The Sharp End (Shadowrun)

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"My God?" the Sergeant asked, his voice low and shaking. "What have they done?"

Click to shrink...

I was wondering what would send our MC into the shadows, and I think I just got my answer.

Great chapter, cliffc999. Even though I already knew how Bug City ended in canon, and the effects of FAB, it didn't feel like I was reading a foregone conclusion, if that makes any sense.

 

[cliffc999]

Glenview Naval Air Station, Ares Extraterritorial Compound
6 March 2058

The brass made the first official announcement several days after we'd cleaned up the Nasty Grrls turf. Our main guess had been right on the money - Strain-III Beta was indeed an anti-magical bioweapon. Of course that was still highly classified shit and we weren't supposed to talk about it, but we weren't stupid. Anybody in the Containment Zone with any awareness of recent events had to at least be suspecting by now that something that weakened and killed magical beings and which spread like a plague and not a gas was in play in the Containment Zone. You didn't need a PhD in epidemiology to figure out that something that spread from person to person over time and then kept spreading from the second wave of people to infect yet more people had to be a germ, not a gas. And so, the troops had been given a basic 'what is going on' briefing before the rumor mill could gin up a worse explanation than the truth.

The Fluorescent Astral Bacteria series had been invented by a company called BacteriTech and bought out by Ares several years ago. At that time it was just a minor mutation and a biological curiosity - a perfectly ordinary strain of benign bacteria that had an unusually 'thick' astral presence. Even the sort of very basic magical theory that they taught generally to high schoolers knew that even though they didn't have an astral extension, mundane life forms still formed a barrier that an astrally projecting magician couldn't pass through. Life was magic, or some stuff like that. Then they got into trying to explain that the Earth being 'metaphorically' alive was why an astral projection couldn't go through the ground even if it could go through a building wall just fine, but that stuff only made sense to magicians.

The relevant point here was that FAB was the only known substance that would have a physical reaction in realspace to the immediate presence of a purely astral being, like a mage's astral projection or an umanifested spirit. Oh, it wasn't a dramatic reaction; the stuff would just be pushed aside by the astral 'shadow' of whatever was trying to float through the particular volume of near-astral space that directly corresponded to its physical location in realspace. Or, if the FAB was packed densely enough, such as by being suspended in a nutrient gel, it would be too 'thick' to push through and actually block out the astral presence. Now, something as simple as letting vines grow over a building would form a basic barrier to astral intruders - they couldn't pass through anything alive and too solid to push out of the way, remember? - but for obvious reasons it was impractical to fully contain interior volumes of space in a building that way.

But compressed FAB barriers could be built into hollow wall panels and used to create astral containment chambers without needing magical warding or enchanting, and the bacteria could also be used to create astral tripwires that would react if passed through. And Ares had the patent on FAB, and had made a ton of nuyen upgrading peoples' security systems with non-magical astral anti-intrusion measures even if the stuff was sometimes tricky to work with and had a costly upkeep.

Strain-III of the FAB series, however, was nowhere near as benign. Somehow Ares had come up with a version of that stuff whose 'interaction' with the near-astral plane was fatal. Normally FAB was like any other bacteria - it ate nutrients, it replicated to make more bacteria, repeat step one. But Strain-III was... as near as I could wrap my head around it, it was apparently some kind of fully dual-natured bacteria. And what it ate was astral energies. Magic, or life force.

Now, despite everything the news had been doing to reassure and divert people it was kinda obvious to anyone with a brain that the whole Bug City crisis was not in a stable condition. The Wall alone wasn't a solution - even with everything that hunger, exposure, disease, bugs, each other, etc., had done to reverse-decimate the population of Chicago there were still enough survivors in there to outnumber the troops surrounding Chicago by several to one. And while the bugs' reproduction rate was limited by time, access to victims, and the number of surviving queens, that's all they needed. There were no factories to bomb, no natural resources to deny them, no supply lines to interdict.

In order to get a larger army to surround Chicago the UCAS - or anyone else - would need to sustain an entire modern industrial economy to build planes and tanks and guns and everything, as well as years of time to recruit and train troops to wield them. In order to get a larger army of bugs, the bugs in the Zone only had to wait. The whole 'wall them in, then set up the Containment Zone force to shoot anyone who tried to get out' was a stopgap, not a solution. If the bugs had enough time to grow their forces to where they could successfully crash the Wall and get out of northern Illinois in force, then nothing could stop them.

But that announcement had been last week. When the higher-ups noticed that morale was kinda starting to slip a bit at the initial revelations of 'Beta' - hey, we damn sure didn't tell anyone, but word still got around - they'd authorized all the Ares officers to share some officer-level briefing intel that they hadn't originally bothered to release to the grunts. The most notable portion of that release today being the story behind why the hell Ares had detonated a tacnuke in downtown Chicago in the first place. Because you'd think that blowing a nuke off in the middle of an inhabited UCAS city in what was nominally peacetime would be a mega-sized case of what the fuck, and yet the government hadn't so much as sent Ares a stern letter of protest over it.

Apparently, when the initial Ares black ops team - the one we knew from the Truman Tower paydata to have been Captain Ravenheart's, although we hadn't told anyone else about that - had been following up on insect spirit abductions in Chicago, they'd walked straight into the largest bug hive that anyone had ever seen or heard of. It had been the mother lode, the heart of the bugs' 'secret invasion' plan that the Universal Brotherhood had been the first wave of before people had caught on to something wrong there and started taking it apart. The bugs must have spent years of effort finding enough 'ideal merges' and enough magical resources to invest that many flesh-form queens, because host subjects compatible enough to take even the most powerful possessions like that were few and far between. But they'd done it, and all their carefully hoarded "fuck you, humanity" was stashed right there.

