Chicago Containment Zone, UCAS
January 5th, 2058
"I'm surprised
anyone is still alive in here." I said as I linked my HUD into the feed of the surveillance drone several thousand feet overhead to look down at our convoy as it drove slowly down what was left of Interstate 90, and at the rows of crumbling, overgrown buildings the expressway was passing by.
Riding buttoned-up in an APC always sucked - in a lighter vehicle you'd have a gunport or a window to shoot back out of, as well as your choice of doors to exit through if you had to unass the vehicle in a hurry. In a Citymaster you rode in an armored box, with only the driver and the turret gunner able to actually respond to anything. And a Citymaster's being armored enough to ignore small arms fire only guaranteed that the enemy would dedicate his supply of anti-vehicle weapons to you - assuming he had any. But if he did then you were left with your only option being to pray that the Trophy counter-measures worked, because you wouldn't have time to wait for the ramp to drop so you could bail. And if we hadn't had the drone overhead to link to then we wouldn't even have been able to see anything, because the UCAS' Citymasters didn't have the external camera pickups or internal smart-display walls that ours did.
"Official estimates are that the approximately seven million people trapped in the quarantine zone have suffered 90% casualties over the past two years." Rebecca said quietly as she sat next to me, the HUD in her helmet and her retinal implants synced to the same display that I was. "I'd guess that it's more likely 95%... minimum."
"That's over six and a half million people who were left in here to starve, or freeze, or get torn apart by the bugs." I tried to wrap my head around it. "Even with all the food drops in the world-"
"It's a tragedy." Sinclair agreed from where he was sitting across from us on the other row of seats down the inside of the APC's flanks. "But all we can do now is avenge them by helping kill all these damn bugs once and for all."
"It wasn't the bugs that put up the Wall." someone- I couldn't tell exactly who- murmured discreetly. "It was the UCAS."
A disapproving snort came from the side of the compartment where the APC's turret gunner was standing with his head up in the cupola.
"There was a legitimate reason then to be worried then about possible refugees possibly being full of bug infiltrators-" Sinclair stopped and swallowed heavily. "But in
hindsight, yes... maybe they made the wrong call."
"Shit was ice cold." one of the troopers - his ID tag read
Merrickson in my HUD - from the other five-team riding along with us today broke in. "What they did with that phony VITAS outbreak-"
Sinclair firmed his lips even as his eyes remained sorrowful. "We're losing our concentration here, people." The interior of the APC fell silent.
"Task Force Agile, this is Guardian." the call came over the operational freq we were sharing with the UCAS Army today. 'Guardian' was the call sign for the battlefield controller sitting back at their HQ watching all the feeds, including the intel take they were split-screening from us.
"No changes on plot. We have you on the scope as ten mikes from jump-off."
"Guardian, Agile One-Actual confirms." the CO of our little combined-arms expedition replied.
"No contact yet."
"There's no way they don't know we're coming." I observed quietly, as the convoy slowed and began to take the off-ramp at Kedzie. "We're practically holding a parade right down the street at high noon. Anybody with a good pair of binocs on any rooftop around can tell the whole city that the armored cav is rolling in."
"I hate this combined-ops stuff." Adamson groused. "The host force always gets to make the plan, but then they throw
us in head-first and expect us to bleed to unfuck their fuck-up."
"We're PMCs, Nick." Jeffers said sardonically. "The clients don't pay our premium because they think they can do the job themselves." Everybody politely ignored the angry muttering coming from the front of the APC at that one.
"Everyone double-check their gear." Sinclair ordered, and we all started doing our final weapons checkout and comm sync tests as the convoy drew within several minutes of our destination.
In the first month I'd been here I'd seen action three times, not counting our first night's excitement or routine patrols. Nobody was interested in explaining to grunts like us exactly how our targeting priorities were generated - even Sergeant Sinclair only knew what was passed on down to him from the officers, and that wasn't much more substantial than a plan-of-the-day. The rest of our time we spent doing the usual routine - training, maintaining our gear, studying background datafiles to keep fresh. But now, for the first time since I'd checked in, our whole platoon was going in on a straight-up daylight assault. And not just our platoon but also a detachment from the UCAS Army's armored cav. It was their APCs we were riding in right now, actually, even if Ares had built and sold them.
And in less than ten minutes we'd be knocking on the front door of one of the largest concentrations of bugs anyone had found this month.
"All Partner forces, this is Agile One-Actual." the UCAS task force commander interrupted my woolgathering, using the call sign our platoon of Ares augmentations to his mission had been given.
"We will be arriving at final assembly area in two mikes. Be advised that we will be met by local partisans who scouted this hive for us in the first place, so do not, repeat, do not, fire on unidentified metahuman targets."
"Partner One-Actual acknowledges. All Partners, disembark as soon as the column halts but weapons tight until I give the call." Lieutenant Menendez's voice immediately followed. Sinclair's voice joined the quiet wave of acknowledgements from all the team leaders, and slightly less than two minutes later the APC came to a halt and the rear ramp began to lower. We all got out of the Citymaster as quickly as we could and quickly oriented on the target building less than a block to the south. A ten-story glass-and-metal tower, the sign out front was a discreetly anonymous street number and a small logo of whatever real-estate corporation was renting out the various floors to small tenants.
