect of taking on a gang's claimed territory when they'd clearly been receiving heavy weapons shipments from another corp in return for services rendered, all of Bravo Company was tasked for the operation.
Although we were wired pretty high, having remembered how tough the Nasty Grrls had been when our fire-team had run into them before, the remnants of the gang we hit surprised us by folding like a cheap accordion. The main benefit of the several skirmishes we had was giving Rebecca a chance to plausibly claim that a bullet had hit and wrecked her cyberdeck, freeing us from the worry that a dedicated forensic examination of her deck could still reveal traces of what we'd actually done and hadn't done to that revealing desktop datastore in Truman Tower. But I'd been happy to pick up one of the fallen Grrls' guns and stage a 'lucky hit' on her deck from about twenty feet away, so we wouldn't even have suspicious powder burns on the thing's hide, and that took care of that.
And then the platoon's fire teams all finished converging on their central building, and we found out why the gang had seemed so hollowed out.
The Nasty Grrls had had an 'outer' and an 'inner' component to the gang. The outers were Zone dwellers - largely attractive women - who met the gang's standards and were willing to fight and kill for the Nasty Grrls while they each waited their turn for inner circle recruitment.
But the inner circle of the gang had been insect spirits. Specifically, they'd been mantid spirits. The mystery of their superhuman strength, speed, and immunity to pain that we'd seen that night, as well some of their 'enhanced' appearance, was now explained. They'd been bug hosts all along, the subtle "good merge" kind of possession that Captain Ravenheart had told us about. The outer circle of the gang had been given cosmetic surgery or spell-locked illusions to enhance their beauty not just as a vanity and intimidation feature of their gang colors but as a shell game to hide the presence of the genuine superhuman predators lurking among them, whose spirit-enhanced beauty was a part of their hunting toolkit. After all, the best way to hide red fish was in a tank of other red fish.
"Holy shit." Nick said as we stood in what appeared to be an improvised basement bomb shelter ooking over the corpses of several fallen 'inner circle' Grrls, them having coughed up and sweated green blood and foam in their death throes. "There isn't a mark on them. No punctures, no trauma. They just... died."
"They didn't die easy, either." I said, pointing at the claw marks in the walls of the room and the wrecked furniture. "Looks like a mantis spirit in bug form was busy having convulsions in here, even if they reverted to humanshape when they finally stopped moving."
Rebecca looked up from where she'd been working on a portable cyberterminal one of the Grrls had had out on a nearby desk. "This one spent their last day recording some observations about what was happening to them. They must have died before they had a chance to transmit them to anyone, though."
"Or they couldn't reach a Matrix hardline." Sinclair said. "After all, it'd be hard to find one of those still working in the Containment Zone."
"No, they had a hookup here to the pirate Matrix feed that that NooseNet crew was running for CZ dwellers." Rebecca corrected him. "The other gangs thought the Nasty Grrls were human, remember? They had access to what services and trade the Zone barter economy was still offering."
"Maybe they didn't think there were any other bugs left to get their message out to." I wondered out loud.
"That's probably it." Rebecca said somberly. "Because according to this journal, they started feeling weaker the day Operation Extermination launched. For the first twelve, eighteen hours it was apparently barely perceptible, but then the phenomenon accelerated."
"What phenomenon? What the hell does something like this?" Nick pressed.
"Their magic... faded away." Rebecca shrugged. "This was a journal written by an alien creature that was dying from something it could barely perceive and didn't understand, so it's really not specific. But they described it as... fever, weakness, and a constant drain on their magic. It spread from one to another, until it got them all."
"But spirits are made out of magic." I replied. "Even ones that are merged with flesh, like flesh-form bugs. If their magic was being drained somehow, then their life would be drained along with it."
"And so it was." Rebecca nodded.
"They're describing some kind of manavore." Sinclair tried to reason out loud. "Some kind of magic-suppressing substance-"
"That replicates?" I countered. "This journal entry right here says that it started with just a couple of them, then spread to the others. And the onset of symptoms wasn't all at once, but started slow and then grew stronger as the victim's metabolism grew weaker. That's not the behavior of a chemical agent. That's a bioweapon."
Horrific revelations aside, the op to reclaim the Nasty Grrls territory had gone without a hitch. Beta had killed every insect spirit it had infected. While there were undoubtedly a statistical fraction of surviving bugs still laying low out there in the CZ - not even the most virulent superplague infected everyone in a hot zone, there were always a few percent of people who simply never got exposed in the first place - none of the Nasty Grrls' leadership had been in that category. Enough of them been exposed in the first wave that it had spread all throughout their gang before they'd known what was going on, and that was all she wrote.
And with their organizing cadre all struck down by a mysterious horror the outer echelon of still-human gangers, the dupes and camouflage that the Nasty Grrls had used to help hide their true nature as bugs, had all scattered to the four winds before we'd even gotten there. The regular Zone inhabitants who'd lived in the Grrls' turf as their subjects, paying tribute and labor in return for gang protection, were still hunkered down helplessly in their tenements when we arrived and had been entirely willing to take the UCAS Army's evacuation assistance instead, and so after we finished retaking and clearing the territory Bravo Company was broken back up into operating platoons and sent back to work doing recon and sweeps.
We'd turned all the Nasty Grrls' final logs and journals in to Command as per regs, as that kind of stuff was useful intel to the planning types. The degree of interest the intel guys back on the staff showed in it only confirmed our suspicions that 'Beta' was indeed an Ares bio-weapon - after all, what better field test reports could you get about your new wonder-weapon than to read the dying journal entries of the enemies it was killing? And of course we'd read all the journals ourselves first before turning them in. It's not as if dying bugs had had time to write an entire novel. And while none of us had shed a tear for the bugs, we'd all been horrified at the larger implications.
Because if 'Beta' was actually a self-replicating bioweapon of some kind that fed off of the life force of astral entities, then it would be inescapably fatal to any dual-natured entity that was exposed to it. Even magicians and adepts only had an astral presence when they were actively interacting with the astral plane - if they were astrally projecting or perceiving, or in the midst of casting a spell. Otherwise, they were as mundane as I or any of the team was.
But a dual-natured person or creative was precisely that - simultaneously present on both the physical and the astral plane as their natural state of existence. On the plus side this let them permanently perceiving astral energies and auras without even needing to make any effort, as well as often coming with access to innate magical abilities such as a shapeshifter's - what prior mythology would have called a were-creature - ability to take animal form, or a devil rat's supernatural immunity to poisons and diseases and radiation, or a leviathan's impossible size and strength in defiance of the biological square-cube law. Or a flesh-form insect spirit's permanent ongoing possession of a host body.
But on the minus side, this would mean that if something dual-natured was exposed to Beta, then they could not escape it. A magician could deliberately go dark, not use any magical powers or perform any kind of astral interaction, and hope to keep the infection from spreading or progressing. But any magical being - whether a spirit, or a dragon, or a shapeshifter, or anything - that was exposed to this virus couldn't damp down, couldn't withdraw their natural extension into astral space, couldn't stop it from draining away their magic and their life force until it killed them.