Now, bug spirits didn't necessarily need queens to create more flesh-form bugs. There were lots of insect spirits already existing on whatever freaky far metaplane they came from, and insect shamans could summon them to Earth and let them invest a victim. But it took a queen bug to actually create new insect spirits... and it was a lot easier and faster to do possession rituals to create new flesh-forms if you didn't have to have the spirit you were stuffing into whatever poor bastard make a whole trip the long way from the metaplanes. Basically, it was like those real-time strategy games you could play on your PDA. You could slowly convert enemy units into friendly units, or you could build your own costly 'queen' units that made the process of converting/summoning new units of your own much faster and cheaper.

Which is why, when they'd found literally hundreds of larval queens in the Cermak Hive all nearing hatching - and from multiple different insect species in the same place, something not usually known - Ravenheart's FireWatch team had understandably freaked the fuck out. They'd known enough about bugs even back then to know that if those queens all hatched at once it would almost certainly be the end of the damned world. The actual Containment Zone crisis had been what happened when only the few percent of queens that had survived the Cermak Blast had all gone into 'Shit, we're already blown, might as well go full rampage mode' at the same time. If they'd all popped loose at once? Very likely nothing could have stopped them.

Now, some of these things we'd already been clued in on. Even a megacorp knew that the grunts had to have a vague idea of what was going on, because leaving your troops shooting totally in the dark only meant that they wouldn't be hitting anything. But what they hadn't shared with us before now was that authorizing that FireWatch cell to deploy the Cermak tacnuke had been the limited response to the crisis, a desperate last-minute Hail Mary by Ares to head off what the plan A had been.

Y'see, the UCAS government had found out about the contents of the Cermak hive simultaneously with Ares. Now, the way the Lieutenant had been told the story it had sounded like Ares had done the public-spirited thing and immediately brought the legitimate government into the loop upon discovering the threat, blah blah blah, but if you believed that one then you probably also believed in the tooth fairy. My own guess was that that retired FBI guy who had been riding along with Ravenheart had taken one look at this shit and called it in to his old workplace the instant he could ditch her long enough to find a phone.

And then shit really got tense, because both Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries and Tir Tairngire had rapidly found out why the UCAS government had just gone to Defcon Two. And they'd both reacted by sending special emissaries to President Haeffner and Ares CEO Damien Knight to share some things about about insect spirits that even Ares hadn't found out yet. Which part made sense given that Tir Tairngire was one of the most magically advanced nations on Earth what with all the elves that had gone to settle there, as well as being right next to Seattle where the Universal Brotherhood case had originally broken wide open. And the owner and CEO of Saeder-Krupp was the Great Dragon Lofwyr, who had actually been alive back in whatever ancient era of magic had contained the insect spirits' first attempt at invading Earth. So they'd apparently had access to magical lore about the insect spirits that wasn't generally known at the time. They'd apparently presented not merely claims but proof, and that proof had apparently been entirely convincing.

Which is why the UCAS government - whether on its own or due to heavy arm-twisting from Saeder-Krupp and the Corporate Court, they didn't say - had agreed that preventing a mass queen breakout from Cermak was an essential enough objective to justify the use of WMDs on a civilian population center.

Apparently the UCAS' original plan had been to use gas. To load up enough ANVAR-TFM nerve agent - that same stuff we'd used to help bust the major roach nest near Wrigleyville back in January - and flood the entire district with it to poison every bug within miles around, then blame it on a super-huge terrorist attack. Something like Alamos 20k and the fall of the Sears Tower all over again. That's why the UCAS had started the phony VITAS-III plague scare and issued the shelter-in-place order right before Bug City kicked off; they didn't want any bug possession victims, particuarly not any flesh-form queens, moving outside of the target zone before they could finish prepping the strike. That's also how the Wall had gone up so fast after the Cermak Blast, the whole thing being finished in only a few days - the mobilization efforts had started shortly before Cermak.

But rather than nerve-gas millions of people Ares had chosen to go with a backpack nuke carried right into the guts of the Cermak Hive instead, and it had mostly worked. Enough of the queens were either died or knocked into spirit hibernation of some kind that the breakout had been small enough for the Wall and the CZ strategy to actually keep the rest from breaking out. And the casualties from the Cermak Blast had been limited due to the nuke strike having been underground enough to be tamped. Oh, you still didn't want to go anywhere near the Cermak crater, but they'd only lost a small surface radius immediately around Ground Zero instead of losing most of the damn city. And they hadn't bothered telling our officers whether anyone was pissed that Ares had unilaterally veto'ed the UCAS' wide-area sterilization to go for a tight-focus burn instead, but since nobody had vaporized the general vicinity since they'd apparently decided that the tacnuke was close enough for government work and that they could finish mopping up the surviving bugs by conventional means.

Until they'd found out the hard way that no, they couldn't, and the stalemate had dragged on for the next two years. Long enough that they'd finally agreed to deploy something like Strain-III Beta.

"How much of that do you think was true?" Rebecca quietly asked me afterwards, as we were both sitting alone on a nearby low ridge that overlooked the golf course. Nick had been pretty distant the past few days and the Sergeant was kept hopping with admin stuff, so what free time we'd had was largely spent with each other. I was pretty sure at this point that people who didn't already know that Rebecca was gay were thinking that we were a couple but hey, they could go screw themselves.

"If I had to put money on it?" I scratched my chin in thought. "I'm going with 'Nothing was actually a lie, but the presentation was selective.'"