"All right, you've already heard the briefing but while we wait for our native guides I'll go over this one more time!" the Lieutenant called out. "Intel is that there's at least a hundred Roach spirits in the Kirkman office complex, laying low and digging in! That many roaches means the possibility that they're gestating a queen in there. Unfortunately roaches are good at burrowing so the simple solution of knocking the building down with an FAE is not an option in this case! We're going to have to burn them out floor by floor, bottom to top!"
Everyone turned to look at each other, but nobody talked. There really wasn't much you could say to that.
"But before we go in, we'll roll in the ANVAR-TFM canisters to soften them up! Do not forget that commercial pesticide in that high a concentration is a lethal nerve agent even to metahumans, so if your armor breaches containment you will need to
immediately call away that you're compromised, inject the antagonist, and get your damn helmet off and your backup filter mask on! Then fall back to the casualty collection point outside if you can! The UCAS troopers don't have chemical protection gear as good as ours, which is why they'll be staying outside and buttoned up in their vehicles to hold the perimeter! Any questions?"
I swallowed my butterflies and raised a hand. "Sir, last month I saw an entire team go down to maybe six to ten bugs in the open, and now we're fighting a hundred-plus in tight quarters?"
"That's right, rookie, your team was on the SAR op near the stadium wasn't it?" the lieutenant glared at me. "For your general information those were mantis spirits, individually the deadliest type of bug in close quarters, and from all indicators fairly powerful specimens of the breed at that! These are roaches, quantity over quality. And they should be reduced to a fraction of their normal combat power by the pesticide in addition. Any
further questions?" he glared at all of us.
"Right, then-" he continued, only to be interrupted by one of the lookouts calling away
"Contact! Contact inside the perimeter!"
Everyone turned to face that direction, our weapons half-raised, just as a tall thin-faced woman with narrowly-cropped dark hair faded into view from where she'd just dropped an invisibility spell and we all relaxed on seeing that it wasn't a bug or someone with their weapons out. Her voice rang out clearly to all of us, tinged with knife-edged scorn. "
Ares? I called the UCAS Army, who invited you into this?" A sudden motion in the corner of my eye drew my attention as I realized that Sinclair had reflexively taken half-a-step forward before checking himself, his expression visibly shocked to see her. What, was that all about?
"The UCAS Army." Lieutenant Menendez said pompously, striding briskly over to face off against our arriving guest escorted by the first sergeant and a couple of the guys from Team One. "Ares has greater specialized capabilities and equipment for-"
"Spare me." she continued, shutting him down instantly by sheer force of personality. Incongruously she wasn't dressed in the usual ragged clothing or looted protective gear of Zone dwellers but instead wore a suit of advanced combat armor similar to ours, but beaten and scuffed with what looked like years of abuse without an opportunity to get it to a repair center for proper refinishing. If it had ever had identifying markings or logos of any kind they'd long since been painted over or dissolved.
"Okay, recognition code Lima Seventeen." she continued, and we relaxed even further at hearing the code phrase we'd been told to expect from our native guide. "I'm from the Wrigleyville sanctuary community about three-quarters of a mile north of here. We found this hive, and I scouted it out for you. These damn bugs are too close to us to be allowing them to raise any new roach mothers to maturity - one is enough! - and they're also sitting too close to the main trade routes to some of our food suppliers south of here. I'm a mage, and a veteran bug-stomper, and I'll be going in with you to burn the place." She spoke right over the Lieutenant as he tried to interrupt. "I've already been through several of the lower floors and haven't found it, so the damn roaches are keeping it higher off the ground. Which is
not usual behavior for roaches, so there's something in there they really don't want disturbed."
"But you're not
certain there's a new roach-mother gestating in there." the Lieutenant pressed, visibly wrinkling his nose in digust at the idea of working with someone who looked to be as much of a hardcore shadowrunner as any antagonist-of-the-week from an action trid.
"Unusually large cluster of bugs, lots of foraging expeditions bringing in extra food, highly sophisticated defensive behavior beyond their usual standard.
Maybe they're just hiding their collection of Pop-Cracks prizes in there,
Lieutenant, but I doubt it." she scoffed. "And however long you've been bug stomping it isn't a tithe on how long I've been doing it, so don't even try."
"Arrogant know-it-all indig-" Jeffers began, only for Sinclair to turn to him and shut him down with the harshest glare I'd ever seen him use. He didn't even have to speak, his expression said it all.
"Team leaders over here, we'll
debrief our
expert." the Lieutenant answered with heavy sarcasm, and Sinclair fell out with the other fire-team lead NCOs to enter the huddle. After a couple of minutes they broke up, and my eyebrow raised as I noticed that the native guide had attached herself to Sinclair as he returned to us.
"I volunteered us to escort our local scout." he answered before anyone could even ask.