Rebecca managed to hit the outlaw 'NooseNet' matrix subnet to retrieve photographs that had been taken and posted by several Zone dwellers, who were busy trying to get them out to some indie trid station or media pirate willing to broadcast them in defiance of the UCAS and corporate censorship that was very carefully keeping anything like this off the main Matrix feeds. And what we saw made me feel sick.
The ghouls of the Cabrini Refuge and the surrounding 'Ghoultown' had been wiped out to a man. Like any other infectee of Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus, the transformation had made them magical and dual-natured beings. Given that ghouls had a supernatural immunity to all mundane pathogens, they would have been even more open out exposing themselves to potential biohazards than any other Zone Dweller would have. And once Beta had gotten loose in their population, it had gone through them like a berserk velociraptor through a petting zoo.
The photographs of dead ghouls lying all over the floor in what had been their homes and shelters, all dead without a mark on them, reminded us of atrocity footage from the Euro Wars. Specifically, from incidents where the Second Ottoman Jihad guys had hit civilian populations with nerve gas. We'd seen similar scenes with our own two eyes involving dead bugs, but those were bugs - even the ones that looked human. But even if not legally recognized as such, ghouls had still been people and not bugs. We'd even met some of them just a little while ago. They'd volunteered themselves unasked to cover our backs while we took care of business despite their mistrust and fear that one day the UCAS and Ares would come back to 'finish the job' that the mobs that had burnt them out after the UCAS' brief flirtation with legalizing the status of ghouls had failed.
And as it turned out, they'd been right to fear that all along.
Because when Damien Knight or Roger Soaring Owl had been handed this 'Beta' stuff by an Ares R&D team, when they'd seen a chance to turn the tide in the Bug City crisis and wipe out all the bugs at the price of collateral'ing every other magical creature in the zone... apparently they'd run the numbers and liked what they saw. Billions of nuyen worth of real estate and asset, hundreds of thousands of people, all reclaimed after the world had written them off as lost. And all it had taken was a willingness to sacrifice a few thousand lives. Hey, why not? I'm sure some suit or other had said while stuffing his face with caviar. It's not as if they were real people anyway.
"My God?" the Sergeant asked, his voice low and shaking. "What have they done?"
Author's Note: Sorry about the delay getting this chapter out, but I had to drive to the VA hospital twice in the past two days to go take care of admin stuff. Arguing with the benefits people is always a PITA, and it's a relatively long drive, so, needed to wait until I had time to refocus and create.
Strain-III Beta of the astral bacteria series is entirely canon, as was Operation Extermination, and this is precisely what they did at the end of the Bug City arc. So yeah. We've seen one side of life as a corporate soldier, now we begin to see the other sides. I actually changed some details - the size of the Truman Tower (it is implausibly taller in canon, seriously, get a sense of scale, Shadowrun writers), the exact spread of the bacteria, etc, etc. - but for all the good parts, no tabletop RPG setting ever had worldbuilding that couldn't still use a little tightening up in post-production.
For those expecting a giant glorious bug war and not getting it, the story was never going to be about giant glorious battle scenes. It's largely the personal journey of several people, the sort of people who in normal Shadowrun campaign would exist as faceless NPC stat blocks to roll for initiative and then get shot and die by your elite shadowrunning teams. As the story goes along, we shall see if they can change and become something more... or if they just become yet another story of how cyberpunk worlds are cruel and life is cheap.
Oh yes, and there's also that techno-thriller plot that keeps lurking around the background. Definitely gotta still work on that. *g*
February 22, 2058
"Did he have a family?" I asked the team as we sat outside our tent in the dark of late evening,
It had taken the repair techs only a couple of hours to replace the power supply and control chip that had shorted out, as well as swap out the severed carbon-fiber bundles in my arm. I'd still have to go get an overhaul done later, but the field repairs got my arm back up over 90% functionality and that was enough for now. The armorers swapped out and fitted a new forearm section to my hardsuit, restoring my NBC-seal integrity from the hole that the queen wasp had punched right through it. So I'd be ready to go right back out the next morning.
"According to his file, no." Sinclair sighed. "He was from Redding in California Free State - the northernmost city by the border with Tir Tairngire?" Sinclair kept explaining, referring to the high-tech elven separatist nation that had splintered away from the Native American Nations shortly after their own secession from the United States. "After the Tir's attempted invasion in 2053, he quit his city militia to go sign up with Ares instead. Never took home leave there, never wanted to speak about it. I guess he must have lost them."
"Christ, is there even anywhere to bury him?" I asked meaningfully.
"Orders are that all corpses reclaimed from the city are to be cremated." the Sergeant replied. "They'll send the ashes to whoever he designated they be sent to - if he designated anyone at all."
"Larry was not a 'plan ahead' type of guy." Nick agreed. "Heck, it took him almost as long to make Trooper First Class as you took to make sergeant. I think his life plan was to retire as a corporal."
"Hell, I don't even know where I'd have you send my ashes." I suddenly realized. "I mean, by default they'd go back home, but the only thing my dad would do with them would probably be to piss on 'em before dumping 'em in the landfill."
"Well, you can at least put in a note to have them sent to a CAS veteran's cemetery or something." Sinclair said helpfully. "And there's a monument in Detroit to all Knight Errant troopers killed in the line of duty. Jeffers' name will be recorded there, at least."
"Yeah, but the only ceremony he's going to get is the one we're having right now." Nick said mournfully, as he reached for the lone six-pack of beer that Rebecca had managed to scrounge somewhere.
"To Larry Jeffers." Sinclair said, raising his can. "And to all absent comrades."
"Absent comrades." we all clinked our cans together, and drank.
We spent a little while all telling our favorite funny story about the man - well, not me, as I'd only known him a few weeks - and then our informal wake filed an unspoken motion to adjourn. The Sergeant still had admin work to finish up, and Nick wanted to go try and get some Matrix time in the public-access tent to call his wife and kids, so Rebecca and I were left trying to find something to get our minds off recent events. So we took a stroll outside the Ares compound over to the nearest UCAS Army mess tent to find some guys to mingle with, both to see if we could score some late-evening rations and to pick up on the grapevine.
The hot topic of conversation in the mess tent was, of course, about the 'Beta' weapon that had let us so effectively rip the guts out of the bugs. Because whatever it had been, it was clearly a runaway success, but there still wasn't the slightest bit of official guidance as to what the heck it was. So speculation was flying fast and furious, and we pitched our thoughts into the bull session as readily as ayone else.
Given that a lot of bugs had clearly been exposed to it but there were still the occasional full-strength holdouts like the wasp queen we'd run into, it visibly wasn't some kind of wide-area ritual magic because that would have globally covered everywhere in the Zone without exception. And a magical working with that kind of power and area coverage was entirely possible, as the entire world had learned when the combined power of what had to have been every shaman in the Native American tribes had fired up the Great Ghost Dance back in 2017 and smashed the US Army, at that time still the most powerful military force in the world, so hard that most of the western half of this continent was now called the 'Native American Nations' and the old United States had balkanized harder than the old Soviet Union right after the Cold War. Heck, my home nation of the CAS hadn't even seceded from the UCAS until shortly after the NAN had broken away.