"You noticed that Ares comes out of this narrative looking like the good guys." She nodded. "Two years after the fact the truth is finally out, that our tacnuke actually saved Chicago from devastation instead of being the warmongering idiots who recklessly detonated the whole Bug City crisis like they've been accusing Ares of being for the past two years. Which means that the home viewing audience will now be primed to believe that we wouldn't have deployed something like Strain-III Beta unless we really really needed to."

"Which revisited bit of history just happens to make the UCAS look like the reckless nuke-em-all types and us like the precision tactical operatives who only acted out of necessary triage when backs were already against the wall." I agreed. "At just the time when news of what's really happening in the Zone is starting to leak out on the pirate nets and we're maybe a couple weeks out from President Haeffner having to answer some very unfriendly questions at a press conference. Ares is already laying the groundwork to win the spin cycle about Strain-III's public release before it starts. And before the UCAS can get the idea of laying the bad PR off on Ares to cover their own asses."

"Do unto others before they do unto you." Her lip curled tightly. "And that's why they'd now tell something previously restricted only to officers to every Ares grunt in the zone. They know somebody won't be able to keep their mouth shut, and that's exactly what they want. For this to still end up leaked all over the Matrix without it being an official press release."

"You're probably right." Sergeant Sinclair's voice surprised us from behind. We'd actually been staying at least somewhat alert, but he'd still managed to get the drop on us. "But that theory actually makes it more likely that the version of events we were given was the truth." he pointed out reasonably as he sat down next to us. "If they went this route and then were caught out in a lie later, the backlash would be twice as bad as not having tried it at all."

"Just because it's true still doesn't mean it's not-" she trailed off, her eyes going distant. I was pretty sure I knew what mental images she was looking at right then.

"Yeah." I agreed. "As soon as extradimensional insect monsters that reproduced by Body Snatchers bullshit became real-world stuff, then it was never going to end any way but the messy way. As horrible as that is to say."

"I don't-" she caught herself and shut up. "Sorry, Sergeant."

"Gabe." he corrected her. "Nothing official right now, we're all alone here."

"When I was in the CAS Army-" I began, because I didn't know which way Gabe was going to jump here and I wanted to draw heat away from Rebecca if need be. "The year my unit spent backing up the border patrol... either of you ever get assigned to the CAS/Aztlan border?"

"No." Gabe said. "What parts of the border zone aren't under direct government control generally have Lone Star security contracts, not Knight Errant. But I thought the disputed zone was officially demilitarized?"

"Gabe, it's all the disputed zone down there." I sighed. "And yeah, San Angelo and Austin are officially demilled, but the several brigades of 'civilian security consultants' stationed in each city are still patrolling in Stonewall main battle tanks and Stuart LAVs. But out there in the southwestern desert there's still lots of miles of border that aren't 'privatized', ours and the Azzies both. And when the Azzies reconquista'ed half of Texas and pushed the border as far north and east as Austin, how do you imagine the rest of Texas felt about that? The only parts of the border zone that don't have an 'incident' pop loose every couple of months are the parts that are entirely uninhabited." I closed my eyes and continued more reluctantly. "While I was there, the Azzies thought up a new harassment tactic. They'd take Rapiers - you know, those barely man-portable "brilliant" heavy anti-armor missiles? Up to two miles range, with your choice of remote wireless guidance, GPS targeting, or optical recognition homing?"

"We're familiar with those." Gabe nodded.

"There's lots of places there where you've got half-and-half border towns." I continued. "A few thousand people on our side of the border, a few thousand people on their side, and the no-mans'-land in between. Even in places where there was a border crossing post, it'd be a couple cleared lanes wide at most and the rest of it would be sensor strips or razor wire - even minefields in some places. And they started firing off Rapiers from their side of the line, on fire-and-forget GPS targeting. So all of a sudden you've got a pop-up missile that could punch through the top of a Stonewall, only it's coming down right on top of a Stuffer Shack. Or a church. Or a school."

"Isn't that normally called an act of war?" Rebecca gaped.

"Oh, but the Azzies weren't firing them." I faux-piously mocked. "Clearly it was subversive elements and agitators, using stolen military hardware! So regrettable that the sovereign nation of Aztlan-"

"You mean Aztechnology Corporation." Gabe sniffed derisively.

"Hey now, the the AAA-rated megacorporation of Aztechnology and the sovereign government of Aztlan are entirely separate and distinct entities!" I rolled my eyes. "Just like a hammer and a nail are both separate and distinct entities. No prizes for guessing which one's the hammer and which one's the nail."

That got me a pair of chuckles.

"So yeah, every few days another half-dozen or so civilians would die, and our diplomats would yell at their diplomats, and the Azzies would repeat their bullshit apologies and then go on to say something about how the 'unavoidable' sentiments caused by 'historical aggression' would inevitably recur in the populace despite the very best that law enforcement could do to stop terrorists and rebels like the mysterious missile launchers who were totally not Azzie operatives of any kind, honest. But hey, they promised they'd really do their best to try and catch the 'criminals' this time!" I hawked and spat.

"In other words, they wanted the CAS to move the border towns further back." Rebecca said. "Which would mean that they'd just move the border fortifications up another mile or two when you weren't looking, then tie everything up in legal red tape about 'abandoned land' and 'disputed possession' for the next fifty years."

"Or we could just wait and keep watching people die until we'd finally proven we didn't care how many people they killed - at which point they'd probably have just pivoted and turned that into their next propaganda circus." I agreed. "Well, somebody in Atlanta must have gotten well and truly fed up at how transparently insincere the Azzies' diplo-bullshit was, because the next time a 'terrorist' missile attack popped loose on the border, about four hours later there was a 'short circuit' with a Wandjina fire-support drone that just happened to 'accidentally' drop a thermobaric cluster warhead right on top of the city hall on the Azzie side of the line. And then our ambassador apologized to their ambassador and gave a very heartfelt speech about how tragic it was that a sudden need to divert military budget funds to disaster and medical relief had resulted in certain equipment maintenance shortfalls, but that they really hoped the situation would improve in the future." I turned to look at them both. "Next week the Azzies announced that they'd had a breakthrough in the case about military weapons being stolen and blackmarketed, and they anticipated that the mysterious missile attacks would cease. And voila, the killing stopped."