Lieutenant Menendez went over to the command track to coordinate final details with the UCAS senior officer before we entered the building. Two of the other teams started unloading the gas canisters and escorting them into the lobby. The other teams started setting up and preparing for entry, and for a minute nobody was looking at us.
"Lieutenant, what are you
doing here?" Sinclair asked her with quiet urgency, literally snapping to attention as he faced her.
"Captain." she corrected him. "And seriously, you trust them all that much?" she probed.
"They're my team." he answered her as matter-of-factly as a man saying
The world is round.
"Fair enough." she nodded back.
"Captain Ravenheart was my platoon commander during my first year in Rapid-Response." Sinclair hurriedly explained to the rest of us. "But ma'am, you-"
"Team Three, get on the mark!" Lieutenant Menendez's voice snapped out, and we all started to hustle.
A curt "We'll talk later." was Ravenheart's only reaction.
For all that we were sweating going straight into the depths of a bug hive, for once the operation actually was as much of a roach stomp as the brass had promised it would be. The roaches really
were notably smaller and weaker than the mantid spirits that I'd seen shred the old Team Five so easily last month, and made weaker still by the part where we'd flooded the building with enough pesticide that anyone not who wasn't wearing sealed hardsuits like ours or been implanted with chrome lungs would die in under a minute.
Of course, 'smaller and weaker' was still a relative term. We were still talking about man-sized giant bugs, with at least most of the proportional strength and toughness that implied. Even a small roach spirit was superhumanly fast, as strong and tough as the average ork, and had an armored carapace that could stop pistol fire. The bigger ones were worse. And they were stealthy as hell, effectively impossible to sneak up on without magic due to how sensitive they were at picking up vibrations in the air and ground, and goddamn fast. Anybody who'd walked alone into this building - except Ravenheart, apparently - would have gotten shredded to pieces before they could stop to scratch their ass.
Without the pesticide weakening them even we'd have needed a full company to do this job and would have taken respectable casualties in the doing, and that was despite us being decked out in Ares' top-of-the-line milspec combat armor and tricked out with large-caliber battle rifles loaded with APDS and semi-automatic 20mm assault cannons for heavy weapons for popping holes in hardened roach hide. And with plentiful magical support riding along besides, as well as us being a cut above the usual line grunt in both training and experience. There wasn't a militia in the Zone that could have hoped to get this job done without getting an entire horde of themselves wiped out in here. Even the UCAS Army was staying outside for a reason - their spec-ops teams could have matched our skill and had at least some of our gear, but the troops waiting outside would have gotten ripped to pieces in here even if they wouldn't have been taking their lives in their hands trying to fight bugs in close quarters while wearing relatively fragile chem suits and in an atmosphere pumped so full of nerve agent that even with our NBC protective systems we still had to attach internal oxygen tanks to affoid suffocating. Which is why they were staying outside turtled up in their APCs and limiting their contributions to keeping us from being interrupted by anyone else, as well as using their chaingun turrets to pop what few roaches decided to try leaving by the window.
So 1st Platoon of Bravo Company, Ares Containment Zone Task Force methodically cleared their way deeper into the heart of the bug nest, room by room. BattleTac linked all of our suits' and weapons' sensor systems into a single unified grid much like IVIS did for the Army's AFVs, so between that and generous onboard computing power in our commlinks the HUDs in our helmets let us effectively see through walls. A simple command thought into our datajacks or helmet 'trodes would let us put digital waypoints or target markers up on the readouts to do callouts and warnings for the entire platoon or any selected subgroup of it, automatically outline both us and anyone the software could identify as hostile in green or red target auras respectively, and several other nifty tricks besides.
So what would for other troops have been an incredibly tedious hours'-long evolution of clearing the zone by searching one room at a time, then posting security detachments behind us to hold corner and chokepoints and keep the bugs from flowing back in behind them, with every step having to be called out audibly to keep people from running into each other or shooting each other, could instead be done by us in a fraction of that time. We could press on multiple axes simultaneously without worrying about friendly fire, secure our rear flanks simply by dropping some sensor buoys at the relevant intersections to watch for bugs while we all moved on ahead, and use a whole variety of high-tech sensors to see straight through the darkness and interior ruins to spot the roaches lurking under the rubble before they went off on us like so many insectoid land mines. We stacked up every possible unfair advantage we could and used it to murder our enemy in their own homes as thoroughly as we could, no matter how unsportsmanlike or drama-free our behavior had to be.
In other words, we were soldiers.
"Would you explain something to me?" I asked 'Captain' Ravenheart as our team was held up at an atrium on the sixth floor, waiting for two of the other teams to finish sweeping side of the building before we resumed our advance upwards. "About the bugs." I continued when she turned to glare at me suspiciously.
"If I can." she conceded, relaxing a bit.
"The corpo briefing we got was all full of technobabble, but if you've logged serious time as a street mage then hopefully you can dumb it down for me. Aren't bug spirits supposed to be
spirits? Y'know, magical critters from the astral plane? Shouldn't you and the other mages here be the only thing we've got that can even touch them? I mean, I know spirits can temporarily manifest as solid so even mundanes like me can see and interact with 'em, but even when manifested they can just basically ignore physical trauma and fade back out at will." I shrugged.