Be that as it may, the lead competing theory that it was some kind of chemical agent that somehow suppressed magic and/or weakened magical creatures not only was against everything commonly understood about science and magic, but also potentially very worrying in a general sense. After all, if they'd come up with something that could weaken or kill all the mages and spirits and whatever in an area without touching anyone else, then I could think of a whole lot of people who would gladly dust every city on the continent with it and call it a job well done. Hell, I'd grown up in a town full of them.
I really, really hoped that this stuff was only insect-spirit specific, and/or that Ares was keeping a tighter lock on the supply of whatever-this-was than they already kept on the nuclear warheads. But at least the metahuman troops in the city were staying as healthy as everybody else was, even if actual practitioners of magic were being ordered to keep clear.
At least we had that.
* * * * *
Chicago Containment Zone, UCAS
February 24, 2058
They didn't need any more strategic recon on D Plus One, so the Rapid-Response teams had spent that day being retasked to ride along on the medevac choppers instead. The airspace was relatively clear after the massive bombing campaigns of the first day of ops and a whole lot of dead wasps, so the helos were back in action.
Not that any of us were medtechs, but we did have basic combat lifesaver training and could slap on a trauma patch and stabilize someone long enough to get him back to an aid station. And while there weren't too many other units getting stuck in deeply enough to need people like us to come get them out, there were always a few unlucky bastards who drew the low card even during the most one-sided war. We'd found that for ourselves on the first day.
So this morning, at the start of D Plus Two of Operation Extermination, our mission profile changed yet again. The full-on "bughouse swarm" that Command had been hoping to provoke had finally happened late yesterday, but by that point Beta had visibly ripped the guts out of them. Many of them were already staggering as they emerged, half-dead before they even took a single bullet. Even the larger queens were going down to levels of firepower that they'd have contemptuously ignored so much as a week ago. Whatever Beta was it was apparently heavier-than-air, because the wasp nests up high in the tall buildings were exposed less and so they were the toughest holdouts. However, wasps trying to fight out in the open air above the city were also vulnerable to aircraft, and so the Dragon gunships - both ours and the UCAS' - had moved in with homing missiles and rotary autocannons to shred the buzzing bastards on the wing. The bugs had finally come out for series of large set-piece battles in the open, on our terms and with our secret weapon having already critically weakened them. And so they'd died... well, like bugs.
So now came the tedious part - with the vast majority of the bugs did, it was time to smoke out the few that had decided to try going to ground and waiting it out, with an entire abandoned city for them to be hiding in. Rumor drifting down from the field HQ was that a lot of the Ares contingent was already preparing to pack up and move out to new contracts in a week or two, because soon enough the parts of the operation that needed high-priced specialists like us would be done and the tons of routine, boring spadework would be up to the UCAS military to finish. So the Army guys were already looking forwards to weeks of tedious house-to-house clearing procedures, while we were found new taskings intended to maximize the use they could get out of us as we drew to the end of our tour here. Such as today's mission, which was a clear-recapture-and-secure of a specific high-value structure that had been lost to hostile action over two years ago.
The entirety of Bravo Company was rolling on this, so Lt. Menendez' role was reduced to passing down orders from the Captain as he called the shots from a headquarters track parked out in front in the street. The op schedule for this one was a literal flowchart, fully detailed and with lists of specific objectives, resources, and intel caches that they hoped to find and recover.
"Right now they're busy liberating an entire city from the bugs, and we're sent here to do industrial espionage." Rebecca swore disgustedly.
"To be fair, recapturing potentially compromised structures is a valid Rapid-Response mission. And our contract with the UCAS allows us full discretion to enter and secure any insect-compromised structure in the Containment Zone not actively in the possession of friendly forces, which this is." The Sergeant tried to be reasonable, though my sentiments were more with Rebecca.
When the Alamos 20k terrorists had destroyed the old Sears Tower back in 2039, the old downtown Loop had been devastated. The several-block area the Sears Tower had collapsed onto were now known as the Shattergraves, and they'd been infamous as a haunted area full of hostile spirits and the worst sorts of urban predators - both two-legged and otherwise - even before the arrival of the bugs. Even the parts of the onetime Chicago Loop had been abandoned as being too close to the Shattergraves and had been verging on becoming as lawless and devastated a territory as the famous Seattle Barrens, while the financial and corporate center of Chicago had moved south across the Chicago River into what had at onetime been the northernmost part of the old South Side and was now simply referred to as the Core.
And standing at the very heart of the Core was the 200+ stories of the Truman Tower, the tallest structure in Chicago. Truman Technologies had been 'only' a single-A megacorporation, not even extraterritorial, but they'd still been the foremost power in Chicago prior to the eruption of the Bug City crisis. When Artificial Sensory Induction Systems Technology, or ASIST, had been invented back in 2018 it had been in the R&D lab of a Truman subsidiary and they'd had full ownership of the rights since the beginning. ASIST allowed sensory impressions to be directly streamed into a computer even as they were simultaneously experienced by a metahuman's nervous system, where they could then be digitally recorded, or even edited, and then played back into another metahuman's brain where he would experience a full-sensory hallucination or waking dream of everything the original subject had perceived. It was the core technology underlaying both simsense entertainment and all forms of direct mind-machine neural interface, from cyberdecks to smartgun links to skillwires and datajacks.
And even though a AAA megacorp like Ares or Fuchi could have bought and sold a dozen subsidiaries the size of Truman Technologies before breakfast every day and twice on Sundays, even after their patent expired their historical advantage and proprietary refinements had still kept them at the leading edge of ASIST research. While they didn't dare to directly compete with any of the megas, they'd still made a very good thing at licensing their applications and refinements to larger megacorps for incorporation into their own product lines. They'd also had their homegrown media-entertainment empire via their founding and ownership of several of the leading simsense production studios, even to the point of having created their own little 'Hollywood East' among the Chicago Westside.
But the coming of the Bug City crisis had wrecked all that. While old Daniel Truman and most of his family had successfully evacuated the city immediately after the Cermak Blast and days before the Wall first went up, most of the Truman facilities and personnel in the city had been left behind. The old Hollywood had gotten a revival as new simsense production giants arose there out of old studios, their onetime rivals having been gone, and all of Truman's R&D facilities in Chicago had lain open for the taking. One of the most prosperous source of contracts for shadowrunners willing to slip the Wall and brave the Containment Zone had been for in-and-out raids on Truman research sites, hoping to score a new prototype or an R&D data cache for either Truman's own recovery or for the benefit of any number of corporate rivals.