"What were the casualties?" Gabe asked intelligently.

"Everyone in city hall." I said. "Politicians, cops, datapushers, and janitors all." I shook my head. "I didn't have personally anything to do with it, natch. I was in the Rangers, not the artillery or the air force. I wasn't even stationed nearby. But I had been one of the first-responders to one of the missile attacks, so at the time I really wasn't feeling charitable to the Azzies. Shit, when it comes to their government or their army - or Aztechnology - I still don't. But..." My shoulders slumped. "Do you think the Azzies would have stopped if we'd just picked a squad of Azzie grunts doing a border sweep and 'accidentally' vaporized them?"

"Very unlikely." Gabe agreed. "Best case scenario, it's 'acceptable losses' and they keep going. Worst-case, they use it as an excuse to really escalate - after all, it was a direct attack on military assets. And it would have been an expected response of yours, so it wouldn't knock them even remotely off-balance. They've long since had a script for that."

"Yeah." I agreed, as Rebecca looked mildly horrified at us both. "But innocent people were dying, and because our opposition was being commanded by conscienceless psychopaths, the only thing that would have backed them off required us to match atrocity with atrocity. What made the Azzies cut and run wasn't the losses they were taking, but the uncertainty. If we were willing to go this far, against all expectations, then who could predict what would happen next? And so they packed it in."

"That... really sucks." Rebecca said. "But-"

"But how does it relate to this?" I agreed, waving my hand vaguely in the direction of Chicago. "Because it's got two things in common with this crisis. One, sometimes the enemy is just so ruthless and indifferent to life that all rational options are already off the table and you've got no choice except to either raise or fold." I moistened my dry mouth and continued. "Just like the Zone. Like I said - once extradimensional insect monsters were on the table, then there was no way it was going to end clean. The only two questions were 'how dirty?' and 'who loses?."

"And the second thing in common?" Gabe asked.

"That grunts like us never get a vote on what our bosses are going to do when the gloves come off." I said. "I didn't prep or fire that drone back then, and nobody sitting here did any of the R&D on Strain-III or dropped any of it on Chicago. Hell, we didn't know that shit existed until after the CZ was already done and dusted." I put as much earnestness into my voice as I could. "Nothing happened that wouldn't have still happened if you or I had never been here." I reassured her. "The UCAS might have done this, and Ares might have done this, but we didn't do this. It's not on us."

"You're entirely right, Mitchell." Gabe agreed. "It's regrettable... honestly, it made me feel sick to my stomach." he conceded. "But that still doesn't mean we were on the wrong side."

Rebecca looked at us both, then nodded silently and didn't push the point any further. Because while Gabe was our friend, he was also our team leader - and if we put him into a conflict between friendship and duty, he lost either way. But hopefully I'd defused the tension, and Rebecca would be able to believe what I'd just said.

If only I'd been able to do more than just barely believe myself.

* * * * *​

Glenview Naval Air Station, Ares Extraterritorial Compound
March 8, 2058

"... maintaining the blockade of the stricken city of Chicago has been one of the heaviest burdens on the brave men and women of our military. For more than two years they have maintained an airtight line of defense around the city, protecting those on the outside from whatever Awakened nightmares lurked within its boundaries and staging daring rescue missions to extract those unfortunate individuals trapped inside."

UCAS President Haeffner's address to a joint session of Congress was up on the big-screen tri-D in the mess hall. It was being broadcast in prime time, so we were all available to watch it after a long day of packing and stowing gear. We'd gotten the word that morning that our movement orders had come in, and while civilian contractors would take care of things like disassembling the prefab barracks and packing up the furniture and the routine supplies, nobody except Knight Errant personnel was going to be touching our ordnance, combat vehicles, or the rest of our milspec equipment and secure records. So it all had to be inventoried, packed, and locked into the shipping containers, and we'd all pitched in. Then we'd all been told that a required viewing of a special address on the public Matrix would be scheduled for 1900 hours, and now here we were.

"And now those brave men and women can finally rest. This morning I met with Damien Knight, CEO of Ares Macrotechnology, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Governor of Illinois. At that meeting we all concurred that Operation Extermination had been successfully completed. And thus I am proud to officially declare that the quarantine of Chicago is lifted. Once again, Chicago will be the City of Big Shoulders.

"On behalf of the American and Canadian people of the UCAS I would like to think Ares Macrotechnology for their assistance in this time of crisis. It is my intention, and that of the UCAS government, to use the information gathered by Ares personnel and our own ongoing investigations to ensure that such a terrible tragedy can never again happen to another UCAS city. Thank you, Mr. Knight."

Despite being at least sixty-odd, the finest in genetic therapy and applied biotechnology had gifted our ultimate boss with both the looks of a simstar and the physique of a 30-year-old Olympic athlete, and Damien Knight cut a very impressive figure indeed as he stood up from where he'd been seated alongside and slightly behind President Haeffner in the row reserved for special guests of honor and took a bow for the camera. I noted in passing that the other guests of honor included the Vice-President of the CAS and Prince Ehran of Tir Tairngire.

President Haeffner briefly explained what Strain-III Beta did and how it had turned the tide - in the most positive terms possible. He also went out of his way to reassure everyone that it posed absolutely no danger to humans or metahumans, and that even magically active people could escape the effects without permanent harm simply by refraining from astral interaction or magic use of any kind for enough hours to let the stuff starve to death. And that since Strain-III could not hope to exist for long without active magical sources to feed upon, it's spread was not only inherently limited but any release of it in the wild would rapidly be self-correcting.