"That's accurate as far as it goes." she conceded. "But seriously, Ares didn't even explain 'true form' versus 'flesh form' to you guys?" she rolled her eyes, and I noticed Rebecca moving in closer to us to fascinatedly eavesdrop on the convo. She hadn't gotten to be our squad techie without having a fascination for all kinds of technobabble. Plus she was just one of those naturally nosy people, even if on her it looked cute.
"Not in any words that made sense." I agreed. "Or if they did, went over my head like a red-balling panzerjock."
"Right. OK, the sixty-second version is that it really
is 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' with these fucking things. Bug spirits that are still fully spirits are 'true form'. But insect shamans can not only summon bug spirits, but use a ritual to invest them into a human captive. A permanent spirit possession, where a bug spirit eats the soul of whoever lived in there and walks their carcass around as a 'flesh-form'. Most of the time they're barely able to use the flesh as an anchor at all, and it doesn't remotely retain the human shape." My blood ran cold at the sheer matter-of-factness with which she described this
fucking Lovecraftian bullshit.
"You're telling me that every fucking bug I've put a bullet in since I got here
used to be a person?" I almost shit my pants.
"Yes." Ravenheart replied quietly.
"You said 'most' of them don't retain the human shape." Rebecca chimed in softly. "That implies-?"
"If it's a 'good merge' - which thankfully doesn't happen often - then yes, you can get a bug walking around inside a human skinsuit." Ravenheart agreed. "Worse yet, they assimilate the memories of the host too, so they can walk and talk and emulate human behavior. Make no mistake - the human's spirit, the
anima is still as gone as if they went full cockroach.
Every flesh-form you see, no matter how human, is not still not a person - it's a thing that murdered a person." She stopped and visibly wound herself down from an oncoming rant. "But memories have a physical component in the brain that they're now using, so they can still pretend to a humanity they never had. There were bug infiltrators walking around
years before the Zone went up, even if they had to work a lot more slowly and subtly. The whole Universal Brotherhood mess alone-" She shook her head. "Getting the Chicago hive together was supposed to be their big invasion kickoff, and we barely-." She quietly slammed one palm on a nearby wall in frustration. "Fucking bugs!"
"Fucking bugs." I breathed out heavily in horrified agreement. "So despite the part where it makes 'em
more vulnerable, the bugs are still taking and 'flesh-forming' as many people as they can so they can
stay here? Permanently? Instead of having to go back wherever spirits go to when the summoning runs out?"
"Exactly." Ravenheart nodded at me briskly. "And that's why we're all here wading through this nightmare."
We resumed the advance, and finished up on the ninth floor about an hour later. Ravenheart and the two combat mages our platoon had from teams One and Four just volley-fired the Roach mother spirit and its gestating daughter to death with as many manabolts as they could pump, which saved us from having to bring in a demo charge and take the top two floors off the building. The platoon stopped to take a breather while we went back down through the building and made sure to do our mop-up, which gave Ravenheart and Sinclair a chance to finally go off into a quiet corner and have that talk she'd promised him. Apparently she still wasn't willing to share her story with the rest of us.
However, despite her experience and magical powers she'd entirely underestimated both the curiosity and the talent of our team's hacker, and so despite her and Sinclair having gone off-net to talk privately with their helmets touching Rebecca had used her maintenance backdoor to discreetly re-open Sinclair's helmet mike anyway, only she kept it isolated from the rest of the platoon tacnet and just over our own intra-team circuit to us. Or, rather, to me and her, because Adamson and Jeffers visibly didn't want to risk it and both volunteered to go down the hall and secure that corner while we did our thing over here.
"-two survivors of my FireWatch team besides myself." her voice sounded in our ears, and both Rebecca's eyes and mine went wide at realizing that Captain Ravenheart had been a member of Knight Errant's single most elite spec-ops unit, the Ares equivalent of Delta Force.
"Maybe twenty or more other Knight Errant personnel who got stuck in here when the Wall went up and they wrote off everyone in the city- from the security detachment at the local Ares office, here on other routine assignments, you can imagine. And, of course, all sorts of volunteers from among the civilians that we're guarding plus a smattering of veterans from other places."
"And they just abandoned your whole team inside here when the Wall went up instead of letting you report back in? They can't be worried that you're possessed, they know how to check for that now. And even if there aren't enough mages to astrally scan everyone who wants out of the Zone, there's certainly enough to verify our own high-level operatives!" Sinclair thought out loud.
"They won't even answer my radio hails when I try to share what intel we're still gathering from in here. And I'm not even going to share my speculations about why that might be happening, Gabriel. You're not cut out for this kind of spook shit and you never were. You're a good, loyal trooper- and that's all you should need to be." she shook her head at him.
"It's still not right. Look, they might be leaving you out in the cold but I can run a message-" He began.
"No." She interrupted him firmly.
"If not up my official chain of command, then maybe-" he fell silent as she held up her hand, palm out, visibly thinking over his last remark.
"That... might be useful, but I don't want to risk it at this juncture. To risk you at this juncture. Look, for right now I'm handling this in my own way. If it turns out that I really need to use that connection later-" she reassured him.