And then Operation Extermination had launched and the UCAS had hired Knight Errant to support its own efforts at clearing the CZ, meaning that we could now breach and clear any building in the Containment Zone not currently being actively occupied by its legitimate owners or their designated agents - and to do so legally. Meaning that instead of hiring 'runners to try and slip the CZ to steal the paydata in Truman's corporate databanks, Ares could now just boot the door and go in to take it. Well, technically it was still illegal for Knight Errant to actually loot the building while we were in the process of saving it... but it's not as if there were anyone else riding along today to actually see us doing it.
So Bravo Company, 6th Rapid Response Battalion, was now taking time out in the early days of the grand and glorious effort to recapture a fallen city from extradimensional insect monsters to instead clear out enough of another corporation's HQ building from said monsters to allow the "retrieval teams" we were clearing the way for to come in and swipe anything still worth stealing. While the UCAS government, and by extension Truman Technologies, was actually paying us for the privilege of our doing it.
Yeah, even the Sergeant - who was as loyal a company man as you could ever find - couldn't make himself sound entirely sincere when he talked about the legitimacy and necessity of our mission today.
Given the height of the Truman Tower, and the fact that the elevators weren't entirely trustworthy yet, 1st Platoon had been set up for a helicopter insertion on old man Truman's personal landing pad while the rest of Bravo Company was busy waiting for us to finish up before moving in to secure the ground floors. Our mission was to clear out any remaining wasp nests - the bastards loved the tops of high towers - and then secure the CEO's penthouse and the high-end executive offices, and hopefully find any still-working computer systems or data caches that would give us the security overrides for what automated tower defense systems were still working. We had a pair of Dragon gunships escorting our Skyhawks that had already used their nose turrets to take out the air-defense emplacements around the Truman Tower's top floors from stand-off distance, because while they clearly didn't have any of the operators left in the building to use them the automated point-defense mode might still have been working and it was simpler to just autocannon the gun mounts from outside their automatic engagement range than find out the hard way.
There had indeed been a fairly large wasp nest set up in the spacious living atrium of the penthouse suite, but they'd apparently been exposed to Beta because all we had to do in the way of clean-up was push their corpses off of the balcony. After finishing a careful sweep for any dormant bugs, as well as any still-working security systems that had somehow survived the intervening several years and the wasps tearing their way in the side of the building to set up a nest here, we then split up into teams and began the search.
"Team Three, you're still short a man so you hold here and secure the penthouse." the Lieutenant ordered us as he prepared to lead the other teams down to the executive office levels right beneath us.
"Do you want us to continue searching here for any of the secondary objectives, sir?" Sergeant Sinclair asked him.
"You are aware that while a certain amount of 'shrinkage' could be overlooked elsewhere in the building, Mr. Truman almost certainly remembers exactly what he left behind?" the Lieutenant curled his lip scornfully, and we all bristled at the implication.
"They were in a hurry, Lieutenant." Rebecca said tonelessly. "They may not have properly secured or purged their datasystems."
"I doubt that Mr. Truman or his staff were that careless, but yes, go ahead and look." he conceded, and then the rest of the platoon headed off and we got to work.
"Damn, so this is how the super rich live." Nick said wonderingly. Because now that we were stopping to actually look at the furniture, the Lieutenant's brief suspicion that we'd been thinking about a looting run didn't quite look so crazy. Every single piece here looked to cost more nuyen then the furniture in the house I'd grown up had cost when all put together, and a few of the richer items in here might well have been able to buy the house. Full-on Dir-X simsense, the uncompressed kind normally used only for studio masters, in every room's entertainment unit. Genuine Italian marble countertops and gold-plated faucets. Antique wood furniture, fancy paintings, precious sculptures - including one that Rebecca recognized as a unique treasure that had disappeared from the old Chicago Art Institute after the Alamos 20k incident had required the building to be abandoned. Even his daughter's bedroom had had tens of thousands of nuyen in designer clothes and personal electronics just tossed around carelessly, right next to her teeny-bopper holo-posters and stuffed animal collection. It was like a visit into another world, one that you normally only saw glimpses of in simsense entertainments about high-end corporate execs and their personal soap operas. We actually took some time out just to stand and wallow amongst it all, and even I was feeling a temptation to just say 'hell with it' and pocket a gold bracelet or something, before I shook it off and got back to work.
"All right, Mr. Truman himself will of course have a personal study but he almost certainly won't have done any actual work in it." Sinclair said thoughtfully. "His corporate office is only several floors below us, and if he has any real work to do he'd just take his personal elevator right down. When you're the CEO you get to set your own hours. So there almost certainly wouldn't be anything in the local buffers of his desk computer up here, because he would hardly ever need it. And that means we're looking for a smaller office, or possibly even just a desk in the corner, and its desk computer."
"His executive assistant's." I followed along. "Because that gal - or guy - is going to be expected to stay on top of the boss's inbox and email queue even in the late evening and on weekends, and Mr. Truman isn't going to wait for them to go all the way downstairs and find a work terminal to log into when he wants it checked now and not five minutes from now."
"Sounds like a plan." Rebecca agreed, and after a short search we did indeed find a small room, barely above cubicle sized, directly adjacent to Truman's study that had a notably less fancy (even if it was still very expensive by our standards) desk than the big antique mahogany showpiece the boss had used. Hanna Ujlkanen, Special Assistant to the CEO said the antique brass nameplate on her desk. Nodding at this confirmation of the Sergeant's reasoning Rebecca got out her deck, jacked herself into the secure cyberterminal built into the desktop, and got to work.
"Right, we've still got some battery power off the emergency reserves... okay, Truman didn't skimp on her desktop but nobody's been doing any security software patches on this unit since '55 so even a basic utility can crack that passcode now..." Rebecca muttered to herself. "This isn't a hot cyberdeck like a high-end 'runner or one of the Matrix Security specialists would have, just a basic field model, so I'm not even going to try pushing up from here to tickle the corporate datacores directly... plus, it doesn't feel like the downstairs crew has finished restoring power to the main server banks yet."
"Anything in the desktop unit itself?" Sinclair asked professionally.
"Secure file storage module, some fairly hefty encryption on it." she said. "Probably where the classified corporate documentation is hiding. Decrypt utility is working on it.." A corner of her lip curled scornfully. "Last active login on this terminal is October 10th, 2055."
"That's a week and a half since the Cermak Blast." I said. "Almost a full week since after the Wall went up. They left her behind in here? And she still kept coming to work for that long?"
"She was probably afraid to leave the Tower until the food started running out and she had to." Sinclair nodded grimly.
"There's a lot of routine email traffic, her appointments calendar, file notes, journal..." Rebecca said. "Should I be reviewing any of this stuff, or should we leave that for the S-2 guys?"
"Do a keyword search." Sinclair said after a brief pause for thought. "Anything related to insect spirits or Ares corporate business, things we can claim as relevant to our mission here."
"Okay- huh." Rebecca blinked. "And as soon as I put that in I got a whole cluster of hits. Get this, boss. Several days before that tacnuke went off in the Cermak hive and kick-started this whole mess, Mr Truman's son-" She chuckled briefly. "Who was also named Mitchell, as it happens."