Any mention of what would happen to dual-natured entities was conspicuous by its absence, except for indirect reassurances that the bugs couldn't possibly hope to escape once exposed.

"In conclusion I would like to send a personal message to my fellow citizens; a call to everyone who hopes, as I do, for a better tomorrow. I ask you to get involved in helping to revitalize and rebuild our nation. Go out and register to vote. Volunteer for public service, if you can spare the time and opportunity, or donate to worthy causes. Do what you can to promote positive change and a safe environment. Support the corporations helping to keep our economy strong. For if we can all do these things then the United Canadian-American States can forever remain one nation, under God, indivisible, and with liberty and justice for all.

"Thank you all, and good night."

The Tri-D faded out, and the officers dismissed the assembly. Predictably, most of us stuck around to start talking about what we'd just watched anyway.
​

"Well, that explains why we're packing up." I observed to the general atmosphere. "Contract's ending, and it's time for Ares to start earning nuyen on us elsewhere. The UCAS can handle the mop-up."

"Mop-up? There's still shooting going on at the Wall!" someone from 2nd Platoon burst in. "Fuck, you can go outside and hear the gunfire from here!" Which we couldn't, really, not with everyone talking - but yeah, the distant pop-pop-pop of occasional gunshots faintly audible from the northern side of the Wall that was only a couple miles south of us had been an unsettling punctuation to Haeffner's speech.

"Didn't the UCAS troops get the stand-down order?" someone else asked confusedly.

"The troops on the Wall got the order to let any crossers through without challenge several hours before President Haeffner's speech made it official." one of the staff intel guys chimed in. "Word is that gunfire is from 'spontaneous demonstrations'."

"Oh Christ." Nick swore. "Let me guess. We've got 'concerned citizens committees' out there who think that everybody leaving the Zone has got to be a bug, and they've gotten together and decided that if the UCAS Army isn't going to do anything about it then they'll do it themselves."

"Fucking vigilantes." we mutually eye-rolled. "And please don't tell me that Knight Errant's going to get stuck with the riot-control contract to go put that mess down."

"Nope, the UCAS Army and Eagle Security get to field that one." someone else chimed in loudly from several tables over. "And thank God. The last time Knight Errant had to deal with anti-Chicago-refugee lynch mobs, the news footage made us look like war criminals."

"Damn, I was hoping this deployment would last longer." one of the mechanized infantry guys who'd been shipped here recently for the big push surprised us.

"You actually liked Containment Zone duty?" Rebecca gaped at him. "Where the hell did they transfer you in from?"

"Sekondi." he replied flatly.

"The pan-corporate seaport/enclave on the West African coast." Gabe explained for her. "It's relatively safe inside the walls - provided you patrol vigorously enough - but if you go so much as fifty meters outside then you're wide open for anything from the worst sorts of Awakened wildlife to any one of half-a-dozen tribal wars to enough pirates to fill a province-" he waved his hands. "I was stationed there for my first tour fresh out of training."

"Holy shit, brother, then did someone at the assignments office not like your face." the other guy fist-bumped the Sergeant. "And yeah, with this TDY done now I've got to head back there for eight more months."

"At least you got a break in the middle." Gabe grinned at him.

"Anybody know where we're going next?" Rebecca asked. "Because we're already stowing our gear for transport, but I can't turn up so much as a rumor to where we'll be shipping it."

"The most recent word I have is that they're going to give us a less intense posting to let us rest up a bit from Bravo Company's having spent the past year here on the Containment Zone detail." Gabe told us. "But I don't know where yet. Apparently there's several competing priorities."

"Makes sense." I agreed. You could only keep a unit - especially a spec-ops fast-reaction outfit like ours - at a wartime op-tempo for so many months before you had to pull them back and let them rest and refit. Admittedly, 'less intense' for us still encompassed things like possibly ending up on SWAT duty in a city where Knight Errant had the municipal police contract, or being assigned to some corporate facility or another as a heavy reaction team to back up the permanent site security guys, but while you still got shot at doing those things they were still much less exhausting then going into outright battlefields like the Chicago Containment Zone, and would definitely involve far fewer bugs.

Thank God. I'd just gotten here in time to only do a couple months of this crap and I was already looking forward to leaving. The rest of the company had been here for almost a year.

* * * * *​

Denver, CAS Sector
March 15, 2058

As it turned out, Bravo Company of the 6th Rapid Response's next stop was the Mile High City.

The Denver Front Range Free Zone was a unique phenomenon, a reflection in miniature of the divided and just plain screwed-up nature of North American politics ever since the Awakening. If people thought that the divided city of Berlin during the old Cold War was strange, then they'd never seen Denver. Instead of being divided into two pieces the city was split up into six separate sovereign jurisdictions - UCAS, CAS, Sioux Nation, Ute Nation, Pueblo Corporate Council, and Aztlan.

Early 21st century North American history made sense only in a world where the return of magic had made the otherwise impossible entirely possible. The early 2000s had already driven the world to the brink of instability even prior to the Awakening, what with things like the first VITAS pandemic in 2010, several nuclear meltdowns in Europe and the old US, stock market crashes, you name it. The rise of megacorporate extraterritoriality also dated back to this era - although the Seretech Decision of 1999 is what had ultimately laid the roots of megacorporate power by legalizing the right of corporations to raise and equip private armies, it took the economic dislocations and power vacuum of the early 2000s to allow the first megacorps to really start growing into the AAAs and their Corporate Court that now dominated the economy and international politics of the world.

But most relevant to Denver was when a group of Native American terrorists, for reasons nobody ever figured out, decided it would be a great idea to hijack an Air Force nuclear missile silo and send the ICBM screaming over the pole straight for Russia. None of them were taken alive, of course, but they'd managed to somehow arm and fire the bird before they were taken out. God decided to be merciful and have the missile spontaneously fail while still sub-orbital, and the Russians managed to keep their fingers off the trigger. But in a world where enough shit had already gone wrong that the planet was basically one bad day away from a global psychotic episode, the US government had thought that re-legalizing the old Japanese internment camps of World War II was a great idea. Only this time it was the Native Americans who were all up for being tossed into them.

God only knows how that one would have ended if the world had remained mundane and thus the United States had retained military supremacy in the situation, but the internment camps had only just gotten into full swing in late 2011 when the Awakening popped loose and surprise! Turns out magic was real all along and a whole lot of mythology was actually distorted records of real stuff from prehistory, it had just taken a few thousand years off! And all over the world, various superstitions and magical traditions that hadn't been anything more than academic stuff and parlor games suddenly started returning actual results, as the 'mana level' of the planet surged back up to a level that the paranatural theorists (eventually) figured out probably hadn't been equalled since prior to the invention of writing.

And one of those magical traditions that actually worked now had been the several Native American shamanic belief systems that the separate tribes had had. Which is how Daniel 'Howling Coyote' Coleman, a shaman of the Ute tribe, ended up spending the next several years of his confinment painstakingly experimenting and figuring out how to best use his new powers.. And in 2014 he becmae the leader a massive collective protest/ritual in the internment camps intended to invoke the power of the Great Ghost Dance against us palefaces.

And it had worked. All the camp security systems had failed as if they were EMP'ed, and the guards who actually fired on the escaping people saw their bullets hit a magical protective barrier and bounce. And thus began the rebel/guerilla movement that in 2017 ended when a second invocation of the Great Ghost Dance managed to make half a dozen volcanoes on the Pacific Rim all erupt simultaneously within a second of each other.

The US had finally backed down. Although both invocations of the Great Ghost Dance had been tremendously costly efforts - literally hundreds of participants of the massive group ritual had died from the strain - the point had been made. Even without access to enriched materials or sophisticated manufacturing capabilities, thanks to magic the Native American Nations were effectively a rival nuclear power. The rebellion ended with the Treaty of Denver in 2018, which ended up conceding most of the western half of North America to the newly-founded Sovereign Tribal Council. While practical considerations had forced them to grant citizenship and tribal status to anyone who could claim even the faintest ancestral connection, even those people who were as white as I was, the old United States was forever dead and the continent had balkanized.

The threat of the Great Ghost Dance faded away when the NAN coalition fell mostly apart without the immediate external enemy being that immediate anymore, but the separate member states of the NAN had shaken out into strong nations of their own comprised of related tribal confederations. Aftershocks of this balkanization continued when the southern half of what was left of the US seceded in 2034 to become my homeland of the Confederated American States. In 2035 they were followed by the mostly-elven Sinseareach tribe seceding from the NAN to declare themselves as the nation of Tir Tairngire, claiming most of what had been Washington State and Oregon for their own and inviting in non-tribal elves from all over to come form their separatist ethno-state. 2035 is also when the former nation of Mexico, now having assimilated much of Central America into itself and calling the new territory Aztlan, invaded Texas and pushed their northern border all the way up to Austin.

But most relevant to us is the part where Denver had also become a disputed city-state, eventually divided amongst the various relevant parties. The three largest NAN nations - Sioux, Ute, and Pueblo - had all had their borders intersect at Denver, and Aztlan had somehow managed to get a semi-legitimate territorial claim put in via legal reasoning I still didn't understand. Add in the old United States arguing over it, and the historical wrangling over Denver continued to be a barely simmering flashpoint even 10 years and more after the Treaty of Denver had ended the original NAN wars. The secession of the CAS had only made the mix even more complex.

But eventually everyone involved had decided that while they didn't want to give up their claim on Denver, they wanted to restart the war over their claims even less. Which is how Denver was nowadays split up into six 'autonomous defense zones', each one under a different national sovereignty but in theory free of any national military presence and thus acting as buffer zones against a possible renewal of hostilies.

Uh-huh. Demilitarized just like Austin and San Angelo were demilitarized.

Although Bravo Company wasn't being assigned as part of the large detachments of 'civilian security specialists' glaring at each other across the walls and no-mans'-lands as they polished their 'security' vehicles of tanks, fighter-bombers, etc, etc. No, we were deployed to the CAS Sector as a ready reserve force, as Knight Errant had both the municipal police contract for the entire CAS Sector of Denver and a lot of KE-guarded corporate facilities - both Ares' own facilities and other corps who'd subcontracted us for corporate security duties - that liked to have Rapid-Response troops like us ready to deploy to augment them as needed, like a SWAT team responding to beat cops calling away a ten-thirteen.

And since this tour was going to be a corpsec rotation, not a military field deployment, that meant we could go back to living like real people. No more barracks or field messes. We'd get to rent apartments, buy food in grocery stores and cook it in kitchens, and eat in restaurants, and have an entire, actual city to go have fun in when off-duty and not just a soldier's Strip right outside a military base. So despite the near-certainty that we'd still have to deploy at least occasionally against shadowrunners or go-gangers or all the other messes that a major municipal area could generate, and of course we'd still have to keep up our training and do some patrolling, we could get back to our lives.

Which was fine by me. Because if I never saw another insect spirit again, it would be a million years too soon.
​

---

Author's Note: The opinions of the MC are not necessarily those of the author. And Mitchell entirely has reasons to be thinking the way he is right now, even if it's not what might have been expected.

I hadn't anticipated getting more backstory about the decision-making behind the Ares bomb and Strain-III this early, until I realized that Ares would have a valid reason to leak that shit to their troops right now. Notably, prepping the PR battlespace for the public announcement of Strain-III to keep Ares from being made the goat. And so they did.

As for the founding of the Native American Nations - look, that dates back to original Shadowrun 1e in the 80s and it's a foundational part of the setting geography and has been for the entirety of the game line. So never mind how much sense it doesn't make, we're stuck with it. Push the "I believe" button and move on, all of us who actually played the game had to.

And yeah, welcome to Denver. This is the Shadowrun city that's so weird it made Seattle look normal, even if Seattle is the flagship city of the gameline and thus gets a lot more page space. I still own the original Denver boxed set from 2nd edition, it's a trip.


​

 

[DIT_grue]

A couple of things that look like typos:

And they'd both reacted by sending special emissaries to President Haeffner and Ares CEO Damien Knight to share all some things about about insect spirits that even Ares hadn't found out yet.

Click to shrink...

Delete this word?

I was pretty sure at this point that people who didn't already know that Rebecca was gay was thinking that we were a couple but hey, they could go screw themselves.

Click to shrink...

were

 

[htgriffin]

Nice reminder that the run-up to Bug City came under the category of No Win Situation.

 

[Placeholdername]

Ah, Denver before Ghostwalker shows up and takes charge. This should be interesting.

 

[kraryal]

had done to reverse-decimate the population of Chicago

Click to shrink...

A scholar, in this day and age!

Aw man, the trouble with such a well fleshed out and embedded narrator is that we only know what he knows. It's gotta be at least half wrong on the whole PR thing, but how would we tell?

 

[Jarudazuigu]

Heh. Also fun fact for people wondering why the Main Character is so salty about Aztlan?

*Raises finger*
They revived the Aztec religion as described by Spanish monks.
Made it into national religion.
Aztechnology is the megacorp who's the most prolific user of Blood Magic. The type of magic that turns you into cyberpsycho. When in Shadowrun if you over-chrome yourself, you die because your soul can't take the strain. The only full-borg conversions in Shadowrun? Either robots run by AIs OR literally cyber-zombies. "Invented" by Aztechnology with the help of "ancient Aztec religious" blood rituals.
*lowers finger*

Aztechnology is capital E evil. More than Arasaka from Cyberpunk ever could. Arasaka, and majority of Megacorsp from Shadowrun, are the Evil Overlord type. They'll want you to buy their product, provide your life as wage-slave and make them rich at your expense. Aztechnology? They have "mysterious goal" ... that I won't spoil, it's easy enough to find within the game lore. In the implications, I mean.

 

[cliffc999]

To put it another way, the Azzies knew the truth about the Universal Brotherhood years before anyone else did... and didn't tell anyone.

Oh,not because they liked the bugs. They don't. But their own agenda was best served by letting horrible things happen to other people, so they did.

 

[Jarudazuigu]

Cliff, do you plan our Main Character warring against Azzies?

 

[htgriffin]

To put it another way, the Azzies knew the truth about the Universal Brotherhood years before anyone else did... and didn't tell anyone.

Oh,not because they liked the bugs. They don't. But their own agenda was best served by letting horrible things happen to other people, so they did.

Click to shrink...

Basically, while there are very few Even-Vaguely-White Hats in the setting, the list of factions/entities which one should not side with if Aztechnology comes into open existential conflict with them is only marginally greater... and that list is split between Immediate Threats To All That Live & Let Them Wreck Each Other Before Finishing The Survivor.

 

[cliffc999]

Fortunately, Aztechnology will not be the main villains of the story... which is a good thing, both for the MCs and for the readers.

In fact, I only mentioned them because it's a part of Mitchell's character background. As well as an illustration that even if you don't work for a corp you still often work for a place that makes significant moral compromises, because cyberpunk.

 

[Doc Sithicus]

What have we got here? A new story by cliffc999 - always a pleasure to read. Watched!

 

[naarn]

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?"

Click to shrink...

Sure, they were fairly nice as ghouls go, but... all ghouls are obligate cannibals, most ghouls are serial killers, and the ones that aren't serial killers are only able to refrain from being so due to the help of limited logistics that could be helping other ghouls to refrain from being serial killers. That is to say, the population of ghouls is far above the amount that can be ethically fed (though changes in how the dead and medical waste get disposed of could narrow that gap a bit). Plus the ghoul strain of HMHVV is much more virulent than other strains - ghouls accidentally Infect others at significant rates. I believe it's considered legal (and often moral) to kill ghouls without any individualized cause just about anywhere outside of Asamando, largely because of such reasons.

So while I expect them to regret the deaths of ghouls they were friendly with, and be discomforted by pictures of massacres of ghouls, I expect most people to consider the deaths of ghouls to be... not that much of a loss.

edit: I think there's an actual bounty on ghouls in many jurisdictions, including both the UCAS and the CAS. Though I'm not sure exactly when such bounties were issued and/or rescinded.

 

[cliffc999]

I believe it's considered legal (and often moral) to kill ghouls without any individualized cause just about anywhere outside of Asamando, largely because of such reasons.

Click to shrink...

IIRC, it is. And yeah, our MCs are reacting emotionally and not logically. Of course, that's called 'character development'.

As to the delay in the update, blame Todd Howard. A few days ago I went 'Hey, I haven't played Skyrim in years, let's see if it's still fun' and the next thing I know I'm staying up till midnight testing new mod configurations. That having been said, Mod Organizer 2 still kicks Vortex's ass, fight me.

I should get back on track soon.

 

[Masked-Divider]

IIRC, it is. And yeah, our MCs are reacting emotionally and not logically. Of course, that's called 'character development'.

As to the delay in the update, blame Todd Howard. A few days ago I went 'Hey, I haven't played Skyrim in years, let's see if it's still fun' and the next thing I know I'm staying up till midnight testing new mod configurations. That having been said, Mod Organizer 2 still kicks Vortex's ass, fight me.

I should get back on track soon.

Click to shrink...

Ahhhh Skyrim and Fallout have been endless time pits (more like black holes) devouring all my free time with all the plentiful and pleasing MODS. Can't tell you how many hours were spent just getting my mod list juuuuust right to have a great experience. Only to play for a few hours then leave it for weeks at a time due to [Life] *shudders*.

Edit: and God bless and Curse Todd Howard for endlessly releasing the game over a gajillion times. We want Elder Scrolls VI TODD!!! Preferably in timescale that isn't measured in years.

 

[Velk]

As to the delay in the update, blame Todd Howard.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, I can't throw stones here because of the glass house I'm in, I started at 7:00 yesterday and when I looked back the clock after playing it was almost midnight.

 

[Ragnarokasgard67]

I don't really know much about Shadowrun, what is Ares FireWatch? Are they just special forces but better or something else?

 

[cliffc999]

I don't really know much about Shadowrun, what is Ares FireWatch? Are they just special forces but better or something else?

Click to shrink...

They're basically Ares' equivalent of Delta Force.

 

[Unique]

Cliff any other shadowrun si or fanfics like this for you to recommend?

 

[cliffc999]

Well, it's time to face the music - this story is going nowhere. The muse is dead.

I originally did just stop to take a video game break, but the problem is that after I broke I just couldn't get into it again. And so I considered various things but they never got off the scratchpad, wrote the beginnings of next chapters that I never posted, went off and revisited some of my Shadowrun TTRPGs, then decided to refresh my mind by doing other stuff for a while, and when I came back...

... the muse was not only dead, but decomposing. So I stopped and concentrated and took internal inventory on why exactly I felt no enthusiasm for this thing anymore, and why I hadn't ever since the initial rush of 'This is what I composed during the first flush of creation!' wore off.

And the answer was simple to find when I finally went looking for it, however disappointing it was.

Put simply, I'm not enthused for writing this thing because virtually no one is reading it. Oh, I still have some of my faithful regulars here, I'm not discounting you guys... the problem is, I seem to have nobody else besides the few people who will read literally anything I post.

Seriously, I usually average a couple hundred likes per chapter of any of the bigger stories I write. Some of my best have gotten multiple times that. But this one hasn't even broken a hundred on any of them... and to put that in perspective, the very first Jumpchain story I ever posted on SB, which is the first anything I posted on SB, which is the first story I posted anywhere? That piece of crap written when I didn't even know what I was doing as a writer, in an episodic outline format that barely qualified as a story, still busted 100+ likes per post.

And it had a lot more comments per chapter on this. While this story? There's virtually no discussion provoked at all... and yes, I'm infamous for hating a certain category of "discussion", but that doesn't mean I like posting into a soundproof chamber.

So while I'm not the sort of author who holds future posts to ransom if I don't get a certain minimum # of likes, I certainly am not immune to the dopamine hit of clicks - that's why most fanfic authors write. They write because they feel good when they write something that catches on.

And this? Apparently, I have written something that has mostly failed to catch on.

So yeah, I'm out. Muse is done here. And no, this doesn't mean 'if we cheer enough belatedly, he'll come back!'. You know me, you know that I never officially punch the 'I Quit' button for as long as I even think I might get an idea later (I mean, I still have stories officially on hiatus that have been there for years without saying 'Abandoned' yet.) This one? It's done.

Sorry. Hopefully now that I'm free of this creative anchor, I'll eventually think of something else to write.

 

[heralding_bubble]

Sad to hear, but at least you know it and let us know instead of leaving it in limbo.
Thanks for what you did write, and I hope your next project will be fulfilling.

 

[Revenant42]

No problem it happens hope your next work works out better

 

[MadGreenSon]

Hey man, it's no problem. Go get your clicks.

 

[marekekeke]

Sad, but I totaly get it, thanks for writing.

 

[Dormouse]

Good luck in future endeavors.

 

[cliffc999]

Oh, one amusing thing I could mention - the character of Corporal Rebecca Mierson?

While her name and appearance in this are non-canonical and chosen by me, because canon didn't specify, she is a character you've seen before - in Shadowrun canon. Because what decker do we know who went into the shadows in the early 2060s and is ex-Knight Errant, and is a meddling snoopy nose who is a fussbudget about her friends?

Yup. Pistons.

Her transition into the shadows while Mitchell didn't leave them was an upcoming plot arc. (I like to think the roots of her disaffection were already starting to be foreshadowed here - at least, I intended them to be.)

 

[Vrenze]

Ah well, I did like the story but as one of those new regulars who'd read anything you write I do have to say this was one of the less interesting of your stories but I put that more on the setting which I am just not as familiar with. Hope you find something you'll enjoy writing!

 

[Kyrin Fireheart]

Well damn. Here's looking forward to your next story then!

 

[Lucid Lunacy]

Hopefully now that I'm free of this creative anchor, I'll eventually think of something else to write.

Click to shrink...

While it's a bummer to hear that the fic's dead, at least there's this! Hopefully the next one works out. Thanks for putting the time in to give us stories Cliff!

 

[Pavalos]

Sad to hear, but they for letting us know. I was wondering why its in this forum. Most stories, no matter what, end up in NSFW since most people seem to go there. That could be part of it. Either way, hope to see more of your work