"Then you know how to reach me, ma'am." Sinclair agreed passionately.
"Now let's get back to-" Ravenheart suddenly broke off and her head snapped around to look at the both of us, as we'd apparently made the mistake of staring too visibly at the goings-on over there.
"Oh god damn it- Rebecca, switch off and forget you ever heard any of that. In fact, wipe your entire comms buffer, both of you!" Sinclair swore viciously, before reaching up to check and then click off the physical lockout switch on his helmet radio.
Ravenheart's
I will hunt you down and murder you in your beds if you even breathe any of that too loud facial expression did all the talking that she needed to do on the topic, and she ghosted out of formation and headed back to wherever she'd come from as soon as we reached the ground floor again without even stopping to check out with Lieutenant Menendez. Nobody else brought the topic up all through our ride back to the Knight Errant prefab compound that they'd set up here when Ares' component of the CZ operation had really got going, and we hung up our gear and went through the post-mission debrief and checkout and all the rest of it.
We'd had what Jeffers explained to me were pretty light casualties for a bug hunt of this magnitude. Nobody had died, even if two guys had had to be medevac'ed for toxin exposure after bugs had breached their suits and they almost certainly wouldn't be back out of the hospital until Ares had paid for some new cyberlungs. Outside outside of that we had only a few guys with broken bones, lacerations and contusions, and one particularly unlucky trooper from Fire-Team Six who was still on a concussion protocol after a charging roach had sent him out a third-story window. So we already knew that First Platoon would be taken off the line for maintain-and-refit for at least a week while we waited for most of our casualties to get off of sick call, and were looking forward to some down time.
So it wasn't until me, Rebecca, and Sgt. Sinclair all decided to do a nice little jog in the late evening that we got an opportunity to discuss what had happened in private while we were busy loping up and down the now-deserted perimeter road underneath the spotlights.
"You invaded our privacy." Sinclair snapped at Rebecca, his voice audibly full of hurt.
"You're too damn trusting sometimes." she glared back at him fearlessly. "Look, it was pretty obvious from the jump that some kind of spook shit was going on, and- hell, she even
said it!" Rebecca continued in an exasperated tone of voice more suited to a mother chewing out her sulky teenager. "You are not cut out at all for spook shit! You are not remotely devious enough! So as your best and decidedly more
subtle friend I did what I always do, I looked out for you!"
"And you?" he glared at me.
"Not gonna lie, I was just curious as hell." I admitted frankly. "But Rebecca's got a point. This lady you haven't seen in years expects you to snap to and salute out of the blue just because she was your platoon leader once? Boss, do you even know she was still
with Ares when the Wall went up? Like,
for certain know? For all that she couldn't show bona fides to us today, she could have already burned her SIN and gone shadowrunner years ago."
"I-" he began, before closing his mouth. "You don't know her, you've never met her before, so you can't be blamed for how absolutely
bullshit that sounded." Sinclair sighed, not even in anger but in sorrow. "But you are both talking out of your ignorant, overly suspicious - and
yes, sincerely concerned for a friend and teammate - asses. Captain Ravenheart lived and breathed service to Ares even more than I do." He paused briefly and continued. "Besides, she wouldn't still be wearing her old suit if she hadn't still in Ares service when the Containment Zone was put into place. Unless it's in a no-man's-land like the CZ you can't even begin to go wearing this gear on the street any more than you could try shadowrunning in repainted Red Samurai armor. If she'd already gone into the shadows so much as a week before the Wall went up, she'd have had to ditch that suit like it was radioactive."
"Valid point." Rebecca conceded intelligently. "But I'm still not apologizing."
"I know better than to expect that." he rolled his eyes briefly, before exhaling heavily and nodding at her with a compassionate smile. "But you both understand-"
"What, that we have to forget that this shit ever happened? She said it herself - you staying the hell away from this whole business of hers is the best thing she can do to protect
you. Which also means
us. So if anybody ever asks, angry Indian lady spent the entire trip ranting Neo-Anarchist propaganda at us from the jump and never so much as hinted that she wasn't born from two SINless strangers who'd met at a masquerade ball." I agreed immediately.
"Let's just hope that anybody else in the platoon who spotted exactly what she was wearing thinks that she looted it off of a corpse." Rebecca reminded us. "But yes. The lips, they are zipped. I'll make sure Jeffers and Adamson understand that too."
"Good." Sinclair nodded at both of us, and we fell back into a companionable silence as we finished the rest of our run.
"Hey boss, you hear the news?" Jeffers greeted us enthusiastically as we re-entered the barracks after showering. "Command thinks we need some decompression after a major bug incident, so on top of the operational stand-down the whole platoon's getting a three-day pass!"
"Really?" he raised his eyebrows, then pulled out his PDA and tapped the screen to check his messages. "And- yes, that's the official announcement right there. Corporal, show Mitchell how to hit the camp intranet and download his liberty card."