"You'd think if I'd grown up in a place this fancy, I'd have bothered to remember it." I joshed back, to the brief chuckles of everyone.
"In any event, young Mitchell Truman was already doing the teenaged rebellion thing. Moving out of the Tower to set up his own place, partying, slotting chips, dating girls his parents didn't approve of, all the usual symptoms of affluenza." She shrugged. "About a week before the Cermak incident he up and vanished with his latest girl, a Linda Hayward. They didn't miss him until he didn't show up for his father's birthday party several days after he'd gone. several days' worth of unanswered messages in the queue, all that. Truman's corporate security people went through his son's apartment and found no signs of forced entry or abduction, but his not returning to the apartment for several days had them concerned for his welfare."
"Meaning they were afraid he'd gone into the wrong bar with his latest squeeze from off the streets and gotten himself geeked before his DocWagon bracelet could guide in a medevac, or else had fried his brains with a bad chip and was still comatose in the back of some crack house somewhere." I rolled my eyes.
"So after a couple more days' worth of effort by his security people turned up no traces, Mr. Truman had his assistant go and hire a high-end private investigator - a retired UCAS FBI agent and hermetic mage called Kyle Teller. And this is where the story gets weird, because there are two search terms all over the files that Ms. Ujlkanen had been keeping about the case." Rebecca opened her eyes and looked up at us gravely. "Apparently, Linda Hayward had actually been an insect spirit, a sleeper agent in human form. And they'd sent her as a honeypot to hook in Mitchell Truman and try to use him as a possession victim to infiltrate the most powerful and influential family in Chicago."
"Christ." Nick swore. "You're telling us that Truman's kid was bugged?"
"Let me tell it in order." Rebecca insisted. "Teller tried an attempt to locate Mitchell with ritual magic but it failed, as if Mitchell Truman had been hidden behind powerful astral warding. That definitely ramped up suspicions, but before Teller could do more than begin to trace the Hayward connection Mitchell Truman turned up in the emergency room of HW University hospital. At that time, all they'd known is that he'd been picked up by Eagle Security while wandering naked and delirious on the streets, and that something had almost entirely burned out his brain. Even astral scans didn't register anything. Daniel Truman had his son transferred to a private care facility and then gave Mr. Teller a new job - find out what had happened to Mitchell and who was responsible. So Teller got back to tracing the mysterious Linda Hayward, and soon enough her trail ran right back to remnants of the Universal Brotherhood. And that's when he found out about the attempted possession that Mitchell Truman had just barely escaped when their ritual glitched."
"The Universal Brotherhood? That big charity organization, like a privatized version of the old United Way, that came out of nowhere about ten years ago?" Sinclair asked to confirm. "And that had turned out to be a major front for insect spirits trying a slow, covert possession and infiltration strategy among all walks of life until the UCAS and Ares became aware of them in early '55?" It was typical of him that he'd make sure to recap all the relevant data rather than assume we already knew it, if it hadn't already been brought up specifically.
"The very same." Rebecca said, looking up at us interestingly. "And that's where we hit the second search term. Because according to the reports Teller was making to his client, when tracing the Hayward connection back to the Universal Brotherhood holdouts in Chicago he soon enough ran into a Knight Errant FireWatch team doing their own covert investigation back from UB traces elsewhere that had led them to Chicago." She looked at us meaningfully. "A team headed by a Captain Anne Ravenheart."
"Oh drek." I swore. "If those spooks wanted to make damn sure we had massive amnesia about anything Ravenheart might have told us just from bumping into her, what would they do if they knew we had this?"
"We have to turn this in." Sinclair insisted. "Knight Errant would already know that Captain Ravenheart worked with this Teller and who had hired him - this was before the Containment Zone went up, so she'd still have been making mission reports. And the Lieutenant knows we were searching here."
"Yeah, but he doesn't know if we found anything." I insisted. "Rebecca dumps that database, then frags the desktop, then we rip that computer's hard drive out and say that Truman's people must have taken it with them when they left. Security conscious and all that."
"I'm with him, Sergeant." Nick said. "Those spooks didn't seem like they were hoping we'd found something, but like they were really hoping we hadn't."
"But this could be-" Sinclair began, and stopped. Yeah, corporate loyalist or not, even he couldn't kid himself about how ruthless the counter-intel spooks had come across in our one brief encounter with them. "Rebecca, you said that you were decrypting a secure file storage partition on that system. Was that partition protected by a data bomb?"
"Yes." she nodded. "You want me to deliberately trip the failsafes?"
"Exactly." Sinclair said. "If we claim that that computer was gone when we got here, then forensic evidence could potentially prove us wrong. And the Lieutenant already knows we were searching the datasystems in the penthouse. So we tell them that we found this system and tried to crack it - which is the truth - but the security software was better than our technician was and the whole unit wiped itself before we could recover anything."
"Before you wipe it, was there anything else in there relevant to this whole mess? I know we don't want to get into this, but I also want to know if we're keeping ourselves oblivious to any immediate danger." I thought out loud.
"Not related to this." Rebecca replied. "The last report from Teller that Ms. Ujlkanen wrote is dated a couple days before the Cermak Blast. When Teller started getting close to the end of the string he apparently didn't have much time to report in regularly. And... okay." Rebecca trailed off, closing her eyes again. "Give me a minute to set this up as carefully as I can, so even a deep data recovery on the physical drive doesn't turn up any suspicious traces... and, done." The cyberterminal's display winked out and started displaying the red X that indicated a bricked unit. "System is fragged."
"Good." Sinclair exhaled in relief. "Then hopefully we can finally put this all behind us."
* * * * *
Chicago Containment Zone, UCASFebruary 25, 2058
We spent the night in Truman Tower, but having confirmed that the building was mostly bug-free the next day they had us turn over our "recovery" mission to a dedicated salvage team and their own security detachments while they sent us back to more standard combat actions.
As it happened, First Platoon's new job today was to do cleanup on a group we'd run into before - the Nasty Grrls gang. Apparently they'd claimed about two square blocks of territory to the west of Goose Island. We could actually have hit their eastern edge with our sniper rifles from our rooftop vantage point when we'd did the anti-piracy op, not that we'd known it then. Which would mean that they'd been operating quite a ways away from their usual patch when we'd they'd hit us during that extraction op on my first night in the Zone, but as we'd seen at the time someone had been paying them very generously in gear and favors to do so.
So given how tough a fight those girls had given our fire team that night, as well as the prospect of taking on a gang's claimed territory when they'd clearly been receiving heavy weapons shipments from another corp in return for services rendered, all of Bravo Company was tasked for the operation.
Although we were wired pretty high, having remembered how tough the Nasty Grrls had been when our fire-team had run into them before, the remnants of the gang we hit surprised us by folding like a cheap accordion. The main benefit of the several skirmishes we had was giving Rebecca a chance to plausibly claim that a bullet had hit and wrecked her cyberdeck, freeing us from the worry that a dedicated forensic examination of her deck could still reveal traces of what we'd actually done and hadn't done to that revealing desktop datastore in Truman Tower. But I'd been happy to pick up one of the fallen Grrls' guns and stage a 'lucky hit' on her deck from about twenty feet away, so we wouldn't even have suspicious powder burns on the thing's hide, and that took care of that.
And then the platoon's fire teams all finished converging on their central building, and we found out why the gang had seemed so hollowed out.
The Nasty Grrls had had an 'outer' and an 'inner' component to the gang. The outers were Zone dwellers - largely attractive women - who met the gang's standards and were willing to fight and kill for the Nasty Grrls while they each waited their turn for inner circle recruitment.
But the inner circle of the gang had been insect spirits. Specifically, they'd been mantid spirits. The mystery of their superhuman strength, speed, and immunity to pain that we'd seen that night, as well some of their 'enhanced' appearance, was now explained. They'd been bug hosts all along, the subtle "good merge" kind of possession that Captain Ravenheart had told us about. The outer circle of the gang had been given cosmetic surgery or spell-locked illusions to enhance their beauty not just as a vanity and intimidation feature of their gang colors but as a shell game to hide the presence of the genuine superhuman predators lurking among them, whose spirit-enhanced beauty was a part of their hunting toolkit. After all, the best way to hide red fish was in a tank of other red fish.
"Holy shit." Nick said as we stood in what appeared to be an improvised basement bomb shelter ooking over the corpses of several fallen 'inner circle' Grrls, them having coughed up and sweated green blood and foam in their death throes. "There isn't a mark on them. No punctures, no trauma. They just... died."
"They didn't die easy, either." I said, pointing at the claw marks in the walls of the room and the wrecked furniture. "Looks like a mantis spirit in bug form was busy having convulsions in here, even if they reverted to humanshape when they finally stopped moving."
Rebecca looked up from where she'd been working on a portable cyberterminal one of the Grrls had had out on a nearby desk. "This one spent their last day recording some observations about what was happening to them. They must have died before they had a chance to transmit them to anyone, though."
"Or they couldn't reach a Matrix hardline." Sinclair said. "After all, it'd be hard to find one of those still working in the Containment Zone."
"No, they had a hookup here to the pirate Matrix feed that that NooseNet crew was running for CZ dwellers." Rebecca corrected him. "The other gangs thought the Nasty Grrls were human, remember? They had access to what services and trade the Zone barter economy was still offering."
"Maybe they didn't think there were any other bugs left to get their message out to." I wondered out loud.
"That's probably it." Rebecca said somberly. "Because according to this journal, they started feeling weaker the day Operation Extermination launched. For the first twelve, eighteen hours it was apparently barely perceptible, but then the phenomenon accelerated."
"What phenomenon? What the hell does something like this?" Nick pressed.
"Their magic... faded away." Rebecca shrugged. "This was a journal written by an alien creature that was dying from something it could barely perceive and didn't understand, so it's really not specific. But they described it as... fever, weakness, and a constant drain on their magic. It spread from one to another, until it got them all."
"But spirits are made out of magic." I replied. "Even ones that are merged with flesh, like flesh-form bugs. If their magic was being drained somehow, then their life would be drained along with it."
"And so it was." Rebecca nodded.
"They're describing some kind of manavore." Sinclair tried to reason out loud. "Some kind of magic-suppressing substance-"
"That replicates?" I countered. "This journal entry right here says that it started with just a couple of them, then spread to the others. And the onset of symptoms wasn't all at once, but started slow and then grew stronger as the victim's metabolism grew weaker. That's not the behavior of a chemical agent. That's a bioweapon."
Horrific revelations aside, the op to reclaim the Nasty Grrls territory had gone without a hitch. Beta had killed every insect spirit it had infected. While there were undoubtedly a statistical fraction of surviving bugs still laying low out there in the CZ - not even the most virulent superplague infected everyone in a hot zone, there were always a few percent of people who simply never got exposed in the first place - none of the Nasty Grrls' leadership had been in that category. Enough of them been exposed in the first wave that it had spread all throughout their gang before they'd known what was going on, and that was all she wrote.
And with their organizing cadre all struck down by a mysterious horror the outer echelon of still-human gangers, the dupes and camouflage that the Nasty Grrls had used to help hide their true nature as bugs, had all scattered to the four winds before we'd even gotten there. The regular Zone inhabitants who'd lived in the Grrls' turf as their subjects, paying tribute and labor in return for gang protection, were still hunkered down helplessly in their tenements when we arrived and had been entirely willing to take the UCAS Army's evacuation assistance instead, and so after we finished retaking and clearing the territory Bravo Company was broken back up into operating platoons and sent back to work doing recon and sweeps.
We'd turned all the Nasty Grrls' final logs and journals in to Command as per regs, as that kind of stuff was useful intel to the planning types. The degree of interest the intel guys back on the staff showed in it only confirmed our suspicions that 'Beta' was indeed an Ares bio-weapon - after all, what better field test reports could you get about your new wonder-weapon than to read the dying journal entries of the enemies it was killing? And of course we'd read all the journals ourselves first before turning them in. It's not as if dying bugs had had time to write an entire novel. And while none of us had shed a tear for the bugs, we'd all been horrified at the larger implications.
Because if 'Beta' was actually a self-replicating bioweapon of some kind that fed off of the life force of astral entities, then it would be inescapably fatal to any dual-natured entity that was exposed to it. Even magicians and adepts only had an astral presence when they were actively interacting with the astral plane - if they were astrally projecting or perceiving, or in the midst of casting a spell. Otherwise, they were as mundane as I or any of the team was.
But a dual-natured person or creative was precisely that - simultaneously present on both the physical and the astral plane as their natural state of existence. On the plus side this let them permanently perceiving astral energies and auras without even needing to make any effort, as well as often coming with access to innate magical abilities such as a shapeshifter's - what prior mythology would have called a were-creature - ability to take animal form, or a devil rat's supernatural immunity to poisons and diseases and radiation, or a leviathan's impossible size and strength in defiance of the biological square-cube law. Or a flesh-form insect spirit's permanent ongoing possession of a host body.
But on the minus side, this would mean that if something dual-natured was exposed to Beta, then they could not escape it. A magician could deliberately go dark, not use any magical powers or perform any kind of astral interaction, and hope to keep the infection from spreading or progressing. But any magical being - whether a spirit, or a dragon, or a shapeshifter, or anything - that was exposed to this virus couldn't damp down, couldn't withdraw their natural extension into astral space, couldn't stop it from draining away their magic and their life force until it killed them.
Rebecca managed to hit the outlaw 'NooseNet' matrix subnet to retrieve photographs that had been taken and posted by several Zone dwellers, who were busy trying to get them out to some indie trid station or media pirate willing to broadcast them in defiance of the UCAS and corporate censorship that was very carefully keeping anything like this off the main Matrix feeds. And what we saw made me feel sick.