"It goes on your credstick, so you use one of the hardline terminals." Rebecca walked me over, and it was the work of a moment to download the right digital encryption key to my stick. Now any MP who ran my stick would see that I did indeed have authenticated and verified permission to be off-base and in civvies, as well as a handy countdown clock utility for when it would expire and I'd have to report back in.
"Your armor and loadout got to be locked up in the armory when you're on pass, but you can take your sidearm off base even in civvies." Jeffers explained good-naturedly to me as we headed off to check in our gear. Our two team NCOs stayed behind to finish up some admin stuff before they signed out - ah, the perks of rank - so us line grunts got to go ahead. "Eagle Security's got the local police contract and they're a cooperating jurisdiction, so a Knight Errant ID is all we need for a concealed-carry license."
"Good, because you'd have to be an idiot to hit the Strip unarmed." I agreed. "You guys
have a Strip here, right?"
Jeffers snorted. "You ever hear of a military base that didn't have the bars right outside? Or
other entertainments?"
"Well I don't mind a strip club, but I've never liked the idea of paying for sex outright." I answered straightforwardly. "So if the upcoming tour of local attractions includes your favorite whorehouse, I'll skip."
"Any particular reason?" he probed diffidently. "I mean, shit dude, you just spent almost a whole year in the training cycle and then a month in the field, the back pressure's got to be pretty built up."
"Maybe he's married." Adamson broke in from behind us, him having caught up to us easily on his longer legs. "We don't all wear rings."
"Oh, you are?" I turned to look at him over my shoulder, legitimately interested.
"Known her since grade school." he said proudly. "What, you surprised?" he continued challengingly.
"Nope." I nodded back at him, and then turned and left it at that. We reached the armory in silence, checked in our gear without incident, and officially signed out on pass.
"So, not due back on-base until midnight on the 9th." Jeffers said with great satisfaction as soon as we'd clocked out. "It's not even 2200 yet, we've still got time to make last call at my favorite place."
"Been a long day." I demurred. "I'm just gonna head back to the barracks, fall into my bunk, sleep
luxuriously until
late tomorrow morning, and then go hunt up an Applebee's off-post and get myself a stack of pancakes
this high. With extra carbosyrup." I smiled widely in anticipation. "No offense to the food service personnel of Ares, but whoever the corp's connection for pancake batter is should be fired. Maybe out of a howitzer."
"Yeah, that shit tastes like recycled plascrete." Jeffers agreed readily. "Weird, Sergeant usually takes the whole team out for drinks are on him when we've just finished a big one, but looks like he's staying in tonight too." he mused. "Well, that just leaves more for us. You comin' with me, big guy?"
"I could go with a few beers before bedtime." Adamson agreed, and the two of them headed off and I went to turn in.
* * * * *
O'Hare Subsprawl, UCAS
January 7th, 2058
O'Hare Airport had at one time been the busiest airport in the world, and was still well up there on the list of global international air transport nexuses. Thousands of planes flew into and out of this airspace every day, ranging from hypersonic semi-ballistics that could touch the edge of space to slingshot you halfway around the world in less than two hours all the way down to local commuter puddle-jumpers. Keeping all the air traffic in this space from colliding with each other was a task so complex that even the best in Expert-System driven technology and ubiquitous multi-node Matrix hookups could barely stay on top of it, a task made even more complex by the part where basically everything coming from the east that wasn't a military aircraft or a semiballistic now had to reroute around to the north or south because almost nobody wanted to risk a crash landing in the middle of the Containment Zone.
Still, the westernmost edge of the Wall was over two miles from where I was standing so even though I could still see that shit from a rooftop, I didn't have to worry about Zone crazies or bugs while off-duty. The O'Hare complex was its own dedicated sub-sprawl in the middle of the outer reaches of the Chicago Greater Metroplex, and since there was a UCAS Air Force base here as part of the airport complex there'd been places for their troops to get loose and laid within an easy walking distance of the gate. Which was good, because Ares was leasing space for our task force's temporary compound from the Air Force and that meant we also had someplace nearby to get to. The Army guys stuck on the Wall had their own joints that had sprung up to service them, but not only was that a longer walk but putting us and the UCAS line grunts in the same off-duty joints could potentially prove... problematic. But the Air Force ground crews had no beef with us and vice versa, and so we got to unwind in peace.
After I'd gotten my pancakes I'd spent the next night cruising to see if I could find a young, unattached Air Force female enlisted who was feeling lonely, and I'd succeeded. It was just a one-night thing because she had to be back on duty the next day, but we were both adults and we knew it had just been to relax and with no particular feelings beyond that. Still, that had felt damn good. Like Jeffers had said, it had been a pretty long dry spell for me.
So I went into the next day not feeling any particular urgency, just tooling around a bit to see what I could get into without getting myself fucked up or on report. In the daytime I just bummed around helping myself to the Air Force's on-base rec facilities, as well as keeping up with my workout schedule. I'd already learned in the Rangers that when they gave you decompression time, you wanted to spend it doing precisely that. So I put it in neutral and drifted pleasantly around, except for the effort it took to keep up with the necessary maintenance for your body. Even after a top-end megacorp had paid to cram enough SOTA cyberware and bioware into you that you were loaded down to over 75% of your body's maximum augmentation tolerance, there was still no substitute for sweating out your reps everyday.
I hadn't seen any of the rest of the team except in the barracks to sleep or passing by Sinclair as he was sitting alone with some heavy thoughts and a bottle in one of the bars I'd been through last night. I'd made my hellos, of course, but he'd wanted to be alone to think over that load of heavy shit that his old CO had dropped on him and I'd respected that and left him to it. So I was surprised when late that evening I walked into this strip club in Rosemont and realized that the short guy in the urban-flash clothes sitting at one of the tables closest to the stage was actually a short girl, and one I was very familiar with.
"Hey there, Becky." I smirked at my teammate as I settled down in the seat next to her, and she nudged my shin with the sole of her shoe.
"Don't call me Becky." she mock-glared at me. "So, how's it going?"
"Not bad so far." I agreed, nodding towards the excellent view on-stage. "So, it seems like we've got our taste in women as a thing in common too, huh?"
"Yup." she agreed matter-of-factly. "Are you disappointed?"
"Little bit." I admitted frankly. "Not about how you're wired, of course, just about how it means I'm already friend-zoned for life." I shrugged. Rebecca had been the most interesting girl I'd met, and we'd been naturally 'clicking' together as friends all the first few weeks we'd known each other. Not that I was ready to profess my undying love yet, or even ask her out - and not just because of the fraternization regs - but it was a thing that was naturally in the back of a guy's mind when he was regularly spending time with an unattached girl he got along good with, especially a cute little looker like her. But, it was what it was.
"You're really okay with it?" she probed, surprising me a little.
"Why wouldn't I be?" I replied, letting my confusion show. "It's the mid-21st century for God's sake, nobody gives a shit about orientation anymore."
"Except for-" she stopped herself and looked down, actually embarassed for the first time since I'd met her. "I'm sorry. Never mind."
"Shit, you actually apologized for something, it must be serious." I tried to make a joke of it. "But-" Comprehension finally dawned for me. "Ohhhh, I get it. You find out where I'm from and looked up my hometown, didn't you. And the very first thing that came up on even a basic Matrix search was that episode of that damned soap opera, Until Tomorrow. Where one of the characters suddenly needed a hometown flashback about a wide spot in the road up in the Tennessee mountains that was at least half Humanis Policlub and all redneck, so as to give her a tragic backstory and all." I sighed.
"So you're saying that Hollywood was being even more fictional than usual?" she asked hopefully.
"In the sense that they didn't film on location and the place they used was actually better-looking than the shithole I grew up in, yeah. But the truth is what it is, and yeah, it's a rusty backwater barely surviving around an aging mine shaft and scratching crops off of hillsides with all that implies. Right up to the town being more than half Humanis." I finished, referring to the largest and most mainstream of the we-hate-everything-past-the-turn-of-the-20th-century hate groups, especially everything that came in with the Awakening such as the return of magic and the metahuman variants like elves, dwarves, orks, and trolls. They were like the old Ku Klux Klan of the previous century - something else my home region had been famous for in their day - right up to the point where the slicker parts of their political wing were so good at making their bullshit sound mainstream that at one point they'd almost successfully elected a Presidential candidate. Hell, if Kenneth Brackhaven hadn't been running against fraggin' Dunkelzahn, he'd have won! So I understood exactly what Rebecca was worried about.
"Here's the thing, though." I continued as sincerely as I could. "I'm from the other half of town." The wary silence remained between us, so I continued. "Here, slot my credstick." I said, reaching to haul it out for her. "You know that Ares loads the short-form of our personnel data onto those along with all our other permission and certifications, so I'll key you in to view mine." Not that Rebecca probably couldn't crack the user restrictions on her own, but I wasn't going to strip that naked even metaphorically.
She took the stick and slotted it into her PDA, then let me type in my passcode so she could have read-access to the cover sheet of my file. "Home of record... c/o Headquarters, Knight Errant. Next of kin, the same." She pulled my credstick out of her PDA's dataport and handed it back to me. "Orphan?"
"Nope. Just disowned." I said matter-of-factly. "Dad wanted me to join up with his hood-wearing buddies and start breaking legs along with 'em as soon as I was old enough. I went from hometown football hero to social outcast as soon as I told him 'I'll think about it'." I shrugged. "Caught a beating from the sheriff a couple days after that. Took the bus down the valley and walked into the Army recruiting office the next day."
"So you either let yourself get beat in or else you get beaten up. Christ, that sounds just like Auburn Hills only with different gangs." she shook her head disgustedly. "So much for healthy country living."
"You're from Detroit?" I said, recognizing the name of the notorious slum district that abutted even one of the most prosperous industrial centers in North America, the site of Ares' own world headquarters.
"Yeah." she nodded. "And yeah, my only way out was signing up with the corp just like you signed up with the CAS military."
"I'm sure your test scores didn't hurt." I acknowledged. Because while I had nothing to apologize for about my own IQ, Rebecca was a legitimate genius and it was impossible to miss it. I'd wondered how someone with her brains wasn't already working in corporate R&D or in one of the industrial positions, but if she'd been dirt-poor from the streets and couldn't hope to actually get into a good college on her own that would explain it. "So, did you tell Adamson where I'm from? Is that why he's been so frosty?"
"He's the reason I looked you up in the first place." Rebecca admitted. "As soon as he heard that our replacement was from the CAS military- well, he's had to put up with a lot of shit because of his tusks, even some of it from within the corp. And he likes to know which way he needs to look out in advance."
"Can't blame him." I agreed. "Although I would wish he'd at least begin to realize I'm not into that bullshit. I mean, it didn't take me long to figure out what his beef was, it was kind of obvious, but I was following the Sergeant's advice and letting him move it at his own pace." I tasted my beer and continued. "Honestly, I've got to respect the kinda self-discipline it takes for him to be that damn paranoid about someone and still mesh in as tightly as he has when we're on the clock. But watching every word I say around a guy to make sure it can't possibly be taken wrong-" I shrugged. "It gets old." I had a sudden thought occur to me. "Why didn't you have your guard up too, if you were the source of his intel?"
"Initially I did." she admitted. "But like you said, we 'clicked' right off. You're a fairly charming guy even when you're not putting effort into it, Mitchell. Plus it wasn't my trouble, except at second-hand." She thought it over. "If it's any consolation, I think Nick's about ready to realize he doesn't have anything to be worried about from you as well. He probably doesn't know how to bring the topic up, though."
"Well, you've got my permission to slide your new intel about me to him via back-channel." I agreed. "Saves me the trouble, and besides, you got me into this in the first place."
"Okay, okay, that's fair." she nodded.
"The Sergeant know about any of this?" I continued.
"About the tension between you and Nick? Obviously, it's his job to notice stuff like that." she said. "About your particular background and your hometown's reputation? Not unless he looked it up himself, because I certainly didn't tell him." She shrugged. "He's my best friend, yeah, but he's also team lead. The last thing I wanted to do was put the skids under you with your official chain of command before you had a fair chance to show your stuff."
"Thanks for that." I clinked my glass against hers, and we let the topic sit long enough to each finish another beer and wait for them to change acts up on-stage.
"Don't answer if you don't want to... but why didn't you go along?" she finally continued diffidently.
"You mean, with the hoodboys? Look, I'm no choir boy but I'm not an asshole either." I finally answered. "Beating on people who never did anything to me, that's not my style." I shrugged. "Besides, I'm no technical brain like you - anything more complicated than algebra makes my eyes glaze over - but that doesn't mean I don't pick up on what's going on around me." My voice got more animated as I got into the swing of my lecture. "You know how Humanis' whole beef is that the existence of 'impure metahumanity' supposedly does nothing but create 'unfair' opportunities blah blah blah, they're keeping us down and it's not our fault and everything would be fine if we just made all of Them go away... but the place I grew up in? Do you think we had any metahumans in town who stayed there if they could possibly get out? Nobody with tusks or pointy ears would even go near the place except in an armed convoy, and for damned good reason - and there we were, dirt poor and living in rusty trailers anyway." I snorted. "Our neighborhood's entire existence was a living counter-example against the core of Humanis' platform. I was barely into high school when I was old enough to figure that one out, but by that point I'd also figured out I damn well needed to keep my opinions to myself. Until I finally couldn't stall the old man any longer, and so here I am."
"You have any siblings?" she asked after another long, thoughtful swig.
"One, a kid sister." I shrugged. "I sent her half my pay from my first year in the Army, gave her enough to buy a bus ticket down the valley as well and a couple semesters in a vocational school so she could get a job." I shrugged. "Mom died when I was a kid - got sick, doctors couldn't help - so, no reason to ever go back."
"But your sister isn't your next of-?" Rebecca began, and her face fell as she put the pieces together. "Oh. I'm sorry."
"Caught a stray round when some turbo junkie shot up the Stuffer Shack she was in, her second year in Nashville." I nodded. "Lone Star dropped the fucker in the street right outside, but that didn't help her any." I cursed and finished my beer.
"My condolences." she repeated, and bought our next round - shots - as an apology.
I tossed it back and let the buzz deepen and mellow. "Nah, it's okay. Even if it's not fun to remember, you still-" I chewed my lip. "You've still got to take some time for the people who were important to you."
"Yeah, you do." she agreed. "You've-you've got a good heart, Mitchell. I'm glad to have met you."
"Hey, 'bless your heart' is an insult where I'm from." I teased, and we grinned at each other. "But, yeah. Glad to have met you too."
Author's Note: So, some setting development, some character development, and more MC backstory. I know that the battle scene might not have been as sexy military porn as you might wish, but our MC has a point - the corpo military style is all about as making it un-dramatic as possible.
If you're wondering at the slightly uncharacteristic over-sharing of personal details between those two at the end, remember that they've both been drinking.
Captain Anne Ravenheart is a canon Shadowrun character - readers of the Shadowrun tie-in novel Burning Bright will already be aware that it was her KE FireWatch cell that actually planted and detonated the Cermak tacnuke at the start of the Bug City crisis.