The ghouls of the Cabrini Refuge and the surrounding 'Ghoultown' had been wiped out to a man. Like any other infectee of Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus, the transformation had made them magical and dual-natured beings. Given that ghouls had a supernatural immunity to all mundane pathogens, they would have been even more open out exposing themselves to potential biohazards than any other Zone Dweller would have. And once Beta had gotten loose in their population, it had gone through them like a berserk velociraptor through a petting zoo.
The photographs of dead ghouls lying all over the floor in what had been their homes and shelters, all dead without a mark on them, reminded us of atrocity footage from the Euro Wars. Specifically, from incidents where the Second Ottoman Jihad guys had hit civilian populations with nerve gas. We'd seen similar scenes with our own two eyes involving dead bugs, but those were bugs - even the ones that looked human. But even if not legally recognized as such, ghouls had still been people and not bugs. We'd even met some of them just a little while ago. They'd volunteered themselves unasked to cover our backs while we took care of business despite their mistrust and fear that one day the UCAS and Ares would come back to 'finish the job' that the mobs that had burnt them out after the UCAS' brief flirtation with legalizing the status of ghouls had failed.
And as it turned out, they'd been right to fear that all along.
Because when Damien Knight or Roger Soaring Owl had been handed this 'Beta' stuff by an Ares R&D team, when they'd seen a chance to turn the tide in the Bug City crisis and wipe out all the bugs at the price of collateral'ing every other magical creature in the zone... apparently they'd run the numbers and liked what they saw. Billions of nuyen worth of real estate and asset, hundreds of thousands of people, all reclaimed after the world had written them off as lost. And all it had taken was a willingness to sacrifice a few thousand lives. Hey, why not? I'm sure some suit or other had said while stuffing his face with caviar. It's not as if they were real people anyway.
"My God?" the Sergeant asked, his voice low and shaking. "What have they done?"
Author's Note: Sorry about the delay getting this chapter out, but I had to drive to the VA hospital twice in the past two days to go take care of admin stuff. Arguing with the benefits people is always a PITA, and it's a relatively long drive, so, needed to wait until I had time to refocus and create.
Strain-III Beta of the astral bacteria series is entirely canon, as was Operation Extermination, and this is precisely what they did at the end of the Bug City arc. So yeah. We've seen one side of life as a corporate soldier, now we begin to see the other sides. I actually changed some details - the size of the Truman Tower (it is implausibly taller in canon, seriously, get a sense of scale, Shadowrun writers), the exact spread of the bacteria, etc, etc. - but for all the good parts, no tabletop RPG setting ever had worldbuilding that couldn't still use a little tightening up in post-production.
For those expecting a giant glorious bug war and not getting it, the story was never going to be about giant glorious battle scenes. It's largely the personal journey of several people, the sort of people who in normal Shadowrun campaign would exist as faceless NPC stat blocks to roll for initiative and then get shot and die by your elite shadowrunning teams. As the story goes along, we shall see if they can change and become something more... or if they just become yet another story of how cyberpunk worlds are cruel and life is cheap.
Oh yes, and there's also that techno-thriller plot that keeps lurking around the background. Definitely gotta still work on that. *g*
Last edited:
Blaflaix
Versed in the lewd.
- Joined
- Mar 19, 2015
- Messages
- 1,864
"I would've thought this was right up your alley."
"What's that supposed to mean!?"
"Well, you're a decker, and a geek, and nosy as hell. Industrial espionage combines all three!"
"Yeah, but doing it officially takes all the fun out of it."
Lucid Lunacy
Seeking the Threshold
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2018
- Messages
- 6,038
I knew it was gonna be awful, but damn. An anti-magic bioweapon? Did no one on the R&D teams even bother with the sheer self serving paranoia of "what if it gets turned on us?" Because those kinds of things always bite you in the ass.
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2017
- Messages
- 18,121
Honestly? They were getting kinda desperate for a solution to the problem that wasn't "vaporize the entire city".
kraryal
Not too sore, are you?
- Joined
- Jan 24, 2015
- Messages
- 313
Holy cow Cliff. Here the anticipation was building up for what Beta was, and I thought it was going to be long term mystery, and then WHAM! This chapter was amazing, and horrifying. So is the paranoia in the characters.
When you run an RPG, it must be both thrilling and fingernail-biting. I haven't played much Shadowrun, but you really capture the feel, and it's funny and appropriate how the corpos are going on "legal" shadowruns when the higher up sees a chance. Thanks for the chapter!
When you run an RPG, it must be both thrilling and fingernail-biting. I haven't played much Shadowrun, but you really capture the feel, and it's funny and appropriate how the corpos are going on "legal" shadowruns when the higher up sees a chance. Thanks for the chapter!
I think this should be "dead", or maybe "did for"?
"nuyen than"
Not sure if this should be "left them" or "let them permanently perceive"
htgriffin
Experienced.
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2016
- Messages
- 3,319
It probably "helps" if you can convince yourself you are and never will be vulnerable.
Methinks Saeder-Krupp at least will be working on a counteragent or something scary enough to keep that mess contained.
Lucid Lunacy
Seeking the Threshold
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2018
- Messages
- 6,038
Yeah, at least we can count on Lofwyr not wanting that shit pointed his way.
Jarudazuigu
Sealed, for now
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2015
- Messages
- 20,193
Pity that it''s possibly not working on Horrors. Would be too nice. Also magic-bacteria bio-weapon?
Cliff, did "Shadowrun" doesn't have Resident Evil or Living Dead franchises?! Because I have little doubt that some idiot will ... Umbrella that bio-weapon into population center it wasn't meant to exterminate.
And then bacteria will what bacteria do and ADAPT to not-magical food sources, too.
Pyro Hawk
Unsure if Phoenix or Kitsune
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2015
- Messages
- 3,619
To copy across my comment from SB...
The really dumb thing about this is that, well... Not only possessing but proving they are willing to deploy Beta means Ares is actually going to have a lot of pressure put on it by the other Megacorps. Why?
Because it was already mentioned that the majority of the other Megacorps are Dragon Owned which Beta is fatal against. And what others aren't (Aztechnology) also have very strong connections to something else that is extremely vulnerable to Beta I believe? Sure, all those folks are absolutely going to develop countermeasures, cures and vaccines against Beta. But that's just a reactive game which is asking for a breakthrough to happen which allows Beta or it's descendants to slip through and make a critical impact eventually.
Not to mention the horrors everyone's going to have at the idea that a Megacorp is actually willing to use bioweapons. Even these days, before Covid, bioweapons were probably the most terrifying WMD. Sure, nukes may be scarier because of the radioactive fallout and the 'sudden death' nature, but if you want terror? Look no further than bioweapons, particularly because even if only one side uses a bioweapon then everyone is likely to get hit by it regardless.
After having those magical diseases slam through the Shadowrun setting? People are probably more aware and concerned than people IRL are even post-Covid. Sure, it might not be a major thought in the day-to-day due to how crapsack the Shadowrun setting is but... It's something that adds up to any distaste people have for Ares, and to a lesser extent the UCAS government though I can absolutely see people believing the UCAS government had no idea of the nature of the Ares 'Super Weapon' that would win them the Bug War, which means if someone had to choose between two Groups to back...
Well, they'd probably still back Ares much of the time compared to other Megacorps unless they've got pre-existing Corporate loyalties. But they'd be more cautious about it. And from the sounds of things, the existence of Beta as a biological manavore didn't really get any further attention in-setting after it's use in the lore? Maybe the collateral impact it caused, but not the fact it's a goddamn bioweapon that Ares just has on hand now and can improve or modify.
That is definitely both a let down, plot hole and... Something I could see happening because of the lower concern about diseases back when this Lore was written. After all, pandemics were 'solved' thanks to things like Small Pox being wiped out in semi-recent history. Surely a disease is containable and a manageable risk? Yeah, well... That wouldn't be the case for any intelligent planners that were written these days. Because we've seen just how 'containable' and 'manageable' they are.
And yeah. I could absolutely see this. The problem of course is that as I mentioned above, there should really have been massive ripple effects from the existence of Beta that just... weren't there. Even more so when you consider that the Megacorporation which deployed Beta is like, the one AAA megacorporation that doesn't have Magically Active members running it right? Which means it should really have caused a situation like the world between 1945 and 1949. Except worse because this time, it's not one nation being able to wave around the fact they've got nuclear weapons and you don't to get their way.
It's one major faction waving around they've got a highly effective, comparatively low-cost WMD which has minimal fall out for their most important members whilst everyone else has to deal with the fact that even if they get an equivalent (or stolen copy) of Beta... Well, that just means they also are able to decide to kill themselves off whilst being unable to truly hurt Ares.
The only real 'saving grace' of beta is it looks like it's too effective to be a 'good' bioweapon. By which I mean it kills those it can infect within around 48 hours of infection. Sure, it's virulently contagious but that kill time means the disease just can't spread far from the dispersion site accidentally. To do that, you need to do something like infect a Mage, have them deliberately not use their astral abilities and then 'pop out' into the astral somewhere else populated. Making the Mage in effect a short-lived (because they'll eventually die after enough repeats) 'Sleeper Agent' or 'Carrier'.
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2017
- Messages
- 18,121
Ah. Okay, this would show up notably later in the story but I might as well tell it now because the plausible limitations of the MC's knowledge and experience (after all, none of the main cast are Awakened) is that Beta is somewhat more controllable than that.. and because it's becoming a major SOD point.
Strain-III Beta has one primary limitation... if there isn't an active magical source for it to feed upon, it starves. That limits the spread, as it can't drift around willy-nilly unless it's in very close proximity to a magically active object or entity or there's a high astral background count, which most of the planet doesn't have. There's a reason the Beta exposure in Chicago was initially uneven, and only really got going when the bugs - which of course didn't know the contagion danger yet - started clustering together.
Also, a magically active entity can ditch Beta's affect on its aura if it can move its astral self/extension off of the near astral plane. For a mundane this is trivially easy - they have no astral presence to begin with. For a magician this is as simple as not actively using magic or astral perception/projection for enough hours to let Beta starve.
It's dual-natured creatures that really get killed by Beta, because they can't stop astrally perceiving or interacting. But note that while dual-natured creatures can't withdraw from the astral plane entirely, some of them - like dragons and spirits - can astrally project or travel further in, to the deep metaplanes. Which also gets rid of a Beta infestation, because Beta can only reside on the border between physical and astral space.
This is the other reason the dragons and powerful free spirits aren't in terminal freakout mode over this. They know how to survive it. It's dual-natured creatures that don't have deep astral capabilities - like, oh, flesh-form insect spirits (or ghouls, or shapeshifters, or other paracritters) that get fragged without hope.
Strain-III Beta has one primary limitation... if there isn't an active magical source for it to feed upon, it starves. That limits the spread, as it can't drift around willy-nilly unless it's in very close proximity to a magically active object or entity or there's a high astral background count, which most of the planet doesn't have. There's a reason the Beta exposure in Chicago was initially uneven, and only really got going when the bugs - which of course didn't know the contagion danger yet - started clustering together.
Also, a magically active entity can ditch Beta's affect on its aura if it can move its astral self/extension off of the near astral plane. For a mundane this is trivially easy - they have no astral presence to begin with. For a magician this is as simple as not actively using magic or astral perception/projection for enough hours to let Beta starve.
It's dual-natured creatures that really get killed by Beta, because they can't stop astrally perceiving or interacting. But note that while dual-natured creatures can't withdraw from the astral plane entirely, some of them - like dragons and spirits - can astrally project or travel further in, to the deep metaplanes. Which also gets rid of a Beta infestation, because Beta can only reside on the border between physical and astral space.
This is the other reason the dragons and powerful free spirits aren't in terminal freakout mode over this. They know how to survive it. It's dual-natured creatures that don't have deep astral capabilities - like, oh, flesh-form insect spirits (or ghouls, or shapeshifters, or other paracritters) that get fragged without hope.
nonemouse
I trust you know where the happy button is?
- Joined
- Feb 17, 2019
- Messages
- 678
I'm really enjoying this story so far.
To be possibly too fair to our corporate military overlords, based on my limited understanding of the source material, it's at least arguable that the bugs are a dire enough threat to the entire world, including all the magical dual-natured creatures at risk, that developing and using a bioweapon like this actually is less bad than letting the bug spirits continue to have a foothold. That said I don't know if the people responsible actually know that, and I sure wouldn't trust them with the weapon afterward.
One bit of minor line-editing feedback:
This jumped out as a bit too much "as you know"-ing and not something he'd actually say. It'd probably be fine to condense it to something like just:
"The Universal Brotherhood? That big charity organization that turned out to be a major front for insect spirits?" Sinclair asked to confirm.
as that's really all the information that seems relevant. If some of the other details are going to be relevant later they might be better moved to Mitchell's narration
To be possibly too fair to our corporate military overlords, based on my limited understanding of the source material, it's at least arguable that the bugs are a dire enough threat to the entire world, including all the magical dual-natured creatures at risk, that developing and using a bioweapon like this actually is less bad than letting the bug spirits continue to have a foothold. That said I don't know if the people responsible actually know that, and I sure wouldn't trust them with the weapon afterward.
One bit of minor line-editing feedback:
This jumped out as a bit too much "as you know"-ing and not something he'd actually say. It'd probably be fine to condense it to something like just:
"The Universal Brotherhood? That big charity organization that turned out to be a major front for insect spirits?" Sinclair asked to confirm.
as that's really all the information that seems relevant. If some of the other details are going to be relevant later they might be better moved to Mitchell's narration
cliffc999
Connoisseur.
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2017
- Messages
- 18,121
I'm going to leave it in anyway because it's IC for Sergeant Sinclair to actually make sure everybody within hearing distance has been recapped on the relevant tactical data, even if they likely already know it.
They knew.
Last edited: