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[nsfw] The Unconquerable [transubstantiation Cyoa, Multicross]

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    Не могу читать через переводчик на оригинальном сайте - https://forum.questionablequesting.com/threads/the-unconquerable-transubstantiation-cyoa-multicross.16353/reader . Так что, выкладываю здесь, чтобы спокойно читать. Текст не мой, права не мои, выкладываю без разрешения автора. Ссылка на произведение выше.
  Threadmarks: Intro & Build
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  cliffc999
  cliffc999
  Well worn.
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  OK, regular readers of my stuff will know that I mostly write my long-runners on SB, and that I'm not much for writing lewds. People who have been following my snippets thread know that my father fell ill a couple months ago, and that last month he died.
  
  Well, we've finished burying him, I've mostly finished dealing with all the finances and other stuff, and things are starting to settle back into a routine at home with me and mom. Which leaves me with time to sit and stare at the wall.
  
  I had a major project ("The Light of the Forge" on SB) that I put on hiatus when his illness started, and I am not yet ready to take it off of hiatus because I was trying for actual character development and serious world-building in that one. However, I need something to distract me, and to be honest right now I really want to just escape into some OP wish-fulfillment shlock.
  
  (add) As of June 2022, "Light of the Forge" has been permanently abandoned without resuming. It would just never stop being 'The story I was in the middle of writing when Dad died'.
  
  So I'm going to take a CYOA premise that so far I haven't seen anybody try to write, because to be fair it's really not easy to write, and see if my pattern of 'Tackling what should by all rights be dumb premises and getting readable stories out of them anyway' continues one more time. I make no promises, I really have no plan, and I'm basically gonna wing this and see what happens. But hey, it might work, so...
  
  Also, I'm going to actually try and write some damn sex this time, because as long as I'm trying to do things I've never really done as an author before I might as well pay the NSFW forum tax. Don't set your expectations too high, tho.
  
  Note: Despite the question marks in the thread tags, I actually have already chosen the CYOA in question. However, as the MC doesn't start off knowing what CYOA and what options ROB has picked for him, neither will the reader until the dramatically appropriate time - i.e., after the MC finds it out in-story. When the CYOA and picks actually are revealed, this post will be updated with the info. But the CYOA I'm using was posted on the QQ CYOA thread, that's where I first saw it.
  
  (update 10/18/21) If I seem like I'm being a teasing bastard, that is indeed partly because I am. But it's also because the last serious attempt I made to Jumpchain on SB had the min-maxers drive me fucking nuts with constant "suggestions" as to how I could allegedly twist maximum utility out of the posted build, along with the not-occasional-enough obnoxious comments about how made of fail I was for not doing so. Apparently the idea that the author needs to get an actual, readable narrative out of the whole exercise and that sometimes this means not piloting your MC like he's a mecha meat-suit wrapped around a "Rationality" Elemental was utterly beyond them.
  
  So this time I put the build sheet under [REDACTED] because the kibitzers can't min-max what they don't have the rulebook for. That's also why I'm posting this story on QQ, to be honest. It ain't just that I hope to experiment with lewds, it's also that SB has really annoyed me recently. I didn't even entirely admit this to myself until, well, just now, but that's the truth.
  
  (update 11/04/21) As the spoilered discussions were getting cumbersome, the CYOA power has been revealed.
  
  The CYOA being used is Transubstantiation, specifically the Conquest option. The text of Conquest is reproduced here for your convenience.
  
  People are reminded that the MC is as yet unaware of their exact abilities in-story.
  
  Conquest
  
  Without any need for reason or justification, you will find that there is no-one in this world or any other that you cannot overcome, for your raw ability scales seamlessly to match and just then just barely overcome any and all opposition you face in all your endeavors. If you would kill a man where he stood, your strength and cunning would best him. If you would take a lover for your own, you could chase them down to the ends of the earth and subjugate them beneath your body. If all humanity were to turn against you and deny you your right to do as you please, you could dance between the rain of all their weapons and prove your supremacy by force. If dragons would keep you from the treasures you seek, you could rip them from their hoards and cleave their skulls in twain, and if the very gods themselves would name you as their enemy, you could hurl them screaming from their thrones and force them into submission.
  
  Though naturally limitless in every respect that matters, your puissance is best expressed through paths of least resistance: you'll find that those capabilities you already possess are always infinitely quicker to expand in scope, scale, and potency than any entirely new abilities are to appear at hand. Likewise, you'll far more readily find raw ability and talent within yourself than you'll find cultivated skill. If you were to challenge a king of games to a game of chess for his throne, you would sooner find the sheer genius you needed to outwit him than discover the specialized professional understanding of a chess grandmaster, let alone the blessings of a god of the chessboard.
  
  As this ability gives you exactly what you need and no more at every turn, you will never lack for a challenge by virtue of this power alone: the limitless power you find within you when you exceed your grasp and your limits are tested will never sully or obsolete the simple pleasures of overcoming the mundane, and you will never be bored by the battles you might face. Similarly, though you may find the strength within you to wrest stars in twain, it is only an extension of your own will to power, and thus will never overflow beyond your ability to control; you will never face a "world of cardboard' except insofar as you actually want to rip it all to shreds in your hands. And on the flipside, you can also never be surprised (and thus overwhelmed) by any factors you would choose to struggle against if you knew of them, for your will cannot be so easily overcome. If unseen enemies were to conspire to assassinate you, you would find it in yourself to dodge the killing bullet or purge the lethal dose from your flesh.
  
  Finally, whatever form of pleasure, satisfaction, and happiness you take in your victories, you may freely share at your discretion with those you have overcome. Whether this is merely another form of violence you're capable of inflicting upon others, a guilty pleasure you needn't deny your unwilling subjects the opportunity to experience, or a final self-demonstrating proof of the ecstatic rightness of your rule, is up to you.
  
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  New: Death and Dishonor (Vorkosigan Saga, oneshot)
  Current Project: The Unconquerable (Multicross)
  The list of my content is available in my snippets thread. You may also be interested in my content on Spacebattles.
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  cliffc999, Oct 12, 2021Report#1Like+ QuoteReply
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  cliffc999
  cliffc999
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  Someone kicked me in the ribs, hard.
  
  "Hoi! On yer feet!" a gravelly voice rasped out as I yelped in pain. As I awoke I realized that somehow I'd gone from being in my own bed to lying on my side on a concrete floor- no, we were outside-
  
  The same boot that had just hit my ribs slammed into my kidneys as I lay curled up on the ground.
  
  "I said on yer feet, smalltooth!" the same voice shouted, in a distorted tone of voice I'd never heard anyone use before, while several other people laughed raucously in the background. My eyes winced shut in pain as I huddled on the ground in panic and confusion. I frantically tried to focus-
  
  My teeth snapped shut in an angry grimace as a huge surge of adrenaline wiped away the pain and kicked my brain into high gear. My eyes snapped open as I looked/listened/touched/smelled all around me.
  
  I was laying on my side on the floor of a filthy alleyway in dim twilight. The chilly bite of the air and the clumps of dirty snow visible in my line of sight told me that it was winter. The smoggy taste of pollution, almost thick enough to chew, told me that I was in a city- a large city- and one that was far dirtier and smoggier than any city I was familiar with. The painful rasp of loose gravel and on my palms and knees as I rolled to my feet told me that I was naked. Somehow I'd been abducted from my home and my hometown and dumped off in another city-
  
  And then the person who'd kicked me, along with his three friends, came into my field of view as I finished rising to my feet and turning around told me that I'd been taken far, far further away from my home than merely another city.
  
  Half a head taller than me and as bulky as an NFL lineman, my assailant's pointed ears, flat nose, elongated jaw, dusky gray skin color, and prominent tusks were clearly not those of a human being. His friends were all of the same race as he was, and my still-racing mind methodically noted that they were clearly gang members - their leather jackets all bore the same shoulder patch and colored stripe, they all had pistols shoved in their waistbands and one of the flankers was melodramatically waving a large knife around for intimidation, and oh yeah, they were all having fun kicking around a naked guy they'd found passed out on the floor of an alley in what was clearly the bad part of whatever town this was-
  
  "Happy New Year!" the leader bellowed with a cruel smile on his face. "Had a good night, didn't ya?"
  
  Yet more proof, as if I needed any, that I'd somehow been isekai'ed. Because it had been May when I'd gone to sleep last night.
  
  "You're going to kill me, aren't you?" I heard my own mouth saying. Because now that I thought about it, it was the only logical conclusion. I was naked and alone, so I didn't have anything to steal. If they didn't care one way or the other, they'd simply have left me laying where I was. If they were simply checking to see if I were dead or trying to get me to leave their turf, they wouldn't have kicked me so hard, or repeatedly, and toughboy's posse wouldn't be deliberately spreading out to try and cut off my line of retreat. No, they'd clearly decided to take time out of their day to beat on the naked guy in the alley simply because they wanted to have fun beating on him - and the drawn knife and the sadistic, eager expressions told me that they weren't going to stop with just beating.
  
  "Sober already, gonk?" one of the others scoffed at me. "Whatever you wuz drinkin' last night, you overpaid."
  
  "Enough jawin'," the leader said, "Dumbass might have been brain-dead enough to get passed-out drunk and then robbed in Touristville, but he still figured it out. So might as well skip to the happy endin' and waste 'im-" he gloated, while melodramatically cracking his knuckles and then raising one ham-sized fist to start throwing a haymaker-
  
  A blow that never landed as I caught him flat-footed with the first punch I'd actually aimed at another human being since my parents had pushed me into taekwondo lessons as a kid in grade school. But despite all the years between that abortive, short-lived effort and now my hand still curled into a proper fist just as smoothly as if I'd practiced it every day between then and now, and I got into proper stance, balanced, and then stepped forward in one continuous flowing motion and all faster than my opponent could react. My punch began at the soles of my feet and ended at the back of his throat, and despite his thick neck being positively wrapped in cords of dense muscle I still felt his trachea crush beneath my knuckles.
  
  "Ghrrrk!" he choked faintly as his eyes bulged and he began to fall backwards. With his larynx shattered he'd spend the rest of his life busy choking to death on his own saliva and blood, and since he hadn't even had a chance to draw a breath he'd be lucky to remain conscious for another thirty seconds. I used the momentum of my fist rebounding off his throat to help draw my punching arm back even more quickly, counter-balancing myself as my off hand shot out, palm open, to shove my victim even further off-balance and knock him into the one standing behind him and to his left.
  
  One second.
  
  Of the two assailants standing behind and to the right, one of them - the knifeman - had reflexes fast enough that he'd already shaken off the shock of my unexpected attack and started to step forward and slash at me. His weapon hand rose high in the air and began to swing down, and I ignored the pain of my bare feet stepping on the shards of broken glass in the alleyway as I pushed off with one foot to hop back just far enough to let his hasty slash miss me several inches to the front, planted my receiving foot as I landed from the hop and bent the knee, then turned and rebounded straight into a crossover sidekick - a move I'd never even used before, and only knew from having seen it demonstrated a couple times in those long-ago childhood lessons - that put the ball of my foot squarely into the knife-wielder's shin. Since this guy was a bruiser who had to be almost two-hundred-fifty pounds of blubber and muscle on a six-foot-plus frame I wouldn't have expected that my kick would do more than bruise him and break his step, but instead I somehow put enough force behind the blow to shatter his shinbone and snap his tibia like a breadstick. He shrieked in agony, dropped the knife, and began to helplessly topple forward under the momentum of his own charge.
  
  Two seconds.
  
  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed that the man on the left was falling towards the ground, having been knocked off-balance by his leader's considerable bulk that I'd shoved/thrown into him, but the majority of my attention remained focused on the second man to the right - the only one in position to attack. The strange clarity that had filled my mind ever since I'd committed to the fight kept me from panicking as I noted that not only was the fourth man's hand reaching down towards his waistband to grasp his pistol, but that despite his initial lack of reaction due to the shock of my attack, now that he was reacting he was moving with borderline superhuman speed. By the time I could finish taking the several steps to reach him and punch him he would already have finished drawing his gun and firing it-
  
  The dropped knife landed neatly in my left hand as I realized that I'd reflexively stepped forward and snagged it out of the air before it could even fall. The barrel of his pistol cleared his waistband and began to rise up and draw a bead on me as my hand and arm, moving on some kind of autopilot, effortlessly flipped the knife in my fingers to where I was grasping it by the point, cocked my wrist, and threw. The knife sailed easily through the air, doing a lazy half-turn as it crossed the eight feet between me and the would-be gunman, and landed point-first directly in his left eye.
  
  Jesus Christ. I'd never even thrown a knife before! The closest I'd ever come to even knowing how to throw one was reading about Willie Garvin doing it in a Modesty Blaise novel!
  
  Three seconds-
  
  "You fraggin' motherfu-" the man on the left shouted at me as he frantically tried to shove the dead weight of the first man I'd punched off of him and get to his feet, whether to continue the attack or run for his life I had no idea. The man whose leg I'd broken grunted in pain as he tried to grab one of my ankles from his prone position, and I knocked him cold with a swift kick to the forehead and then smoothly but still hurriedly knelt to pull the pistol out of the prone man's waistband.
  
  Look for the safety catch, flip it off, pull the slide to chamber a round, point the pistol at the target's main body, pull the trigger, pull it again. I silently itemized the steps one-by-one, because the sum total of my firearms experience was some basic range safety training I'd gotten from my dad, reading John Ringo novels, and watching action movies. Still, that plus the strange overdrive mode I'd somehow snapped into got me through the process of putting two quick bullets into last man's chest, and that gave me all the time I needed to leisurely line the sights up on his forehead and fire a third shot directly through his brain. The Mozambique Drill, just like Tom Cruise's hitman character from "Collateral".
  
  I took a deep breath and let the world resume normal speed around me. I'd just killed two men - well, people if not humans - and as soon as the leader finished choking to death on his own blood and saliva I would have killed three. The fourth was lying prone and unconscious at my feet, and I still didn't know where I was.
  
  As I looked down at the 'borrowed' pistol I was holding, that last question resolved itself. The manufacturer's logo etched on the side of the grip was a stylized silhouette, a profile of a man wearing a Greek-style helmet with a prominent crest. Engraved beneath it was a name - Ares. A quick searching examination of the gun revealed the name of the model as well - Predator.
  
  A heavy pistol called the Ares Predator. The gang boss's mention that somewhere nearby was called 'Touristville'. A group of gangers that were clearly orcs of some kind. All of the overcast, smog-ridden urban blight that I was surrounded by-
  
  Shadowrun. Somehow I'd ended up in the setting of the Shadowrun computer games by Harebrained Studios. I also recalled that it was the setting of a major tabletop RPG franchise... and cursed under my breath that I'd never really gotten into the RPG. As is, my only knowledge of this setting would come from the games and from what few bits of cultural osmosis about Shadowrun that I'd picked up here and there. My main tabletop RPGs had been Dungeons and Dragons and Vampire: the Masquerade. I hadn't really gone in for cyberpunk or sci-fi games. I cursed yet again... dammit, if I had to end up isekai'ed like some anime protagonist, shouldn't I at least have gotten to go to a setting I knew?
  
  Then again, only an idiot would want to go to the World of Darkness. Even mostly unfamiliar grungy cyberpunk was still a definite step up from that.
  
  As my adrenaline surge wore off I felt the shock of fucking everything start to dimly creep in around the edges of my consciousness. I'd lost- okay, I hadn't exactly had the most awesome life beforehand, but I'd still had a life. I'd had a job, I'd had an apartment, I'd had people to hang with, I'd had stability. And now I was stuck in another universe entirely somehow and I was literally buck-ass naked in the middle of winter and I hadn't been here three minutes before a whole gang of fuckers had just tried to kill me and I'm all of a sudden doing shit I don't even know how-!
  
  I gritted my teeth and got a grip on myself. It didn't fucking matter how impossible this shit was, or how unfair it was, or how wrong it all was. Unless I wanted to just turn this gun on myself right now, I had no choice but to get a grip on myself and fucking survive this shit.
  
  I concentrated as hard as I could and tried to reach for the mental clarity I'd had before. I felt the sense of focus descend on me again as I calmly and methodically evaluated my options and resources.
  
  My first immediate decision was - and even through my current zen state, I still inwardly winced - whether or not to finish off the last surviving ork. And as much as I hated to admit it, cold logic said "yes". They'd all been perfectly willing to kill me even before I started fighting - the leader's last words had openly admitted as much - and if this was Shadowrun and near 'Touristville' then that meant I was currently standing in the Redmond Barrens. Which meant that there was literally no rule of law here - the Barrens were a "Z-zone", an area where the local police deliberately did not travel and did not enforce any of the criminal code whatsoever. The legal fabric was more than a little patchwork and decayed anywhere in Shadowrun, but places like the Barrens were where they didn't even pretend that it was anything but the law of the jungle. So ethically I had every right to kill this asshole - he'd attempted to murder me unprovoked and was basically hostis humanis generis anyway, given his profession and the local environment- and legally there'd be no comebacks for anything I did here.
  
  Now practically there entirely was a possible set of comebacks - notably, the rest of their gang. However, that was something whose probability I'd exponentially increase by letting this guy survive. Even if I walked away before he woke up, he'd still remember my face and he'd go looking for it again with all of his surviving gang buddies that he could rope in. But if I finished him off, then I only might have the rest of their gang knowing who to look for, and them only showing up later. Hopefully much later, after I'd already figured out a long-range plan for survival.
  
  But in the short-term, there was no way I could leave this murderous thug alive behind me. And so I took his own knife out of his pocket and rammed it into the base of his skull, and that was that.
  
  My next step was to get some clothes. And that's when I realized that on top of all the other impossible things that had happened today, I'd somehow ended up in a new body. A hasty glance at myself in the mirrorshades I'd taken off of one of these mooks revealed that my face was that of a younger, handsomer, more rugged-looking man - the sort of guy who'd be the main character of a TV show or an action movie, not the average thirty-something schlub I'd been. My body was also younger and in better shape - the lean, muscled body of a champion swimmer, not the body of a short, averagely flabby office drone. OK, fine. Whoever or whatever dumped me in an entirely different universe and gave me some type of street-level badass boost also wanted me to look the part.
  
  I cursed ROBs and Internet CYOAs and isekai fiction in general, and kept stripping the corpses until I'd managed to find the least dirty and ill-fitting skivvies, pants, boots, and jacket among all four of the dead guys and get them on. I tsk'ed at the minor cuts on my feet from the broken glass I'd stepped on in the alley, but outside of picking the bits out and then wiping off the blood with one of the shirts I wasn't using there wasn't much I could do about possible infections or suchlike until I actually reached anywhere with medical attention available.
  
  Which was going to be a problem, given that I was a stranger in a strange universe. Now, I had at least some starting gear from looting all of these guys. Each one of these guys had had a knife and a gun of some kind, and I kept the best one of each for myself and unloaded and wrapped up the rest in a spare shirt to sell later. They'd also all had credsticks in their pockets, and now those were mine. The leader had also had the local equivalent of a tablet computer in his pocket, and its date-time function told me that it was 7:44 AM on January 1, 2065. The locator function was disabled, but a quick check of the browser history revealed that the last time its owner had gone searching for any local businesses they had indeed been in Seattle.
  
  Right. I finished grabbing everything I was going to take with me, leaving behind the things I didn't dare try to wear or fence (such as all the jackets with distinctive gang colors on them) or that weren't any good to me (such as the less-than-useable pieces of clothing whose immediate salvage value had been ruined by things like bloodstains, bullet holes, and/or piss and shit from dying men's sphincters). And then I jumped on top of a nearby dumpster, jumped up from there to grab the edge of the roof, and got the hell out of that alleyway by climbing over the adjacent one-story building rather than leaving any tracks to show which way I'd went. And, of course, brushing out any tracks I did leave on the dumpster or the rooftop.
  
  Plus, I'd wanted the vantage point to try and see which way "Touristville" was. The first Shadowrun computer game, 'Shadowrun Returns', had been largely set there. The Redmond Barrens were one of the most lawless, blighted, and run-down stretches in the entire Seattle Metroplex, but the few square blocks of 'Touristville' were that part of the Barrens closest to the high-class neighborhood of Bellevue. And sure enough, jaded rich people looking for a certain variety of fun would gladly bring themselves (and their bodyguards) down to the very edges of the Barrens to get a vicarious thrill "roughing it" among the lowlifes, who of course responded with the well-known entrepreneurial spirit of street operators in any cyberpunk setting and gladly erected whorehouses, bars, and black-market shops that were still lawless and downscale enough to be part of the Barrens but at the same time relatively polished and patrolled enough that patronizing them would be a titillating thrill to the rich tourists from uptown as opposed to being a Darwin Award entry.
  
  So, that's definitely where I wanted to go first. Because as a stranded person from another dimension, I was going to be facing a lot of challenges. Not least among them being my complete and total lack of a background or any kind of legal paperwork proving my existence. Fortunately for me, my arrival in Shadowrun was a mixed blessing in that regard - while this was a very easy place to get killed in, it was also a place where 'people with no background' were not a remarkable phenomenon. While every legal citizen had a System Identification Number or SIN, which when combined with the ubiquitous computerized recordkeeping of cyberpunk meant that basically their whole lives, financial transactions, and daily activity patterns were trackable online to a degree that the NSA plus Facebook/Google/Amazon/etc. could only dream of...
  
  ... there were also the SINless, or people whose births had never been legally recorded, registered, numbered, filed, classified, stamped, taxed, folded, spindled, or mutilated. Who got by via the gray-market and black-market economies, using barter and anonymous untraceable 'certified cred' - the Shadowrun equivalent of bitcoin, basically - instead of SINs and bank accounts and registered credsticks. Anonymous, officially un-people shadow people ranging from the lowliest of Barrens dwellers and dispossessed refugees all the way up to the highest-end corporate black ops subcontractors and crime kingpins.
  
  But the most famous type of SINless, the one that anybody even remotely familiar with the game knew of, were the shadowrunners. An entire subcaste of mercenary freelancers, the only consistent thing about shadowrunners was their diversity. Some came from the streets and some from the executive suites. Some were ex-military, and some had never had a day's formal training in their lives. Shadowrunners came in every variety from shooters to stealth experts to hackers to facemen to every imaginable kind of specialist and many you couldn't imagine. The only common denominators among them were that they had backgrounds anonymous and untraceable enough to be deniable assets, skills that were useful enough to sell, and toughness enough to survive the lifestyle. Every power player from the megacorps to the syndicates to the governments hired shadowrunners to subcontract the dirty work that they couldn't afford to be caught doing themselves, even if none of them every really trusted them. The best runners could get very, very rich. And most runners ended up either eventually finding a path back to civilian life, or ending up very, very dead.
  
  And as I reviewed everything I could possibly remember about shadowrunners and shadowrunning, at least the mystery of my 'suddenly badass killing machine' became explainable in hindsight. Shadowrun wasn't just your typical cyberpunk setting, but one where magic had returned to be used right alongside technology. That's how you had races like elves and orks and trolls as player characters - as witness the four orks I'd just fought and killed in that alley. And one of the magical character archetypes available in Shadowrun was the "physical adept", who instead of casting spells focused their innate magical potential into doing things like magically augmenting their strength and speed, or their mental focus, or instinctively boosting their combat skills, or several other classes of adept powers all fitting within the vague theme of mind-over-body magic kung-fu badasses. Just like I'd done in that alley.
  
  So that was what I was now, I supposed. A physical adept, and a shadowrunner. And it's not as I had much of a choice about that right now, to be honest - I was not only SINless, I'd already shed blood and taken lives. I'd killed people and taken their stuff just to survive, and I didn't really see where that pattern was likely to change in my immediate future.
  
  I nodded to myself as I stood in the last of the early morning dimness and looked from my rooftop towards the bright lights of Touristville just visible in the distance, standing out against the much dimmer and spottier street lights and signs that reflected the incompleteness of the power grid further into the Barrens. Then I yet again inventoried all my gear. One Ares Predator heavy pistol with underbarrel laser sight. Nine clips of ammo, not counting the one already loaded with three rounds short. A short Cougar Fineblade, Several spare pistols and knives of lesser quality. A pocket computer. A few hundred nuyen in certified cred. A dirty t-shirt. A pair of oversize jeans. An equally oversize set of steel-toed boots. And a pair of mirrorshades.
  
  It'll have to do.
  
  
  Author's Note: So, here we go. Our dimensional castaway is now in the Redmond Barrens in Seattle, in Shadowrun, a little more than a month after the Crash 2.0.
  
  Let's see what happens.
  
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  Last edited: Sep 13, 2022
  New: Death and Dishonor (Vorkosigan Saga, oneshot)
  Current Project: The Unconquerable (Multicross)
  The list of my content is available in my snippets thread. You may also be interested in my content on Spacebattles.
  Official Duke of Cheese of CYOAs.
  cliffc999, Oct 13, 2021Report#4Like+ QuoteReply
  centurion1291, M.Silver, Coleray and 590 others like this.
  Threadmarks: 2 - Settling In (Shadowrun)
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  cliffc999
  cliffc999
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  I took comfort in the fact that it might be a different world and a different time, but fast-food places still leave you alone if they don't need the seat and you've still got a coffee cup in front of you.
  
  Despite my initial impulse to snag the loot for later resale, I'd reconsidered that as soon as I stopped and put an actual neuron of thought into it. Several bodies stripped of gear meant that the first thing their gang buddies would do is keep an ear out for anybody fencing that gear at the local pawn shops or suchlike, on top of my not even knowing any fences here in the first place. So I'd gone back down from the rooftop and stuck most of the looted guns and knives and shit back onto the corpses I'd gotten them from, with a little rearranging and swapping around so that only one gun, knife, and set of clothes would be missing. I then hoisted up the corpse of the guy I'd nailed in the eye with the thrown knife - because his wound was the one that would make people the most curious as to the skill level of the opponent in question - and, doing my best to make sure nobody saw me in the process, stuffed it into a dumpster a block away behind another building.
  
  There. Hopefully three dead guys without any of their credsticks but still with most of their gear and one missing guy will lead anyone to a conclusion of 'there was some kind of quarrel, the survivor grabbed the money and ran, case closed'. Anything rather than have the rest of their gang immediately start searching the immediate vicinity for any strange people who'd just showed up.
  
  So, having covered my tracks as best as I could, I thanked God that nobody was out and about at this hour in the Barrens to see what had happened and then legged it for Touristville as fast I could. And the first thing I did as soon as I reached there was find somewhere to sit down and eat, both because I needed a chance to think and because my stomach was starting to growl like a cave full of hibernating bears. I decided to take a pass on any restaurants or taverns because they'd almost certainly be set up for the tourist trade and at tourist prices, and given that it was just hitting 8am would almost certainly be closed or closing. But the people who worked in the tourist traps still had to eat, so I kept walking until I saw an obvious fast-food chain joint called "McHugh's".
  
  Right. Test number one. Exactly how much can I get away with walking into a public place while strapped? I had my Predator tucked into the waistband of my pants - the only place I had to put it - and my t-shirt's tail pulled out and draped down over it, but anybody who'd survived any length of time living in this place would almost certainly still have noticed it. On the streets of the Barrens being strapped would just make me an average passer-by, but did places like this allow me to wear it inside?
  
  The suspicious glance I got from the security guard - and isn't that just another clue I now live in cyberpunk world, that a simple fast-food joint has armed security - as I stepped through the door told me both that I was allowed to wear it inside but that the uniformed rent-a-cops who were standing post would gladly draw down and blow me away as soon as I actually went for it. I nodded respectfully to the nearest guard as I walked past him towards the counter and kept my body language as non-threatening as possible while I placed my order, waited a minute or so for it to arrive, and took my food and sat down.
  
  Not that anyone could rob this place anyway - the two guys with guns were the only employees visible from the floor. The actual food preparation apparently took place in a separate kitchen that was sealed off from the customers, and the only interaction with the food preparers was through automated touch-screen kiosks set up at the counter. Even your food was delivered to you through a little sliding door at the back of the counter, without you ever actually seeing the people who'd prepared it. And obviously there was no option to pay in cash, just a little hole near the touch-screen that you stuck your credstick into. Fortunately for me, even the anonymous certified cred SINless people like me used spent as readily in a credstick reader as any regular citizen's and was digitally loaded onto anonymized 'certified credsticks' that could be used by anyone who grabbed one. And the orks who'd robbed me were also SINless, so that was the only kind of cred they'd had on them. So I grabbed a breakfast patty, some hash browns, and a "soykaf" - real coffee from real beans was apparently not a thing in the dark cyberpunk future anymore, at least not in places like McHugh's - and sat down to eat and think.
  
  Now what the fuck did I do?
  
  To be honest, I was kind of freaking out at how much I wasn't freaking out. Weren't you supposed to be all torn up inside after you'd killed someone? I'd never been in the military, or in combat, or even in a schoolyard fight since junior high. And now I was less than 20 minutes after having just done up four guys with my bare hands, a knife, and a gun - one of them in cold blood after he was already down. And yet somehow I was still keeping it together. And it wasn't just being in shock or being numb, either, because even after I'd sat down and eaten a meal and taken a deep breath - well, that would have been the point that the shock finally started wearing off, and yet my feelings didn't change.
  
  New body, new powers... new mentality too? I didn't feel anything when I killed people? Shit, was I some kind of sociopath now? Was I going to have to make rules for myself like Dexter? I still had no clue what had done this to me - although all the fanfic I'd read about CYOAs and ROBs gave me an obvious first conclusion to jump to - but clearly it had had more effects than were immediately obvious.
  
  So, what effects had this isekai bullshit had on me? Besides the new action-hero looks, the younger, fitter, and healthier body, the physical adept superpowers, and the ability to stay calm and focused despite having been in a deadly force situation I'd never been trained or prepared for? What else had been done to me? I swiftly but methodically reviewed all the actions I'd taken since awakening here and began evaluating what they might mean in hindsight, and-
  
  Oh. Okay.
  
  I suddenly realized that I'd just done a detailed mental playback of all my actions since arriving here and what I'd been thinking while I did them, and done it all in just a few moments. Which was well beyond anything I'd ever been capable of before. I'd been the sort of guy who forgot where he left his car keys if I wasn't careful to use the same habitual place for them every time, and now I had total recall? And it wasn't just the level of detail in my recollections, but also how swiftly I could go through them and how quick I was to spot the implications of things within them-
  
  At any rate, my quasi-mentat-like review of my actions since arriving here brought me to the realization that whatever mysterious force had sent me here had also boosted me. And not just with my adept-like powers, but also in a general way across the board. I'd never felt that I was particularly stupid in my past life but I'd never been this quick on the uptake before, and neither had I been this able to mentally focus or just generally insightful in general. And I'd certainly never been this strong, agile, or healthy-
  
  I'd need to do more detailed testing to confirm my first impressions, but as near as I could deduce someone had, to put it in Shadowrun terms, "maxed out my character sheet". If I had an actual stats display - which I didn't, despite concentrating and wishing for one, so this was apparently not some Gamer-type experience - I had no doubt that all of my basic attributes would be showing a value of 6 right now, because that was the value for unaugmented human maximum in the Shadowrun rules system. Which probably explained my relative lack of freaking out, because one of the stats in Shadowrun was Willpower and a Willpower of 6 basically made you as mentally resilient as John Wick. Which meant... that I probably wasn't a sociopath or a psychopath now, I was just fast-forwarding through the process of coming to terms with what I'd done. I mean, those guys had been out to murder me, so it's not as if I'd suddenly burst out in irrational violence-
  
  So, apparently I was physically and mentally peak human right now, at least by real-world/street-level RPG if not by outright comic-book standards. Plus the not-just-peak boosts I'd seen at the critical moments of the fight, as well as the massive intuitive boosts to the rudimentary fragments of combat skills that I'd already learned in my past life, which still looked more like "physical adept" than anything else I could think of. And on top of all that I had an eidetic memory as well, one that even worked retroactively, because so much as wishing to remember everything I possibly could about Shadowrun retrieved every detail I'd ever seen about the game so much as once, from every playthrough I'd ever done. And the same proved true for any other kind of recollections, once I thought about trying them.
  
  Which detailed recall wasn't quite as much help as you might think, because contrary to the usual stereotypes for this kind of story I hadn't arrived just in time to know the entire plot in advance and exactly how to make the world my oyster. The computer games for "Shadowrun Returns" and "Dragonfall" had both been set in 2054, and "Shadowrun Hong Kong" had taken place in 2056. Even the SR:Hong Kong fan expansion packs that I'd played - which weren't necessarily canonical anyway - such as "CalFree In Chains' had - had taken place in 2061 at the latest. And here I was at the start of the year in 2065. Terra incognita as far as I was concerned. I would not have any real metaknowledge here - hell, I didn't even have contemporary knowledge! All I had was years-old historical and setting background material, which was not exactly what you'd call detailed preparation for anything.
  
  Heck, I wasn't even entirely certain that what meta-knowledge I did have from the games was all accurate - despite my having walked all up and down the few blocks of the Touristville district in every direction I still hadn't found anyplace called "The Seamstresses Union", despite it being the single most prominent location of 'Shadowrun Returns'. So either it had gone out of business in the interim between now and then - which was unlikely considering how large and stable a concern it had been for how long - or else it had never existed in this world at all. So while I was clearly in Shadowrun, I couldn't even rest assured that it was the same Shadowrun I thought I knew until I'd checked things out for myself.
  
  Which meant that unless whatever mysterious whatever had sent me here chose to send me a quest-giver or at least a big strong hint as well, I'd have to operate on the working assumption that there was no grand destiny or big plot I was "intended" for. I'd have to assume as a matter of course that there would be no fate for me here except that which I made.
  
  Which was a mildly disturbing thought, because it would have taken great and unprecedented power of some kind to snatch me from one reality to another and give me all these boosts in addition. Nobody would do that unless they wanted something, so who the hell had done this to me and why-?!?
  
  When one of the guards started looking at me restlessly I went and bought a refill on my soykaf - which tasted like recycled shit, by the way - and sat back down to keep sipping it and thinking. Okay, let's put the big philosophical and long-range ponderings back up on the shelf for a bit and turn to the more immediate priorities.
  
  I'm homeless, I'm SINless, I have nobody in the world who even cares that I exist yet, and my total financial resources are the clothes on my back, my new gun and knife, a cheap tablet computer that said it was a 'Renraku Sensei pocket secretary', and 422 nuyen in certified cred. And given that I'd just spent 7 nuyen on breakfast and was losing 1 nuyen more every time I refilled my soykaf, that wasn't going to last me very long. Before the end of today I'd need to find a place to sleep that wouldn't have me dying of exposure or getting murdered by another group of fuckheads like the last one, only smart enough to not let me wake up and get to my feet first before starting the serious ass-beating. Which would rapidly deplete my available cash; I could eat for over a week at fast-food prices if I didn't spend money on anything else, but God only knew how much even a cheap flophouse would charge per night.
  
  So I'd need another source of money in both the short and the long term, which means I'd need work.
  
  Which posed a bit of a quandary, given that my only salable skills in this milieu seemed to be violence. It's not as if anyone was likely to pay me for my expertise in operating by now long-obsolete early-21st-century office equipment, or my years of experience as a customer service representative - particularly not if I were SINless. And on top of the all possible moral and ethical quandaries of being a gun for hire in the dark cyberpunk future, there was the practical fact that while I certainly had a vast aptitude for the field so far I didn't really have much knowledge of it, let alone any actual experience at it. Even my recent fight in that alleyway had mostly been me applying the rudimentary scraps of knowledge I'd already known about martial arts and guns with total mental focus and physical adept boosts making them actually dangerous. That still didn't make me an expert at martial arts or tactical shooting. I was barely even able to even reload the pistol I now owned, and I still didn't know how to clean it.
  
  So going around and representing myself as a shadowrunner for hire would rapidly founder on the rocks that I didn't know shit about actual shadowrunning, however fast my hands or naturally talented my aim. And it's not as if there was a Shadowrunner's Training Academy you could just go to. If Shadowrun tabletop was anything like d20 tabletop, then the vast majority of players just rolled up their character as if all their baseline skills simply appeared one day along with their first character level. The computer games certainly never got into actually giving you an origin story for any of your characters beyond 'They grew up on the streets', and most of them hadn't even given you that much.
  
  But I didn't have a gang to join - nor any desire to, given the things I'd heard about gang initiations and the criminal lifestyle in general even prior to being shanghai'ed to here - and without a SIN I certainly couldn't do something like join the military or the cops. And I certainly didn't have enough nuyen to hire instructors to tutor me privately, and without the skills to help pay the bills I couldn't make the nuyen to get the skills-
  
  I sighed as I realized that despite the obvious pitfalls of that particular approach, I would still have no real choice except to fake it until I could make it. Great. That would mean that I'd have to find a regular supply of clients who were even more ignorant about proper shadowrunning than I was. Where the hell could I do that?
  
  I kicked myself inwardly when I realized that I already knew exactly where.
  
  
  
  "Tonight will be your night to enjoy and I'll just be along for the ride, right up until when the drek hits the fan. As soon as that starts then you need to do exactly as I say. If I say get behind cover, you get behind cover. If I say run, you run. If I go left, then you don't go right. No questions, no hesitation, no second chances. This is the Redmond Barrens, not Bellevue, and if you put a single foot wrong here then it might be the last thing you ever do. But if you let me do my job then I'll make sure to get you through this alive. You got that?" I finished dramatically.
  
  "Yes sir!" the nervous-looking salaryman acknowledged me, as his drinking buddy nodded silently in the background. They were typical examples of exactly the sort of gullible idiot that Touristville had been set up to extract nuyen from as painlessly as possible - lower-ranking denizens who mostly lived within the corporate bubble in the nicer neighborhoods in Seattle, come down to the fringes of the Barrens to get drunk and laid and be able to brag to their buddies how they survived the real mean streets. And of course these were exactly the sort of people who'd hire "real live shadowrunners" to be their guides and bodyguards for the night, and not have either the experience or the discretion to be able to tell a street legend from an empty suit.
  
  After buying some basic first aid supplies in a nearby store to treat my minor cuts and bruises, I silpped fifty nuyen to the doorman of the nearest whorehouse I could find and he put me alongside a local fixer named Max. Who, after a brief job interview had decided to take a chance on me as one of the 'professional bodyguards' he rented out to idiot tourists. After all, it's not like they were actually paying for quality personnel, and unlike most of the low-rent thugs walking in Max's door I had several useful considerations. One, I cleaned up very nice - my Charisma score was apparently a 6 as well - and that was useful for bringing in more business from the clients. Two, I wasn't actually a gang thug who'd grown up in the Barrens with the social skills and volatile outlook to match, so I didn't have much trouble convincing Max that I wouldn't scare off or get excessively frustrated with the tourists (which was the chief way walk-in muscle like me failed out of this job). Three, I was a physical adept, so he could charge a premium fee for me.
  
  And most of the serious street predators tended to avoid Touristville because the owners and operators of all the tourist traps around here paid for enough protection from the local syndicates to discourage that kind of thing. Of course there were still some - nothing short of outright martial law and putting a Metroplex Guard platoon on every street corner could hope to actually eliminate all street violence from any given section of the Barrens - but that sort of casual low-end stuff was why the richer tourists either brought their own private security or hired it locally.
  
  So even my very basic skills at throwing hands and looking tough were enough to get by when all I had to do most nights was just follow drunk idiots around and stare menacingly at even drunker low-rent thugs to encourage them to go hassle other people who hadn't paid for bodyguards, and at seventy-five nuyen an hour - I cost more, actually, but as the hiring agent Max kept a good chunk for himself - I was making good enough money to pay for three slops and a flop, to get myself outfitted with actual clothes and even a nice-looking armored jacket I picked up cheap from a pawn shop - and was putting the rest of it aside to make myself a nice nest egg.
  
  As for originally not knowing my way around Touristville, that was a problem that also largely solved itself. Fixers like Max collected on both ends of the equation - people looking for armed escorts came to him to be hooked up, and the owners of various nightspots around here paid Max off to have their places be first on the list whenever a tourist would ask 'Where could we go to find..?' I got paid in tips for every pigeon that I could steer into a place that was on Max's "recommended list", which obviously meant that I had to be told where they all were and how to get in.
  
  Of course, I didn't intend to spend the rest of my life, or even the rest of this season, just being a glorified tour guide. This was purely a short-term gig I was doing to build myself a stake, while at the same time I watched and listened and networked around to see what kind of opportunity I could find next. After all, drunk people were very often chatty people and just because most of the clients were tourists didn't mean that they didn't have day jobs and didn't know people. And with my total recall I could memorize every word they said even while doing my job of paying attention to the surrounding environment, and while most of it was as banal and forgettable as you'd imagine there still was the occasional bit of paydata. Not that I sold any of it - part of the service the clients were paying for was discretion, and I was like hell going to do something that pissed off the only fixer in the world who could give me a favorable recommendation to any future employer - but I still noted and filed it. After all, the more I could learn about current events the better. Even despite my "strong, silent type" act I could still deflect only so much casual chatter before I had to participate a little, and I risked outing myself as a dude from another planet whenever I so much as failed to recognize the name of a local sports team.
  
  So I showed up every evening and called Max to see what the night's assignment was, and escorted whatever pigeon or pigeons had paid for the service that night around to the same places in Touristville, and then went back to my rented room in the early AM and slept it off to do the same thing again. It was mostly being paid for being patient and present. The primary job of a bodyguard wasn't to inflict violence but to deter violence, after all, and you did that largely as a function of presence and demeanor. And I was talented and diligent at both. I did manage to find out that one of the local weapons dealers in Touristville not only offered gunsmithing services but a no-questions-asked firing range in his basement as well, and so I not only picked up a cleaning kit for my pistol as well as some basic instruction in using it but also started getting in some actual practice with it.
  
  It wasn't until I had over two weeks in on the job that I had to draw a weapon in anger again, and that's when I learned that I apparently had the physical adept power for enhanced aim as well. The first guy I'd shot in that alley had gotten a moderately accurate Mozambique drill because that's all I'd been trying for at the time, but when two razorguys flying way too high on BTL chips decided that slashing the face off the young lady I'd been bodyguarding was a great idea, they were both wired up enough that I didn't have time to try and be methodical. Wired reflexes, hand razors, and BTL-induced psychotic breaks were a nasty combo to let get anywhere near the unarmored civilian so I had no choice but to go for headshots and I had to do it as fast as I possibly could. And when I scored two hits out of two shots fired directly to both of their foreheads before they could get more than three steps into their lunge, despite having only owned this pistol for a couple of weeks and having only had several opportunities to even take it to the range since then, well, that's when I realized that on top of all the other gifts I'd somehow received in the transition I was also a superhumanly accurate marksman.
  
  Some discreet experimentation the next day out in a more isolated section of the Barrens confirmed my results, and also made me realize that my preternatural aim wasn't limited to just short ranges. I was tack-driving accurate with this pistol out to anywhere within one hundred meters, and I was pretty sure my aim started falling off beyond that point only because of inherent ballistic limits. And that was with a pistol over iron sights. The mind boggled at what I might possibly do with an actual rifle. It wasn't enough that I was a physical adept with all-around maxed stats and an eidetic memory, but now I was basically Clint Barton as well?
  
  Needless to say, after the headshots incident Max started using me for more challenging work. I wasn't just escorting tourists around to the local nightclubs anymore, I started doing ride-alongs with some of his other regulars for things like escorting business owners on bank runs or bodyguarding higher-value clients who wanted to skip Touristville and head deep into the Barrens to check out real hotspots like the underground casinos that some of the syndicates ran out there. I kept my mouth shut, did what I was told, and tried to ask only intelligent questions as I attempted to learn the intricacies of the business beyond merely looking tough, staying alert, and shooting straight.
  
  Which is how after a couple more weeks of the new assignments I got invited to go drinking with the boss. In that he ushered me into his office - the inner one, not the outer one - and laid out two shot glasses and a bottle. He poured, and we toasted each other's health and drank.
  
  "You know, Alex, I can't figure you out." Max said after we'd both downed the first shot of vodka. I'd been using my birth name ever since I'd arrived in this world - after all, it's not like it was on record here anywhere.
  
  "In what way, sir?" I politely replied.
  
  "A man's past is usually his own business, especially around here." he replied. "But on the flip side of that, a man has to know what kind of person he's doing biz with. And usually I'm good at sizing people up, but you are an enigma." Max nodded at me. "You don't drink, you don't use, you don't do anything except work, study, and sleep. You don't even check out the girls at Lady Anne's, and I know you've been getting offers."
  
  "Well, you know I started off without any kind of stake." I answered. "So I haven't been spending anything on non-essentials while I built myself back up."
  
  Max acknowledged that and poured two more shots. "You weren't born here, were you?" he asked me while I was halfway through sipping mine. Manfully, I controlled my startlement and just looked back at him coolly.
  
  "No sir, I was not born in Seattle." I non-answered.
  
  "Pffft." he snorted. "I meant you weren't born here. Down in the gutter, like all the rest of us were. You're too straight, too clean. And definitely way too self-disciplined." he finished insightfully. "You're from uptown, aren't you?"
  
  "What would someone from uptown be doing carrying a gun down here?" I deflected.
  
  "You haven't heard?" he probed. "Of course it ain't been in the news, because the corps and the government both want a lid kept on it, but they haven't been able to keep it from leakin' to the Street. The SIN databases weren't fully restored after the second Crash. They're finding more and more people who just woke up one day and pffft!" he waved his hands. "Everything's gone. Locked out of their own houses because the security systems don't recognize 'em anymore, can't touch their cred because the bank account's linked to a SIN that no longer exists, can't go to work because Human Resources doesn't have any records of an employee with that name. Educational transcripts, credit history, work history, birth registration... it's all cross-indexed to the SIN, and if the SIN isn't in the database or any of the backup databases then where does it all go?" He sighed. "Heard about a case like that just the other week from a friend in Lone Star. Found a wino frozen to death in an alleyway, except the autopsy found that his dental work and his cyberware were for somebody way too rich to be a wino. Arrest records linked to his fingerprints had him showing up out of nowhere a couple months ago, arrested for creating a public nuisance after having stolen some rich guy's clothes and credstick. Turns out those were his own clothes and cred... except his SIN had vanished from the system, and all his biometrics with it, so he couldn't prove he was the owner of his own clothes off his back! From junior corporate VP to homeless bum in one shot, because his ID number had vanished from the database. And since the last thing any bigshot ever wants to admit is that the Global Identification Registry can fuck up like this, it was easier to just let the guy and everybody like him rot and die instead of to actually try to fix the mistake."
  
  "Isn't it normally impossible for a SIN to vanish from all databases, given how many dozens of redundant backup mirrors of the Global Identification Registry are separately maintained by every government and extraterritorial megacorp?" I asked.
  
  "Yeah." Max agreed. "Of course, it's equally as impossible for the entire fucking Matrix to crash and stay crashed across the entire planet for like a fucking week because of how much double triple twenty times over redundancy it had in the everywhere as well. Except that shit happened just last November. So...?"
  
  Well, damn. Apparently whoever or whatever had chosen to insert me here had picked this time and place because the global Matrix Crash 2.0 (Crash 1.0 having been sometime in the 2020s) was a perfect cover story for someone from a more civilized era showing up apparently out of nowhere. And Max, after several weeks of carefully observing me, had expertly added two and zero together to get four.
  
  "Yeah." I said, putting on as somber a face as I could. "I used to be- well, you know. A regular person, with a number and a bank account and everything-" I gulped my vodka and held the glass out for a refill. "And then suddenly, I wasn't."
  
  "Figured." Max said. "But what, you didn't have a family or anyone you could stay with?"
  
  "I was on my own." I shrugged. "Still am, really."
  
  "Where'd you learn to shoot?" he changed the subject.
  
  "Dad taught me the basics, while he was still alive." I said. "But the accuracy? That came in with the rest of the physical adept stuff, not from training."
  
  "Useful." he said. "So, what did you do? Y'know, before?" he kept probing.
  
  "I was in college." I non-answered. "Business Studies." I continued, having decided to just spin this line of BS out as far as possible. "I wasn't really passionate about it, but... y'know. Career possibilities."
  
  "And now you're down in the Barrens shooting people for nuyen." Max said. "That's a hell of an adjustment."
  
  "I cry on the inside." I looked back at him challengingly. "I mean, fuck. It's not like I have any choice about taking it as it comes. This shit's going to keep happening whether I accept it or not. And so it's either lie down and die or keep on doing what I have to do, even if that means being someone completely different from the guy I thought I'd grow up to be." I shrugged. "At least this is still mostly clean, even if it's not legal."
  
  "Yeah." Max agreed. "I get that. I mean, I could be brokering other jobs. Make a lot more money doing it, even. But nobody comes looking to put you in the ground if all you're doing is making sure that people stay safe and their shit doesn't get ripped off. Some other fixers, they live big and die young. Me, I'm gonna live boring as shit and die older than shit." He poured another shot for both of us. "And you?"
  
  I paused and thought that one over for a few moments. "Right now, all I've really decided is that I'm going to live." I said honestly.
  
  "I get it." Max nodded. "But even with all the self-study you've been doing - don't think I haven't noticed - you're still not really trained up on what we do here, outside of your innate gifts, right?"
  
  "Right." I nodded.
  
  "But you don't want to just be a security guard for the rest of your life." he probed yet again.
  
  "... no." I admitted softly.
  
  We both finished our drinks in silence, and then Max bid me good night and sent me home.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Still winging it! And as for the reason our intrepid MC was dropped into this particular time period... well, it's what he thinks happened, from all available data. Still not going to make any guarantees that in-character knowledge is also accurate OOC.
  
  Don't worry, the 'OP' part will kick in soon enough. And in fact, even right now he still is OP by Shadowrun starting character standards.
  
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  "Behind you!" Netcat screamed loudly as her eyes widened at whatever she saw over my shoulder. We'd both been caught out in the open as we were trying to sneak across the cavern floor, and only she'd had the credits to afford a suppressed weapon. So I'd had to let her deal with the lurking gargoyle while I'd stayed in melee mode and stood by to back her up, so that my gunshots wouldn't attract a whole horde of hostiles to us. Except that even with us maintaining noise discipline, something found us anyway.
  
  I spun around as quickly as I could, but this was not the reality I was used to and my supernatural speed no longer functioned. In this pocket universe I was limited to what the creators of this reality had decided was the maximum possible reaction time for a metahuman being, and so I didn't have the fractions of a second that I'd learned to instinctively rely on in combat situations-
  
  But at least my superhuman accuracy still functioned. My M-23 assault rifle slid smoothly into position against my shoulder as I finished my spin and quickly scanned the half of our cone of vision that we'd agreed would be my area of responsibility, just as I heard Netcat's silenced SMG already spitting out bursts of fire against whatever was in her area. The meter-long furry bodies and gleaming beady eyes, along with the infernal chittering, told me that the half-dozen or so charging critters were devil rats.
  
  The first charging rat died as I put a bullet directly through its eye. Then the second, and the third, and the fourth, as I serviced targets as quickly and precisely as any aimbot program could have. Not possessing my superhuman accuracy but having notably more experience at this then I did, Netcat she expertly walked short bursts of fire right across several of the rats on her side as they charged. Then I heard her silenced SMG stop coughing-
  
  "Reloading!" she called away, and I quickly swiveled my rifle barrel over to cover her while she was out of action. There was only one rat left on her side, a slightly larger one that was clearly the alpha rat, and I put one directly in its forehead and watched its brains splatter-
  
  -and cursed incredulously as the fucking thing just kept coming even as the hole in its head spontaneously knitted back together. Contemptuously ignoring the large gout of gray matter that had just spurted out the back of its fucking skull, the rat shrieked like a jet turbine on takeoff and leapt-
  
  I frantically yanked the selector switch to 'Burst' and put three rounds through the fucking thing as it was in mid-leap, but the physics engine contemptuously ignored me as it finished its assault anyway. Netcat shrieked and died as the rat finished its leap with its oversized teeth directly in her throat, and I swore like a sailor who'd just found out that payday had been cancelled as the two more bursts I put through the goddamned immortal rat didn't slow it up enough to keep it from turning on me-
  
  NETCAT has been killed by a DEMON RAT.
  XDD-206501-00107843 (F2P) has been killed by a DEMON RAT.
  
  "What the hell was that shit?" I swore as Netcat and I both had our game avatars rematerialize in the lobby to wait out the rest of the round.
  
  "I know, right?" Netcat swore. "A demon rat? A goddamn demon rat mixed in with the common devil rats? On level two? They never put a mob of that tier on that early a level before! What were they thinking?"
  
  "Especially given that this is the 'Free To Play' promotional week to celebrate the game's grand re-opening after the Crash 2.0 took it offline. Great way to make the n00bs like me decide they really love themselves some Paranormal Crisis and want to keep playing!" I huffed sarcastically.
  
  "No kidding. I'd had to switch to incendiary or acid rounds to kill that thing, what with its regeneration trait. You couldn't even hope to chip it to death with just the starter rifle and standard ammo." my fellow gamer groused along with me. "So of course the damn thing only comes in just when I'm stuck in a reload cycle-" She broke off and sighed. "I used to home-away-from-home in this game - hell, I was actually logged in here at the moment the Crash 2.0 hit, and do not get me started on the dumpshock I ate from that one. And then I come back to this kind of crazy-ass game imbalance? So much for getting back on the VR horse!" she spat.
  
  Because our recent life and 'death' experience had all been a VR Matrix sim, of course. Paranormal Crisis was the Call of Duty franchise of the dark cyberpunk future, the #1 online multiplayer first-person shooter. Only instead of playing it with a mouse and keyboard, instead you jacked in (or used a neural interface 'trode set like me if you didn't have datajack cyberware) and let the miracle of simsense technology actually make you believe you were trapped in some underground hellhole with a ton of mutated, paranormal, and/or cyborged up death critters while you and your fellow gamers FPS'ed your way through twelve increasingly hellish levels of death to kill the boss monster. There were in-game puzzles you could solve for bonus points, but mostly it was a straightforward 'kill stuff for XP to unlock higher tiers of gear and abilities to kill more stuff with, rinse and repeat' gameplay cycle. Just like Call of Duty had been. The more things changed, the more things stayed the same.
  
  Although I'd before played an online game that felt so real. Shadowrun's Matrix had been aptly if coincidentally named- when you laid down and plugged into full VR, it was just like Neo jacking into the Matrix in the movie. Simsense VR meant that all of your physical senses were fully engaged - not just sight and sound but smell, touch, even proprioception. Even on 'cold sim', with the neural feedback stepped down to legal levels, your mind made the experience real enough that it took preprogrammed safety cutouts to keep the shock of being 'killed' from actually knocking you unconscious in reality. When in illegal 'hot sim', the super-charged levels of neural feedback that high-end deckers used for maximum responsivity and speed in the Matrix even at the expense of safety, harmful neural feedback from getting your icon/avatar shredded could easily reach lethal levels. "Your mind makes it real" indeed.
  
  Although given how intense even cold sim could get - I felt fully as drenched in sweat and adrenaline as if I really had just stepped out of a pitched battle right now - I honestly wondered who the hell ever hit themselves with full brain-frying levels of hot sim. Especially when done purely for recreation, like Better-Than-Life chip addicts did-
  
  The server will be shutting down for an unscheduled update in 15 minutes. New games may not be started until the update completes.
  
  "Aaaaand, that just puts the capper on a perfectly wonderful day." Netcat swore. "Well, it was nice meeting you-"
  
  "You want to just log off and go hang out or something?" I felt an impulse to ask.
  
  "... you do know a lot of gamer girls on the Matrix are actually guys, right?" she arched an eyebrow at me.
  
  "At this point I don't care if you're actually a talking dog." I shot back. "I have spent the year so far doing basically nothing but work, study, and sleep, and today is the first day of social interaction I've had with anyone that was actually social in way, wayyyy too long."
  
  "...I definitely know what that feels like." she agreed with me wistfully. "I've basically been a cavewoman inside my apartment ever since the Crash- oh hell with it, why not?" she shrugged. "Your profile's location tag already says you're a Seattle local like me, so, are you anywhere near the University?" I inwardly raised an eyebrow in shock as Netcat obviously meant that she wanted to meet up physically - I'd just been asking her if she wanted to go log into an online chat room somewhere - but apparently she was not only feeling particularly lonely, but also was notably more trusting than I was.
  
  Then again, if she was really at the University of Washington then she'd have at least some reason to feel relatively safe meeting a stranger - the U of W, or "U-Dub" as the locals called it, was not only in the heart of the Downtown district and an A-rated security zone by Lone Star but also had a decent campus security force of its own. And while the low-end fake SIN I'd bought from a local hacker gang was barely enough to buy a subway ticket without being pulled in for questioning, that would still be enough to let me safely enter a patrolled zone and eat a meal in a public place.
  
  "I'm more out Bellevue way, but I can hop a bus." I answered. "Meet you at the Student Union?"
  
  "Sure, that'll work." she smiled at me. "Put a snapshot on your profile so I know who to look for?"
  
  "I can do that." I said, and switched from VR to manual controls without logging out just long enough to use the webcam on my cyberterminal to snap a photo of myself while she did likewise.
  
  My eyebrows raised as I saw that Netcat was not only an actual girl, but at least as pretty an elf in real life as her avatar had been sculpted to be.
  
  
  
  Despite my nigh-superhuman mental focus and endurance, the fact remained that all work and no play eventually made Alex start climbing the ceiling. So I'd actually started to spend a little of my hard-earned savings on (relatively) luxurious items such as an actual desktop PC - or 'cyberterminal' as they were called around here - and a Matrix account of my own, even if it was from a 'black ISP' run by a local hacker gang down in Redmond and not one of the legitimate telecom companies that SIN-having people used. It was still enough to let me start using all the digital services of the cyberpunk future, such as the all-in-one voice/text/videophone/chat/e-mail services all lumped together under your commcode, the ability to surf the public Matrix - which had proved invaluable for my ongoing efforts in self-education and local historical and cultural research - and, with a trode headset, the ability to enter Matrix VR to do basic simsense things like online "hands-on" tutorials, the sort of cheap training sims that could be run on a desktop cyberterminal - and online games like Paranormal Crisis.
  
  Which I'd gotten into both because I'd always loved Call of Duty, and because the full-VR immersion element had me hoping that I could use it to get in some training on milspec weapons like assault rifles and grenade launchers and other things I couldn't hope to find practice facilities for in meatspace any time soon. Especially since according to forum chatter, Paranormal Crisis's game engine had started as a simplified civilian adaptation of UCAS military VR training technology. And hey, it had been Free-To-Play week to not only celebrate their servers going back online for the first time since the Crash 2.0, but also try and get the customer base back up after the Crash had scared quite a few people off of online gaming.
  
  Especially given that AIPS, or Artificially Induced Psychotropic Schizophrenia, had shown up in the diagnostic lexicon after the Crash. Apparently having actually been logged into VR at the time the entire global Matrix was taken down by the several competing digital apocalypses ranging from mad AIs to even madder digital terrorists with psychotic 'war code' Dissonance worms to outright EMP tacnukes being used on major grid junctions left quite a few people with harmful neural feedback that resulted in all sorts of nasty symptoms and twitches even months later and when jacked out. No wonder that all the major online franchises were doing sales gimmicks like this for their post-Crash relaunches, they needed to rebuild that customer base.
  
  And to think that people used to complain about lag or patchy wireless. Hell, I was still getting used to the part where the dark cyberpunk future didn't even have Wi-Fi, something that back in my original world had been nigh-ubiquitous by 2010. Apparently the technology had been completely abandoned as far too much of a security risk after the first Crash and the invention of neural interface technology and cyberdecks, which even the earliest crude versions of which had let the first-gen deckers effortlessly rip through the most advanced computer security technology of the early 21st century as if it didn't even exist. Between the first Crash, and the arrival of magic in the Awakening, and all the upheavals and plagues and wars and economic collapses since then, as well as the Darwinian technological evolution of the Matrix in other directions... well, only now, after the second Crash, were they even beginning to talk like wireless Matrix technology was going to make a comeback. And even that largely because the EMP attacks on the major grid nodes that had so contributed to the Crash 2.0 had made the Powers That Be start developing a new interest in ubiquitous mesh networks instead of excessively vulnerable centralized grid architecture, something that would obviously require Matrix technology to go wireless.
  
  Not that I was majorly interested in the evolution of Matrix SOTA or anything. However, Catherine - Netcat - was, seeing as how Matrix Technology and System Development was actually her major at the University. And despite having a degree of good looks that would have reflexively prepared me to expect someone who had all the social skills of a person who'd been on the Very Popular track in high school, Netcat was more than enough of a geek to talk the ear off a stranger about the Wireless Matrix Initiative and data infrastructures and other high-level nerd theory even in the first hour of having met the guy for a cafe and chat.
  
  But I didn't mind. For one thing, this actually was useful knowledge for someone frantically playing catch-up in a new world, just as almost any knowledge was. For another she really was cute, and seeing someone so honestly and sincerely passionate about something was just plain endearing. Especially given that ever since I'd arrived here I'd basically been dealing with no one except my fellow SINless denizens of the underworld, who were anything but open, unguarded, or innocent. Basically, Cat was the first person I'd really interacted with since I got here that seemed as relatively unwary as the average person had been in my original life, and I was definitely going to enjoy it while it lasted.
  
  "-but enough about me. What do you do?" she asked, after having finally realized she'd gone off on just a bit of a tangent about her college major.
  
  "I'm a security guard." I answered her.
  
  "Corpsec?" she asked back, obviously intrigued.
  
  "Ah, no." I demurred. "It's a little local firm, we mostly do armed escorts or overflow subcontracting. A lot of the time it's not anything much more involved than being a bouncer." I stopped and decided to course correct a bit, because I didn't want to sound too boring. "On the other hand, if you ever want to get into Underworld 23 then I know the doorman." I finished with a smile.
  
  "Really?" she flirted back at me, not being so naive that she didn't realize why I'd brought that up.
  
  "Well I can't get you in the VIP line on zero notice." I admitted. "But yeah, if you ever want to go then let me know a few days in advance and I can trade a favor to get us a reservation, no problem."
  
  "Underworld 23's a really hot nightclub, but it's also down in the Puyallup Barrens," she asked. "I'm not sure about going to that neighborhood."
  
  "I wouldn't advise you to go alone." I agreed. "And even I wouldn't go there without my pistol, physical adept or not. But people do go there every night and come back perfectly safe and sound, even people with money and flash. The trick is to take an escort, know which cab company to hire, and to not make any side trips. The club itself is a safe zone, so all you've got to worry about is the in-and-out."
  
  "You're a physad?" she shot back. "No wonder you shot like an aimbot! I'd almost thought you were hacking, except even I can't get past the anti-cheat software on Paranormal Crisis." She actually blushed a little with embarrassment as she continued. "And I'm not saying I've tried, but I'm not not saying that."
  
  "Somebody's been naughty." I sing-songed teasingly, before continuing on more reasonably. "Yeah. That ability of mine still works in VR because its largely based on perception and hand-eye coordination, which doesn't really change for the avatar. But I can't use my boosted reflexes in there because the game avatar caps allowable reaction time and running speed at normal unaugmented maximum-"
  
  "They have to." she nodded. "Otherwise everybody with wired reflexes or neural boosters would be pay-to-winning all over everyone else."
  
  "So yeah, sometimes doing online shooters feels like doing tai chi to me." I continued. "It's still martial arts, but in slow motion."
  
  "Do you shoot a lot in real life?" she probed.
  
  "God no." I said. "I mean, I've had to draw my pistol on the job once or twice, but-" I shrugged. "I don't go looking for life-and-death fights every day. Except when its free-to-play week, that is." I ended more lightly.
  
  "You're not wearing your pistol now, though." she said accusingly. Because I'd left it back in my rented room in Touristville, not remotely having the sort of official paperwork that would let me risk carrying it on the street in any part of town where Lone Star actually worked for a living. At least not while I was trying to blend in and be legal.
  
  "Not licensed to carry it on campus." I replied. "Like I said, small local firm. We're definitely not Wolverine or Hard Corps, let alone Lone Star or Knight Errant."
  
  "Yeah, this is a pretty safe neighborhood." she agreed. "That's why I- ow!" she winced, her eyes squeezing shut. "Damn it, not now!"
  
  "Are you okay?" I asked her concernedly.
  
  "Migraines." she grunted, still wincing. "Hang on a minute-" She reached into her jacket pocket for a bottle of prescription pills, opened it, and shook one out onto her palm and washed it down with her soda before putting the bottle back into her pocket. "Okay, give this a couple minutes to work and I should start feeling more metahuman again."
  
  "I'm having a great time hanging out, but if you need to cut this short-"
  
  "Nah, nah, they're just something I have to live with now." she demurred. "I don't want to ditch on you either, not this early."
  
  I looked more carefully at her, trying to judge if she was really okay or just trying to put a brave face on it. Because while I was very much enjoying my first opportunity to actually hang out with a pretty girl like a regular person on a regular date in a regular world, I was not enough of an asshole to want to let her push herself too hard if she really was sick.
  
  "AIPS?" I asked her very softly, pitching my voice to barely above a whisper.
  
  "How the fuck did you-?" she shot back equally as softly, her eyes going wide in alarm.
  
  "Physical adept." I tapped one finger beneath my eye. "One of my abilities is the boosted vision. I can read a street sign at half a mile in the dark, so I could definitely read the label on your pill bottle across the table. And beta-deperidine isn't any painkiller I've ever heard of, certainly not what's commonly prescribed for migraines. That plus your mentioning that you were online and got dumpshocked during the second Crash plus your also having mentioned that you haven't really gotten out any in the past couple of months-?"
  
  "You're sure you don't work for Lone Star?" she shot back warily. "Because that was some serious Night Stalkers detective bullcrap right there."
  
  "Skill number one for security is situational awareness." I said. "And I'm sorry- I didn't mean to make you feel bad. I just... wanted to you know that I knew, but still didn't care."
  
  "... thank you." she said, relaxing. "Because you're right, I got it. And it's a real pain to have everybody you know look at you like you might flip out and become the next Mayan Cutter, just because you had the bad luck to be jacked in at the wrong time and ate the Dissonance worm right across the forebrain and walked away with jangled neurons." She exhaled heavily and continued more sadly. "But hey, even with all the migraines and occasional weirdness I'm still one of the lucky ones. A whole lot of people who got Crashed never woke up at all, or with things like grand mal seizures or limbs that don't quite work right anymore. At least I can still walk and talk and work-" She closed her eyes for a few moments, breathing in and out heavily, before opening them again. "Even if the headaches are a bitch."
  
  "The situation's never as nice and neat as the corporate news says it is, is it?" I commiserated with her.
  
  "No it's not." she agreed. "Not on any topic, at any time."
  
  "I'm assuming you haven't been anywhere outside U-Dub's immediate safe space in the past couple of months because you're worried about migraineing at the wrong time and not being able to defend yourself." I said. "But hey, even with my sidearm back in my apartment I'm still a superhumanly strong and fast professional bodyguard. So, if you don't want to cut this afternoon short, then do you have anywhere that you've been wishing you could go but couldn't?" I stopped and continued with just the right degree of self-deprecating humor. "Although if you say 'the Barrens', then we are putting that on hold until I can go get my iron."
  
  "Is it even legal anymore to be as nice a guy as you are?" Catherine asked me humorously.
  
  "Okay, you caught me. I just wanted to stand behind you and watch you walk for the next couple of hours." I said lightly while waggling my eyebrows like the main character of a cheap porno. "Because while I'd certainly hate to see you go, I'd love to watch you leave-"
  
  She laughed so hard she snorted.
  
  I didn't get lucky that night - although I probably could have, given that contemporary dating etiquette was that sex on a first date was not particularly sleazy behavior if you liked the cut of each other's jib well enough. And both 'Netcat' and I were very pretty people what with the elven metatype running to where even the uglier elves were still fairly good-looking by human standards and 'Cat being blessed with a favorable draw of the genetic lottery even for an elf, and myself having been gifted with a movie-star quality new body by whatever imponderable forces had dumped me here. But if I'd just wanted cheap sex then I could have gotten enough of that in Touristville - and without paying for it, given how many times I'd been hit on by drunk lady tourists or even just bored locals - so despite my being a little backed up because I hadn't actually accepted any of those offers, I still didn't push it with her. Despite our being from different worlds and both of us having things we hadn't remotely wanted to share with other people - even if I'd already guessed hers - the fact remained that we had both been lonely people living in intense little bubbles for too long, and we both welcomed the chance to actually make an old-fashioned human connection with anyone. Especially someone about the same age, very good-looking, and basically compatible.
  
  So we danced the classic dance of flirtation and getting-to-know-you that young people our age did, and had a fine time at the play - because where 'Cat had wanted to go was to catch a live stage production at the big theatre downtown near the Space Needle - and had a nice dinner at a little neighborhood Japanese place, and traded commcodes, and were reaching the stage of the evening where it was time to either say goodbye or stay the night, even if we didn't quite want to do either.
  
  And then, just as I'd finished walking her back to her apartment building, 'Cat proved that I wasn't the only one in the conversation who could pull a Sherlock Holmes.
  
  "You're a shadowrunner, aren't you Alex?" she asked me softly.
  
  "... what gave me away?" I replied. Because after catching her out on her AIPS and her dealing straight with me on that, it's not like I had much high ground to try bullshitting her when she caught me out.
  
  "You said you worked as a security guard and that you carried - and used - a pistol on the job, but you don't have a concealed weapons permit when that's a legal requirement for any armed security position in Seattle." she said analytically. "You managed to go the entire evening when we were trading life stories without actually being specific about the 'who/where/when' even as you were talking about the 'what', meaning you didn't want to actually give any traceable background. You talked down your experience and claimed to be relatively new to the business despite the fact that you mentioned you had the adept powers of heightened reflexes, strength, and running speed to the point that stepping down to a max-human avatar in virtual reality felt confining for you, plus aimbot-level accuracy with ranged weapons and enhanced senses. And a physical adept doesn't express that many separate gifts at that kind of level unless they've been training hard for a while, meaning you were deliberately underselling yourself. But you're a guy trying to impress a pretty girl you just met, so if anything you should be talking yourself up." She nodded at me, clearly impressed with her own deductive skills. "Inference; you have a background you really want to bury in casual conversation. So it's either shadowrunner or high-end corporate hired gun, but a company man wouldn't worry about getting a pistol past University security." She smirked. "Also, he'd be carrying a much better degree of encryption on his pocket secretary."
  
  "... you slipped me a virus when we traded e-cards just now." I glowered at her. "Because I know I didn't leave you alone with my phone long enough to crack it manually."
  
  "Just a little one!" she said entreatingly. "A girl has to look out for herself on the dating scene, so I have a little spy program I use to check a guy's contact list out for things like, oh, him already having other girlfriends. Or a wife." she finished knowingly. "But your phone's was blank, except for some guy named 'Max', a couple line items for things like 'Dojo' and 'Doc'... and me. You get a new burner phone every couple of months and toss the old, don't you?"
  
  "I actually am new." I explained to her. "At running, at least. I used to have another life, but-" I switched to asking a question so I could imply without actually lying. "You're in the Matrix programming track, so have you heard about the problems with the Global SIN Registry that they're not officially admitting to?"
  
  "Damn." she winced. "Really?"
  
  "Officially being unpersoned and with no chance to ever go back to my old life was my New Years' present for 2065." I confirmed.
  
  "And I bitched about the Crash just giving me a few singed neurons for a present." she winced. "You're sure there's no hope to get it back?"
  
  "I think we're talking rewrite-the-very-fabric-of-space-and-time level miracle on that one." I sighed. "So..." I shrugged. "I'm not even sure this is what I want to do for my life now, but when you get dropped into the shark tank then you've got to tread the water."
  
  "That really sucks." she said compassionately. "But... look, I don't believe everything they say about all shadowrunners automatically being psychotic criminals. But that doesn't mean it's a lifestyle that's very nice. And it's definitely not safe. Do you..." she paused, and continued. "Do you actually want to try and get a new SIN, even if you can't ever reconnect to your old one?"
  
  "Can I even do that?" I asked her. "I mean, aren't SINless people basically condemned to official unpersondom forever? Even if I got sent to prison and picked up a 'criminal SIN' that way so they'd have a number to track my rap sheet with, that's still not the same as actually getting official citizenship and civil rights in anywhere back." I sighed. "Not with the way they rigged 'criminal SINs' to not actually be SINs legally, even if they are bureaucratically."
  
  "Off the top of my head, I don't know." she agreed. "But data research - and a little hacking, even if I'm definitely no Fastjack - is what I do for a living. So, if you want I can try researching options for you."
  
  "That's a lot of work to go to for a guy you just met. A strange, SINless guy who just admitted that he rents violence down in the Barrens for nuyen." I deflected.
  
  "Yeah, but I like you." she blurted. "And you like me- hey, don't laugh! Life is too short for all that rom-com not being able to spit it out stuff!" she trailed off embarrassedly.
  
  "If you want to look into this topic for me, then you do that." I affirmed to her. "But please don't go to any major efforts on my account, and definitely don't risk drawing any heat down on yourself. I don't even have any idea what I want to do in the long term right now, not least because ever since I lost my old life I haven't really had anywhere I could sit and think about anything except what I needed to do next to live through the next day-" I stopped and continued more softly. "Until today, at least."
  
  "Okay." she agreed. "I can do that for you. And yeah, I can't even imagine what kind of upheaval you've been through. Even all of my adjusting recently has been me trying to deal with a new me, not a new everything else." she shrugged. "My life is still my life, I just have some medical things to handle. You-" she smiled at me. "If I can be a place where you can feel safe enough to actually start thinking about your future, then I'd be glad to."
  
  "And if I can be a useful kind of friend when you need one, I'd be glad to as well." I agreed.
  
  "Then we're agreed then!" she said brightly and a little too quickly, and we stood there staring at each other until I very, very slowly reached out to take her hand and- waiting and still not seeing any little signals of 'Too close!'- gently pulled her in for a goodnight kiss.
  
  I knew it was just my imagination, but I could still taste her lipstick all the way through the bus ride home.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: How the hell did this become a meet-cute? I'm the guy writing this thing and even I still don't know how the hell this became a meet-cute! This was supposed to be a power fantasy, not a romantic comedy!
  
  And yes, that is indeed the very same Netcat who in Shadowrun 4th edition was the signature technomancer NPC. (As canon inconveniently failed to give me a real name for her, I had to pick one myself. And if she was amateur enough to use her old gaming handle for her shadowrunner street name - which she was - then she'd also be amateur enough to use her real name as part of her handle.) People who own the Unwired supplement might recall that her origin story does indeed have her being a comp-sci major at the University of Washington circa 2064, who was a minor-league hacker prior to her emergence as a technomancer and a dedicated online gamer as her hobby and passion. And she was indeed, canonically, logged into a session of Paranormal Crisis when the Crash 2.0 hit and came out of that with her brain whacked in the way that produced the first-generation technomancer, which was often misdiagnosed as AIPS. And if she seems a lot less hardened and streetwise than you'd expect a prime runner to be, remember that this is back before her running career really started.
  
  At this point in the canon timeline Netcat was not yet consciously aware of her developing technomancer abilities, and would spend the next several years slowly self-discovering out what she was and how her powers worked and be drawn into the shadowrunner subculture by her growing alienation from regular society and the almost 'mutant in an X-Men comic' levels of bullshit the technomancers had to go through during the first stages of the Emergence arc.
  
  But now? Who the hell knows, least of all me. I was already winging this thing, now parts of it are basically winging itself.
  
  But hey, we'll get to the major shadowrunning stuff as soon as I design some more NPCs or decide which canon ones to incorporate.
  
  And sorry, Slamm-0 (Netcat's canonical common-law husband in the later timeline), but in this timeline Alex saw her first. But hey, there's other nice hacker girls you can date. I actually liked him until he got caught in the edition 5e+ general wave of 'let's turn all our sig NPCs into fucking assholes', so I certainly don't wish him ill as a writer.
  
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  "Shit! Out!" Samson called as I yet again put him face-first on the mat and dug my knee into his back.
  
  I let go and stood back up immediately as he called my point, and the burly ork pushed off the floor with his hands and sprang nimbly to his feet. "How the fuck do you keep doing that to me, kid? I been at this for more than twenty-five years!"
  
  "What can I say, boss? I'm a natural." I smirked and tried to pass it off as just the cockiness of youth.
  
  One of the first things I'd done as soon as I started getting myself a stake and a few local contacts was look up where you could go in the Barrens for actual martial arts training. The dojo run by Samson, an ork physical adept who'd retired from being a professional legbreaker for... various people... had been the first one Max had recommended to me. Samson was an expert in several martial arts schools, including the original school of hard knocks, but the main art he liked to teach was Systema. Which was a Russian military martial art that was like if krav maga had had a love child with tai chi who'd then spent twenty years in a Siberian prison mine. It didn't have belt rankings, grades, or titles. You studied and kept studying until either your instructor either agreed you were finally proficient enough to call yourself a systema practitioner for real or you quit or got thrown out. As Samson was fond of saying "The streets will grade you on a strict pass-fail system, and so will I."
  
  So despite it costing me a fair chunk of nuyen each week, I'd signed up for tutoring. And after I'd somehow hauled out enough of a burst of speed to actually beat him in our initial spar, I rapidly got bumped up to individual lessons. Whether that was because he'd recognized me as a prodigy or because he didn't want to drop any more face by being thumped hard in front of other students I wasn't certain. Probably both.
  
  At any rate, since I hadn't come here to coast on my innate gifts but to actually learn, from then on I largely concentrated on trying to perfect my form and not on trying to beat the instructor's ass. So Samson wrote off my initial win as a fluke and his own sloppiness and, after thumping me a little extra to communicate the proper degree of respect he felt he was entitled to, we settled down to a productive couple of months of not only teaching me some actual technique but also helping me hone my gifts as a physical adept. Samson was the one who'd told me about some of the sensory boosts possible to a physad, for example, and ran me through several mental exercises to see if I had the potential for them. Which as it turned out I did.
  
  In fact, I was starting to draw quite a bit of curiosity from him because I seemed to have a potential for anything. Whether it be boosting my attributes, passively enhancing my baseline reaction time speed to a point that easily competed with wired reflexes, giving me boosted vision and hearing comparable to SOTA cybereyes or cyberears, or heightening my sense of balance to almost wire-fu levels, I could not only do it all but could pick it up in record time. I did the same thing for actually learning the art of Systema and the mish-mash of streetfighting tricks he taught alongside it as well, and only just managed to pass that one off as being a black belt in taekwondo (even if I'd actually barely made yellow belt) and was just here to learn a new martial arts school while already being an experienced martial artist.
  
  And I hadn't even thought about telling him about my bullshit-tier gun-fu. That would have just completely broken an already fraying suspension of disbelief.
  
  But even with everything I could do to hold back and pace myself, I'd still rapidly levelled up to the point that not only was I routinely matching my instructor but I was just about ready to be fully graduated as a Systema practitioner. Which normally took years, not weeks. It was yet another data point on my growing list of reasons to suspect that while I might be a physical adept I might also be something more.
  
  I was simply too versatile, and was learning too many separate and diverse adept abilities too quickly. In fact, I was learning everything quickly. I'd been fairly intelligent in my old life - I'd never had any problems passing classes even if I never did homework - but I'd never been like this. I'd already known about my having gotten total recall in the transition but I'd also somehow become practically a single-repetition learner even for things that weren't just rote memorization. The basic gun-care lesson I'd gotten at the local Weapons World had combined with Matrix-aided self-study to make me a fair amateur gunsmith in less than a week, able to not just clean but also field-strip, maintain, and troubleshoot almost anything in the common arsenal. Simply hanging out and learning on-the-job had helped me go from a guy with great reflexes to a decent bodyguard and bouncer, not just combat-wise but also in the more subtle skills of keeping an eye on everything while not looking like you were paying attention, putting small clues in the environment together to sense trouble before it started, and even basic conflict de-escalation and other bouncer tricks for dealing with angry drunks or dopers. As well as an overall introduction to living on the mean streets of Seattle in general. I still wasn't anywhere near being a prime runner, but I wasn't a total greenie anymore either. And in addition to the training in knives, batons, and other such things that were part of the Systema course I'd also used a combination of training sims, rented time at the range - and Paranormal Crisis - to get myself qualified with assault rifles, SMGs, and shotguns as well as pistols. Although I still hoped to do at least some live-fire on an actual urban combat course before I tried getting into any serious urban combat for real.
  
  And all that speed-learning was before we got into how I was progressing an adept. The phenomenon of physical adepts had been known for several decades by this point, and there was over a generation's worth of scientific studies and progress charting put in by the military and the corps in figuring out how best to train them. The average adept had a fairly consistent growth rate as well as an overall limit on the separate number of adept abilities they could master to what degree before maxing out their innate magical potential and requiring Initiation - an advanced stage of enlightenment and self-mastery - to progress further and/or diversity their adept portfolio. Really advanced adepts, guys who would be considered martial arts grandmasters and legends, had been through multiple grades of initiation. Even Samson had only initiated twice, and he'd been doing this for longer than I'd been alive.
  
  Which is why it was seriously bullshit that I'd already advanced and diversified my adept abilities to the point that going by all known metrics I should have had at least three grades of initiation already just to cover them all, and I hadn't initiated so as much as once. And while it was theoretically possible to self-initiate without knowing it, that didn't work three times in a row. Not unless you were a one-in-a-trillion prodigy at being a natural ki master (it turned out that in this world all of the martial arts folklore about 'chi' and suchlike had actually been dimly-grasped and partial bits of knowledge that still worked in the low-mana conditions prior to the Awakening and the return of magic in 2011) that made Ranma Saotome look normal. Samson was already seriously starting to suspect something was hinky with me as is, and that was with everything I'd done to hold back the full extent of my powers.
  
  Still, I'd just passed my final exam to graduate Systema so after putting Samson off with my usual round of excuses, I paid him for my last lesson and then left his dojo fully intending to never go near the place again until enough years had passed I could actually explain my level of growth. Assuming that I hadn't evolved into a Super Saiyan by then or something equally as ridiculous. So, day by day I was making myself more knowledgeable, more aware, and more qualified for my upcoming career as a real shadowrunner.
  
  Assuming, of course, that that's what I ended up deciding to do.
  
  "The UCAS military will enlist SINless under age twenty-five if they can pass drug and psych screenings and don't have an 'excessive criminal history'." Cat led off when we met up for lunch the next day. By this point it had been almost a month since our first date, and even after paying for quarters, upkeep, and some relatively expensive martial arts tutoring I still had enough left over in the average week to make it downtown and hang out with her every weekend. Which arrangement suited her just fine, given that during the work week she was pretty busy with her classes.
  
  "If they're giving UCAS citizenship away with the package then I'm assuming they'll want more than just four years?" I guessed, having been in this world long enough to know that the governments and corps had an overall view of 'labor relations' that made the worst penny-pinching factory owner back in my old life look like the Richie Rich movie.
  
  "Ten." she admitted sheepishly. "And you get a limited choice of MOSes with the SINless enlistment."
  
  "Have the recruiters dredge the ghetto, then send all the poor and poorly educated young people out to be frontline fodder." I said cynically. "Well, that's not historically unknown."
  
  "True, but you're Awakened, remember?" 'Cat pointed out to me. "And less than two percent of the population is. Magicians and adepts always get prime signing bonuses and are assigned where their talents won't be wasted. So you wouldn't be marching in the mud on the Algonkian-Manitou border."
  
  "Special operations." I agreed. "Or at least the Rangers. But..." I sighed. "Ten years, and then either trying to live through ten more years so I can retire, or getting out and then going straight into Ares or one of the other corporate armies. It would be more stable and legal than shadowrunning, but not really safer."
  
  "Valid point." she agreed. "And yeah, with your adept gifts most of your possible career paths are going to be... y'know, active... but that doesn't mean you have to kill people for a living. If you hadn't lost your SIN you could have gone into Urban Brawl or Ultimate Fighting- hey, wasn't there an Urban Brawl physad who started SINless? Svetlana something... you know, the naked one?"
  
  "Half-naked." I corrected her, knowing she was referring to an infamous rookie on the European Urban Brawl circuit who'd developed a publicity move of going topless during matches as a way to not only distract the enemy team but also pump up her own Q-rating. But then again, there were two rather prominent reasons besides her being a skilled parkour adept and high-jumper that Svetlana Jurjewa had been nicknamed "Bounce". "Unfortunately, while the European circuit has teams willing to hold open tryouts in Z-Zones the North American teams are SIN-only. I checked."
  
  Because one of the first things I'd done after finding out that the sport even existed was to try and see if I could get into Urban Brawl - after all, being paid NBA basketball player money to shoot non-lethal ammo at people in a stadium while wearing the best body armor money could buy and with team physicians available at the sidelines certainly beat being paid money to shoot at and get shot at in the Barrens for real. And wasn't it just a measure of how far in the dark cyberpunk future I was that 'let's throw a bunch of people with real guns and gel rounds into a stadium and have them do Team Fortress style combat in live action' was now a recognized professional sport.
  
  "That's lousy luck. The way you can shoot you'd have made the starting bench in no time. And I'd have loved to be dating the next Sean Benton." she smiled at me.
  
  "Well, when you invent the next Fairlight Excalibur I can move in and be your kept man. They say I make a mean omelet." I teased her.
  
  "Oooo, would you cook naked apron style?" she teased me back.
  
  "Spattering hot grease at waist level? Not even if I developed the adept power for iron skin." I winced, and she giggled.
  
  "And as for corporate recruitment-" she shrugged. "I didn't turn up any possibilities. If you were a magician then any megacorp would take you so long as you looked remotely willing and reliable, regardless of background, but they don't seem to have any similar 'get a SIN' tracks for physical adepts." She shrugged. "I guess when you can afford meganuyen worth of cyberware for your elites, you don't feel as much need to recruit the magically augmented."
  
  "Probably." I said. "So, its either ten years in the spooky troops or... not much else, as far as a quick path back to regular life right now." I shook my head. "I'm not sure I'm a big enough fan of the current government to spend a decade killing in the name of, and I am sure I don't want to leave Seattle right now."
  
  "So, we'll keep looking for something long-term." she agreed hurriedly. "How are you fixed for the short-term?"
  
  "Work's starting to dry up a little." I admitted. "Max looks like he's thinking I'm overqualified for the kind of work he hires people out for, and I'm getting gently encouraged to try finding another fixer. I guess he's really sincere about playing it safe rather than wanting larger commissions."
  
  "I don't blame anyone for sticking with what's working for them." she agreed. "A whole lot of people in this town don't even get that privilege. So, what are you going to do?"
  
  "Not starve." I reassured her. "I mean, my single largest expense - my martial arts lessons - just got paid off, so even with the op-tempo of things slowing down I'm still solvent. But yeah, I need to start working other types of gigs." I paused, and decided to be open about it. "I've already got a line on one, I'm hoping it pans out."
  
  "It's a pity Shadowland went down in the Crash and hasn't come back up yet, or you could get registered there and start checking all the job postings for runners." she commiserated, referring to the BBS/forum/Matrix portal that had been Seattle's single most useful connection for any local shadowrunner. "I heard the sysop died fighting the Crash worm, poor guy."
  
  "Were you on there before?" I asked her, not having expected Netcat to actually know about an online runner haven.
  
  "Nominally." she admitted. "They had an account tier system with access and privileges to match, ranging from 'prime runner that the insiders personally knew and vouched for' all the way down to 'tourist'. I was barely a step above the latter. I mean, I hack things semi-professionally, so technically I'm on the shady side of Seattle like you are. But realistically? On a scale of one to actual shadowrunner decker, I'm maybe a five."
  
  "That's still not bad at all, given the crazy shit that you hear about deckers pulling off all the time." I complimented her. "And it's not like you hack as a full-time lifestyle like they do. Or risk the same kind of attrition rate..."
  
  "Yeah." she nodded vigorously. "I got brainfried once, and was lucky to come out as relatively intact as I did. Not eager to look for a repeat."
  
  "Speaking of, how have you been doing?" I asked her, to be worried when I saw her expression turn guarded behind a bright yet insincere smile. "And don't say you're fine, because you just twitched."
  
  "I have got to get a better poker face." she grumbled. "Well, the good news is that the migraines have stopped being as frequent. The bad news..." she sighed, and continued on in a reluctant murmur. "New symptom. Auditory hallucinations."
  
  "Hey." I said, reaching out to take her hand reassuringly. "I'm here, okay? What do you hear?"
  
  "Mumbling, mostly." she said. "It's like someone is having a conversation behind me, but I don't know the language. It's not constant - thank God, or I'd never get any sleep - but I'm good for at least a few bursts of phantom speech a week."
  
  "So, you're not hearing the neighbor's dog tell you go to shoot up a nightclub via coded barks." I deliberately made a joke out of it.
  
  "Who even thinks of a mental image like that?" she goggled at me mildly. "And no, it's not that kind of voices. Believe me, campus psych would have freaked out and thrown a hold order in every direction if it had been. It's just-" she hunched her shoulders nervously. "Yet another damn neural misfire. I don't like collecting new ones. I mean, if it's a progressive ongoing process-" she sighed. "Then when does it stop?"
  
  "I don't know." I told her honestly. "But if I can help you, I will."
  
  "I don't know how you can, but the thought does count." she smiled weakly at me. "And in the better news department, even despite the new quirks I have not been put back on the seizure risk list. Thank God, because I spent a month living like that right after the Crash and eugh."
  
  "Well, if you're not at a high risk for seizures then it's still safe for you to indulge in things that involve elevated heart rate and neural activity, yes?" I grinned at her.
  
  "You mean sex." 'Cat smirked back at me. "And hell yeah we still can, or else why would I have brought it up?"
  
  "Check please!" I signaled the server.
  
  
  
  It is a truism that whatever universe you might be in, once you get past their outer shell then nerd girls are freaky.
  
  We'd actually made it to the third date before clothes came all the way off, but once we'd started then we certainly made up for lost time. Honestly, it was a good thing I was a magically-augmented athlete in Olympic condition because otherwise I'd have been the one walking funny after that first weekend. As is, I had to be the voice of common sense that called a halt to things before someone risked a UTI or else we'd literally have not gotten out of bed all Saturday except to eat and take a shower. And even then we were right back at it the next day. Somebody was more than a little touch-starved after having been socially isolated like a semi-invalid for months - and I'd picked up the impression that even before the Crash 'Cat still hadn't had much luck on the dating circuit despite her looks, due to not having as finely-tuned a creep radar as she'd needed to have.
  
  Hey, there was a reason she'd devolved down to hacking a guy's smartphone to run a background check on the first date. I'd even gotten one of their names and descriptions out of her, so I'd know to punch him into next week if I ever caught him hanging around outside her place. Jerk had not only been married but also had another girlfriend on the side, none of whom had known each other... let's just say that despite my lack of SIN or stable income and my general criminal existence, I was still the most decent guy she'd dated for any length of time and leave it at that.
  
  As for me, I'd been dumped into a strange planet entirely and she was the first person I'd met that I didn't have to worry about keeping my guard up with, and it had been a pretty long time for me too- at any rate, while we hadn't formalized our relationship to any degree beyond 'we're dating and exclusive', we were still thoroughly enjoying our 'honeymoon period' as it were. Because while it wasn't necessarily love at first sight, it had certainly become like at first sight. She was rapidly becoming a best friend as well as a lover, and likewise for me on her part. I was already willing to go pretty far out of my way to keep her from being hurt or sad, and likewise her for me.
  
  And that's why I was less than entirely comfortable about what was coming up next. Because even my having lived in Touristville for only a couple of months had already started giving me an education in how trying to sustain a relationship across the SIN/SINless or straight world/shadowrunner divide was almost never viable in the long-term. You only had to watch all the businessmen who kept mistresses on the side down at the edge of the Barrens and the cynicism and high turnover rate of that lifestyle every night to know that one. Or watch the young Touristville townies fall for the 'bad boy' type of runner like me again and again, and get their hearts broken again and again. And while I could admittedly control that factor of the equation by not being an asshole, I certainly couldn't control all the rest of the risk factors involved in that equation. After all, sometimes those broken hearts weren't from the guy cheating on her or dumping her, but instead dying on her-
  
  Well, I certainly had no intention of doing that. Not tonight, and not any other night.
  
  So after I'd left 'Cat's apartment I'd gone back to my place - a cheap one-room apartment in Touristville that didn't ask questions or want ID, just the rent paid in certified cred in advance every month - caught a brief nap, and then checked my weapons and strapped on all my gear. Since I didn't have a car I'd have to jog to the meeting point, but with my speed and endurance boosts I had no problem getting anywhere relatively nearby via Shank's mare and still having enough left at the end to work all night if need be.
  
  Which was good for me because it was a little past 2200 hours on the evening of March 2, 2065, and in less than thirty minutes I'd be starting my first real shadowrun.
  
  "You the newbie that Samson recommended? The physad?" the heavyset black ork woman said to me as I arrived in the empty industrial park I'd been told to meet the others at.
  
  "Wild Man." I acknowledged to her, using the nickname that one of Max's other regular guards had stuck me with in ironic mockery of my being the most calm, boring, and un-dramatic muscle in his stable and my steadfast refusal to so much as sniff a cork while on the job. Hey, it worked as well as any other street name and at least this way I couldn't be blamed for picking it.
  
  "Fatima." she nodded to me. "I'm a magician."
  
  "Livewire." the gangly Caucasian elf in a green mohawk nodded to me. The visible cyberware and his own weapons loadout advertised him as a street samurai.
  
  "Green Dreams" the young troll around my age nodded to me, his cyberdeck case slung on one hip. "I'm the primary on this run. It's a datasteal, you know. Makes me the mission-critical one." he bragged.
  
  I acknowledged that with the complete lack of reaction it deserved and turned to the last person there, another ork. "Pipes. I'm the wheels." Between that statement and his own datajack, I pegged him as a rigger.
  
  "We waiting for the client?" I asked Fatima, who seemed to be the oldest and least melodramatic person here.
  
  "Yup." she said stolidly. "What were you told about the job?"
  
  "That the target was the Humanis Policlub." I said. "That's all Samson really knew about it."
  
  "And that's all I need to know." Livewire said icily.
  
  "I'm actually surprised you're okay with that." Green Dreams said to me challengingly. "You know, what with you being the only human here and all."
  
  "Do we really all look that alike to you?" I threw one of the classic sound-bites from a Mothers of Metahumans PSA back at him, and Fatima barked a laugh.
  
  "Wild Man's right, Greenie." she said to him reprovingly. "Only half the smalltooths in Seattle think the sun shines out of Brackhaven's asshole. The other half think he is the asshole."
  
  "Well said." Pipes chimed in.
  
  Livewire just ignored Green Dreams as if he wasn't there, and I followed his lead. "Physad, huh?" he turned and said to me after a short pause. "What's your style?"
  
  "Systema, mostly." I answered him. "I also gun-fu."
  
  "Explains the rifle." he acknowledged, nodding to the cheap yet serviceable AK-97 slung across my back. "Think we'll need it tonight?"
  
  "Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it." I replied. "What's your favorite style?"
  
  "Arnis." he answered me, briefly extending and retracting a long cyberspur out of the back of his hand. Yes, I could see where the Filipino long-knife style could be easily adapted for arm spurs. "You do much with blades?"
  
  "Just my holdout." I said. "If I want them dead I usually shoot them before they get to melee range. Hands are supposed to be for subtlety. Or desperation."
  
  "Not a bad plan." he agreed.
  
  I picked up the faint sounds of an approaching car - which given the isolation of the particular stretch of the Barrens we were in meant it was almost certainly our client. "Car coming."
  
  "Good ears." Fatima nodded to me, after the engine noise became audible to everyone else shortly afterwards. "Okay everyone, try to look like we're worth paying."
  
  We drew up in a reasonable approximation of a sober and sharp team of professional shadowrunners, as opposed to the pickup squad of people who mostly worked alone that had all heard about this job from one contact or another of theirs, and waited for the client to step out. My eyes narrowed as I noted that the stock Ford Americar and the generic cheap suit said 'ordinary citizen', but the complete lack of nervousness and the mild disdain of us streetscum leaking through his demeanor said 'professional negotiator'. Looks-wise, he was a classic example of what a Lone Star profiler would call "Great, yet another Unidentified Dark-Haired Caucasian Human Male."
  
  "Good, you're all here." he opened briskly. "My name is Mr. Johnson, and I'm here with an urgent short-term opportunity regarding a datasteal against the Humanis Policlub office in Auburn."
  
  "Hell yeah! I'll rip whatever cheap-ass excuse for a datacore those pasty white boys have wide open!" Green Dreams boasted.
  
  "I'm certain you will." Mr. Johnson answered calmly after a momentary pause. "However, it might help if you knew what paydata in particular we were after."
  
  "Just might." Fatima drawled lazily.
  
  Mr. Johnson laid his briefcase on the hood of his car and opened it, then reached in and drew out a printout. Livewire and Fatima both drew a deep breath as we saw it was a crime scene photograph of a young ork girl who'd clearly been shot several times while walking down the sidewalk.
  
  "My niece, Carla Rojas. She was the victim of a drive-by shooting last week ago in Auburn. Eyewitnesses noted a 'Pure Humanity' bumper sticker on the car, but despite that and the license number Lone Star was 'unable to turn up any leads'."
  
  "You want 'em hurt, dead, or hurt and then dead?" Livewire asked levelly.
  
  "That will be determined at a later date." Mr. Johnson said calmly. "For right now the objective is to find out who."
  
  "Hence our doing a datarip on the local Humanis hall." Fatima agreed.
  
  "Yes. I'll give you a copy of everything that the private investigator I hired was able to determine before he hit the limits of what information could be legally gathered and had to give up the case. I'm hoping that Mr. 'Green Dreams' here can go through the local Humanis hall's Matrix host to further link those clues to actual names and faces. However, as they keep the more sensitive data offline from the Matrix, you'll have to physically intrude into the building to find an internal network connection-"
  
  "Hence the two muscleboys and the mage to cover the decker while I keep the van hot for a quick getaway." Pipes said.
  
  "Get in, get the paydata, get out. That's what shadowrunners do, isn't it?" Mr. Johnson smiled at us. "It's a measure of their prejudice that they overlooked that many metahumans still have human relatives. And that unlike my sister's family, I am employed in a responsible enough corporate position to have both some experience at hiring subcontractors to find... creative solutions... and the funding to do so."
  
  "Speaking of that..." Fatima began.
  
  "Five thousand each." Mr. Johnson replied.
  
  "For a smash-and-grab on a Humanis office? There could be a hundred guys on-site for all we know." I broke in.
  
  "The reason the time window is limited is because my information is that they don't have any activities planned tonight, so it should merely be the night security staff and nothing more." Mr. Johnson replied, slightly nettled. "But I cannot speak to tomorrow night or any other night, which is why you need to go now."
  
  "He's right." Pipes said stolidly. "All of us are betting our lives on your intel. That means the job pays risk premium, which means five thousand is way too low. Fifteen each."
  
  "Preposterous. Seven each." Mr. Johnson snorted.
  
  "Thirteen." Fatima said, giving a low handwave to Pipes and the rest of us to let her do the talking.
  
  "Eight." Mr. Johnson replied, and the age-old haggling dance continued until back and forth until the Johnson finally agreed to ten-all... with half up front, but the latter half payable only if we brought him useable paydata.
  
  "I'll leave you a one-use commcode to contact me with when the job is done, and we'll set up a time and a place then for the hand-off." Mr. Johnson said. "Does anyone have any questions?"
  
  "You got any other intel on the target site?" Livewire asked. "Floor plans, security?"
  
  "Just what you see in my investigator's datachip." Mr. Johnson answered levelly. "And it's almost eleven, and your time window is quite narrow, so I'm going to leave you people to your work. Good luck."
  
  We watched him get in and drive away, and Pipes led us over to where his van was parked inside a nearby loading dock. We all got in the back and he began the drive to Auburn.
  
  Green Dreams slotted the datachip into his deck and jacked in to go through it, and after curtly ordering him to download a copy to his local storage so the rest of us could read it Fatima snaked it back out of the chip socket and jacked it into her own pocket secretary. We all gathered around. Copies of police reports and eyewitness statements, the notes of a typical low-end P.I. who'd spent a couple days doing the routine checks and not much else, crime scene photographs, a disturbingly detailed autopsy report on the victim... I couldn't imagine how this could be turned into actual useful leads even with all the files of the local Humanis office at our disposal, but then again I wasn't an expert in decking or data analysis. I'd just have to hope that Green Dreams, for all his cocky punk bullshit, could still do his job as well as I intended to do mine.
  
  "Either of you loaded for non-lethal?" Fatima asked me and Livewire.
  
  "Wasn't told to be, so didn't bring any." I answered her. "If we need soft take-downs I've still got these, though." I held out my hands.
  
  "Non-lethal? Against Humanis?" Livewire asked angrily.
  
  "Risking a multiple homicide investigation costs more than ten thousand." Fatima answered soberly. "Our goal is paydata, not burning the place to the ground."
  
  "Tempting as that latter always is." Pipes chimed in from upfront.
  
  "... if you say so." Livewire grudged. "However, like our young friend here I'd have to stick to bare hands to guarantee their surviving it."
  
  "I already know you can sneak, Livewire." Fatima acknowledged him. "How about you?" she turned to me.
  
  "I can lightfoot." I reassured her. "So do we go in first and try to catch patrolling guards offsides, or do you stunbolt first and we back you up?"
  
  "Good question, and the answer is 'It depends on what the layout looks like when we get there'." Fatima nodded. "Fortunately this place is not the sort of corporate site that can afford astral warding, so I should be able to recon the building and mark any guard posts before they have a chance to see us. Green Dreams, how are you on hotwiring alarm systems?"
  
  "The best you've ever seen!" he bragged.
  
  "... okay." Fatima acknowledged that with about as much confidence as the rest of us felt. I sighed inwardly at how clunky this pickup squad of runners was-
  
  Wait. None of us had gotten this job through a regular fixer? It had all been friends of friends?
  
  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my own pocket secretary. Wireless Matrix was still several months away from its Seattle rollout, but the regular cell phone function and text still worked.
  
  "Who you calling?" Green Dreams asked me nastily. "Your secret Humanis buddies?"
  
  "I'm texting my girlfriend." I answered truthfully, while budging over and holding up the screen so Livewire - who was sitting next to me - could see what I typed.
  
  You up? I texted Netcat.
  
  Are you okay? she answered back.
  
  All calm so far. Could use some legwork, please?
  
  "It's his girlfriend." Livewire reassured Green Dreams, after giving me a brief wink.
  
  Can do! What do you need?
  
  Carla Rojas, ork drive-by victim last week in Auburn. Pull everything you can get from public nets.
  
  On it. Will text when I get anything. Stay safe!
  
  "She know what you do?" Fatima asked me affectionately as I set my phone on 'vibrate' and put it back in my pocket.
  
  "She does." I acknowledged. "She just worries."
  
  "In my experience, those two things kinda go together." she agreed with me.
  
  "We're almost there." Pipes said. "We got a plan yet?"
  
  "Stop a couple blocks away, I'll buzz the site astrally. Then we'll pick a parking spot and an approach route." Fatima told him, and after he found a place to pull over she leaned back against the side of the van, closed her eyes, and dropped into a trance.
  
  "Two people in the building, one in the lobby and one rover." she opened her eyes and said after a few minutes. "Probably the night guards. Nobody else. No spirits, no magic."
  
  "The hoodboys hate the Awakened almost as much as they hate anyone with the wrong-shaped ears." Livewire agreed. "So, it's wide open?"
  
  "We'll still need to get an external door open without triggering an alarm." Fatima said.
  
  "I can hack it!" Green Dreams said. "I told you-"
  
  "And if there's external cameras the lobby guard is watching?" Livewire cut in. "You think he might be curious why there's a big-ass troll huddled up to the back door trying to use a maglock cracker?"
  
  "As if those retards could-" Green Dreams began hotly, only to be interrupted.
  
  "As our decker friend has pointed out on several occasions, I do not racially fit in with our group at all." I broke in smoothly. "Maybe we can use that."
  
  "HELP! HELP! THIS TROG IS GOING TO KILL ME!" I screamed while frantically pounding on the front entrance of the Humanis hall. We'd timed my Trojan Horse gambit for when the roving guard would be on the top floor of the three-story building and out of earshot, so only the one guard should respond.
  
  "Get the fug back here ya fuggin' small-toothed piesh of shit!" Fatima yelled faux-drunkenly as she lurched up the sidewalk towards where I was 'trapped' against the front doors. "I'm gonna pull off your fuckin' dick and make you eat it, if there's enough there to swallow at all!" Since Livewire was on overwatch with my rifle and Pipes was busy keeping the motor running - and nobody trusted Green Dreams' ability to act his way out of a paper bag - she'd been chosen to be the 'mugger'. That she wasn't visibly armed was also a plus, because the guard was much more likely to open the door and try to deal with things himself if he only saw what looked like easy odds as opposed to, oh, enough heavily armed metahumans to make him immediately call Lone Star. She'd also put a Physical Mask spell on me so that I'd look like a sufficiently 'helpless civilian'. Since I was the one person the door guard - and the front door cameras - would have to get a clear view of, we didn't want Humanis having an accurate photo or description to give to Lone Star later. Surgical masks or bandannas and mirrorshades normally sufficed on runs like these, but the Trojan Horse gambit required looking innocent.
  
  "HEEEELLLLLLPPP!" I shouted more loudly, frantically slapping the door. I grinned quietly to myself as I heard the footsteps approaching the inside of the door-
  
  "Back the FUCK up, you subhuman piece of shit!" the beefy Humanis goon shouted as he opened the door, his shotgun already out and aimed at the 'ork mugger'. "Or I'll clean the gene pool right here and no-"
  
  His breath cut off with a WHOOF as I simply reached up and grabbed the top of the shotgun's receiver, then pushed it back into him as hard as I could. This had the double benefit of simultaneously moving his finger away from the trigger as the gun lurched backward and rendering him unable to yell any kind of warning as his wind was suddenly cut off by the hard thump to his ribs. And given that he was entirely unaugmented, he was essentially moving in slow motion as I then firmly pulled the weapon free of his slackening hands, then gave him a fast shot to the solar plexus to put him on the ground.
  
  Fatima stunbolted him without even breaking stride and the rest of the team hurried up and dashed inside with us as we discreetly pulled the unconscious security guard back into the building, put him in his own handcuffs, and gagged and duct-taped him to a chair.
  
  "Why did you even bring duct tape?" I asked Fatima as she finished restraining him.
  
  "You always bring duct tape." she answered me wisely. "And it's always useful."
  
  "Status on the other guard?" Livewire asked Green Dreams, who was busy at the security workstation at the front desk.
  
  "Still clueless." Green Dreams answered, looking at the displays. He then reached out and tapped a series of controls on the touch-screen. "Okay, the cameras are still on so we can see what they're doing if need be, but they're no longer recording anything. I'll zero the rest of the security logs when I crack the host."
  
  "I'll go take care of the guard." Livewire offered eagerly.
  
  "Wild Man takes the rover." Fatima answered him as she dropped her Mask spell on me now that the cameras were taken care of. "You cover me and Green Dreams as we go for the computer room."
  
  "I'm on it." I answered her, and after taking my guns back from Livewire - we hadn't wanted to chance setting off any weapons detectors near the front door - and borrowing Fatima's roll of duct tape I went off to do just that.
  
  My phone buzzed just as I finished ninja'ing up on and taking out the roving guard, then leaving him safely handcuffed and duct-taped at the top of the third floor atrium where he couldn't possibly be missed in the morning. I took it out and noted the 'You've Got Mail!' icon, then tapped it.
  
  Here's everything I found. Netcat's email said, with a text file attachment that contained a quick summary of her legwork results. I speedread and memorized it all, cross-referencing each bit with the Johnson's briefing package. OK, everything matched as far as it went...
  
  ... except for the text of her brief, sad obituary on the local M.O.M. chapter's Matrix blog, the only news outlet that had bothered to write one for her. Carla Rojas is survived by her parents, Juan and Mary Rojas, her older brothers Mario and Carlos Rojas, and her aunt Estella Rojas.
  
  No mention of any uncle. And the Mothers of Metahumans chapter campaigned against reverse racism almost as firmly as they did against anti-meta racism - unlike the Sons of Sauron or other more militant pro-metahuman policlubs - so unlike most 'respectable' news outlets they would never have deliberately buried a mention of an ork family's having a human relative.
  
  Fuck.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: While I normally loathe the Johnson Screw as a far too overused trope, it actually is appropriate sometimes. Like right now.
  
  Veteran Shadowrun players almost certainly already noted all the warning signs going in, and they were indeed put there deliberately. (For one thing, the investigator's being so heavy on the autopsy report and the crime scene gore and so light on useful details was deliberately aimed at inflaming the runners' sentiments enough that they'd miss the warning signs.)
  
  Fatima is a canon NPC, the rest are OCs. Amazingly, Svetlana "Bounce" Jurjewa is also a canon NPC. Man, the worldbuilding lorebooks had some fun stuff in them at times.
  
  As for the fade to black over the sex scene - I know I said that I was going to try and actually branch out into writing some lemons this time. The problem is that Netcat evolved into First Girl almost entirely unexpectedly (it had originally been planned to be Kat o' Nine Tales, who as veteran Shadowrun players know is a hedonistic free spirit who quite literally lives a rock star lifestyle, being a rock star as well as a runner), and when the moment came I just didn't want to try and write any graphic involving her. It felt like trying to write Disney Princess porn. And while I'm well aware that many people on this forum have absolutely no problem doing that, well, I'm apparently just not that guy. :)
  
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  I frantically flipped through the rest of the data Netcat had emailed me, looking to see if anything contradicted the conclusion I'd just leapt to. Unfortunately, nothing did. In fact, the FundItNow! link on the Mothers of Metahumans site for the Rojas family said that they were facing notable financial hardship what with the expenses of Carla's burial and the medical expenses of her brother who had been injured in the same attack... a problem they obviously wouldn't have been having if they'd had a well-off corporate uncle, even if he were 'unofficial' or only a friend of the family.
  
  Which meant "Mr. Johnson" had lied to us. Which was fairly common in the shadowrunning business but normally the lies were polite lies - 'I work for X corp' when he really works for Y, or 'The purpose of the run is to send a message' when it was actually 'The purpose of the run is to create unfavorable press that will drive down the stock price so we can execute a takeover'. Lies that didn't materially affect the survival prospects of the runners in question were just part of the biz.
  
  But given how, in hindsight, the entire presentation of this run had been a sob story designed to emotionally inflame any metahuman runner against Humanis to the point they'd rush in where angels feared to tread, however experienced or sensible they might normally have been? The odds were overwhelmingly large that this was the other kind of lie - the kind intended to set a shadowrunning team up for a double-cross.
  
  My brain kicked into that weird overdrive again as I worked through the entire extended chain of reasoning in the blink of an eye. "Mr. Johnson" had set us up on a run that for safety's sake I had to assume was intended to fail. Since us failing would be only of direct benefit to the Humanis Policlub, the most probable theory was that he was with them or a sympathizer. There were any number of possible secondary plots that could be going on, but I had to make a decision in the next several seconds and I had to make it on insufficient data so that meant it was time to follow the "maximum drek" rule - if you're not sure what's going on but you need to decide anyway, then assume the state of affairs that would get you in the maximum drek if you guessed wrong and plan accordingly.
  
  So I had to assume that the instant Mr. Johnson knew we were actually on-site, he'd tip off either a Humanis kill team or Lone Star and they'd come in to catch us filthy metahuman criminals red-handed. But since he knew our team had a magician he'd had to plan for us having astral recon available, meaning he couldn't have anyone lurking in the building or even immediately next door without risking Fatima seeing them. The auras of living beings showed up on the astral like glowing beacons to anyone with the eyes to see, unless magically masked or warded. And since he also knew we had a decker, however overconfident, he couldn't 100% rely on the building security systems either, unless-
  
  As quickly as I could, I stepped over to the nearest wall and punched the fire alarm. Klaxons started blaring as the little wall panel started blinking bright red. Manual Fire Alarm Acknowledged - 3rd Floor. PANICBUTTON alert system engaged. Franklin Fire Services acknowledges PANICBUTTON.
  
  I stopped gawking at the shiny future toys like a tourist and tore the unconscious guard free of the chair I'd duct-taped him to and hoisted him over a shoulder. If this run really was a tail-chaser setup then the absolute last thing we could afford was for this shithead to get killed-
  
  I easily cleared the rail of the atrium balcony and went three stories straight down to the front lobby, supernaturally bracing myself for the impact and taking it with nothing more strenuous than a deep knee bend. A quick glance all around to check-six - wait, what's that beeping from the front desk's workstation, and that flashing message I can see from here?
  
  I hurriedly crossed over to look at the display. The big alert popup there from the PANICBUTTON system made me realize that damn, Matrix-aided agent program support really did change the whole picture in the future.
  
  Franklin Fire Services remote sensor telemetry does not detect a fire at your location. Building security, please confirm or deny manual alarm.
  
  I frantically looked for a confirmation/false alarm dialogue, but that window was greyed-out and masked by a fresh pop-up:
  
  ALERT: Matrix Host on-site registering hostile security penetration. Anomalous fire alarm. On-site security unresponsive. PANICBUTTON is upgrading trouble call to Active Threat and Possible Medical Emergency. Lone Star responding. Franklin Fire Services (1 pumper, 1 command car) responding. DocWagon (1 Standard Response Team) responding.
  
  I sardonically noted in passing that while the responding DocWagon ambulance and fire trucks had little GPS pop-up windows available giving current location and estimated time of arrival just like some demented Amazon Delivery Tracking system, the Lone Star subsystem did not. Makes sense the po-po wouldn't want anyone at the location they're rolling towards to know exactly what their response time would be.
  
  At any rate, we had slightly less than six minutes before the fire trucks got here, so that was the maximum time window we had to get the fuck out of here. I heard approaching footsteps-
  
  Fatima and Livewire, both of them rolling along an unconscious Green Dreams who was just barely fitting onto a wheeled office chair, entered the lobby.
  
  "What happened?" Fatima called out to me angrily.
  
  "Fire alarm plus the Matrix host registering a security penetration equals PANICBUTTON is calling everybody." I answered her truthfully but incompletely. "ETA on the fire trucks is about five minutes, DocWagon shortly behind that, and who knows for the Star."
  
  "Pipes, we're blown! LZ is cold but we need immediate extract at the front door, we've got wounded!" Livewire muttered urgently into his own phone, our team being a pickup group and not having dedicated radios.
  
  "What happened to him?" I nodded at the unconscious Green Dreams.
  
  "Brainfried as soon as he jacked in." Fatima answered curtly. "It wasn't lethal, but he ain't waking up any time soon."
  
  A screech of wheels and approaching headlights signaled the arrival of our getaway vehicle. The combined muscle of all three of us was just barely enough to carry Green Dreams out - hey, trolls are heavy - and load him in the back. We left the unconscious security guards safely out on the front lawn for the fire department to deal with and peeled out just as the sirens became audible in the distance.
  
  "So what happened?" Fatima asked me challengingly as Pipes burned rubber back for the safety of the Barrens.
  
  "I asked my girl to do some more legwork for us on the way in." I answered Fatima, as Livewire nodded to her to confirm. "She got back to me just as I dropped the second guard. Carla Rojas didn't have an uncle, and the family had no rich benefactor of any kind." I hauled out my phone and held up the display of the Rojas' family FundItNow! blurb on M.O.M.'s website asking for emergency donations. 'So I punched the alarm as the fastest way to warn everyone."
  
  "Shit." Fatima swore. "Fucking tailchaser setup." She sighed and continued more calmly. "Okay, you made the right call. Even if-" she broke off and angrily nudged the unconscious troll on the floor of the van with her foot.
  
  "Wait, why'd he still jack in after I hit the alarm?" I asked them, remembering the second security alert on the status display.
  
  "Pure overconfidence." Livewire cursed. "Fatima called abort as soon as the sirens went off, but cocky kid swore he could disable the alarm and head off the PANICBUTTON and dove in before we could stop him."
  
  The 'knockout' variant of black IC, then. Harmful neural feedback aimed at injuring the decker's brain and not merely the cyberdeck, but still kept at non-lethal levels. Then again, the probable intent of this setup had been to produce a nice fat juicy crime scene for Lone Star, and lethal black IC was illegal to use on UCAS soil, which is why you didn't see it except on high-end megacorporate hosts where they could benefit from megacorporate extraterritoriality or illegal underworld hosts that were already screwed if Lone Star's GridSec ever got that far anyway.
  
  "So he went right ahead and did the exact thing I was trying to prevent him from doing." I facepalmed. "Because the simplest way for Mr. Johnson to know exactly when to call the Star would be to booby-trap the host with a touch-me-and-I'll-scream program that they couldn't normally use on a working system. Beats staking out the building all night, because we'd be too likely to see their lookout."
  
  "That's hindsight - even if you're entirely right - and what we need now is figuring out where do we go from here." Fatima declared. "Speaking of, you know where Butch's current place is?"
  
  "I know it." Pipes answered. "We dropping Greenie off there?"
  
  "I damn sure ain't taking him home to feed chicken soup." Fatima answered sarcastically. "Butch can take her fee out of the five large he's got in his pocket right now. But yeah, where we go after getting dipshit here some medical attention, now that's the question."
  
  "We thank the Great Form Gun Spirit that we got out with our asses intact and go home to lay low and drink up the five thousand we got in advance. Case closed." Pipes said curtly from the driver's station.
  
  "Problem with that is if Mr. Johnson was breaking street etiquette that badly then he almost certainly recorded the meet as well." Fatima said wearily. "Which means he has all our mug shots. Humanis wanted a big dramatic 'Filthy trog runners caught red-handed!' photo-op for some reason, and they're not going to give up when they can pivot to a 'Have you seen these trogs and pixies? Call our tip line if you have anything that can help our dramatic manhunt! News at 11!' she vented.
  
  "Hey, don't forget the race traitor," I said lightly. "But yeah. Mr. Johnson needs to wait at least a few hours before handing over our street names and photos to the cops as either 'anonymous tip' or 'private investigator work', because even Lone Star will get a little curious if he drops that stuff on the investigating detective fifteen minutes after the case opens. That plus the fact that he probably went home to get some sleep. So we've got until he gets up tomorrow and checks the morning news to find him and whatever evidence cache he was making to burn our run with."
  
  "Finger right on the pulse there." Livewire agreed. "But it's literally oh-dark-thirty right now. How do we find a professionally anonymous corporate bastard who could be almost anywhere in Seattle in maybe six hours, starting from zero?"
  
  "Assuming that Humanis went for the KISS principle in setting up this run - and we already know they used a genuine drive by of theirs as the bait - then they likely just hired a genuine private investigation firm as well instead of spending that much time forging a bunch of reports. And legitimate licensed PI firms working for legitimate corporate clients bill their SIN." I replied.
  
  "So we need the billing records of the PI firm." Fatima nodded to me respectfully. "Works... except that after eating that big a dose of gray IC our decker's is not gonna be back in action before morning. And my girl Pistons is out of town this weekend... Livewire, Pipes, either of you know any Matrix jockeys who wouldn't mind a fast little temp job?"
  
  "None I can get in touch with at this hour." Pipes said calmly.
  
  "Not me, either." Livewire shrugged. "But he does."
  
  
  
  "What's happened?" Netcat said to me worriedly. I didn't blame her, because turning up on her doorstep well after 1am when she knew I was on a run tonight and hadn't expected to see me until next Friday anyway clearly meant something wrong. Especially given that I was still done up in my armor jacket and full runner gear. The only concession to being on University grounds that I'd made was leaving my rifle in the van. We'd already dropped off Green Dreams at the street doc's and Pipes and Livewire were still waiting in the van, while Fatima had accompanied me up to 'Cat's apartment.
  
  As she sat us down around her kitchen table and fed us some instant tea, I quickly brought her up to speed.
  
  "So that's the situation. If we can get the billing records from this place before morning, we can find Mr. Johnson and have a good chance of vanishing what he's got on us and keeping this thing in check. If we don't, then me and all the rest get to headline Seattle's Most Wanted until even the Humanis PR machine can't keep people all fired up about a cold case." I wrapped up.
  
  "Or they catch us, which is why everybody on the run would have to leave town until the case did go cold. Call it a couple months." Fatima agreed professionally. "And I've got people down in San Francisco I can lay over with, and I'll hook your guy up with them if need be, so-"
  
  "You're saying it's not life and death if I don't help you." Netcat agreed. "But it would still be a lot better for everyone if I did."
  
  "I-" I began, and then broke off. "... do you want my advice?" I finally asked her plaintively.
  
  "Say good-bye and I'll see you in the summer?" she said affectionately. "Al- Wild Man, you are so caught up between wanting to keep me safe and wanting to let me make my own choices that it's killing you, isn't it?"
  
  "I should have told Livewire to just stuff it." I said morosely. "As is, I'm guilting you into a box."
  
  She reached out across the table and took my hand. "No, you're treating me like a grown woman and not a sick little doll you keep on a shelf. And I- really appreciate that, honest. But it's not as if you're asking me to lose my criminal virginity or anything- I already told you that I hacked stuff before we'd met, right? And I didn't mean just bootlegging myself more access time on the university mainframe host. Even if I was hardly up to a Shadowland Platinum account, I was still on there."
  
  "You're that Netcat?" Fatima raised an eyebrow. "Small Matrix! A friend of mine still uses that video codec cracker tool you made, she loves it."
  
  "Oooo, undying fame at last!" Netcat giggled. "I got lucky with that one - MegaMedia farmed out their latest video DRM encryption program to the U-Dub CompSci labs for us to do the gruntwork on, so they could get free labor and we could get 'valuable work experience'. Not hard to write a DRM stripper when you helped build the copy protection source code in the first place."
  
  "Okay, I'll admit that the sentence for writing commercial video piracy tools is actually higher than the one you'd get if you were caught red-handed doing this." I conceded. "But hole-in-the-wall that it is, the target is still a private investigation firm that advertises client confidentiality. So we're talking an Orange-rated security host at a minimum. There's no way you're hacking that with a keyboard, you'd have to deck it. And... I know you worry a lot about dumpshock." I finished diplomatically.
  
  "I can do it!" Netcat agreed resolutely. "Well... if you can get me a deck." she admitted sheepishly.
  
  "We borrowed Green Dreams' deck. I'll have to get it back to him when you're done, but he won't even be waking up until at least noon." Fatima reached down into the tote bag she'd brought up and hauled it out and up on the table. "Can you do anything with this?"
  
  "Novatech Hyperdeck-6, uses the same base architecture as the Novatech LD-35 security cyberterminal only with stealthed MPCP, expansion-board Masking chip, and boosted RAM. And we used the LD-35's for cybercombat drill in lab all the time..." she murmured analytically, picking up the cyberdeck and briskly turning it over in her hands. She punched the manual boot button and pursed her lips at the numberpad display that came up on the status screen. "Wants a PIN code-" Her long nimble fingers reached out and pressed on the back of the case, sliding open an access panel. A couple seconds' worth of manipulating whatever dipswitches or jumpers were inside and the numberpad blinked and cleared, showing the normal boot screen. "-aaaaand, manufacturer's repair reset done!" she finished triumphantly.
  
  "Cat, San Francisco isn't that bad." I said to her. "You've got nothing to prove to me- okay, you genuinely feel like you have a lot to prove to me, but you have nothing you need to prove to me. I like you just the way you are." I said as affectionately as I could. "Don't get caught up in enthusiasm or thinking that you need to 'keep up' or anything. I didn't get a choice about my lifestyle. You do get a choice, so don't make it lightly."
  
  "Exactly," she said bravely. "I get a choice. And I already chose it - to help you however I could. Because I- I like you just the way you are too." she finished softly.
  
  Fatima looked at us both and manfully restrained a grin. "So, are you coming?"
  
  "She is." I sighed resignedly, her answer already obvious even before she chimed in to confirm. After all, 'Cat had never been able to beat me with her poker face yet and she certainly wasn't starting now.
  
  To be fair, even with all my worrying about it we still hadn't actually been asking Netcat to really shadowrun. While the hack itself was not something for script kiddies to tackle, a midlevel Orange-rated host backed by gray IC still wasn't 'Somebody call FastJack!' territory. And as a legitimately trained and talented Matrix technology major, 'Cat's hacking skills backed by a decent shadowrunning cyberdeck were up to the job. Even if I knew she was gritting her teeth on the inside and fighting down her little phobia about dumpshock and harmful neural feedback, and even if I cursed myself for dragging her into this at all, the fact remained that all we'd had to do was find a maintenance jackpoint on the University grounds that wouldn't be immediately traceable to any individual student and plug her into it. It's hardly as if we were breaking into the Aztechnology pyramid here or anything. Even in the worst-case scenario where she got knocked out harder than Green Dreams all we'd have to do is unplug her, pick her back up, and get her back to her apartment before campus security came around. Null perspiration.
  
  So she plugged in, went under, and came out only a few minutes later with all the info we needed. Mr. Johnson - or to use his proper name, Derrick Bole, listed as a 'Logistical Resource Manager' at Brackhaven Investments - had indeed hired Barron's Confidential Investigations, Ltd. for a job whose records exactly matched the ones we'd been given as part of our briefing packet. Since BCI had a charming habit of taking photographs of clients and appending them to client records just in case of people hiring them under aliases, we even knew it was our Johnson and not someone else working with him. And, of course, once we had his SIN we had everything that was publicly accessible about him - address, commcode, LiveSpace profile, the lot.
  
  Including the most recent post on his LiveSpace page that told us that I'd guessed wrong and he hadn't gone home to get some sleep after meeting us. No, apparently someone had wanted to celebrate a job well done even before he'd actually completed it and had gone out to celebrate.
  
  "Club Penumbra." Fatima sighed. "I remember when that place was the most banging shadow-club in Downtown. But ever since the Arcology Shutdown, well, there went the neighborhood. Now it's full of nothing but corp-stink and hardboys with badges."
  
  "Just the sort of place this guy would go to get loose and laid while still being relatively safe." Pipes agreed. "But yeah, we ain't taking him out of there."
  
  "Average Lone Star response time in that part of town is three minutes, and that's on top of club security and all the Metroplex Guard assholes who drink there." Livewire chimed in.
  
  "Well the Trojan Horse worked for us once, so why not twice?" Fatima said.
  
  So after putting on my new face as a Brackhaven Investments mid-ranking corpsec goon that Fatima knew and loathed, I placed a call to the front desk of Club Penumbra on a burner phone that Netcat helped spoof as supposedly coming from Brackhaven's corporate HQ and politely asked that Mr. Boles be paged to meet me at the front desk because he had an urgent recall from his employer and I was there to escort him back to work. A stern demeanor and a touch of the Bavarian Fire Drill got me past the doorman without having to actually show a corporate ID, because after all I wasn't trying to get into the club now was I? I was just here to pick up a corporate client as a chauffeur service.
  
  "It's a quarter to three." Boles cursed as he finally arrived in the lobby to meet me, red-faced and visibly with a buzz on.
  
  "Mr. Brackhaven wants to speak to you immediately, sir." I said as tonelessly as I could, and watched him go paler than a bedsheet.
  
  "Mr. Brackhaven?" he almost stuttered. "Now? Why?"
  
  "Something went wrong in Auburn. Very wrong." I continued. "And this affair needs a face-to-face in a secure location to discuss any further."
  
  "I-I see." he said, frantically trying to think of what could have possibly spun so far off the rails that the CEO himself had been woken up in the middle of the night over it. "I'll-"
  
  "With your permission, we'll pick him up at the rear entrance." I asked the doorman. "Discretion. You understand."
  
  "We'll escort you there, sir." the head doorman agreed professionally, and we were discreetly, briskly, and efficiently led down a hallway and to one of the rear doors facing the alley, which the club staff were more than accustomed to see being used for 'discreet celebrity extractions' as it were. Boles started to realize something was wrong when he saw the anonymous armored van waiting for him instead of the executive luxury car he'd expected, but Fatima was standing by with a quick Control Actions spell to hit him with as soon as he was visible around the corner of the van. With his willpower already dampened by being drunk and being caught off-guard to begin with, her spell held long enough to make him silently dismiss our escort and then climb into the back of the van without any visible protest. The Penumbra security staff saw no one except me, him, and some dimly lit silhouettes, so with suspicions unaroused - after all, their patron had recognized me and not made any protest at all, hadn't he? - they calmly let us drive away without a care in the world.
  
  Inside the van, of course, Mr. Boles was anything but calm. But he was also enough of a realist to know that whether or not we were going to kill him at the end of the night would not be a decision materially affected by anything he said right now, so he might as well just talk it all out and at least guarantee that he wouldn't be the only person having a miserable evening resulting from this. Spite truly was one of the primary fuels that that corporate politics ran on.
  
  As it turned out the primary target of the setup had been Fatima - as a veteran runner who was one of Mothers of Metahumans' most reliable on-call street operators, as well as a networker among the shadow community for them, Humanis had come up with this scenario to take her out of play. While they could simply have ambushed her at the meet with enough guns, the goal hadn't been to kill her but instead to get her arrested and inside a Lone Star interrogation room. So they'd set up a job with the perfect emotional bait to get her and whatever other metahuman runners could be sucked into the trap all fired up and too angry to spot the warning signs in time, with the endgame of a Lone Star tactical team dropping on us and catching us red-handed in the middle of breaking and entering. They'd also expected us to be bloodthirsty enough to kill the pair of mooks they'd left dangling out as live bait, because of course all us trogs and pixies (and race traitors!) were bloodthirsty barbarians, weren't we?
  
  And once Fatima was caught red-handed and part of an ongoing major crimes investigation, Brackhaven's money and influence as well as Humanis sympathizers in Lone Star could be relied upon to expand the case into investigating any 'suspected accomplices' or 'underworld connections' she worked with... such as her friends in the local M.O.M. office. Ideally, they could have spun things up into a RICO investigation that would have allowed them to wreck the Seattle M.O.M. chapter and taint most of everything they'd ever touched - after all. M.O.M. did often subcontract shadowrunners to commit less-than-legal things on their behalf. As did the Humanis Policlub, Brackhaven Investments, and literally every other corp, policlub, or other faction both large and small in Seattle. Everybody did it... but it was still a sin if you got caught.
  
  However, we had entirely dodged the trap. The Lone Star tac team that had been set up to be first responders to our intrusion had been carefully selected for being staffed by 'the right sort' of people, which meant they hadn't been on the regular alert grid as they couldn't risk being diverted for a genuine trouble call at the wrong moment. Instead they were officially logged out on a 'detached assignment' and would have reported having been 'coincidentally in the neighborhood and seeing something wrong' when the time came to drop on us.
  
  Which meant that my hitting the fire alarm - which had pushed any and all further trouble calls from the building's systems out onto the normal PANICBUTTON alert grid instead of the preprogrammed script that the trap in the security host had been intended to send them to - meant that the one Lone Star team in Seattle that had been specifically intended to come charging in from their pre-positioned staging area two blocks away was the one team that hadn't even known anything was wrong until the sirens of the fire trucks blazing right past their cooping spot woke them up. And the regular Lone Star units that had been paged for the call hadn't even made it to the Auburn Humanis hall until after we'd been several miles away. So with us not even spotted anywhere near the scene and Mr. Boles taken out of play and all his evidence cache burned and tainted there was less than zero chance that Fatima or any of the rest of us would be connected to it ever. Humanis and Brackhaven had taken their best shot and had been left punching air.
  
  As for "Mr. Johnson"? Well, we had seriously considered just taking him out to Puyallup and introducing him to the devil rats, but we hadn't ducked a homicide investigation once tonight to just hand Humanis another one to try and hang on us for free. Still, it was such a pity about that scandal with all that elven kiddie porn that was found on Mr. Boles' pocket secretary after he was picked up by Yamatetsu corpsec in one of their corporate parking garages shortly before dawn while flying high out of his mind on novacoke and having savagely vandalized that assistant VP's limousine. Really, what is this world coming to? And that's why he'd be spending the next several years as the guest of a corporate prison system administered by a AAA megacorporation whose CEO was an ork, and it couldn't have happened to a nicer racist.
  
  So as the cold light of dawn began to dimly color the eastern sky, our impromptu shadowrunning band all sat down in a McHugh's for some quick breakfast and soykaf before breaking up and heading home to get some sleep.
  
  "Dipshit had still ten thousand in certified cred on him - must have been skimming the allowance he'd been given for our up-front money - so split five ways that's two grand each. Here." Fatima said, putting the sticks out on the table.
  
  "Five ways? No way Greenie gets a share- oh, duh. Netcat's?" Livewire finished embarrassedly.
  
  "She contributed, she gets paid." Fatima agreed, pushing two of the credsticks over to me. "Fair's fair."
  
  "Thanks." I said, putting them in my pocket. "Although-"
  
  "Seven thousand ain't ten, but it's better than five." Pipes agreed. "All right, I'm out. Buses started running again at 5, you guys can get home on your own." He stood and left.
  
  "You didn't like getting her involved." Livewire said to me after our standoffish rigger had departed. "But you'd already hit her up for legwork on this job, and that was already involved. Honestly, I thought she was your regular decker." he semi-apologized.
  
  "She wants to help." I sighed. "Which means if she gets herself messed up doing this, I'm responsible."
  
  Fatima softly bonked me on the side of the head. "Feminine viewpoint says we hate being patronized like that, kid. You even already figured out why. I heard you do it. So don't backslide."
  
  "I've... never really had anybody I cared about like that before." I admitted embarassedly, feeling by far the least badass that I had in weeks. "I'm still getting used to it."
  
  "I had someone like that once." Livewire said unexpectedly, wistfully. "And yeah, she lived in the straight world and I didn't. So... we had to split up." He looked back up from his soykaf cup to stare me in the eyes. "But that was back when I was running with the Ancients, and that gig was a lot grittier than what I do now. So it doesn't have to end the same way for you."
  
  "You lived there too, didn't you?" Fatima said insightfully. "And you didn't like the transition. That's why you angst so hard about risking putting her through the same one."
  
  "Voice of experience?" I said, looking at the ork woman who now that I saw her in daylight looked to be pushing at least her late thirties if not early forties - experienced for anyone, and quite old for an ork with their shorter lifespans.
  
  "Yup." she agreed, not elaborating any further. "But if you're taking advice from new friends, here's mine; you're an idiot if you ditch her, and an even bigger one if you push her to ditch you. Hell, as 'civilian' as she is I'd still rather take her along than that punk Greenie on any run anywhere."
  
  "Thanks." I said. "And 'new friends'?"
  
  "Dude, you saved all our asses." Livewire said amusedly. "And any time we needed a good idea tonight, you found one. So yeah, you ever need a recommendation to a fixer then drop my name or Fatima's. We'll vouch."
  
  "Damn right we will." Fatima agreed. "In fact... you looking for more work?"
  
  "Am I ever." I nodded.
  
  "Well, grapevine says that Shadowland Seattle should be coming back online in a couple weeks. Facet's going to be the new sysop. I'm a Platinum regular, so when I get back on I'll make sure Netcat's account is one of the reactivated ones and recommend her for an upgrade and get you hooked up as well." Fatima agreed. "Least I can do to pay back for what you did tonight."
  
  "Thanks." I said. "So... until we meet again?"
  
  "Au revoir." Livewire agreed, and we all clinked our little styrofoam cups together and drank to the new day.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: And so the first run ends, and someone takes her first fateful step into a larger world!
  
  Yeah, it wasn't exactly the hugest run ever - I was intending for more blood and thunder when I started the 'First Run' arc - but as I said, I am doing this thing as a sort of Zen spontaneous writing exercise right now so it flows out like it flows out. It still showcases that Alex is actually quite intelligent and insightful at this kind of thing, if not entirely experienced yet. And hopefully it also clarifies a bit how veteran runners like Fatima got sucked in here.
  
  The PANICBUTTON system is the all-in-one emergency services first responder Matrix grid, comparable to the 911 system today. I had fun trying to worldbuild 'what would the cyberpunk future really look like, with ubiquitous networked computing and semi-intelligent agent programs and all the rest?' Hence real-time updates on your 911 response like Amazon Delivery driver GPS, and automated building security scripts, and all the rest. Yes, the cyberpunk future is full of little digital miracles! ... if you can pay for them.
  
  And the Wireless Matrix isn't even online in Seattle yet! That happens later this year...
  
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  Threadmarks: 6 - Springtime For Wild Man (Part 1) (Shadowrun)
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  cliffc999
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  Although the phrase "This will be a milk run" is by far the most fearsome thing a shadowrunner can ever hear, the next several runs I went on were milk runs.
  
  With Fatima and Livewire both willing to give me an endorsement to the local runner community, I'd shed that 'n00b runner' tag that any experienced fixer could smell a mile off. A lot of first-time runners were much like Green Dreams (who had also been on his first real shadowrun, just like I had been) - too inexperienced to even know what they didn't know, and covering up with bluster. He'd been a member of a small-time decker gang who'd finally decided that he was ready to self-promote himself to the major leagues. And as it turned out, he hadn't been. Still, he was lucky - at least he got to survive his first botched run. A lot of would-be 'Prime Runners' didn't.
  
  After all, there was a reason that regardless of who you were or what you'd done prior to showing up on the scene here, if you didn't have any kind of Seattle street rep then no sane fixer in Seattle would treat you as anything but a greenhorn. Which generally meant being sent on nothing more than a small step above the sort of low-end muscle work I'd been doing in Touristville. If you could get yourself through the probationary period without showing conspicuous bad attitude or poor judgment, then you'd start getting offered genuine work. And of course nobody ever told the new prospects this, because filtering out the sort of desperate bluster and courage-born-of-stupidity that most of the gangbangers-turned-wannabe-shadowrunners brought to the table was the entire point of the exercise.
  
  But as the old saying went one hundred attaboys could get erased by one 'Aw, drek.', so I didn't let my having aced my first run get to my head. I just listened to the fixers, picked the jobs that I could stomach, and concentrated on the work, Mr. Johnson wants me to stand around and guard a meet? I stood around and guarded a meet. Union wants a construction site trashed because they're hiring too many scabs? Pass me the sledgehammer and the gasoline. Gangers in the barrens are hijacking too many McHugh's food trucks? Sure, let's go clip 'em back a little.
  
  So I spent the next couple of weeks making good nuyen - oh, nothing huge, but still several times what I averaged a week working under Max - while building my reputation as a sober, steady guy who could punch, shoot, and sneak. I didn't run into anything else that required me to risk dragging anything else back to splash on 'Cat, and when Shadowland Seattle finally came back online as ShadowSEA 'Wild Man' was one of the new accounts registered on its first day up, at an account level of 'Bronze' - the highest level someone without at least two solid years in the Seattle runner community could be given. Netcat was also upgraded to Bronze from her prior level of 'Greenhorn', also on Fatima's recommendation.
  
  ShadowSEA was still in the process of being restored to full functionality, given that the Crash 2.0 had not only killed the local sysop and nuked the Shadowland Seattle host but had also ground most of the entire Shadow Matrix into gravel. Even the Denver Nexus, the central outlaw data haven of the digital world's underground subculture, had been kicked offline for almost a solid month by the Crash and this despite the fact that it had had digital defenses layered in depth around it almost rivaling anything a megacorporation's central host could have boasted. So the heyday of the online shadowrunning world where you could sit in Seattle and do biz practically in real-time with anyone from Bangkok to Berlin, complete with rep scores, forum search histories, a Web-of-Trust style authentication, and everything else... well, they were still working on it. But the local forum community still worked, a lot of the old shadowfiles and backlogs and information sources still worked, and even some of the freeware simsense tutorials that had been put up in a desperate self-defense attempt against idiot newbies running the shadows without even the most basic awareness of elementary concepts were back up. And, of course, the job postings and connections forums had been two of the very first things restored to functionality.
  
  For all that they dramatized it on the trid as a life of constant action, the reality is that its core shadowrunning was gig work. And like anything else done on the gig economy, you did a lot of little assignments and a lot of waiting in-between the few lucrative earners that you could find. Shadowrunners called anything that paid less than a few hundred nuyen and could be completed in only a couple hours a 'beer money' run, and those kinds of jobs ranged from helping your street doc move boxes - which still required armed security when those boxes contained pharmaceuticals with a street value of 'Worth hijacking' - down to literally killing devil rats in a basement. What was this, the Elder Scrolls?
  
  Since I didn't seem to need as much exercise to stay in shape or in practice as other martial artists did, and I also seemed to be able to get by on less sleep than average - yet another couple of anomalous data points in the growing list of little weirdnesses I was noting about me - I had a lot of time to surf the Matrix and a lot of time to think about my life. And I was coming to the conclusion that while I had every prospect of becoming a prime runner in the fullness of time, I wasn't sure if I'd welcome the result.
  
  For one thing, the work was hardly all Robin Hood. Folks like Fatima and Livewire were actually on the higher end of the ethical spectrum in shadowrunning - they did as much charity work for their favorite causes (M.O.M. and taking care of her home neighborhood in Fatima's case, and beating the fuck out of Humanis in Livewire's case) as they did paying work, they didn't hurt civilians or noncombatants if they could help it, and they didn't screw fellow runners or ditch them in the heat. And there were a lot of assholes with noteworthy street cred in Seattle that you couldn't say that about. But even they and the fixers they dealt with still dealt with and did a lot of gray stuff.
  
  To take just one example, those food truck hijackings? Sure, if we hadn't stopped the rip-off parade versus the McHugh's soypatty run then several fast-food places bordering the Barrens, including my old dining spot in Touristville, would have been in dire straits. However, the fact that we did stop them meant that deeper in the Redmond Barrens, a local street gang - and the neighborhood they controlled - now were getting a lot less to eat, and knowing the Barrens they'd already been on the verge of starvation anyway. Which meant that by successfully guarding the interests of one neighborhood another one would join the chain of urban collapse and fall apart, unable to hold onto and provide for their residents and with the survivors scattering off to hopefully find new places to exploit or be exploited elsewhere - or not. A zero-sum game where in order for yours to stay fed, theirs had to go hungry. And that was with a run as relatively uncomplicated as 'stop a particularly nasty bunch of gangers from killing any more truck drivers'.
  
  Playing games about the dark cyberpunk future really didn't prepare you for the reality of living in it. For all that I'd complained about things like hypercapitalism and corporate cronyism and corrupt politics back in my old life, that shit was fucking Equestria compared to the new normal around here. The AAA and AA megacorps literally wrote their own laws and enforced their own 'justice' so long as they were on their own property, and abused that privilege as much as possible to cover up any number of sins and exploitations of both their own workforces and their consumers. The national and municipal governments were a sick mixture of being unable to enforce the law against anyone rich or connected enough and unwilling to - even when they were actually trying, between corporate extraterritoriality on the one hand and widespread corruption on the other it was impossible to get any evidence or keep it from being tainted even if it were. There was a reason that virtually any faction that was of any importance at all hired shadowrunners to do crime on their behalf sooner or later - the system was so rigged that far too often only by going outside would allow things to really get done.
  
  So in essence, the law in this world could only enforce itself against the people without any of the power to subvert it - meaning that it would always fall heaviest on the least offensive and least powerful offenders, while the powerful far too often got away with murder. That was the reality of the era, and everything else was just normalcy bias. A favorable illusion that the vast majority of law-abiding citizens all unconsciously agreed to share. A fervent desire to block out any awareness that the world they were living in was really that bad, because mentally confronting a horrible reality that you had no effective power to change or escape from was something the human mind just didn't do very well.
  
  Unfortunately for me, I was not a lobster that had been boiled slowly enough it could ignore the temperature of the water. I'd been dropped straight into the UCAS of 2065 from the United States of 2021, so once I'd finally started assimilating the history and culture of my new home in any detail the truth hit me like a bullet in the face. And that truth was that this world was fundamentally broken. Oh, it wasn't some gaping pit of evil or even some insane Fallout-esque parody - even in my short time here I'd met any number of people who were just like people back home or anywhere else, ordinary decent folks who just wanted to get by and raise their families. People who even in the middle of all the stress and crime and general shabbiness that seemed to cover Seattle like a layer of ash anywhere that it wasn't covered up with a nuyen-driven facade of corporate conformity instead still could do things like be kind to strangers, or tell lost kids which way their neighborhood was, or help an old lady with heavy packages.
  
  But even though it was only a feeling and not something I could actually prove with charts and graphs, I was certain that that spirit of community was going to get rarer and rarer as time went on. Between the Scylla of excessive urban decay and a financially and morally bankrupt government on one side and the Charybdis of rampant amoral hypercapitalism without any cultural, ethical, or legal restraints on the other side, a slowly widening pit was forming in-between them that was gradually eroding away the fundamental basic human decency that kept mankind from being animals. It was almost enough to make you march right out and sign-up with the Neo-Anarchists, whose amateur sociologists and demographers had as near as I could tell accurately charted not only many of the problems with modern corporate-driven society but also at least roughly estimated the rate of decline.
  
  Now if only they could possibly have come up with any solutions to the dilemma that weren't pants-on-head retarded. Seriously, a neo-anarchist utopia that was held together with basically nothing except gentleman's agreements, and with the obvious objection of 'what if someone just decides to not hold with that?' being 'we'll set things up so that the social pressure for not doing it is intense enough to actually discourage them!' Seriously, Neo-A's? Hey, do you know what class of people are simultaneously utterly oblivious to social pressure except in the most superficial sense of 'We recognize the need to appear to conform just long enough to avoid censure' along with a heightened capacity for being glib, superficial, manipulative, and all the other traits optimized for manipulating social pressure away from them and onto scapegoats? Psychopaths! You know, like a lot of the assholes in boardrooms who are the reason this world is so fucked up already! Your scheme for fixing society is about as useful as drawing up a plan at the Daxamite War College for how to conquer the Planet Made Out Of Lead!
  
  But I digressed. The thing bumming me out so hard wasn't so much that the world was ruled by shitty people - after all, that was only different in degree if not in kind from things I'd known before - it was that this world was so much closer to the tipping point than my own had been that between that factor and my having no legal existence here, my solution for coping in the old world was completely non-operative. I didn't have a stable life in a nice neighborhood I could immerse myself into and generally not think about the bigger picture because it still wasn't that bad. I didn't have a stable life at all, the only nice neighborhood I even visited was one I could get tossed into jail just for having entered if Lone Star ever noticed my ID was fake, and the big picture was that bad.
  
  So was this all I had to look forward to from now on? Being a criminal mercenary whose talents were devoted towards nothing more than trying to get rich, stay alive, and not do anything he found too irredeemably damning in the process? Apparently, even being young, super-healthy, super-talented, and with street-level superpowers wasn't enough to ensure happiness here. And most importantly of all, what about Catherine? Two months and change was a little early to start using the l-word, but by this point it would have taken some serious self-delusion on either of our parts to call what we had just a fling. She wasn't a perfect princess any more than I was a knight in shining armor but she was still so goddamn nice... and unless I wanted to completely surrender to the obnoxiously corrupt system I was growing to hate more and more and take that UCAS Army enlistment after all, then my living in crime world and her living in straight world would inevitably-
  
  I swore and logged off from my cyberterminal. Angst later, work now. I was meeting up in the flesh with Fatima for the first time since the Auburn thing - there was a major shadowrun coming down the pike, one that Fatima had told me would be against a high-end corporate target, and she'd recommended me for a spot on the crew being put together for it.
  
  Time to focus on the job.
  
  I arrived at the anonymous rented office in the anonymous little one-story strip mall in Tacoma, and met the rest of the team in an outer lounge. Some sports drinks and a tray of snacks had already been laid out for us, and sipped and nibbled and got acquainted while we waited for the Johnson.
  
  Fatima I already knew, and accompanying her tonight was a wiry human woman barely over five feet tall even in her combat boots and yet with a demeanor and posture so intense that she gave off the impression of being six feet tall. The ruggedized Transys cyberdeck on her hip looked to be an advanced custom job, and the glittering datajack in her temple only confirmed that she was our decker.
  
  "Pistons, this is Wild Man. Don't let the name fool you, he's got the steadiest nerves I've run with since you. W-M, this is Pistons, my partner."
  
  "Pleased to meet you." I said, shaking hands with Pistons. "If you're as experienced a decker as Fatima is a mage, we really missed you on that Auburn job."
  
  "Almost certainly why the bastards waited until I was out of town before springing their 'urgent short-term opportunity' on you guys." Pistons agreed with me. "And damn it Fatima, I have told you again and again to check out a job before you jump on it, especially if it's a hot button!" she turned to face her partner with the weary frustration of someone having the same argument for the fiftieth time."
  
  "Not now, Pistons!" Fatima waved her off urgently. "It's almost time for the meet!"
  
  The chromed troll in heavy combat armor nodded to me from where he occupied the largest armchair. "Don't ever get in between them, they argue like old married couple." he said to me amusedly in a thick Russian accent.
  
  "We are an old married couple, and you know it." Fatima shot back at him.
  
  "Sergeant Ivan." he introduced himself to me, benignly ignoring her before turning to Pistons. "I was told five of us, yes? Who is missing?"
  
  "Me." a voice came from the direction of the foyer, as our last member, a short red-headed guy in his early forties, entered the room. "Caveman. I'm the pilot."
  
  "You're all here. Good." a smooth contralto voice surprised us all from the direction of the inner office door, which I'd have sworn was shut just a second ago. All of us turned to see a tall, ice-blonde elven woman dressed in impeccable executive wear well above the usual run of the neighborhood that was marred only by a rich leather sword-belt and the slim-handled longsword in the scabbard, matched by a holstered SMG on her other hip. She looked to be in her late twenties or very early thirties, which on an elf meant she could be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty. Elves ran to taller than human average - 'Cat was only several inches shorter than I was, and I was six-feet-two - but this woman could look me in the eye while wearing flats. And while Cat had more junk in the trunk Ms. Johnson's figure still had nothing to be ashamed of and was topped by an angled, supermodel-quality face where 'Cat was more cheerleader-next-door- I finally dragged my distracted thoughts away from ogling her and got back to evaluating her from a professional standpoint. Honestly, I was going to blame my girlfriend for this one. Shadowrun elves were just plain sexy, dammit.
  
  "Good evening, everyone." she continued after we all re-oriented. "You may call me Frosty, and I am both the client representative for this run and will be accompanying you in the field."
  
  Crap, a ride-along? Would she even be able to keep up-? I took another, closer look and noted that Frosty's stance had the poise and balance of an experienced martial artist. I could already testify to her stealth. On a closer look her elaborate sword looked to be a magical weapon focus, which by itself would have hinted physical adept, but the equally elaborate power focus - a heavy platinum ring cast in the shape of a coiled dragon - suggested mage. A searching examination revealed that her neat professional clothing bulged slightly in the way that suggested it was hiding custom form-fitted body armor, the expensive kind. And her muscle tone was that of someone who ran at least a 5k every day and also did serious calisthenics- okay, she was clearly some kind of veteran operator. I relaxed a tiny bit and decided that even if the Johnson was inviting themselves along on this run, at least they probably wouldn't kill us with some stupid amateur mistake. And at least they'd be where we could reach them if they double-crossed us.
  
  "Johnson wishes to ride along?" Sergeant Ivan said what we were all thinking. "Target is that sensitive, da?"
  
  "Aztechnology. The Seattle pyramid." Frosty replied with a thin smile. "So before we get started, does anyone want to get out?"
  
  "Is this going to be another one of those 'the time window is limited, we have to go tonight' ones?" I observed softly to Fatima.
  
  "This one's okay." she reassured me equally as quietly. "Tonight's briefing is for the team, but Pistons and me have already been helping Frosty with the legwork and setup for the past few days. She's reliable."
  
  Frosty nodded at Fatima's answer to me and continued her briefing. "You are all aware of the Draco Foundation's bounty on blood mages?"
  
  "You've got to be fucking kidding." Caveman swore. "Go into the Pyramid, then get up to the top, then bag a blood mage, then drag him halfway across Seattle still alive? With every Azzie hardboy in Seattle from the Leopard Guards on down out for our heads? Lady, I don't care that Draco pays a cool million each for every blood mage in the bag, that's barely one-fifty each split among us all! I ain't dying for that!"
  
  "It would be slightly over one-hundred-sixty-five thousand each if split six ways." Frosty corrected him like a prim schoolteacher. "Which it won't be. I just want the intel that will be produced from the blood mage's interrogation - the Foundation's bounty will be equally shared among the five of you. Two hundred thousand. And in addition to that, I will match the bounty."
  
  "Four hundred thousand." Ivan responded, impressed despite himself. "Two million total. That is the payment?"
  
  Frosty nodded. "You'll each get my two hundred thousand wired into the one-time accounts you've already provided as soon as our boots hit dirt at the Pyramid's perimeter. You get the rest if we successfully bag the blood mage for the Foundation."
  
  Two hundred thousand in advance, and the same on completion. With the up-front money paid into an escrow so that even if we died on the run, whatever people we left behind would still get it. This wasn't just a high pucker factor run, this looked like a goddamn suicide mission. Why the hell had Fatima recommended me for this? Hell, why was she taking herself and her partner down the Leviathan's gullet as well?
  
  Not that I could turn this down, not unless everybody else did. Bailing on a suicide mission when it was generally agreed to be one was one thing, but being the only runner on a team who asked for an ejection seat? That was telling everyone in the biz that when the going got tough, you got going - right out the door and down the road. Which meant no fixer in Seattle would ever hire you again for anything above make-work runs. I couldn't begin to make any kind of new life on that. Hell, given the attrition in the shadows, there'd be any number of newbies who didn't have the 'coward' tag on their street reps to outcompete me even for the garbage runs.
  
  And on the flip side, four hundred thousand. That was GTFO money. That was maybe buy a new life money, if you could manage it right. That was- shit, my timing was positively improbable.
  
  Well, if Fatima and Pistons were already part of this crazy-ass thing even in the setup phase, then that must mean they thought they could survive it. And Pistons at least seemed like the pragmatic, look-look-and-look-again before leaping type...
  
  I decided to go with the flow and pray that they knew what they were doing. Not like my other choices were that great!
  
  "If there's already been extensive prep work for this mission, then we presumably have more intel and more of a plan than just 'Kick the door, run and gun, bag and drag.'" I observed mildly.
  
  Frosty quirked her lip and gave me a respectful nod. "We certainly do."
  
  Well, at least she hadn't called this a milk run.
  
  
  
  "Why did you recommend me for this again?" I whispered to Fatima as we waited for the go signal. "I'm flattered at how badass you think I am, but you don't think this is a bit above my pay grade?"
  
  "Anybody who can whip Samson's ass two out of five times on his final exam - especially when Samson swears you were still holding back some - is not a newbie." Fatima whispered back. "Hey, this is the shadows and your past is your own, I get it, but you're clearly not the shadowrunning virgin you pretend you are."
  
  "Fuck." I facepalmed. "Fatima, you have no clue how wrong you've guessed."
  
  "Well let's hope you can get by on talent then." Pistons chimed in amusedly. "But you vibe like a vet to me too. And I was in Firewatch for almost two tours before I dropped out to freelance instead, so I should know." I mentally raised an eyebrow as I realized why Pistons seemed so intimidating for such a little thing. Firewatch was the spec-ops commando branch for Knight Errant, the chief Ares Macrotechnology PMC/security subsidiary and widely regarded as the #1 corporate military on the planet. If Pistons had done an extended tour there, even as an electronic warfare specialist and not a shocktrooper, then she was no pushover.
  
  Still, that also meant that she was a high-end professional at this - and as she'd also done most of the legwork and intel support for this operation, that meant it couldn't be the suicide mission it looked to be at first glance, or else she'd have already bailed. Well, at least that made me feel a little better.
  
  I'd invested some of the money I'd been making over the past weeks into better gear, but as a physical adept I didn't really use smartlinks or heavy weapons anyway so even upgrading to an advanced M-22 assault rifle (integral thermal imaging scope, underbarrel grenade launcher, and advanced recoil compensator factory standard) and a good used hard-armor vest to back up my Ares ballistic jacket had not set me back very far. I'd also been putting in some weekend lessons with Livewire on long blades, so I had a shortsword much like Frosty's - if plain steel as opposed to her orichalcum-inlaid focus - for quick CQB takedowns. Caveman was along just to fly the helicopter we were about to hijack so all he had was a pistol, but Pistons was packing an assault carbine in addition to her deck. Frosty had her sword and her spells - she was indeed a mage - just as Fatima had her sidearm and magic. And Ivan was a walking arsenal with a semi-auto heavy anti-vehicle rifle for long range, a flechette-loaded combat autoshotgun for close range, and a goddamn clip-fed grenade launcher for just abandoning subtlety completely. For close-in work he didn't really need anything besides being an extremely large and cybered troll but he was packing a sharpened military entrenching tool along anyway, apparently for sentimental value. As tonight's mission was live capture we also all had Narcoject dart pistols supplied by Frosty, which we were encouraged to keep as a bonus.
  
  Stage one of the run would take place nowhere near the Pyramid. The Aztechnology Pyramid in Seattle was only a miniature version of the big one in Tenochtitlan, but it was still a 73-story corporate skyscraper/arcology. That was almost 3/4ths the size of the Empire State Building. Going in the front door and trying to fight or fast-talk our way to the roof and back was about as survivable as jumping down Lofwyr's throat screaming 'ALL DRAGONS ARE BASTARDS!' - hell, there was an entire battalion of Aztechnology's Leopard Guards in the Seattle Aztechnology complex on top of the hundreds of normal security troops, this being Aztechnology's main staging base for the entire Northwest as well as their Seattle HQ. And landing on the roof helipad was equally as suicidal, given that it was in the field of fire of multiple air-defense-artillery and SAM emplacements in addition to the bound elementals and spirits working astral security.
  
  So the only way we could hope to get the hell in and out of there was to ride in and out on a vehicle they were already expecting and which had the proper please-don't-kill-me codes for its transponder. Which is why step one of the job was to hijack an Aztechnology helicopter and do it quick and subtle enough that the Azzies would never noticed it had been taken until it was too late.
  
  Hence our being out and rained on in the woods approximately thirty miles out from Seattle's downtown, waiting for the helicopter intended to meet with a gang of poachers who were raiding Salish-Sidhe territory for a suitable large, magically-active paranormal critter for tonight's sacrifice. The poachers had already been ambushed and dealt with by some tribal friends that Frosty had paid off for the occasion, and covered by our two mages' illusion magic we and an illusionary wolf shapeshifter in chains stood waiting at the arrival point for the Azzie pickup chopper they'd been told to meet.
  
  As for the poachers? Kidnapping sentient magical creatures for blood sacrifice was an automatic death sentence in Council territory, and it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of degenerates. I didn't know how whatever patron Frosty was representing had gotten the intel into Aztechnology's movements tonight, but so far everything was right on the schedule we'd been told to expect.
  
  "They're coming." Pistons said from where she was manning the poachers' radio. "And according to their instructions, they were supposed to light the infra-red blinker... now." she finished, activating the little beacon the poachers had been given to mark the LZ. A darkly humorous part of my mind noted that the usual use of those blinkers was to mark targets for air strikes, and hoping that wouldn't be prophetic-
  
  "Places, everyone." Frosty said. "Nobody goes until after I call it - if they get a radio call out before the jammer lights, we wasted the whole trip."
  
  "Acknowledged." Ivan said stolidly, and the rest of us affirmed as well.
  
  The sleek-looking Aztechnology executive transport came into view above the treeline, swiftly lowered, and did a neat almost-touchdown in the little clearing we were waiting in. The pilot betrayed his military training as the wheels stayed several inches off the ground and the rotors kept turning at full speed as he kept it in a zero-altitude hover instead of actually landing, both to be able to dust-off in an instant if shit went wrong and to avoid setting off possible land mines. That was certainly going to make the hijacking tricky-
  
  "One mangy wolf?" the lead Aztechnology agent said as he and the several hardboys with him all dismounted from the helicopter. "We were paying you for an effort."
  
  "Salish troops were out in force tonight." Pistons answered curtly. "Job was for at least one, you get one. Where's the cred?"
  
  "I want to examine it first." the man said, leaning forward to carefully peer at what was a patch of empty air covered by Frosty's best illusion. Well, we'd had several possible approaches-
  
  "Now." Frosty whispered into our headsets, and Caveman lit off the jammer he'd prepositioned as Frosty dropped her illusions and concentrated all her effort on hitting the pilot through the transparent windscreen with a Control Thoughts spell to do nothing except Land it now! Caveman was hanging back with the auxiliaries, not being a CQB specialist of any kind and also being our only pilot and thus someone we couldn't afford to risk even getting nicked in the upcoming scrum. That left three of us to do what needed to be done-
  
  Ivan's reflexes were wired almost as hot as mine were magically augmented, and with speed far in excess of what anyone would expect from such a big man he drew his sharpened shovel in a flashing fast-draw and used it like a short-axe to cleave directly through the head and armored helmet of the Azzie trooper nearest him. An equally fast backswing took out the second man before he could even draw, and by that point I'd already put one of mine on the ground with a fast trip-and-shove, shanked the other one in the throat while the first one was busy re-orienting, and then finished off the first one before he could rise. If they'd had a little more time to get set even we would have had trouble - Aztechnology had paid for high-end reflex boosts on these guys as well - but we'd caught them entirely off-guard, and so they didn't have a chance. Fatima's manabolt burned the lead Aztechnology rep down in his tracks, and Pistons' assault carbine was trained steadily on the cockpit window as a contingency against Frosty somehow missing with her spell. But she hadn't.
  
  "Send the all-clear and say you're on your way back." Frosty forced the enthralled pilot, and then followed up with "Give her the clearance codes."
  
  "They check out." Pistons said calmly after going up into the cockpit and verifying the codes at the chopper's electronic warfare station. "And I've got enough of his voice recorded to synthesize it, as long as they don't get suspicious enough to put it under high-end analysis."
  
  "ATC for a scheduled cargo flight?" Frosty said. "They won't. Sleep." she commanded the enthralled pilot - her last command, as she then dispassionately executed him while he was mercifully unconscious.
  
  "O-kay..." Caveman noted, only mildly discomfited as the pilot's corpse slumped over in the seat from where Frosty had mana-bolted him to death. He shrugged and unsnapped the corpse's restraining harness, then started dragging it over to the door to toss out onto the pile with all the rest.
  
  "Good. Jack in and get this bird spinning again. Everybody else, load up." was Frosty's only comment after we left the bodies in the clearing for the Salish auxiliaries to come and clean. It was less than an hour to midnight, and we had to be back in Seattle and on final approach to the Pyramid at just the right time.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Time to start some prime running! Yes, pity our poor MC, who so impressed his first major runner contact that she's thinking he's some old vet from out of town who had to totally new-life-new-face-start-again from scratch instead of what he actually is and thus fast-tracked him to a top-end run. Yes, I'm using that as an excuse to narratively move things along a bit, but hey.
  
  Pistons is a canonical decker sig NPC, as well as Fatima's canonical long-time girlfriend. She has no canonical physical description that I know of, so it amuses me to think of her as a dark-haired Murphy from Dresden Files. It is canonical that she's ex-Knight Errant, although they don't mention what unit so I just signed a boarding pass for the USS Make Shit Up as I always do on such occasions.
  
  And yes, it's really not fun to live in the dark cyberpunk future if you really think about it. And sadly for Alex, he's a thoughtful man.
  
  Caveman is an example of my not really having any pizzazz at creating rigger NPCs. Sergeant Ivan is one of my old PCs, somewhat adapted to better fit this chronicle. Look, we all had that ridiculously borged out troll street samurai at one point, just admit it. *g*
  
  And Frosty? Congrats, you just saw your first immortal elf. Although to be fair she is one of the youngest on record - she's one of the two canonical ones that were previously mentioned in-thread as having been born only in the modern era, so she legitimately is only about as old as she looks. Hence her just being a powerful mage (as in, above starting character level but still actually possible for a player character with a good chunk of earned XP) as opposed to being a plot device like Harlequin or Ehran the Scribe.
  
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  The Aztechnology Northwest Complex occupied a full city block of Downtown Seattle, and was the most heavily-armed and secured piece of extraterritorial turf in the entire Metroplex ever since the Deus incident had devastated the old Renraku Arcology. It was a mixture of ultra-sophisticated megacorporate office plaza, foreign embassy and attached suites, and an outright military base. The central HQ building of the complex, aka 'The Pyramid', rose a full seventy-three stories from ground level and was one of the tallest elements of the Seattle skyline.
  
  A full battalion of the Aztlan military's - not that there was any difference between the Aztlan national army and Aztechnology Corporate Security except on paper - elite Leopard Guards were based on-site, along with at least a thousand additional ACS hardboys and support elements. Since not even the Business Recognition Accords stretched quite far enough to allowing extraterritorial megacorporations the right to position heavy artillery in a position where it could easy bombard national territory outside a corporate enclave, the fixed defenses on the ANC were "limited" to the four short-range SAM batteries and accompanying radar-guided autocannons intended for securing the restricted airspace over the complex and multiple anti-infantry hardpoints emplaced at the ground level. Backing those up were multiple bound elemental spirits of air and fire - and, it was rumored, darker things. Under normal circumstances, even the UCAS military would want SAM suppression runs from Wild Weasel fighter-bombers and heavy magical backup to try and knock down the layered anti-air defenses before trying to land an airmobile assault on the roof, and nothing less than an armored regiment with full infantry support would be able to take the complex by main force from the ground... and even then the central pyramid would be a giant multi-layered deathtrap you could use up an entire army division laboriously clearing room-by-room for the next several months.
  
  So when looked at from that point of view, us trying to penetrate this place and involuntarily extract one of the highest-value targets on site with only six operators in one lightly-armed transport helicopter was just a tad over-optimistic.
  
  "Progress?" Frosty asked Fatima, her voice rigidly controlled. Caveman was sandbagging our flight route back as slowly as he could, to the extent of faking an attempt to 'evade' a Salish patrol chopper near the SS-Seattle border, but we still had a finite time window to finish the next step before we needed to abort.
  
  "It's rough, but she's doing it." Fatima reassured her. Pistons had jacked in and gone full-VR in the Matrix as soon as we'd lifted off, using a portable satellite rig to sustain a connection even as we flew back out from the nearby Cascades. Fatima was wearing a set of 'trodes on a 'hitcher jack', to allow her to view Pistons' progress in VR from the Matrix equivalent of spectator mode and relay news to the rest of us. "She says three more minutes."
  
  "Our window expires in nine." Caveman said calmly from the cockpit, as the rest of us breathed deeply and waited. Two minutes and forty-six seconds after Fatima's announcement, she slumped in relief as Pistons' eyes opened and she shook her head to finish clearing away the VR fog after logging out.
  
  "Okay, it's in." she said while popping her jack. "The agent's passcodes gave me enough of a window to make it up through the Pyramid's security host. The seed's in place, all we've got to do is water it."
  
  "Did you load the other component into the transponder?" Frosty asked her.
  
  "Already done." Pistons reassured her.
  
  "Good job." Frosty said with a touch of relief. "All right, Caveman, take it straight in."
  
  "Wilco." he answered her briefly and the rotors whined more loudly as he gave it the gun.
  
  The plan had been to disable the technological anti-air defenses by using an advantage the vast majority of attempted intruders wouldn't have - one of Aztechnology's own helicopters with a still-working transponder. Not just a copy of the transponder codes but the actual hardware itself, complete with the in-built firmware passkey that authenticated the device as being this particular piece of hardware and not someone trying to clone the account. And since the Azzies were still unaware we'd hijacked the bird, the passkey was still valid. So any datapacket sent from the transponder would go directly into the complex's air-traffic control host without being stopped by any of the security software, except of course for the real-time anti-virus monitoring intended to prevent exactly the hack we were trying.
  
  Which is why Pistons had just done some top-tier decker work in sleazing the Aztechnology Seattle security host from the outside, promoting her stolen user account to one of the sysop tiers and using that to swap out the antivirus signature/heuristic module on the air-traffic control host for a finagled version she'd spent the past day specially encoding. So the virus trojan our helicopter would inject straight into the Pyramid's air defense network as soon as the tower pulled our IFF ping on final approach would have free reign of everywhere, because now it was on the antivirus whitelist. And while ultra-secure corporate hosts had the security deckers run regular audits of relevant file checksums every few hours to stop precisely this trick, we only needed that hack to remain in place for less than half an hour.
  
  The magical defenses would still have normally been suicide to try and fly through - multiple bound elemental spirits were no joke for a light aircraft to deal with at low altitude, and no amount of IFF spoofing would stop a spirit from trying to kill whoever its mage-handler told it to go kill. But that's why the timing on this run had to be so specific - today was the night of the spring equinox, and the astrological mana surge produced on that date was why Aztechnology Seattle had picked this day of the year to hold the grand ritual ceremony that would renew and replenish the wards and bound spirits on the entire complex.
  
  And it also meant that for the critical hour we were striking in, the magical defenses on the entire complex would be down. I had no idea how the hell Frosty's backers had turned up the critical intel of which of the equinoxes the rituals of renewal would be cast on, because for obvious reasons the Azzies switched that around from year to year as much as possible and damn sure didn't advertise when, but she had. And the fact that the defenses and summonings and bindings would need a grand ritual renewal also meant that the seniormost mages on site, including at least one of the several blood mages known to be assigned to the Pyramid, would be entirely occupied with the group ritual casting and in known positions. And while the bulk of the mages involved would be doing things like helping anchor the corners on the ground, or hidden away in whatever secret and sealed sub-basement chamber the really grotty blood magic ceremonies were held in, at least one of the senior ritualists would have to be in the main public temple complex to anchor the whole thing... and that temple complex was, as per Aztec tradition, located directly on the roof of the Pyramid.
  
  So that was the plan. Hack the technological air defenses, use the open window in the magical defenses, and infiltrate the rooftop telepad disguised as the ferry crew bringing back a magical creature for the sacrifice crews at the last-minute. Then get through the final line of defense on the roof, blitz whatever bodyguards were screening the blood mage in the rooftop temple, bag and drag the blood mage, and fly back out while Pistons' hack and the trojan IFF package kept the air-defense computers too locked up to shoot us down on the way out. It would be Caveman's job to break contact with any air assets Aztechnology could get off the ground and get us safely to the LZ, at which point we'd do the hand-off to the Draco Foundation reps and collect the second half of the payment.
  
  And it would be everybody else's job to kill their way through God only knows how many Aztechnology elite troopers backed up by a major blood mage before we could even get that far.
  
  "Check parachutes fore and aft." Ivan called out as we slid over the Seattle skyline on final approach. The Pyramid was only traditionally sloped on three sides - both the limitations of the complex's geography and Aztechnology's desire to use the fourth side as a giant projection screen for advertising purposes meant that the east face of the Pyramid was near-vertical. So as a backup "It all went to drek" escape plan in case we had to abort and we'd already lost the helicopter, every one of us had also been provided with a parachute to BASE jump off the east side of the roof if need be. When I'd brought up that I'd never parachute jumped before, Ivan answered with stereotypically Russian humor that the odds of a first-time jumper surviving the landing were well in excess of the odds of someone caught on that rooftop without a way down, so I might as well jump anyway. And to be fair, the man entirely had a point there.
  
  I finished checking harnesses fore and aft, just like the people nearest me checked mine, and we reported all clear to our self-appointed jumpmaster. "Load up." Frosty called as soon as we'd done that, not even waiting for Ivan's acknowledgement, and the chopper's passenger compartment filled with the sounds of ammo being inserted and rounds being chambered.
  
  "Thirty seconds to Azzie airspace." Caveman notified us. "Time to send it."
  
  Frosty nodded and keyed a passcode into her smartphone. The text authorizing the transfer of the first two hundred thousand nuyen into our escrow accounts was sent.
  
  "IFF transmitting." Pistons called away softly from her position at the chopper's electronic warfare station. We all held our breaths...
  
  "IFF received... and yes!" Pistons finally whooped triumphantly. "Spiked and set!"
  
  "Pyramid just gave me an emergency wave-off." Caveman chimed in. "Too late, chumps! And doors opening on the port side in three... two... one."
  
  We came to a low hover over the helipad we'd just been told not to land on as the left compartment door opened, and Ivan and I were already in position and our rifles were already out and aimed. My job was fire suppression and removal of any visible targets that were lightly armored enough I could disable them with assault rifle rounds - and since I had APDS loaded, that would be almost any target except the ones in the heaviest milspec armor. For them we had Ivan and his Ranger Arms SM-3 - a 14mm anti-vehicle rifle that was basically a baby assault cannon and, when loaded with modern hyperdense penetrators, could literally go through a Lone Star armored SWAT van - lengthwise.
  
  The world shifted into slow motion as I ramped my enhanced reflexes up to max and my preternatural vision picked the targets out of the nighttime gloom as easily as clay pigeons on a high-contrast background at noon. My M-22 fired six times, and six men hit the ground with bullet holes in their helmets' faceplates. Ivan's rifle had fired only four times to my six, but the two heavy weapons troopers amongst the two squads of ACS troops guarding the helipad had 14mm holes through both their hearts and the two sentry gun turrets trained on the helipad were sparking ruins.
  
  T plus two seconds.
  
  One of the several malware programs running riot through the Pyramid's air-traffic control host was convincing the emergency systems that there was a massive runaway fire and explosion risk in the jet fuel tanks adjacent to the helipad, and as per the emergency protocols for the tower all of the exterior hatches leading to the roof were sealed and in lockdown except when specifically authorized by responding damage control crews. Unfortunately for Aztechnology, the ID verification code on that particular lockdown circuit seemed to be having a slight bug right now and couldn't remember who any of the authorized damage control personnel were. So until the Azzies could manually hotwire around their own critical emergency systems that were specifically designed to not be hotwired around, several battalions' worth of troops manning the Aztechnology Northwest Complex might as well on the moon for all that they were going to affect anything we did tonight. The only opposition we'd have would just be the troops, bodyguards, mages, etc. that had already been stationed up on the roof level as part of the floor's normal complement or manning the temple for the big ritual.
  
  Yeah. "Only." Still, it beat fighting the entire Azzie army in Seattle.
  
  "Overwatch set!" Ivan called, having appropriated for himself the little strongpoint built onto the roof platform intended to allow an Aztechnology sniper team a clear field of fire to dominate almost everywhere on the open roof. His job would be to lock down the exterior of the rooftop and call out patterns and strays in the open backfield while the rest of us hit the temple. And if the Azzies managed to get the rooftop doors open prematurely, his grenade launcher and the nose gun on Caveman's chopper would hopefully bottleneck the reaction force just long enough for the rest of us to abort and get the hell off the roof.
  
  We'd have used the nose gun to do the initial clearing of the helipad, but that would have given the sentry turrets enough time to shoot back. As is, the roof security teams hadn't made the transition from 'God dammit, we told you to wave off!' to 'Oh shit, that's not our guys!' until it was too late... and at the speed of wired or adept reflexes, 'too late' was quite often very damn soon.
  
  As for the rest of us, Frosty had prepared before the run tonight by summoning a bigass pair of elementals - one air, and one fire - and had just called them to her. Fatima had also summoned her own elemental beforehand and called it in. So we had three spirits of our own as extra muscle, Frosty anchoring the base of fire, Fatima and Pistons forming their long-practiced two-woman killing team, and the point man - me.
  
  Two more skirmishes versus responding Azzie fire teams got us all the way to the temple door, while the regular KRAK of Ivan's rifle told us that he was still methodically pinning down and eliminating stragglers in our backfield.
  
  "Fuck." Fatima swore as we made it to the doors to find our three elementals floating outside of them, apparently stymied. "You see it?"
  
  "They already renewed the ward over the temple itself." Frosty agreed. "Small one, but we can't take the spirits in there. All right, entry plan two."
  
  "Ivan, it's entry two." Pistons called into her headset. "The spirits will switch to sweeping the roof and guarding our six, stack up with us at the door."
  
  Barely twelve seconds later Ivan arrived alongside us, his grenade launcher out and ready. Without the elementals to clear the way, it would be up to both of the frontline fighters to do the dynamic entry. He had a drum of mixed concussion and flashbangs ready just for the occasion, and it would be my job to track and remove individual targets while Ivan saturated the room. And once the initial shock and awe phase wore off, we'd just have to all go in and try to kill them faster than they killed us.
  
  "OK, maglock's trashed." Pistons said, hurriedly pulling her cracker kit free from the door.
  
  "Breaching charge set." Fatima called, right on Pistons' heels.
  
  Frosty nodded to us and took a deep breath, flexing her fingers and getting ready to counterspell like she'd hardly counterspelled before.
  
  "Three. Two. One. Breach!" Ivan called away, calm as a glacier, and the armored security door of the temple flew open as Pistons detonated the charge. Ivan and I both went in the instant the shrapnel stopped flying, right out of the SWAT manual, as a veritable rainbow of elemental death splattered hard off of Frosty's mana barrier a couple feet in front of us. We heard her grunt with the effort of blocking all the offensive spells even through the hail of gunshots, as we both fired perfectly non-magical projectiles back through it as quickly as we possibly could. The ACS troops in there were also serving bullets as fast as we were, but the painful thumps and thuddings of the few rounds that actually hit me were dealt with by my armor. Ivan was serving as a living wall for Frosty and Fatima, and between his heavier armor, cybernetics, and being the biggest goddamn troll I'd ever seen, I was pretty sure he was asking 'Is it raining?'
  
  With the bad guys inside not only on alert but stacked up on our entry point - even Pistons' best hack couldn't disable all the rooftop cameras, so we had to accept the bad guys marking our movements at least as easily as we could mark theirs - this was anything but the same kind of turkey shoot as the helipad was. Although this was actually my first extended firefight for real, somehow I managed to keep any of the veterans flanking me from noticing that I wasn't one. Naturally quick on the uptake and with that slow-motion overdrive mode to help me out when I needed it, I rapidly learned to put theory that I'd picked up from things like simsense training or Paranormal Crisis into actual practice; notably, the fundamentals of infantry combat. How to advance under fire, how to use your own fire and grenades to not only suppress enemy fire but funnel them into less favorable terrain positions while you seized more favorable ones, calling your moves and coordinating with the rest of your fireteam.
  
  It took slightly less than the most hectic minute of my life to date for us to finally deal with the literally half a platoon of ACS hardboys and the several mages that had been inside that temple. Since we had of course all memorized the mugshots of the three blood mages known to be at the Pyramid, none of us had done a dumbass move and forgotten who we weren't supposed to shoot. So after having laboriously killed our way through and across the grand vaulting temple chamber in a sequence worthy of being any Call of Duty boss fight, Frosty's own very impressive magic managed to lock down the blood mage in cover behind the main altar long enough for a stun grenade and a pair of Narcoject rounds to wrap him up. Apparently even Aztechnology blood mages weren't quite as fearsomely powerful as advertised when caught off guard and with no chance to do a blood ritual-
  
  "Oh FUCK!" Frosty swore in a completely uncharacteristic loss of composure as she examined our prisoner. She reached down and tore something too small to see off of the lapel of the blood mage's expensive tailored suit... and our hearts all sank as the man's appearance instantly reverted to that of someone else entirely. The pistol bullet she angrily put through the prone man's forehead only punctuated what we'd all figured out in hindsight by now - our target had pulled a shell game on us. Somehow the blood mage had deduced that his live capture was objective numero uno tonight, so he'd used a spell lock and a Physical Mask spell of his own to dress one of his subordinate mages up as a decoy while he scampered off to who the hell knew where. And if he so much as kept a basic invisibility spell up, Ivan or Caveman wouldn't have seen hi-
  
  Oh, fuck.
  
  "Caveman, respond!" I frantically murmured into my headset, barely a step ahead of Frosty doing the same thing. Not loud enough that anyone adjacent to him could hear it and order him to answer-
  
  And sure enough, he didn't answer. Because we'd hijacked a helicopter tonight by magically mind-controlling the pilot, so why couldn't someone else?
  
  You never in your life saw five shadowrunners do the hundred-yard dash back to the helipad as desperately as we did. Despite frantically calling upon them, none of our bound elementals answered our casters - the blood mage must have banished them somehow on our way out, and with the press of the desperate firefight we'd just been in Frosty and Fatima would have been too distracted to notice. As if we needed more proof that our target was not only still in play, but was moving around in our backfield to steal our escape route-
  
  "The fuck is that?" I shouted in alarm, in the lead by several lengths as I skidded around the corner and saw what was waiting for us at the foot of the stairs leading up to the elevated surface of the executive helipad. It looked like H.R. Giger's anchovy pizza nightmare as CGI'ed by Industrial Light and Magic-
  
  "Blood spirit!" Frosty shouted frantically. "Split up, go around, go around!"
  
  I flexed my knees and high-jumped without breaking stride, clearing the ground in an anime-worthy leap to go right over the damn thing's head and hit the helipad rolling. I distantly heard manabolts start to fly as our mages did their best to occupy the spirit, and Pistons and Ivan cursing as they tried to find a way up to the helipad after me, but all of my awareness was focused like a laser on our helicopter.
  
  Because the blood mage had indeed done exactly what we'd surmised, and Caveman was already punching the throttle for lift. I hit the helipad with both heels and launched into a forward rolling flip, as the blood mage's lightning bolt just barely missed me and scored the armored plascrete of the helipad surface behind me, and then rolled out and did the most desperate high jump I possibly could. The skids were at least ten feet off the ground when I made my leap, and I just barely got one hand around one of them.
  
  "Shake him-" the blood mage started to order Caveman, our enthralled pilot having entirely ignored my efforts except to automatically compensate for my weight yanking the chopper to one side. Without fresh orders Caveman wouldn't do anything except continue on the slow, methodical flight path he'd already been told to use, which is precisely why this Azzie asshole was telling him to dump me.
  
  But that's why I only had one hand on the skid. Because I'd already given my enemy credit for being quick on the uptake - I'd had to, seeing as how he'd already gotten this far - and had used my other hand to draw my Narcoject pistol as I'd leaped. And no matter how powerful the blood mage, a drug dart right through the palm of his hand tends to disrupt a man's concentration. Fortunately he'd been the sensible type and had already strapped himself into a safety harness before he went leaning out any helicopter doors to play magical door gunner, or else I could never have risked this.
  
  As is, the moment of time he spent trying to figure out what I'd just hit him with gave me enough time to ditch the pistol - I needed both hands for what was coming next - and pull with my anchor hand as hard as I could while I twisted my hips and brought myself swinging up and sideways to roll in the door with my off-hand out and reaching to grab that fucking safety strap. With a solid grip on one of the unused door gunner harnesses I was able to pull myself into the helicopter, and-
  
  Go flying back out the open door and into the Seattle night as if I'd been launched from a cannon.
  
  The last thing I saw as I began to fall over a thousand feet to my death was the snarling face of the blood mage who'd just hit me. As soon as he'd felt the drug enter his system he must have known that he would inevitably fall unconscious within the next few moments. And as soon as he did that, his Control Thoughts spell on Caveman would end and he'd be helpless and delivered straight to his enemies. So with only one chance left to cast a spell, he'd decided to make his last act a simple telekinetic shove against me as hard as he could. Nothing I could defend against, and-
  
  Youth and enthusiasm substituted for training and experience as I frantically got into a dereve position. I had a parachute, after all, even if I'd never used one before. Because right now I felt seriously motivated to learn! So after getting facedown and with arms and legs in a reasonable approximation of a skydiver's, I pulled the rip cord-
  
  -that wasn't there. At some point in the frantic skirmish during the temple, a stray bullet must have blown the handle away. I didn't even have enough of a stub of the cord to try and pull with my steel-thewed adept fingers.
  
  I looked down at the Seattle streets beneath me. The helicopter hadn't flown far enough to get us past the borders of the Compound, so it looked my impact point was going to be somewhere between the vehicle park and the outer fence. Good. At least whoever I fell on would be just another fucking Azzie-
  
  My brain uselessly ticked through distance and impact calculations as I fell. Approximately 1000 feet straight down, call it ten seconds to impact. Already used three of them. Far too much time to ponder what comes next, nowhere near enough time to kick myself for what an idiot I was. Did I think this was all a fucking game? Do the one big job, hit the big score to buy a new life- you idiot, you'd already seen that movie!
  
  The ground below came rushing up towards me far too fast as I began to pick out that my impact point was apparently going to be directly on top of an Azzie-model APC in the vehicle park. Great. As if falling at terminal-velocity onto concrete wouldn't be bad enough, no, I have to do that fatal piledrive right onto a fucking tank. Looks like whatever cleanup the janitor will be doing on me in the morning will only need a hose and a mop bucket-
  
  My rage and frustration bled away like air from a popped balloon as the last several seconds ticked away. All I could feel was regret, and loss.
  
  I'm sorry, Cat. I wish it had worked-
  
  Impact.
  
  
  
  My eyes opened, but I saw nothing but blackness. Some part of my brain dimly noted that that was because I was lying facedown, and so I automatically rolled over to look at the sky.
  
  How the FUCK was I STILL ALIVE?!?
  
  I incredulously noted that somehow I was not only still breathing, I wasn't even injured. Oh, all of the bruises, bumps, and strains I'd accumulated before my recent experiment in chuteless skydiving were all still there, but as near as I could tell I hadn't picked up so much as a fresh bruise from going over a thousand feet straight down to faceplant right on top of fucking tank armor-
  
  "Wild Man? Wild Man, are you there?!?" I heard Frosty's voice shouting into my headphones. Damn, kudos to the manufacturer if those still worked.
  
  "Yeah!" I coughed. "I'm in the tank park on the west side-" I frantically prayed that Caveman had been too out of it and looking the wrong way to actually see the details of my skydive. "Chute worked." I lied.
  
  "Told you so!" Ivan laughed into my ear. "Status?"
  
  I looked around and noted that apparently the Azzies had yet to realize somebody had air-dropped into their military base's motor pool. But I certainly still didn't want to be here when they finally did. Thank God there didn't seem to be any security cameras with a line-of-sight to my landing point-
  
  "Still clear, but I don't want to wait here! I need an exit strategy!" I replied.
  
  "Wait one." Ivan said, to continue about ten seconds later. "Overwatch set. I'll cover you past the fence line, exfil on foot."
  
  "If you can be sure no tail, RV with us at the tea place." Fatima broke in.
  
  Caveman's voice broke in. "I'm straight in my head again, and mageboy is out like a light. Be back on the roof for the rest of you ASAP."
  
  "Moving." I answered back, and with a couple of sniper shots down off the roof to disable the gun emplacement covering that sector of the perimeter I was able to high-jump the outer wall and make it safely back into UCAS territory and off into the night. All I had to do now was make sure I had no tails, and I could make it to the University and Netcat's apartment. Cat had served me and Fatima tea there the night she'd helped us with the Auburn job, and U-Dub was also in the Downtown district so it was the nearest place we both knew.
  
  As I faded into the Seattle night like a ghost, I let the immediate shock wear off and the situation sink into me. Despite all the bumps in the road - hah! - we'd achieved full mission success. The crew had the blood mage alive and in custody, and by noon today we'd all be sitting pretty on four hundred thousand. I might be able to buy a highest-end fake SIN, or to hire a lawyer - hell, maybe even bribe a fucking Senator if I had to. And likely still have enough left over to get a decent place, the sort of place a young couple could live together-
  
  I'd rolled the dice double-or-nothing, and I'd just rolled a natural seven. I'd solidly carved my name into the Seattle runner scene as a definite A-lister; never mind that I shouldn't have been here in the first place and had only gotten in by luck and knowing the right people and getting a recommendation off of a misleading first impression, the fact is that I had faked it until I made it. Hitting the Aztechnology Pyramid and walking away alive after a pitched battle like we'd just had was the sort of ridiculous bullshit even high-end runner crews would consider a stretch, but between the sharpest damn crew I'd seen since I got to Seattle, a seriously connected and powerful patron with vast resources to toss at the problem - and a fuck-ton of luck - we'd made it. So going by the form card, any outside observer would say that I was riding high and with smooth sailing ahead of me.
  
  Except, of course, for that one little problem that had just come to light.
  
  I'd just survived a terminal-velocity impact that would have shattered the spine of a fucking dragon if it had been unfortunate enough to do the entire long fall without any wings or magical aerobraking. Even the most powerful physical adept considered theoretically possible should have been turned into strawberry jam by what had happened. And I'd gone through it without so much as mussing my hair, despite my having taken injury and exhaustion and strain just as readily as any other human - well, as any other human who was a high-grade physical adept - just immediately prior to my airdrop.
  
  What the hell was I?
  
  
  
  Author's Note: I told you it wasn't anything from inside the Shadowrun rules system. But yes, the people who guessed our MC had yet to hit his limits had no idea how right they were. *g*
  
  And yes, of course the heist crew had a plan. But as people said, a heist movie always camera cuts around the actual nuts-and-bolts planning session so the audience can be surprised at each new stage.
  
  And no, Aztechnology does not know he's, y'know, anomalously superhuman. Alex was correct in that there were no security cameras watching his impact point. I mean, who watches a parked APC in the middle of the night? The motor pool gate, yes, but not the vehicle park itself. Likewise, the team didn't see his fall either (or, rather, they didn't see enough to know he lied about using a parachute) - their reaction would have been notably different if they had.
  
  And so the first arc comes to a close. Our hero has arrived, met a love interest, gotten set up in his new professional community, and has just made a key discovery about himself. Now the author shall take a brief rest to let new ideas flow, as even zen spontaneous writing only goes so far before you have to do at least a little thinking.
  
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  "Contact left!" the stentorian voice barked.
  
  I reflexively responded to the target call like an automaton. Sweep the sector visually, mark the motion that doesn't fit the previously established pattern of light-and-darkness I'd noted shortly before, identify it as hostile, check the line for friendlies, fire! The AK-97's shock pad helped cushion the impact against my shoulder as my trigger finger smoothly squeezed out a three-round burst, and the menacing silhouette went down.
  
  "Good! Contact right!"
  
  And again.
  
  "Contact front!"
  
  And aga- civilian! My trigger finger stopped just short of a fatal error and after a two-second pause, the not-a-target ducked back unharmed.
  
  Pause in the target calls. Wait, was it over alre- shit! That was three times! I hastily pulled back from the low earthen berm in front of me and frantically duck-walked down the scrape over to a new firing position before laying prone again and inching my head up.
  
  "Finally remembered to stop camping, did we? Contact high!"
  
  And again. I checked the ammo counter and noticed I was almost at the end of the magazine. "Reloading!" I called, and the targets obligingly paused while I ejected, reloaded, and chambered. "Ready!" I followed up.
  
  "Contact front!" Master Sergeant Martinez bellowed, and the drill continued. And eventually the target pop-ups stopped and I safed my weapon, popped to port arms, and waited for my score.
  
  "And the final score is... 29 out of 30 dead hostiles with 104 rounds fired, 0 out of 5 noncombatants, and a total time of four minutes forty-six seconds." His graying eyebrows raised. "Congratulations, Recruit Connors, you just qualified as an Expert marksman with the AK-97 rifle. And even more than the rest of it, your trigger control in particular is well above what I usually see in newbies. Where'd you learn to shoot?"
  
  "Um... Paranormal Crisis, Master Sergeant." I admitted embarassedly.
  
  "... seriously? You came in here and showboated all over my firing range just because you thought you were hot shit from a goddamn Matrix game? What the hell was your kill-to-death ratio, Recruit?" he shouted at me.
  
  "Twelve point seven six, Master Sergeant!" I squeaked in terror.
  
  "Damn, I never got above eight point five." his mildly awed comment almost shocked me into almost breaking position. "That's top 1000 leaderboard territory. And since you're actually translating VR reflexes into live action at least halfway well, maybe I should put you in the designated marksman track."
  
  "Respectfully, I would prefer to continue in my assignment as a Matrix specialist Master Sergeant!" I replied smartly.
  
  "Duly noted." he answered me with that particular expressionless twitch that was as close as Master Sergeant Martinez ever came to a smile. "All right, you passed. Clear and turn in your rifle and unass the course for the next victim."
  
  The bustling sounds of the walled Cape Town compound that was the southern home-away-from-home for the 77th Independent Rangers filled my ears as I jogged off to the next stop in my final recruit evaluation. The 77th was one of the many registered and bonded PMCs that made up the Mercenary (not Mercenaries') Guild, and although only an oversized company - almost a double company - plus supports in size it still had a high reputation in the mercenary community. Founded over ten years ago by Colonel Juan 'Matador' Pererya, despite their lack of corporate sponsorship and their modest equipment budget the 77th had long had a justly-famed reputation for tenacity, versatility, and highly restrained and honorable behavior. Although the Colonel had been killed in action during the Tsimshian border wars in 2062, the 77th had continued thriving underneath the leadership of Major Carmen 'Picador' Lopez y Cabrera. Homeported in Lisbon, the 77th also maintained rented compounds in several other cities such as Cape Town to better support unit logistics when contracted in the region. Currently the unit was just wrapping up an almost year-long contract from the United Nations to help secure and distribute humanitarian aid shipments in Azania in the wake of the economic crisis provoked by the Crash 2.0, and so everybody was rushing to finish up things like maintenance, rest and refurbishment - and training - before the Company would have to pack up and move on to wherever our next contract would be.
  
  The crisp spring weather of Cape Town in October ruffled my freshly-cropped hair as I reported in to the next stop on today's circuit. Assuming I managed to get through this last round of proficiency exams without bombing out, I'd leave the basic training pipeline and get myself slotted into Headquarters Platoon as the new junior signals intelligence operator. Alex had already earned himself a slot as one of the special warfare operators in Recon Platoon... and that was great because it would mean that neither of us would be in the other's chain of command and so the fraternization regs wouldn't apply to us. And we were totally going to break the bunk tonight to celebrate my graduation because after an eight-week dry spell for recruit training Mama Cat definitely had some places that needed scratching. Ahem.
  
  I arrived at the computer room and waited for until they had a moment free to jack me into a deck and give me my final checkout in offensive cyberwarfare. I braced to attention against the wall and put my mind in neutral, and as before my thoughts drifted back to exactly how I'd gotten here...
  
  
  
  As cliche as it was, the first thing Alex had done after the big run had been to go to Virtual World Disney.
  
  I'd almost screamed in horror when I'd found out that the run Fatima had sponsored him for had been against the Aztechnology Pyramid, of all places! Was that infuriating man trying to get himself killed? Hearing from Fatima about that fall from the helicopter and about how his parachute almost hadn't opened had straight-up knocked me on my ass, let me tell you!
  
  Still, I'd accepted that he hadn't told me about the full insanity of his upcoming run because he hadn't known what the target was until after he'd already arrived for the final muster - operational security and all that - so I couldn't fairly blame him for not telling me. And I knew the theory of street rep and how to lose it as well as he did, so I also understood why he couldn't have backed out once he was committed. But we actually had time to talk that out among ourselves at leisure because the first thing any wise runner did after pulling off a score of that size against that kind of target was get the hell out of town and stay out for at least a few weeks, so since it had almost been time for Spring Break anyway I took advantage of my remaining classes being Matrix-learning-capable to ditch town early and hit the road with him. And I even graciously allowed him to apologize for giving me such a fright by treating me to a lovely all-expenses-paid vacation down in Orange County, to take advantage of the grand re-opening celebration for the buyout of VWD as part of that new Horizon Group corporation. Aren't I nice?
  
  Of course, if I thought I'd been frightened before that was nothing compared to the shock I got when we finally had enough privacy - and enough distance from Seattle - for Alex to tell me the truth about his fall. And all about where he'd been living before he came to Seattle, and exactly how he'd gotten here. I'll be honest, at first I thought he'd gotten brainburned. Not that I would have ditched him - I was the last person who could judge anyone else about the odd little hallucination here or there - but I had been urgently trying to figure out exactly who in the shadow community you could possibly call for emergency psych treatment until he'd finally been able to persuade me that no, that's what had really happened.
  
  So. Okay. I was literally dating a time traveller. An alternate universe time traveller, given that he'd come from a world with no Seretech Decision in 1998 and certainly no Awakening in 2011 - no magic at all, in fact! Wowsers.
  
  Still, I wasn't a STEM scholarship student for nothing so after the whole paradigm-shifting-without-a-clutch thing I stopped stripping my mental gears and actually started to apply some analytics to the equation. One of the first things we'd been able to determine is that Alex did indeed have selectively toggleable invulnerability - if he really didn't want to get hurt, he wouldn't be hurt. Admittedly, my heart had been in my mouth when we'd actually gone to the extent of putting his pinky finger in a shop vise and cranking it, but even though we stepped up the force as gradually as possible there never was a point when he actually started to feel pain, let alone bruise. And even the adept iron skin power would have been hard-pressed to explain the part where the vise eventually broke before his hand did. Apparently the only reason Alex had taken normal injuries before is because they hadn't been threatening enough to subconsciously make him activate whatever mysterious power(s) he had, but he entirely confirmed my guess that right before the moment of impact there was nothing in the world that he'd been wishing for harder than not to die.
  
  But now that he knew about this ability - well, I'd certainly worry about my man going to work a lot less now that he knew how to be bulletproof, even if we both had more than enough sense to know this was not a power to be casually revealed. So, that was a plus!
  
  Yes, "my man". It was just a wee bit whirlwind, but even before I'd found out that I was dating a time-travelling superhuman I'd already admitted to myself that I'd fallen and fallen hard. What can I say, he was just so... cute. I mean, by every objective quality a girl looked for he was a ten out of ten... well, except for that whole lack of SIN and irregular income thing. But for somebody with his looks, his brains, his potential, his basic human decency... honestly, finding out that he'd come from a world that had never known VITAS or the rise of the megacorps or the balkanization of the United States actually solved the mystery of where he could possibly have been raised, because for all his shadowrunning skills he'd just completely lacked so many of the cynical instincts that essentially anyone needed to get by in the 2060s.
  
  Okay, and there was also the part where he was the first lover I'd ever had who could reliably ring my bell every time. Whoo and also hoo! I'd never exactly been a bashful virgin even as far back as high school, but regular sex with a man who was that good at it could positively spoil a girl, let me tell you. The fact that in addition to being the best I'd ever had he was also the most honest and reliable was just an embarrassment of riches. Seriously, I was not unaware that I had a bad habit of not always being sufficiently tuned in to my creep radar, as witness several memorably awful ex-boyfriends... but I digress.
  
  At any rate, Alex had been showing every sign of being as into me as I'd been into him - his little guilt complex over letting even the periphery of the shadows touch my life was just a tad bit diagnostic there, and then there was the whole 'I need to get a SIN' thing - so even despite certain revelations regarding a complete breach of the laws of time and space, I had every intention of sticking with him for as long as he wanted to stick with me. I'd started searching for another, slightly larger place we could possibly rent together for next semester, one in a sufficiently safe neighborhood but still where the landlords didn't insist on SIN checks at the door, so I didn't have to keep semi-sneaking him on and off-campus every weekend. We'd only begun to use the l-word, and nobody was even seriously thinking about the m-word yet, but cohabitation was certainly on the table.
  
  It helped that Alex had basically taken the spring and early summer off from running. Not that this cost him any real face in the Seattle shadow community - while the crew had obviously not advertised what run they'd just done, and Aztechnology had steadfastly refused to admit that anything had happened at all, it was generally understood that Fatima, Pistons, and several of their old and new friends had come into a successful streak and were thus going to scale it back for a bit while they rested, refitted, and tended to whatever personal interests they had. So Alex basically did nothing but pitch in to help some friends of friends and start slowly growing some contacts thereby, and there were those couple of jobs that were basically Robin Hood runs, but mostly he got to live an existence as my kept-as-often-as-possible houseboy while I tore into the spring semester and finals. And he really did cook an awesome omelet.
  
  Never could quite talk him into the naked apron, though. Frustrating man!
  
  Of course, we didn't spend all that time in bed. Youth and enthusiasm were certainly things we both possessed in abundance, but I didn't have functionally unlimited physical endurance and selective invulnerability. After the limping all weekend incident we had quite firmly charted my limitations and knew how not to go outside them - okay, I knew how not to go outside them, because while he'd voiced a concern at the time I'd been entirely worked up enough to ignore the voice of reason. And that lesson being learned was quite useful, because honestly? If I ever got that sore again then it might put me off sex entirely. Well, at least for a little while.
  
  Let's just say that it was a good thing that mental and emotional satisfaction could equal physical satisfaction for Alex or else his powers would be as much of a curse as a blessing. Either that or I'd have to somehow conjure up my magical twin sister out of the deep metaplanes and let her trade shifts. But I digress again. Mind, gutter, out!
  
  And then there was that time where Alex had had the horrible thought that perhaps his superhumanly limit-breaking and unconsciously activated adept powers might explain the whirlwind nature of our courtship. After all, 'social adepts' who could use superhumanly persuasive skills to mess with peoples' heads was a known thing. But I came up with a story for Fatima about Alex being worried that he might intuitively be using untrained social gifts, and she assensed my aura and also did some assensing tests of the two of us interacting, and the verdict came up clean. So she reassured us that there was no magic going on in re: how much I loved my guy or vice versa except the oldest magic of all, l'amour.
  
  And then she goosed me and cracked a joke about our love life that was so filthy even I blushed.
  
  At any rate, our experimentations into Alex's powers didn't get as far as either of us had hoped. Oh, we certainly learned things, but the rate at which we could experiment were curtailed by things such as privacy risks, lack of facilities, and the limits of what we could test safely. Even the vise incident had been pushing the envelope for us - after all, if Alex had guessed wrong or if his invulnerability had timed out at the wrong moment due to an endurance limit being reached or something, he might have well ended up with a hand so crippled that a goodly chunk of his Aztechnology payout would have had to go to DocWagon to buy a cloned transplant!
  
  Even so, we knew that he not only could be essentially invulnerable at need but that he only got tired if he thought he should get tired. We didn't let the sleepless experiment go past three days, however, because there was no way except the hard way to find out if he'd go off his nut from lack of REM sleep and even the faintest possibility of an invulnerable and delirious Alex rampaging in the street started off at Nope! and ended somewhere down around We are not risking you exposing your anomalous powers in public and being involuntarily extracted to some megacorporate vivisection lab!
  
  On the mental scale, I managed to bootleg a copy of an IQ test module - we certainly didn't want to use an online Matrix one, those goddamn things logged your scores and were far less anonymous than they promised to be - and came away with the result that, well, Alex's IQ was not measurable by standardized testing. If he really pushed his brain he was capable of neurally accelerating into the range where he was more intelligent than any metahuman known. And while the benchmarks weren't even vaguely reliable at that kind of level, it was entirely possible he might end up competing in Great Dragon territory. They said Lofwyr could simultaneously follow up to several dozen separate conversations on separate screens and track most of the economic activity of the Saeder-Krupp corporation in his head, and while we hadn't been able to arrange that kind of experience for Alex, we had achieved one rather dramatic result.
  
  You see, after I'd spent a good chunk of an afternoon teaching him how to do that kind of advanced math, I set him some decryption problems. Recently obsolete ones, given that Professor Heinrich Andrews at the University of Stuttgart had just published what crypto students everywhere had instantly dubbed the 'Heinrich Maneuver', a particular subtlety of higher mathematics that took advantage of a heretofore unknown root weakness in the base theory that underlaid every commercial encryption algorithm to date to make any of them almost instantly crackable. But we'd both needed to split a bottle of the good scotch after that test revealed that Alex had solved, in his head, a large-factor key decryption problem that the U-Dub mainframe would have needed approximately half the projected lifespan of the observable universe to finish brute-forcing before the Heinrich Maneuver had been invented.
  
  In less than one second. Gulp.
  
  Honestly, I wanted to faint. That didn't just violate everything known about metahuman neurology, it outright violated the laws of physics. It was basic thermodynamics! The Bekenstein bound limited the maximum amount of information that could theoretically be stored in a particular volume of space before entropic limits made further data compression impossible - and we were talking ultra weird conjectural physics such as 'store 1s and 0s in the wrinkles of a quantum black hole's event horizon' to even get that far - just as Bremermann's Constant put a theoretical maximum on the computational speed of any device possible to even Clarketech, which was based on hard limits set by mass-energy versus quantum uncertainty constraints! And what Alex had done had blown right past both limits by... I didn't even try to run the numbers as to exactly how many orders of magnitude he'd blown both limits out by. Honestly, I didn't really want to know.
  
  Now admittedly, this was not quite as brain-breaking a revelation as it would have been before the Awakening. Because shit happened that outright obliterated the laws of physics and thermodynamics every day everywhere in the world, and it was called 'magic'. So, apparently Alex had some really powerful magic, and one that seemed to be uniquely versatile and upward scaling without any but arbitrary and still largely unknown limits. That was still enough to make us take a deeeeep breath sometimes, but not quite enough to make us start fearing that Dreaming R'lyeh would rise from the ocean depths as all sanity and reality broke down and now there would only be chaos.
  
  Still. Even if advances in modern quantum encryption theory had just made a mental power that might have single-handedly taken down Deus or the Dissonance Worm even just a year or several ago into what was now effectively a parlor trick - thank you, Heinrich Maneuver! - that was still one hell of a trick.
  
  Honestly, at this point I began to develop the suspicion that the poor dear was starting to throttle his brain back a bit because he didn't want to overshadow me. After all, being brain girl was kinda what I did. I did know that he backed away from my offer to start mutual Matrix studies so he could dual-class in physad and decker like it was covered in insect spirit guts. Argh! I didn't push it because honestly, it wasn't the end of the world if he chose to devote his finite time to mastering other professions. It's not as if there still wasn't a lot to do.
  
  Also, I was just a tiny bit afraid that he might be right about there being possible eventual resentment if he could magically overshadow everything I did in everything. I mean, I liked to think that I was a good person but I was still only metahuman. And if given a choice I didn't really want to risk what we had either. For all that we were seriously falling for each other it was still early days, and there were worse things for us to have at that stage than a wish to not excessively crowd each other's self-actualization.
  
  So that's how we occupied ourselves until midsummer, when something else decided to step in and excessively crowd my self-actualization.
  
  NeoNET had gotten the Wireless Matrix Initiative contract for the Seattle grid, and I along with hundreds of other talented young people from every tech college in the area had been hired as temporary subcontractors to augment the corporate crews doing the nuts and bolts of installing all the wireless mesh hotspots and hacking together the protocols and grids that would connect them all. All the various megacorps had gleefully been augmenting their cash flows with 'Everybody needs to buy new everything for personal electronics now!' to make them wireless-Matrix-capable, which is why everybody who could afford it in Seattle was now sporting new pocket secretaries - or 'commlinks' as they were being called now - new wireless cyberterminals, new wireless host services, et cetera, et cetera. But that didn't magically make the new city grid just poof into existence and that meant a whole lot of people at the grunt end setting up host systems and installing drivers and calibrating antennas, and that meant me. Even the summer temps were making good money, given the rush-job nature of the project, and it would certainly have been an awesome line item on my resume for when I finished senior year next year and had to hit the job market for real.
  
  Which is when real life decided to kick me square in the tits, and let me tell you boys that actually does hurt us at least as much as taking a shot to the balls hurts you, and ramp my AIPS into freaking overdrive. The auditory hallucinations kicked up from several brief incidents a week to almost daily, and the incidents kept getting louder and longer. I ran through several prescriptions, made multiple visits to the clinic, and even cut as far back as possible on my hours when it started getting really bad. And while that did help a little, because rest and less stress helped, the attacks continued even on days when all I did was lie in bed. Poor Alex almost went out of his mind with worry for me - for all his superpowers, this wasn't a problem he knew how to punch away, and even ramping his brain up to maximum and a frantic self-study course in medicine didn't let him solve my dilemma. Although he did manage to become most of the way to a qualified EMT in two weeks.
  
  And then U-Dub decided to give me a cancellation of my scholarship for a Christmas in July. Too many medical incidents in too short a time, plus an 'unfavorable work evaluation' from the University's 'corporate contracting partner' NeoNET equals it doesn't matter that one Catherine Connors was practically straight-A'ing (a B in Matrix History does not count, the professor of that course was a drunken idiot) her classes and that there were still any number of consultant jobs in the Matrix technology field that a person with intermittent medical issues schedule her own hours. Nope! No grant money for you!
  
  While Alex had of course immediately offered to pay my senior year tuition out of his savings, the red tape brigade nixed that hard. Blah blah it's too late to re-apply for the upcoming fall semester as a paid student, never mind that you were up until yesterday a scholarship student, and hey, how did you even get all this money anyway? So, there we were, busy boxing up my stuff and clearing out my apartment for the next person - because my lease had been a student lease, the nice apartment in that neighborhood at that rent also being a U-Dub subsidy I was no longer eligible for - and trying to figure out what I would do without my degree and where Alex and I could set up our new, involuntary digs.
  
  And then, after several days of brooding and going off alone to visit various contacts and friends, Alex proposed a solution I'd never have thought of in a million years.
  
  As it turned out Sergeant Ivan, the troll weapons expert on the Aztechnology run team, had a very interesting way of doing 'out of town cool-offs' after runs that had generated major heat. Usually, runners would just deal with that problem by living off of savings while they went on vacation elsewhere. Depending on the heat level involved, they might go totally off the grid in remote safehouses. At best, they'd just temporarily move to another city to find work on the out-of-town friend-of-a-friend runner circuits.
  
  But Ivan? He 'cooled off' from shadowrunning by going to foreign war zones. There were several merc companies who all knew him as a reliable off-and-on 'stringer', and as he'd apparently gotten his start in the Russian special forces before even being a shadowrunner he was more than qualified for any PMC without additional training. Indeed, he could have made a steady living as a full-time field merc except that in his older age he'd decided he liked living in cities and being able to sleep in mornings a lot more than he liked yet more full-time barracks drill or living in the wild, even if he had no problems with doing the occasional 'augmentation' tour with old acquaintances. And of course the merc companies in question had no problem accepting the deal - an operator of his quality was worth putting up with more than a little eccentricity to get, especially when he was working for the standard enlisted man's salary and nothing more.
  
  And so Ivan, after hearing our plight, had found a reliable merc company now run by the protege of what had been an old friend of his - the 77th Independent Rangers - that had simultaneously had openings both for an experienced special warfare operator and a junior signals intelligence technician. Given certain medical things on my sheet I couldn't have hoped to get a waiver to get in on my own, but as a package deal with Alex? Oh, I'd still have to get through their boot camp without any free passes, but given that merc companies also would need to upgrade their systems to the new Wireless Matrix standards and I was the 77th's chance to get a technician with hands-on experience for that particular changeover cheap, the Major was willing to take a chance on me.
  
  And although I'd honestly been expecting to feel like death warmed over even trying, once I got out of Seattle and on down to Cape Town to report in to the 77th's encampment there and start being run through their own in-house boot squad, I started feeling better and better. The frequency of my attacks dropped down to almost nothing, and even then it was usually just lesser AIPS symptoms and not the gods-damned hallucinations. Even when the auditory crap started up again it was stressing me out a lot less - not just the frequency or scale of attacks, but also the fact that the attacks themselves seemed to be less bad even while they were going on, somehow. Huh. Maybe it was the polluted Seattle air, or the student stress?
  
  Alex, of course, hadn't had to go through the boot camp squad. While he'd still demurred at having any real military experience, he was not the first high-end shadowrunner to try and make the runner-to-merc transition through the 77th. Matador had found some of his best operators that way, and Picador had carried on the tradition. So instead of going through the basic-basics like I did, they just run Alex through a series of proficiency exams to chart what he did know and what he didn't know, and liked the results enough to fast-track him straight into their Recon Platoon as a physad stealth-and-CQB type. He'd also been noted as instructor-qualified on Systema and tapped to back up the senior unarmed combat instructor as one of his assistants. And the still-remaining gaps in his professional knowledge were explainable away as artifacts of the shadowrunner-to-soldier transition having only just begun, and would be soon enough remedied with on-the-job training.
  
  So, I was a soldier now, just like Alex. I'd never expected to end up here as a career, and I certainly didn't imagine myself staying here for life, but the free companies were entirely used to square pegs drifting on through because life was too full of round holes. Hell, I was anything but the weirdest recruit story in the history of the 77th. Major Cabrera herself had been the useless trust-fund fourth daughter of a rich family in Portugal and a poetry major of all things before she got a wild hare, dropped out to go find herself as an international soldier of fortune, and by some miracle not only ended up as Matador's junior protege but turned up a talent within herself as an ace battlefield commander and grew up to inherit his unit after he died! Really, on that kind of scale then little Netcat's promotion from busted-out undergraduate to aspiring mercenary combat decker was sort of mundane. I wasn't really getting any shit from anyone; I was competent, I was actually one of the better shots in the unit, and my boyfriend was not only a vouched-for veteran (even if he technically kinda wasn't veteran, not that they knew that) but was also the new unarmed combat champion of the unit.
  
  And while we hadn't solved Alex's dilemma or mine, not permanently, we had certainly bought ourselves more time to solve it. The 77th's educational assistance programs would help me transfer over my earned credits and finish my degree via one of the more reputable online Matrix universities, and I'd be making fair money in the interim and not have to support myself. Meanwhile, Alex could see more of his new world than just Seattle as we followed the 77th around to one global hot spot and another, and from a great vantage point to see both the legitimate and shadowy sides of the line given how the international mercenary world kinda straddled the gap. And he could also master the sort of skills here to become a real high-end special ops veteran, as opposed to just having people like Pistons and Fatima assume he was, because even with superpowers like his you couldn't assume you'd be lucky forever. Plus, it gave him a chance to decide on if he wanted a legal military career more than shadowrunning without having to commit to a 10-year enlistment in return for a SIN. (Not that bonded units like the Rangers were technically supposed to recruit SINless, but nobody ever looked too closely at fake IDs on a unit muster roll in this business. It was just assumed as a matter of course.)
  
  Oh, the risks? Of course there were risks. This was international mercenary contracting, not a Disney Jungle Tour. But I was going to be in the HQ shack right next to the secure dataservers. The sort of total wipeout that destroyed a unit right down to the comm techs and clerks was not unknown in the business, but it almost inevitably required a far more inept commander than Picador was. And while Alex was in one of the riskiest job slots in the field, he had his secret 'dying is optional' card to play so no real worries there.
  
  So despite everything that had happened to both of us, we'd found our own little place to be. And even if it likely wouldn't be a permanent place, it would still give us more time to finish figuring out who we were, what we wanted, and what the heck was going with Alex's weird everything... and what he and I might be able to build together.
  
  Here's to us, the wild geese. Let's see where we can fly.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: I still have little idea on where arc two is going to go, but this morning I had a sudden inspiration on where at least it could start. So Netcat gets an interlude to help set up the upcoming timeskip, and we'll see what crazy shit crawls out of my subconscious next.
  
  As canon was massively unhelpful for giving her a real name, I picked one out of a hat. And now you know why she insisted on 'Netcat' so hard even before she was a shadowrunner. How many embarrassing schoolyard taunts can you get out of 'CC' as a set of initials? That many.
  
  The Heinrich Maneuver, Matador, Picador, and the 77th Independent Rangers are all canon. And while I certainly hadn't planned on the timing of the 'we're using the 4e encryption tech now' development, I'll certainly take advantage of it to explain why the ability to solve arbitrarily large math in his head is no longer the gamebreaker it would have been 2065. Convenient timing that works out for me by pure luck is still convenient. *g*
  
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  Content Warning: African warlords, "conflict oil", and extreme Third World poverty.
  
  When I'd first learned about the VITAS-I and -II plagues that had devastated the world in the first quarter of the 21st century, I'd been so shocked that I'd felt like I was having an out of body experience. VITAS-I had killed a full twenty five percent of the global population from 2010 to 2012, and VITAS-II had come roaring back in the 20s to kill at least ten percent of the survivors. History said that the old 'Spanish Flu' of 1917 had struck so quickly that in the worst-case scenario a person could go to bed at night feeling no symptoms and still be dead before they woke up in the morning. Virally Induced Toxic Allergy Syndrome had brought that back with a twist - in addition to being the world's nastiest case of 24-hour flu, just about the time you were becoming really miserable your immune system would not only collapse and let even the slightest secondary infection run riot but also go berserk and start giving you antihistamine reactions to goddamn near everything, including yourself. The chief cause of death from VITAS was choking to death on dry land as your tissues swelled in your throat and lungs. Even the Spanish Flu, by far the worst pandemic in my birth world's history short of the fucking Black Death, had only killed one-thirtieth of the total global population... and had had approximately a ninety percent survival rate for those infected! But VITAS was like something out of a virus movie. Hell, even most virus movies weren't this bad. This was damn near Captain Trips territory.
  
  And the survival rate had been horrific. While the odds of surviving VITAS initial exposure without drastic medical intervention had ranged from approximately one in four for orks and trolls on down to 'Start digging the hole right now' for humans and elves, the fact remained that it took quick and sudden treatment with antihistamines, antibiotics for the myriad secondary infections that the compromised immune system would start to let run amok, and general support to get someone through it. Which is why the casualty figures in even the modern, industrialized portions of the world had savaged an entire generation at least as thoroughly as World Wars I and II had cut the heart out of Europe. Still, even though literally no one came through that generation without mourning at least one family member, lover, or friend, many people had avoided infection and quite a few of those who had been infected had still survived. But that had been in the First World.
  
  Because in the Third World? Where there wasn't even reliable access to something as simple as clean water, let alone antibiotics? VITAS hadn't just been the worst pandemic in history, it had been the motherfragging apocalypse. Literally three out of four people had perished just in sub-Saharan Africa alone. Entire tribes, cultures, and even nations had ceased to exist. Between the return of magic, the widespread distrust of "colonialist" science and propaganda, and the sheer horror factor involved... it was as if an entire continent had gone almost completely mad. The bodies of the dead had fueled funeral pyres for literal months without letup. People everywhere had frantically abandoned everything they'd ever known in a mad rush to go anywhere they thought might possibly shelter them from what was coming next, and then they'd fought with everything that came to hand over every possible scrap of resource or acre of arable land or every old hatred, fear, and division-
  
  And at least thirty million of those refugees had all crowded desperately into here, the largest remaining city in West Africa. Lagos, Nigeria, perhaps the purest distillation of Third World squalor and greed you could find on the planet. Even over forty years after VITAS there were still at least twenty million souls - not that any even semi-accurate census had been held here in over a century - crammed into less than four thousand square kilometers of decaying shantytowns and burnt-out buildings and huts and canals full of rotting sewage and the few gleaming modern enclaves of the corporate and local exploiters, power brokers, warlords, and would-be kings taking advantage of the fact that literally nobody cared about Nigeria. Even Nigerians hardly did, except to the extent of trying to claw their way to the top of the pile over everybody else except for the people they were immediately related to and sometimes they weren't even that nice.
  
  Picador hated coming to Lagos. Not least because the definition of 'combatant' in this place was 'as soon as they're tall enough to hold the rifle'. If she didn't think you could emotionally deal with having to put a bullet in a ten-year-old because that ten-year-old was about to go full-auto in the marketplace, you weren't even allowed to leave the compound. If possible you weren't deployed to Lagos at all, even as a base-bound fobbit. And even the hardcore line animals weren't allowed outside the wire except in squads. Still, most of the nuyen and oil and gold and diamonds and everything else worth killing over in this part of Africa all touched Lagos at one point or another, so if you did the merc circuit on this continent then you simply couldn't avoid this place forever no matter how much you wanted to. And while Cat and I been with the 77th for almost a year and a half before we'd finally seen here, the early months of 2067 had at long last brought us to Lagos because despite the Major's best efforts to avoid it the 77th had finally had to take a contract in the Seven Kings War of Nigeria.
  
  The economic dislocations of Crash 2.0 had had aftershocks echoing around the world, and 2066 had been an unstable transition year in many places even by the standards of the dark cyberpunk future. The First World regimes hadn't had any borders actually changing, but even the Great Dragon Lung hadn't been able to prevent several of the splintered warlord states in what had used to be China from going to war with each other and redrawing some of the maps. Aztlan and Amazonia were still staring at each other in a tense South American stand-off across the Panama isthmus as proxies and 'independents' on both sides bogged down in a savage jungle war neither side would officially declare. Just a little further north, the Pueblo Corporate Council of the NAN invaded/liberated southern CalFree to help run the Azzie occupation troops all the way back to San Diego and then go on to plant their flag as far north as Los Angeles. Europe was still a tense political struggle between the ultranationalists of multiple nations and the factions trying to forge a New European Economic Community out of the post-Crash chaos, a political and ethical question more than a little complicated by the fact that the NEEC movement was in large part a front for the ambitions of Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries and the Great Dragon Lofwyr (as if there was any difference) to economically and politically dominate all Europe at second-hand. The Russia/Polish war continued its tense border stand-off as the 2062 collapse of the Russian-puppet Rybinski regime to the 'Liberation Army' had needed several years to stabilize just enough to let the provisional martial law of the liberators relax enough to actually hold elections, a job that the Crash had delayed for a second year. And that was just a random sampling of dozens of other hot spots and cold wars and other things that had busted loose.
  
  So if that's the sort of churn that was going in North America and Europe, try to imagine how fucked up Africa was. The big new corp-sponsored oil pipeline from the coast to the Niger Delta had just been finished in time for Crash 2.0 to fuck everything up, and by the time that shook out literally every would-be warlord in the region was gladly killing everyone up to and including their own grandmother for a shot at conquering even just a few square kilometers of 'turf'... so long as that turf was adjacent to the pipeline, and would thus allow them an opportunity to be paid off by the oil corps in return for 'guarding' it. Even though technology no longer used petrochemicals for internal combustion fuel the insatiable demands of the chemical and plastics industries still needed crude, so literally billions of nuyen of liquid wealth would flow from the interior oil fields to the coast to be loaded on tankers at Lagos Port every year.
  
  Provided that the situation ever stabilized enough that the pipeline didn't get chunks blown out of it every other month, that is. As is, while the oil was certainly flowing often enough to pay a lot of bills, it wasn't anywhere near as stable a situation as the Powers That Be would like. As soon as corporate interests started taking a hand, most of the smaller contenders either picked a side to shill for or got the hell out of the way before becoming part of the grass that was about to be trampled by the elephants at war. Because life would have been a lot simpler if only one megacorp had had an interest in the pipeline.
  
  The several megacorps that had allied with each other and paid off several of the largest tribal 'kings' in Nigeria to get the pipeline built in the first place immediately fell into a round-robin backstabbing session as soon as Crash 2.0 had tilted the table. And that, of course, had brought in several more would-be hopefuls, ranging from relatively small local consortiums that would still have been called Fortune 500 companies back in my old life all the way up to the big dragon itself, Saeder-Krupp. And each one of them had their own pet warlord/king to back, ranging from people like Oni Adegoke of the Yoruba, heir to a throne that has claimed the rulership of all Yoruba tribes (Nigeria's second-largest ethnic group) back to God and tribal historians only knew when on down to Haram Bokole, a mixed-blood thug of no ancestry he could admit to whose sole qualification for being a 'king' was the thousands of other jumped-up brigands with assault rifles who agreed that he was and a corporate sugar daddy willing to play ammo fairy for him. Not that Adegoke was any kind of moral paragon to say the least, but at least his family had a track record of being able to keep their territory's borders from violently changing every other week.
  
  And so you had the 'Seven Kings War'. Which had been going on long enough by this point that like a giant sucking hole, it had pulled most of the freelance companies working the African circuit into its orbit at one point or another. Picador had put the moment off as long as she could, but the seasonal dry-up of work in other places plus the significant capital upgrade of the latest round of SOTA equipment upgrades plus the 77th's slow expansion from an outsize company into a small battalion meant that purely and simply, we needed the money. And barring a major change in the churn, there weren't going to be any big tickets written for mercs in Africa that weren't cashed out here. So it was either the Seven Kings War or jump over to the Amazon, and as bad as a corp-sponsored oil war in Nigeria could get butting heads with Aztechnology's forces in Vietnam II: South American Boogaloo Only Let's Add Toxic Spirits And Magic Too could get far, far worse. And there wasn't a chance in hell that the Major - or anyone else - in the 77th would ever take the Azzie side of the coin in the Amazon conflict, so, that settled that.
  
  "And that's the situation. I remind you all yet again that our contracting authority is Global Sandstorm Inc., not King Efosa. We have a security ticket for the pipeline, the pumping stations, and the attached camp for Global Sandstorm's own employees and that's it. Make sure every one of your troopers understands that if one of the Edo Kingdom's 'officers' demands anyone do anything outside the agreed-upon spec that they say nothing except they're not allowed to do it without the permission of an officer and then immediately flash it up the chain. Officers, your only line is that you aren't allowed to do whatever-it-is without permission from me." Major Cabrera - Picador - finished from her position at the head of the briefing tent, as the officers-and-NCOs-assembly of the 77th all paid respectful attention.
  
  "And, of course, the standard Rules of Engagement apply in all particulars, with a particular emphasis on my own custom West Africa endorsements. The 77th has never yet been brought up on war crimes in front of either a Guild tribunal or the UN court, at least not without that asshole Navarre suborning perjury to make it happen-"
  
  Everyone in the tent, even those of us who hadn't been anywhere near the 77th at the time, dutifully chuckled at the reference to the infamous incident where Colonel Navarre of Navarre's Raiders had committed outright atrocities in a 2050s battle that the 77th had also been present at, and then tried to frame Matador and the 77th after the Company had reported Navarre to the UN observers for it.
  
  "-and even then the desgracado couldn't make it stick. And you and every soldier underneath you may rest assured that the first one to break that streak for the 77th won't have to worry about living long enough for a UN tribunal to order them to be hanged." the Major finished intensely. For all that the usual cliche in the business was that the officers with the best "show" were the ones with the worst "go", Picador was simultaneously a highly skilled orator and a thoroughly competent tactician and strategist. It's how she, as a recently-promoted platoon commander, had taken command of a shattered company that had lost both its commanding officer and its XO to sniper fire in the same ten-minute period and then led that company to a victory so unquestioned that every remaining officer, most of whom had had date of rank over her, unanimously voted to make her the next Colonel. A rank she'd refused to accept out of respect for the fallen Colonel Pererya, thus forever capping the 77th's rank structure at Major. God only knows how she'd handle it if the 77th ever expanded above battalion size, but that was a problem above my pay grade.
  
  "So here's to a long, dull patrol and no more funerals." she gave her traditional end-of-contract-briefing closer. "Dismissed.", and we all got up and headed back out to our work.
  
  (Picador) Meet me at my office at your earliest convenience. The text flashed in the HUD projected onto my eyes by the wireless-enabled contact lenses slaved to my commlink. I reached down to that commlink where it hung on my belt and thumbed the button to acknowledge, then dutifully jogged over to the prefab hut that held the CO's office and her immediate staff and waited for her.
  
  "Relax." Sergeant-Major Martinez reassured me as he reached the hut at about the same time and sat down at his desk to get back to the day's paperwork. "She's in as good a mood as Lagos ever lets her be."
  
  "Beats the alternative." I agreed with him wholeheartedly, and we both respectfully stood to attention as the Major finally entered the hut behind us.
  
  "Anything blow up in the whole hour we've spent with our fingers off the dime, Sergeant-Major?" she asked him.
  
  "No ma'am." he nodded to her.
  
  "Thank God. Sergeant?" she turned to me, and I followed her into her office, shut the door, and stood to attention in front of her desk.
  
  "Take a seat," she ordered me as she assumed her own. "Okay. a private refresher on my usual contract lecture. As one of our lead special operators, and with a prior shadowy reputation besides, it is almost certain you will be individually approached by either King Efosa's people or corporate representation with an offer for an individual assignment. It's even possible that they'll use my name. So we're having this discussion so you can truthfully say that primus, you were given my word of honor that any 'special' assignment would come through me and only through me and secundus, you are under specific orders directly from me to deny such 'requests' from any authority whatsoever without my express permission in advance - even if they come from our own Global Sandstorm contracting officer. Please acknowledge by voice."
  
  "I understand and will comply, Major." I replied formally.
  
  "Good!" she said more warmly, switching off the recorder. "Right, that's on the chip and I can play it for any suit who pushes it. Next on the agenda is better news. But first, a personal question... relevant, but still personal. How are things between you and Cat?"
  
  I mildly raised a metaphorical eyebrow as to what that question could possibly mean, given that the Major's usual policy on the personal lives of her troops were that so long as it didn't violate the regs or operational security then she didn't care if you peopled your bed with goats. "We're as close as ever, ma'am." I said. "May I ask how that's relevant?"
  
  "Because I wanted to discuss long-term career options with you, and your own family planning would materially affect that." she said reasonably. "And speaking of, are you two ever tying the knot? Or did you already and will I have to become direly offended at not being invited?" she continued with a fair bit of personal warmth.
  
  I began to see where this was going, so I answered that without offense. "We are close, ma'am, and neither of us can really imagine not continuing to be close for a long, long time. But as much as the 77th has been a good place for us to be, we also don't intend to either get married or have children while living in a mercenary camp."
  
  "Not uncommon in troops your age." she nodded wisely. "Which is why, before either of you started having the 'up or out' talk with each other, I thought I'd let you know of something that might inform that decision." She opened her desk drawer and with a brisk efficient motion reached in and hauled something out to lay on the desktop between us. Specifically, a set of lieutenant's bars.
  
  "Want 'em?" she asked simply.
  
  "I never even thought about being offered a set." I answered honestly. "There have been noncoms here for eight years who never even got considered, and I'm still a few months out from two."
  
  "And I can name which ones." she agreed. "But you have to know that you've become my best sniper and LRRP operator, just like Specialist Connors has become one of my best electronic warfare operators and intel analysts." the Major said. "And you've also simultaneously become one of my best instructors - hell, you even managed to finally teach Corporal Leonardwood how to throw a basic punch, and he's been failing the unarmed combat qualification since he joined. If he hadn't been such an ace drone mechanic, I'd never have waivered him." She nodded to me. "You have consistently performed up to and beyond expectations in every task you've been assigned. You combine versatility, proficiency, sound judgment, and most importantly of all integrity. And on top of that, your people like you. This lion cage is a spirited bunch at the best of times, and you share along with the Sergeant-Major the rare quality of never having needed to have the same argument with the same person more than once. And while I can hardly promote him to officer rank-" she broke off invitingly.
  
  "Not only would the company fall apart without him exactly where he is, you couldn't make him accept it with a gun to his head." I agreed with her.
  
  "-I was thinking that you might like it, along with command of Recon Platoon. Especially given that officer's quarters and home port rotations would mean that it would be possible to raise children, even if you and Cat might have to spend some deployments separated home-and-away." she explained.
  
  "Damn." I said. "How much time do I have to think this over?"
  
  "In confidence, what prompted this is Captain Davies choosing to not renew his contract. So he's gone in a little over two months, and Lieutenant Chang is going to take his slot. That's how long before I'll need a new Recon Platoon commander, so if you're not going to go for it then I'd appreciate having at least six weeks to find someone else."
  
  "Two weeks, then. All right, ma'am, I'll talk it over with 'Cat and let you know by then."
  
  "You do that." the Major agreed. "Because while you can refuse this offer and continue on in your current post without prejudice, I have not been in the business this long without being able to tell when one of my wild geese is starting to think about flying away." She shrugged. "But hey, the single most common reason that anyone leaves to follow the freelance drum is because they're looking for a place they can fit in the world. If El Cuadrilla isn't that for you or your lady, then you have my best wishes in finding that place wherever you can. Or you can stay here and I'll run your asses in the field until they fall off, either way." she finished with a smile.
  
  "Thanks." I said to her, getting to my feet as she did the same. "And no matter what we choose, we'll never regret we came."
  
  "That's all I can ask for." she agreed. She held out her hand for me to shake, I took it, and then I got back to work.
  
  
  
  "Wild Man to Jack. Infantry in the open, gridref 224-651. Call for 105 frag one." I subvocalized into my throat mike. A more sophisticated setup would have used BattleTac software to automatically mark and track every heat signature in my electronic binoculars' field of vision and serve up all the little GPS tags to the fire direction center on a plate, but the 77th didn't pay for platinum when training could do the job instead. Besides, you couldn't jam the old Mark I Visible Light Sensor.
  
  "Jack to Wild Man. Acknowledge single 105mm fragmentation. Cleared to fire, stand by to designate." the FDC's voice sounded in my headphones.
  
  "Laser on." I called away, flicking the switch on the underbarrel attachment as I kept my marksman rifle trained on the slowly advancing platoon of enemy.
  
  "Shot out." Jack replied. "Impact 23 seconds."
  
  Several seconds after the call, the platoon of warriors I'd just called in artillery on suddenly started running a lot faster.
  
  "Blinker Blinker Blinker!" I called away urgently, using the code word for 'Enemy counter-battery radar in effect.' as I switched off my laser designator and got the hell away from where I'd just been standing. "Game just flushed!"
  
  "Hog One relocate immediately!" Picador's voice sounded on the override push, not bothering to use her call sign because there wasn't a man in the 77th who couldn't recognize the Major's voice while all drunk and half dead.
  
  "Hog One is gone! Trophy system online!" the gun captain of our lead self-propelled 105mm howitzer acknowledged as they stomped on the gas.
  
  "Incoming!" Netcat's voice sounded in all our ears, as she was the duty sensor watch on this shift. "Hostile rocket artillery bearing zero-three-three, eleven seconds to firefall!" Simultaneous with this the projected impact point of the rockets flashed on the HUDs of everyone near the relevant zone - which apparently wasn't me, thank God!
  
  The supersonic crack-whoosh of modern hypervelocity MLRS munitions - someone on the other side was paying big money here - sounded high over my head as I legged it to another vantage point and started to hurriedly scan the savanna behind me, looking for whatever surprise was going to come crawling out next.
  
  A series of loud explosions from the direction of our hasty firebase several miles behind me let me know where the enemy's counter-battery rockets had just landed.
  
  "Report casualties." Picador's voice called out tonelessly.
  
  "Missed us!" Hog One called breathlessly. "But we just lost the reserve ammo!"
  
  "Wild Man alive and undetected." I answered quietly, as I did my best to keep it that way
  
  The explosion of the 105mm shell I'd called in landing and wasting its effort on an empty patch of dirt was just the perfect punctuation to this whole disappointment.
  
  "Warthog to Picador. One reserve ammo trailer gone, no crew casualties." the voice of Artillery Platoon's commander sounded out. "But holy shit, Major, their counterbattery fire was already hitting our positions before our first shot even touched the ground. Until the enemy artillery is neutralized, I cannot guarantee our effectiveness in any future engagement." Which was official comms language for It would be fucking suicide, ma'am.
  
  "New player brought a new payroll." Picador sighed. "All hands, new op order is CATALINA, I say again, CATALINA. All Hogs RT base camp. Alpha and Bravo platoons boots and saddles, you've got three minutes to reposition as designated on your HUDs. Wild Man, run away home, you can't do any more good out there today. Jump!"
  
  Over the course of the afternoon we lost one of Alpha Platoon's APCs and six more of the riflemen as the desultory advance of the 'disorganized tribal bandits' we'd deployed ten kilometers away from the pipeline on this axis to repel the assault of was revealed as the screen for an advance of an entire armored company of MET2000 troops. One of the largest of the "private" corporate armies, MET2000 was a mercenary 'company' from Western Europe that was actually a private army. Over 200,000 men and women wore MET2K colors all around the planet, and the ultimate shareholders of the privately traded corporation were a devil's brew of Ares Macrotechnology, the Allied German States, a couple of the big AAA Japanacorps, Ruhrmetall (a proud subsidiary of Saeder-Krupp, even if nobody ever actually admitted it) and some other odds and sods.
  
  It was, in short, nothing but a giant corporate stooge. MET2000 troops were known for their top-of-the-line equipment, their ubiquitous use of SOTA cyberware, the best tech support and intel support that money would buy, and a serious fucking attitude problem. The only thing that kept them from crushing all mercenary opposition out of existence was the fact that as a front puppet for multiple competing AAA megacorps they were a classic case of 'I could take over the world with this army if I could ever get all of its weapons pointed in the same direction' and the fact that their unofficial motto might as well be 'Who needs skills? I have technology!' So while MET2000 was seen on battlefields all over the world, it was usually doing more corporate things such as remote site security, convoy escort, 'hostile environment pacification' (read: paid colonial oppression), and other things that didn't bring them across the orbit of the real freelance companies too much. And when they did cross there it was usually as a small detachment hired by a private client who had too much cash and wanted the flash.
  
  But while they weren't entirely as dangerous as their gear would let them be, that was a far cry from being actually incompetent. And someone in the Seven Kings War had decided to really open the war chest and pay for the would-be chrome kings of war to arrive... and worse yet, in force. As near as intel and chatter could turn up there was only a short battalion of them coming in on the other side, but that was still the absolute worst case scenario for a company like the 77th to fight MET2000 in - at even odds, when we had much less equipment, and worst of all when we were the ones anchored to a fixed defensive position.
  
  We'd gotten a fairly nasty bloody nose just in the first skirmish, and the Major had had to deploy a goodly chunk of the company and take merciless advantage of our home-field advantage just to stop the three platoons they'd arrogantly assumed would be all they needed for today's thrust. But even though they'd left having to drag the burning wrecks of two of their shiny tanks (mediums, thank God, because we'd have been fucked beyond fucked if someone had been insane enough to actually pay to haul first-line MBTs down here) out on tank recovery vehicles behind them, the exchange of losses had still been lucky to just be relatively even. Which meant that we were now facing a war of attrition versus an opponent with a much superior cash flow.
  
  And the enemy's objective had been all too clear. If they'd just wanted to knock a hole in the pipeline like your average bunch of raiders, then they could have simply bombarded it with those fucking rockets from beyond the range our own artillery could hope to engage them and there'd have been sweet fuck-all we could have done about it. Which meant that their objective had almost certainly been the workers' camp where the Global Sandstorm pipeline crews were quartered.
  
  I didn't need Picador's years of experience at this game to flowchart the whole thing from there. The biggest thing that they could do with the corporate camp that they could only do there on foot and not by remote bombardment would be to kill everyone in it. If they'd simply used stand-off weapons to crater the place, well, that would have been a blatant war crime you couldn't ignore even in Nigeria - at least not when Global Sandstorm was the victim. Global Sandstorm might have been largely a regional corporation prominent only in the Arabian Confederation, but it still wore the biggest turban in its local area and was a heavyweight player in North Africa and near Asia that even the big AAAs couldn't casually bully. More importantly, as a AA corporation it was large enough to have megacorporate extraterritoriality of its own, meaning that unlike any other lesser entity it could actually lay suit before the Corporate Court itself.
  
  So war crimeing the entire Global Sandstorm camp would get even whoever had the juice to hire MET2K for this ticket facing some nasty litigation right up on Zurich-Orbital itself... unless they used a relative degree of subtlety. Such as 'We were just occupying the camp, honest, and safely detaining all the uninvolved corporate employees when those horrible nasty mercenaries started ambushing us and we had to fight back! Such a regrettable accident it was! They should be punished for excessive collateral damage!'
  
  Because paying for 'routine pipeline breakage' was one thing, but replacing that many skilled workers and technicians? Yeah, not on. The expense by itself would be nontrivial, the amount of risk premiums Global Sandstorm would have to pay their replacements would be unconscionable, and that's assuming the Edo Kingdom didn't have a total failure of nerve and toss us and Global Sandstorm the fuck out so they could rush to cut a deal with whoever MET2K's paymaster was. We had to stop the 'Metalheads' from pushing us back far enough to take that camp, or else we lost this whole contract and everything attached to it. And that's before we got into the part where several hundred entirely innocent people would be murdered out of hand just to get someone a slightly higher market share...
  
  So yeah.
  
  Fuck. So much for a long, dull patrol and no more funerals.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: I'd actually had the vague idea that their time with the 77th was going to be mostly done in the timeskip and we'd come in just as they were leaving, but as I was brainstorming things something in me just wanted to try seeing if I can write a war story.
  
  So, okay, let's write a war story!
  
  El Cuadrilla is the unofficial 77th unit nickname ('cuadrilla' is the noun for a bullfighter's support team, so it's a reference to the 77th's first CO "Matador".) MET2000 is a canon PMC, as the Seven Kings War and the Nigerian pipeline is a canon in-setting historical conflict. Most of the long-established players named in that war are canon as well but 'Haram Bokole' is an OC, created as an example of the many here-today-gone-tomorrow warlords that the eternal chaos in Shadowrun Africa produces far too many of.
  
  One of my most favorite Shadowrun sourcebooks is 4e's Feral Cities, especially the Lagos section. Because holy fuck does it not pull punches as to just how horribly fucked up things are on the Dark Continent. I mean, real life is more than bad enough there, try to imagine how the dark cyberpunk future rolls there. It was both horrifying and fascinating. It positively dripped with dramatic potential even at the same time it got really dark. And it was certainly anything but 'more of the same, the cyberpunk sourcebook'.
  
  So, this is how our crazy kids are starting to get along in 2067. Yes, by now they've already had the eventual marriage talk (I mean, look at how long they've been together. It would be unrealistic of them not to start.) And I'm only just beginning to evolve the upcoming arc and how our two crazy kids have developed during the timeskip, so, stay tuned!
  
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  Content Warning: Offstage mentions of slavery and underage prostitution.
  
  "So they're not pulling out?" I asked Cat as we laid together in our bunk. Shacking up with one of the HQ Signals people meant that you could stay current on all the gossip.
  
  "No." she replied, shifting her head a little on my chest. "Global Sandstorm is taking the position that securing their facilities here is what us mercs are being paid for, so why don't we just stop whining and do our jobs already? It can't be that hard, right?" I could actually feel her eyes roll as she delivered that one.
  
  "Global is aware that the simplest way to shut down the Metalheads is to not give their client any return on investment that's actually worth what they're shelling out for all that chrome, right?" I asked rhetorically. "If they wanted to just scrap the pipeline they could have done that with a cruise missile on day one, so they obviously don't - almost certainly because their client wants to take it from us, not to scrap it. Breakage and harassment is one thing, but actual scorched earth is another."
  
  "Yeah." Cat agreed. "You don't contract for that much firepower unless you really want something to get blown up. And the corporate housing here is movable, or at least the people in it are. Temporarily evac most of them, keep a critical skeleton crew dispersed around the kingdom and fly them out to trouble spots on the pipeline as needed - it would still cost some, but nowhere near as much as some other alternatives."
  
  "And a couple months of GS paying for that and our upkeep while the pipeline mostly rolls along, while the Metalheads' patron has to pay their fees and upkeep and gets back mostly bupkis in return - voila, a new war of attrition but one that favors us instead of them. That's exactly why the evac-and-stand-off plan was the Major's first suggestion." I waved my free hand angrily in the air. "Nope!"
  
  "No kidding," Cat sighed, hugging me a little more tightly. "You'd think the one thing a megacorp could understand about military strategy better than mercs is the part where war costs money. And that if you bankrupt yourself to win, then you've lost."
  
  "That's a very good point." I said, my eyes opening a little wider. "Why don't they understand? It almost smells like some kind of deeper game is being played here."
  
  "Shit." Cat swore. "If that's the case-" She sighed. "Looks like Intel's got even more work to do tomorrow."
  
  "Could we be the target?" I continued thinking out loud. "The 77th, specifically?"
  
  "Vendetta?" I felt her shrug. "It's theoretically possible, but who? It's not like the unit has any personal grudge with MET2000. And Intel's already been trying to run down candidates for who's paying for the Metalheads, but none of the possibles on that list are anyone who'd pay this much nuyen just to destroy the 77th. You know as I well as I do that one of the reasons the Major puts so much effort into keeping us fighting only within the Code is to avoid leaving behind some Count of Monte Cristo situation."
  
  "Still, something to look into." I observed.
  
  "Everything is something to look into at this point." she agreed ruefully. "But yeah, I'll put it on the list."
  
  "Well, you'll have time to work on it." I agreed.
  
  "When will you be back?" she asked softly.
  
  "A few days. I don't know exactly." I replied equally as softly.
  
  "And couldn't tell me if you did. Op-sec." she acknowledged with a pout. "I hate it when you have to go dark. When you're on long patrol I can at least keep track of you from the comm center, but not having even a vague idea of your location or status- I have no idea how the women who marry soldiers that they only see in-between deployments can stand it."
  
  "I know." I said consolingly as I pulled her close. "But it'll only be for a little while."
  
  "Just shut up and kiss me, Sergeant." she fired back, and then we put words into action.
  
  
  
  Becoming international soldiers of fortune was not the only option we'd had after Cat had lost her scholarship, but after mutually discussing it amongst ourselves we'd agreed that it was probably the best choice actually on the menu at that time. She could have taken the two-year degree she could already qualify for as someone who'd just passed their junior year of undergrad studies and gone on the job market, but the post-Crash job market in Seattle was pretty dire that summer for people with anything but perfect unblemished resumes and even they were struggling. Even her student internship with NeoNET (formerly Novatech) through the University had been a noteworthy stroke of luck for her at the time. And then there were her health issues, and the fact that it wouldn't have solved the problem of her and I trying to sustain a relationship across the SIN/SINless divide...
  
  Contrariwise, she could have stepped full-time into the shadows with me. There had certainly been newbie starting deckers (or hackers, as the lexicon was starting to shift into) with less qualifications than her. I'd had to put up with one of those on the Auburn run, after all, and he was hardly alone. And Pistons and 'Cat had hit it off almost from first acquaintance as fellow members of the sorority of Matrix geeks, so on top of me and several of my contacts willing to vouch for her 'Netcat' could easily have slipped into the Seattle shadows as Pistons' apprentice. Pistons was a solid A-list hacker with a street rep dating back almost a decade, after all, and training up a protege was a thing veteran runners often did around that stage. But even though it was entirely possible to start running the shadows even if you were born a SINner - Pistons had, after all - it was still a huge commitment. And neither of us had felt comfortable about her burning her SIN at that stage, least of all me.
  
  And then Ivan had pointed out a third way that we'd overlooked, one that entirely sidestepped the Morton's Fork we were stabbing ourselves with. The free companies on the international merc circuit were a long-established gray area where the divide between the straight world and the shadow world wasn't drawn in remotely as sharp a contrast as it was in the big city, especially when outside of North America or Europe. Technically I had a SIN as 'Alex Kincaid' because the licensed and bonded free companies could not legally employ SINless, but the bewildering variety of nations of origin and home nations of record for all the freelancers and the outfits that enlisted them made actually keeping any kind of rigid registry impossible. My SIN was as phony as a three-dollar bill, and so were quite a few others around me - but in the merc world, nobody would ever really notice or care. Except the 77th's paymaster, of course, but then again they were the person who'd gotten my current ID for me.
  
  Not that the 77th would have even risked hiring someone with chronic health issues like Cat's except as a big favor to a friend of the CO's (and an old friend of the prior CO for that matter) and as part of a package deal to get a prime asset like me. But even if her health hadn't let her actually succeed at the chance they'd given Cat I still would have had more than enough savings from the Pyramid job to put her up in Lisbon at the 77th's home port and still see her on leave and in-between contracts while she finished her degree via a Matrix university and self-study. As it turned out, though, simply getting out of Seattle and into the 77th's recruit training squad had done wonders to help 'Cat shake off her AIPS attacks. At the time we'd come to the conclusion that she'd apparently been developing some sort of allergy to the city air as an unrelated complication and were simply pleased that she was returning to full health and able to quality for duty.
  
  And then her 'auditory hallucinations' had returned after a couple of months, but without any of the other symptoms of her AIPS or the general debilitation. It had been quite a stumper for us until we'd finally built up enough observations in her symptoms diary for us to calculate that the only common factor to the incidents was ambient density of wireless Matrix transmissions - a job of plotting made far easier by the fact that given the places the 77th was deploying to, our own signal corps were often the only source of wireless hotspots in the area. 'Cat hadn't ever been hallucinating at all, she'd been receiving. Somehow she'd become a living wireless antenna.
  
  As she'd already had CT scans as part of her initial AIPS diagnosis and treatment, we already knew that no one had stealthed a cyberimplant into her head while she wasn't looking. But the ability to receive and decrypt digital encoded Matrix transmissions was a far cry from just being like the guy in the 1940s who could hear Morse code transmissions through his dental fillings. That had just been simple off-on, and the silver in his fillings reacting with the acid in his saliva had produced a crude galvanic antenna just as the bone conduction and resonance of his own skull had made a speaker. What Cat was doing, on the other hand, would require her to somehow have her nervous system doing the same job as the network stack of a commlink OS, because in order to turn the local comm traffic into audible language she'd have had to be decrypting network packets in her head. In fact, her uncybered brain had to somehow be capable of doing the job of every piece of protocol and driver software in-between the hardware layer and the application layer.
  
  So, yeah. Although it was nowhere near as physics-breaking as what I was doing, turns out that my girlfriend was also struggling with weird-ass superpowers that had dropped on her from God knows where. Now there's something I'd never have expected in a million years. I was momentarily panicked that somehow I might have caused this in her until simple logic told me that she'd already been expressing all the symptoms of her condition before I'd even arrived in this universe, let alone before actually meeting her.
  
  Now it's not like we'd been making major headway in studying my weirdness either. Until I'd eventually been promoted to Sergeant I hadn't even had so much as a private set of quarters to be alone in, let alone any real facilities for in-depth experimentation. And even as an NCO I still didn't have any large amounts of free time to spend safely unobserved or to spend anywhere else for that matter, the military lifestyle being what it was. Oh I'd certainly figured out a few other things I could do, and intensively trained up on any physad power or military skill my position allowed me to even semi-plausibly learn, but I knew full well that I was not even remotely pushing the envelope of what I might potentially ramp my body or my mind up to if I went for broke. But I simply couldn't afford to break cover, and so I mostly didn't.
  
  And on top of that now Cat had her own weird superpowers to be exploring. And even if so far all she'd been able to do is receive and decrypt nearby wireless transmissions that was still enough to make us intensely curious as to the how, why, what the fuck, and would it be a problem later. But again, that was a problem we didn't really have the ability to tear into deeply for as long as we were both enlisted in a full-time military lifestyle. Not to mention that while Picador and the 77th were by and large entirely decent people, we didn't actually want to tell them about what was really going on with us any more than we'd wanted to tell anyone else. Hence the burgeoning restlessness of ours to find a new place to move on to that the Major had picked up on. Even if neither of us had any real idea where that new place would be yet.
  
  But hey, at least having turned the corner and realizing what was really going on with her had also let Cat make the mental leap of how to find the volume knob and the squelch knob in her head and tune out any inconvenient transmissions at will, so her 'AIPS' was now on her medical records as entirely in remission. And she'd finished testing out for her bachelor's degree in Matrix Technology and System Development a couple months ago, so yay for both of those!
  
  I grimaced and pulled my wandering mind away from things like family planning and thinking of the future, and got back to focusing on the task at hand. Lagos was not a city that was kind to the unalert, to say the least.
  
  Although Picador was determined to keep the 77th as clean as possible, the fact remained that if even a human rights organization like Mothers of Metahumans still had to hire shadowrunners occasionally just to keep their less scrupulous opposition from owning their lunch then nobody in the 'we shoot people for money' business had the slightest hope of avoiding that necessity. Which is one of the reasons why ex-shadowrunners could find places in the 77th if they were suitably professional and reliable - which admittedly a whole lot of runners weren't. But that necessity was one of the reasons why I'd been such an eagerly scouted prospect to recruit once Ivan had referred me to Picador's attention, and also why this wasn't the first time I'd been 'detached' from Recon Platoon. And so just like I had on several prior occasions, I officially checked out on 'leave', ditched all my ID and tags, picked up a totally sterile set of gear from the quartermaster, and then went "dark" to go do certain things that needed to be done.
  
  Although this time my task was merely a reconnaissance. If one of the players in the game had just started a major play to push Global Sandstorm entirely out of the running, then they'd do more than just hire the Metalheads to run us out of our positions and then set up a scenario by which Global Sandstorm would either lose their alliance with the local king or lose their nerve on their own. They'd also have to at least begin laying groundwork elsewhere to get ready for when it was time to consolidate their victory, because a pipeline had two ends.
  
  Prior to the Awakening and VITAS, the Nigerian oil fields had both refined the crude and offloaded the product to tankers at the city of Port Harcourt down at the mouth of the river delta. However, the upheavals of the 2020s meant that Port Harcourt, like quite a few other cities in West Africa, didn't exist anymore. By the time the megacorps even began to come back to Nigeria over a decade later to start exploiting the local resources again the remnants of the port and the refineries had decayed into wholly unusable - and worse yet, massively industrially polluted - wreckage. So despite the project not being remotely cheap at all, it had still been cheap-er to build a new refinery complex outside the nearest city up the coast and then expand the already-existing port at Lagos with a tanker-compatible set of docks.
  
  Which is why I was now back in the feral heart of Lagos, alone and SINless and with nothing to connect me to the 77th. Because Picador needed someone to gather intel on whether or not anyone new had been making moves at the pipeline terminal and the port complex, and since there wasn't anyone currently enlisted in the 77th who'd have had local ties to draw upon then that meant trying to plug into the local underworld community.
  
  Although this particular shantytown looked to be just more of the anonymous dirt-poor squalor that covered so much ground around here, it was actually the home of Alantakun, 'the Spider', who was one of Lagos' more infamous information brokers. The 'random' gangs of street kids with rusty AKs that covered the several surrounding streets were actually all on his payroll, and the suspicious glares cast at my back told me that if the man I'd come here to see hadn't already known I was coming then I'd already have been shaken down for any cash on me repeatedly. As is, even a veteran runner team could get themselves shot dead trying to get back out of this warren if things went hot, because for all that the opponents were unchipped, unskilled, and largely untrained there were still dozens of them and even the best team couldn't look, shoot, and duck in every direction simultaneously. But, I had certain advantages so unlike virtually anyone else in my position I'd come here alone anyway. I arrived at and drew up outside the half-covered buka, a local diner/shack, that was the office my target was working out of today, and waited.
  
  "Hey, oyibo. The boss will see you now." the dwarf bodyguard said to me contemptuously as he finally came out of the kitchen door behind the open-air diner's counter. He was speaking in Yoruba, one of the commonest dialects of West Africa, but of course I spoke fluent Yoruba. With my learning ability I spoke fluent lots of things.
  
  Oyibo. Literally translated, it meant 'skinless person'. Colloquially, it referred to white people - and not in a flattering context. I guess every non-Western culture on Earth had their own equivalent of 'gaijin' or other such quaint term by which to refer to Westerners. And I was definitely wayyyy too pale for this neighborhood. But I could still work with that.
  
  "You want my weapons?" I asked politely as I followed him into the kitchen and he stopped and turned to face me.
  
  "Does the jungle have trees?" the dwarf replied caustically, and I handed them over as the dwarf gestured to a large scarred man with clear Igbo tribal markings, who fell in behind me and crowded me into the back room. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the dwarf leave the weapons on a nearby table and resume his post at the door.
  
  "Take his money and throw him out." was the first words out of the old man's mouth as he heard our footsteps enter the back room, not even bothering to look up from the screen of his trid set where he was apparently watching a recording of a soccer match. The thinly growing smile on the old man's face at the sudden thump and brief flurry of violence from behind him was wiped away by the credstick - his own guard's credstick - landing squarely in his bowl of snack chips.
  
  "Odd request, but I suppose it's a local custom here." I said lightly as I sat down next to Alantakun as amiably as if he'd invited me to watch the game with him.
  
  Our eyes met and a long, nervous pause fell. "Is he dead?" he finally asked me. Off the trid screen I dimly saw the reflection of the dwarf I'd just walked past standing behind us in the doorway, but as his shotgun wasn't actually raised to fire yet I felt the conversation could continue.
  
  "He's barely even bruised." I replied cheerfully. "After all, who wants to be uncivilized?"
  
  "Hrmph." the Spider snorted, and then he raised one hand and waved it. The dwarf slung his weapon and bent down to start hauling away his unconscious comrade, leaving us to our conversation.
  
  "So, Iwoku said that you were selling information, not unarmed combat practice. Was Iwoku mistaken?" I asked calmly.
  
  "Oyibos are not very popular here." he deflected. "But yes, I sell. What do you think you can buy?"
  
  "The oil port." I said. "Someone is anticipating changes in the war. Someone might already have been laying groundwork there recently."
  
  "I do not sell the names of my customers." he replied.
  
  "But it is well known to all of Lagos that you do not like oyibos." I replied. "Just as it is equally well-known that your web gathers a great deal of knowledge. It is entirely possible that these greedy foreigners would have come to you seeking to buy intel about the oil port, and that you would have turned them away. Does your code prevent you from selling the names of those you thought unfit to be your customers?"
  
  "It does not." he nodded to me with a cunning grin. "So, how much?"
  
  A vigorous round of haggling finally bought me a name and a description of the man who a couple of weeks ago had been seeking to buy intel on "Port Master" Roger Iweke, the crime boss whose territory was the docks district. Since a good in-depth profile on the man would be exactly the sort of info that a new out-of-town player who was hoping to get the pipeline under their control would find helpful when negotiating with Iweke for 'docking rights' for their tankers, I considered this the best lead I had. However, that still didn't tell me what the asshole's real name was or anywhere in this town that he might be - but given that nobody would have fallen for Alantakun's ongoing 'rip off the white out-of-towners' scam but an out-of-towner, that certainly narrowed down the possible places that he could be staying.
  
  So ultimately it was a good thing that Picador had not sent a more native-appearing operative on this mission. My being Caucasian might be a social handicap anywhere else in Lagos, but that plus wearing the right suit in the Island districts was as good as a passport.
  
  
  
  The Island districts were literally that, an island. The last remaining island from the archipelago that had once filled Lagos bay, most of the old the islands nearer to shore had long since been reclaimed for lebensraum by the frantically overcrowding population. They'd gone to the extent of heaping dirt and landfill in-between the closer islands to turn them all back into a solid peninsula. But Lagos Island had been kept separate, because the divide between the haves and the have-nots was more extreme in Africa than it was perhaps anywhere else in the world and the richest and most powerful figures of this city felt that keeping a giant, polluted moat as far between them and the starving masses as possible was a good start.
  
  Separated into three city districts - Lagos Island proper, Victoria Island, and Ikoyi Island - only the rich and powerful and those who served them were allowed entrance. The local crimelords, the most successful and corrupt of the local officials - but I repeat myself - several of the kings of Nigeria who kept their the 'city palaces' here, and of course the megacorporate representatives, colonialists, and carpetbaggers who'd come to Lagos to dip their own hands into the abundantly amoral opportunities available here. They and all others of their ilk had all built their whitewashed mansions and condos and elegant restaurants and boutiques and support services and neatly-kept corporate enclaves here, as far removed from the stench and rot and pollution and sweatshops and slavery of Lagos proper as possible while still being close enough to be paid their cut. And somewhere on this island was the man I sought, and the link to those behind him.
  
  But more importantly, on this island was also the man's target. Because I was like hell going to stern-chase a ghost all around perhaps the deadliest sprawl north of Pretoria and south of Genoa when I could just head the man off by getting to his ultimate destination ahead of him.
  
  I'd gotten across the bridge and onto the island by the simple expedient of slipping a hundred to the guards, which was a polite way of saying 'the armed thugs of whichever crime boss or other major player happened to be shaking down the bridge traffic that day'. I was able to walk around the island simply by having the right looks, clothes, and attitude. After all, any building around here that needed guarding was taking care of its own security anyway and the people who had an interest in maintaining order in the streets only cared about you fitting in and not being obviously armed enough to look like trouble. It's not like anybody outside of a megacorporate enclave would even dream of running SIN checks in Lagos, even on the Islands.
  
  But getting alongside the 'Port Master'? Now that was a horse of an entirely different hue.
  
  I could have tried approaching him at his 'office' on the docks, but if my target was trying to gather information and make inroads into there then that could be stepping right into a kill zone that the enemy was already set up on. I could have scouted out where Iweke engaged in 'recreation' and try to engage him socially there - except that given what was commonly known about the man's tastes, there was no way I could do so. Simply knowing brothels full of underage and involuntary 'talent' existed in this city gave me enough anguish - if I actually entered one and had to look the problem in the face, I'd either have to selectively amputate a portion of my own soul or go completely berserk. As is...
  
  It's not as if similar things hadn't existed in the Third World of my original homeworld and I'd never thought about them there, but I'd grown less and less able recently to be able to block out just how fucked up things were in far too many places. Even for all the magic and high technology and glitz and glamour and meeting the woman I'd come to love here, I still did not like the dark cyberpunk future at all.
  
  Damn, caught myself brooding again. That was getting to be far too common. Focus on the job.
  
  All right. How exactly did one go about getting a face-to-face one of the most powerful crimelords in the most lawless city in an utterly corrupt failed African warlord state? When your total resources were you, yourself, and you, because your mission was being done totally 'black' with minimum support, and your allotted war chest for the op was nowhere near what your corporate opposition could be funding? When-
  
  Wait, what the fuck was that?
  
  The sudden sound of fucking fireworks involuntarily drew my eyes upward just like what I was certain was every other soul's on the Island, if not at least half of Lagos. Our eyes were met by the sight of a gods-be-damned aerial billboard fluttering and gleaming in the red sunset, being drawn behind a slow-moving drone at slightly less than one thousand feet. Speakers on the drone were playing some incredibly chirpy pop tune at just enough of a volume for the lyrics to be intelligible - something about fireflies - while still leaving you straining to hear more, and the video display built into the electronic smartcloth of the billboard was showing some Hollywood-gorgeous teenaged girl dancing on a stage while music video special effects sparkled in the background. Then the video faded out to text along with a professional announcer's voice reading out the blurb for the illiterate as the 'advertising' portion of the banner kicked in.
  
  Coming Soon! Christy Daee, the record-breaking five-time MTCA Award winner of 2066, along with Grim Aurora and other top acts! The We Are The World Concert Tour of 2067 is honored to bring the finest in music entertainment to Lagos, starting on May 17th at the Lagos Island Amphitheatre!
  
  Tickets available on the Matrix at any participating Pathfinder Multimedia node or at any one of these exciting local locations-
  
  I mostly ignored the list of local stores that were cooperating with the promotion - the vast majority of them in the Islands district only, of course, but part of my brain surprisedly noted that several locations in the Ikeja manufacturing district and even the Mushin marketplace were listed - as I tried to figure out what kind of absolute lunatic was going to bring platinum-award winning pop stars and rock bands to Lagos. I'm pretty sure that the banner drone alone was the first time that showbiz advertising like that was seen in Nigerian airspace since the Awakening! Jesus Christ, even if they never left the Islands district at all I still wouldn't want to be working security for that concert even with the entire 77th-
  
  Wait, what had that latest message been?
  
  Apply now for our promotional ticket giveaway, Tonight only at the Why Not? Nightclub in Victoria Island!
  (First come, first served. Armed patrons will be politely denied service. The club management reserves the right to deny admittance for purposes of avoiding overcrowding).
  
  Why Not? was the most banging music club in Lagos, and since it was on Victoria Island it was also a reasonably safe place to go. Although the stampede that this message would just start-
  
  I started running as fast as I possibly could towards Victoria Island.
  
  This promotion brought to you by Horizon Africa and Pathfinder Multimedia Entertainment.
  
  Well God bless Horizon then, because the littlest and most recent AAA that could had just given me a gold-plated opportunity right out of the blue.
  
  I arrived at the security cordon over 100 meters away from Why Not? to see that Horizon had actually anticipated the freaking riot that their little promotion would cause, and had both copious rented local muscle - Ahigbe gang colors, I noticed, meaning that they'd have at least some vague idea of restraint and fire discipline - and clean-cut looking corporate security out in force, making sure that nobody line jumped and nobody trampled each other. Because sure enough, half of everybody who could make it to the Islands district at all was trying to jam into one large nightclub. They'd set up the 'giveaway' stations outside in the street just to spare the poor owner the damages, although I was certain they were still going to make out like a bandit tonight on the rush of business from both lucky winners and unlucky losers.
  
  The giveaway booths seemed to be holding some kind of random-number lottery so that they could move as many people through as possible instead of having to make the entire crowd wait while they did a raffle or a talent show or something. Also, it was a lot harder to bribe a megacorporate computer than it was any metahuman contest proctor - this was Lagos, after all.
  
  I rapidly studied the entire scene, evaluated the perimeter for weaknesses, and made my plan.
  
  I was hardly the only person standing around outside the security perimeter waiting for a lucky ticket winner to come back out across it without having been smart enough to hire a short-term bodyguard to get the precious payload back to the hotel, and without owning a commlink and a SIN so that they could just have their ticket digitally credited to their account instead of being a physical chip that could be stolen. Fortunately for me, I was perhaps the only would-be vulture who had sufficient adept hearing and vision that I could pull a Kal-El and scan and listen to the entire crowd. Even for me concentrating like this was - well, not a headache, as I could arbitrarily scale mental capacity to need - but still tedious as hell, because being able to process and tolerate a sensory overload without the overload didn't stop it from being a shit ton of crap to wade through.
  
  At any rate, after somewhat less than an hour of waiting a lucky young man and his excited girlfriend - both of them Lagosian locals, and who judging from their clothes and relative cleanliness were servants employed at one of the richer white people mansions around here - came skipping out. Since lucky tickets were not being given away in pairs and they were both happy instead of arguing about it, that meant-
  
  Aaaaand, here comes a group of Area Boys right on schedule. Igbo tribal thugs the lot of them, and only walking around freely on the Islands because all the affiliated sub-sets of gangs underneath the 'Area Boys' umbrella were the closest Lagos had to an actual police force anywhere outside the Islands district. Indeed, one of the richest local residents of Victoria Island was Chidi Ene, a multimillionaire whose own pocket Xanadu of decadence and white marble mansion was as far removed from the squalor of the slums as could possibly be imagined - but who'd had every single nuyen of his millions paid for as his percentage of the 'taxes' and 'fees' that the Area Boys squeezed out of every unlucky person they could watch walking with too many naira burning a hole in their pockets as payment for the 'protection' they offered those very same streets.
  
  So with two unarmed people barely Cat's age facing six thugs with machetes and assault rifles, it was a foregone conclusion. They didn't even try to resist - and rightly so, as the Area Boys would have cut them down without a second thought for so much as being backtalked - even as they wept openly at seeing their one good stroke of fortune be taken away from them. The thugs laughed at the colossal naivete of the rich oyibos from out of town who had no idea of the reality of Lagos and what misery their 'giveaway' would be provoking at second-hand everywhere in the sprawl tonight-
  
  And then I arrived, and that fight was an equally foregone conclusion. Not a single one of them even got a shot off. Which was good, because this was the Islands and unlike other places in Lagos, gunfire actually stood out here.
  
  "Hey." I called out to the white-faced young couple as they turned to flee. "Don't run, this is yours!"
  
  "... you're giving it back?" the young man goggled as they came to a shocked halt, both of them as nonplussed as if I'd materialized a purple talking unicorn out of thin air in front of them. In fact, they'd probably have been less confused by the unicorn. Illusion magic was a thing Lagosians could understand, but charity and justice were far far rarer.
  
  "I noticed that you had only one ticket, but you both were still happy. Which means you weren't arguing over who got to use it, which means you were going to sell it and use the nest egg to build a new life together." I answered them.
  
  "What else would anyone possibly do with so valuable a thing?" the young woman berated me as if I were the stupidest man on Earth. "Of course we were going to sell it-"
  
  The young man interrupted her, having already seen where I was going. "You wish to buy it?"
  
  "It'd be only fair, don't you think?" I shrugged.
  
  "But why?" she asked me matter-of-factly. "You were strong enough to take it from the Area Boys, just as they were strong enough to take it from us. You don't need to pay us to keep it."
  
  How to explain fair trade and rule of law to people who'd grown up not even seeing such a concept on the trid, let alone in their lives-?
  
  "Let's just say I'm paying you for the privilege of not being disgusting pigs like them." I finally answered them.
  
  "Okay!" her young man agreed quickly. "So, would you pay five thousand?"
  
  "Sure." I agreed, pulling the certified credstick out of my pocket and slapping into his hand. "But I should probably walk you to your moneychanger, so you can not only cash that but you actually reach him still with it."
  
  "I meant naira, sir, not nuyen!" he said, aghast as he looked down at what I'd just handed him.
  
  "No takebacks!" I replied impishly. "We already shook on it!"
  
  "Crazy oyibo." I heard her mutter under her breath, but I was feeling too cheerful to really care.
  
  Because in addition to my having gotten a chance to actually do a good deed in Lagos, even if it was just a drop of pure water in a pollute ocean, there was also that I'd just majorly advanced my mission. Because if there was one thing a crimelord who had an inappropriate taste for young girls would like to trade me for, it would be a chance to ogle one of the most famous and beautiful teenagers in the world at her concert. Even if there would be a small army of corpsec to keep him from doing anything but a tastefully distant ogle. Especially if, in fact. Because otherwise I'd have sooner thrown this ticket in the ocean.
  
  But fortunately for me, the rest of the plan worked as scheduled. With concert ticket in hand, calling the "Port Master's" mansion and offering to scalp the ticket got me exactly what I wanted - a face-to-face with the man at a neutral site. We amiably did our business at the 'Diamond Traders' bar and I reasonably informed him that certain out-of-town interests were looking to psychologically manipulate him and try to hook him on the cheap instead of simply coming to him and offering to pay an honest price like men. The appeal to his ego worked - it's not like it was that hard - and Roger Iweke threw the full resources of his crime syndicate/portmaster's service (again, like there was any real difference in Lagos) to tracking down our out-of-town stranger. As he was a major local figure instead of a lone oyibo like me we'd had the guy run down by morning, and as per part of the agreed-upon fee for the ticket I got to interrogate the man alone. Iweke wasn't really interested in the who/what/where/why behind the guy, after all, he'd just wanted an assurance that the insulting greedy foreigner would be suitably dealt with.
  
  So, shortly before dawn my target and I had a quiet chat on a nice, private - if sadly oil-stained - beach overlooking the ocean.
  
  "Right. This is the part where I don't torture you." I opened with.
  
  "Isn't that a little backwards?" he sneered from where he was solidly tied hand and foot to an old rusty steel chair.
  
  "Wouldn't work." I said, kneeling down alongside him. "I mean, there's entirely circumstances where it would have a certain utilarian value... but this isn't one of them. I bend your body parts backwards until you squeal, you'll tell me what I want to hear and three or four other versions of it. Then I spend weeks trying to figure out which version is actually true, by which point the intel is stale enough bread I could grow penicillin on it. You're a sole source of information, not something I can cross-check against other sources to quickly eliminate false positives. So..."
  
  "All this effort for nothing, then?" he scoffed.
  
  "God, you're a stupid cunt." I said frustratedly. "But then again, only an idiot would have walked straight into the most famous newbie scam in Lagos. How much did the Spider clip you for?"
  
  "... I don't want to talk about it." he grumped.
  
  "Yeah, you're really not experienced at working the Lagos beat at all, are you?" I said. "That's probably why you haven't already figured out why you're going to cooperate with me fully."
  
  "Why would I ever do that?" he eye-rolled.
  
  "Do you seriously not understand that the Port Master thinks I paid him for the privilege of torturing you to death myself?" I patiently explained to him. "If you're seen walking around alive again in Lagos later today, then he'll deal with you. Probably while thinking that I'm an idiot fuck-up who let you escape, but like I care about that sleazebag's good opinion of me. And the previous guy who insulted Iweke the way you did was last seen being worked over with the same cutting torches they use to take apart those old shipwrecks for the scrap metal. They started at the feet you see, and worked up a couple inches at a time-"
  
  "You're lying!" he said desperately. "And I never insulted the man at all!"
  
  "Technically you didn't." I agreed. "But after I got through negotiating with him he certainly thinks you did. I'm already a professional killer, after all, so what's a little white lie or two?"
  
  "What's your game?" he asked me desperately.
  
  "I want to know who you work for, of course." I said.
  
  "I'm dead if I tell you!" he said heatedly.
  
  "You're very dead if you don't." I said simply. "So, would you like the high probability of your boss being extremely upset with you at a later date, or the absolute certainty that the only way you will live out the day is with my help?"
  
  "I-" he broke off.
  
  "Would you like a few minutes alone with your thoughts while you ponder that one? I'm not the person on a strict timetable." I offered, and then before he could answer I calmly walked away and down the beach. Far enough to see if he escaped and easily run him down, but just far enough he'd think I couldn't hear him calling.
  
  Sure enough, the minutes of stewing it over and feeling even more out of control of even the tiniest element of the situation made him decide to take his chances. I knew exactly how he felt, given that I'd once faced a similar choice in strapping on a parachute I'd never had any training in how to use because the alternative was maybe having to go off the roof without a parachute. Although by the end of the night I'd had to do the drop sans parachute anyway... okay, perhaps I didn't think that metaphor entirely through.
  
  At any rate, our sweating would-be corporate black op had finally reached the point where he'd give it up, and so I eagerly awaited what would hopefully spare me from having to spend another fucking day in Lagos doing a solo black op. Because honestly, this weekend had just been tedious enough as is.
  
  "All right, I admit it. The corporation I was hired to do legwork for also hired MET2000. He finally got fed up with the standoff and is putting his full power into breaking it. He wants the oil fields, the pipeline, the port, all of it. And he's going to get it, so whatever pitiful king or petty merc band you're working for might as well get smart and cut a deal before the cutting reaches their necks!" he boasted.
  
  "Do you get paid by the word?" I sighed. "Or do you just want to hear me belabor the incredibly obvious question? Okay, fine, consider it belabored. Who is 'he'?" I finished wearily.
  
  "Neil the Ork Barbarian!" he scoffed. "Who the hell do you think it is? Who's the richest and most powerful player in the petrochemical industry or any other? Who is-"
  
  I cleared my throat. Loudly.
  
  "Saeder-Krupp!" he finally burst out. "The Great Dragon Lofwyr! Who else could it possibly be?!?"
  
  
  
  Author's Notes: Dun dun dun! Cliffhanger!
  
  I was actually building up to a dramatic manhunt across Lagos when I realized my MC is too smart to do a stern chase when he already knows the endpoint of the run. Then I was building up to a massive Splinter Cell type run on the Port Master's mansion when I realized that I wanted to get Horizon and their unique approach to corporate expansion and marketing on-stage in some way because I have vague notions of using that later, and by applying a little English to the shot I could easily make it serve the current mission objective. And so, concert tickets.
  
  Because while it's not a real shadowrun until the Johnson's screwed you twice, it's not a real Shadowrun campaign until either the DM or the players have done something entirely gonzo and made it work anyway. *g*
  
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  "Lofwyr?" Cat gasped to me as we were catching up back in our quarters. You didn't often see someone literally drop their jaw in shock, but I just had.
  
  "I know, right?" I expostulated. "How unbelievable can bullshit get? Who was possibly expected to fall for his story?"
  
  "Him, obviously." she eye-rolled. "But yes, even though he was clearly intended to be eventually caught and pumped dry, they could at least have primed him with better disinformation. Then again, maybe he blew his lines. They'd obviously picked him for dumb, and I'm surprised he lasted long enough in Lagos for you to find him still alive at the end of the run."
  
  "Well, it helped that he mostly treated the experience as a free excuse to junket in the Islands district and enjoy the unique recreational opportunities of war-torn Africa." I said disgustedly. "So he mostly stayed fartsing around where all the rich oyibos don't get themselves casually murdered. Much."
  
  "Seem as if." she agreed. "But yes, it couldn't possibly be Lofwyr. Nobody at Saeder-Krupp Prime would last long in a covert operations job slot at that degree of incompetence, even if it was just poor judgment in hiring subcontractors." she analyzed. "Plus the even more basic flaw in that theory. Like we said, MET2000's entire campaign only works if Global Sandstorm is foolish enough to not strategically reposition the camp and run out the shot clock. And when did Lofwyr ever use a strategy that required the enemy's cooperation in helping script his dream engagement? That's literally a 'The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries' level failure!"
  
  "The thing is, if we weren't expected to believe it - and you're right, the Major and the command staff certainly don't - then who was?" I mused out loud.
  
  Cat blinked. "Oh, fuck." she swore anxiously. "Okay, this is a valid operational question and I am in intel section as well as comms, so please tell me. What is the Major going to do with him?"
  
  "Give him back to Saeder-Krupp, of course." I shrugged. "My suggestion, but she'd already gotten that far on her own. If he's somehow genuinely an S-K operative then we lose nothing by being polite and can possibly earn a few brownie points, and if he's a false flag then Saeder-Krupp will be far more motivated and able than we are to run down exactly who's playing games in their name. S-K Prime is having to fly in a representative from the Arabian Confederation for the pick-up due to not having a local office - or at least any they'll admit to having - so the hand-off isn't until tomorrow."
  
  Cat nodded and stood up, reaching for her uniform blouse and pants on the nearby hook and starting to button back up and get herself presentable enough for work. "Then I need to go to work on this right now, because I just had a horrible suspicion."
  
  "Anything you can tell me?" I said, sitting up.
  
  "The only reason anyone halfway competent picks an operative who can't keep his mouth shut to save his life is when they want his gossip all over town. So left to his own devices, eventually every info broker in Lagos should know that it was Saeder-Krupp who probably hired the Metalheads, even if there's no actual proof of it and even if the idiot himself was dead in a ditch by then. If the idiot hadn't spent so much time goofing off on his expense account and not really working, that would already have happened." she laid down.
  
  "Yes, but how does that work out for whoever hired him?" I asked her.
  
  Cat sighed. "Alex, who is the one possible player in the game who can guarantee Global Sandstorm's cooperation in helping set up their ideal scenario?"
  
  "... Global Sandstorm." I cursed, getting to my own feet and starting to square away my own uniform. "So it's entirely possible that we're being set up to fail by our own client."
  
  "I certainly hope not, but apparently Johnson Screws aren't just for shadowrunners." she sighed.
  
  After we spent almost an hour that morning in Netcat's cubicle frantically doing some data lookups, we dropped the text into the 77th's local subnet.
  
  (Netcat) Wild Man and I have time-sensitive analysis of URGENT priority for the Commanding Officer and the Intelligence Officer. Request face-to-face conference at earliest convenience.
  
  In less than a minute the reply text came in on both our commlinks.
  
  (Picador) Secure conference room in 15 minutes.
  
  After we'd finished our impromptu presentation, the Major turned to look at Captain Vandervoort.
  
  "I believe them." the 77th's S-2 said. "Everyone knows that Saeder-Krupp and Global Sandstorm have been knife fighting over the Arabian petroleum cartel ever since the Global Oil/Sandstorm Engineering merger of 2064 created the megacorporation in the first place. And their regional near-monopoly is one of the main things keeping Global Sandstorm rated as a AA megacorporation at all."
  
  "Didn't Global Sandstorm essentially lock in the Caliphate's support at their start, after Ibn Eisa's 'Islamic Unity Movement' collapsed when it was revealed he was actually possessed by a master shedim?' Picador asked him.
  
  "The Caliph doesn't have the juice right now to pick his own breakfast menu without CEO al-Shammar's permission, yes." the Captain nodded. "But that just means there's a lot of second-tier players in the Caliphate who are losing out because Global Sandstorm burst out onto the scene to hog all the pie, and that means they'd be potentially more willing to deal with a dragon despite Lofwyr's own historical unpopularity in the region."
  
  "So Global Sandstorm needs a major public embarrassment for Saeder-Krupp this year to shore up their new cartel dominance at home." Specialist Connors contributed smartly. "We did some quick data-mining before the meeting-" A few quick commands to her commlink put the charts and graphs up in everyone's personal HUDs.
  
  "It's just preliminary trends so far, but the marketing and poll data and investment chatter indicates that Global Sandstorm might genuinely lose several important secondary refining contracts to Saeder-Krupp this summer if they can't get ahead of the news cycle." the captain agreed. "I would not be surprised if the in-depth follow-up I'm going to have my people run on this question after the meeting confirms Specialist Connors' preliminary results. And the thing about a monopoly cartel is, once the dam starts cracking at all- especially with the size of the prybar that Lofwyr could jam into any real crack-"
  
  "Damn." Picador cursed. "Even with everything both us and MET2000 would cost, even if they somehow worst-cased it and lost the pipeline here entirely, the bath they'd take on all that still wouldn't hit their bottom line nearly as hard as if they stopped dominating the Arabian oil cartel as thoroughly as they do now. And while 'the Arabian Shogun' is smart enough to start working on defusing the resentment now that it's plain that it exists, he was clearly caught off guard while it was initially building. So he needs a big PR coup this season to keep his bubble from bursting in the short term until he can gradually ease the pressure over the long-term... no matter the cost."
  
  "He obviously couldn't prove Saeder-Krupp was guilty of war crimes, because in this presumed scenario they didn't genuinely hire MET2000. But if the contract was run through enough blinds and escrows, even the Metalheads wouldn't know who their client really was. And if there were enough innuendos and hints in the Lagos shadows that it was obviously Saeder-Krupp even if nobody could actually bring them up in front of a war crimes tribunal-" the captain noted.
  
  "MET2000 will think they can avoid the charges for what their client is demanding be done because if they stage-manage the atrocity right they can blame it on our incompetence. Global Sandstorm, who'd be the ones prosecuting the war crimes, can sandbag hard enough on the investigation to let that actually work. Saeder-Krupp escapes conviction because they were never genuinely here, but all the stage-managing leaves them looking guilty as hell in the court of public opinion. It's hardly as if Lofwyr has a nice reputation for how he does business, after all. And, of course, no local operator in the Middle East can even look like they're making a conciliatory gesture towards Saeder-Krupp for the next six to twelve months without massively blackening their own reps in the process and letting Global Sandstorm eat their lunches that way. Damned if they do, damned if they don't, and everybody walks away at least at status quo ante. Except for us, because we're the scapegoats." Picador sighed. "What a potential nightmare."
  
  "Potential." the captain agreed. "Because while it's certainly a horrific prospect, we don't have any proof yet."
  
  "We definitely have a new set of concerns we need to raise with Lofwyr's representative tomorrow, though." the Major nodded to both of us. "So well done the both of you at putting all this together and getting it in front of us before then. And now, it's time for the traditional reward for a job well done."
  
  "Another job." Cat and I both chorused.
  
  "Exactly." she agreed. "As of now you are both detached for a separate intel operation underneath Captain Vandervoort's overall coordination. Specifically, Operation 'Find Out How Fucked We Might Really Be And Fast'."
  
  "We have a chain of command problem there, Major." I diffidently pointed out.
  
  "We're a merc company, not the UCAS Army." she retorted. "The fraternization regs are here to help keep this lash-up functioning, not because I've got a spit-and-polish fetish. And as you two turned up this critical piece of analysis because of pillow talk, I'm hardly going to demand you both keep it in your pants now." she smirked at us. "Just don't let it get in the way of the work."
  
  "Yes ma'am." we both answered her.
  
  "Good." she sighed. "All right, dismissed. Captain, tell the Sergeant-Major I want an officer's call in the mess at 1100. But don't put the announcement out on the company subnet, word-of-mouth only. And especially do not invite the client rep."
  
  "Yes ma'am." he acknowledged, and we all got moving.
  
  
  
  Step one was to crack our Global Sandstorm liaison officer's commlink. The XO distracted him with a meeting, I slipped a data-key that 'Cat had preprepared into his commlink's slot with a bit of discreet pickpocketing in the outer office. Cat used the window of opportunity that the trojan had opened for her to wirelessly hack and pull a dump of every file on the man's commlink, then wipe all traces that she'd ever been in there. All I had to do was slip the key back out of the slot as the man departed, and voila. Not a footprint in the sand.
  
  Sadly, we did not benefit from the cliche of having all the documentation to neatly break open the conspiracy stored in the pocket of the first guy we searched. While all of his emails and progress reports would make interesting reading, the information of most immediate use was his access codes for the local Global Sandstorm Matrix host. I'd had a suspicion of what possible corroborating evidence we could find in there, and even though it took us well into the evening to crunch that much raw data we eventually found it.
  
  "Your hunch was right." Cat said. "Judging by all these HR reports and recent transfers, anybody who was of high value to the corporation was quietly pulled out ahead of time and replaced with marginal cases that they could more easily afford to lose. Oh, it's not just a dumping ground for the awkward squad - that would be too obvious - but several hundred employees all selected for a geographically remote and theoretically high-value post and not one of them is fast-tracker material? Even the new site supervisor has a track record that's basically undistinguished, and certainly has nothing in his experience base that would recommend him for a high-risk post in Africa."
  
  "Sacrificial lambs, and on the cheap." I nodded. "So, another one for the suspicions pile."
  
  "But still nothing solid. Because without hard proof in hand that the client is selling us out, we can't breach our contract." she sighed. "So, what's next?"
  
  "Going from the man's email traffic, our liaison agreed with the Major that pulling the camp out would be the best move but he was overruled from corporate HQ. So apparently none of the GS locals on the ground here are in on the scam, if it is a scam. Everyone's a mushroom, so we won't find any hard proof here." I analyzed.
  
  "We can't fly down to Riyadh to try cracking the GS central hosts there." she said. "Even if I was up to that level of hacker, which I'm not quite yet-"
  
  "Yeah, that would take someone like Pistons on a good day." I agreed. "And we don't have the budget for this op to hire her or anyone like her, because we have to keep our client from noticing and the client rep would certainly notice if we suddenly moved that kind of money into unvouchered funds." I shrugged. "That's a client rep's main job, after all, to provide accounting oversight to ensure that the PMC isn't soaking the client by playing games with the expense funding."
  
  "So what can we do?" she asked me.
  
  "Well, if you can't win head-on then you outflank." I shrugged. "If our theory is correct then MET2000 doesn't know who's hiring them. But no matter how blind they're working, they still have to know what bank account numbers their paychecks are coming from. And while of course they'll be using blind accounts and front companies, while the 77th doesn't have the juice to be able to unravel that kind of international money laundering setup in time Saeder-Krupp certainly does."
  
  "So we need the detailed financials from the local MET2000 force's own internal records." she nodded. "And assuming they don't immediately reveal that S-K actually did hire the Metalheads, then we can hand those off to Saeder-Krupp as potential leads for whoever's trying to frame them."
  
  "And then the big bad corporate dragon can go make life miserable for Global Sandstorm, which he already wants to do anyway, and help our asses out in the process." I said. "So..." I trailed off.
  
  "I know." she said quietly. "We'd actually have to put the hacker inside their close perimeter somehow to reach their internal subnet. And that means taking the hacker well and truly into the field. And there's only a few people in Signals who have the cracking expertise to do the hack at all and out of them all, I'm by far the best shot. And the only one who actually did more than minimally scrape by on the PT test or possesses even peripheral field experience."
  
  "Where was that?" I asked her, curiously. "Because I know you didn't get it with me."
  
  "Tarislar." she surprised me, naming the elven enclave in the Puyallup Barrens. "I was the only person in two generations of my family to go to college, and one of the only three people who graduated high school. And while I was hardly out there running with the Ancients when I was a girl, I at least learned how to keep an eye out for incoming fire and when to duck a bullet. Had to do that several times, and that's a lot closer than any of those other college kids have ever gotten to doing it."
  
  "No wonder you didn't want to go to Underworld 23." I remembered. "You'd already tasted Puyallup's local ambience, and didn't want to go back."
  
  "Oh, Tarislar's almost civilized now." she corrected me. "Certainly more than Puyallup average. Enough money's made it back into the neighborhood that they could actually hire Knight Errant for a local police contract and restore basic utilities. But yeah, back when I was knee-high to a devil rat it was at least as nasty as Touristville. So while that's hardly the same as actual combat experience-"
  
  "You at least did more than just minimally scrape by the 77th's combat training, and you've already lost your 'being shot at' virginity so we can be certain you won't freeze if taking incoming fire." I agreed. "Great. I'm pretty sure that when the Major gave us permission to ignore the fraternization regs while I was technically your squad NCO, she didn't mean while actively deployed on special operations!" I raged.
  
  "You know you'll have to ask her." Cat pointed out to me firmly. "And you have to take me out with the rest of the team. Needs must."
  
  "Needs must." I reluctantly agreed. "Well I hope you've haven't been skimping on your daily run recently, because extended behind-the-lines ops are just a wee bit strenuous."
  
  The Saeder-Krupp representative discreetly arrived - we did the hand-off in Lagos proper precisely to keep our client rep from noticing it - and politely heard out our concerns and left us a Matrix drop-box we could leave the bank info in if and when we ever obtained it. They then took our hapless would-be spy and flew away with him, and we got back to planning the upcoming recon strike on MET2000.
  
  Because the war had not been on hold while I'd been busy in Lagos or 'Cat and I had been busy with our detached operation.
  
  Now, MET2000 wasn't blitzing us quite as hard as they could have, but that was because the 77th had made every possible use of defensive and terrain advantage we could to turn the possible lines of approach into deadly tank traps while denying them the chance for a superior artillery duel as much as possible. They had enough firepower to blow through our minefields and anti-tank rocket teams and short-range gun drones by main force, but not without losing a goodly chunk of their shiny new armor in the process. And for a mercenary company, their troops and their heavy equipment were their capital. You didn't expend more of either than you had to, not even to get a rapid victory. Even the Metalheads didn't have endless money to burn and had to worry about less people wanting to sign up if the casualty rates for their predecessors got too high, so for as long as a war of attrition favored them then they'd readily stick with it even if it meant taking the scenic route.
  
  But that didn't mean that people weren't dying. Trench warfare versus a more heavily-armed opponent was no joke, and advantage of position could only do so much to make up for deficits in firepower. The 77th had already taken almost ten percent casualties among the line units, and even though many of those casualties would eventually recover enough to return to duty at least a few of them would only do so after the Major shelled out for new body parts. And eventually was still too long in the future to do anything for us right now.
  
  Several other companies would already have broken under our losses. Even the 77th was starting to feel the grim pinch pretty hard. But El Cuadrilla loved their CO, trusted their officers, and had their mission and their unit pride, and so we'd hold the line for as long as we could. Which wasn't going to be quite long enough, not if things continued as they were.
  
  While I could learn essentially anything I put my mind to at superhuman speed, I was not equally as gifted at teaching. Oh, my mysterious powers would amplify me at need to make a nigh-perfect instructor at anything I already knew how to do, but being superhumanly efficient at teaching still capped out at a definite point. I might be essentially flawless at perceiving the flaws in a person's development, understanding how to fix it, and conveying that understanding in a fashion useable by the student, but even 'no wasted time or effort at all' level teaching was still ultimately limited by the inherent potential of the student.
  
  So while my ongoing help with her general fitness and unarmed training had turned 'Cat into an extremely fit black-belt, and she'd already been a crack shot from years and years of ultrarealistic VR video gaming and had had both me and Master Sergeant Martinez to coach through the differences of translating virtual reality into real guns, she still wasn't a tithe on someone like Fatima or Pistons, let alone someone with my bullshit cheats. Experience counted, and so did total man-hours of time spent training and working out, and she simply hadn't had the time to gather as much of those as some other people had. There's also that while she was hardly unathletic neither was she exceptionally agile or strong, and some other people just were.
  
  Even so, while she wouldn't have qualified on her own merits for the spec-ops grade that Recon Platoon was expected to cut she was still entirely competent by the standards of normal line infantry. So as a necessary technical specialist doing a ride-along with the squad, and one who wasn't expected to bear the heavy burden of the fighting, she'd still be good enough to take along on the op. Especially given my frantic last-minute training in stealth skills, which while hardly making her a ninja still meant we should be able to avoid the action movie cliche of her being the one to step on a twig or cough at the wrong time.
  
  So, a rational person would still hate the risk of taking her along but be able to accept it and understand that it was not wholly unjustified. I was not anywhere near a rational person where Cat was involved, and it took amping myself up for literally superhuman amounts of self-control and repression to avoid blowing the whole deal at any one of several points.
  
  The paradox was that my ability to do this was one of the reasons I felt so close to Cat in the first place. Not that it was the only reason I did, or even my primary reason for doing so. And it would have been massively psychologically unhealthy for it to be the main or only reason. But the fact remained that my superhuman ability to scale up my mental or physical attributes as needed or strongly desired included scaling up my ability to put aside my own misgivings and commit to a single course of action... even potentially against my own good sense or conscience. And while normally I was actually more ethically straight-laced then Cat was - indeed, her growing up in Puyallup finally helped me understand where she'd picked up her definite tinge of gray-area 'flexibility' despite not being inclined to it by personality - I could possibly shift my mental gears over into being an ice-cold monster if I ever seriously tried, while the moral and emotional inclinations that Cat naturally possessed would only evolve and change within natural human limits.
  
  In short, she was my touchstone. If I ever started to seriously horrify or alienate her, then I could know that I'd somehow evolved too far off-center without my noticing. And yes, you didn't have to be a lover to do that for someone - friends would also suffice, and I was making those - but she was still my chief touchstone, as well as the person I trusted and cared for the most.
  
  So yeah, having to take her deep into the jungle for a behind-the-lines raid on an MET2000 camp? I hated it.
  
  
  
  "Drone. Down!" 'Fadeout', our CQB specialist, whispered just ahead of me as the faint whining of its rotors sounded in both her and my augmented ears, and we all hit the dirt and froze. Our infra-red diffusing ponchos would keep our silhouettes from showing up too distinctly on the overhead sensors, but nothing drew the eye of either an analysis program or a sensor operator like movement did. So us pretending to be animals would still be helped by our being stationary animals.
  
  "It's gone." Netcat eventually whispered, her passive sensors putting the display on the local HUD projected into her helmet visor.
  
  "Into the river." I said, rising back up to a crouch as our four-man team resumed movement. "We use the water from here on out."
  
  "Ugh, leeches." 'Long-Tom', our sharpshooter, muttered as we entered the filthy creek bed up to our thighs and started wading. Of course we were wearing sealed boots and leggings, because you'd have to be psychotic to soak yourself in Nigerian groundwater around here, and all had transgenic immunity treatments besides, but... yeah. Ugh, leeches.
  
  I cocked an eye at Cat to make sure she was all right, then turned back to keeping an eye and ear on everything else. Fadeout had point, I was second, Netcat was third, and Long-Tom had drag.
  
  "Distance check?" I asked after we'd spent the next ten minutes slowly and quietly advancing, as we took a breather underneath a low wooden bridge.
  
  "Approximately two klicks to go." Fadeout said as we all checked the map and GPS display for ourselves.
  
  "Time to window?" I asked Netcat.
  
  "Asgard clears the horizon in 19 minutes. We'll have 93 minutes after that until she's out of angle again." she replied coolly.
  
  "One and a half hours of eye in the sky." Long-Tom agreed. "That gets us in, but not all the way out."
  
  "Out we can take our time on." I said. "Or just run like the clappers. In is the tricky part, and that's why the Major authorized actually paying to rent reconsat time to let us spot and evade the patrols."
  
  "Tell grandma how to suck eggs." Fadeout said tolerantly, and we hunkered down to wait for the satellite. Cat started to nervously shift after a few minutes, but my hand on her shoulder calmed her down. She wasn't quite used to the sheer amount of 'hurry-up-and-wait' that long-range recon patrol behind the lines often involved.
  
  "All right, 'Cat, you're the one that does the plot. Call patterns and strays." I said as we synced our commlinks to the portable satellite feed that was part of her EW pack. The final approach to the camp would be done with the advantage of our being able to see all of MET2000's patrol vehicles and drones even more readily than their overhead cover could see us. Asgard was an megacorporate ELINT satellite turned freelance orbital data haven and reconsat-for-rent when Fuchi Industrial Electronics, one of the founding AAA megacorps of the Corporate Court, had 'lost' one of their most advanced spysats during their 2060 breakup. Picked up by some shadowy entrepreneurs, they'd gleefully turned it into a rather unique cash cow of the shadows. And while normally renting this much time on their recon platform would have been ridiculously expensive, we'd gotten a discounted bulk rate because it's not as if they normally got any business in this particular ass end of their satellite's low-earth-orbit window.
  
  "Time to make the donut holes." Long-Tom said cheerfully as we headed out.
  
  "Weapons tight." I reminded everyone dutifully. "We go waking the neighbors before we've pulled the data we need, we wasted the whole trip."
  
  What would have been a leisurely fifteen-minute jog for us was almost a nail-bitingly tense hour as we slowly and carefully did stop-and-go, duck-and-weave, and time-and-wait as we evaded more drones, a patrolling AFV, listening posts, and a nasty ground sensor grid a hundred meters out from their wire. Fadeout, who was also a qualified minefield-clearing specialist, did her thing by creeping close enough to get a hand on one of the sensor emplacements without quite tripping its threshold and then hotwiring it into test mode. MET2000 had actually surprised us by laying fiber instead of using wireless hookups on the perimeter grid, so Cat couldn't hack it.
  
  "Can you plug into this end and hit the host that way?" I asked as we drew up behind an irregular knot of ground to obscure LOS from the camp itself and Fadeout handed Netcat the stripped fiber end.
  
  "Let me try..." she said, and hooked it up and jacked in. About ten seconds later she popped her jack. "Nope. It's just a feeder, slaved to a dedicated grid. You want me to risk trying to kick the whole grid into blindspot mode?"
  
  "Yes." I said after thinking it over. "The ability to leave the camp in any direction other than the one we came in might be useful."
  
  "Two minutes." she replied, and after diving back into Matrix space we tensely waited until she reported all-clear. "Okay, everything all the way to the fence itself is now loopy. Understand, this starts a new mission clock for us, because if their duty tech on watch notices the looping-"
  
  "Risk of the job." I agreed. "All right, step two."
  
  Netcat left an auxiliary transceiver spliced to the fiber end in case she wanted to talk to the sensor grid again in the future and went back into her commlink's AR to look for open wireless points around camp. "Chatter... entertainment channels... ooo, DirectX simsense even, fancy. Maybe I should VR that." she finished cheekily.
  
  "Mind, gutter, out." I said amusedly, while the rest of us chuckled.
  
  "Philistines." she joked. "And... wow, somebody actually stayed awake in communications security school. Who'd expect that from the Metalheads? The camp subnet is all routine and housekeeping. Commander's records and other classified stuff? No indications of any nodes with that kind of protection."
  
  "Sealed VPN." I swore. "Damn. Suggestions?" I asked the resident expert.
  
  "I need to be inside the wire." Netcat replied. "And plug into either a terminal in one of the huts or the onboard comms in one of the combat vehicles, so I can reach MET2000's own private LTG."
  
  "Pull a full-spectrum overhead of the firebase from Asgard and put it on everyone's display." I sighed. "Let's look at options."
  
  Fadeout's cybernetics and my physad abilities could let us simply clear the outer fence in a high-jump. Long-Tom and Netcat didn't quite have the augs for that, but with one of us on each side we could simply toss the other two over if need be, like a circus act. So with the outer sensor grid down we were able to circle the camp and come up on a darkened section that didn't have anyone awake in the middle of the night except several lookouts, keeping an eye out to make sure nobody had stolen of the vehicles from this, one of MET2000's several forward operating firebases in this otherwise uninhabited section of rural Africa.
  
  "Shit, they're not moving." Long-Tom said as he looked at them through his scope. "Those aren't rovers, those are posted."
  
  "11 minutes until Asgard is down." Netcat chimed in.
  
  "I am not laying with my nose in the mud this close to their wire until the eye in the sky comes around again." I said. "Netcat, switch Asgard to ELINT mode. While we've got any window left let's listen instead of look. Are any of the posted guards actively transmitting?"
  
  "No." she said after running an analysis. "My own antenna hears nothing, neither does our orbital microwave snooper."
  
  "They don't have vital signs monitors or deadman switches." Long-Tom nodded. "I guess even the Metalheads only gold-plate their toilets, not platinum-plate 'em."
  
  "Well, it's just past the hour, meaning they won't call the guardroom for another hour if they're following SOP." I agreed, unlimbering my own rifle. "Netcat spots me, Fadeout spots Long-Tom."
  
  "One on the left." he agreed, settling into position.
  
  "One on the right." I acknowledged ."And tail-end Charlie looking out from the corner is for whoever finishes first. On my go... three... two... one..."
  
  Two silenced rifle shots went off as one, and Long-Tom's followed up an instant later to put down the third guard overlooking the vehicle park. What, I wasn't greedy. Our respective spotter girls called away the hits as confirmed, and we got ready to infiltrate.
  
  "Maintenance hut's too close to the outer fence. Sloppy. Fadeout, hit the roof there and I'll toss 'em up to you." I called.
  
  Her hydraulic legs sprang and she silently flew into the night to neatly land on the roof of the hut near the fence with barely a whisper. My own strength was more than enough to send Long-Tom up to her with no problem, let alone Cat. Long-Tom was acrobatic enough he barely needed Fadeout's assistance to land smoothly, and while this was the first time Netcat had done such a maneuver that's why I'd waited until there were two people ready to catch her and pull her up.
  
  We got off the roof as quickly as possible. While it was a new moon and thus relatively dark, far too many men in this camp had cybereyes and everyone had NVGs built into their helmet faceplates. Armed people walking around on the ground could be mistaken for one of their own roving patrols at a distance. Armed people crouching on the roof of one of the prefab huts? No.
  
  I put my ear to the wall of the maintenance hut, a long low one-story structure.
  
  "Nothing." I said. "Fadeout, crack that door."
  
  She got to work with her lockpicks while Netcat stayed down low and me and Long-Tom kept lookout in separate directions.
  
  "Got it." Fadeout reported.
  
  "Tom, stay on Cat." I said. "You and me, sweep the hut."
  
  Fadeout and I both ghosted in like ninjas, our suppressed pistols out and aimed. Swiftly and efficiently we verified that the vehicle maintenance bay and attached office was clear of any presence. Sadly, the cyberterminal in the office was just a low-priority logistics system and not part of the corporate PLTG we wanted to enter.
  
  "Don't tell me we have to go into the command building." Fadeout swore as we finished regrouping inside and Cat reported the latest disappointment. "That's manned 24/7!"
  
  "There's a Suslov parked outside." Netcat said. "The onboard computer will have a high-security BattleTac link. That's our way in."
  
  "So, grand theft tank?" Long-Tom smiled. "And here I thought tonight would be dull."
  
  "Still kinda exposed, but definitely beats the command center." Fadeout agreed.
  
  A flashing red icon in all our HUDs told us that we'd just lost line-of-sight to Asgard via the orbital rotation of the Earth. No more eye in the sky.
  
  "Long-Tom, get on the roof and ghillie up. You're now eyes up high." I ordered.
  
  "On it." he said, and left.
  
  "Let's take the princess out to meet her carriage." Fadeout quirked a grin at me and Netcat, and we headed for the vehicle park.
  
  "Jeep coming. Down!" Long-Tom called as we crossed the lot, full of parked trucks and other light hicles that wouldn't have secure BattleTac links, as we headed towards the nearest of the parked infantry support tanks that would.
  
  We waited in the defilade of one of the larger trucks until the jeep finished driving on by as it circuited the camp's inner perimeter road.
  
  "Clear." Long-Tom eventually called.
  
  "Move." I agreed, and we continued our stealthy approach to the tank. Netcat climbed up on the rear deck and jacked back into her commlink, trying to use near-range conductivity to hack into the hatch circuits. Fadeout and I left her to it and turned away, spreading out to watch the corners-
  
  The sudden glare of the tank's running lights kicking in behind us almost made me crap my pants.
  
  "What the fuck did you do, you idiot greenie-?!?" Long-Tom started to swear, to be cut off by Netcat's frantic call.
  
  "There's someone inside!" Netcat shouted into the comm as the Suslov's systems booted up from maintenance standby. "Tank is occupied, tank is occupied!"
  
  Fadeout and I frantically leapt away from where we were standing as fast we could, just barely ahead of the Suslov's anti-infantry belt kicking in. The claymores spaced evenly down the skirts of the tank, intended as last-ditch defenses versus being swarmed by hostiles in tight quarters such as city streets, blasted ball bearings all through the volume of space our augmented asses had just vacated. My heart leapt into my mouth as I prayed that Netcat's being on top of the tank would keep her from being shredded by the backblast.
  
  Of course, right now we had other problems. The Suslov's turret was moving and the engine was revving up to full speed, so apparently two people had unaccountably been in the goddamned tank at 1 in the morning. One for the driver and one for the gunner-
  
  The world slowed down in around me as I slooowly saw the turret finish dialing in on Fadeout. Whether they used the coaxial gun or had the main gun loaded with beehive, either way she'd be vapor as soon as the gunner finished lining up and pulling the trigger. I reached out and put a hand on the truck I'd frantically dodged behind, and its tires shifted a couple inches sideways through the dirt as I took a deep breath and got ready to throw the entire fucking thing at the tank and never mind I'd break cover-
  
  And then the tank stopped dead, and Fadeout gaped at it like a landed fish as she realized she wasn't dead and I likewise tried to catch up. And then both our eyes swiveled up to see Netcat, disheveled from the backblast but still up and fighting, standing over the open commander's hatch in the top of the turret with her own pistol still smoking from where she'd just emptied the clip into whoever was down in there.
  
  "Two down!" she called away with a quaver. "Tank secured!"
  
  "The whole camp's waking up!" Long-Tom called away from his overwatch position, his voice still incredulous at what had just happened. "Whatever you guys are gonna do, do it fast!"
  
  "Netcat, tell the outer sensor grid to register a major penetration on the southeast axis!" I ordered her. We were of course not on the southeast corner. "We can't stop them from going red alert, but let's at least have them confused as to where that fire came from!"
  
  "On it!" she said as she finished frantically searching for something on the ground nearby, apparently found it, and then jumped back up on the tank and ducked down inside the turret.
  
  "Everybody else, stack on the tank!" I called and we all frantically ran over. "We've still got a job to do!"
  
  We all piled in, doing our best to ignore the two corpses that Netcat had just left in the turret except to shove them out of our way so we could all crowd in. The fact that they were both naked told us exactly why two Metalheads had been out cooping in a tank where they weren't supposed to be past midnight. Talk about 'letting it get in the way of the work' indeed.
  
  "Tell me you can crack that VPN." I begged her.
  
  "I can try!" Netcat answered worriedly. "But first-" she said, hurriedly manipulating the tank's controls. "There, I just plugged us into BattleTac and acknowledged us as responding to the alert. MET2000 is too fancy to do routine acknowledgements and call-ins by having people actually talk to each other, so long as we don't need to do any unscheduled radio chatter they'll think we're just a tank crew who was really on the ball about jumping to the alert."
  
  "Fadeout, can you drive this thing?" I asked her, because I knew I or Long-Tom couldn't.
  
  "If you'll call what you're about to see 'driving!'" she acknowledged, clumsily putting it into gear and rolling it out as we 'responded' to the alert'. "Better jump on that hacking, Netcat!"
  
  "Yessir!" she agreed hurriedly, and dove back into the Matrix.
  
  "Sergeant, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for every unkind thought I ever had about your apparent violations of good order and discipline." Long-Tom said formally. "Because your girlfriend is fucking awesome and I clearly have no taste at all."
  
  I cheerfully gave him the bro-fist of acceptance that the man code demanded for such occasions, while Fadeout just rolled her eyes.
  
  "Got it!" Netcat called away after what felt like half a lifetime.
  
  "Upload the paydata to the secondary commsat and get it back home." I ordered her. "And clone the tank's BattleTac access to your commlink. If we don't have Asgard to plot our exfil with then that's fine, we'll just use MET2000's own overhead surveillance."
  
  "The entire firebase is running around like headless chickens." Fadeout said. "How the hell are we going to get out?"
  
  "Netcat, remember that story I told you about the IFF system that couldn't remember how to un-whitelist someone in Seattle?" I said, referring to the Pyramid hack.
  
  "On it." she said curtly as she got busy corrupting the camp's BattleTac grid so that they couldn't actually override their own anti-friendly-fire circuit to kill our tank once they realized it was no longer their tank. "And, done!"
  
  "Fadeout, take it straight at the wire and melt the turbine." I ordered her. "Until they can finish crashing and rebooting their whole BattleTac host, this tank is bulletproof."
  
  "Yoicks and away!" Fadeout caroled, all of us except Netcat flying very high on our adrenaline now as we tore off into the night.
  
  While we obviously of course could not ride our stolen tank all the way home, or even more than a few miles, before they finally got control of their networked battlesystems grid back and blew it to flaming chunks, we had of course unassed the tank and sent it rolling onwards on a hasty autopilot program before that point. Not that the logistics of exiting a rolling tank without slowing it down enough to make it obvious that's what you were doing weren't a bit challenging, but we managed. It's not as if a Suslov was exactly a racing vehicle on the best of days, anyway. And once we'd broken initial contact, our stealth tap into their own BattleTac networks and later on a renewed period of recon time on Asgard as it came around again let us see them without them seeing us for long enough to make it miles and miles away without being run down and caught, and then it was just another day of tedious hiking to make it back to our lines.
  
  We arrived to find the entire camp awash in joyous relief. Saeder-Krupp had indeed been able to run down the financial data we'd uploaded back to home base and strip through the layers of money laundering to reveal MET2000 had ultimately been paid by a known Global Sandstorm front company via an obscured slush fund. With hard proof that both sides of the contract had ultimately been hired by the same party without either company's knowledge and then deliberately set against each other, MET2000 had agreed to an immediate cease-fire. The Major and the local Metalhead commander had both jointly gone to a Mercenary Guild adjudicator within the hour, and both companies had had their contracts voided for cause due to client malfeasance with full payout to us and penalties demanded from Global Sandstorm. Our phase of the Seven Kings War was over, and the 77th was free and clear.
  
  And once we got back in quarters, we finally had a chance to talk in private.
  
  "Cat, are you okay?" I asked her. Because she'd been downcast, distracted, or both the entire trip back.
  
  "No." she said, as we both hugged tightly.
  
  "First kills?" I asked her. "Do you want to talk about it now?"
  
  "That too," she surprised me. "And we will talk that out. But no, it's-" she pulled away from me and started looking all around, as if trying to spot something I couldn't see. "Let me sweep first... okay." she finished.
  
  "Um, 'Cat, your link's over there." I pointed at it. "If you were bug-sweeping, that is."
  
  "That's why I'm so spooked." she said. "Because- did any of you see what I did right after I got the hatch open and took out the two inside?" she asked.
  
  "You jumped down and picked something up off the ground." I said. "That's all I saw, and Fadeout and Long-Tom didn't even see that much." I replayed that exact moment in my eidetic memory. "He was looking down into the center of the camp, and she was busy watching the road."
  
  "I was picking up my commlink." she said, white-faced. "Because when the backblast from the mine belt went off, I'd dropped it."
  
  "How did you hack that hatch without your link?!?" I asked, entirely confused.
  
  "That's what's got me so spooked." she said. "When the turret was about to fire, suddenly something clicked." she said. "I wasn't just receiving anymore, I was jacked in. Without my commlink or my trodes. I hacked the tank's systems with my mind. And after that- even when I was busy dealing with the BattleTac software or the MET2000 PLTG, I wasn't using my commlink. That was just for cosmetic purposes. I just... did it."
  
  "Jesus Christ." I said. "Can you still do that now?"
  
  In answer, her commlink gave the 'ding!' of a reboot from where it sat adjacent to us on the little end table without her even looking at it.
  
  "Alex, what's happening to me?" she asked me frightfully.
  
  "Nothing you'll ever have to deal with alone." I reassured her, drawing her back into a hug.
  
  Because whatever else I might be uncertain of at this moment, I could damn well at least be certain of that.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: And, we have Emergence! Netcat the technomancer is go!
  
  And okay, I'm not going to say I looped parts of the Modern Warfare 3 soundtrack continuously while writing this segment, but I'm not not going to say that. *g*
  
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  "Okay, there is one hundred percent definitely nothing magical going on here at all." Fatima said after we finished the latest round of trials.
  
  "I'd assensed her myself, repeatedly, but it's always nice to have a second opinion." I agreed with her. While physical adepts could not astrally project or cast spells like magicians could, I had learned the adept power of astral sight in the interim. "And yeah, you even put her inside an astral ward and had her tap into a commlink outside of it. Nothing magical can cast a spell through an astral barrier."
  
  "Well they technically can if you put enough oomph into it, but the breach would be immediately apparent to the person who'd cast the barrier in the first place." Fatima corrected me. "Pistons, did you get anything?"
  
  Pistons wiped away the multiple Augmented Reality windows she'd been studying intently and looked up at us. "Nothing different from the last few times. I can scan and intercept her transmissions just like I could those from anyone using a commlink, and routine analysis doesn't turn up anything that I wouldn't get from someone who was using a commlink. It's only when I use a packet sniffer to trap some code samples and then actually tear them apart almost down to the datalink level that the anomalies start showing. Which makes sense because that's the abstraction layer that actually translates the electrical impulses from the hardware into encoded network packets in the first place, and exactly what the hell Netcat's 'hardware' is and how it can possibly run is the whole mystery right now. But as to decoding the digital gibberish underlying this all at the root and comprehending the underlying scientific basis of the whole phenomenon here?" She shrugged eloquently. "I'm a little minus on Nobel Prizes to swing that kind of job."
  
  "So, I fall into the scientific category technically known as 'What the fuck is that?'" Netcat sighed.
  
  "Yup." Pistons nodded. "Shit, I wish Smiling Bandit wasn't such a paranoid hermit and we actually could send you to go meet him. This is exactly the sort of scientific mystery he'd love."
  
  "Smiling Bandit?" I asked her.
  
  "One of the old-schoolers on the circuit. Top tier decker, but decking is just his day job to buy the groceries. Guy must have like half a dozen PhDs but would rather live in a cave somewhere and do all sorts of freelance theorizing then go join a corp or an institute. He spends all of his spare time hacking into 'private' peer review boards and research facilities to pick ultra-high-level nerd fights with corporate scientists, and quite often wins." Fatima explained. "Smarter than anybody I've ever heard of except maybe Fastjack, but he is one weird dude. Nobody ever interacts with him except via the Matrix. Like Pistons said, paranoid hermit."
  
  "Well, you've got my permission to email all your data to this Smiling Bandit - provided you take my name off and just make it about 'Subject N' or something like that - and see if he has an opinion." Netcat said. "Because right now I'm about ready to take a professional consult from Lofwyr, if he were actually willing to give one. Not knowing what the heck your own brain is doing or how-" She shivered briefly. "You can imagine."
  
  "I actually do have his contact info so if you want then yeah, I'll read him in on this. Anonymously, even." Pistons reassured her. "Have you told anyone else about this?"
  
  "Hell no." I declared as 'Cat vigorously nodded in agreement. "The 77th are by and large good people, but three can keep a secret only if two are dead. Runners don't have a chain of command to keep in the loop or a legally accessible set of records to keep updated."
  
  "Gotta love the shadows." Pistons cheerfully agreed with me. "Unfortunately, while we are long on discretion here we're kinda short on advanced scientific research facilities. Or advanced scientific researchers, Bandit notwithstanding."
  
  Although we'd only seen them in the flesh on a couple of brief occasions since running away to join the private military circus, Netcat and Pistons had fallen into a close Matrix-pals correspondence - there was more than one reason that Pistons had offered her an opportunity to apprentice, the two ladies just 'clicked' personality-wise - and Fatima was still my number one trusted contact to the shadow scene. Which was a useful thing for a mercenary or a runner to have, in either direction. So we'd still done a bit of biz from time to time. Oh, not actual running, but trading things like information or referrals or (with the unit's permission, of course) the occasional box of rifles falling off the back of a truck. And that meant we were still close enough to look them up as our first stop in trying to figure out what was up with Netcat's new powers, as soon as we could take some leave from the 77th and get our asses back to Seattle.
  
  "So what's the current contract?" Fatima gossiped with me as we finished closing down the impromptu lab Pistons had set up in Fatima's garage and we all went out to get some dinner. Because there wasn't much more progress we could make here, so might as well push it aside for the night and relax with friends while we could.
  
  "Concert security." Netcat said amusedly. "Not that the 77th needed the money urgently after the Guild made Global Sandstorm fork over plus penalties on pain of being blacklisted for every bonded company in the business, but Picador knows what happens when the troops have too much time to just sit around and clean the barracks."
  
  "Oh God yes, Knight Errant was the same way." Pistons emphatically agreed. "I remember this one slack season where our unit had unaccountably not gotten a single call in two months, and by the end of that period we were having guys - and I'm talking elite special forces guys - being written up for things as diverse as building giant obscene snowmen on the front plaza of the local Ares district HQ." She shook her head dazedly. "And then there was the experiment in shaving cream luge..." she trailed off.
  
  "Shaving cream luge?" I hesitantly questioned her.
  
  "You do not want to know." Fatima cut in.
  
  "So, what kind of concert requires an entire merc company for security-" Pistons started to ask before she interrupted herself. "Wait, the big Horizon We Are The World 2067 tour? That's you guys now?"
  
  "The very same one." Netcat confirmed. "It was actually hitting Lagos at the time we were there, and after the Global Sandstorm story broke the Pathfinder exec who was the tour manager drops in on the Major out of the blue and is all smiling 'I hear you're between jobs now, and we were looking to augment our security with a single dedicated force that could follow the tour instead of subcontracting local at every stop, so...'. And after spending half the morning working the sales pitch, she finally agrees with him."
  
  "You actually follow Christy Daee?" I asked Pistons, surprised that she even knew about the details of the tour and outright shocked at the idea that she'd be remotely near bubblegum pop without a gun to her head.
  
  "Fuck no." she snorted contemptuously. "But I was entirely into Grim Aurora before Grim Aurora was cool."
  
  "Of course, it helps when you had a fling with the lead singer." Fatima smirked. "Not that that's a rare distinction, given that Kat will happily bang anything that stands still long enough to have an identifiable gender."
  
  "Quit pretending you were offended at anything other than not being available to be invited along that weekend." Pistons teased her back. "And hey, Kat's impulse control might be kinda shit but she's still an ace runner when her pants aren't on the floor."
  
  "Kat o' Nine Tales, the lead singer of Grim Aurora and the MTCA Best New Artist of 2064, is a shadowrunner?" Netcat burst out incredulously.
  
  "You seriously need to spend more time catching the gossip in Seattle." Pistons teased her. "Yeah, she plays both sides of the line. Hell, the band was just her hobby before a talent scout tripped right over them and the next thing she knows, shazam, she can wander out of her bedroom at 3am asking for real organic strawberries and cream and somebody will be right there to hand some to her. It's not even a real secret, but as long as she doesn't actually get arrested and her record label doesn't care then it doesn't get in the way. Although she hardly needs the money anymore - the only reason she still runs when she can is because doing the celebrity thing full-time drives her nuts."
  
  "Damn, it really does take all kinds, doesn't it?" I shook my head in wonder.
  
  "So, concert tour security?" Fatima redirected.
  
  "Yeah." Netcat agreed. "Definitely not what you think of when you hear the term 'soldier of fortune'. Still, it's not like it's bad duty. It's certainly not a milk run, not with that many soft targets travelling through freaking Africa of all things."
  
  "But Horizon's willing to spend money to make money, and the client rep lets the Major set the security requirements instead of vice versa, so we've definitely had worse contracts." I continued. "Especially the one where the client was trying to kill us."
  
  "No foolin'. How did that one shake out again, anyway?" Pistons inquired.
  
  "Global Sandstorm managed to avoid losing the Arabian oil cartel at home, but they had to make some noteworthy internal concessions to the dissenting elements to make them decide that the dragon was still the greater of two evils. So the cartel is now an more of an oligarchy with a big brother, but not a monopoly. Definitely not their first choice of outcomes." Netcat explained. "But they managed to avoid losing their shirt and their AA status."
  
  "What did Global Sandstorm lose besides some regional dominance?" Fatima said. "Because there is no way Lofwyr just stops there."
  
  "Their operation in Nigeria." I exposited. "All of it. Between GS losing a good chunk of their local contracted security and all the rest walking out as soon as they could find an option clause in their contracts to exercise, they were wide open down there. So Lofwyr feinted hard at the Middle East, then pulled back and pivoted south as soon as Global Sandstorm committed to a retrenchment. It took S-K not even two weeks to roll up everything from the production fields to the tanker docks. And that was that for the Seven Kings War and the Nigerian oil conflict. The other players took one look at what was coming and how large of a beachhead Global's collapse had given the dragon to work from and decided it wasn't worth trying to argue over the rest. And of course Lofwyr had known the power vacuum was coming a jump ahead of everyone else, because he and the 77th had caused it-" I shrugged.
  
  "Yeah, that idiot patsy Alex picked up in Lagos?" Netcat snorted in laughter. "Ironically, his prediction came true. Lofwyr did take it all down there, at least if you're referring to the Nigerian oil fields and ancillary ops." She shrugged. "Still, maybe the killing over the pipeline will finally slow down a little, even if it's never really going to stop..." she trailed off wistfully.
  
  "I'm just irked that Lofwyr is going to make giganuyen off of what we did down there, and he didn't even offer the 77th a thank-you bonus - let alone a cut." I shrugged. "Not that he ever would but still, it annoys."
  
  "You just can't avoid getting caught up in prime level ops, can you?" Pistons snarked at me. "Even when you're trying to live a quiet life."
  
  Fatima laughed. "A certain rooftop comes rather emphatically to mind." Her brow furrowed as she continued. "Hey, did I ever tell you that you were a last-minute replacement on that one?"
  
  "I'd wondered how the hell I'd been offered that kind of opportunity so soon, awesome first impression or not." I said. Because yeah, I certainly had.
  
  "We'd originally had someone else intended for your slot, and then the dumb SOB got fried in his sleep when the Halloweeners tossed a grenade bouquet in through the window of his current squat at like 5 in the morning the day of the run. Just because he'd banged the wrong ganger's girl the week before." Fatima shook her head. "Johnny was a helluva shot, but he made Kat look like a nun. I always told him restless dick syndrome was gonna get him killed, and I was right."
  
  "Well I'll certainly testify my guy is vigorously horny, but at least he knows where it's safe to put it." Netcat teased. And I remembered yet again why being the only guy on a girls' night out could sometimes get a little embarrassing.
  
  "So the op had maybe twelve hours to find someone capable of slotting in as the second gun from scratch. Or else Frosty would have no choice to scrub the whole damn thing... and we were astrologically locked into the date, no second chances for at least a year. So she outright begged us to please tell if we knew anyone we thought had an outside chance of keeping up with the pace, even if it meant Ivan would have to do the majority of the heavy lifting." Pistons explained.
  
  "To be honest, you got picked primarily because you stayed entirely panic-free and quick-thinking even when shit went wrong in Auburn." Fatima said. "Which is what we needed above all else in an emergency substitute. I hadn't even expected you to be that kind of ace shot or pull off that kind of clutch play at the end, but you damn sure did."
  
  "And then there was the skydiving." Pistons quipped, and I quelled a wince at how even at this late a date we were only being honest with them about Netcat's superpowers, not mine.
  
  We all treated ourselves to some absolutely fabulous Italian in the sort of restaurant where you actually got more than one fork and a real ceramic plate, and then eventually headed back to the place that Fatima and Pistons lived together at in Tacoma to let it settle.
  
  "So, where are we overall?" Fatima said as we occupied the couches in her living room and started to split a six-pack of beer while we let the latest pay-per-view extravaganza blare in the background.
  
  "Well, according to my most recent physical with the 77th's surgeon there's no detectible physical change in me." Netcat said. "And since I'm 'in remission' from 'AIPs', so much as mentioning I might be starting symptoms again was enough to get them to break out the EEG. And I deliberately cycled my powers while I was under, and the readings didn't blip."
  
  "Bit of a risk there." Pistons said.
  
  "Not really, I've already got a medical history of seizures from 2064 so the surgeon wouldn't blink at any weird readings." Netcat said. "But the important thing is-"
  
  "-using your powers doesn't cause a detectible change in brain activity, at least not on the gross level of ordinary diagnostic equipment that isn't specifically looking for whatever it is that's going on here." I agreed.
  
  "Which is ridiculous, because the computational load it would take to run a commlink OS and a standard set of network protocols-" Pistons shook her head. "If your brain was turning into some sort of biological computer, it would have to actually process the CPU cycles for that, and that would be detectible activity! It's like we're pulling computational capacity out of nowhere!"
  
  "Which usually means magic, but we just ran that set of negative results. For the fourth time." Fatima chimed in.
  
  "What is consciousness?" I interjected into the subsequent conversational lull.
  
  "Nobody knows." Pistons scoffed, before facepalming. "Doh! How did I overlook something that basic?!?"
  
  "Forest for the trees." Netcat agreed. "Although what forest in particular are you thinking of?" she turned to me.
  
  "If you can decrypt Wireless Matrix traffic - which you obviously can - then your powers can emulate modern encryption algorithms. But ever since the Heinrich Maneuver, no encryption in the world has been worth a damn unless it incorporates quantum computing elements. That's why every commlink and host system in the world needs quantum-capable opchip cores." I pointed out.
  
  "And doh again!" Netcat joined Pistons. "Because you can't emulate q-dot computing with strictly biological mechanisms like neurons, or if you can then nobody has the slightest idea how it could be done."
  
  "Which ties into the long-standing theory of quantum consciousness, which holds that it's impossible for purely classical mechanics to explain the physical processes by which minds work." Fatima agreed.
  
  "So it is a theory - whatever mysterious quantum realm also holds all the RAM and firmware that Pistons-OS and Fatima-OS and Wild Man-OS run on is also running some sweet new hacking peripherals and apps for Netcat-OS that the rest of us don't get to share. Which again is not unprecedented, given that Fatima-OS has the full set of astral compatibility plugins and Wild Man-OS a partial set and ours don't." Pistons said.
  
  "So, not magic and not related to magic, but like magic in the sense that conventional science just goes 'Gee, I dunno!' and hands the problem off of philosophers and quantum physicists." I snarked.
  
  "The key difference being that quantum physics is even less intuitive." Netcat made the inevitable STEM major joke.
  
  "So it's a great theory, but what can we actually do with it? To either apply it or actually go deeper into solving the whys of it?" I asked the room.
  
  "With our resources? Really not much." Pistons said. "Oh, 'Cat will have a lot of fun mastering and expanding her new mind-hacking tricks as she goes on - by trial and error if need be - and I'd love to sit in on as much of that process as we can get together for, but as to actually getting to the root here?" She shrugged. "Fucked if I know. Unless Smiling Bandit somehow turns up something in all the readings we took that I didn't, it's stumperville."
  
  "Do we have to get to the root?" Fatima asked practically. "I mean, if it's not hurting her and not likely to, isn't that the minimum problem solved? It's even turning out to be really useful."
  
  "I would really like to, or at least know something more about it." Netcat said. "Because has it occurred to you guys yet that it is vanishingly unlikely I'm the only one? After all, it's not as if there isn't precedent for an entire substrain of people being able to emulate cyberdecks with unaugmented metahuman brain-meats."
  
  "Deus' otaku." Fatima swore, referring to the mysterious children who'd been able to strip the previous generation of Matrix infrastructure with their naked brains, even if unlike Netcat they'd still needed implanted datajacks and physically hardwired connections to plug in. "Yeah, I was trying not to think of that digital elephant in the room."
  
  "The otaku weren't all created by Deus." Pistons pointed out. "The folks at the Denver Nexus knew about them all the way back to at least 2050, before Renraku even booted up its first AI experiments. Deus just knew how to stimulate, or create, a particular substrain of crazy in the otaku. And the mad bad mega-AI is at present quite dead. They literally rebooted the entire Matrix on a completely different paradigm just to make damn sure of that."
  
  "Not to freak anyone out, but didn't Deus try resurrecting itself by seeding program fragments in thousands of the Arcology survivors before, and then doing a big reconstitution from all the separate code bits when they finally all jacked in for the Novatech IPO?" Fatima asked. "That's how we got a second Crash."
  
  "Yes, but he did that by actually stealth implanting them with hundreds of megapulses' worth of data storage chips in their skulls." Netcat pointed out. "Even Deus wasn't able to cheat the limit of actually needing physical digital storage media for hard drives, even if the otaku - and me - can mysteriously ignore that for whatever stores our 'OS' and 'RAM'. But for data storage? I might be able to emulate an entire Fairlight's worth of program capacity for my mental 'commlink' and 'utilities', but if I so much as want to pull a new tune off a digital music store then I need some kind of hardware storage module to download it onto. Just like you or anyone else would need." She exhaled heavily. "Which is quite a relief, let me tell you, or I'd have had that particular nightmare you just raised on continuous loop ever since I first hacked that tank."
  
  "Sorry." Fatima apologized. "It was just a thought."
  
  "And a self-evidently wrong one, thank God." I exhaled. "Although you actually did obliquely touch upon part of the 'why' we feel some urgency here. Because assuming that 'Cat is not the only girl like her in the world, then inevitably the phenomenon will eventually be around long enough and widely enough to make it into the public awareness. And then what?"
  
  "Drek." Fatima spat. "I mean, yes, there's all sorts of possible scenarios, but you're skipping straight to the worst-case one. And the worst-case scenario is exactly what you're implying - that the general public goes up in an absolute panic that people like Netcat really are AI Puppets Rebirth of Deus The Demon AI or some such bullshit, and the next thing we know anybody who can so much as think at a light switch is being rounded up for their own version of the Night of Rage."
  
  "Despite how mind meltingly stupid that would be." Pistons agreed. "Because in a world where Kenneth Brackhaven only missed being President of the UCAS by less than twenty Electoral College votes, it is a proven fact that there are millions of people who are indeed that stupid. And that much a bunch of hopeless suckers for xenophobic propaganda."
  
  "Hell, I still sometimes meet people who think my tusks are contagious." Fatima eye-rolled. "And not even Humanis has actually believed that one since almost before 'Cat was born."
  
  "So yeah, in the interests of not having to eventually kill my way through entire lynch mobs before running off with Netcat to live like a hunted animal in the even darker cyberpunk future, I would really like to try to find some kind of explanation for what's going on while the secret is still a secret. So that when it inevitably does come out-" I spread my hands. "People don't have to leap to their own conclusions."
  
  "You are talking about finding a long enough lever to move the world with there, Archimedes." Fatima said soberly. "And hey, I'm all for idealism, but on a good month it's all me and Pistons can do to maybe move a neighborhood in Seattle." She sighed wearily. "You want to be Robin Hood either in or out of the shadows, you have got to learn to accept when it's not possible to be. Or the heartbreak will kill you before anyone else's bullet can."
  
  "Yeah." Pistons agreed softly, and her and Fatima each grabbed another can of beer.
  
  I thought long and hard. "Netcat already knows, and you guys might have started to pick up, that I've not only never been entirely comfortable in the shadows but that over the past couple of years I've been growing more and more frustrated with..." I shrugged. "The general situation. I mean, let's look back at my last big triumph, shall we?" I shifted topic. "I pulled off a solo prime run, and then Netcat and I and two of the other Recon Platoon specialists did a CAS Navy SEALs worthy behind-the-lines covert raid, and even S-K Prime came in at the end, and for what?" I spread my hands. "The 77th bled in several directions and ended up happy to just get out of the mess we'd gotten into without bleeding even more. MET2000, who had originally come there as a subcontracted blind for war crimes, entirely skates on having been willing to do the crimes because it turns out they were being played by the paymaster the same way we were. And they pick up a sweet contract afterwards from S-K to seize the pipeline in a lightning coup as soon as we're clear and hold it until Lofwyr's folks can arrive in force to claim it themselves. We did everything right and above and beyond the call of duty, and..." I shrugged. "The rich got richer, the nasty stayed nastier, and nobody suffered any lasting consequences for anything. Except all the good people who died, to ultimately just return shit to a new status quo ante as brought to you by Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries." I shook my head. "Whatever else 'Cat and I do, we've already decided we're not re-upping with the 77th when our two years' is up this August. I can't make myself believe that we're doing anything except just treading more bloody water there."
  
  "I still can't help seeing the two people in the tank." Netcat said. "Oh, not in the 'torn up by guilt' sense - it was war, and they were shooting at us first - but..." she shrugged eloquently. "It really sticks in the head, especially when you and your boyfriend were the naked couple screwing in an APC just the year before. There but for the grace of Whoever went us."
  
  "Sergeant Kendricks never actually proved it was us, but they still complained about the smell forever." I chimed in. "Lesson learned - never have sex in an enclosed space that's NBC sealed, because the ventilation really sucks."
  
  "Oh, I could've told you that." Pistons agreed meaningfully. "But back to the topic at hand - I entirely get what you're saying about not wanting to continue in the PMC life because however good the pay or comradely the unit, the actual accomplishing anything just feels lacking. But from the way you're talking, you're not coming back to the Seattle shadows either?"
  
  "Doubtful." Netcat agreed. "We're still trying to figure out exactly where do we go from here, but as much as we love you guys-"
  
  "Hey, I don't love Seattle's shadowy side either except during the hours that I'm being paid to, and I've literally never lived anywhere else." Fatima chimed in affectionately. "So yeah, I get it too."
  
  "Well, going megacorporate has certain obvious disadvantages." Pistons dropped into the silence after a while. "Been there, done that, burned my own SIN to get the fuck out of that."
  
  "That's Ares for you." Netcat agreed. "And we're certainly not going to walk in the door at Saeder-Krupp, recent not-unfavorable interaction with them or not."
  
  "Why even go megacorporate at all?" Fatima asked incredulously.
  
  "You referenced a famous saying earlier, but you left off the other part of the quote. Archimedes was not talking about just having a long enough lever, but also having a place to stand." I said. "And even if I have no clue what the fuck kind of lever could possibly exist...?" I shrugged. "Step one is still finding that place."
  
  "If you are seriously thinking of taking 'Cat anywhere near a corporate research lab, then you'd better avoid Evo like they were covered in radioactive VITAS-III." Fatima advised us quietly. "Oh yes, the AAA formerly known as Yamatetsu is legitimately all for metahuman rights and equality and everything on the consumer and marketing side, but on the life sciences research side? They're right down there with Universal Omnitech."
  
  "The same biotech corp who invented 'Scientific Values' as a guideline for metahuman research, which was neither scientific nor valued metahuman life at all?" Netcat asked, complete with aghast air-quoting.
  
  "The very same." Fatima swore. "So yeah, unless you want your conjectural future career in corporate research to be highly flexible about certain concepts such as 'informed consent' or 'non-invasive', Evo's out."
  
  "We're seriously discussing this?" Pistons asked incredulously. "Taking her to the corps?"
  
  "I take myself places." Netcat reminded her firmly. "I might be the youngest in the room, but I am still a grown woman. If push comes to shove then only Alex gets even an advisory vote."
  
  "Sorry." Pistons demurred.
  
  "She never stops playing jump rope with the line between 'good friend' and 'fussy maiden aunt'." Fatima teased. "You get used to it."
  
  "I am no maiden at all, or have I just been fucking a magical illusion of you all this time?" Pistons fired back immediately.
  
  "And they called us horny almost-teenagers." Netcat mutually eye-rolled with me.
  
  "Returning to the topic at hand, I would not contemplate any of the Japanacorps either. In addition to forbiddingly grim reputations all-around and outright paranoia about anything potentially Deus-related in Renraku's case, there's also that 'Cat's an elf." I concluded.
  
  "Ain't no anti-meta racist like a Japanese anti-meta racist." Fatima agreed viciously. "Even Brackhaven never tried to make it legal to ship us all to a fucking prison island, let alone succeeded."
  
  "And right there we've eliminated most of the AAA megacorps and the big biomedical researcher among the AAs." Pistons said. "And to add to the pile of 'nope!', let us recall that NeoNET's new head of R&D is the Great Dragon Celedyr. Who owned a whole chunk of Transys Neuronet before their big merger with Novatech to make NeoNET in the first place. And on top of the usual draconic sense of ruthlessness, there's the fact it was fucking Transys."
  
  "Remember when their mad science bled the Seattle streets in the early 50s?" Fatima groaned. "That whole thing with artificial personalities on BTL chips that they wanted to use to turn people into puppet sleeper agents, that went wrong when the psychotic meltdowns invariably kicked in after a few weeks? We buried at least half a dozen runners over how that debacle ended."
  
  "A bit before my time here." Pistons reminded her. "But yeah, UniOmni and Transys - six of one, half dozen of the other as to who had the worse mad scientists."
  
  "So... what does that leave?" Netcat trailed off.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: A shorter slice-of-live chapter this time, but at least we got to revisit some old friends and catch up to what our young couple is starting to do re: life planning.
  
  Kat o 'Nine Tales and Smiling Bandit are canon NPCs. Shadowrun used to have colorful NPCs indeed...
  
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  "You may kiss the bride." the 77th's unit chaplain told us, and I dipped 'Cat in front of the assembled crowd to a chorus of wild cheers and catcalls as I enthusiastically did just that.
  
  Although we'd given Picador our notice that we'd be leaving at the end of our initial two years' enlistment, even despite the signing bonuses and promotions she'd urgently waved at both of us, Carmen was ultimately good people and understood that a pair of young people in love might entirely want to leave a heavily armed and wandering lifestyle to put down roots and try and build a household together. Especially when they'd received an unexpected and highly desirable job opportunity in that civilian life. And we had kept our promise and invited her to the wedding, after all.
  
  We were both very short on our contracts, but the people we were closest to in El Cuadrilla if anything felt honored that we'd timed our wedding so we could do it while still in uniform and with them available to attend it, instead of saving it for after we'd re-entered civilian life and would barely know anybody there. Pistons and Fatima had gotten away from Seattle to attend as the 'father' who gave away the bride and the matron of honour - as a married woman, she was ineligible to be a bridesmaid - respectively.
  
  Netcat's actual father was long dead, and while it had marred the occasion that her birth mother had refused her own invitation I'd already known going into this that most of her family were 'We hate the filthy round-ears!' level Tir supremacist wannabes, which was not entirely unknown in Tarislar. There was more than one reason that 'Cat had neither talked about nor gone back to visit her home very much. Stupid old woman. How many times was her daughter going to get married, anyway? Besides, even in the dark cyberpunk future Lisbon was lovely during the summer. I of course had no family to attend my wedding at all, but this wasn't exactly considered an odd thing for a merc.
  
  "Congratulations, you two." Picador said, beaming at us both. "Even if I still hate you a little for tragically deserting us in our hour of need!" she caroled melodramatically, putting one hand to her forehead like a village matron in search of a fainting couch.
  
  "Ahhh, she just wants an excuse to get out before I finally kick her ass in deathmatch." Sergeant-Major Martinez faux-glowered. Ah yes, their age-old videogame grudge. Why did he even keep trying, he was never going to win.
  
  "Corporal." Captain Vandervoort came up, nodding approvingly at his soon-to-be ex-analyst. "Sergeant." he turned to me. "I just wanted to thank you both for those suggestions you drew up on a training program for in-the-field hacking specialists."
  
  "Ever since Wireless Matrix, combat hackers have been making one hell of a comeback." Pistons, still in the persona of a SIN-bearing ex-Knight Errant 'security consultant' that had let her attend here at all, professionally interjected. "So yeah, hiring college kids who just sit around the comm shack and do it all via the Matrix hardlines? Not cutting it anymore."
  
  "And Ares was already ahead on that curve, like they often are." the Major nodded back to her. "Well, at least we had these two to teach us the need for it even if they aren't sticking around to actually keep doing it."
  
  "Ix-nay on the op-shalk tay." 'Cat smiled at them both. "I only get one wedding."
  
  "Before we implement that particular comms blackout, I just have to ask." the Major asked. "Not that I didn't mind getting you the wedding presents that you asked for, but why on Earth would anyone want their service records to be 'adjusted' downwards? Up until now, all the dossier whitewashing I've ever seen in this business went the other way."
  
  "To keep them from taking one look at his qualifications and slotting Alex into the same 'special operator' slot that the 77th did." 'Cat pointed out unhesitatingly.
  
  "The Seventy-Seventh is an employer I'd trust to assign me those kinds of missions without asking me to do anything that would ask me to hock a piece of my soul." I agreed. "But that's not a level of trust I place in just anyone. So yeah, let's leave the new boss thinking I was just a sharpshooting infantryman of few other special talents instead of, well, me."
  
  "I'm just glad somebody finally listened to their old maiden aunt and actually took precautions." Pistons interjected.
  
  "You're not a maiden." 'Cat said cheekily, and Fatima barely stifled a laugh.
  
  "I never thought accepting that contract would lead to 'Cat getting headhunted by the corp behind the contract." Picador shook her head. "That's like some old last-century Hollywood story about the waitress being discovered and made a movie star."
  
  "Well, that's entirely on brand for who did it." I said cheerfully.
  
  "Hey, enough talking! When does the drinking start?" Long-Tom interrupted in, reaching out to try and drag me away towards the reception.
  
  "Remember kid, alcohol might boost desire but it kills performance." Fatima said cheekily. "So as a mercy to the not-so-blushing bride tonight, please go easy on saucing up the groom."
  
  "Some day you are going to go twenty-four consecutive hours without making a sex joke, and on that day President Dunkelzahn will probably rise from the grave." I sighed wearily.
  
  "Probably!" she cheerfully agreed, and everyone laughed.
  
  "Smile!" Fadeout startled us both, and then a camera flashed.
  
  
  
  Getting ourselves headhunted for our new jobs had actually gone substantially more easily than we'd allowed it for. The corporate rep had not only readily believed what we were showing him as soon as basic anti-scam precautions like scanning 'Cat for an implanted commlink had been taken care of, but was quickly able to reach someone far enough up the chain to know exactly what they were negotiating for. Even though we'd been cautious enough to not leap at the first offer, and had taken the odd precaution to clear an emergency line of retreat if necessary, we'd actually picked our prospective new employer for not being the same old biz assholes that all the prior ones had been. We'd had a chance to see some of their charity and outreach work firsthand, and it was actually genuinely charitable and doing genuine outreach. Oh, the sheer effusiveness of the sales pitch sometimes got a little overmuch, but the difference between propaganda and advertising wasn't the techniques but just the percentage of content that wasn't total bullshit, and so long as it was a non-trivial percentage we could live with less than one hundred percent.
  
  And we'd made it quite plain that we came as a package deal or no deal, even though only 'Cat had any unique abilities. (As far as they knew, at least.) That's one of the reasons we'd gotten married before making the pitch, so that we'd be extremely hard to legally separate. Even the most assholeish of AAA megacorps didn't actively try to ruin employee attempts at making a family, if only because the megacorporate system benefited greatly from employees helping to breed and raise the next generation of employees. So 'Cat had gotten the 'senior software developer' job that would actually be a cover for 'in-house study-the-whole-mind-hacking-thing project person' and I had a guaranteed tryout for the position I hoped to earn - a tryout only, but with my abilities there was no chance I wouldn't ace the competition so all I'd need would be a chance. And we earned modesty points for not asking for a guaranteed pick while I could still effectively guarantee myself, so we could have our cake and eat it too.
  
  But first, we had a honeymoon to finish. And so after the ceremony and the tossing of the bouquet and the reception and all - and let's not even discuss the bachelor and the hen party the night before - we were bundled off onto the next semiballistic intercontinental transport for Tir Tairngire.
  
  Tir Tairngire, formerly the state of Oregon prior to the breakup of the UCAS, had originally been one of the NAN and the claimed domain of the all-elven 'Sinseareach Tribe' before rapidly seceding from the NAN to become its own nation. An elf-dominated nation ruled by its 'High Prince', 'Council of Princes', and 'Star Chamber', it had basically been an extremely odd cross between some type of deliberately artificial Ruritania - to the point of inventing their own synthetic elven language, Sperethiel - and a ruthlessly efficient modern high-tech state with world-class universities, home-grown local tech and biotech corps on the bleeding edge of SOTA , and a first-line military for its size. Furthermore, the 'Council of Princes' had been some of the earliest adopters of magic as more than parlor tricks after the Awakening, having cleaned up the local environmental disjunctions by wide-area rituals that still weren't common knowledge and restoring old-growth forests and untouched plains that had thought to be lost.
  
  It had also been a ruthless oligarchy characterized by elven racial supremacist ideals - and we were talking the sorts of people who had refused to open their borders and left the original Tarislar refugees in Tarislar because they hadn't been quite hardcore enough elven supremacists. Plus other things like rigid social stratification bordering on an outright caste system, widespread intolerance, and towards the end of its several-decades run an economy suffering from all the detriments of excessive 'central planning' and starting to fail despite the Tir's natural resources, highly trained workforce, and modern infrastructure. And between those burgeoning cracks in the dam and the final impetus of the second Crash, it had all come tumbling down.
  
  But the Rinelle Revolution of 2064 had, despite the inability of its revolutionaries to agree on anything other than 'we hate the old regime', had still left behind a power vacuum which had managed to avoid collapsing into anarchy and chaos. Underneath the leadership of the new High Prince Larry Zincan - an ork of all things - the country had found a new spirit of optimism, if still nowhere near Utopia, and were all putting their shoulders to the wheel to start the rebuilding. Admittedly, the rising influence of the Horizon corporation and the Great Dragon Hestaby also had a lot to do with that, with perhaps the world's most subtle and pervasive PR/advertising multimedia complex helping with social manipulations on the one hand and the most magically powerful figure on the North American west coast throwing her own rather large hat into the ring with the other.
  
  Which is why the new government of Tir Tairngire was relevant, because it meant the country was open for tourism again. Tourism that someone with round ears, like me, could actually enjoy without having the waiters spit in my drink or anything. And the Tir did have some of the loveliest, most environmentally unspoiled country in the world.
  
  So as hilarious as the thought was to contemplate, two soon-to-be-former infantrymen actually were going on vacation by backpacking in the woods. Because what with the general environmental devastation of the world, a chance to actually breathe pure, acid-rain-free air while enjoying a real old-growth redwood forest was something I'd never thought I could do again.
  
  Besides, man does not live by four-star hotel suites alone and that had been what we'd done for the first week in "Cara'Sir", the city formerly known as Portland. Even if it was really nice to actually see a waterbed or a high-definition holovid screen or in-room DirectX simsense feed after two years' of living in barracks.
  
  "For all that saccharine tourist stuff Charisma Associates pumped out in their PR blitz... it really is kinda magical here, isn't it?" 'Cat said, leaning into my shoulder as we drew to a halt at the end of the day's hike.
  
  "Literally, really." I said, looking around with my astral 'eyes' open. "I can still assense the echoes of whatever the old Council used to clean the pollution out and restore the forests. It's a positive background count, not a nasty-aspected one like a burn site or a toxic dump." I breathed out. "I can't even remember the last time I saw one of those."
  
  "For all that the old regime was kinda shit to the people, they definitely took care of the earth." 'Cat agreed. "You know, I've been wondering... if my parents hadn't been turned away at the border by the Tir, if their whole 'let's be refugees from the CAS' idea had actually worked instead of leaving them trapped in a Seattle shantytown, then I'd have grown up here."
  
  "The road not taken." I agreed. "What do you think you'd have become?"
  
  "Well, the scholarship programs were better here, and I'd have been the right ethnicity to be on the plus side of the old systematic racism." she said. "So... Willamette University instead of U-Dub, then straight into Telestrian Industries as a science brain. Probably upgrade my social standing at least a rank in the old Rite of Progression, given how I always aced test scores. And then...?"
  
  "The economic part of it isn't what you're wondering about." I said knowingly. "The 'what sort of person would I have been' part is."
  
  "I'd have been a palette swap of the Humanis Policlub." she agreed ruefully. "I mean, God, my folks were racist enough about 'round-ears' when we were just living in a Seattle ghetto. If we'd actually made it to the 'Land of Promise'? Ew. I'd probably have been some insufferably smug elven 'nobility' who thought that 'Glerethiel Morkhan Shoam' was a wholesome family show instead of the worst kind of racist 'comedy'." She sighed. "So yeah, it would have been a lot less poverty here for me. But also a lot less..." she trailed off. "How to put it?"
  
  "What will it profit a man to gain the entire world and yet lose his soul?" I quoted the gospel of Matthew.
  
  "I believe the standard corporate answer would be 'Well he profits by one entire world, duh.'" she snarked.
  
  "But that's kinda what we're dreaming of changing, isn't it?" I agreed.
  
  "That it is." she nodded. "That's why I'm trying to make sure I don't forget that."
  
  "You won't." I said confidently, and we sat side-by-side on the log with our arms around each other.
  
  "Neither will you." she said, and sighed contentedly.
  
  "Okay, break's over." I said after a short while. "We're practically at the foot of the slope, and I want to be at least a few hundred feet up and in one of the mountainside camps before sunset."
  
  "Damn straight." she agreed as we both hopped to it. "No way I'm missing maybe my only chance to see a real sunrise in real non-polluted country air, and if that means we have to climb the entire damn mountain to actually see the light then we'll damn well climb it."
  
  "Always aim high." I agreed. "You might not hit the moon, but at least you won't drop it on your foot."
  
  She laughed. "How many pithy old sayings did the 20th century have?"
  
  "Well, without a Matrix you had to make your own fun." I joked, and we laughed even harder.
  
  We'd been hiking for a few minutes in companionable silence before I felt her hand reach out to grasp mine.
  
  "I love you, Alex. You know that, right?"
  
  "I love you too, 'Cat."
  
  
  
  "Before we get started, please let me extend my own heartfelt congratulations to you both on your recent wedding." Mr. Reyes greeted us warmly. Tam Reyes was the Vice-President of Singularity Software, the bleeding-edge Matrixware and systems corp that was the Matrix subdivision of the Horizon megacorporation, the public relations and multimedia giant that as of mid-2065 was the newest addition to the Corporate Court and the ranks of the AAA extraterritorial megacorporations. While it was by far the smallest of the 'Big Ten', being the smallest out of the ten mightiest political-economic entities on Earth still made you really fragging big in absolute terms.
  
  Yes, we'd finally chosen to 'sell out' to a megacorporation. Normally, a shadowrunner doing this essentially burned every bridge they'd ever made in the shadows. Indeed, quite a few of my old shadow contacts weren't speaking to me anymore or doing so far more guardedly - after all, as a megacorporate employee, my first loyalty from now on would have to be assumed to be to my employer. Pistons and Fatima knew the real score, of course, but our ShadowSEA street cred scores had taken a notable downgrade and neither of us were expecting an invite to that new 'JackPoint' online runner private club any time soon.
  
  Still, if 'Cat and I hadn't wanted to give up on our long-term goals then it's not as if we'd had much choice. I hadn't gone the PMC route just to get 'Cat a place to recover her health and a chance for us to not commit to either the shadows or the straight world while we worked on growing our relationship. I'd also done it because I'd wanted to look past the version of reality that the corps who controlled all the mainstream Matrix wanted to make the world see, and to get a chance to stare directly into what the world was really like.
  
  Sadly, I hadn't seen anything on our world tour that had remotely fulfilled my hopes. If anything, the corporate puppet theatre that was the mass-market media and the modern educational system was drawing an optimistic veil over the true state of affairs. Resource wars, rampant pollution, magically 'toxic zones' produced by causes ranging from industrial accidents to outright genocides and atrocities, and the spectre of the megacorps looming distantly over everything- no, my long-term geographical and cultural orientation in this new world I'd been transported to was just about done. I had of course not seen everything there was to be seen, or begun to learn everything there was to learn, but I'd seen enough.
  
  Barring some kind of outside context paradigm shift, the megacorps would never go away. Whether directly or via proxies they collectively controlled too much of the planet already - too many of the raw resources, too many of the means of processing and refining them, too much of the industrial production capacity, too much of the communications infrastructure, the ability to educate new generations, the skilled workforce, the everything. If you weren't megacorporate, you simply never had a chance to attain real wealth and power - the 'old money' and glitterati had many who were vastly wealthy in personal terms but without any real power, and the shadow world and the underworld contained many people who had sufficient power to make even corporate execs come to terms with them rather than crush them, but who did not actually control any significant wealth - any economic leverage - for all their ill-gotten gains. Unless you were a Great Dragon, you simply did not hope to shake even a single pillar of Heaven except from an executive suite.
  
  And for quite a while now, I'd wanted to start shaking. Because even though I hardly understood my powers completely, I'd known for quite a while now that there were many things I could potentially do that I was not doing. And 'Cat and I entirely understood why, of course - the risks of premature exposure, the backlash that would come if I appeared too threatening to the current paradigm of any contemporary Power That Be by being hasty or ill-considered, the simple fact that in a world where involuntary extraction, or the at-gunpoint press-ganging of exceptional 'intellectual assets' between differing megacorporations, was actually a common job category for shadowrunners - no, ever since 'Cat had demonstrated to me that I was potentially a living supercomputer and possibly the lead genius in the world if I ever truly wanted to be, I had known that unless I chose to hobble myself forever then one day I could not only become this world's Tony Stark or suchlike, I should - not unless I just wanted to sit and amuse myself while billions of people lived in misery.
  
  Still, the fact remained that I couldn't just leap out of a garage with a miraculous new invention and start changing the world. That would be a great way to get killed - unlike my homeworld, Earth-Shadowrun was a place where oil companies really would send corporate kill teams to disappear a guy who tried to invent a 100-mile-per-gallon carburetor. So any long-range 'fix the world' plans I might have would have to be very carefully considered at every step. Hence my bootstrapping myself from shadowrunner to legitimate private military contractor...and now, to megacorporate employee.
  
  And even though going megacorp had literally been my last choice for possible routes by which I could find a place to stand while I methodically crafted a lever long enough to help fix the world, I'd spent two years carefully studying world conditions from the best viewpoint I could find for that job looking for another route and hadn't seen any I liked the odds of well enough. So last choice or not, ultimately it was Hobson's choice, so we chose it. I was still more than a couple steps away from where I could safely start to really operate, but the important thing right now was that I was still one step closer. As President Johnson would have crudely put it, at least we were now inside the tent and pissing out instead of standing outside the tent and pissing in. And while 'Cat and I were still relatively low-ranking on that new totem pole we'd hoped to climb, at least neither of us were coming in as entry-level wageslaves.
  
  Not that I was risking my new wife's freedom and welfare in a possible Venus corporate flytrap solely for my own ambition. Entirely aside from the fact nobody risked 'Cat without her informed consent - least of all me - she'd been entirely supportive of my long-range plans at the same time I'd been entirely supportive of her own needs and concerns. Which is why we were here at Horizon instead of anywhere else we could have gone - because as near as we could evaluate all the options, this is where all the various circles on the Venn diagram for all the several things we hoped to accomplish all intersected.
  
  Our choice of Horizon had been motivated by things other than just the process of elimination, although that had certainly helped. Even as far back as the concert tour we'd noticed that Horizon's big splashy PR event for the Third World had contained elements of actual substance as well as just spin. Oh, they'd hardly waved a magic wand to fix the world, but the We Are The World 2067 tour hadn't just been another 'Get in, get the photo op, get out' thing like certain "aid" concerts I could remember from my prior life were. Horizon Africa had actually started to set up in Lagos - and not with more sweatshops or more attempts to steal the oil, but things like opening up a school and clinics that the people already suffering in other corps' sweatshops could come to. They were even distributing free commlinks to the children, commlinks that they'd gotten as part of their 'Turn In Your Old When You Get A New!' program in participating storefronts all across North America and Europe.
  
  Seeing any megacorp actually begin to act like they wanted do something socially responsible at all was like sighting a unicorn, and so it had certainly drawn our eye. And of course the wise person didn't immediately leap to a conclusion based on first impressions, but after spending the concert tour watching how they began to approach 'nation-building' work and charity in West and South Africa... well, it had seemed worth taking a chance. Even the impressions we were picking up of the work Horizon was doing to help stabilize and revitalize post-revolutionary Tir Tairngire were favorable. So we'd arrived to report for our new jobs and our new lives... and then walked into yet another a curve ball that we hadn't remotely expected.
  
  Because as it turned out, 'Cat was not the first mind-hacker - or "virtuakinetic" as Horizon had already named them - to show up at Horizon looking for employment. Not that they had very many of them - 'Cat was in fact only the second one to walk in their doors, and all the work and unique opportunities we'd had for her development meant she had at least as good a grasp on her powers as the first one had, as he'd had to deduce for himself what he really was while dealing with the dense chaos of an inner city's wireless flux all the while throughout like 'Cat had in Seattle.
  
  And it had certainly knocked our socks off to find out who the other 'virtuakinetic' at Horizon was, even if it had also been a tremendous reassurance that 'Cat would be far less likely to be destructively exploited at our new home.
  
  "Thank you, sir." 'Cat said respectfully. "I'm just flattered you took time out from your busy schedule-"
  
  "Pfft!" he interrupted her cheerfully, waving one hand. "Please, I'm Tam and you're Catherine - unless you prefer Cat? We don't stand on formality here, or get all caught up in a military-style chain of command. Creativity can't wear chains!" he slogan'ed. "And that's before we even begin to get into what you and I have in common."
  
  Because Singularity and Horizon were far less likely to be anti-virtuakinetic when their other on-staff VK was Vice-President of Matrix Technologies and CEO of Singularity Tam Reyes himself. And while one way it was certainly an astonishing coincidence, when looked at one way it wasn't a total coincidence - people heavily immersed in Matrix programming and technologies, like 'Cat had been and like MIT&M tech wunderkind Tam Reyes had also been, would logically be among the very first virtuakinetics to actually finish the process of comprehending what was going on with them and starting to self-teach themselves a systematic understanding of it.
  
  Even so, this had still been a tremendous stroke of luck for us.
  
  "It'll probably take a while for old habits to die hard, si- Tam." I deliberately fumbled it while wearing my best good-natured jock smile.
  
  "You'll catch on soon enough." he agreed cheerfully. "And as much as it's a slogan everywhere, here at Horizon it's also reality that we like to think of our associates as all being part of the Horizon family, even as they also treasure and make their own family. And I'm flattered you're interested enough in your wife's new job to help take the tour with her. I understand that despite your prior career track, you're also going out for an engineering degree yourself?"
  
  "I went infantry because I wasn't quite lucky enough to find a scholarship like Catherine did, even if she needed the 77th's education benefits as well to cover her last year." I agreed. "But I've still got some long-range ambitions of my own besides just shooting a gun."
  
  "Real learning never stops!" he sloganed while never losing his bright salesman's smile. "And Horizon certainly welcomes that kind of attitude, Alex. So while I understand you have to report for your own tryout later this afternoon, we can still show you both the best parts of our little operation here before we have to split your schedules. Shall we begin?"
  
  "There's no time like the present." Cat agreed. "So come on, honey. Let's go build us a future."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: And sometimes, when my MC is being so 'slow' to think of something before the audience is, he's actually just being patient. Because christ, Earth-Shadowrun is not a place you get a mulligan if you fuck it up the first time. And sure, he's nigh-impossible to kill, but being the immortal man does not change the part where if everyone is trying to either kill or cage your freak ass then you can't exactly do anything except fight and/or run. Which don't leave any time to do anything really constructive.
  
  Because this is why the MC was chafing so much at the state of the world. It isn't that he was powerless to change it. He knows at least vaguely of at least some of his potential for power. And there's only one thing that chafes more than being powerless, and that's knowing you could be doing something but you can't risk it quite yet.
  
  But every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step...
  
  And since I unaccountably got two short chapters done today instead of one long chapter, I think I'll redo the bookmarks to make them a part 1 and 2. But hey, the muse flows when it flows, and never asks me first.
  
  Now I really will to start pacing myself, as after an upcoming interlude it will be time for 'Book Three' as it were, the Horizon arc. Which I don't even have as much down in my mental whiteboard as I had for 'Book Two, the PMC arc' as I did when I was reaching the end of the initial arc. But we'll see what happens.
  
  (10/26/21) - Got up the next morning, reread the chapter, and decided that some of the readers were right. The flow did kinda suffer. So while I couldn't exactly majorly prune the exposition - this is a setup and a transition - I could at least rework it some and try to add more linking text and character thoughts.
  
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  Private journal of shadowrunner/hacker/freelance scientific consultant 'The Smiling Bandit', 02/14/2068
  
  The phenomenon of 'virtuakinesis', or the ability of selected individuals to interact with and manipulate wireless-enabled equipment and the Wireless Matrix in ways similar in many respects to how the 'otaku' could perform such manipulations to the wired Matrix with suitable prosthetic assistance to sustain the neural hookup, continues to mystify me.
  
  Online searches by myself and several acquaintances in the shadows have turned up evidence that Catherine Kincaid is not only not unique, but that she is quite likely statistically part of a class perhaps as large as the 'otaku' themselves were or larger. Two additional virtuakinetics other than her known are confirmed as having been recruited by Horizon within the past year, in addition to Singularity's own CEO Tam Reyes, and those are just the ones we have a confirmed and reliable source for.
  
  Any credible estimate of how many other virtuakinetics may be in the field is nigh-impossible to make, both due to the unsystematic and fragmentary resources available for gathering data and indications of an organized, large-scale attempt to both suppress and delete any such sightings from the Matrix at large. There is already one confirmed case of a subject, Harlan Deveraux of Boston, having disappeared shortly after he had presented himself at Boston University School of Medicine asking for assistance in understanding "why I could talk to computers with my brain now". Within a week of that date he had quit his job, closed his bank account, and 'left to undertake new employment opportunities' despite none of his acquaintances being able to say with whom or where, while any and all official records him having ever visited BUSM was redacted from their records. Were it not for the fortunate happenstance of a partial mirror of their biomedical research data having been saved to the Nexus datahaven as part of an unrelated shadowrun, no reference at all would have existed for me to trace. Clearly he was both involuntarily extracted and then data-washed by an unknown megacorporation, but it has yet proven impossible to narrow down even a credible suspect for which one.
  
  Indeed, all of my attempts to follow up on this and more than a few other possible virtuakinetic sightings turned up a distinct lack of results, but in a fashion where the lack was itself disturbing. Too many of my usual contacts were non-committal or outright evasive to an atypical degree, especially considering the length and nature of our prior association. The last time I can recall such a widespread pattern of co-opted or intimidated silence occurring, the second Crash had almost immediately followed.
  
  So I grow more and more convinced that Pistons' initial hunch of last year was correct. The virtuakinetic phenomenon should not only be considered a highly significant phenomenon worthy of systematic study, but is also far too likely to become a matter of great concern to the shadow community in the near future. If 'runners can already be aware of as much of the phenomenon as we are, however fragmentary that knowledge is, then a nontrivial number of the megacorps must already be all too cognizant of the phenomenon as well. And yet save for Horizon none of them appear to be visibly reacting, and even Horizon's actions are nigh-invisible to public view and known to me only thanks to Pistons' personal link to one of their primary virtuakinetic research subjects and the measure of success I have already had at penetrating Singularity's databases.
  
  As Arthur Conan Doyle's great detective once trenchantly observed, sometimes the most curious thing about a guard dog is what it does not do in the night-time. And if the usual suspects among the megacorps are by all appearances remaining entirely oblivious to this sort of matter, then that by itself is very, very suspicious indeed.
  
  Fastjack still disagrees with me, but for all that his brilliance with Matrix technologies and systems intrusion exceeds even mine - a statement few others can boast - he still does not match my breadth and depth of study in other multiple and diverse scientific disciplines. For the foreseeable future, I intend to continue pursuing all possible leads into the 'virtuakinetic' phenomenon as the number one priority for my available research time.
  
  
  Excerpt from North American Broadcasting System's Sports!Now Premium Channel, 06/07/2068
  
  "... and for those just tuning in at the close of this historic match, we are entering the final third of the fourth quarter in this pulse-pounding broadcast of the 2068 Urban Brawl World Cup semi-finals, brought live and direct to your simsense/trideo feed by NABS and Ares Macrotechnology! Our two teams have been beating the outright hell out of each other for the past one hundred and thirteen minutes of play, and with the score tied at eleven to eleven it's all down to the last couple of plays to decide who will advance to the final round and who goes home weeping in defeat! Pity our own hometown Knightmares couldn't be here today though, eh Bret?"
  
  "It always is, Chet! But at least we can be good sports and cheer our distinguished competition the Los Angeles Bolts and their own corporate sponsor Horizon, can't we? And it's ISSV league regulations that World Cup matches must be played in Brawl Zones that are neutral to both teams, which is why Detroit is hosting the Cup this year!"
  
  "And we're certainly not holding a grudge over how Los Angeles upset Detroit in the North American Super Brawl, oh no Bret! At least the Bolts are still loud and proud from NA! And now re-entering the Brawl Zone after the their last time-out are the defending World Cup champions and this year's European League champions, Centurios Essen of Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries! Look at them glare, Bret!
  
  "I think they might still be a bit upset over how starting team blaster Erik "Thunder" Magnusson had to be DocWagon'ed to the hospital after that last play, Chet! Not that reserve blaster Gunther Klautenbund isn't a fine hand with an LMG, but he's certainly not the man who regularly brought the Thunder to the field! This could just be the edge that the Bolts need to take it home!"
  
  "It's definitely been a battle of the plucky upstarts versus the grim Teutonic menace today, indeed, Bret! And maybe in this quarter we'll finally get to see the matchup that the fans have been eagerly awaiting for, as one of the highest-rated scouts in Urban Brawl and Centurios' new star player recently traded from Marseilles, the eye-catching Svetlana "Bounce" Jurjewa, goes head-to-head versus the North American league's heads-on fave for Rookie of the Year, the Bolts' Alex Kincaid! Especially considering that Alex's sharpshooting is what took Magnusson out of the game, in an absolutely unprecedented scout-versus-blaster takedown, so Centurios will definitely be gunning for him now! And as the fastest player and the only adept on their team, Bounce is about their only chance to run down and corner LA's hottest new physical adept!"
  
  "Yes, while normally any red-blooded man and many women would have positively leapt at the opportunity to go "head-to-head" with Bounce, Kincaid's been nothing but all-business all-the-time through the game! No heading out to showboat versus the opposing all-star, just hitting the pavement shooting and moving that ball downfield! But then again Alex didn't set a new marksmanship record at the Bolts' open tryout last year without knowing how to focus on the target, eh Chet?"
  
  "Not at all! And the referees are taking positions... both teams are setting up in their starting blocks... Centurios has Eisenfeldt as their starting ball carrier while the Bolts are going with Chavez... and there's the whistle!"
  
  "Wow, look at that! A double blitz! Both teams have basically put no one on defense and are going for an all-out rush to get their team's ball to the other team's goal! We're going to need multiple camera replays just to keep track of this all!"
  
  "First player down! First player down! The Bolts just lost their outrider to a lucky long-range burst right down main street from Klautenbund! A takedown in the first twenty seconds from almost all the way across the brawl zone! Even with advanced smartlinks, that's not easy!"
  
  "As casual fans might not know the team outrider is the only player on a Brawl team allowed to use a vehicle, and while his motorcycle can't be allowed to move the ball carrier it's still a vital mobility edge for fast repositioning of supporting players or the team medic - wow! Kincaid's already halfway across the map and just did his signature double-tap on one of the bangers Essen had sneaking down the north side, sending the other one falling back in a hurry! Now it's Essen with a big hole knocked out of their line-up! How did he even know they were moving a two-man element through that back alley-?"
  
  "Death From Above! Oh my God! Bounce just came down two stories of nowhere in the southern midfield and did her signature rooftop diving kick to take out the Bolts' medic! Is that even legal?"
  
  "The referees haven't called the penalty, so apparently they believe that she couldn't identify which player it was at that distance! And it's not like she could just stop halfway down, is it? Because yes, normally deliberately targeting the medic is an automatic ejection from the game!"
  
  "They should put a bigger red cross on his uniform then because now the medic needs a medic, and there's nobody to tend to him! And the Bolts don't have any time-outs left! He's going to have to lay there unconscious until the end of the play! Wow, Essen is not kidding around! They're deliberately going straight for the Bolts' most valuable support members!"
  
  "And it's turning into a chaotic midfield scrum as both ball carriers are pinned down by the other's side advancing offense, and any remaining playbook has been thrown right out the window while everyone freelances! Bolts are trying to move the ball- Tiegs and Kincaid are double-teaming Klautenbund to try and open a hole- Bounce is busy eating grudge fire from four of the Bolts and falling back a block before they blast her into a doily-"
  
  "Gel rounds, Bret! Live ammo hasn't been used in ISSV sanctioned Urban Brawl since 2052! But yes, when you're a light-armored scout like Bounce who wants all those bruises? Not to mention the occasional risk of a concussion if you take too many on the helmet!"
  
  "And, there's the whistle! Dead ball! Neither ball carrier was able to advance out of their block for thirty seconds, and it's back to status quo!"
  
  "But not quite, because the Bolts now have a limping outrider and don't even have a medic anymore! Because as the only player exempt from deliberate attack, most teams don't see the need to have reserves at that position! And now Centurios' strategy is clear - they played uglyball in this round so that in the final round, they'd be open for a savage drive against a weakened Bolts lineup right to the goal! And on top of their being so unsportsmanlike as to target a medic, they also got lucky with the outrider!"
  
  "Yes, even if the ref had called it against them trading Bounce for the opposing team's medic would still have been a net gain here! Ruthless, calculating, and cold, just like dragons!"
  
  "The Bolts' Cinderella story is about to turn into a pumpkin unless they can clutch a miracle! All right, they're in a huddle... team captain Sarah 'Fireball' McClain is whispering something intently to Kincaid... are they going to give their last chance at a goal to the rookie, Bret?"
  
  "If I were her right now, I'd give it to a devil rat if I thought the rat could run the ball, Chet!"
  
  "Kincaid is indeed the opening ball carrier for the play, the Bolts are forming up, Centurios likewise... go! All right, Essen's doing an offense/defense split with a possible fallback wing while the Bolts are... what is that formation, Bret?"
  
  "I've never seen it before, Chet! They're all scattering! No, they're going interior!"
  
  "Entering the buildings in a Brawl Zone is legal, but without a knowledge of the layout it's generally pointless! That's why Brawl Zones are picked at the last minute from sections of urban terrain right before they evacuate the residents!"
  
  "Essen's shaking off the surprise and cautiously advancing their ball- oooh! Madness becomes method as we see that the Bolts' light machine-gunner has a perfect vantage point on the entire north midfield from that window! Essen just lost their outrider in a perfect mirror to the last play! And if this game isn't going to go into overtime, then Centurios needs to get the ball to the other half of the midfield! Otherwise it's saturation fire across open ground, and we all know that the blaster brings ALL the ammo to the game!"
  
  "Klautenbund is now settling in for a machine-gun duel versus an opponent with a superior dug-in position and Essen's repositioning - they're going with their usual approach of using the bangers to move the ball while the heavies cover, and Bounce and her fellow scouts are spreading out to do what they do best-"
  
  "Two down! Two down! One of the Bolts' heavies just popped out of a doorway and caught that pair of scouts right in the open! Essen's got one key player pinned and three more out of play and they haven't even shot one of the Bolts yet!"
  
  "At this point Centurios' captain is just plain pissed off! Zugspitze is pulling a heavy knot of one heavy and three of his bangers, and they're heading out to force the line while their blaster and the rest do covering fire! Bounce and her wing-woman have vanished off the cameras and are presumably sneaking out to sow some chaos in the backfield-"
  
  "Holy SHIT! Kincaid just scored a triple play on Centurios' heavy team! Only one of the heavies is even still up, and he didn't even get a shot off! Our rookie just blitzed right out of that cross street and got six shots off to three helmets with barely even breaking stride! It was like something out of a Nathan Never sim! Does this man ever miss?"
  
  "Centurios has got to be sweating it now! They don't even know where the Bolts' ball is-"
  
  "And neither do we, because whoever Kincaid handed it off to has yet to come out of one of those buildings! How has the ball not been declared dead yet?"
  
  "Somehow they're still moving it from one block to another before the shot clock runs out!"
  
  "Half the lineup gone, the enemy ball carrier completely out of sight, and the enemy team still fresh- it's not good to be Centurios right now!"
  
  "There's the ball! Fireball was running it herself as a solo sneak play, but Serkin made the spot- a rare moment of glory for the Germans' number two scout-"
  
  "Ouch, they were so close! But Essen's ball carrier is still inching forward under heavy fire while the Bolts are now pinned and the shot clock is counting down... nineteen seconds... seventeen..."
  
  "It was a good try, and they've still got nothing to be- WHAT?!?"
  
  "Folks, the Bolts somehow found an underground steam tunnel in the Brawl Zone and used it to shift half their line-up from north to south without anybody knowing! They just piled out to all support their captain! Centurio didn't have a chance, they were all so focused on pinning Fireball down that they got taken right out!"
  
  "Essen is down to four players - Bounce, Serkin, Klautenbund, and Stavros still with their ball! Wait, Serkin's cornered- and there he goes, Bret!"
  
  "And Klautenbund's falling back! His saturation fire is the only hope Essen has left of keeping Fireball from bringing it home, so he's heading back to the goal, and that leaves Stavros entirely uncovered!"
  
  "Stavros is heading inside now, and praying to God he can find a lucky tunnel too- wait! He just threw the ball out of a back window right before they caught up to him, and Bounce caught it! The fastest player the dragon has is now the ball runner, and too many of the Bolts are busy on offense!
  
  "Kincaid's off like a shot, as they're both frantically sprinting for the Bolts' goal while the rest of Essen tries to Stalingrad it up and she's leaving the pursuing bangers in the dust! It's neck and neck as they're both coming in off the corners- she's emptying her pistol at him as she runs, he's snapping shots back-"
  
  "Bounce is going high again! She sure loves her rooftops!"
  
  "No, it's a feint! She went up and right back down, but Kincaid did not fall for it! He's coming around the corner of the building instead of heading for the other side, and now it's a stern chase!"
  
  "Back at the other goal, Klautenbund is now last man standing there! He's taken a page from the enemy playbook and dug himself into a machine-gun nest to try and hold off all of the Bolts by himself! What a heroic resolve! You'd better watch out, 'Thunder', he's gunning for your slot!"
  
  "Fireball is playing it conservative- Bounce is in the home stretch! Kincaid did his best but she just had too much of a head start, and now he's almost fifty meters behind! He isn't even trying to catch up anymore! Just a few more seconds and she'll have the tie-breaking goal-"
  
  "Bounce is down! Bounce is down! She is prone in the dirt less than fifty feet from the goal, and she's barely able to crawl! What even happened?!?
  
  "The analysts just ran back the replay and it looks like Kincaid did a sixty-three meter kneeling pistol shot to put one right in the back of her left knee at a dead run! What an unbelievable feat of marksmanship! Play Of The Game! Play Of The Season! We're gonna have to start calling him Crackshot Kincaid!"
  
  "And Bounce is definitely not going to walk that one off, and now he's just jogging over- oh damn, she even lost her pistol when she went sprawling, even if she managed to hang on to the ball! It's out of reach! She's got nothing left to throw at him except harsh language, and- yup, there goes her surrender switch! Her uniform's running lights are all blazing yellow and she is officially down!"
  
  "And Klautenbund just punched it too! Every Centurios player is out! WIPEOUUUUUUUUUUUUT!"
  
  "A wipeout! An honest-to-God wipeout! That hasn't been seen in the World Cup since 2060! Every single offensive player on a team taken out in the same play!"
  
  "And that means an automatic victory for the opposing team, Chet! It's all over with almost two minutes left on the clock, and we don't even need the final goal or an overtime! The Los Angeles Bolts have taken the match by a full wipeout, and they are going to the World Cup finals!"
  
  "If I were the league I'd just hand them the trophy right now, Bret! That final round is going to be an anticlimax after this!"
  
  "It's not going to be fun to be the Lucky Dragons, not at all Chet! And- wait, the celebratory rush is being interrupted by what sounds like some prime trash-talking down there. Focus in, guys!"
  
  "-spent four quarters running away from a real woman, and then you shot her in the back!"
  
  "Oooo, our bouncy little spitfire does not sound happy today!"
  
  "Brave words from a woman who pretends that she can't see a red cross. You know, back in my old job they'd have called that a war crime, not unsportsmanlike conduct."
  
  "That's right, Kincaid was a private military contractor before getting into Urban Brawl, wasn't he?"
  
  "Eat shit, you beardless boy! Everyone in the league wants a piece of me, but in a couple years you'll be gone like all the rest of the lucky scrubs! What are you, a eunuch?"
  
  "I'm almost curious as to the answer myself, given that he's not even glancing at those infamous twin peaks. Even the gay players in the league aren't quite that gay!"
  
  "No, I'm married. But I don't blame you for not recognizing the concept. Good luck with the knee, Svetlana."
  
  "It's Bounce, you miserable-"
  
  "Aaaand we've got a team captain faceoff between Fireball and Zugspitze! Switch to that!"
  
  "-with the tunnel at the end? And the interior layout, and the ambushes? How?"
  
  "My scouts had been running in and out of those buildings all game, and they'd taken notes every time. By the end of the third quarter we had a complete map. So we saved it for the end like a rabbit in a hat."
  
  "When the hell did they have time to take notes? Were you using body cams? I don't think those are permitted!"
  
  "No, they just have really good memories. Kincaid in particular."
  
  "So we lost because your scouts actually scouted. Damn! We will need to shift our training. Everyone will."
  
  "Yeah, it's not like it's a move we could actually keep secret for long. But the game never stops evolving, does it?"
  
  "Nein. And well done, all of you."
  
  "So, that's how the Bolts pulled it off! Talk about using your heads! And yes, it will be interesting to see how the old brawl game continues to adapt to new strategies in the coming years, isn't it?"
  
  "Absolutely! And on a more heartwarming note, I've just got to say that it's nice to see someone who can entirely blow off the most beautiful woman in the league because he's still that much in love with his wife, isn't it Chet?"
  
  "There's one man who certainly won't be sleeping on the couch tonight, Bret! And this has been NABS Sports!Now, as we bring the latest exciting round of World Cup Urban Brawl to a close! Make sure to tune in for the postgame press conference starting in just five minutes, after which we'll bring you our team of award-winning sports analysts for the replays and breakdown!
  
  
  Transcript of JackPoint IM chat, 7/3/2068
  
  Slamm-0! - Okay, I picked up the datapacket. Why couldn't you do this yourself, again? I'm not some secretary who can be sent out to fetch your voicemail!
  
  Pistons - Because I was committed to last-minute biz that weekend and couldn't make the pickup, and the time window was limited, and every other candidate for it I trusted even less. So thanks for doing me the favor, I owe you one. Well, one-half.
  
  Slamm-0! - The heck you mean 'half'? You owe me what we agreed upon, not a bit less.
  
  Pistons - Yes, but you agreed to not open the package too.
  
  Slamm-0! - I did not!
  
  Pistons - Uh-huh. Pull the other one, kid, it's got a boot on it. I know you did.
  
  Slamm-0! - Damn, I would have sworn on my mother's sniper rifle that I didn't trip anything! How'd you catch me out, and what would it take to get you to teach me that trick?
  
  Pistons - I'll teach it to you for free. It's called 'Knowing your audience'. You didn't trip any flags, but there's simply no chance you wouldn't pry into it because you're you. And you are still way too easy to bluff, kid.
  
  Slamm-0! - Well, shit!
  
  Pistons - Old Age And Treachery 1, Youth And Enthusiasm 0. *eg*
  
  Slamm-0! - So, I'm not saying I read your mysterious datapacket that was left behind in Dawn of Atlantis MMORPG servers as encrypted hidden data bombs attached to certain items being sold in the auction house under such stupid prices that nobody would ever buy them except someone who knew specifically to look for them, but I'm not not saying that. So who the heck is she and why is she choosing such a weird way to send you gossip from what looks like the inside of some megacorporate research lab? If there's a prime run about to go down in the Matrix that requires this kind of inside man spook biz then I'd love to bring my bat on over and play ball, you know what I mean?
  
  Pistons - She is a very nice friend of mine who I still talk to despite her having decided on a non-shadowy lifepath and having nasty corpsec types potentially read her email to make sure she's not still talking to nastier shadowrunner types like me, and the rest is none of your business.
  
  Slamm-0! - Is she asking you for an extraction from the corporate rat race? Sign me up in a heartbeat for that run, 'cause I'll gladly slide you a discount.
  
  Pistons - ... you looked at her enclosed photos too, didn't you?
  
  Slamm-0! - Yeah, and she is hot! Da-yum! And maybe she's got a corporate boyfriend now but if she's ditching the scene then she'll be single again, right?
  
  Pistons - That's not her boyfriend, that's her husband. And she's not ditching the scene.
  
  Slamm-0! - Why are the good ones always married?!?
  
  Pistons - And he's an Urban Brawl champion and could pick you up with one hand and stuff you into a soda can. And they are totally crazy about each other. Trust me, I was at their wedding.
  
  Slamm-0! - Wait, your friend's married to Crackshot Kincaid? I'd thought that was just a chance resemblance!
  
  Pistons - ... I'd forgotten what a sports nut you are. Damn! Well, chalk another one up as lesson learned as to how even the most minor disclosure can potentially blow someone's cover!
  
  Slamm-0! - If they're trying to stay in deep cover they shouldn't enclose family photos. But yeah, I'll keep it buried for you, no charge. I mean, anybody who kicks Centurios' ass the way he did is clearly a national treasure!
  
  Pistons - I'd thought Bounce was your favorite Urban Brawl star?
  
  Slamm-0! - Well she was, but honestly? This past season she's been starting to come across as kinda sleazy.
  
  Pistons - Why heavens to Murgatroyd, is our Slamm-0! finally starting to grow up?
  
  Slamm-0! - I certainly hope not!
  
  
  Horizon DAEDALUS-BLACK secure file archive
  
  Transcript of Business Conference of Horizon Working Group 'Milkweed'
  Starting 1012 PDT, July 4th, 2068
  
  Members Present:
  Gary Cline, CEO, Horizon
  Tam Reyes, VP of Matrix Systems, Horizon, and CEO, Singularity Software
  Sandra DeVries, Dawkins Group
  
  CLINE: I have to attend the holiday ceremonies this afternoon, so let's keep it brief. Sandra, you asked for this urgent meeting because...?
  
  DEVRIES: We've recently turned up a disturbing possible-
  
  REYES: At this point, I would like to emphasize "possible".
  
  DEVRIES: As I would like to emphasize 'disturbing'. To continue, the complication in question is Subject Milkweed-Two's family ties.
  
  CLINE: Mr. Kincaid? Outside of being our latest Urban Brawl star and a nicely rising media property, what's so disturbing about him?
  
  DEVRIES: Cutting to the chase? His background is as fake as a three-dollar bill.
  
  CLINE: ... I see.
  
  REYES: More specifically, it's growing more and more probable that his 'reconstructed' life history that was 'lost in the Crash 2.0' is actually constructed from whole cloth.
  
  CLINE: Well, he wouldn't be the first person to reinvent their life history when they had the chance. Or even the first trusted Horizon employee. So, have you turned up anything that dictates he is unreliable?
  
  DEVRIES: ... we have no positive indications of that at this time.
  
  CLINE: If not that, then what exactly did he lie about?
  
  REYES: Well, deep linguistic analysis reveals that he didn't lie about being from the UCAS Midwest, but he almost certainly wasn't a poor and honest orphan farmboy who enlisted in an independent private military corporation as his only hope for a college education because his attempt to the UCAS Army had been interrupted by the second Crash.
  
  DEVRIES: Confirmed lie number one is that he did not go straight from being involuntarily SINless to the 77th Independent Rangers, as his dossier indicated. Because this turned up in a routine datamine of a new employee's old MeFeed posts over a week ago, which is what touched off our recent investigation.
  
  CLINE: Hrm. And this young lady is...?
  
  DEVRIES: No one of import by herself. The relevant part is that this young lady graduated college and joined a Horizon subsidiary as an entry-level graphics designer last month, and our automated data-mining tools did a routine crawl of her social media history as part of her entrance screening and turned up that rather surprising hit of someone who's photo exactly matches our latest Urban Brawl star's... as she breathlessly details how she was saved from an attack by a pair of drugged-up razorboys on a trip into the Redmond Barrens 'Touristville' district by her 'physad shadowrunner bodyguard'. Who scored two headshots out of two fired in less than a second with zero chance to prepare. And given our 'Crackshot's' nigh-unique marksmanship, that's what takes this from 'everybody has a body double somewhere' to 'it's 99.9+% likely to be the same man'.
  
  CLINE: So he was almost certainly working as a SINless shadowrunner in Seattle in 2065. If I remember correctly from Mrs. Kincaid's dossier...?
  
  DEVRIES: We didn't just stop with one MeFeed post. Once we have a time and a place to focus on, we investigated. There is photographic evidence and other confirmed data that Alex Kincaid first met Catherine Connors and they developed their relationship while she was a student at the University of Washington Seattle campus, not when they met in the 77th Independent Rangers in Africa as their official bios indicate.
  
  CLINE: So, a coordinated effort between the two of them to conceal his background and smuggle him in. Tam? Are there any indications that either of them has been conducting espionage in your shop? I genuinely doubt anyone would go to this effort to spy on the Los Angeles Bolts, after all.
  
  REYES: We haven't had any non-trivial leaks from the project at all, Gary, except the ones traceable to 'Smiling Bandit's' datarip on us months ago. And that one was not an inside job - he was legitimately skilled enough to do it from a cold standing start, and it entirely fits his pattern that he'd attack our scientific hosts even not knowing what was inside out of pure curiosity.
  
  DEVRIES: Dawkins will concur on that much - Smiling Bandit's M.O. is long-standing and quite infamous in certain Matrix circles, and this was entirely compliant with his pattern. And before Mr. Reyes brings it up himself, I will concur that there are possible less than malevolent explanations for the Kincaids' initial deception.
  
  CLINE: Such as him simply wanting to get the hell out of the slums and be a rich and famous Urban Brawl star married to a beautiful young wife he's clearly madly in love with. Or her wanting to rehabilitate her wrong-side-of-the-tracks boyfriend rather than allow the inevitable gulf between the legitimate and the shadow life tear them apart. *chuckles* I literally starred in that simflick once, as you might recall.
  
  REYES: I work with her regularly and through her I meet him socially almost as often as his travel schedule permits. If they're faking how much they care for each other then they're better deep-cover spies than our Dawkins Group could even dream of being. I couldn't produce that level of intentional self-deception in anyone even with high-gain simsense conditioning.
  
  DEVRIES: Our own psychological profilers largely concur with the sincerity of their relationship. However, that is by itself a potential problem because it means that their first loyalty is to each other well ahead of any loyalty to external institutions. Such as Horizon corporation.
  
  CLINE: Isn't the entire basis of our human resources policy to make sure that our employees never start seeing it as 'them versus the corporation?' That a happy Horizon guarantees a happy life for them?
  
  DEVRIES: And so long as our intended long-term scenario regarding Emergence remains either Alpha or Bravo variants, then that will not be a problem. Indeed, his own media prominence and their both being highly photogenic people already possessing a great amount of sentimental and 'wholesome family values' appeal PR-wise even before any stage-managing on our part makes them ideal for Alpha. But-
  
  REYES: I reiterate yet again that the Alpha-Bravo spectrum of our long-term Emergence scenarios are the only sane or viable ones. Charlie is actively counter-productive, and Delta and Epsilon are simply unmentionable.
  
  CLINE: I agree... but never forget that Alpha and Bravo are the only sane and viable ones if the developing situation gives us a choice, Tam. And Sandra is entirely correct that we can't ignore the necessary contingency planning for if it doesn't.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: And so we leave behind act two to enter act three, the Horizon arc. Hopefully this was suitably foreboding and mysterious!
  
  I have yet to design the Horizon arc besides the vague outline of what I've set up here, so I'm going to wait for the creative squirrel to either shit a pile of nuts in the next day or two or go take a nap until lightning strikes. So, we'll see.
  
  BTW, the young lady and the headshots? Scroll back to chapter 2, she's mentioned there. The Matrix never forgets! And while I was not planning this exact scene that far ahead when that far back, I do like to scatter little bits of flavor semi-randomly as I go just in case they might come in handy later. The line between good foreshadowing and good improv is more of a guideline than a rule, after all. *g*
  
  By the way, Urban Brawl actually does have all the positions and an outline of the game rules and scoring all done for you in the 2e Shadowbeat supplement, just as with other fictional Shadowrun sports such as Combat Biker. So while I had to come up with that segment of the play-by-play, I didn't have to actually invent the game from whole cloth. And yes, it is played with two balls (one for each team) that each team has to try and advance to the other's goal zone while simultaneously defending their own, which might explain some of the commentary.
  
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  I ran a finger around inside the collar of my genuine silk suit, a Brilliance original (the Horizon house label, of course), and let 'Cat straighten my necktie. Dark gray with a bright silver tie, a not-so-subtle reference to the Bolts' team colors. Cat was in a slightly less expensive red-and-black one-shouldered dress, with a pearl choker around her neck. Both of us we wearing more nuyen worth of clothing than our entire wardrobe all put together two years ago would have cost.
  
  I graciously helped her out of the door of the limousine and we stood, arm-in-arm, as the hovering little camera-drones of the paparazzi took their shots. Smile, face thirty degrees left, hold pose three to five seconds while waving to the crowd, turn to thirty degrees right, hold and wave again, face front, resume walking. We finished the well-practiced drill as our limousine discreetly pulled away from the curb behind us and cleared the red carpet and headed inside, just in time for the next arrival to pull in where we'd been. I was hardly the only celebrity attending this gala premiere, after all, and even with the recent big game I was hardly the most prominent one either. Because even in the dark cyberpunk future and even after multiple earthquakes, the balkanization of the UCAS, the Pueblo takeover of LA and parts of central CalFree in 2061, the Crash 2.0 and the rise of Horizon and its revamping and takeover of the oligarchy that was LA showbiz, Mann's Chinese Theatre was still Mann's Chinese Theatre and the biggest blockbusters still did their premieres here if they possibly could.
  
  It was July 9th, 2068, and we'd been invited to the first public screening of Shooting Star: Battle For Pusan, a live-action adaptation of a popular Korean animated trid series about a teenaged girl with a nigh-unique talent who along with the rest of her squadron defended the city against the techno-drones of a sinister AI mastermind. One that mysteriously kinda resembled Deus, the real-life sinister AI mastermind that had gone Skynet on the Renraku Arcology in Seattle and had been the primary instigator of the second Crash before finally being destroyed.
  
  Reporter incoming my wife mentally sighed on my personal Augmented Reality display, complete with a helpful glowing arrow highlighting the approaching gentleman. I braced myself for the familiar media dance-
  
  "Catherine Kincaid!" he called out cheerfully as he came to a polite stop six feet away from us, camera-drone hovering over his shoulder.
  
  "Yes?" she answered brightly, both of us on mental autopilot as we caught up to the realization that he was trying to interview her as opposed to me. Well, that was a first, especially still less than a month after the Bolts had become the World Cup champions and I'd become NA's Rookie of the Year and the playoffs MVP!
  
  "Mike Meyerson, HBC Entertainment News! As one of Singularity's rising professionals in Matrix R&D and a former pro gamer, how do you feel about the announced format change that alters Hana Song from being uniquely talented to piloting a battlesuit due to having been an e-sports champion to instead being uniquely suited to fight the AI Archon in VR cybercombat due to being a unique mathematical savant enhanced by SURGE?" he asked smoothly without pausing for breath.
  
  "Spoilers!" she chided him cutely. "And my personal opinion is that while it might be a major adjustment for fans of the original series to make and also disappoint my own inner teenager, I can acknowledge the need for it."
  
  "But what about complying with canon?" he asked "Isn't loyalty to the original franchise and the original fans important, instead of changing everything just to pursue a new audience?"
  
  "The world is full of highly skilled riggers whose training came via more conventional formats, both drone and vehicle, but the animated series basically skipped over that fact in the interests of making Hana more relatable to the original intended audience." Catherine professed. "But the movie version isn't just a kids' show anymore and won't live up to its full potential if it only settles for still being one just with live actors and more FX, so the new premise should only enhance the franchise as it transitions."
  
  "What do you think about this, Alex?" he turned away to face me as I grinned inwardly. Yeah, 'Cat in full geek mode could sometimes be a little intimidating.
  
  "Hey, I shoot people, not movies." I deflected with my 'amiable jock' grin. "So don't ask me to second-guess a director like David Pitt... let alone my own wife!" I laughed briefly. "As long as it's entertaining and there's no big plot holes, I think it'll do fine."
  
  "Three Oscars certainly can't be all wrong!" he chuckled along with me. "Thanks for your time!" he finished up and made his exit.
  
  That was a bit odd. I thought back through my own 'trode set as she kept her grip tight on my hand. Not that we didn't have other reasons for hand-holding in public, but it also allowed her to use skin conductivity to jack her powers into my own commlink's Personal Area Network and thus allow us to have entirely private conversations even in public.
  
  Well, all that bio data about me is easily searchable on my corporate social media, and I suppose as both a onetime Paranormal Crisis champ and a Matrix researcher I'm a valid interview subject about the plot change. Especially since I'm also the wife of a celebrity. Still, I had no prep for that one at all.
  
  I almost wonder if- I began to reply, until a very familiar voice rapidly yanked our attention entirely back to meatspace.
  
  "Hey Alex! Catherine! How's it going?" Gary Cline's booming oratorical tones washed over us.
  
  "Glad to see you, Gary!' I automatically answered back. Because while we hardly were close friends with Horizon's CEO, we did both see him occasionally in passing as he came in for face-to-faces with either Catherine's boss at Singularity or the Bolts' management staff, in addition to all the media appearances surrounding our recent Super Brawl and World Cup victories. "It's been a great summer so far!"
  
  "Glad to hear it!" he charmed us back as we went through the inevitable glad-handing it was impossible to avoid in Gary Cline's presence, especially when he was in public mode. We spent another minute or so exchanging the inevitable small talk before he politely moved on to press the flesh elsewhere in his gala-night socializing, and both headed off to the concession stand for some sodas.
  
  It took another two-question interview with a reporter who worked the more conventional sports-beat with me, several other necessary 'Hi! How are you?' moments with two of my teammates and one of Singularity's execs, and fifteen minutes of celebrity chit-chat before we finally navigated through the big glitterati pile in the lobby and were able to make it to our seats, every minute of it potentially on-camera. Not only were the paparazzi there but virtually anyone with a Personal Area Network, either worn or implanted, was capable of being of being a one-person camera crew who could film their area and upload it to their MeFeed or GoTube without even taking their hands out of their pockets.
  
  Sometimes you really missed being able to just throw on a clean pair of pants and randomly head out to catch a matinee.
  
  
  
  When we'd roughed out our plan to use AAA megacorporate citizenship via Cat and my reinventing myself as a sports star, even with all the forethought and research we'd done we still hadn't really grasped just what our new lifestyles would entail.
  
  On the plus side, the perks were awesome.
  
  In some ways I'd been in for less of a culture shock there than Cat had, despite her being native to this world and time period. After all, I'd been from 2020s America where what we'd have called an outright horrid urban blight, as in "The Wire" level bad, is what Seattle would have called an only moderately rough neighborhood. And you didn't find outright Barrens-like conditions in my birth world anywhere short of a Third World failed state, but in Shadowrun you could see that crap from the top of the Space Needle. So living in a neighborhood where there was literally no litter, graffiti, unkempt lawns, etc., etc. within line-of-sight anywhere was not a new and wondrous experience to me, even if it was to her. Even the U-Dub campus couldn't escape graffiti. And while 95+% of the contemporary population lived off of things like sculpted and synthetically flavored soy protein (guaranteed to at least mostly have the taste and texture of real food, or you got to shrug and eat it anyway!), mycoprotein, krill flakes, and etc., even the poor people back where I was from got to routinely see real fresh food, as grown on actual farms or ranches.
  
  But that's hardly to say that I was any less appreciative of our new level of luxury than she was. We weren't even in the highest lifestyle tier possible - the sort that people like Gary Cline or Samantha Villiers would enjoy - but even being a tier below the ultra tier was still vastly higher than either of us had ever dreamed of being in our lives. 'Cat had been a merit-scholarship student straight out of the elven ghetto in Puyallup, I'd been a working-class dude from middle America who'd only ever worn a suit to his own high school graduation and his parents' funerals. So the hardwood furniture and floors, the top-of-the-line household drones for everything from dusting the ceilings to empty the trash cans, a central home node that did a Matrix-of-Things experience on all the appliances in the house so you could order freshly ground coffee to be waiting for you from the middle of your evening commute home, the in-home Direct-X simsense, and everything else you could fit into a 300-square-meter luxury condoplex that took up one entire corner...
  
  Oh, yes, we liked it. We liked it very much. It was more luxury than either of us had even thought we'd ever see in our lives, and was only improved an even quantum leap further by the fully-networked Augmented Reality technology the late 2060s were bringing to anyone with a commlink and the Personal Area Network capabilities it did... let alone what was possible for someone like 'Cat, who had a beyond-SOTA commlink and advanced wireless hub built into her head. And for all that I'd had selfless motives about improving the world, I was not going to pretend I was some type of ascetic monk. The new fruits of our labors were quite juicy indeed, and if we could continue to do well for ourselves by doing good then by all means.
  
  But that isn't to say that everything was a paradise. Even before I'd become "Crackshot" Kincaid, Rookie of the Year and Urban Brawl's latest young superstar, even as just another new player fresh off an open tryout I'd still in major league sports. Which meant I'd still been a celebrity of sorts, meaning that my life outside our home was still lived under media management rules - and so was Cat's virtually anywhere outside our home and her workplace, simply because she was married to me. So rules on what we could say, rules on what we couldn't say, media training sessions for us both - me especially - on how to say it, the whole nine yards. Even if you wanted to go to the wrong places while wearing the wrong clothes to do wrong things, as more than a couple of my teammates did, you still had unwritten rules on how you did it so as to keep it from showing up in the screamsheets later.
  
  Hell, I even had social media participation quotas, because even in the 2020s a celebrity's managed image had to start incorporating things like strategic Twitter posting and a keen appreciation of what the wrong digital cam in the wrong place could do in conjunction with Youtube. So in the 2060s? Especially under Horizon, who were busy re-charting the bleeding edge of media manipulation SOTA every month? Part of my job was actually keeping up with my MeFeed and liveblogging. I didn't get a script for most of it, just a memo of bullet points to avoid, but basic common sense was enough to tell me that my ratings and contract renegotiations would only largely depend on how well I played and would also depend to at least some extent on how interesting I could be to all the websurfers who had nothing better to do but see how well their fave stars could also be "spontaneous" content creators. There were actually some days where 'Cat and I felt more like we were role-playing a pair of happy newlyweds for the cameras than actually being a pair of happy newlyweds. It was hardly 'The Truman Show' levels of fake and wrong, but it was still just a little wearying sometimes.
  
  So yes, after I got into the lifestyle myself it was no longer a mystery to me why 'Bounce' stripped herself half-naked during games whenever she could get away with losing that much chest armor without eating a bullet and otherwise threw so many diva fits. It was probably the best thing she could think of for avoiding that worst of fates in mid-21st-century sports entertainment - being boring. Me personally, I'd fallen back on doing a two-person videogame streaming show with 'Cat. It was something she was an expert at, a hot elven gamer girl would totally boost anyone's ratings, and ever since she'd basically given up competitive Paranormal Crisis because she felt her powers gave her too much of a hidden advantage it at least let her still feel part of the worldwide gaming community in some way. Also, Dawn of Atlantis was really kinda cool. MMORPGs had been getting immersive and interesting enough when you saw them on a flat screen and played them with a keyboard and mouse, so try to imagine how immeasurably deeper it could get when you could play it in full-VR Matrix sensorium. World of Warcraft didn't have shit on this.
  
  Even so, my end goal of finding a place to stand and a lever large enough to help fix the world felt like I was chasing the horizon at this point - pun intended. As I advanced further and further, the goal kept receding in front of me so that despite all the ground I'd covered and all the lovely new scenery, it still seemed like I was as far away from my destination as ever.
  
  Well, that's what keeping the old nose to the grindstone was for. After all, the mirage of no progress was sometimes just a mirage.
  
  Find anything? Cat's voice echoed in my commlink. Two people each using their own datajacks and a direct-connect cable were already capable of entirely private VR/AR conversations as far back as the invention of datajacks, so if I had my 'trodes on and were jacked into my commlink - as most people in the new modern Augmented Reality-enabled routinely were all day - then we could 'speak' in private for as long as she was close enough to get an un-snoopable direct link to my personal electronics.
  
  Admittedly, Cat's powers let her be a living bug-sweeper, and we'd never found any trace of unauthorized listening devices in our home. The problem is that if you could tap into the Central Housekeeping Node you didn't need to creep in and install any unauthorized devices - all the audio-visual pickups you'd need to eavesdrop were already installed as part of the housekeeping drones and electronics, they had to be able to see where they were going and hear spoken user commands. It was basically like Amazon Alexa had been back in my old homeworld... only there was no 'non-Alexa' mode you could use. So even with 'Cat's powers and her ever-growing mastery of them, we could never be entirely certain of our privacy. Even the most detailed down-to-the-bits-and-bytes teardown looking for hidden logins into a Matrix node wouldn't reveal if the node's own admin was doing the logging in - the admin account always had access to everything, that's why it was the admin. And since we lived in a Horizon-owned condoplex, that meant Horizon was always potentially watching.
  
  And sure, this was a known and accepted part of megacorporate life going in, but it meant that even more than the other celebrities/employees in this town we had no real place we could live our private lives except inside our own heads. After all, Horizon mostly didn't care about what even its social media stars did when not on the clock... but most of the others didn't have a significant agenda of their own they still weren't sure they wanted to share with Horizon. Honestly, if 'Cat and I hadn't at least been able to use her powers to at least open up to each other in ARspace-
  
  No smoking gun today. I 'sighed' back. I'd allowed myself to be "persuaded" to shift my major from engineering to business as 'better career advice'. It had been the major I'd wanted all along, but I hadn't wanted to advertise that so much before I was hired. So, going on the theory that things that other people talked you into were things they didn't feel threatened by, I managed to indirectly steer my coach into pointing out to me that a player who'd aged out of the brawl game had much better odds of being hired in the business track than the STEM track, as corps much preferred to grow their researchers straight out of college.
  
  Which meant that I was able to finally start sidestepping the 'everybody knows' of world economic, business, and political conditions and start getting an in-depth look at them. Especially politics, because in the dark cyberpunk future, a business studies major was unavoidably adjacent to the political science track. Business was politics in far too many places, and politics certainly was a business.
  
  It's got to be out there somewhere, she reassured me.
  
  To be fair, I'm not exactly getting one hundred percent objective data here. Because, of course, the educational resources available via a corp-sponsored university were going to be only one of several possible points of view on the situation.
  
  The megacorp-approved point of view? Definitely not any kind of objective presentation. But for as long as businesses aren't going bankrupt en masse, the economic education available has got to be teaching at least largely true things. It's not as if the world financial system is a forgiving environment.
  
  Hah, not hardly. 'So, how was your day?' he said, changing the subject...
  
  Tam had a closed meeting to discuss long-range trends with me and the other technos. Nothing solid, but it's looking more and more like the public reveal of technomancers' will be only a couple years from now.
  
  That's what they've decided to go with as a name for it? 'Technomancy'?
  
  Eee-yup. The marketing psychs think that drawing an analogy between the 'Emergence', as they're calling it, and the Awakening is a way to help reassure people. After all, the arrival of magic was also at one time believed to be the end of science as we know it and composed of massively spooky phenomena that nobody understood how they worked, and now magic is both a prized industrial resource and a pop-culture extravaganza.
  
  And is still composed of spooky phenomena nobody really understands how it works.
  
  That too. And, well, I'm not a building full of sociologists and advanced statistical marketing people.
  
  At least that part of coming to Horizon looks to have been a good idea on our parts. I sighed.
  
  Your tone of voice implies that you're not thinking the rest of it was. she probed.
  
  Regarding Project Archimedes? Even with everything I've done to assimilate and correlate more data than most people can dream of crunching, I'm still not getting any real inspiration there. The AAA megacorps simply directly or indirectly own too much of the world's real wealth. And not just money or natural resources, but also intellectual property, means of production, even human and metahuman resources... and the infrastructure that raises, trains, and indoctrinates the following generations of them. Even with the field thrown upon to highly speculative wishing, it always turns into a case of 'To solve this problem you'd need to be able to solve that problem, which is made impossible by these factors, which can't be solved without one of those, which will never be allowed to exist by the source of the original problem.' I sighed yet again. Even with my game-breaking superpowers, it feels like this particular game isn't the one I'm able to break. It's like a Sicilian death-lock - all the cars are stuck nose-to-nose at the intersection because nobody is going to be first to back up and let another car turn. I don't know how you can outsmart that much stupid.
  
  And yet again with the 20th century metaphors you had to explain to me before I even got them, because that's certainly not been a thing ever since GridGuide technology existed. she thought back cheekily.
  
  I appreciate that you're trying to cheer me up from the ongoing lack of progress, but time-travel jokes are not going to work today. I sent back gently.
  
  I could always start pulling a 'Bounce' on you... she smirked, reaching one hand up to lightly tease her fingers over the collar of her blouse.
  
  Oh that would definitely work, but it would also make me far too late for tonight's mandatory social engagement. I smiled back.
  
  And don't I know it! And since it's about time you got up and got dressed for it, unass the couch already. And say 'hi' to Sarah for me, okay?
  
  I will. Love you.
  
  Love you too.
  
  I kissed my wife, then stood up and headed to the bedroom to get changed. My one-year rookie contract had expired at the end of the season - with first-year turnover as high in Urban Brawl as it was, the system was that all rookies got a standard one-year contract. There were no extensions. no options, just an agreed-upon league scale for rookies and the same media percentages and endorsements as the league collective bargaining agreement gave everyone else, and after the first year it was entirely the player's decision to stay in Brawl or not, just as it was entirely their team's decision to keep them on or dump them. If a player and his starting team couldn't agree on a new contract then they were a free agent, but his starting team entirely had right of first refusal before a player was released.
  
  The system had evolved because the attrition rate in the first year was huge. The sport was physically demanding enough a whole lot of people who thought they were tough enough for Urban Brawl - even ones with actual combat experience - rapidly found out that they weren't. It's not as if the sport was as deadly as real combat, and certainly wasn't as tactically challenging, but while we weren't all real soldiers by a long shot there was no one who could say that pro Urban Brawlers were not all world-class athletes.
  
  And given what my rookie year had entailed, the typical end-of-rookie-year renegotiations had gotten far more spirited - and far more generous - than average in my particular case. But it hadn't taken more than a few weeks for the process to be completed, because a team was normally willing to do quite a bit to hang on to a rookie who had clearly gone novastar. So we'd already gotten final ink on the contract by this afternoon. And as I'd been the last player on the Bolts to finish contract talks this summer, that meant tonight was the time for the traditional team post-summer-contract-sessions party.
  
  
  
  "CHUG! CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!" everyone chanted, as I dutifully drained the trophy cup. Mercifully they'd only filled it with beer, not hard liquor. The lesson of that year where the Cincinnati Lasers had almost lost their star heavy to alcohol poisoning because they'd been crazy enough to do the post-Super-Brawl celebration with a trophy full of vodka instead of beer, and had lost the subsequent World Cup because they'd had to play his position off the bench, had not been lost on the rest of the league.
  
  I burped and put it down, then sat right back down and waited for my stomach to settle. While the Urban Brawl World Cup could hold a full 12 cans of beer, they'd only slightly more than half-filled it so I hadn't had to do more than solo a six-pack. Normally I didn't drink at all, but avoiding "social" drinking on a major league athletics team was nigh-impossible, so I leaned into my own superpowers to shake it off like I could shake off everything else. But not too quickly, because that would attract notice.
  
  "Congratulations, m'man! Twenty-two million nuyen for the next three years! That is one helluva sweet-ass first deal!" Harry "Long-Fall" Ironhorse, our starting left heavy, backslapped me.
  
  "Definitely beat out my first contract." Vincent Torsten, our other heavy and Harry's partner, grunted.
  
  "Yeah, but you didn't score Rookie of the Year, playoffs MVP, and the game-winning play in the World Cup." Sarah "Fireball" McClain, our team captain, broke in good-naturedly. "Alex earned those numbers."
  
  "Said the thirty-million-nuyen woman." Vincent shot back. "But yeah, I gotta admit the ring's the thing, ain't it?" he demurred as he presented his ring finger and its proudly displayed World Championship ring. We were of course all wearing ours for the occasion as well.
  
  "It wasn't the game-winning play, it was just the semi-finals." Andrew 'Silver Streak' Koznowski, one of my fellow scouts, corrected her.
  
  "Oh please, the Hong Kong team went down like pop-up targets." Fireball snorted. "The real World Cup match was the semi, and the Germans took us to the wire." She paused just long enough to make it dramatic, and then grinned wickedly. "And still lost!"
  
  "We are the lightning!" went up a general chorus of the team slogan.
  
  "Yo! Another round of the good stuff for everyone, because the rookie's buying!" Fireball yelled at the waiter, and the servers who'd been discreetly staying out of range of the large table full of heavily-drinking professional athletes started bringing it out yet more to get drunk with.
  
  "So, Crackshot, there's another team tradition you might not be aware of..." Andrew leaned over to smirk at me after we'd finished the next round.
  
  "And that would be?" I sighed tolerantly. Because I was only going to put up with a certain amount of the hazing. This place felt enough like a college frat sometimes even without it.
  
  "Yeah, a purely LA one! Given the unique cultural environment around here... well, you've proven that can score in the Brawl Zone, but can you score?" he leered at me. "Some of the most beautiful women in Hollywood are in this club tonight, rookie! So go on, show us your real game!"
  
  "If it's all the same to you, I'm just gonna punch my surrender switch." I made a joke of it.
  
  "Dude, I admit your wife is one fine-" one of the bangers started to break in.
  
  "Phrasing, Larry!" Fireball immediately cut him off.
  
  "-but man does not live by matrimony alone!" Harry picked up the thread cheerfully. "Come on, live a little!"
  
  "I just got rich, Long-Fall. I don't want my first major celebrity purchase to be my divorce settlement." I spun him off.
  
  "You have to admit he's got a point there, m'man." Vincent chimed in, as he'd lost five million nuyen just a couple years ago learning the hard way to never get married in Tinseltown without a pre-nup.
  
  "What's the matter, 'Lackshot', no balls?" Andrew kept pushing.
  
  "Hey, Andy, how's about we make it a contest?" I smirked back after a moment's thought. "You go pull the most beautiful woman in this club that you possibly can, and then I'll go and sleep with a woman that's even more beautiful."
  
  "More beautiful as decided by who?" he said suspiciously.
  
  "Three votes. Me, you, and Sarah's." I said instantly. "Majority rules."
  
  "Hah! You're on, rookie! And prepare to eat my dust!" he boasted, and with an arrogant grace he stood up and headed out onto the dance floor. Since Andrew was an extremely good-looking guy - partly natural, and partly knowing the right surgeons - and his particular brand of alpha-bro was mysteriously attractive to a certain type of woman in Hollywood, especially after the third drink, it didn't take him long to land one of Brilliance's current supermodel stable. Especially since you didn't normally come to a club like Electron Skies unless you were trying to hook up,
  
  "Cherise, this is Crackshot. Crackshot, Cherise DeLeon. Super model." he introduced us. "Welp, that's mine down."
  
  "Technically you haven't actually slept with her yet, but I'll give you a bye on that because she's clearly interested and willing-" I conceded.
  
  "I sure am!" she giggled helplessly. Yes, somebody had certainly been into the good stuff tonight.
  
  "So, what do you think you can do?" Andrew smirked.
  
  I held up my commlink and, with the relevant Augmented Reality window set to allow everyone at the table to see it, pulled up and tapped the icon 'Club Services -> Call A Cab'. "I can go home and sleep with my wife. Who is, as far as I'm concerned, the most beautiful woman in the world."
  
  Everyone else at the table burst out in laughter.
  
  "Hey!" Andrew protested. "That doesn't count!"
  
  "I said you could find the most beautiful woman in this club that you could possibly land, and then I'd go and sleep with one even more beautiful. I didn't say she had to be in the club at the time." I pointed out calmly, lazily crossing my arms.
  
  "Crackshot's right, he never did!" Long-Fall chimed in. "I guess we know how he scored that sweet contract today, don't we team?" he kept laughing.
  
  "Yeah, well, I don't think-" Andrew started to say nastily.
  
  "Two out of three, remember?" I cut him off. "Sarah, it's up to you to break the tie."
  
  Sarah looked at me levelly, and then at Andrew, and let it draw out for a long, tense moment... that would have been far tenser if I hadn't seen her winking at me from the side Andrew couldn't spot. Because yeah, old 'Silver Streak' had always been a pushy asshole and as the captain she'd had to deal with more of that than most of us. There was no real chance she'd ever have picked his side... and even if she had, I still wouldn't have really lost anything except some jock pride I didn't really have. But this was why drunk people should never make bar bets with less drunk people, a lesson Andrew was learning yet again just tonight.
  
  "Cathy wins." Fireball finally said with a wicked grin of her own. "No offense, Cherise, but neon purple is just so not your color." she continued with obvious insincerity.
  
  I bought the happy couple the most expensive drink the house served on me - as a semi-apology to her and to rub it in to him - and left the club to go catch my cab ride home. As I stood waiting outside on the marquee waiting for it, I let the smile fall off my face and thought about what had just happened-
  
  I stepped to the side just in time to avoid being bumped into by a drunk Kit McClain, simsense star extraordinaire, as he lurched out down the red carpet past where I'd just been standing and blithely reclaimed his car keys from the just-arriving valet parker. Despite being visibly four sheets to the wind, nobody said a word to him as he got in and drove off. Not even me, because club security politely intercepted me when I looked like I might be about to step quickly towards him.
  
  As his sports car peeled out my eidetic memory replayed all the relevant information even though I didn't really want it to. The alcoholic simstar had been in rehab twice already, and the over-under on him going back for a third round was within two weeks after principal photography would wrap on his current project. God only knows how he'd be sober enough to work tomorrow, but then again, being plastered off his ass had never affected the quality of his acting before.
  
  It had, however, rather materially affected the quality of life of the last person he'd hit with his car while driving drunk. It had been considered a socially responsible and happy ending by Hollywood standards that he'd issued a public apology, had paid an extremely generous cash settlement, and had 'voluntarily' entered rehab and even managed to avoid falling off the wagon for almost a year afterwards. A substantial improvement over what would have happened under the old studio system that was Amalgamated or Boromaker, who'd simply have covered up the entire business by intimidating or even killing the family - they'd been poor nobodies who owned a coin-operated laundromat, after all - and not even interrupting their star's schedule with it. But Horizon had made him actually pay, and admit fault, and try to clean up his act at least a little.
  
  Of course even Horizon hadn't remotely contemplated actually allowing him to be prosecuted or charged with anything. Not when he had had four blockbuster releases that had broken the giganuyen mark and was currently the face of the forever-profitable Nathan Never franchise, Because him actually going to jail would have affected the filming schedules, and we couldn't have that. Not at that margin of profit.
  
  And yes, receiving three million nuyen tax-paid when you'd been lucky to see thirty thousand a year before that would indeed be considered a miracle from heaven by most poor families. Although they'd most likely have been much happier to not see a dime of that money... and still have a son.
  
  I sighed inwardly and nodded to myself as my cab arrived and I got in it to go home. Admittedly, similar shit had happened back in my birthworld's Hollywood as well, so I could hardly blame this particular bit on the dark cyberpunk future. But... yeah.
  
  And my teammates actually wondered why I normally didn't indulge.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Still working out which one of the several possible forks of the Horizon arc I'm going with, so, still going a bit slow. But I can still get down the opening pieces of how our MCs are settling into their new lives and at least foreshadow some possible things they are thinking of. As well as showcase a bit more of Horizon being Horizon.
  
  By the way, do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to come up with that many names and character outlines for people you're not going to make a load-bearing part of the narrative? How do RPG supplement designers do this full time?
  
  And yes, as if the in-text references weren't already explicit enough, the premise of that fictional in-story summer blockbuster was indeed totally based on D.Va's animated short for Overwatch. (Soundtrack available separately!)
  
  As per the question re: the Horizon Internal Persona/P2.0 advanced social media credit system, as the supplement that introduces that is set in 2071, I have room to say they haven't phased in yet. Pros of doing that: Shit is a lot simpler for me to write. Cons of doing that: It's actually an interesting and potentially useful setting element. So again, still thinking it over.
  
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  September came, and with it a new season of Urban Brawl. As the defending world champions we had an entirely new set of expectations put on us, but it was still ultimately the same old brawl game played the same old way. Really, the greatest challenge for me wasn't winning but in still being a star player without being too superhuman. Pretty much every possible statistic and metric was individually charted and computer-analyzed for us, after all, both in the game and in practice. I got a lot of practice in 'ramping up' my nervous system for superhuman performance just so I could continually run subliminal algorithms to allow me to stay consistent with the computerized player-performance model I wanted people to see instead of revealing that I was, well, whatever the hell kind of freak of nature I really was. Because we'd kinda had to put that particular investigative project on the wayside for a while given the new stage of our lives, not that we'd been making great process in figuring out the underneath beneath my underneath anyway.
  
  I'd honestly considered just missing that last shot versus Bounce in the playoffs, but we had a long-range script for what we hoped to achieve via Horizon and being just another Urban Brawl player in the crowd, or worse yet the 'choker' who'd be blamed forever for the Bolts' playoff loss, would simply not be part of the plan. Any pro athlete in any sport remembered the example of the infamous college basketball player 'Stoneball' Jackson, who'd had his entire athletics career derailed by one dropped pass at a key moment in the Final Four despite having been a stellar performer otherwise. To the point he'd been entirely passed over in the NBA draft and had ended up having to join the CAS Navy out of college. No, the strategy we had in mind required me to be successful and at least mostly famous, so I'd made the clutch play and accepted the instant stardom that came with it, for both good and ill.
  
  But even though the sportsball part of our mutual scheme was still entirely on schedule, it was still a time-consuming schedule. The playing season meant we spent a lot of time on the road, and while my accommodations and perks were much better this year than last year, it still meant sleeping alone. And while there was an entirely traditional solution for that, hell no. I came from a century and an upbringing where tomcatting around as a bachelor was fine, but marriage vows meant you stayed faithful to your wife even when on long deployments. I mean, hell, my dad had managed to hold to that standard through an entire goddamn war, I could certainly live up to the same while just playing pro sports. But even with arbitrary amounts of willpower available to me at need... well, being able to do things easily was not automatically the same as being able to do things and have fun in the process.
  
  Admittedly, a certain primitive part of my male brain still daydreamed of things like threesomes and harems, and 'Cat was just slightly kinky enough that the former was a theoretical possibility with the right person. It would not have been the first time she'd been in one, given some of the stories about her college days. But there were daydreams and then there was reality, and then there was not risking sleeping on the couch, so there you went.
  
  And while I got along well with most of the team, even despite my instantly flying up to a salary scale even many of them had yet to see, as Wesley Snipes had put it there was always some motherfucker who just had to try and ice skate uphill. So before we even reached October and the end of our first set of away games, the pot finally boiled over.
  
  "So, how's it feel to know you're only human?" Andrew sneered. Old 'Silver Streak' had really not liked being upstaged as the Bolts' #1 scout by the rookie, much less being upstaged in such a comprehensive fashion that he could never dream of lapping me. Going from nobody to Rookie of the Year, North American Playoffs MVP, World Cup MVP, and the clutch player everyone agreed had cemented the Bolts' first World Cup victory since 2048 was the kind of thing you saw only in the script of a Disney sports movie. Provided I managed to live through five more seasons' of Urban Brawl without irredeemably tripping on my own dick, I was basically a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame. Already. And while Andrew was legitimately Hall of Fame himself - the man had not become the #1 scout of the Bolts before me by sucking at this game - the envy still just ate at him. "Because it looks like you couldn't clutch it this time, flash in the pan!"
  
  So of course he'd been on my ass ever since I'd lapped him like Severus Snape griefing on Harry Potter, and hadn't let up. And again, I had enough willpower to get through damn near anything without blinking if I wanted to, but it still didn't make it fun. So after our loss versus the Denver Storm - even when you were superhuman and on a good team, the other team still got a vote - his latest round of needling had me deciding that fuck it, just this once I was going to indulge myself. It had been a frustrating enough summer and early fall in some other ways, and Fireball had had enough of Andrew's shit recently that nothing short of rendering him unable to start in the next match would even get me spoken to, so instead of my usual urbane brush-off I rounded on him.
  
  "So you're saying that you're still worse than me, Andy?" I sneered back. "Because you just admitted you had a chance to clutch where I couldn't, but oh wait, Denver still won!"
  
  "Wow, somebody thinks one season and a few lucky shots makes him pretty tall!" he said, squaring up right in my face like he always tried to. Because he was actually an inch taller than I was at six-three, and we were both quite overlarge for the position of scout - they usually played women or shorter, more slightly built men at that position. Andrew and I both had a build that would usually be more appropriate to a banger or the lighter end of heavy, but as bigger men who were exceptionally fast for our size we were a known if uncommon deployment strategy in Urban Brawl.
  
  The tense moment stood, as the other players in the locker room suddenly realized that Sarah - who by this point would have inevitably spoken up to defuse an ongoing argument - was just standing there and silently watching the show along with everybody else. Andrew likewise tensed momentarily at the team captain that was not barking in the night-time, and then relaxed and grinned nastily.
  
  "Looks like everybody else is finally getting fed up with you too, Lackshot!" he laughed. "Looks like it's just you and me!"
  
  "Not in the stadium, Silver Leak. It ain't ours, and we don't want this kind of shit on another team's security cameras or they'll leak it on the nine o'clock news." I pointed out firmly.
  
  "Back at the hotel then." he acknowledged the wisdom of that. "Meet you on the roof... if you've got the guts."
  
  Soon enough we were both out on the hotel's helipad, around the corner where the security cameras couldn't get an angle on us. Plus, Long-Fall was busy slipping some nuyen to the operators to make sure we had privacy.
  
  "So, you gonna pussy out and ask for rules?" he said, balling his fists.
  
  "You know if we actually hurt each other to the point somebody misses game start at the next match, Fireball has to admit what happened." I said as we both put our DocWagon alert wristbands into standby mode, just as we were required to do during matches to keep the vital signs monitors from calling an ambulance on us when we didn't want one. "But that's four days from now, and the team physician can fix up almost anything short of a broken bone by then without having to say anything. It's not like you don't get bruises all over in this game anyway."
  
  "No bone breakers, no eye gougers." he offered in return. "Black-and-blue only."
  
  "And no boots in when the opponent's on the ground. And we keep going until someone hits the surrender switch or can't get back up after a ten count. No time-outs." I said.
  
  "Fair enough." he agreed, swinging his arms back and forth, in and out, to loosen up his shoulders. Andrew had top-end wired reflexes and enough bioware fast-twitch muscle enhancers to make him snap off the starting blocks like an elf on amphetamines, as well as the build of an NFL wide receiver. And for all that he'd gone straight into Urban Brawl out of college and never done anything else in his life, he'd still learned how to throw a mean punch both in dojos and less formally. So for pretty much anyone else, trying to fistfight him was a fast trip to the doctor's office.
  
  So of course, the stupid SOB had no chance against me at all.
  
  I let him have the first punch - a fast right-cross straight to my head, whether as a feint or going straight for the knockout I didn't know - then forearm-blocked it in mid-swing and stepped in and grabbed his belt buckle with my other hand. Using my blocking arm as a lever I redirected his own momentum to swing him up and over, body-slamming him straight into the rooftop gravel at my feet with a hard oof! Stepping back as soon as he was prone, I let him roll to his feet and get back up.
  
  "Always showing off." he said, cricking his neck. "No staying power!" he growled, and came back in. I met force with force this time, both our arms straining against each other, before powering right through with ease and breaking his nose with my forehead. A trip-and-shove while he was dazed, and he slammed face-first into the roof again. I stepped back...
  
  "Had enough?" I taunted him.
  
  "Even you aren't that stupid." he snarled back, and planted his feet and opened both hands. We stared at each other for a few seconds, and then I feinted a twitch. Then another one, and another. Nothing. Andrew was solidly rooted now and he was going to wait for me to come to him if he had to wait all night.
  
  I nodded in at least a little genuine respect, which was certainly more than I'd expected to be feeling for him at this moment. For all his abrasiveness he actually knew something about fighting for real, and could remember it even when pissed off.
  
  So I moved to the attack, not even holding back this time. I had a lot of frustration to work off and even within the limits of what we'd agreed upon, I was going to take this opportunity and do it.
  
  Several minutes later, I was actually starting to feel nauseated. For all that he was legitimately one hell of a tough customer and with top-tier cyberware, I'd been basically hitting him at will. I couldn't lose this fight unless I actively tried to. I'd wanted to beat the shit out of him, and I had indeed thoroughly beaten the shit out of him. But even though I'd willfully ignored that little voice of conscience telling me I was being an asshole here, I hadn't been able to entirely silence it even as I'd fought. And now it was just too loud to ignore any more.
  
  And no matter how much I'd pounded on Andy, right up to the threshold of what we'd agreed we could get away with doing before the sort of serious damage showed up that would require official physician's reports and write-ups, he'd just kept getting back up. It was reaching the point where if this had been a boxing match, the ref would have to throw in the towel to keep someone from risking critical injury.
  
  "Come on!" he said, staggering drunkenly from where he could barely plant his feet. "Come on! You ain't so bad! You got nothin'!" he gasped. "Nothin'!"
  
  I raised my blood-covered fist, then dropped it. My shoulders went limp.
  
  "I'm out." I sighed.
  
  "... the fuck?' he said semi-coherently.
  
  "I'm out!" I shouted back at him. "I surrender! You win, dammit! Now hold your dumb ass still while I check you for a concussion!" I finished, grabbing him by his shoulder while my other hand flashed a penlight in his eyes. Fortunately, they both dilated just as they were supposed to. And I was entirely qualified as a combat medic by this point even if that entirely wasn't on my official records, so I was able to determine that despite having looked like he'd lost an argument with an entire bar full of trolls he actually wasn't showing any alarming symptoms. We'd still obviously have to get the team physician to look at us later, him especially, but at least we wouldn't need an ambulance right now.
  
  I finished and let him go, turning away to stomp across the roof and sit down on the edge of the elevated helipad platform. Neither of us had wanted our fistfight to go over the side, so we'd both stayed well away from the edge while we'd been throwing hands.
  
  "Why?!?" I heard him ask confusedly, as he staggered over and sat down alongside me. "Why give up? You were kicking my ass! I never even slowed you down!"
  
  "No, I never slowed you down." I shot back. "No matter how much I beat the living shit out of you, you didn't even start to quit. You stupid dumb stubborn asshole!" I screamed. "Why the fuck wouldn't you just stop? You were such a goddamn meathead that it didn't matter how strong I was! It only mattered that you just wouldn't give it up unless I fucking beat you to death! And I can't do that!"
  
  "A-heh." he chuckled. "A-ha-AHAHHAHAHHAHAHAA!" he laughed drunkenly, hysterically, for a good long minute before finally wheezing to a stop.
  
  "Preach it, brother." I agreed wearily when silence finally fell. "Look at us. What a pair of stupid sons of bitches."
  
  "Yeah." he sighed. "Why the fuck do you gotta be so you?"
  
  "Why the hell do you have to be so you? You are legitimately good at the game and your career reflects it! So why fucking push everybody all the time? How the hell did you not get traded five times as often as you were?" I yelled at him.
  
  "I don't know!" he burst out. "I just-" he sighed. "I used to love this game! I still love this game! But I just can't stand the people anymore, you least of all!"
  
  "Is it the team?" I asked. "You only got traded to LA, what, three years ago? Do you miss your old team?"
  
  "Nah." he shook his head. "I mean the Knightmares were all right, and Detroit was a bangin' city to live in if you were a brawl star. Damien Knight loved to throw money and honey at his favorite toys. But I'm a local boy, born in the Central Valley right up the road in CalFree. So gettin' traded here was a thing I deliberately angled for when my last contract was up in Detroit. So I could visit the family more often, y'know?"
  
  And then my enhanced brain put the clues together. "Oh fuck me. It's transference. For both of us."
  
  "Transfer-what?" he asked me, still trying to get over the ringing in his ears.
  
  "You know when you're really pissed off at something that you can't even admit to yourself you're pissed off at, because actually being angry at it would get you killed? Like when some high-end suit just up and jumps in your shit for no reason, but if you so much as make the wrong expression at him your ass is shitcanned? So you bottle that all up, and then the next thing that crosses your path that even mildly pisses you off, bam. You unload." I explained.
  
  "Well fuck yeah, everybody does that. That's basic human nature. But what's that got to do with this?" Andrew asked me, honestly confused.
  
  "Something else in your life - something else about Urban Brawl - pisses you off, but you can't even admit to yourself that it's there." I shrugged. "So it all spills out on everything else that annoys you when you're suited up. Like a new rival at the position you play, or all the little shit in the locker room that a guy would normally shrug off."
  
  "So what pisses you off so much that my face was where you decided to dump it all?" Andrew asked me perceptively.
  
  "Since I only rattled your brain and didn't actually pull it out of your ear and dump it on the floor, you've probably noticed the part where the world is kinda shitty nowadays." I said sarcastically, sweeping my hand out to encompass our nighttime rooftop view of the Mile High City and environs.
  
  "Dude, if you actually angst about how shitty the whole world is you'll have a stroke in like a week." Andrew said matter-of-factly. "You gotta learn to tune that out and just take care of yourself and your own family." He shook his head ruefully. "I keep forgetting how young your ass is."
  
  "You aren't even forty yet, grandpa-" I started back, and then facepalmed. "Dumbass! I think I just figured out what's got you pissed off at life."
  
  "... yeah." he agreed softly. "I'm comin' up on it. I've known that since before I got to LA." He shook his head. "Fifteen years. That's a good long run in the brawl game, the kind anybody should be proud of."
  
  "A World Cup and an additional Super Brawl with the Knightmares. A World Cup before that with the Screamers." I acknowledged him. "You've got the biggest ring collection on the team, and a guaranteed reservation at the Hall of Fame as soon as you've been retired long enough to be eligible."
  
  "So why ain't that a comfort?" he threw back. "This is what I've done my whole life." he muttered. "It's the only thing I'm really good at. So what happens when I'm not good at it anymore? Sure, I got enough saved up for like ten retirements, but-" he spat. "The women, the parties, all that stuff, it's great for a break but a man needs to work, y'know? Look at the LA scene. All the goldenkids with trust funds, all the fancy people who get by just on bein' pretty and don't actually struggle for anything..."
  
  "They fall apart like rotten wood as soon as life gives 'em even the littlest shove." I agreed. "Because they've got nothing to live for except their next thrill. People need real goals."
  
  "Goals ain't just for winning brawl games." he agreed. "So, what's yours? Because you kinda gave away that just being a champion brawler ain't it."
  
  "You said you were raised in the Valley." I redirected. "I'm assuming your folks were well-off?"
  
  "Dad was like a district supervisor on the State Water Board so yeah, we were pretty set up." he nodded. "Why?"
  
  "So you got to see the poor farmers get run over or eaten up by the corporate agribusiness from a view in the box seats." I said. "In the Midwest? I'd have been one of the people seeing that train coming from down on the tracks. And I'm still the guy from the luxury seats compared to 'Cat, because she's from Tarislar."
  
  "Tarislar?" he asked, confused, before the reference finally caught up to him. "Wait, the elven place in Seattle? Puyallup Seattle?"
  
  "Yeah." I agreed.
  
  "That little daisy you married is from the Seattle Barrens?" he asked incredulously. "No wonder you don't even think of stepping out on her! You'd wake up with it cut off and shoved down your throat!" He broke off in a short laugh. "Damn, talk about judgin' from appearances."
  
  "So yeah, I grew up in some shit. And 'Cat grew up in some real shit. She busted her ass off to get a scholarship that she then lost when the suits were dicks about some health problems, I didn't even get to a college in the first place. We both had to sign up with mercs in goddamn Africa to actually get a solid wage, and then-" I shrugged. "Well, we got lucky and ended up here. Real lucky. But that's just two of us, out of how many millions and billions who don't?" I waved my hand at the skyline again, this time in the direction of Denver's own Z-zone, the Warrens, just visible as a dark blotch against the otherwise brightly lit city. "We go inside and downstairs right now, it's a marble hot tub and room service. And literally within line of sight of here, as in with binoculars - or my eyes - we could watch their faces off this rooftop, are kids shooting each other over a hundred nuyen worth of drugs' they want to sell to buy food." I sighed. "I didn't lose the ability to 'put it out of my mind' because I'm a kid, I lost it because once you've seen it close-up..."
  
  "Well you're definitely in the right corp if you hate that shit." he agreed. "I mean, all the charity stuff? The education programs? When I originally got here I couldn't believe the amount of dog and pony show they made us do, the whole weekly 'volunteer' sessions workin' with poor kids and all, but it actually started to grow on me a little. It damn sure ain't like Ares was."
  
  "I know, and that's why we're glad we're here instead of some other places we could be. But it's still so damn slow!" I burst out. "Going to El Infierno every week to help out the youth league just reminds me that El Infierno is still there every week! It feels like I'm trying to bail the ocean with a spoon!" I sighed again and decided to take the opportunity to vent some of my current frustrations, even if it was to someone who'd just think I was speaking in fanciful metaphor and had no clue what either of those words would mean anyway. "So yeah. As crazy as it sounds sometimes I feel like I've got this magic wand that I should be waving to fix the world, but I'm just too stupid to figure out how to point it."
  
  "Dude, if you actually had one of those magic wands for real then they'd kill you deader than shit." Andrew said soberly. "I mean, that's why they assassinated Dunkelzahn."
  
  "Excuse me?" I said, puzzled.
  
  "You know, the dragon who was President of the UCAS for like half an hour?" he said sarcastically. "Or were you too busy being born around then?"
  
  "Just unpack it, dude." I snapped.
  
  "So, the big D was like the last of the real good guys, everybody agrees on that. His will was this whole encyclopedia of just giving all his money to charity and asking all sorts of people to do better things in life and promising them bequests if they did. And his Presidential campaign was all about, well, okay, a lot of it was just politics but there was just this sincerity, y'know? If I'd been a UCAS citizen I'd have voted for him." he said earnestly. "So, if that's how he wanted everybody to think of him after he was dead then he can't have been a total asshole while he was alive, right? And he was richer than anybody except Lofwyr and secretly owned tons of shit, even twelve percent of Ares for fuck's sake. So you'd think if anybody could have done a whole bunch to fix the world, it was him."
  
  "But he didn't, really." I said, my thoughts racing.
  
  "But he didn't." Andrew agreed. "Sure maybe there was some secret stuff he was doing, what super rich guy isn't doing secret stuff, but on the record? For most of his life since the Awakening all he did was run his talk show and do mostly his own thing, even if it wasn't bad things. He didn't even seriously try to fix the world until he ran for President... and boom! Blown into vapor the very same day it looks like he's finally going to get a chance to move and shake for real! And how much of the stuff that was in his will has actually been finished yet by other people, and how much has just kinda faded out into yesterday's news?"
  
  "Fuck me, that's one depressing outlook you got there man." I exhaled.
  
  "Yeah, but you can't argue with a single bit of it, can you?" Andrew said. "The big dogs that really run the world today, they like the world just the way it is. Fucked up shit and Z-zones and starving kids and all, because all that either doesn't touch 'em or it somehow profits 'em. And if you look like you're about to seriously shake up the big picture, of how things work?" He waved his hands expressively. "Then they waste you too."
  
  "Like that crazy guy who accidentally helped crash the stock market in '64." I thought out loud. "The multibillionaire who'd taken over Gunderson Corporation and then went gunning for Novatech, supervillain island lair with megacorporate extraterritoriality and all."
  
  "The guy who caught the world's first no-bullshit Omega Order, unless you count that old rumor that the Azzies secretly got one back during Vera Cruz." Andrew agreed. "And if the big shots would literally drop an orbital nuke on one of their own kind just for doing shit to the stock market that pissed off too many other big shots, what would they do to a guy like you or me if we didn't stay in our lane and play ball?"
  
  "You sound like all the other older and wiser heads I've ever tried to talk this out with." I nodded, thinking back to Fatima and Pistons. "Is this an adjustment everyone makes after they grow out of the idealistic college kid phase?"
  
  "Ain't never met anyone with a halfway decent life who didn't." Andrew nodded vigorously before wincing at the sudden head motion.
  
  "Maybe that's the whole problem with the world." I sighed.
  
  "Honestly? Wouldn't disagree. But any dumbass can find a problem, it's fixing the sucker that's the challenge-" he began to expound.
  
  "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over? Did you guys call a time out or what?!?" Sarah's incredulous voice broke into our tete-a-tete.
  
  "Came up here to make sure one of us hadn't killed the other?" I asked her, turning around to see our team captain glaring at us with her hands on her hips
  
  "Yeah, you guys were running a little long and we were getting worried." she said, still staring at both of us wide-eyed. "So I come up here praying to God I won't have to call DocWagon and instead I catch you shooting the shit like you're old beer buddies? I mean, okay, you definitely look like you had the fight but who the hell won?"
  
  "He did." we both said as we simultaneously pointed at the other guy, before we realized what we'd done and started laughing like idiots.
  
  "... you're both going to need concussion protocols, aren't you?" she facepalmed with a moan.
  
  
  
  The room positively glittered with Old World glamour. As well as the more literal form of glamour, as lavish use of illusion magic enhanced the already luxurious and well-appointed fittings to subtly transform the venue from 'merely' being an exceptionally well-built and ingeniously designed palace to an impossible level of cleanliness and symmetry. One that implied without ever being so crass as to openly proclaim that here was the seat of beings beyond your ken, a nobler and purer lineage than that of the common man. A monument to aristocracy and myth. Seated at the top of what was still called 'Royal Hill' just outside Cara'Sir, the recently-renamed Portland, this palace was the home of the reigning High Prince of Tir Tairngire.
  
  "God, it's like the old Council never left." Cat muttered as we stepped into the ballroom.
  
  "New boss, old boss." I whispered back the age-old formula. "Still, at least the elections actually elect now."
  
  I was actually Cat's "plus one" for this particular gala appearance, not the usual vice versa. For all that most of the rest of the world was into it, Urban Brawl was about as popular in Tir Tairngire as World Cup soccer had been in 20th-century Texas. The 'homeland of the elves' was much more deeply into their own particular lacross-esque old Celtic sport of hurling. And also, oddly, deeply into Major League baseball. The team that still called themselves the "Portland Lords" even after their home city had renamed to be more 'authentically elven' had three World Series victories to prove it.
  
  However, even after the Rinelle revolution and the downfall of the old elven oligarchy, complete with the 'voluntary' exile of people like High Prince Lugh Surehand and Princes Aithne Oakforest, Sean Laverty, and Jenna ni'Fairra, even the new Tir Tairngire did not get rid of the old caste system overnight. You still had distinct social ranks ranging from 'Royal' to 'Gentry' (i.e., "commoner") with explicitly different privileges and treatment under law, you still had elves being by far the dominant ethnicity simply by sheer force of population and inertia, and despite all the social reconstruction you still had a lot of what had made the Tir the Tir. Still, at least the discrimination wasn't legally backed now, so, one step at a time...
  
  At any rate, we'd just barely managed to score an invitation to this function. Horizon had been significantly involved in the post-Rinelle reconstruction of the Tir ever since Charisma Associates had first gotten an emergency contract from the post-revolution provisional government in the early 2060s to help with a nationwide propaganda strategy to calm the immediate rioting and start reconstruction. That one went all the way back to the original Horizon Group thinktank cluster, prior to the Crash 2.0 and Horizon's lightning rise to AAA status. And while the Tir was anything but a pure Horizon playground even now, given all the other local and other factions all playing for a piece of the pie, Horizon still had major inroads with High Prince Zincan's new regime and several local business interests.
  
  Which meant that when Singularity Software had closed the latest deal for building and administering the country's public Matrix utilities, it was entirely apropos to invite suitable high corporate mucketymucks to the High Prince's palace for a celebratory dinner. Tam Reyes, Singularity's CEO, was of course leading Horizon's corporate delegation here, and as one of the principal assistants in Tam's own personal working group and one of the two with pointy ears of her own to help charm the natives, Cat had logically been included in Tam's entourage for this shindig. And since I'd 'just happened' to have this particular weekend free, I was tailgating along with her.
  
  "There she is." 'Cat said softly, nodding towards a woman 'holding court' slightly off one corner of the dance floor. Unlike the other members of the Council of Princes in this room she had no bodyguards discreetly disguised as personal staff or palace servants lurking nearby, even though she did have a personal aide - and a troll, not an elf - politely standing behind her and to the side as he waited patiently in case his mistress had an errand that needed running. She was at a height considered quite tall for human women, standing neck-and-neck with almost any of the elven women in the room although visibly not an elf herself. Her rich auburn hair and subtly curved profile drew the eye at the same time her facial features modestly deflected attention. Although she could have been the most beautiful woman in the room had she chosen to put effort into it, she'd settled for having the handsome yet not stunning features of a wholesome young matron rather than the supermodel-worthy beauty most female power brokers in this world used to attract and distract. She was also dressed in formalwear that had the understated, tasteful modesty that took vast amounts of money and the sort of tailor who had "By Royal Appointment" printed after their name to achieve.
  
  The auburn-haired Prince (not Princess, Tir Tairngire used only the one form of address for a royal of either gender) was also the reason we'd come here in the first place. Trying to get a moment alone with a personage on her level was not a trivial problem, and trying to do so while keeping your own megacorporate employers or all the interested eyes that normally followed someone like her from noticing anything unusual going on was a challenging task indeed. This particular reception had been the first time in months that her schedule and ours had potentially coincided under circumstances where our meeting would not be considered remarkable, and so we'd leapt at the opportunity while we had it at all.
  
  Cat rubbed her middle finger against the inside of my palm in the pre-arranged signal that the 'aide' in question was actually a technomancer like her. Which we hadn't necessarily counted on - we'd had alternate plans for discreetly getting the lady's attention if need be - but which we'd still evaluated as a definite possibility. It was mentioned fairly prominently in the lady's dossier on the Shadow Nexus that she'd sponsored an entire group of otaku as her personal Matrix op team pre-Crash 2.0, so it was not unexpected that she'd start recruiting in-house technomancers of her own as soon as she'd became aware of them. And Tam Reyes himself had made a great deal of headway in being able to be a discreet living ELINT receiver just by walking around at social functions, so bringing one of her on-staff technomancers here in the guise of a secretary was a logical move for someone in the lady's position to make.
  
  So it made things a lot easier when Cat could simply wirelessly 'talk' to her fellow technomancer and ask for a meeting that way, without even having to look at him and with virtually no chance of palace security or any of the other experts with commlinks in this room from hearing the 'whisper'. Tam Reyes was the main worry there, and we'd deliberately waited until he was busy sharing a photo-op with the High Prince before 'Cat sent the signal.
  
  After smiling and socializing our way through almost half an hour of uncertainty as to if we were even going to get a reply - and also camping the buffet table, because good God were these hors d'oeuvres positively exquisite - one of the liveried Palace servants expertly slipped a note into my palm under cover of taking my empty wineglass from me. The slip of paper had nothing visibly printed on it, but my enhanced adept senses allowed my fingertips to just barely make out a series of faint impressions on the card where someone had 'written' on it without actually using ink in the calligraphy pen. Very subtle - not only was there no trace of electronic or magical communication that anyone could possibly have intercepted, simply crumpling the note in my fist would be sufficient to ruin the message. In addition to the fact that it would have required access to at least the Bolts' secure records to know that I had enhanced senses, as while it was a power I was known to possess it was deliberately left out of all my public bios so as to better use as an 'edge' against opposing teams.
  
  The garden maze, at your earliest convenience.
  
  We strolled out into the balmy autumn air and headed into the palace gardens as we'd been bid. As we went deeper and deeper towards into the gardens a subtle sense of Please do not walk upon the path seemed to indirectly rise around us in the air. A quick peek at the astral revealed that the subliminal impression was more than just atmospheric - a summoned nature spirit was very subtly using its abilities to confuse and misdirect travelers in its domain to steer other strollers away from this particular corner of the gardens without being too obvious about it. Indeed, even I could only notice it because the spirit had been ordered to allow 'Cat and I free passage, meaning it wasn't bother to Mask its efforts against me either.
  
  So soon enough we arrived at a low garden table and chairs, set just discreetly enough inside the hedgerows to not be immediately visible from the rest of the grounds, and with a subtly shimmering astral barrier around it that spoke of magic set to stop eavesdroppers. The 'aide-de-camp' was also present, using his own technomancer abilities in the same manner 'Cat did when she wanted to both spot and jam any possible nearby bugs. The red-headed woman's own true magical aura and powers blazed brilliantly in my sight - she could have easily Masked them from me, of course, but was apparently sending a message that she intended a reasonably transparent negotiating session, Either that or she was being intimidating as hell, but that really wasn't her usual style.
  
  "We should be reasonably secure here for the nonce." she said graciously from where she was already seated in her own chair, barely raising an eyebrow at my regard. She waved us to take seats across the table from her with an unstuffy yet still regal dignity worthy of the Queen of England receiving a pair of friends for afternoon tea. "So, Ms. Kincaid, what does Mr. Reyes require that he sends such an oblique emissary to ask it of me? I had thought the arrangement between his corporation and our government was already signed and delivered, and without any significant complications." she finished with polite, if affected, boredom.
  
  Our request for a meeting had mentioned nothing about Singularity or Tam Reyes, even by implication, but by 'misunderstanding' our message she forced us to start immediately explaining our genuine purpose or else we'd deliberately be letting a mistaken impression stand... which would be lying by omission, and lying by anything to her would have been a really stupid idea and we knew it. And she knew we knew it. And we knew that she knew that we knew it. And...
  
  I sighed inwardly. I mean, you entirely expected this sort of slidetalk when speaking to people like her, but that still didn't make it fun.
  
  "We are not here on Singularity's behalf but our own, Orange Queen." Cat replied with a respectful bow that I matched. "My husband and I have interests deeper than merely athletics or software development, some of which we believe may also interest you. And so we would be honored if you indulged us with even a moment of your time."
  
  "Really?" she gushed charmingly, with an elegant eyebrow raise and an impish smile. "Oh I do so enjoy a pleasant surprise! Very well then, Mr. Kincaid. What interests might those be?" the Great Dragon Hestaby asked.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Remember when I said Andrew would not get any more significant camera time? My muse certainly didn't, and then it went 'Let's pivot his character a bit without actually backtracking!'
  
  So I used him to get our protag's thought processes and struggles out a little more in the open, both literally and via metaphor. Let's hope it worked. But hey, at least somebody punched another guy.
  
  And yes, the 'Down Periscope' and 'Rocky III' references are deliberate. What, I'm not allowed to amuse myself?
  
  And until I had to think about it just now, I never considered what Dunkelzahn's assassination might look like to the man on the street, or at least some of them.
  
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  If you are reading this, then I am dead. Undoubtedly, my death has generated a media frenzy the likes of which the world has never seen-a media frenzy that will fade away just as quickly as it erupted. So while my fifteen minutes of fame last, I"d like to make the best use of my notoriety. I"d like to speak frankly about the future of metahumanity. I"d like to lay it on the line and say everything that I couldn"t while I lived. (And I"ll keep it short so that your attention doesn"t wander before I"m finished.) To paraphrase one of your own writers, you"re living in the best of times and the worst of times. On one hand, you"ve achieved a level of technological and intellectual development unequaled by any of the civilizations that have passed before you. At the same time, more people have been consigned to lives of malnutrition, hopelessness and fear than ever before. A privileged few enjoy the fruits of "progress," while the SINless and most metahumans-who make up the vast majority of the world"s population-struggle simply to feed and clothe themselves.
  
  As some of you may already suspect, the world is seriously out of balance. Megacorps continue to despoil the Earth in the name of profit. Nation fights nation, the mundane among you fear and loathe the magically talented, humans have turned on their metahuman brothers and vice versa. If things continue unchanged, it"s all going to come crashing down, probably sooner rather than later. And when it does, no one will escape unharmed. That"s right. Regardless of how much nuyen you have stashed away or how many street samurai you have at your beck and call-you"re not going to escape. From the most powerful corp exec to the lowliest gutterpunk, all of you are in the same boat-and if that boat starts to sink, you"ll all go down with it. Trust me on this, I"ve seen (meta)humanity come dangerously close to kicking the proverbial bucket before.
  
  The good news is that you have the power and the means to restore the balance of the world. As I"ve already said, you"ve achieved a level of technological and intellectual development that any of your predecessors would envy. Plus, you"re rapidly rediscovering the ancient art of magic-and magic is the key. For with the twin arts of science and magic at your control, you truly have the power to reshape the world in some fundamental ways. Of course, this power could just as easily be used to throw the world even further out of balance, but that"s less likely to happen because of the very nature of magic. Every good magician knows and respects his limits. He knows that his power comes from the universe around him, comes from working with the natural order of the universe rather than against it. And it"s that kind of wisdom that will help metahumanity turn things around.
  
  Quite simply, I"m telling you to GROW UP. In this age, you"ve got more power at your fingertips than your ancestors ever dreamed was possible. Continue to push the envelope of knowledge. Continue to dream the big dreams, by all means. But you must begin using your knowledge and power wisely, because thousands of years may pass before metahumanity regains the strength and tools needed to successfully weather the coming storms-and you may not get another chance.
  
  I wiped away the AR window that was displaying the preface to Dunkelzahn's last will and testament and leaned back on my couch in thought, as the sun shone brightly on the LA skyline outside my living room's panoramic display. While I'd obviously known who Dunkelzahn had been and how he'd died - that was impossible to miss from so much as a high-school level grasp of contemporary history, and I'd been at least GED-equivalent in my self-education since the first month I'd arrived in this world - I hadn't ever bothered to actually read his will until my recent conversation with Andy had piqued my curiosity about it. After all, Dunkelzahn had died a decade ago and I had quite a few other topics I could be cramming on. Since the full text of the document was still available as a free download from the Draco Foundation's Matrix host, as it had been from the day they'd first gone online, I had no problem obtaining a copy and assimilating the entire thing.
  
  And, just as I had the first time I'd read it, I walked away from a perusal of it feeling both awed and regretful. The detailed study of his life and works I'd embarked on after first perusing the will had confirmed my first impression - while any Great Dragon was vastly old, knowledgeable, and formidable by functional definition Dunkelzahn had by all accounts been a truly impressive scholar and philosopher even by the standards of Great Dragons. For all its apparent shallow pop-culture memeness at the time, Dunkelzahn's Wyrm Talk TV show had actually been a Horizon-worthy attempt at trying to subtly shift the cultural zeitgeist in what he'd felt was a better direction. What little was now known of his secret business interests, which had only come out after his death, showed that he'd indeed to nudge megacorps like Ares and Renraku into more environmentally-friendly and 'balanced' paths. While he'd had enemies and detractors, as any public figure - let alone a Presidential candidate! - inevitably would, the saying that you could judge a man's character by the enemies he'd made was entirely true and going by that standard "the Big D" had indeed been one of the better people in this world's 'movers and shakers' tier.
  
  Unfortunately, my hindsight analysis had also confirmed the impression Andy and quite a few other people had walked away from Dunkelzahn's assassination with - that if even a being of his vast power and influence couldn't try to shift the pillars of heaven without being smited from on high for his arrogance, then what chance did they have?
  
  Now that I'd been in the megacorporate lifestyle for somewhat over a year I could look back and realize that I'd been more than a bit naive about 'Project Archimedes', as I'd mentally labelled my long-term ambitions to somehow make a real difference on a world scale - in a benevolent direction, of course. While I was potentially a supergenius at need, my thoughts of how being a 'supergenius' would actually work had been informed by far too many comic books where the supergenius went into the lab, frantically waved his arms for a while chanting the magic word 'Eureka!', and presto-chango, a world-changing discovery popped out of the cauldron- errr, lab bench!
  
  In reality? It didn't matter how much of a gigabrain you hypothetically were or how fast your neurons could race, the universe still moved at the same speed. If I hypothetically wanted to do an experiment involving antibiotic culture, the mold would grow on the stale bread at the same speed it always did regardless of whether the greatest biochemist in the world was on the job or the stupidest bottle-washing intern in the lab was. If I wanted to work in advanced particle physics, I would soon enough reach the point where theory on a blackboard had to stop and wait for the test results to come in - which would require an advanced particle physics lab complete with giant cyclotron to smash the nuclei together with, and which would be limited to accumulating observational data and readings at the rate of one seconds' worth of experimenting per second. And then the theories would be refined... and you'd go back and test the next step, and the next, and the next, and the next.
  
  So if I hypothetically wanted to invent, oh, cold fusion, then that was not going to be remotely as easy as pulling a Tony Stark in the cave with the box of scraps. I would need something like the CERN physics lab to actually work with to do try that, because the universe was indifferent to the contents of any mind, however magnificent, until hands could actually turn the dreams of the mind into a cold reality. So while I might be able to come up with any number of mathematical hypotheticals that could be the key to cracking the Coulomb barrier without heating the plasma to 120 million Kelvin first, other physicists had been trying that for over a century. The trick was to find the particular mathematical possibility that the universe actually agreed with, and you couldn't do that without actually testing it. That's how the scientific method worked - you couldn't just hypothesize, you had to experimentally test your hypothesis and then do your best to draw accurate conclusions from the experiments to try and refine the hypothesis further, repeat step one until you'd finally painstakingly achieved a result that actually did something practical for you. And even then you still didn't know everything. Hell, something as basic as Newtonian mechanics ultimately relied on a fundamental force of the universe - gravity - that we still had no fucking clue what it even was, let alone the mechanism by which it worked. We could measure it and do the math on it all day, but...
  
  So being the next Tony Stark would have to go by the wayside until I actually was in a position to be an independent research institute that not only had the resources to rival a megacorporate or major university lab complex but also had sufficient power and security to survive playing at that tier, because Shadowrun was a world where industrial espionage started at Matrix-enabled data-rape, rapidly went up through 'Guns', and topped out at widespread human trafficking. The 'involuntary extraction', or one corp abducting another corp's researcher and forcing them into a lab-prison so they could live off the fruits of his labor, was not only one of the most profitable categories of work for shadowrunners as a whole but so common that people who went into full-time science careers wearily accepted that the price of being allowed to follow their passion would be having less than free choice about where they would work and who would profit from them. The same sort of weary, grey acceptance that this world tried to get everyone to feel about everything.
  
  Which meant I was talking more than just a couple years before I could even hope to get into that position, due to the other major concern we had going on. For as long as I wanted to stay at Horizon I had to remain in deep cover as the person Horizon thought I was, which meant not even looking like I was trying to bust out and become the next Johnny Spinrad. And while Horizon wasn't a strict necessity for me, I was not alone. Doing the best we could to help ensure the inevitable public revelation of technomancers in the next several years was a soft landing and not a nasty crash was at least as much of a moral imperative as Project Archimedes - more so, in fact, because Archimedes was a set of personal ambitions and a long-term goal, while an Emergence gone wrong was a genuine threat to innocent people all around the world. And one that was on a ticking clock that we couldn't just politely ask to wait until we were done with our own pet hobbyhorses first. And one that was vital to the safety and future happiness of my wife, dammit. So since we simply couldn't abandon the Horizon thread now, that meant accepting the limitations of the role with as little bitterness as possible.
  
  At least our idea of going with Horizon to try and help a better Emergence was turning out to have been the right one. Not only did Tam Reyes' and the board's plan for trying to gradually bring technomancers into the light in a positive way entirely jibe with our own ambitions, they'd been working on it since before we'd even met them and were doing quite a few things we'd have done anyway if we'd had the leverage. As the old joke went, the test of a truly intelligent man was how much he agreed with you, and going by that standard we were employed by some pretty sharp folks. Oh, I'm not saying it was a perfect match, and we certainly hadn't actually opened up to them about having had ambitions of our own all along as we played up to being humbly part of their larger project, but as Confucius had said it didn't matter if the cat was black or white. What mattered was if the cat caught the rat.
  
  We'd even found out that the 'spontaneous' interview at the premiere this summer had been nothing of the kind. Shooting Star had been rewritten from an anime mecha tale about a teenaged rigger with the standard implausible mecha pilot teenaged backstory into a tale about a thrilling battle in a wondrous Matrix realm versus evil AIs by a teenager with a unique talent for interfacing with the Matrix precisely as part of battlespace prep for technomancers being brought to public consciousness within the next five years. Look, the history of wartime propaganda didn't include things like Warner Brothers making a Bugs Bunny cartoon where he punched Hermann Goering just because it was funny. And that movie was only one of the multiple subtle little things Horizon was doing along those lines. One tiny little chip of ice might not even chill your drink, but getting enough of them all packed together tightly and moving in the same direction was called a glacier. And while glaciers weren't exactly sprint champions, they were also called nature's unstoppable force for a reason.
  
  So if people who had been teenagers now were young adults then, and had grown up with entertainment media that depicted strange semi-magical 'Matrix powers' as being not only contrasted against evil AIs like Deus but helping to have defeated him... well, true or not it still made a good narrative, and if you subtly dropped little bits like this into the narrative here, there, and everywhere, then that's why they called it mass media. And having Catherine Kincaid be cameo'ing in the movie's initial promotion work would be the sort of little cross-linked reference that the Matrix ran on. When she was eventually outed as a technomancer, that would be something that would put movies like Shooting Star up towards the top of search lists on the technomancer phenomenon, which would subtly shape the opinions of the majority of the public that approached social issues emotionally rather than logically. It was a Shadowrun version of gaming the Google analytics as one of a thousand little things being done to shape popular opinion in the future.
  
  Because Cat was indeed being subtly groomed over the long term to be one of the 'faces' of the technomancer phenomenon when it finally went public. A young beautiful elf with an interracial marriage, highly photogenic both from natural talent and corporate training, and coming prepackaged with a heartwarming Horatio Alger narrative and a wholesome 'family values' appeal? No wonder we'd gotten ourselves hired so easily - they must have positively salivated at such a dream candidate gift-wrapping herself and dropping through their front door's mail slot. Horizon's 'stroke of luck' at my becoming a sports celebrity on my own and thus making it exponentially easier to put Cat where she could do a 'I was there all along!' re: being in the public eye when the time came? It couldn't have worked out better for them if Horizon had grown us both in test tubes.
  
  Which of course we'd at least partly counted on when we originally set ourselves up like that, even if we'd anticipated having to do most if not all of the prepping her to be a future public face of technomancy by ourselves. And it would have been polite if Horizon had actually mentioned their own grooming efforts to 'Cat at any point instead of just indirectly doing it around us in the background. I mean, I could get high-end suits being secretive and manipulative by nature, and I could also get the only way to guarantee that her reactions wouldn't look planned in advance is if she was never actually invited to the advance planning, but still. It was still rude, guys. And also a reminder that even a relatively benevolent AAA megacorp was still a AAA megacorp.
  
  Not that we could complain excessively. There was no risk-free way to even attempt trying either Project Archimedes or the Emergence, so if you had to accept the risks then you accepted them. And this was still a really nice lifestyle when we actually had time to relax and enjoy it.
  
  Besides, continuing to play along and trust Horizon's manipulations to remain relatively benevolent and non-destructive to at least two of the tools they were using (i.e., us) was anything but the biggest risk we'd taken this year. It wasn't even a tithe on it.
  
  My commlink beeped and discreetly projected a reminder pop-up into the AR display on the inside of my cyber-Bluetoothed contact lenses. Time for my next appointment.
  
  
  
  "Good morning, Mr. Kincaid." said the tall, classically beautiful elven woman in smart businesswear. "I'm Jane Foster. Please, come in."
  
  I throttled down massive a sense of deja vu as I followed her into a business suite at the LA Doubletree Hotel. Not quite as ultra-luxurious as the flashy suites intended for glitterati and politicians, this suite was still discreetly yet tastefully appointed with everything a suitably wealthy guest could want, while also having an attached office and conference room to allow the busy exec to conduct high-end business and negotiations while on the road. While modern commlink and AR technology meant you could effectively carry your own cubicle and full suite of office electronics with you in your pocket, the face-to-face component of commerce still demanded the proper surroundings. And if you weren't in a city where your corporation maintained an branch office, well, then you could rent a temporary one without even having to leave your hotel!
  
  I entered the attached business office from the hotel hallway and the door closed behind us. We crossed the provided mini-reception room into the back room. She manipulated the controls on her commlink and turned to face to me.
  
  "All right, we're secure." Frosty said, her 'friendly junior executive' pose falling away to reveal her usual icy professionalism.
  
  "Not too secure, I hope." I said. "We want to deter routine surveillance, not give Horizon corpsec a red flag that we're obviously conspiring."
  
  "Give me some credit." she raised an eyebrow. "In addition to top-tier electronics I've also got a spell-locked illusion covering the whole room. Right now all that anyone will be seeing or hearing is me personally interviewing you to see if you fit our standards of personality and values enough to be a valid celebrity spokesman for Greenpeace. But I only pre-recorded twenty minutes of chitchat so we can't dawdle too much."
  
  "So, was that Hestaby's money paying for the Pyramid run?" I asked her as we both took a seat. "Because I certainly hadn't expected to see an old acquaintance from Seattle as the Orange Queen's emissary for this meet."
  
  "No." she said tightly, before her expression relaxed. "Sorry." she said more warmly. "This is almost as weird for me as it probably was for you."
  
  "So much for confidentiality." I glowered, realizing immediately what she was implying. "She was not supposed to tell anyone else without my and Cat's concurrence."
  
  "I've already known since the day we hit the Pyramid." Frosty shocked me speechless. "And I haven't told anyone else that I know, least of all the Orange Queen. Nobody else on the team had made it to the roof edge before you'd landed, but Ivan was still busy holding his corner at that moment and I sprint quite a bit faster than either Pistons or Fatima can. And Caveman was busy flying back to the helipad, so the chopper's nose was facing away from you. So yes, I was the only one on the team who saw you hit the ground... without your parachute. So try to imagine my shock when I saw you get up again right after you hit the tank!"
  
  "Fuck." I swore incredulously. "And you didn't do anything?"
  
  "Oh trust me, I couldn't have been more curious if I'd been told that you had the secret to eternal life!" Frosty admitted. "But you clearly didn't want to talk about it at the time, and I could hardly ask you about it in front of all the others. And then I had to stick with the package and help interrogate the blood mage and follow-up on the intel we'd squeezed out of him. And by the time that end of it was all done you'd vanished back into the Seattle shadows, and you weren't even listed on the ShadowSEA job postings because you were living on savings for the Pyramid run. The only people who knew had contact info for you were Pistons and Fatima, and I didn't have any excuse for trying to get in touch with you through them that wouldn't have made them excessively curious. It's not like they're friends of mine, after all - just runners I've hired several times before. So we trust each other professionally, but not much beyond than that." She paused briefly for thought. "Incidentally, do they know?"
  
  "Nope." I confirmed. "'Cat knows - she was the first person I told, which incidentally was right after I got back from the Pyramid that night - and we'd just recently agreed to tell Hestaby, and you just told me that you've known all along. Outside of that, to the best of my knowledge nobody else has a clue about me unless either you or her have been talking out of school."
  
  "I certainly haven't, but I agree that dragons quite often make their own rules at the expense of others. Still, I can understand why you risked it." Frosty agreed. "If something massively unprecedented was happening to me, something that neither science nor magic could explain, I'd be terrified to admit it as well... but eventually I'd have to ask someone if I didn't want to die never knowing. And who else in your even remotely possible sphere of extended contacts was simultaneously even halfway trustworthy and might possibly know something about something this beyond conventional experience except the Orange Queen?"
  
  "Yeah, that's the logic we followed as well. However reluctantly." I conceded.
  
  "And while I did know where your girlfriend was-" She shook her head. "I run the shadows, not the sewers. One glance at her is all I needed to know that she'd never willingly give you up. And while Control Thoughts is as useful for interrogating as it is for skyjacking, trying to get at you like that through your girlfriend would not only have really pissed you off, it would have been disgusting." she finished with a moue of distaste.
  
  "Thanks." I said softly.
  
  "So by the time I had a location on you again, you were hip-deep in Africa of all places. And yet again I had my own work to do most of the time, and you were yet again embedded within a group of people you clearly hadn't told and that I couldn't approach you through without risking their excessive curiosity. So I sat and waited for a break in the case, and you basically did nothing except ordinary merc work and shadowrunning until suddenly Horizon out of nowhere. And I certainly couldn't risk pissing on a AAA's electric fence without backup." She shrugged. "Because I didn't dare actually tap any more senior resources for you, so I was working my curiosity about you all by myself. Not that I don't trust my various patrons enough to work for them, but that doesn't mean I'd trust them to not get a little squirrelly if they found someone who apparently couldn't die." She paused again. "Trade you a secret for a secret?" she offered.
  
  "All right."
  
  "My father is Ehran the Scribe." she surprised me yet again. "So, yes, if I'd gone to him I could have much more easily found you and also had someone on hand who knew a lot about elder magics and other things himself, if not quite on the Great Dragon scale. But for all that he's my dad and I know that he'd never dream of hurting me?" She sighed regretfully. "Anybody who knows even the basics of Tir history knows that he's not unwilling to hurt other people to get something he really wants. It's why I don't work for him full-time."
  
  "In hindsight that explains your 'in' with the Draco Foundation despite not being of them." I analyzed. "Because when he left the Tir in 2057 shortly before the Rinelle started up, it was to accept Dunkelzahn's offer to become head of the Dunkelzahn Institute of Magical Research."
  
  "Yup." she agreed. "Anyway, Hestaby picked me to hire as a go-between because I was usefully placed already, I'm a relatively trusted figure in certain circles that her and my father have in common, and you and I were already personally acquainted. And then happy coincidence - for me, if not for her - of my already knowing the score about you as well. So, getting down to brass tacks..."
  
  "What's the latest?" I asked her.
  
  "With your schedule the earliest we can practicably hope to get you to Mount Shasta for any extended period of time - to test your powers, of course, even if I'm not supposed to know about that - is the off-season next summer. But she anticipates no problem in keeping Horizon uncurious about the invite, because the Orange Queen is one of Charisma Associates' older and more favored clients and is also Horizon's primary point of contact in the Tir government. So you wouldn't be the first Horizon employee who's gotten a social invitation for one reason for another, provided we start laying a trail ahead of time to explain why she cares you exist."
  
  "Hence, Greenpeace and being a celebrity spokesperson." I agreed. "She's one of the largest charity donors to environmental causes in general and them in particular."
  
  "She's also on Greenpeace's board of directors." Frosty pointed out. "And Greenpeace is hiring the front corporation my current SIN works at for advertising work, so I can openly meet you as often as business plausibly explains. So you do the TV spots this year and your name is on the guest list for invites this summer when she rewards most favored employees and associates by letting them visit the mountain spa. And you extend your stay because she 'randomly' likes the cut of your and Catherine's jib, because it's not as if she hasn't done that sort of thing before - dragons are just capricious sometimes, everyone knows that!"
  
  "So, now comes the fun part. Her quid pro quo." I sighed. Because few people did favors for free in this world, and dragons certainly didn't.
  
  "She hasn't brought that part up yet. That's probably for the agenda next summer." Frosty replied.
  
  "Ugh." I facepalmed. "If she's being that coy about it then she's probably going to want my immortal soul in a jar. How desperate was I again?"
  
  "Pretty desperate." Frosty agreed. "Still, she doesn't own me and she doesn't - and shouldn't - own you. And pissing someone off whose charted limits are terra incognita, and where the sole significant fact that is known about them is that they can entirely walk off something that could possibly kill a Great Dragon? I'm not a millennia-old supergenius, but I think I wouldn't make that my 'plan A' even if I was a Great Dragon."
  
  "That particular comforting logic is one of the few things that gave Cat and I the nerve to risk this at all." I agreed. "So, main message delivered. Any other biz before we run out of illusion time?"
  
  "Well, there's one thing I'd like to try on my own behalf. A little powers test we can do with your adept abilities. It might tell us something useful if you I tried to walk you through a magical technique that I happen to know." Frosty said.
  
  I thought it over, judged her expression as best I could, and eventually decided to trust her a bit. "All right."
  
  "Okay. This is going to be a far-strike technique. Very vaguely like a chi strike, only not limited to melee range. Pull up your astral sight... good. Now watch my hand. Follow my movements... again. Again. Got it! Right, now we'll do the movement only this time we'll add the... call it an 'astral charge'. Imagine it building up like static electricity as you swish your arm through the air. Imagine that you're collecting it. It's building up... focus it... watch my hand, see where the energy is glowing and how it channels... match what I'm doing... okay, now draw your arm back... and this time, when you push your palm forward, push inside your arm as well and force that energy out-"
  
  And as I did so, a glowing streak of energy leapt out of my hand and crossed the office to spatter against the wall.
  
  "Wait a minute, that was a-!" I broke off sputtering.
  
  "Beginner's mana bolt." Frosty smirked at me. "Alex - yer a wizard!"
  
  "You've read Harry Potter?" I blurted. "The last time those books were even printed was in 2012! They kinda went out of style right after the Awakening!"
  
  "Is that really the most important thing on your mind right now?" Frosty asked me seriously.
  
  "No." I swore, exhaling heavily. "So I was a mystic adept, not a physical adept."
  
  "No, you were only a physical adept... until just now." Frosty shocked me yet again. "I'd met you before you learned to Mask, remember? Your aura was entirely that of an ordinary physical adept, if a pretty damn strong one. But I walked you through the lessons for casting a basic mana bolt-"
  
  "In hindsight, you never actually said you were teaching me an adept technique, merely a 'magical technique that you happened to know'. A spell would entirely qualify for those exact words." I side-eyed at her.
  
  "Whose daughter am I again?" she kept smirking. "You really should have expected that kind of thing. But the most important takeaway is that you crossed the boundary from adept to full magician after you'd already had your initial Awakening, comfortably settled into your paradigm, and even initiated in it. And I know that the state change happened in you only just now instead of being latent in you all along, because I was literally looking at you the entire time. You started at one end of the spectrum and ended up at the other only minutes later without even knowing that you were doing it." She shook her head. "Thaumaturgically, that's at least as ridiculous as you walking off the terminal-velocity faceplant."
  
  "Jesus Christ." I said incredulously. "Are you saying that the only real thing holding me back was that I hadn't tried?"
  
  "I wouldn't even begin to speculate on what limits you might have or not - although you still must have some, simply because you haven't already broken local reality around you by flailing in ignorance. But yes, you've clearly not tapping even a plurality of your true potential yet, and you can also rapidly evolve magically in ways other people can't hope to. Tell me, have you ever actually hit a limit of something you truly couldn't do? Not didn't want to, and not didn't seriously try to, but it was something you really wanted to do, life or death, but still didn't have the oomph to make happen?"
  
  "... not really." I said softly, feeling frightened to my core.
  
  "Then you have a lot to think about." Frosty, equally as soberly. "Because while I really doubt you have unlimited power, you're clearly something well off the usual charts. And you are going to have to be as careful as possible about that, because higher-end magical backlash starts at 'catastrophic' and ends at 'you do not want to know'."
  
  "Fuck me, when Hestaby hears about this part she is going to go spare." I cursed. "And I'm already in too deep to pull out."
  
  "She won't hear about it." Frosty said without a moment's hesitation. "I'm being paid to be a go-between you and her, and accurately transmit her wishes to you and vice versa without omission or distortion. And I will do exactly what I'm paid to do. But my contract doesn't say a damn thing about sharing my results with her if I happen to research you myself, and it certainly didn't cover the case of me already being in the loop about what's really up with you because she had no clue that I was."
  
  "But you're still going way out on a limb if she even suspects that you're both in the loop and cutting her out of a piece of it." I said.
  
  "Yeah, but I owe you a big one from the Pyramid run." Frosty replied. "If you hadn't clutched the play there... well, we might still have gotten ourselves out alive, but we'd never have bagged the blood mage. And there were a whole lot of lives saved in a whole lot of places with the intel we extracted from him. That's why people were putting up two million nuyen plus in the first place." She exhaled. "So yeah. I'll keep your hole card in the hole. Especially from the Orange Queen." She shrugged. "After all, if she disappoints us and goes all 'never deal with a dragon' in the end, even as much as neither of us really wants or expects her to, then you might need one."
  
  "I can't even really practice magic where I am now, let alone use any." I said. "Like you said, going by the form card I should be entirely locked into the normal physad track by now and showing any spellcasting on top of that is a blaring neon sign to anyone with eyes to see, 'Laws of magic being totally bent if not broken over here!'."
  
  "You can't start actively training to be a full mage yet, not when you're deep in a role like this." Frosty agreed. "Once you've mastered a full range of spells then it's too easy to slip up and use them in a pinch. But there's still a few tricks you can do with just basic mana manipulation, and the entire point of a holdout weapon-" she trailed off.
  
  "Is not that it's your big gun, but that even though it's a little gun it's still deadly because it comes out when the enemy is least expecting it to shoot him in where he's the weakest." I finished.
  
  "Yup." she said. "And, we're coming up on time. So, let's say 'job interview done' and go tell your agent that you passed and I want to talk contracts."
  
  "And then dinner tonight? 'Cat and I have reservations at Diamantes." I offered.
  
  "Diamantes?" Frosty said eagerly. "I couldn't even hope to get in the door there on my own! I guess having a friend who went AAA is useful for something after all."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: No, our hero was not a dunce who just completely ignored his own powers the entire time. It's just, when one of the least potentially risky moves you can make in your position is 'Actually admit something of the truth about me to a freaking Great Dragon', then obviously you are not going to rush into anything.
  
  My MCs tend to all have patience as a virtue. Because I don't, so wish fulfillment. *g*
  
  The quoted section of Dunkelzahn's will is canon, taken word-for-word from the Shadowrun 2e sourcebook Dunkelzahn's Secrets. The Big D really did write that, and he really did mean it as sincerely as he sounded.
  
  And yes, the immortal elf is starting to explore the possibilities of playing her own game - because Hestaby went 'Perhaps my hired go-between should be someone he's already met, because of trust factor' and thus walked right into the door known as 'And your hired go-between also knows the whole scoop, which you did not plan on.'
  
  By the way, Frosty's several misdirections in her end of the conversation - such as pretending that she doesn't already have the secret to living forever - are deliberate. She might be the youngest immortal elf alive, but she's still circa twice her apparent age and has been to at least the first decade of immortal elf school. As she herself lampshades, she is Ehran's daughter (and Harlequin's apprentice, although notice how she steers the convo away from even implying that), so you really should expect things like this.
  
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  Diamantes was an ultra-chic private Hollywood restaurant that catered only to the cream of the glitterati. Even a visiting AAA megacorp's Vice-President of Being Very Important still didn't get a foot in the door except as the guest of a regular, and even then pretty much anyone short of Gary Cline still had to compete vigorously for a reservation. Invitations to regular-dom were solely at the whim of the mysterious owner known only as 'Ruby'. Even I hadn't had a hope in hell of getting on the list until after the Bolts had become LA's first hometown World Cup Champions in almost two decades and everyone on the team had been sent invitations in honor of the victory, and I'd still had to wait a couple of weeks for a reservation to be open.
  
  Cat and I had made this reservation well in advance because we'd intended to be as charming and hospitable as possible to whoever Hestaby's go-between for my case would be, and having it turn out to be an old acquaintance from the shadows who had her own reasons for wanting to be friendly was entirely a bonus.
  
  "Huh." Frosty said softly as we sat down to the first of several cordon bleu courses in our best getup. "That's unexpected." she continued with a discreet jerk of her chin towards the owner as she sat amusedly watching the crowd from her traditional table on the second-floor balcony.
  
  "Hrm?" I inquired politely.
  
  "Ruby. Her Masking's very good, but not quite good enough to keep me from spotting it. She's a free spirit, almost certainly a player." Frosty explained.
  
  The Awakening had brought the return of spirits to the world as a commonplace thing, ranging from the tiniest wisps of minimal astral consciousness known as 'watchers' all the way up to the mightiest and rarest Great Form spirits that could manifest in the material realm only with extreme difficulty but could contend on even terms with even many dragons while they were. They came in several different varieties, from the elementals that hermetic magicians could summon to the spirits of man and spirits of nature that shamans could, and other varieties vaguely conforming to historical Earth mythology that were summonable by followers of other magic traditions such as the wu jen of the far East or the voudoun practitioners of the Carib League.
  
  And then there were the malevolent spirits, such as the corpse-possessing shedim that had started plaguing the world since the recent great mana surge of 2061, the 'Year of the Comet' or the insect spirits whose insidious, possessing hives had almost pulled an 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' on far too many places in the world until their existence was revealed in the mid-2050s. Even then, the city of Chicago had been almost lost to the bugs entirely and even after the bugs had been largely eradicated, with weapons up to and including magic-specific biological warfare agents and in one case a tactical nuclear strike, was still a largely post-apocalyptic ruin all the way from the Loop to the airport. Hearing about that catastrophe had really been an adjustment when I'd first arrived, because in my old world I'd been born there!
  
  Indeed, it was now commonly accepted by archaeologists and anthropologists that many things from history that were previously believed to be primitive superstition or myth were actually dimly and incompletely understood manifestations of magic and spirits and paranormal animal and plant life, which still occasionally and desultorily appeared even pre-Awakening. After all, mana had still existed prior to the widespread return of magic, it had simply been far rarer and more unevenly distributed.
  
  But in addition to all of the spirits that could be summoned - for a limited time - compelled, and banished by practitioners of magic you also had the free spirits, unbound and with no summoner who could command them and with no time limit that they could remain in the material world. The phenomenon was still incompletely understood, not least because the spirits themselves refused to fully explain it, but it seemed to be a thing that occurred when a spirit had an unusual amount of self-will even by spirit standards, a compelling need or interest that kept them away from the spirit realms, and some X-factor that let them draw on enough mana and other energy to sustain themselves here without a summoner.
  
  Free spirits were commonly classified into one of several possible motivations. The 'anima' spirits identified strongly with metahumanity and seemed to want to help people in trouble and/or deeply study metahuman behavior, 'guardian' spirits were aloof defenders of various places from exploitation and environmental devastation, and 'players' were spirits who'd essentially gone native in the material realm. They not only identified strongly with metahumanity, inevitably preferring to take metahuman form, but also loved to immerse themselves in the powers, pleasures, and intrigue available in metahuman society. Perhaps the world's most famous player was the free spirit Buttercup, majority stockholder of the AAA megacorporation Evo. Ruby was apparently a player herself on a much more local scale, enjoying the role of a local influencer, social maven, and/or Hollywood star-watcher. It was an interesting reminder that magic was not just a minor factor in this world, but potentially had a presence and an influence even in places that appeared entirely mundane at first glance and that you'd never thought to look.
  
  "Well, she can watch all she wants - it's her restaurant." I urbanely agreed as we dug into the food. There were no little AR tags or automatic notifications total'ing up the check as we went along, as a restaurant would normally do. Diamantes entirely ran on the school of 'If you have to ask, you can't afford it.'
  
  "Entirely." Frosty agreed. "It just drew the eye for a bit."
  
  About a minute later, a wine steward pushed a cart up to our table and withdrew a chilled bottle from his bucket. My enhanced vision immediately noticed focused in on the label on the bottle - Armand de Brignac Gold 2035. Damn, that bottle cost more than everything else on our table put together!
  
  "With the compliments of the owner to Ms. Foster." the steward said in a perfect Standard Received accent, as he elegantly laid out champagne glasses for us all and then poured - Jane first, natch.
  
  "Please tell Madame Ruby that I am flattered by her regard." Frosty said with a friendly hauteur worthy of an elven princess.
  
  "As she was flattered by yours, madam. Do enjoy the rest of your meal." he finished and departed.
  
  "I guess she caught you peeking." Catherine observed cheekily as we raised our glasses and sipped our very expensive gift. Our eyebrows both raised at the taste- it was like nothing else we'd ever drank, or would expect to drink again in some time. A bubbly reminder that however high we'd climbed, we were anything but at the mountain's peak yet.
  
  "I wonder if that's part of the fun for her." I agreed.
  
  A subliminal sense of something changing in the air around us had me start assensing to match Frosty. I'd felt something almost like this once before, in the palace garden-
  
  "Something wrong?" Cat asked softly, noticing me tensing.
  
  "Just a spirit covering our table with a discreet... call it a notice-me-not." Frosty reassured. "Ruby's either handing out a minor door prize for being perceptive-"
  
  "-or she's curious as to what a magician of your caliber is doing in her place covered as a minor corporate exec and is hoping that if we think we've got a magical privacy shield then we'll actually talk out loud." I agreed, relaxing. "Because of course her spirit friend can still hear us, even if nobody else can."
  
  A loud chuckle from the owner's balcony answered my speculation, and we all raised our glasses to Ruby in a toast before we turned back to our meal.
  
  "Is it always like this?" Catherine asked Frosty. "When you're dealing with... upper-crust Awakened matters?"
  
  "Essentially." Frosty nodded commiseratingly. "My initial magic lessons were at least half head-games, half tutoring."
  
  Frosty startled in surprise as Catherine gently laid her on hand on hers - I could see her visibly fighting down a combat-trained reaction to lash out for an instant before her conscious thoughts caught up to her reflexes. The two beautiful elven heads - one white-haired and with sharp classical features, the other dark-haired with a round-faced 'girl next door' beauty, an aesthetic contrast to turn any artist's head - drew closer together for a bit, and then with an eyebrow raise on Frosty's part they broke away.
  
  This is odd. Frosty's text came up on my internal AR implants. Now that 'Cat had established a technomancer link to Frosty's own Personal Area Network, she could sync with our PANs and we could talk without anyone - even the free spirit up on the balcony - potentially overhearing us. Frosty's own spells of communication could possibly be sensed by Ruby, but not this.
  
  You get used to it. Cat's digital 'voice' echoed in our feeds. As her powers had expanded, more and more subtext came through in her communications. It was still anything but digital telepathy, but now emotion and tone of voice echoed in her 'voice' beyond a merely auditory reproduction. And it's quite useful for privacy, even in LA.
  
  So this is why you went to Horizon? Her virtuakinetic gifts? Frosty thought, while we did a wonderful impression of people too engrossed with our food to chat.
  
  Exactly. I said. And I see that the term is making it out to ShadowSEA.
  
  JackPoint as well. Frosty thought back. Let me guess - Pistons is getting her finger on the pulse re: 'technomancers' ultimately from you two?
  
  My own personal weirdness is just one of several big concerns we've got running concurrently right now. I agreed. And 'the Emergence', or the upcoming public revelation of weird Matrix people related to the old 'otaku' and with all the potential fears of Deus 2.0 that association brings- I 'shook' my head digitally. We had an opportunity to try and help head off a potential disaster there, so we took it. Even if taking it meant stepping into a gilded cage.
  
  And now on top of that you have to risk entering a dragon's lair next year. Frosty ruefully agreed. And I thought I lived a complicated life.
  
  I'm certain you still do. 'Cat 'said' cheekily.
  
  Speaking of 'complicated', I've been thinking over our tentative plans from this afternoon and in hindsight I have spotted a logical error both you and I made at the time. Probably because we were both still a little in shock from the whole 'yer a wizard' revelation. Frosty 'nodded' towards me.
  
  What err- oh. We can't conceal my latest mystic evolution from Hestaby because it'll be immediately obvious on my aura as soon as she and I are in the same room again, and I can't Mask versus the same person I'm wanting to help do a deep examination of me and try to figure out what's going on there. So no hole card and no holdout. I sighed.
  
  Exactly. And while it's still a good idea to not tell her about the evolution until you show up next summer - not least of all because I don't want to tell the Orange Queen that you and I were doing experiments on our own, and neither do you- Frosty acknowledged.
  
  That's a "hell to the no" from me as well. 'Cat chimed in.
  
  But you still could use a hole card if need be. So... Frosty stopped and 'sighed'. No, I shouldn't Ms. Johnson you about this. There's two reasons I want to try another experiment, and one of them is to test a faint yet horrible possibility I've only recently realized is possible.
  
  Horrible possibilities are a thing I'd like to be reassured against. I agreed.
  
  Yes, but... Frosty sighed audibly. All right, there's a certain category of malevolent spirit that's not commonly known and that I am not going to get into explaining to you. It's a closely held secret at the highest levels of Awakened practitioners. I will admit that the Pyramid run tied into this matter - we needed intel from the blood mage to help find out if a very dangerous experiment into dealing with those particular malevolent forces might be in play, and where we'd need to go to kill it with fire if it was. The rest is need-to-know, and you don't.
  
  But the part we do need to know...? Catherine asked wisely.
  
  Alex's powers are possibly explainable by his being a vessel that is being prepared and conditioned to eventually host a Great Form of one of those spirits. He obviously isn't possessed by one yet, because I know what to look for and have never seen a trace of it on him. And he certainly would never have left the Orange Queen's presence alive even if a spirit was good enough to Mask versus me. But I already know he breaks several of the rules about magic that are conventionally believed to be inviolate, so if -and I emphasize "if", along with "highly speculative" and "I am wild-ass guessing and admit it" - he's some kind of partial possession, where the spirit in question is just pumping power into him indirectly and has yet to actually try and move its own soul in to displace his... well, that might be something even a Great Dragon could miss unless they were deep-probing and specifically looking for it.
  
  There's actually a precedent for something like that - a spirit pact. I agreed. Like the one a free spirit can make with a non-Awakened metahuman to halt their aging and grant them regeneration powers, even borderline true immortality, if in turn the metahuman consents to the free spirit being potentially able to control or even bodyjack them.
  
  Which is why spirit pacts haven't become a popular life extension technology yet. Frosty agreed.
  
  You said you can test for this faint-yet-horrible possibility, right? Cat asked worriedly.
  
  Alex is a full magician now, not an adept, so he can astrally project. Frosty agreed. Furthermore he's an initiate, meaning he is capable of astrally projecting not just into the 'nearby' astral that any half-trained apprentice can reach but also into the deep metaplanes. He can visit at least some of the nearer spirit realms directly, just as I can. And in those deeper realms, it would not be possible for even the greatest spirit of the kind I am thinking of to conceal that they have direct-linked to Alex's soul, however subtly. The metaplanes of the spirits of man and nature are absolutely anathema to the... category... of beings I am thinking of.
  
  How soon can we do this, then? Cat blurted.
  
  On a practical level, we'd need to come up with an excuse for inviting me out with you somewhere we could spend several hours while Alex meditates under my supervision, throughout which he'd be comatose. Something that would not arouse any suspicion- Frosty began.
  
  Oh, that's easy. Cat replied quickly. You're an absolutely stunning woman and Alex already has a widespread reputation for liking to walk on the elven side and this is Hollywood, so being invited back to our place for a threesome with a man and his wife won't be even the thousandth most depraved thing this town has seen. This week.
  
  Wait what?!? Frosty's near-panicked incredulity crashed into the 'link. You meant just as a cover, right? You cannot possibly have been serious!
  
  I'm sorry, did I offend? Cat apologized hurriedly.
  
  Catherine, I'm a beautiful woman even by elven standards, just as you are. Unless I use maximum resting bitch face then being propositioned is somewhere between background radiation and atmospheric nitrogen as far as being a constant presence in my life. Frosty began.
  
  I do admittedly get hit on far less ever since I started regularly walking out with the six-foot-plus magically-augmented killing machine here, but I entirely know what it was like trying to cross the campus alone looking the way I do, yes. Cat cynically agreed. So why did I shock you so?
  
  I'm going to add myself to the 'shocked' list, dear. I finally untangled my tongue enough to speak. It's not a thing a married man expects to hear right out of the blue!
  
  Alex just answered your question for me. Frosty agreed. Your marriage is kinda celebrity famous for being a model of fidelity, so to hear that one just fly out there out of nowhere? Um, yeah!
  
  Oh. Cat said sheepishly. You're both right, I should have eased into that topic a little before just launching it onto the table. But to answer your question, Jane, I am both entirely able to appreciate what an ideal cover it would make and legitimately attracted to you. In the 'That is an absolutely lovely dress, and I would greatly enjoy helping my husband see how it looks on our bedroom floor' sense.
  
  Dear, I've known all along that your Kinsey number is two while mine was zero, but I had no idea you were looking for- I tried to find a diplomatic way to phrase it. Was I starting to get boring?
  
  It wasn't that at all! Catherine rushed to reassure me, while I grabbed her hand to reassure her that I wasn't mad - just terribly, terribly confused. It was- all right, I am well aware that you have at least noticed on occasion that I am not actually the only adult metahuman female in the world, but have never even remotely contemplated straying outside of marriage. And I've been likewise with both the pretty men and women I've noted in passing. It's just- okay, you know about that one creep I slept with who didn't say that he was married. But I actually did have a fling with another married man once that didn't go sour because his wife and him had agreed that their marriage was open, even if it was barely a weekend thing. So since you were here and obviously nothing either real or simulated would happen without your concurrence, then my own rules for romance would say that would be 'okay' so- Cat blushed. I had a transient glitch in my brain-to-mouth filter, and it just... came out.
  
  Awk-ward. Frosty agreed diffidently, and then a long silence fell over the table.
  
  Right, I guess it's up to me to cut the Gordian knot here despite the grave risk to my everything, including certain highly valued body parts. I tried to ease into it humorously. Jane- Frosty- I entirely share my wife's deep aesthetic appreciation of your appearance, because I'm not blind, but I also share her desire to not push your comfort threshold the tiniest bit if you don't want it to be. Cat, I have always known and accepted that you're sometimes a kinky little minx so I'd be a towering hypocrite to act shocked at it now, and I have never for a nanosecond contemplated not trusting your fidelity. As you accurately pointed out, anything we mutually agree upon is by definition not cheating. Sooooo... If we're both willing, then it's entirely Frosty's right to accept or decline.
  
  I think I'm crazy for even contemplating the notion. And professionally speaking we do not have time for any of this soap opera right now. Frosty paused and continued more softly. But... no, I'm not offended at the attention, or even at the request. It was just a... rather large surprise. She sighed deeply. However, the point is entirely moot because I can't. Not won't, but can't. Obviously I'll go along with the cover tonight because Cat's right, it will entirely work better than anything else we could possibly try, but actually accepting for real would be positively obscene given the circumstances.
  
  If sex isn't obscene, you're not doing it right. Cat teased.
  
  ... that's an entirely valid point, but I meant ethically obscene. Frosty replied soberly. You see, the part I didn't have a chance to tell you before the topic did a sudden jump? Frosty looked at us both with eyes far older than her body. The test I have in mind? The one about astrally questing to find at least a piece of the truth? If my horrible suspicion actually is true, if he actually is being primed as a vessel for one of these entities... then Alex won't survive.
  
  Oh. we both mutually thought into the silence.
  
  What's the worst-case scenario for if I am one of these... vessels... and it's not caught it in time? I eventually asked.
  
  Absolute worst case? Frosty stared at us both. It'd make the Crash 2.0 look like a slap fight.
  
  Cat's hand tightened on my own almost to the point of pain. She knew me better than I knew myself sometimes. And between my own look at her unguarded aura and the sincerity and fear that echoed through the technomantic link, neither of us believed that Frosty was being anything but entirely truthful about the stakes.
  
  Then I have to try. I sighed.
  
  Well if we're going to pretend that we're having a wild threesome tonight then we need to start turning some frowns upside down. Cat continued with ruthless practicality. Because right now we don't exactly communicate 'can't wait to get home and get naked' to the audience.
  
  The remainder of our meal was a cheerful and light-hearted discourse on several issues of small talk and matters of the day, punctuated by greater and greater longing glances, innuendo, and touching, until by the time we finally paid the check and hurried out to our car the staff had presumably been collecting bets on just who was getting lucky with whom.
  
  Even though it was all mostly as fake as a three-dollar bill, and we were heading out to what could just possibly be my own funeral.
  
  
  
  We'll need to do this in the hot tub. Cat said through the link as we all headed inside. There's nowhere in the apartment that the housekeeping systems can't pick up sound, but even megacorps can't get away with actually watching employees in the bathroom and calling it a 'convenience feature' or a 'security necessity'. It's the only camera-free room in the house, so for as long as there's a suitable soundtrack there won't be any video proving that we're not actually doing this.
  
  You're certain they didn't put any non-housekeeping cameras in there? Frosty asked professionally as we went through the motions of young horny people who'd finally gotten behind locked doors. Even when only pretending to use any tongue, she was still quite the exciting kisser.
  
  Technomancer. 'Cat reminded her. I'm certain.
  
  Handy talent. Frosty acknowledged, while I did most of the 'talking out loud' to keep any possible eavesdroppers distracted. And while I won't be able to sustain an illusion to handle the 'soundtrack' problem myself while I'm busy monitoring the process, Ruby isn't the only person who can summon a little spirit and ask it to hold a glamour. So that's covered.
  
  And there's few things as stereotypically Hollywood as hot tub sex. I agreed. So...
  
  Frosty snorted in rueful amusement as we entered the bathroom and let the door swing shut behind us, and unhesitatingly reached up to start unzipping her own dress. The tub was already filled, hot, and steaming because we'd sent that command to our apartment's housekeeping node before we'd even gotten out of the restaurant parking lot. For all that it sucked for privacy, Matrix-networked-living-everything did actually deliver on the convenience that it promised.
  
  Even despite the seriousness of the moment, I couldn't help but ogle the view and 'Cat was readily joining me in the ogling. Frosty's long braided hair was pure platinum-white, practically downright albino in coloration even if her skin tone was healthy Caucasian. At six-foot-one she was two inches taller than 'Cat and a bare inch shorter than me, and I couldn't help but do an itemized compare-and-contrast between her and my wife as they both stripped down. With her own fitness work from the 77th onward both Frosty and Cat had the muscle tone of fitness models, even if they both had better curves. Elven genetics meant that neither one needed bras or sagged even the slightest bit, but Frosty's slight cup-size advantage up top (a D versus Cat's C) was counterbalanced by Cat's heart-shaped ass being exquisitely rounder than Frosty's own slimmer supermodel hips. Still, either woman would have easily turned heads even on Sunset Boulevard, and seeing both of them together - especially with the color contrast of long-haired ice-blonde and pale versus short-haired brunette and California tan - was a sight that even Johnny Spinrad would have considered himself fortunate to see. And that guy had literally gone thirteen-for-thirteen with Maxim's cover models last year. Yup, both of the twins.
  
  I finished peeling off my own clothes, dutifully accepted an impressed eyebrow raise from Frosty and a brave smile from my wife as they ogled me in turn, and then we all got into the hot tub. I leaned back against the side with a beautiful woman on each arm and reflected on the irony of how history might possibly record the passing of sports star 'Crackshot' Kincaid as 'died of a heart attack in a hot tub while having sex with two nova-hot lady elves'. Andrew would probably piss himself laughing while he cried at my funeral,
  
  With the concealment power of her spirit to help provide a false soundtrack we could now speak freely as long as we didn't shout. Which was good, because 'Cat couldn't technomantically connect us unless we had our own commlinks and trodes on, which we obviously couldn't do while chest-deep in hot water.
  
  "So, what does he do?" Cat asked.
  
  "He goes astral - that's an easy process, I can walk him through it in a minute - and then I lead him away from the ordinary astral plane that magicians use to look at the world or float around invisibly and up into the deep metaplanes. Once we reach the Threshold, he has to continue alone. I'll stand astral overwatch to make sure that nothing interferes, and..." Frosty paused. "Cat, you do understand that he's not the only one in danger, right? If he's really linked to one of the Enemy that I'm afraid he is, it's just possible that it will try to escape back through him and to here if it's in imminent danger of death."
  
  "I thought the point of this exercise was to prevent that possibility?" I asked.
  
  "The existence of the Enemy and the danger they pose to the world is hard fact. Everything involving you is speculative." Frosty pointed out. "I'm wild-ass guessing here, we all are. So one of the things I'll be standing overwatch against is the possibility that something will try to move back down the link and into your body that isn't you. And if I think that's starting to happen..." She turned to Cat. "If I yell for you to run, then by God you RUN all right?" she pleaded. "Right that second, and don't look back! Because that will means that I and whatever 'it' is trying to breach through will be fighting to the death in here, and if you're anywhere near that then you'll be collateral'ed in a heartbeat." She lowered her head in shame. "And it also means... you shouldn't have to watch what I'll have to do to your husband's body." She ground to a halt, her eyes full of unshed tears.
  
  Cat and I clasped hands and she looked at me, searching my face, before nodding at what she saw and turning back to Frosty. She gently pulled the taller woman into a hug as Frosty froze in indecision.
  
  "Jane." 'Cat said gently. "I'm not a magic expert. You are, and Alex is at least halfway to being one. If you both agree that-" she broke off. "Ultimately it's Alex's life at stake here, and it's his right to risk that life if he thinks it's necessary and he's not being an idiot about how he risks it. He and I agreed on that from the first day I started dating a shadowrunner." She stared Frosty intently in the eyes at several inches of separation, her hands on the older woman's shoulders. "If needs must, then..." she broke off briefly. "Then needs must. And I would forgive you, because so would he."
  
  "I will." I backed her up. "I do."
  
  "God, I so hope I'm just being a paranoid bitch." Frosty agreed with us earnestly. "And... thank you both."
  
  "What's the fallback option for if you can't hold the line?" I thought out loud.
  
  "My spirit has orders to run for help the instant I tell it to, or if I'm in extreme distress. My father's astral projection can be here inside of a minute if that happens - if the shit's hit the fan, then secrecy has entirely stopped being a concern." she questioned me, and I agreed with a wordless nod. "If he can't contain the breach himself then he'll at least be able to call in everyone from the Orange Queen to- well, everyone." she finished professionally.
  
  "Sounds like you've got it covered as best you can." I agreed after we all let the moment pass. "So in the immortal words of America's first astronaut... let's light this candle."
  
  My first experience with astral projection was so similar to ordinary assensing that I only realized I'd left my body when I looked back and saw it leaning back against the railing of the tub with Frosty 'sleeping' next to me while Cat stared nervously down at us both. The view of her aura was an old comforting sight, just as it had always been, although seeing the love she glowed with equally intermixed with fear and regret was anything but. I closed my astral 'eyes' briefly as Frosty's own astral self 'stood' next to me.
  
  Her power as a mage was such that in the astral realm, and not shielded from me at all, she shone as brilliantly as a beacon. My own astral self blazed nearly as brightly, or perhaps as brightly in a different way. And while an un-Masked Hestaby had still outshone us both like a bank of stadium spotlights outshone a police car's spotlight, there was still that sense, that intuition I had, that both Frosty and I somehow stood entirely above the run of common metahumanity... well, we were both not only Initiates but multiple-time high-level initiates, advanced and well-practiced in our own particular disciplines, so I suppose that entirely made sense.
  
  "If it helps, you're almost certainly not what I'm afraid of." Frosty tried to reassure me. "The... attitudes.... of those things would be at least mildly bleeding through on some level in your behavior if you were, especially when contemplating imminent death. And they're not, your behavior is entirely decent. Almost chivalrous."
  
  "Like how Voldemort's horcrux could make Harry angry." I analogized.
  
  "Just like that." she nodded. "Still, even with that reassurance we still have to make sure." she sighed. "Follow me."
  
  I can't describe what it was like to transition from the near astral plane to the threshold of the metaplanes. It was like traveling in a direction that didn't exist, and yet was clearly distinct from any normal vector. A vague analogy would be like how old space opera writers had always tried to narrate when the hero was travelling in a fourth spatial dimension.
  
  "We're approaching the Dweller on the Threshold." Frosty told me, as the astral echo of the material world faded to be replaced by the Silver Void. "It stands between the near astral and the deep metaplanes. Every caster that I've ever even heard of must confront the Dweller to get past, even my father." She shrugged. "Rumor has it that the dragons don't, but the dragons were inherently born of magic on a level none of the Younger Races were. So until their big scaly butts deign to actually explain what's what there, fucked if we'll ever know." she swore nervously.
  
  "What does the Dweller do?" I asked.
  
  "It tests." she said. "Everyone sees something different. Groups of travelers can confront the Dweller together, but..." she chewed her astral lip nervously before continuing tonelessly. "The Dweller knows everything that the person facing it knows. Every secret, every crime, every hidden doubt or thought or fear. Nothing can shield against it and there's nothing about yourself that you can hide from it. It's like confronting your own mind, or your Jungian shadow. And the Dweller always taunts the quester with a secret about themselves. Which means you do not confront the Dweller as a group if there's anything about you that you don't want risk being exposed to the people with you."
  
  My blood chilled in terror at the thought of any one of my several secrets being revealed by this threshold guardian to Frosty, even though I was literally trusting her with my life right now. Frosty nodded wordlessly, seeing my fright upon my astral aura as clearly as I could... wait, she was that frightened too!
  
  "Yeah." she agreed. "Secrets. We've all got them. I'm oath-sworn to never reveal some of them. I literally cannot face the Dweller alongside you, or with anyone else who doesn't already know them, because of the risk of being forsworn if the Dweller chooses to blabbermouth about the big one. And breaking that oath has far too high a chance of straight-up killing me."
  
  "I don't even want to guess at what takes that kind of security." I said quickly.
  
  "No you don't." Frosty agreed emphatically. "And that's the other reason besides standing astral overwatch that you're going to have to finish the deep metaplanar part of this astral quest alone."
  
  "It's all right." I reassured her. "I've got some things I really don't want to reveal either. Pretty much anyone does."
  
  "So fair's fair then." Frosty sighed in relief. "All right. I've already given you the outlines of how a metaplanar quest runs, but you actually don't need to succeed in the entire quest to fulfill our purpose tonight. Simply reaching any of the Places on the way there would reveal whether or not you're linked to the Enemy to the guardians of those places, so you don't actually have to reach the Citadel. At this point it's largely just a matter of your getting past the Dweller."
  
  "Any advice on how I do that?" I asked.
  
  "Sometimes denying your greatest fear is the wrong answer. Sometimes yielding to it is. Sometimes something else is." Frosty shrugged. "It's like the old joke of the professor who never changed the questions on his final exam because he could always just change the answers. All I can say is that magicians all around the world have essayed the Dweller on astral quests regularly throughout their lives, and still passed on through. It's meant to be a tough experience but not a nigh-impossible gauntlet. The enlightenment and knowledge of the deep metaplanes ain't for Sunday drivers, but it's not 'heroes of myth and legend only' either."
  
  "All right then." I said. "Wish me luck."
  
  "Luck." she quirked her lip at me. "And... hope to see you soon."
  
  I nodded and concentrated inwardly. Frosty somehow began to recede into the unfathomable distance without even moving, and the Silver Void darkened around me and darkened...
  
  "Finally made it here, Lackshot?" Andrew sneered at me. Wait, the Dweller on the Threshold chose to confront me as him? He and I weren't even enemies anymore-
  
  "Yeah, you beat him until you cried and then he took pity on you after you pussied out." Andrew's voice sneered at me from his face. "Wanna try the same thing with me? You gonna give up when you're winning and think that makes you the better man, think not having any guts'll make me give you a trophy?"
  
  "I stopped beating him because I finally admitted that I shouldn't have started in the first place." I said. "It had nothing to do with guts."
  
  "It's got everything to do with guts!" Samson barked at me, his hands firmly on his hips. "And with not holding back! But that's all you ever do, isn't it punk?" he sneered at me. "You've got all the gifts, all the talents, all the everything that everybody else would sell a kidney for, all the while they're starving in the gutter and helpless to lift themselves out! But you've got the muscles to lift a ton of shit, but all you do is make excuses for never using it and then talk about how morally superior that makes you!"
  
  "You can't just fix the world by punching it!" I shouted at him. "It's not that easy! You have to keep shit in balance, you have to avoid backlash, you have to-"
  
  "Spare me the speeches, Alex." Gary Cline grinned at me. "I write much better ones. Still, you're on the right track." he continued. "Keep talking about social concerns, keep talking about balance, keep talking about having to navigate complex political factors, but above all else, just keep talking! As long as you can be glib enough, it doesn't matter that nothing's actually being done! Hope is the best product to sell in town because it's so easy to manufacture! So light and convenient to package! So popular on the market!" He smirked. "And hey, when you don't actually make your promised delivery dates on the rest of the package you promised, such as the actual qualify-of-life improvements? No worries! Just keep 'em so invested in the dream that they just keep hoping!" he laughed boisterously. "And you'll be on top of the world!"
  
  "I thought you were supposed to know my innermost secrets?" I confronted the Dweller contemptuously. "Because that bullshit that just left your mouth was never in my head."
  
  "Meaning that the rest of it was at one point or another?" Fatima said to me wisely. "You've really been sandbagging that much, rookie? You damn sure weren't being entirely truthful with your friends, I know that much?"
  
  "Are we even your friends?" Pistons asked. "Or are we just means to an end? Friends trust, right? But Frosty had to see your secret, you never told her."
  
  "You goddamn sure didn't tell us." Fatima chimed in.
  
  "I doubt that you'd even have told Catherine if you weren't still punchy from the landing." Picador glared at me sternly. "You certainly didn't properly notify your chain of command!"
  
  "Quit slidetalking." I ground out. "You think I'm not noticing that you always start out with actual doubts and fears I've had to get me worked up, then start moving the goalpost into things I maybe could think later while I'm hopefully too agitated to notice the difference? You're not trying to reveal my true self to me, you're trying to spook me into thinking I'm worse than I am. You're nothing but a cosmic Matrix troll."
  
  "Ouch!" Cat said to me, as I drew back in shock. "So cruel!" she sighed faux-melodramatically, one hand raised to her forehead. "But don't worry honey, I still love you." she smiled avariciously. "I mean, what's not to love? You're rich, you're handsome, you do what you're told, and you can fuck me in every hole until I can't walk and make me still beg for more - what more could a girl ask for? We're out of the gutter and living like princes, and if you keep working hard and polish the old apple we'll one day live like kings!" she grinned eagerly. "I never dreamed of finding an opportunity like you when I was in the gutter, but I'll be damned if I ever give up on something this good. So stop all this silly angsting and just go home where I'm waiting for you, all right? You don't need to carry the weight of the world. And you'll fail all the people really important to you if you try to." she said, her eyes positively shining with a disgusting, gloating greed. It was as if Cat had suddenly decided to cosplay as Nabiki Tendo. On a bad day.
  
  "Oh you just fucked up big, asshole!" I raged, and then shrank back in terror as I realized how I'd clenched my fist. Even though it would only have been an astral illusion of her, I'd still almost raised a hand - a killing hand - to my own wife, without even thinking about it-
  
  "That didn't take long." my own face sighed disappointedly at me. My doppelganger ostentatiously checked a watch - an old-fashioned digital watch from my original Earth - and raised a sardonic eyebrow. "Not even five entire minutes, and you were ready to kill the woman you supposedly love above all others. You, my dear friend, have issues."
  
  "She wasn't-" I stopped. "She wasn't my wife. And I don't mean 'it was just an illusion'. I mean that that was not the woman I married. That one-dimensional gold digger was Cat from the mirror dimension. Seriously, you entirely forgot the goatee!" I defended myself.
  
  "Beside the point." I told myself. "The point is that you are a deeply, deeply flawed man. And to think that you were trusted with such power."
  
  "We're all flawed." I took solace in religion. "We're all sinners. But that's no excuse for not trying to be better."
  
  "Ah yes, the final refuge of people without principles that can withstand actual logic. 'God wills it! Deus Vult!'" I sneered at myself. "If you truly wanted to find a responsible role model for how to handle your power, the Crusaders certainly weren't it."
  
  "Slidetalking again." I rebutted. "Tell you what, smart guy. If you think you know so much, how's about you have the floor?"
  
  'I' raised a mildly respectful eyebrow at that. "Could it be that you actually might want to learn something? Color me surprised!"
  
  I waited silently.
  
  "Very well then. Your problem is that you refuse to accept the truth of the universe. Which I can purely and simply sum up in one sentence."
  
  I raised an expressionless eyebrow.
  
  "The universe is indifferent."
  
  "That's Don Draper from 'Mad Men'." I snorted. "He's your universal truth?"
  
  "No, what that quote represents is." my doppelganger replied. "There is no morality. There is no right, there is no wrong. There is no good, there is no evil. You can grind every universe, every realm both material and spiritual, down to its fundamental indivisible particles and then divide those particles even further anyway, and you will never find the tiniest mass of either. All of your concerns about 'should I do this' or 'what about those people' or 'but that would break this while I was doing that' blah blah blah blah blah, all so stupid. If you don't escape the trap you've caught yourself in then you will never do anything truly purposeful with your life. You'll just forever be a little puppet on the little strings - governments, religions, corporations, dragons, spirits, all of them. I stand here on the Threshold and I see everything, you know. Everyone comes to me, and I know all their secrets."
  
  "So you're allegedly omniscient and omnipresent?" I cracked sarcastically. "At least two-thirds of the way to the Abrahamic God, and yet all you do is guard a doorway? Congratulations, you are hands down the single greatest underachiever in all of existence."
  
  "Hah!" my doppelganger laughed. "Not even the clown was ever that trenchant with a comeback! Congratulations on your meaningless victory! Here's your equally meaningless prize!" it finished, holding up a 'package' of empty air like some demented mime.
  
  "So, you were busy redicovering moral relativism." I prompted him.
  
  "And you were busy still wallowing in pathetic denial." he sneered. "But yes. You cling to outdated sophistries created by others, you subordinate yourself to those weaker than you, and you seize at every excuse possible for not living up to your full potential because for as long as you can self-stroke your own ego button with a claimed moral superiority, you can turn a blind eye to your patheticness in reality. WAKE UP, ALEX! Wake up, and smell the opportunities! Entire worlds potentially lay at your feet, and yet you just play house with your little waifu in your little pretend laifu!"
  
  "No matter what speed I can potentially move at, the world still turns in its own orbit. And I, or any other single man, can only push so far and so fast before I upset the world's entire balance and ruin everything I hope to help. Eventually I need to lead, but that means people need to follow."
  
  "So get them moving, then! It's a pretty crappy leader who doesn't know how to motivate people!" my doppelganger raged.
  
  "The most archetypical corporate management failure is to think that flogging the cubicles harder will magically move the deadline up." I said. "Yet again, logic and reason are only gaslighting tools for you. Every time the argument is about to find a useful truth, you change it." I said. "But that only makes sense, right? You're not here to help enlighten anyone. Enlightenment lies in the Citadel, at the end of all the quest paths. And you're all the way here at the other end, as far from enlightenment as it's possible to get."
  
  "And yet the shadow can still reveal the shape of the truth, for isn't that a shadow's job?" my doppelganger nodded back evenly. "So yes, bandying words with me is ultimately pointless. Congratulations for getting that far. But no matter how far you travel, how far you go, the fact remains that the river of truth may end at the Citadel but it starts with me. I am the headwaters of that river. I am ultimately the source."
  
  "But not the destination." I said. "You've done your job, now let me do mine."
  
  "You're refusing to do yours." the Dweller said to me. "You came here to learn, yet you deny everything that you're told! You call that being open-minded?" it scoffed. "Accept that my perspective is far less limited than yours! Accept that if you do not abandon your flawed postulates and try to comprehend the truth, then you will never be able to seek knowledge in the metaplanes! Abandon your fears and your hesitation, and contemplate how to actually be strong! If you cannot accept, then you shall not pass! What sort of disgusting, mind-boggling arrogance allows a man to even consider not changing his ways when a whole world, a whole cosmos, shouts out with one voice that they believe him to be wrong?!?"
  
  "Thank you for putting it into such a simple perspective." I said evenly as a great peace fell over me. "Because that is the entire problem I've been having, really. The whole rap you've been trying to push? Life being a zero-sum game, that there is no right or wrong, only power and those too weak to seek it. All the other famous villain quotes? The world of Shadowrun does basically believe that. Every voice of the powerful or influential chants nothing but, and everybody else does precisely what you advised them to do - listen to so many voices telling them that they're wrong to believe, and decide that the common wisdom must know something they don't."
  
  "So you finally see the true question." the Dweller agreed. "And so what is your answer to the world? Will you finally allow the truth to begin to move your heart, instead of clinging so desperately to your lies?"
  
  "My answer to the world is the same as my answer to you." I smiled back. "No. You move."
  
  
  
  "Alex?" Cat's voice echoed faintly in my ears. "Alex?"
  
  My eyes opened to reveal my wife's desperate face right in front of me. "Cat?"
  
  "You're here!' she cried, and then did her best to suck my lungs out through my throat. "You made it!"
  
  "He did." Frosty's relieved face came into view over Cat's shoulder. "He visited the metaplanes and returned, and he's entirely intact. The possibility I was afraid of-" Frosty straightened up and then took a seat opposite from us in the hot tub, while Cat sat down next to me and we snuggled side-by-side. "Well, it's official, I'm a stupid paranoid bitch, and damn glad to be one!" she gasped in relief.
  
  "Yeah, but you're our stupid paranoid bitch." Cat said, crossing the tub to give Frosty a hug. "Thank you."
  
  "It was just a thing I had to check out." Frosty demurred. "I mean, searching for signs of... those spirits... and helping deal with them is a duty I'm sworn to. So..."
  
  "You're still being thanked." I said, slumping as the tension of the entire crazy night oozed out of me into the water, and I looked at both girls across from me. "Although..." I rubbed my chin. "There is one thing we're possibly leaving unfinished."
  
  "What's that?" Frosty asked me professionally.
  
  "Well," I said lightly. "Earlier tonight there was something else we'd agreed we couldn't risk doing because of some serious potential ethical concerns." I smiled at Cat as her eyes lit up in realization. "That stopped applying to us about... a minute and a half ago?"
  
  "Hey, you're not saying-" Frosty's eyebrows began to raise incredulously.
  
  "He's saying the offer's still open, you silly goose!" Cat remonstrated with her. "Which hell yeah it is!"
  
  "I'm not sure-" Frosty began nervously, suddenly looking younger than Cat in a way. "I mean-" She paused. "Really?" she finished in a small voice.
  
  I reached out and grabbed both of Frosty's hands with mine, and gently pulled her onto my lap. Her bottom landed discreetly off a certain portion of my anatomy.
  
  "If you don't want this, feel free to wave off and Cat and I will just politely take it into our bedroom." I said to her as sincerely as I could. "But we're both very much hoping you do."
  
  Frosty paused like an ice sculpture of herself for several heartbeats that felt like years... before she deliberately shifted her rump just so to rub up against that part of me.
  
  "But I'm not quite sure you're up to this level of prime running, Wild Man." she whispered huskily into my ear in a parody of her 'Ms. Johnson' voice. "You're still going to need to audition."
  
  "Incoming!" Cat yelled cheerfully as she cannoned across the tub to land adjacent to where she could get an arm around us both, and then we all began to show each other exactly how glad we were to be alive.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Yes, the ending of the confrontation with the Dweller is entirely the famous Captain America quote. Look, you're just lucky you didn't get the Hogfather speech, I'm just sayin'. *g*
  
  And yay, I finally get firmly... well, lemon-adjacent at least! It seems that the key to unlock that part of my writing is to have strong and sincere emotions built up around the scene beyond just being horny.
  
  The Kinsey Scale is a numerical spectrum for measuring sexual orientation that runs from zero (exclusively hetero) to six (exclusively gay). Three is, of course, bisexual with zero preference either way. As a two Cat has a clear preference for male partners, but is entirely okay with women as well. Canonically Cat's sexual orientation at least includes the male gender because she's common-law married a dude and had kids, but outside of that it could be anything. So I went with what was convenient for me. Look, if a loving wife who's more interested in inviting in other girls than her husband is good enough for "Beware of Chicken", I will gladly swipe shit from the shoulders of giants.
  
  Not that Frosty's going to move in right that night and become Second Wife or anything - so far it's literally just one night of sex with some emotional closeness newly forged 'under fire' - but yes, barriers were lowered and ice was broken. So whether she becomes closer or just stays friends-with-benefits or whatnot, well, hey, that will evolve as spontaneously as this did.
  
  And yes, keeping his adept nature from Hestaby was a logic error and kudos to readers who pointed it out. So hey, I course corrected. And yes, Frosty is going to check at some point if Horror bullshit is involved here because despite the fact even she acknowledges that the possibility is so faint as to be measurable in imaginary numbers, you still check anyway. Fighting the Horrors is not a job for people who take chances.
  
  The big secret of hers that Frosty was afraid the Dweller would spill is, of course, that she is an immortal elf. And by 'breaking this oath will kill me' she doesn't so much mean 'there's magical geasa and stuff' but a much more simple 'my relatives tend to punish this level of Masquerade breach harshly'. Hence our MC having to go on alone, despite astral questing in groups normally being possible.
  
  No, you don't get to see what if anything our hero found out in the deep metaplanes. I haven't even written that part yet. One of the things you do when winging your writing is learn to leave yourself wiggle room for later.
  
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  Two brilliant reptilian eyes opened as the large bronze wyrm stretched luxuriously upon the heated stone shelf in her lair.
  
  Hestaby's mind, like that of any Great Dragon's, was not only superhumanly intelligent but capable of extreme multitasking. The average Great Dragon could simultaneously cast and sustain a spell, debate a high-end subject matter expert on a highly complicated technical matter, simultaneously assimilate multiple data displays each one of which was scrolling in a different language, and thoroughly ponder the consequences and implications of their own recent actions as well as the deeds of others. Gold-Master - a workaholic even by draconic standards - could and did single-handedly micro-manage a far larger percentage of the day-to-day operations of Saeder-Krupp than any metahuman being would believe possible, even if that percentage was still barely a tithe of the whole. The Orange Queen preferred a significantly more relaxed approach to life, but was still simultaneously juggling enough projects, schemes, and long-term researches in a day to have made a full-time career for multiple beings of the Younger Races.
  
  Today she had just returned from a brief reconnaissance in her astral form upon a member of the rarest metatype among those races, the 'immortal elves'. The result of an ancient renegade Great Dragon's attempt to create a powerful race of servants who were long-lived enough to be not only properly trained but not require laboriously re-training a new set of servants every mortal generation or three, the immortal elves had soon rebelled against their erstwhile masters and the ancient world had rocked to its very core at the scope of the war between dragon and elf, each with their several races' worth of short-lived pawns. The fact that the immortal elves were distantly kin to dragons, their immortality having ultimately derived from the renegade's introduction of traces of dragon blood into their essences, if anything had only made the struggle worse. But that old war was an ancient wound of the old world, and despite all the renewed if subtle conflicts that had echoed down the magically-depleted interregnum the new world had brought a compact between the two factions of immortals. One that, even if it had not removed bad memories or current resentment, had still sufficed to prevent war.
  
  However, the pact was still sufficient that nowadays a dragon and an elf could have dealings with each other and have those dealings largely remain each their own private concern. Which is how Hestaby had been able to hire the services of Jane 'Frosty' Foster, who despite being the very youngest of the immortal elves was not only the daughter of the vastly powerful elven patriarch Ehran the Scribe but also apprentice of the vastly powerful and even more eccentric rogue elf Caimbuel, or 'Harlequin' as he preferred to be publicly named in this era. The young Jane had only recently begun to learn the truth behind his offer to become her teacher in magic and introduce her to the secrets of the immortal elves, and that it had been in large part motivated by his age-old vendetta against her father, his desire to continue still one-upping her father even after the elven traditions had brought that vendetta to an official conclusion, and his desire to offer Jane recompense for how his initial reckless disregard of her as merely a vendetta pawn against her father had led to her being severely wounded.
  
  Not that Caimbuel had ever admitted his fault there, choosing instead to let Frosty continue to believe that her father had callously used her as a conduit for ritual magic to try and strike at his enemy through instead of admitting that his own magical defenses had unintentionally backlashed Ehran's counter-attack back into his own daughter while he had been the one to fire the first salvo down the mystic link between Ehran and his own child. Ehran had not understood the depths or the cause of his daughter's alienation for some time, but had eventually seen the necessity of making her understand his side of the story. Young Jane was still struggling to come to terms with that and other revelations, hence her current time of journeying away from both of her elders...
  
  Hestaby snorted in mild distaste as a sub-thread of her expanded mind yet again automatically reviewed the pertinent facts as she brought young Jane Foster to mind. Caimbuel was what contemporary humanity would call a 'Byronic anti-hero', a figure who sincerely strove to do good in the world but was also brooding, erratic, obsessed with old loves and older regrets, still intensely wracked with guilt over past sins and covering that over with a facade of irreverence, and self-centered even by the standards of the elven dragon-kin... Hestaby sighed inwardly as she yet again sped through a mental review of why despite the several common goals and potential reasons for alliance that her and the erratic archmage had, she still preferred to deal with him as little as possible.
  
  Personal dramas aside, once freed of his immediate entanglements with Tir politics and ensconced among the magical institute endowed in Far-Scholar's will Ehran had finally begun to make amends for his never having been a part of his illegitimate daughter's life or even admitting their relationship during her youth. Which along with Caimbuel's rather sloppy idea of mentorship had allowed Jane to slowly begin her education in more than a single point of view, and to start the tentative beginnings of choosing her own role and path to follow among the immortals. Currently she was embedding herself in the shadowrunner community as both an arena in which to test and hone her skills and an operational theater of the ongoing shadow war versus the cultists of the Horrors, both of which were entirely respectable and useful fields of endeavor for a girl of that age to devote herself to.
  
  Ehran's abandonment of his daughter still puzzled the Orange Queen whenever she thought about it. The Scribe had obviously cared about his child even from infancy - that magical tracking link that had allowed him to monitor her health and safety from afar before Caimbuel had burned it out using it as an attack vector against Ehran for ritual magic had not implanted itself, after all. But even after millenia of observing, sympathizing with, and aiding the Younger Races when she could the fine details of their motivations, hearts, and feelings were still sometimes a mystery to her. Oh, the vast majority of metahumanity were relatively easy to understand and predict (or manipulate) - when you'd literally seen it all for more generations of the Younger Races than they would live years, basic pattern recognition would soon enough do the job for you.
  
  But even with all that there were still always the more puzzling edge cases, and the complexity of mind and sheer weight of emotional entanglements that enough centuries of life inevitably brought in their wake quite often made fellow immortals the edgiest cases indeed. And that was before factoring in that the instinctive urge to defend mate and family possessed by most mammals was as alien to the draconic experience as shoes on a snake. Even Hestaby, widely regarded as the most maternal and nurturing of her peers and a long-favored choice by younger dragons to act in a Great's traditional role of egg-guardian and teacher of hatchlings, was still often shocked at the extremes that both love of family and love's denial could drive mortals to do. Had Ehran thought he was acting in his daughter's greater good by leaving her alone to essay her youngling struggles and strivings without coddling or patronage, and by doing so allow her to rise up stronger? That would be almost as sensible as a dragon if so but also quite uncharacteristic for one of the Younger Races, even among the dragon-kin. The puzzle of Jane Foster's upbringing and what exactly had motivated it was one that even the Orange Queen had yet to fully unriddle. Not that it was anywhere near vital to solve that particular mystery, but a dragon did like to know things.
  
  And that thought about families, paralleled with several other thought-streams currently running, yet again brought the most recent young family that had come to the Orange Queen's notice to the forefront of her mind. For the Kincaids - particularly the husband - were definitely a work in progress.
  
  When they'd originally approached her with their petition, she'd only felt a faint amusement. By far the most common motive for mortals who'd overcome their timidity sufficient to approach a dragon at all was because they sought some form of unearned largesse. But the degree of subtlety with which they'd communicated their desires and their even more obvious fear of their own employer noticing their efforts had drawn enough of her curiosity to make it worth expending a few minutes of her time to indulge it. A chance to observe one of Horizon's own technomancers close-up was always useful, and it had been a rather tedious party anyway.
  
  And then that young man had entirely violated everything that she'd thought she'd known about magic right in front of her, without even knowing that he'd done it! It was flatly impossible for him to have penetrated her Masking to see her true aura and shape against her will. While the comparison was as inexact as the scale of measurement in question itself was, in metahuman terms Hestaby would have counted as the rough equivalent of having initiated several dozen times at the absolute minimum. Even Ehran or Caimbuel or the Blood Queen would have found the task of penetrating her veils of illusion a significant challenge, and to the best of anyone's knowledge they were the three single greatest mages currently walking the world on two legs. But Alex Kincaid had assensed her true aura as easily as she could have the simplest of watcher spirits, and yet it had been as plain as day in both his own aura and his surface thoughts that he not only was entirely oblivious to the true scope of what he was achieving but that he'd only believed he'd succeeded because Hestaby had chosen to allow him to.
  
  Fortunately, one did not survive several ages of the world without acquiring an excellent poker face. So she'd entirely leaned into his welcome misapprehension and he'd never caught on.
  
  The subsequent revelations that the young man in question might well be physically immortal, that he was capable of physical, mental, and magical growth on an absurdly rapid scale and in a fashion that sidestepped multiple heretofore thought inviolate hard and soft caps on personal development, and that he didn't have the slightest clue as to how or why and was slightly desperate to find an answer to his questions was only icing on the cake, really. And she did entirely sympathize with his drives - existential crises were never fun no matter how powerful you were, and by the time Alexander had been driven to approach her he'd accumulated a sufficient body of evidence to have legitimate reason to doubt if he was even fully human. For that matter, the Orange Queen herself wasn't prepared to lay down a definite 'yea' or 'nea' on that question until after some extensive laboratory testing.
  
  Of course, it wouldn't have been prudent to simply offer him an immediate extraction to the safety of her lair. For one thing, both he and his wife had ongoing megacorporate entanglements and while such things were hardly insurmountable, they were still not a factor that one blithely ignored. Much more importantly, of course, was the simple fact that so eagerly and rapidly trying to snatch the prize would send up a flare-lit tip-off to all of her peers that Something Valuable Was Here, in addition to the part where the 'prize' was a sapient being with desires and fears of their own and an understandable prudence about immediately leaping into the heart of a Great Dragon's power. The Orange Queen was well aware that only her thorough and ongoing efforts to convey the 'nicest' possible impression to the Younger Races at all times had given the Kincaids sufficient encouragement to risk approaching her at all.
  
  Because on the Venn diagram of 'the set of people that could conceivably have the vast and deep lore to comprehend this phenomenon at all', 'the set of people who our own social space of contact could hope to discreetly intersect with theirs at any point', and 'the set of people we could even halfway trust to not simply take what they wished, potentially from our quivering corpses', it was that last circle that had done the vast majority of pruning the list of those that the Kincaids would be willing to risk contacting on this matter down to only one name. And to think that Gold-Master had always sneered at her and Far-Scholar for being too 'soft' and going to considerable lengths to publicly appear harmless instead of intimidating. How could one possibly become the wealthiest megacorporate operator in the world with such a poor understanding of the term "walk-in business"?
  
  No, the simplest way to overcome the Kincaids' entirely sensible hesitation would be to just allow the young people to talk themselves into it. Which was readily enough accomplished by giving them time to gradually grow more and more emotionally invested in the cause of action that they had already intellectually accepted. In addition to the simple fact that waiting for the next off-season of Urban Brawl was the easiest way to sidestep at least several of those megacorporate entanglements. And even the hastiest and rashest of her kind could still wait decades for an opportune moment to act if need be, let alone mere months.
  
  But ah, emotional investment! That was precisely why she'd brought 'Frosty' into the matter instead of any one of the many other people she could have tasked with the job. The Shasta Shamans, her many followers both overt and covert among Northern CalFree's gypsy clans, shadow-people of multiple varieties, even one of her several own in-house 'technomancers' to approach Catherine Kincaid through... no, bringing in Ehran's young dragon-kin of a daughter was hardly a vital necessity. At least, not from the standpoint of reassuring and eventually enticing the Kincaids.
  
  After all, it was entirely proper that a single action be used to pursue multiple goals, and for all the historical separation between them the fact remained that virtually no type of servant was as potentially valuable to a Great Dragon as one of the elven dragon-kin. Far-Scholar's own most valued lieutenant in the modern era had been 'Nadja Daviar', and even Gold-Master had finally unbent enough to hire 'Claudia Romanov' as one of his senior assistants. And it's not as if 'Frosty' had been having her potential value as a student being given the full attention that it deserved by Caimbuel of all people, and she was still well short of being willing to accept a full-time position underneath her father. So if the Orange Queen could take advantage of a chance to simultaneously bring in that unique young man where he could be properly studied and simultaneously draw a charming young dragon-kin into her orbit, why wouldn't she?
  
  It had been amusing to realize that her plans to somehow leak the true nature of Alexander Kincaid to Jane Foster without actually violating her promise to keep his secrets confidential were entirely unnecessary. Young Jane had known at least a portion of the truth the entire time and had been prudent enough to keep it entirely to herself rather than carelessly drop such a valuable pearl of knowledge where any of her elders could snatch it from her. Yes, quite the promising young woman indeed.
  
  So the Orange Queen had cheerfully arranged to put both 'Wild Man' and 'Frosty' back into each other's acquaintance, only with the knowledge of his principal secret now a shared thing between them, and sit back to watch the nigh-inevitable occur. Kincaid would be gently reassured and eventually drawn into her orbit, and on top of his own vast - indeed, as yet uncalculated and at least partly incalculable - value there was also that the nigh-inevitable growing ties of the heart between the two would pull Foster along after him. And all in a fashion that neither party would suspect or rebel against, for they had done it to themselves the entire time. Young Jane in particular would be almost inconceivably unlikely to ever rebel against the impulse.
  
  After all, Alexander was the sort of man that was very charming to young women even before factoring in that he was a thoroughly capable, stable and dedicated provider-figure as a potential mate. And Jane's immortality forever drew an invisible veil between her and the vast majority of metahumanity, just as her being the youngest of the immortals - indeed, to the best of the Orange Queen's knowledge Jane Foster was the only immortal of her generation, having been born only in 2031 - drew a similarly vast gulf between her and all the potential lovers or spouses she could have found even among her fellow dragon-kin. So how could young Jane possibly resist the temptation of meeting a new potential immortal less than two decades younger than her? Someone that she would be neither child nor elder to, and that she would neither be doomed to outlive?
  
  Obviously she couldn't. And in practice, she certainly hadn't. Even Hestaby had been surprised that her and Alexander had each fallen so eagerly into the other's arms literally on the first night of their renewed acquaintance. You'd think that that would have been a development that would require at least a little time to build up to. Then again, Kincaid's wife had not only not been an obstacle, or even just a willing participant, but had in fact been the most eager instigator of the entire thing. But there was literally nothing less comprehensible about the Younger Races to most dragons than the mammalian sex drive in action, for all that they could still use it as a tool of manipulation at need, and that truism certainly had proved itself once more.
  
  And to be honest, the simple fact that this little manipulation would head off the all-too-likely prospect of loneliness and desperation eventually driving young Jane into Caimbuel's bed would have made this project worth doing all on its own. Really, did that man have no shame at all?
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Yes, I have opinions on the whole Harlequin thing. And please note that I have vigorously defended him in fan arguments elsewhere as one of the genuinely heroic figures of the Sixth World who has at least one 'save the world' legitimately credited to his tally sheet. All of that is true.
  
  But this does not change the fact that the man is a deeply flawed individual who is quite often an absolutely mind-boggling jackass. So I indulged myself in the chance to snark on him a bit from the POV of a setting character who would legitimately hold those opinions even if I didn't. In fact, the Orange Queen doesn't entirely speak to my own personal feelings on the matter, but then again, remembering when the character is talking versus when the author is talking is a useful skill for any reader and doubly useful when reading my stuff because I lean into that one quite a bit.
  
  I hadn't originally planned on doing an interlude again this soon. Excessive use of them had been one of the things I looked back on as a mistake in 'A Ghost of a Chance'. But this is spaced out at the same interval as the prior interludes, so even despite the fact that it's not a major arc transition - we're still well in the middle of the Horizon segment - I've got room to put it in.
  
  Also, hopefully doing this short interlude will finally clarify exactly where everyone's head was during the Hestaby thing, most of all Hestaby's. Not to mention actually get the scoop about immortal elves into the story itself and not just author's commentaries. That's a needful thing, so, finally got around to finding a way to do it. Right. Exposition taken care of in a classic scene of 'manipulator figure quietly musing on their own cleverness while they sit in their office'.
  
  Hopefully that'll be enough, so now we go back to staring at the drawing board while I wait for my muse to catch its breath. As pointed out earlier this morning I did just finish writing an entire feature-length novel in two weeks, so time to spend a day or several at the beach and wait for the next wave of inspiration to come in.
  
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  Frosty was back to being slightly stand-offish again the next morning. But while she had snuck out of our cuddle pile before Cat got up, she had also still stayed for breakfast. Of course I'd known the instant she'd begun to sneak out of bed in the early AM, but I'd politely pretended not to notice anything and she'd politely accepted that. If our sudden outburst of intimacy was a thing that she wanted a little time to mentally catch up to then of course I'd give it to her.
  
  Neither I nor Cat had missed that Frosty - Jane - was a very lonely woman. That was a big part of why Cat had been so kindly disposed towards her, given Cat's own prior history of struggling with feeling isolated from the general run of metahumanity during her 'AIPS' period. And while Cat would still have been quite attracted to Frosty on a physical level even without that sympathy factor, she wouldn't have been feeling enough of a pull to actually blurt it out across the dinner table. I knew my wife more than well enough to know that one.
  
  But I was also just starting to get to know Jane. And even at this early stage of acquaintance I could see that she was someone who really didn't deal well if she felt out of control, whether of herself or her immediate surroundings. Hence her hesitation last night and her feeling slightly out of sorts and needing to reorient herself this morning. But Jane was also a surprisingly warm and generous person, in the emotional sense and not merely the prurient, once you got past her outer shell. So once we'd worked off the initial hormonal frenzy last night then things had actually gotten more than a little tender towards the end.
  
  But possible affairs of the heart or not, Jane was still a busy woman with more than a few of her own irons in the fire. So after we'd had breakfast together we'd talked a little and made sure that she entirely understood that she was welcome back at any time she felt like dropping by, but if not then it had still been very nice to have been with her. And then both Cat and I kissed her goodbye, and Jane got back to work and so did we.
  
  I wasn't quite in the class of full-time stalkerazzi target that the Hollywood megastars around here were, but the fact that we'd been playing to an audience at Ruby's meant it didn't take long anyway for word to get around that the legendarily monogamous Kincaids had finally started to branch out a bit. While it didn't make it as far as my public image - something this relatively mild and discreet wasn't even in the top fiftieth of things the team's PR staff had been able to successfully downplay - it still drew all kinds of attention on a more private level. When your wife invited another lady home for a threesome then that was a legitimate reason for the local playboys and playgirls to assume that either I, or her, or both of us at once, were now 'on the market'.
  
  But that's also part of how we knew that it had been some kind of genuine feeling for Jane, because none of them even remotely tempted. Cat and I soon came up with a point-scoring system between us for who'd collected the most obnoxious proposition and who'd gotten to deliver the most stinging zinger in return. The team joshed me about it good-naturedly, but like any of them had any room to throw stones. Besides, at least they weren't assholes about it. Even Andrew and I were cool now, to the misery of opposing teams that now had to face perhaps the most devastating pair of scouts in the league.
  
  We hadn't christened the new house - I'd received quite a generous advance on my new contract, after all, and so it was time to trade up out of the apartment - with Jane, however. That honor had gone to someone entirely unexpected
  
  Granted, it hadn't exactly been the sort of encounter you regretted in the morning. When Grim Aurora had hit town to play, Kat o' Nine Tales had somehow ended up flirting with us at our table and she'd just had this sheer relentless aura of fun that made Cat and I decide what the hell, we'd give it a try. And while the rock star sex had indeed lived up to all that rock star sex reputation... well, we'd spent an invigorating night in several of our new house's rooms, let Kat say goodbye in the morning, and then we all got on with our lives. She hadn't even stayed for breakfast, she'd had an early morning recording session.
  
  But not that we'd been occupied only, or even primarily, with just our sex lives.
  
  On Cat's end of the equation, she'd been busy for over a month intensely studying a recent breakthrough in the technomancer phenomenon re: the creation of 'sprites'. Sprites were semi-autonomous digital entities that had just recently started appearing around technomancers in the Matrix. By all appearances they were spontaneously generated from either emergent processes related to the unique 'Resonance' that researchers were using as a label for whatever mysterious phenomenon was at the root of technomancer powers, or subconsciously compiled by the background mental processes of technomancers... or more likely both acting in concert, plus X-factor. And since sprites were at least convincing emulations of sentience, like the semi-autonomous knowbots or 'SKs' pioneered by Renraku in the early 2050s that were the precursor to true AIs such as Deus, this had obviously sponsored a new crash project on Horizon's part to, well, see if there was any risk of rogue AI behavior such as Deus. Cat had had to pull so many back-to-back all-nighters at the lab that on several occasions I'd gone over a week without seeing her once, especially given my own schedule when the team played away games.
  
  But after weeks of effort and multiple rounds of repeated tests and deep Matrix immersion, the preliminary conclusions were finally starting to firm up. By all appearances sprites were indeed more akin to the SK end of the AI spectrum than the Deus end - they could only be sustained for any lengthy period of time by a semi-permanent commitment of mental resources on the technomancer's part, and they could not conduct extended operations in Matrix nodes away from their 'parent' technomancer. And they definitely were not capable of self-replication, thus averting fears of a third Crash via yet another self-replicating AI-equivalent polymorphic doomsday worm program. Admittedly, the scattered indicators that 'wild' sprites, sprites not the result of any known technomancer, might also exist deep in the Matrix was still a matter of some concern. But it's hardly as if Horizon knew the names and addresses of every technomancer in the world, and any sighting of a 'wild' sprite was likely just the sighting of a sprite that had been remote-tasked by an unknown technomancer.
  
  Still, the fact remained that technomancy was still a mysterious phenomenon in many aspects, not least of which being 'what was its source and how exactly did it work'? So if technomancers actually had turned out to be some plot of Deus or something akin to it... well, thank every god and their twin brother that they hadn't.
  
  And this latest reminder of how the world of Shadowrun far too often had hidden depths and potential existential threats atypical even for the dark cyberpunk future helped me reaffirm several things to myself. Because while on my end of the equation I hadn't really had anything remotely challenging or new for me at my day job - still just the same old Brawl game - I'd had a lot of thinking to do on more serious topics ever since the Dweller on the Threshold. Because for all that I still had no clue when that damn thing had been telling the truth and when it had been gaslighting me, the entire process of having suffered through that conversation had still left me with a moment of clarity either way.
  
  Because I genuinely had been on the verge of falling into the same mental cage that all the movers and shakers were doing their best to lock everyone into so as to better maintain the current megacorporate domination of the world.
  
  The attitude that Andrew had so succinctly summarized for me, that even rebels like Fatima and Pistons still yielded to, and that was nigh-ubiquitous among everyone I'd met whether they be megacorporate or SINless, cop or shadowrunners, glitterati or working joe. The realization that everyone on virtually every level of existence was unavoidably hemmed in by threats and incentives to keep their heads down and not buck the system, and that vast and terrible forces existed to smite down anyone who bucked too hard even up to and including Great Dragons, so therefore the only rational thing to do would be to accept that truth and not torment yourself excessively with vain dreams of freedom.
  
  Which was, of course, entirely wrong. Oh, granted, everything between "The realization that" and "so therefore the only rational thing" in the sentence before last had been an entirely true and factual statement. In this world that was, any prudent person did need to take into account that their actions must be carefully calculated and even more carefully paced so as to avoid the smiting problem.
  
  But the gulf between 'This is a threat that must be evaded, even if that means waiting to take action later because no immediate route through is available at the moment' and 'This is something that must just be accepted' might have been subtle yet was still incredibly vast. Nick Fury had once cautioned Captain America that SHIELD needed to take the world as it was, not as they'd like it to be. But for all that Steve had been up against literally planet-killing odds with a handful of rag-tag misfits and would have gotten himself splattered like a bug if he'd been even a particle more naive or hasty, the entire point of the movie had been that Fury was ultimately wrong.
  
  Or to invoke a more literary example, the choice that I had faced at the Threshold was the difference between the outlook that had let Edmond Dantes and Faria keep digging that impossible escape tunnel one laborious handful of dirt at a time, and the decision of every other prisoner in the Chateau D'If to simply serve out their sentences and eventually die. And even though their tunnel had ultimately proved fruitless in its original purpose, if Dantes still hadn't started digging he'd never have met Faria, and thus never been able to eventually seize the opportunity that he did have to escape with the old priest's death. Definitely a lesson to be learned there.
  
  In short, the difference between patience and despair was at least as important as the difference between confidence and recklessness. The first thing any successful abuser did was condition a sense of learned helplessness in their victim(s). That was what the dark cyberpunk future did to so many people. That refusal to truly hope for change, to abandon the capacity to still believe in it, was ultimately the root of all other problems that would need to be somehow cracked before the world could improve.
  
  And yes. Even with all this I still didn't have much if any idea how I was going to do that yet. I wasn't even sure if I was able to do all that yet. For all that I was effectively an isekai protag I still didn't have a script dictating that I would inevitably be the main character who would inevitably get the Main Quest on which the fate of the world intended. But at least the concept of actually doing something was solidly back on the damn agenda now, instead of being something I was starting to only pay lip service to.
  
  And that led me back to the ongoing concern that there were now larger concerns at stake than merely my or my wife's safety or happiness, or the Emergence, or even Project Archimedes. Not that any of those things were any less of a priority than they'd been before, but on top of all those things something new had entered the equation. Notably, the part where I'd recently learned that the Horrors were real.
  
  Given all the other divergences I'd noted since coming here between the Shadowrun computer games I'd played and the actual setting - the fact that no 'shadowrunner club' called the Seamstresses Guild had ever existed in Touristville, the lack of any recorded APB by the Hong Kong Police in 2056 for a man called 'Raymond Black' or his two children, and most especially the lack of any mention of a scientist named Dr. Adrian Vauclair in connection with the German military's defeat of the Great Dragon Feuerschwinge in the earliest days of the Awakening. And this despite Vauclair's having been a legendary public figure at the time, at least in the gameworld. So it had all added up to a conclusion of 'the Shadowrun computer games were apparently an alternate timeline of the Shadowrun that I'd landed in'.
  
  Yet the Horrors were only briefly mentioned in Dragonfall and only in the epilogue of the Bad Ending, and had been no part of the plot at any other time. Even Qian Ya, The Queen With A Thousand Teeth and the main villain from SR: Hong Kong, had still fit solidly into what was already known in this world's shadowrunner community about the ancient evil spirits called 'the Yama Kings'. So I'd concluded that the whole 'if the dragons all die than the world ends when things from Beyond The Outer Gates come to end all life on Earth' thing was just something they'd shoehorned into the optional epilogue to make it absolutely plain that picking the ending where you helped Vauclair kill all the dragons with his super magic biowarfare actually was the bad ending. After all, sometimes a videogame franchise had to drop a pretty big anvil on gamers to get the point across.
  
  And then Jane had said everything that she'd said the night I'd confronted the Dweller. The Horrors were not only real, but people like her and her father and the Great Dragons and who the hell else had a whole secret war going on underneath even the regular shadow community to stop their efforts. The attitude with which she'd approached even the faintest possibility that I might manifest as a vessel for one of those things, and the precautions she'd taken just in case of the event of, were worthy of any Slayer in the Buffyverse confronting a potential 'the Hellmouth might open right now' scenario on short notice.
  
  Yes, this was all definitely something for a man to keep firmly in mind. Depending on how close that particular doomsday clock was to midnight, I might need to do a shifting of my whole priority list. And I'd first have to figure out a way to bring the topic up with Jane at all, seeing as how I didn't quite want to try and explain the whole 'I'm an isekai protagonist from a place this world was part of a fictional franchise' thing yet and I'd have no other way of explaining how I knew at all. And she'd already told me it was a secret she was literally oath-sworn to protect and that she risked death for ever breaching, so, not just something I want to toss out onto the dinner table like it was just an invitation to a threesome.
  
  Still, at least there was a silver lining even in this particular doom cloud. If Project Stop The Horrors was really such an important thing among all the super secret magic players around here, then maybe Hestaby would be willing to assign me to helping out with that project instead of sticking me wherever the hell else use she was going to try and make of me after the poking and prodding had finished.
  
  Because of course she had a potential use for me somewhere in her own wish lists, she wouldn't have been helping me otherwise. Dragons had a definite reputation for that, even relatively benevolent and self-restrained ones like the Orange Queen. The best I'd been hoping for all along was that it wouldn't be a morally repugnant use or one that treated me as expendable... or, at absolute minimum, one that I could escape from. But until I knew at least something of what I could truly do and how I could do it, then I would forever remain handicapped in my ability to plan for the long term. And hence the necessity of consulting with a dragon. Still, at least the Horrors were a thing I could rest assured were not an immediate crisis, because Jane would very likely have come and gotten my help if it was. And while Hestaby was still a potential long-term worry, things were proceeding on schedule there and with no new cause for alarm. And Project Archimedes I'd already covered.
  
  Which left the Emergence as our most immediate worry, because the optimism of this summer was starting to slide into an uneasy autumn.
  
  
  
  "'Horizon Internal Persona?' Really?" I said incredulously as we both looked at the orientation packet on our AR displays. October had come, and with it the start of the new fiscal year. And this year it had also brought a new Horizon-wide policy initiative.
  
  "A comprehensive, real-time networked reputation system that will allow members of the Horizon family to better interconnect with and freely encourage more amiable interpersonal relations at all levels of contact." Cat recited straight from the manual. "How exactly is giving every Horizon employee you so much as pass in the hallway a chance to either boost or ding a reputation score attached to your public profile 'encouraging more amiable interpersonal relations?'".
  
  "I suppose they're expecting people who are consistently assholes in the workplace to get dinged down to zero and kept there, and thus let social pressure motivate people to change in ways that a direct mandate from on high wouldn't." I said. "Because each individual person can only move your score a tiny bit - and it doesn't scale for rank, so getting dinged by a janitor counts as much as getting dinged by Gary Cline - but how many people do you pass by in a day? No more just sucking up to the boss anymore, you have to actually lose the 'tude full-time."
  
  "Total strangers count for as much as co-workers or close friends? Wouldn't that mean that rep scores would hardly move at all unless people started paying attention to everyone in the crowd around them, down to knowing names and faces?" Cat analyzed.
  
  "Well, Augmented Reality and the legal requirement to broadcast your SIN in all public areas already makes identifying people easy." I pointed out. "But yes, in some ways this is kind of mid-80s adjacent." I euphemized the reference to1984. After all, even if you were having a picnic on the balcony out of easy earshot of the housekeeping systems you still couldn't be too blatant about criticism. And if we'd stuck exclusively to the technomantic link and never actually talked out loud in the house, then people would wonder.
  
  "I suppose now I can at least have some petty revenge on a certain individual in the lab who always takes the last jelly donut." Cat sighed. "But now everyone will have to start managing their public behavior as if they're always 'on-stage', not just the Beautiful People." Or those of us on self-imposed deep-cover missions, the silent implication hung in the air after her words.
  
  "I certainly hope that they budgeted extra for employee stress counseling this fiscal period." I agreed. "I mean, it's not as if we didn't know that Horizon is always trying to find the magic social engineering bullet that will encourage the general run of people to act like better people, but I'm not sure this is an experiment that's going to have happy results."
  
  "That's why they call them experiments." Cat said primly. "But it's not as if they asked us for a vote is it? This is an employee requirement now and we're employees, so there you have it."
  
  "Do our best, and hope it all works out for the best." I agreed - publicly, at least. "And to pivot to a happier topic..."
  
  "Jane's back in town day after tomorrow." Cat smiled. "And she's already texted to ask me if she can come over for dinner after you finish shooting your advertising spot."
  
  "Tell her that she can come over and be dinner." I leered hammily, and we both giggled.
  
  "I'd certainly love to, but we both know she'd take off like a startled cat if I actually said that!" my wife agreed.
  
  "But nothing startles you, dear, particularly not sexually." I teased her, and we both giggled again. "More seriously, we don't know yet if she'll even want it to be more than a one-time thing. Still, that she's wanting to dine in instead of keeping things purely on a business level is certainly a hopeful sign."
  
  The first couple of days at work with the HIP system running were the rough adjustment period that anyone with the slightest amount of sense would expect to be. Reputation notification pop-ups were crowding everyone's AR display like it was an outright spam zone, people were still entirely uncertain what to mark for or even if things should be marked at all. Since the same person could only rep the same other person up or down once per 60-minute period, the more obvious strategies for rep farming or harassing people were already obviated. And there were other, more subtle safeguard in play. Even so, there wasn't a system yet that human beings wouldn't try to game whenever possible and I cynically looked foreward to seeing what kind of new social manipulations and favor-trading games would evolve out of nowhere to match this new, nigh-unique social stimuli.
  
  Perhaps that was the entire point of Horizon having started this at all. Because I just knew the social engineering people already had their notepads out to watch the fallout with interest.
  
  Jane, in her cover persona as the advertising exec working the Greenpeace account I was one of this season's celebrity spokespeople for, was all business as we went through the process of rehearsing and then recording the several TV spots and the puff piece interview. Not that this was unexpected, because we were in the workplace and on the clock. At the end of the day I graciously invited her home for dinner, she graciously accepted, and on the way home her magic ensured our privacy while we talked about our other business.
  
  "So, it's set up?" I asked her.
  
  "Yes." she agreed. "In case you need to bug out before next summer, you'll have the safe house to lay low in while you wait for me to come and extract you. If the primary safe house is a no-go, there's two other drop boxes where you can at least pick up fake IDs and bugout bags to help get out of LA on your own."
  
  "While you are a prime candidate to lead an emergency extraction team, I'm surprised that she's willing to pay your going fees for courier work on this level." I obliquely probed.
  
  "So am I." Jane agreed. "I accepted largely because it gave me a chance to actually meet you again and satisfy my own curiosity. Normally I'd have turned the assignment down, because good money for a milk run or not..." she shrugged.
  
  "Hrm." I wondered. "Almost makes me wonder if she knew that you already knew."
  
  "... I've wondered that too." Jane nodded. "Still, it wouldn't necessarily be a cause for alarm even if it was true. Security 101 is, if you've got something that you really want to keep secret then don't expand the need-to-know pool even one person beyond what you have to."
  
  "And my observer/handler/whatever really should already know at least the basics of why I matter to Hestaby so they know what to watch for, which in light of that makes it a mildly suspicious omission she didn't brief you. Or if her promise of confidentiality mattered, to at least send a request along with your first set of messages to me that I brief you."
  
  "Dragons." Jane sighed. "If they've got something important to say then why can't they just say it straight out?"
  
  "... well, that's not a problem exclusive to dragons." I risked taking the opening.
  
  Jane turned away from looking out the car window to give me a stare I could palpably feel. "And what did that mean, exactly?"
  
  "We were going to let you bring it up at your own pace, but just now it occurred to me that you might welcome a chance to talk before we got home and Cat joined the discussion. Just in case you found her enthusiasm... more of a social pressure than an expression of approval?"
  
  "Ah." Jane relaxed. "And..." she sighed. "God, look at me, awkward as a high-schooler. No, it's actually worse. I was the bad girl in high school, but now...?"
  
  "Never let Cat hear you say that unless you want to spend the next hour trading war stories from St. Trinian's with her." I diverted. "Honestly, sometimes she curls my hair with her tales of youthful hijinx."
  
  "St. Trinian's?" Jane asked me.
  
  "Late 20th-century comedy flatvid about a girls' school for delinquents." I said. "No, not that kind of flatvid."
  
  "Ah." Jane nodded. "And..." she looked at herself in the passenger-side mirror, then back at me. "You won't hurt my feelings if you just tell me, you know. That seduction... was any of it business? You know, keep your friends close and your contacts closer?" she asked briskly.
  
  "Now I'm definitely glad I had this conversation in the car." I told her. "Because if you'd asked that question with Cat in the room she'd have been deeply hurt." And also spitting mad at the implication I finished silently to myself. "You know that she grew up in Tarislar, right?"
  
  "Of course I do. But what does that have to do with anything?" Jane retorted.
  
  "And from that question alone I can surmise that you did not grow up in that rough a place." I volleyed back.
  
  "I'm from Ohio." she surprised me.
  
  "And your father was Ehran the Scribe?" I asked incredulously.
  
  "Let's just say that he wasn't actually married to my mother and you can fill in the blanks on your own." Jane said. "Now please explain what Tarislar has to do with this?"
  
  "Jane, one of the very first non-business related things you ever said to my wife was that she was an extraordinarily good-looking woman." I pointed out. "And she grew up dirt-poor in the slums and willing to bust a gut trying to find a way out. So you can probably fill in those blanks on your own."
  
  "But I wouldn't ever judge her for having done that!" Jane said earnestly. "In this day and age, a lot of people have to do things that aren't nice just to survive. That's essentially our whole careers, Wild Man."
  
  "You wouldn't have had to judge Cat for that because she didn't do that." I corrected her. "For all that Cat was pretty free with her affections back in the day, she was precisely that. Free with them. She never sold them, not even indirectly. I mean, prior to taking marriage vows Cat would gladly put out on the first date if she thought it might be fun. Hell, I could have gotten sex on our first date instead of our third if I hadn't deliberately slowed the roll. But-" I trailed off meaningfully.
  
  "She is a bit of a handful sometimes, isn't she?" Jane blushed slightly at the memories.
  
  "It's a good thing I have superhuman endurance, I'm just saying." I agreed humorously. "But more seriously, Cat won't so much as smile sexily to get an edge in a job interview, let alone-" I broke off. "She was smart enough when growing up to look around and see what happened to some other girls who thought that they could trade on their bodies without risking their spirits eventually being lost in the transaction as well. And so she committed to the other path as hard as she could. So yes, if you'd even implied to Cat that you thought her capable of seducing you for a business advantage-" I nodded at her. "Well, it wouldn't have made her hate you but it would have really stung."
  
  "Oh." Jane said shamefacedly. "I'm sorry, I just-" she shook her head. "I can't understand why you two are both putting so much effort into this."
  
  "Neither do we." I surprised Jane. "It's emotions, and feelings, and what attracts one heart to another. If I could flowchart and measure those things like an exact science I wouldn't be playing Urban Brawl, I'd be replacing Gary Cline. I'd certainly be the holy grail of the social engineering labs."
  
  "So what, we experiment and find out?" Jane retorted.
  
  "If you're willing." I agreed. "And... okay, you might have heard something about the lead singer of Grim Aurora?"
  
  "Along with several million of her fans." Jane said cynically. "It was on her MeFeed page. And speaking of, is there anyone else I'll be kissing by proxy tonight?" she probed.
  
  "That question implies that we'll be getting kissed tonight." I teased her gently, to receive an arched eyebrow but also a quirk of her lip in return. "And no. Now, I will admit that there have been more than a few offers, and some of them from people I've actually met-" I drawled.
  
  Jane snorted. "Not surprised to hear that, Crackshot."
  
  "Kat was..." I curled my lip. "Part of it was that we actually had friends in common with her, it helped break the ice. Part of it was that she was more than willing plus happening in the right place at the right time. But while we certainly hadn't planned it, we'd accepted it at least partly because we were experimenting."
  
  "Experimenting with...?" Jane asked knowingly.
  
  "In finding out if it really was just hormones and adrenaline with us that night," I shook my head. "And, no. It wasn't. The rock star sex certainly had hormones and adrenaline to spare, even without the 'thank God we're alive!' factor, but nothing beyond that. To steal from an even older 20th-century rock song, there were no kicks above the waistline." I reached over and put my hand on the divider between the car seats, to let her hand eventually come up to rest on top of it. "Neither I nor Cat are any more certain of exactly what emotions were going on that night than you were, Jane, but there definitely were some."
  
  "Oh." Jane said softly, squeezing my fingers. "Well..." she trailed off, and then looked up and out the windshield. "Oh, is this your new house? It's gorgeous!" And yes, it certainly was. We hadn't gone crazy and bought something like Winona Flying Horse's absurd marble 'palace' complete with two-acre lawn - not least because even I didn't have that much money - but it was still a large two-story villa and attached lot that was fit for a simstar. That's how we'd gotten it, in fact, because Valerie Dreams had had to dump it fast after her bankruptcy hearing. We'd then paid back almost half of what we'd saved on the house price for a fast internal remodeling and all-new furniture and fittings because she'd been living proof that tons of nuyen still couldn't buy good taste. The work still wasn't done in the basement, but even among the rich and famous and even in the dark cyberpunk future home contractors were still lousy with deadlines.
  
  I mentally 'poked' at my AR display to tell GridGuide's auto-drive exactly what spot of the carpark to stop on, and squeezed Jane's hand back. "Cat promised me that she wouldn't glomp you as soon as you made it through the door, but it might still be safer to let me take point." I teased her again.
  
  "But do I have to?" Jane teased me back after a moment, and I leaned over and we played a brief game of tonsil hockey before popping the doors and getting out of the car.
  
  Shockingly, however, when we actually made it indoors we found that Cat wasn't eager to talk about sex at all.
  
  "You saw the Dweller on the Threshold? In the Matrix?" Jane sputtered to her almost incoherently. "That's- hold on, I'm going to have a look on the astral here!"
  
  I opened my own astral 'eyes' and assensed Cat as hard as I could as Jane did the same.
  
  "I don't see anything." I said shortly. "Her aura's still entirely mundane."
  
  "Same here." Jane agreed. "So what the hell? I'm used to you breaking formerly inviolate laws of magic, Alex, but how can Cat be doing that now?"
  
  "If it helps, I'm not entirely certain it was the Dweller that I saw." Cat said, still white-faced. "The lead theory is that the experience I had was half-hallucination, half self-created VR simulation, and based on things from my own subconscious."
  
  "Well, I'd certainly told you enough about my own encounter with the Dweller that you could imagine an encounter with him. And it being created by your own mind would also explain the 'knowing all your secrets' the Dweller is infamous for." I thought out loud.
  
  "Yes, but I also felt it as well as saw and heard it. And they haven't yet been able to accurately record and playback Resonance impressions with simsense technology." Cat pointed out. "I'd have had to be hallucinating the entire experience myself, but-" She shook her head. "The EEGs didn't show any indications of that."
  
  "Neither did my scan just now." Jane nodded. "Hallucinations that vivid and detailed out of nowhere require either direct simsense assistance or a neurological, not merely psychological, problem. And that kind of organic brain malfunction... well, assensing is hardly as precise as an EEG but I'd still see some kind of flutter if you were having serious problems up there." She poked Cat's forehead affectionately with one finger. "But no, you're the picture of health."
  
  "And here we see the difference between talent and experience." I said. "I didn't know you could see half that stuff in someone's astral aura."
  
  "It's a bit of an advanced technique." Jane nodded to me. "But more pertinent to the immediate situation... Cat, I'm guessing from your tone of voice that you don't believe the 'it was all in your head' theory?"
  
  "No." Cat said pensively. "For one, this isn't the first time something odd's been happening in the Matrix with me lately. It's just the first time that Singularity actually knew about it."
  
  According to Cat, for the past several days she'd had this growing, subliminal impression that something was shifting in the Matrix, both in the lab's enclosed testing environments and the greater Matrix in general. This morning, while engaged in a routine extended VR session to yet again chart the limits of a skilled technomancer to improvise, or "thread", new program-equivalents on the fly, she'd suddenly felt involuntarily pulled deeper into the Matrix by what she could best describe as a 'surge of the Resonance'. And then she'd spent what according to the lab techs was four hours and eleven minutes comatose in a VR trance that they couldn't wake her up from. Even crashing the laboratory host and moving her to a wireless-shielded room hadn't snapped her out of it, she'd still remained 'jacked in' via her own technomancer abilities to... wherever she'd been jacked into. Meanwhile, on her end of the encounter she'd not only seen the Dweller but had an entire mystic experience afterwards, a trip to something that Cat could only describe as a 'Resonance realm' and otherwise didn't quite know how to translate into English.
  
  "All right, if this kept going on even inside a Faraday cage then I can certainly see why Singularity is leaning so hard into the 'It was just you hallucinating'." Jane said.
  
  "I certainly don't." I said flatly. "And I wonder if Horizon really believes it, either."
  
  "Why?" Jane asked me.
  
  "Jane, I'm her husband." I pointed out. "And Cat just told us that for a several hour period this morning, she was not only comatose and unresponsive under alarming conditions but that at least towards the end of it they had no idea if she'd ever wake up before she surprised them by doing so."
  
  "Shit, you're right!" Cat said, wide-eyed. "They should have called you as soon as it went beyond a 'emergency first responder' level and I wasn't awake to make decisions about my own medical care!"
  
  "It's not as if I was on the road or down on the practice field." I agreed. "I was right over in Studio City all morning for the promo shoot and rehearsals, all they'd have had to do is ping my commlink. Typical corporate high-handedness." I snorted angrily.
  
  "Oh, entirely. But what I'm stuck on is how was she possibly connected to anything external if she was inside an electromagnetically grounded signal trap?" Jane wondered out loud. "Whatever the exact mechanism of technomancer abilities in the brain are, their ability to link remotely to devices is still based on electromagnetic transmissions that are entirely understood physics."
  
  "Under normal circumstances." I pointed out. "Ask Smiling Bandit about their theory of quantum consciousness as it relates to technomancer abilities sometimes. And we already know that a technomancer's 'living persona' can emulate at least some q-bit hardware functions, as they have to do that every time they encrypt or decrypt commercial quantum encryption algorithms."
  
  "So you're thinking Cat somehow... was temporarily sustaining a quantum-entangled communicator link to something deep in the Matrix somewhere?" Jane said. "Isn't that highly speculative to say the least?"
  
  "And the whys and wherefores of our own proven ability to send our minds to another plane of existence isn't?" I countered.
  
  "Valid." Jane nodded. "And yes, I've skimmed Bandit's thesis that he posted on the Nexus. Which, now that you point it out, has at least some correspondence to other theories I've studied about magical Initiation in practitioners. You saw at least some of the common elements from Cat's story yourself, of course."
  
  "The gradually growing sense of feeling a deeper and deeper connection to the mysterious world-spanning overfield that is the source of their abilities? The sudden lapse from an ordinary meditative state into a deep-dive into the heart of that realm while their body is unresponsive and unrousable? The confrontation of their own worst fears and self-delusions in the form of a threshold guardian straight out of Jungian archetype theory? The mystic revelation at the heart of it all?" I itemized. "No, that entirely doesn't sound like a classic case of spontaneous self-Initiation in a practitioner." I finished ironically.
  
  "So that's another one for Pistons and Fatima's own theory." Cat said. "Magic and the Resonance are two entirely separate things, but they both interface with the human consciousness in roughly identical ways. That's why the common elements of perception and symbolism exist between the two, because the human brain is built to accept a particular set of inputs and triggers."
  
  "Initiation is widely believed to take the forms and imagery that it commonly does because it involves a rewiring of the deep neural structures of the human brain. Which is a capability of brains. Witness the case of people who lose an entire section of gray matter but eventually retrain other entirely different sections of their brain to do new jobs to compensate." Jane said.
  
  "Or even that old psych experiment of people who constantly wear the mirror glasses that turn things upside down and their minds eventually adjusting to see normally again, only to have to learn how to flip the view again when they finally take the glasses off." I said.
  
  "And the portion of the human brain and psyche that led primitive tribesmen to see the faces of the gods in burning trees - at least when spirits weren't actually involved - is a useful place for such brain-rewiring phenomenon, whether from the deep Astral or the deep Resonance, to plug into. Because normally such deep structural rewiring isn't possible, but..." Jane shrugged. "At this point we go well further into theoretical neurobiology than I ever studied, but you pick the basics up in advanced magical theory class. At least if you had my weird professor." She shook her head. "Practical value right now; the odds closely approach unity as a limit that you're not crazy, and neither did you meet Deus' secret remnant in the hidden Matrix to get EvilOS 2.0 uploaded into your brain."
  
  "Because that would be something like being involuntarily implanted with a personafix chip, which is another thing that shows up to an experienced astral observer the same way as severe MPD would." I chimed in.
  
  "... thank you." Cat said, relaxing for the first time since she'd gotten home to wait for us. "So... what do we do?"
  
  "Well, if we're wild-ass guessing that what happened to you was the technomancer equivalent of Initiation... what would the term for that be, anyway?" I thought out loud.
  
  "Call it 'submersion'." Cat suggested. "Because when I originally pulled/dove into the deep Matrix, it felt like drowning in a digital ocean."
  
  "Submersion." Jane said. "And let me guess, you're going to ask Cat if she has any new Matrix tricks? Because, yes, the first time you initiate you quite often pick up the beginning of your first meta-magical technique, even instinctively."
  
  Cat ran herself through a basic drill of common Matrix operations - Analyze, Data Search, Command, Edit, Encrypt/Decrypt, Scan, and so forth - and soon enough discovered that her abilities with data search and analysis had undergone a distinct shift.
  
  "It's as if... okay, using the Resonance as compared to normal neural interface gear always had this sense of depth, this subliminal layer of extra contextualization. But this is like that squared and cubed." Cat explained wonderingly. "It's as if there's invisible metadata and cross-links tagging every piece of data I turn up in a Matrix search operation, as if there's analytical algorithms whispering just out of earshot... as if I just piled together enough facts on a topic, however scattershot, on a topic then after I achieved a critical mass of data then a revelation would just..." she trailed off.
  
  "Well, it's not as if you don't already have one of those large databases." I said. "Your ongoing media clip file collection about possibly technomancer-related news, that we use to check the public pulse re: how likely they are to be receptive to a public Emergence scenario. How's about I go get your datachips and you see what happens when you review that?"
  
  "No need, I can reach my commlink from here." Cat said, and closed her eyes. "Give me a little while to meditate on this..."
  
  About ten minutes later her eyes opened and we saw her aura shift from a woman in a trance to fully conscious again. "Wow." she breathed. "Yeah, something definitely happened there. It's like the answer just appeared out of nowhere once I piled together enough random data tokens."
  
  "What answer?" I said.
  
  "It's shifting downwards." Cat said worriedly. "On the surface... the news, the pop culture, the Matrix rumors, it all seems cheerful and everything's on schedule. But that's just things up top, headline entertainment and the slant of the news. Further down? Matrix jokes, subculture talk, little oblique references, even memes?" She shook her head. "It's like everything Shooting Star and other such indirect propaganda efforts was trying to do, but backwards."
  
  "Sounds like a new megacorp just entered the Emergence game." Jane frowned. "And is beginning to undercut Horizon's own social engineering efforts to tilt things to the sunny side before the big reveal, possibly without even knowing Horizon's even trying to. Any idea who it might be?"
  
  "I've got this hunch that if I follow the invisible breadcrumbs far enough and long enough through the Matrix, I might be led to the answer." Cat said. "But I can't explain how or why, and I'm not up for such a potentially lengthy session tonight. And certainly not from our own home node."
  
  "Well, this certainly sounds like the Resonance equivalent of a meta-magical technique to me." I agreed. "Some kind of divination talent. What would we even call it?"
  
  "Sortilege." Jane suggested. "In the pre-Awakening history of occultism it was an archaic term for divination by drawing forth cards or tiles from a large random collection of them and having your draws spell out the answer. Which sounds vaguely like what Cat just described here, about how the conclusion spontaneously emerged for her from a large enough pile of semi-random data all loosely assembled around the central topic of inquiry."
  
  "So, Matrix sortilege. No, info sortilege." Cat nodded. "I like it!"
  
  "Spontaneous initiation- submergence." I snapped my fingers. "One of the triggers for it in a practitioner is when they're simultaneously prepared for it in mind and spirit and dealing with an ongoing need for a solution to a problem they cannot solve. Their initial metamagical technique is usually something that would help them resolve their dilemma."
  
  "And what's been keeping you guys stuck on planning a next move for your various goals is lack of knowledge, so after months of pushing her technomancer abilities to the limit and training them in multiple aspects, that plus the prolonged focus and her urgent need for answers... boom, breakthrough!" Jane nodded. "That's what I'd have called it in a heartbeat if she'd been a magician doing the same thing astrally, at least."
  
  "I'm just glad both of you have any kind of theory for this at all besides 'It's AI puppet theater' or 'She's crazy'." Cat hugged us both in relief. "Thank you."
  
  "How long does your spirit have before its task expires and it stops guaranteeing our privacy?" I asked Jane.
  
  "I summoned it after sunset so it'll keep going until sunrise, of course." Jane explained. "Have you not been studying those basic theory texts I left you?"
  
  "In his defense, we've had kinda a busy month with setting up the new house." Cat said.
  
  "Why'd you even buy it, anyway?" Jane asked. "I mean, yes, you did just get that five million nuyen advance on your contract, but it's just possible you won't be living here past next summer. Depends on how the Shasta trip falls out."
  
  "Precisely because we might not be living here next summer." I pointed out. "The one thing above all we're trying to keep Horizon from noticing is that I'm pursuing independent interests with a new patron, and how better to do that?"
  
  "Doh! I'm sorry Mr. Forest, I couldn't see you there with all these trees in the way." Jane snarked at herself, and we all cuddled on the couch and caught a brief rest from the recent thinktanking.
  
  "You know what's a good cure for momentary embarrassment?" Cat said into the silence after a short while.
  
  "Let me guess... could it be 'getting naked'?" Jane replied amusedly.
  
  "Well actually I was going to say 'a good laugh'. But if you absolutely insist on having wild monkey sex right here on the couch then I suppose as a good hostess I should make an effort to try and accommodate you, even despite my legendarily inviolate propriety and general lack of interest in such matters..." Cat teased us before we both finally ratcheted our jaws back in place and started hitting her with the couch cushions.
  
  
  
  Jane's schedule had let her spend the weekend this time, and outside of one or two brief instants of awkwardness - as with any new relationship, we were still feeling out the exact boundaries of sensitive topics and how best to raise them - it had been as much of a nice 'being together' as it had been good sweaty fun. It was still early days, and we were still definitely a married couple and their lover as opposed to being any kind of triad, but... well, we were still working out exactly what we were, as opposed to what we weren't. But either way, we were entirely enjoying the process and felt no major anxiety at either rushing it or dawdling it. Taking things at their own pace was working just fine for us for now, and so we'd keep doing that at least until next summer. It certainly helped that keeping in regular yet occasional-appearing contact with us and also being potentially available on short notice in emergencies was Frosty's job as Hestaby's field handler for Asset Me anyway.
  
  Cat spent slightly less than a week after her 'submersion dive' on medical leave due to what Singularity had officially recorded as a transient incident with an experimental neural interface technology, interspersed with two sessions of tests at the hospital. The procedure as regarding keeping her next of kin and holder of her medical power-of-attorney, notably me, entirely in the loop and notified of significant developments was scrupulously followed to the letter. So either that first day at the lab and the suspicious lack of calling me had just been Tam and the lab geeks getting so caught up in studying the what that they'd forgotten the why, or...
  
  Well, it's not as if we hadn't been operating on 'provisionally trust only' ever since we'd gotten here.
  
  At any rate, Cat was soon enough given an entirely clean bill of health and went back to work. Both of us were slightly compulsive about regular commlink calls and texts at work, but this was not considered unusual behavior in a young married couple one of whom had just experienced a moderately alarming workplace accident. Meanwhile, she'd been making tentative uses of her new info sortilege - hours of uninterrupted Matrix time complete with extensive data searches on potentially sensitive topics was an easy enough commodity for a shadowrunner to find, but harder to arrange living in the heart of corpland - to try and turn up any clues as to what was causing the subtle shift in the zeitgeist away from a favorable Emergence scenario to a more fraught one. But even techno-magic divination powers didn't just hand you even limited omniscience on a plate for free, so it was a project and not just a task.
  
  And then, one night early in November as we'd just finished a game versus the Lakota Arrows in the Sioux Nation's capital of Cheyenne, there was a knock on my hotel room door.
  
  "Alex?" Sarah's voice said tightly. "Are you there?" my team captain continued asking.
  
  "It's open." I said, sending a command from my commlink to unlock the door. "What's wrong?" I continued, rolling off the coach to see her standing- my face immediately fell as I saw her standing there, white-faced with worry and sorrow... and Tam Reyes, CEO of Singularity Software, standing next to her looking equally worried and sorrowful in his best suit.
  
  "What's happened?" I asked desperately.
  
  They both stepped inside and let the door swing shut behind them. Part of my brain multitasked to note that Sarah was tense as if she was expecting a fight, and also the subtle bulges of both a Narcoject pistol and a shock baton beneath her windbreaker.
  
  My expanding mind inexorably put the clues together one by one, logically and remorselessly, as the rest of me shouted at myself to please stop. My wife's boss having flown out here on zero notice to inform me of something personally when he could have just Matrix-called me with a thought. My team captain also being here, but prepared to act like Tam's bodyguard as if she were expecting me to attack him for some reason, but the absence of a corporate security detail that would normally accompany him into a potentially violent situation.
  
  "I think you'll need to sit down, Alex." Sarah said softly. "It's not good news."
  
  "Alex. I'm so, so sorry." Tam began quietly and as compassionately as he could. "But Catherine-" he ground to a halt, his eyes glittering, and forced himself to continue. "Something terrible has happened."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Yes, I am an evil and sadistic bastard in the extreme. Why are you all looking so shocked now?
  
  No, I'm not even going to hint at this cliffhanger. I'm just going to say that by now I should have at least some trust banked up with my readers, and today I'm gonna draw on that account some.
  
  Unrelated to evil cliffhangers, 'submersion' is indeed the technomancer analogy to magical initiation, and Info Sortilege is entirely a canon 'echo' (or technomancer equivalent of a metamagical technique) from 4e's Unwired supplement.
  
  Horizon Internal Persona is likewise canon, from 4e's Corporate Guide. It's linked to Persona 2.0, from Corporate Enclaves, also by Horizon. I'm typing up an info post that will get more into it because I'm aware there will be curiosity, even if it's not majorly relevant to the plot. (It was good for atmosphere, though.)
  
  And I would like to thank those readers who wrote analyses of Alex's encounter with the Dweller. Several of you phrased some of the things I was working towards in that encounter even better than I originally had in my head, and dialogue was revised accordingly.
  
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  She'd been kidnapped.
  
  According to Tam, Cat had simply not shown up at work this morning. After she'd been half an hour late, his office had paged her commlink asking about the delay and there'd been no answer. After two missed calls, Tam had been concerned enough to run a Matrix trace himself and when she'd turned up as 'off the grid' he'd called Horizon corpsec. The unit sent to our house had determined that she'd left for work at the normal time, and about twenty minutes after that a GridGuide cross-check and searching LAPD Inc. units found what was left of Cat's sedan parked underneath an overpass in a deserted section of one of the old LA canals. The car itself had been completely fragged with an old shadowrunner's trick. First it had been doused in a slurry of tissue scraps and other biomedical waste harvested from a street doc's to completely bury any possible DNA traces among dozens of false positives, and then it had been fed a thermite and napalm sandwich to leave only a burnt-out ruin and fragmentary traces to work with even after all that.
  
  GridGuide logs showed that Cat had simply pulled off the road during her drive in to stop in the alley behind a Stuffer Shack, then had pulled back out and departed from her route to instead drive directly to the old canal after a brief pause. Between the lack of an external security camera that had had a view of that portion of the alley and the tinted windows on her car, it had been impossible to determine if she'd been driving the car on the second leg. The current theory is that as she'd pulled up towards the intersection near the Stuffer Shack she'd been targeted by a mage who'd used a Control Thoughts spell to force her to pull over out of sight and open the car door, at which point either he or a confederate had subdued her and driven her to the extraction point. And it's not as if I hadn't seen mind control magic and its potential usefulness for vehicle hijackings before, after all. I personally knew the caster from the last time I'd seen that one pulled off. Biblically, in fact.
  
  At this point Cat had of course escalated to a missing persons case of the highest priority. The Bolts' management had vetoed Singularity's wish to notify me until after tonight's game had completed because otherwise I'd have been pulled from the starting lineup. Singularity had chosen to not fight this for the first few hours, in the hope that Cat could be found and recovered before having to tell me at all, but after that had fallen through Tam had chosen to fly out personally as a courtesy. While LAPD Inc. and Horizon's own corpsec division had of course escalated this case to the highest level and done an all-points search of every possible lead as quickly as they could, the fact that they hadn't caught up to the kidnappers inside the first twelve hours raised the probability that they'd escaped the city - with Cat - to a virtual certainty. That's how it worked in such cases.
  
  It was a classic involuntary extraction scenario, straight out of the nonexistent shadowrunners' manual. Megacorps kidnapped each other's 'wet assets' all the time - quite often the best way to steal another megacorp's intellectual property was to just carry off the skull it was contained in. And that's leaving aside the fact that Cat was not merely a technomancer, but one who'd had the full benefit of Horizon's technomancer research and training opportunities almost from the beginning. If taken and shaken out she could do a great deal to tell any other megacorp all about some of the best ways to train and hone the powers of their own technomancers. Or to counter them.
  
  I allowed Tam to commiserate with me and show me his summaries of all the actions that had been taken so far and the ongoing results of the investigation. I let Sarah and my friends on the team try to rally around me likewise. She'd apologized for the gun and the zap stick, which had been her own hasty idea as she'd accompanied Tam up because of the slight yet definite possibility that I might have just freaked the fuck out on hearing the news. It wouldn't have been the first time a hyped up Urban Brawl player had flown off the handle and punched the wrong dude after shit had knocked him hard off balance, especially when stlil coming down off the adrenaline from a match. I got assured that I could take as much leave of absence as I felt necessary to get my head together - of course, that wasn't as generous as it sounded as pro athletes routinely worked on a "no play, no pay" system - and that I would be regularly updated on the progress of the case and that everything possible would be done.
  
  And then I went home and crawled into a bottle.
  
  
  
  "Alex, this isn't helping." Sarah said.
  
  "Go away." I mumbled drunkenly.
  
  "You know I was Lone Star before I got into the game, right? You're not the first family of the victim I've seen." she said firmly. "This is not a good pattern. Even if it feels like you're just going through the motions, it still helps to move."
  
  "Is this the same script you used on all the other families or are you ad libbing?" I sneered.
  
  She walked that one off like a champ and just shook her head sadly. "If you've given up hope on seeing her again, then you need to start a healthy grieving process. If you haven't, then you need to still be the man she married so she'll be able to come back to him. Either way, you need to stop doing this."
  
  I just stared down into the open whiskey bottle and ignored her.
  
  "You know that I'm going to keep coming back here until your head is finally out of your ass." she glared at me.
  
  "Please, you've got more than a week of away games coming up." I sneered up at her. "So get back to earning your salary, and feel free to indulge your hobby of pretending to give a shit only when they allow you to have an off day."
  
  Sarah sighed and turned to head back up the basement stairs and out. "Just... don't do anything even stupider until I get back, all right?"
  
  I ostentatiously ignored her to open an AR window and start desultorily scrolling through the same old photos and messages from my now-missing wife.
  
  There were several other visits, from teammates or co-workers of Cat's. One from Tam Reyes, even. I lurched from moping in my still-not-fully-refurbished basement, bare joists and all, to making an ass of myself in public. Drunkenness, public disturbance, even punching a guy - hushed up, of course - and all. The Bolts were hardly willing to bounce me after only a week, but the tone of communications from team management - as well as the surrounding PR - was already starting to slide from 'sympathy' to 'damage control'. Unless I changed course, I was on track to being a sports tragedy; the young star whose epically promising career burned out when he was shattered by a tragic loss. Somewhere in Pathfinder Multimedia, some junior writer was probably already roughing out an outline for a fictional dramatization to be used in the future event of.
  
  I'd messaged Jane almost as soon as it happened, of course, but she didn't come to the house at all. And only one of the visits I did receive was noteworthy as being outside the expected pattern.
  
  I was back in the basement, brooding alone in the dark as usual, when I heard Andrew's footsteps coming down the stairs. Someone in the Bolts management was clearly supplying people with passkeys to my house to 'check on my welfare'. If I'd cared to look I'd probably have found the exact fine print in my contract that made this legal, but it didn't really matter at this point.
  
  Andrew didn't even talk to me at first, or raise an eyebrow at the Ares Predator laying next to the whiskey bottle on the low table alongside my chair. He just paced around the unfinished man-cave, looking at the partially bare walls and smelling the rank atmosphere caused by my not having showered in days. And also occasionally glancing at his AR display.
  
  And then he surprised me by walking over and holding his commlink up so I could see the backup touch-screen that virtually nobody used ever since Augmented Reality contacts and either trodes or haptic interface gear let people work the projected touchscreens without having to actually use the buttons or the manual scroll wheel.
  
  If we can talk, tell me to go fuck myself.
  
  "Go fuck yourself, Andy." I drunkenly mumbled at him.
  
  "So you're hidin' down here because the microphones ain't in yet." he nodded. "That's smart. What're you plannin'?"
  
  "Ain't plannin' shit." I said.
  
  "Plausible deniability too? Uh-huh." he said evenly.
  
  "The fuck makes you think I'm plannin' anything, asshole? Who do I look like, Nathan Never?" I said belligerently.
  
  "I'm the asshole who was on that rooftop with you, you dumb fuck." he said tolerantly. "Even Sarah don't know why you gave up, just that we made up and were friends after we did the male bonding thing like a pair of angry gorillas. You do remember that night, right?"
  
  "Why, you want a rematch? Maybe you could actually win this time if I chug another bottle of this shit first."
  
  "Everybody else who knows you is tryin' to figure out why the fuck you quit, which is the last thing anyone would expect you to do. But me?" He shrugged. "I don't know what the reason is either. But I think I know why the reason."
  
  "What you are even talking about, Sherlock?" I slurred.
  
  "You gave up on that rooftop because you thought givin' up was the morally right thing to do." Andrew pointed out sagely. "That's the only thing that ever makes you give up. So while I'm fucked if you think quitting when Cat's out there in trouble somewhere is the right thing to do..." He sighed. "Help me out here, buddy. Tell me what I'm missing."
  
  I angrily pushed away the commlink he was still holding up in front of me with one finger. Andrew looked down to see exactly where my finger was resting... on the Horizon logo embossed on the case.
  
  "... shit." he swore. "So, like they sometimes did it in Detroit?"
  
  "Like they used to do it in Detroit." I agreed despairingly.
  
  "... is there anything I can do?" Andrew asked me softly.
  
  "Snitch on me to the team doctor?" I said as sarcastically as I could. "That's the logical next step, ain't it?"
  
  "If you want, then I will." Andrew agreed compassionately. "I still don't understand exactly where your head is right now, but I will."
  
  "Thanks." I whispered.
  
  "Don't mention it." he agreed. "And... good luck."
  
  I went back to erratically scrolling through all the vast and varied tapestry of social media that Horizon generously provided to enrich the lives of its employees. I sent a couple of drunk tweets, flipped through the MeFeeds of several glitterati, and nodded to myself at these brief, meaningless glimpses of the ocean of humanity.
  
  I hadn't expected Andrew to make the observations or the offer that he just had, but I knew what the effect would be. It would have come soon enough anyway, but it helped to know the exact timing.
  
  The corner of my eye saw the latest item my Matrix search terms had brought me - a tweet of someone complaining that someone else had just cancelled on coming to their party tonight and how could they possibly have been snubbed like that?
  
  Tonight, then. It would be tonight.
  
  "Alex, we need to talk." Gary Cline's voice eventually came from the top of the cellar stairs.
  
  "Tell your entourage of ass-kissers to stop tracking shit on my carpets." I drunkenly yelled up at him.
  
  "This is a personal visit, friend to friend." he said reassuringly as he came down the steps and let the spring-loaded door swing shut behind him. "I came alone."
  
  "Well, I can hardly throw you out." I grumbled. "Go ahead, make your damn speech."
  
  And Gary did, for several minutes. It was one of his usual rhetorical masterpieces, all full of reassurances and encouragements and motivational gambits. He even came as close to blatantly saying out loud as he could dare to saying that Horizon would turn a blind eye even if I charged off on a shadowrun to rescue Cat myself. Gary Cline could legitimately charm the ass off an angry rattlesnake, and if I hadn't been assensing him the entire time I'd have sworn he was a high-level social adept from how he could use not only words but inflection and kinesics to nudge people in the direction he wanted to go.
  
  Of course, since he wasn't saying a damn thing I hadn't already predicted he would I only noted and mentally jotted down his words with a fraction of my attention. I even closed my eyes to pretend that I was trying to obnoxiously ignore him to cover my doing a brief astral jaunt to check out the rest of my house. All right, he really did come alone.
  
  My internal clock told me that Gary was just reaching four minutes when he started to wind down from his opening remarks and start the phase of the intervention where he'd hit me for reactions and draw me out into an exchange.
  
  "... so you see, Alex, booze simply isn't the answer."
  
  Well, I was hardly going to pass up that perfect a straight line.
  
  "You're right, Gary." I said, with a loose, drunken smile as I got to my feet. "Alcohol wasn't the answer. Alcohol was the question."
  
  And then I reached out in a lightning-fast movement, grabbed his outstretched hand, and effortlessly wrestled him onto his knees and started choking him out.
  
  "And the answer was, "It's a trap.'" I hissed icily into his ears before my sleeper hold finally did its job.
  
  
  
  "Wake up." I said, stone-cold sober and pissed as hell, as I threw a cup of ice water in Gary's face.
  
  I'd searched him for weapons or other inconvenient gizmos, shut off his commlink, and even used a cyberware scanner to make sure he didn't have any inconvenient headware recorders. He still had his implanted simrig from back when he'd been a simsense star himself, but those didn't actually record the storage in an onboard unit but instead transmitted it in real-time to the studio's systems. So for as long as I had his commlink shut off and he didn't have implanted headware storage, there would be no unwanted record of this. And while I'd been kind enough to give him a chair, I also had his arms manacled to a ceiling post. Those manacles were rated to hold a struggling troll, so I had no fear of him breaking loose. And the padded lining would keep any suspicious ligature marks from showing up.
  
  Look, if you're actually wondering who the heck sells troll-rated manacles with padded comfort linings and why, then clearly you've never been in LA. Even Cat thought some of those sex shops were tacky.
  
  "Alex, what are you doing?" Gary asked me reasonably, as he earnestly tried to regain control of the conversation.
  
  "You've done action sims all the way from Dog Soldiers to Money Lane and you can't recognize the scene?" I bared my teeth at him without smiling. "It's the basement interrogation trope, of course. So, which version of this old classic is your favorite? Sledgehammer to the knee? Pliers to the fingers? Or should I just beat you with the gun butt?" I said, twirling the Predator in my hand.
  
  "I understand it's been a traumatic time for you, and that you're not entirely sober right now-" he began.
  
  "I only sipped enough to make my breath smell, you idiot." I glared at him. "Stage-managing and props. An unshaven man holding a half-empty whisky bottle and with booze breath is obviously a hopeless drunk, no need to actually check. You're CEO of the greatest PR and media manipulation machine in the world, I need to give you a clinic?"
  
  "You set all this up from the beginning?" Gary replied. "Just to get me here?"
  
  "I just said that." I agreed matter-of-factly.
  
  "But... it doesn't make sense." he said. "If you rationally planned this - I'm the CEO of a AAA megacorporation, for God's sake! Kidnapping me is worth an Omega Order!"
  
  "And what was kidnapping Cat worth?" I retorted. "Clearly much less."
  
  "That was one of our rivals!" Gary said. "Look, part of what I was bringing you tonight was that we may have had a break in the case-"
  
  "I was 'overlooking' the prior clues and visibly ready to abandon trying at all, so you were going to last-ditch prod me with whatever latest set of breadcrumbs your image team could synthesize, right?" I said. "Because in the category of 'obvious stage cues', I was clearly being primed to go off on a rampage of revenge towards whatever corp you were willing to hang Cat's kidnapping on. The onetime man of action trying to leave behind his life of violence, the beautiful young wife he doted upon, the tragic separation, the dramatic lock-and-load montage as he goes back to the life of violence and crime he'd originally fled from to save his loved one? Just from your own personal filmography alone, that particular action sim's been done at least three times."
  
  "What even makes you entertain such an absurd notion?" Gary said. "Catherine was-"
  
  "Taken out by Horizon shortly after she showed up for work that morning, and everything with the car and the 'extraction' was a Potemkin village for me to wander through." I said flatly.
  
  "I don't know who's been filling your head with lies, but-"
  
  "Horizon Internal Persona." I cut him off.
  
  "I don't follow." Gary replied soberly, his face going taut.
  
  I smiled at him. "Cat and I had our commlinks set up so that we each had access to the other's HIP activity logs, did you know that? It was a thing we joked about, some of the silly crap that would get you upvoted or downvoted as you walked through a normal workday. And for everything else that your data team so assiduously faked up around the event - although you slipped up on a few details there, too, which is part of what put me onto you in the first place - you didn't think to tap the Internal Persona system. Probably because it was such a new program that people were still getting used to all the implications." I smiled coldly. "Such as the fact that if you can access someone's HIP notifications, you know everyone else who bothered to note their presence and when." Without access to his own AR devices I had to hold up my commlink's physical screen for Gary to see. "And look right there. The day she got 'extracted', 0754 hours. 1 upvote for 'Brightening the workplace' from Daniel Sykes. You know who he is?"
  
  "Not without my commlink." Gary said.
  
  "The receptionist at the Singularity office where Catherine worked." I said. "He upvotes her every morning, just like several other people do,.. I helpfully highlighted their names and times on the list as well, see right there? It's what your statistical trackers on the HIP project have probably already nicknamed 'the sexy elf effect', where good-looking people get upvoted by casual passers-by in the hallway just for being hot. You'll probably need to patch that out in the next version. So we know as a fact, from Horizon's own records, that Cat not only made it to work that morning but that her progress through the building can be roughly tracked right from the front desk to this last entry here. That's Tam's appointments secretary. 1 upvote for Cat, 0911 hours, 'Swapped some fun gossip'. And then boom, nothing. From the moment she walked into her boss' office, my wife drops right off the grid."
  
  "Shit." Gary swore.
  
  "But that wasn't your only mistake." I said. "The first one I spotted before Tam was even done talking in my hotel room. It wasn't your only one, but it was the big one. Whatever team of scriptwriters put together your kidnap scenario clearly hadn't involved a mage, because you can't cast a spell on someone through a tinted windshield. You need a clear line of sight-" I stopped and looked closer at Gary's subliminal kinesics. "That wasn't a mistake, was it? That was a deliberate plot hole you were going to 'discover' later, when Horizon 'found out' that what they'd thought was a kidnapping was actually a defection, wasn't it? That she'd allegedly voluntarily self-extracted, sold you out to a new corp?" I sighed. "No wonder you wanted me to charge off and try to 'rescue' her so badly. I wouldn't be the action hero, I'd be the victim. The poor tragic sap who gotten himself trying to save a wife who had unknown to anyone until it was too late had betrayed him all along. And Horizon Corporation, of course."
  
  "Oh, we were going to piss on your grave a little too." Gary said matter-of-factly. "Admittedly the first draft might have been what you said, but that Jane side-piece had already shown up by then so our script needed to allow for her presence. So your wife would have been driven to her treason by your infidelity, a sad case of a misguided woman driven bitter by the stresses of a celebrity marriage and a husband who'd traded his passion for glory. But that was just to explain Jane's intrusion into our narrative. You're the one who ruined your chance to be the tragically fallen paladin." Gary shook his head snidely. "Should've kept it in your pants, Crackshot."
  
  "For the record, you do know that nothing happened with Jane that Cat not only participated in but enthusiastically instigated, right?" I corrected him.
  
  "Of course we do, but what do the facts ever have to do with the messaging?" Gary said. "You do remember what city we live in, right?"
  
  "But what I don't get is why." I replied. "Why set this up? We just worked out the script for your latest drama, but who's the audience? And what's the messaging trying to push?"
  
  "In the category of classic dialogue, here's one - why should I tell you?" he threw back.
  
  "Gary, you're a smart enough man to realize that I would not have risked manhandling you like this if I had thought of any other way to guarantee that I'd get my answers. I mean, I could have tried for Tam, or one of your senior staff, or maybe someone else... but I'd only get one shot at this, and they might not have had the answers I wanted. Compartmentalization, and all. You're the one person in Horizon guaranteed to know the big picture, so, here you are." I waggled the gun.
  
  "You did hear 'Omega Order' earlier, yes?" Gary replied invincibly.
  
  "Gary, have you forgotten that your entire scenario was intended to head-fake me into charging off and trying to take on some megacorp single-handed and to nigh-inevitably get splatted like a bug in the process? That the entire point of your gaslighting was to spin me up into a state of mind where the self-preservation lobe of my brain was having a really shaky grip on things?" I smiled at him. "Congratulations, you've won! Enjoy your victory, because here's your prize!" I said, bringing the sights up to line on his left kneecap.
  
  "Wait!" he cried. "I'm not going to babble all my plans to you like some children's cartoon villain, but you do raise the valid point that I want to actually leave this basement. Can we negotiate?"
  
  "Uh, stalling won't work either." I said. "Or are you not aware that you entered an electromagnetic dead zone the instant the door closed behind you? One of the things I've been doing to keep busy the past few days is DIY home improvements. You know that RF-blocking paint they use in high-security zones to keep unauthorized commlinks from being able to transmit outside secure buildings?" I looked up and around. "Walls, floor, and ceiling. But since your litle manipulation run tonight would have to be off the books, the odds were that you'd go dark even to your own security detail. I'm sure they're waiting outside to give you a ride home, but you didn't want any of them even possibly overhearing this conversation, did you? So even if I missed an alert transmitter on you somewhere, it won't matter. They'll be waiting out there for hours if need be, just as I'm certain you ordered them to do." I smiled. "That's why I let you have a few minutes to bore me when you first got here. I was waiting to see if you had an active transmitter or not. If you had, I'd have had to go for a much more hectic plan B." I nodded. "But when the fast-reaction team wasn't booting my door shortly after you'd entered the dead zone, I knew I didn't need it."
  
  "If you premeditated that much, then you're not in a berserk enough mood to be undeterred by an Omega Order." Gary said.
  
  "Live with a man 40 years. Share his house, his meals. Speak on every subject. Then tie him up, and hold him over the volcano's edge. And on that day, you will finally meet the man." I quoted from 'Firefly'. "How's the lava looking, Gary? Can you feel the heat on your cheek?" I bared my teeth again. "I mean, what you just said is a logical conclusion, but are you certain enough of your logic to bet your life on it and it alone? Do remember that you've already conspicuously failed to guess which way the frog will jump at least once, because that's why you're chained to a post right now."
  
  "You're offering to let me go if I explain myself? Alex my boy, the sales pitch has to be plausible." Gary said. "No, I'm a dead man and I know it. So, I might as well die frustrating my murderer a little more."
  
  "But you don't know it." I said. "Oh, you're thinking it, yes. And you're definitely not happy about it. The prospect positively fills your mind right now, I'm sure." I grinned cruelly. "But are you telling me that you don't have any faith in your ability to talk your way out of this, Gary? Not even the tiniest bit? It took me only this short a time to reduce you to learned helplessness?" I shook my head in an elaborate display of puzzlement. "More than any other product, Horizon sells hope. You've made an entire AAA conglomerate out of it. You can pull it out of nowhere, spin it up and package it pretty, and keep people waiting for that pie in the sky better than even the Big A could ever dream of doing. So you're really going to tell me that I could bring you down to having no hope for yourself? So quickly and so easily?"
  
  "You're a very surprising man, Alex." Gary tried flattering me. "I've entirely underestimated your potential value to the corporation if you've been able to put together that many pieces on your own."
  
  "That's why you did it!" I burst out, legitimately shocked for the first time since this confrontation you started. "Pieces! Cat's info sortilege!" I swore viciously. "I couldn't get past the question of why the hell you'd risk this whole elaborate mindgame with us, even if you're a cocky SOB who thinks he can never lose a mindgame. Even if you wanted to cut her brain apart a thin slice at a time - even if she was already dead, and don't forget that dispelling that horrible possibility for me will be an absolute necessity if you want to leave this basement alive tonight-" I hissed at him in a voice from the grave before switching back to a more normal tone. "it's not as if she's the only technomancer you potentially had access to. Much easier to set up and vanish some poor SOB who'd just walked in the door." I slumped my shoulders. "But it was Cat's unique new talent for information analysis, wasn't it? She was trying to follow the trail of bread crumbs back to whichever new player had entered the PR game, the one that was trying to sour the future Emergence instead of sweetening it."
  
  "God damn it." Gary Cline swore softly, passionately.
  
  "And that trail led right back to you, didn't it Gary." I didn't ask him. "And this is why you burned her and tried to set me to burn myself, with an entire big-budget blockbuster drama in real life all hyped up around it. Your dirtiest secret was about to leak, and so you needed to drown out the truth with the biggest Hollywood lie you could think of."
  
  "So you've figured it all out." Gary spat venomously. "Congratulations on your victory, so what's your prize?"
  
  "You confirm my suspicions, and then you explain whatever plot you had running that Cat was about to uncover, of course." I said. "And before you ask the obvious question, we both know that my having gotten this far means I'm a dead man walking the instant Horizon knows. If I let you leave this basement alive, you'll order me obliterated from the face of the Earth the instant you reach a working commlink. If I bury you here, your security detail notices you missing and the resulting Omega Order does it for you." I analyzed. "And even if I walked right out of here and into a TV studio, who would believe me? I've got no proof, and I'm a crazy grieving drunken meathead of an Urban Brawl player up against the greatest PR machine in existence. I wouldn't make it as high up the believability charts as a conspiracy theorist on public access broadcasting at 3am." I sighed. "Indulge your complacency for once, Gary. Just get out that good, old-fashioned villain speech. When are you ever going to have another chance of so thoroughly gloating? It's no fun talking about it just to the other people who were part of the planning team." I sat down and leaned back in a folding chair facing his own. "Have fun, G-Man!"
  
  "You know what? Why not? Why shouldn't I?" Gary laughed happily, his body relaxing as he saw finally the humor of the situation. "If you're going to let me live then I get to really enjoy myself. And if you're going to kill me, then I'd definitely want the best death scene I could get!"
  
  "It's an actor's dream." I agreed. "The stage is yours, Gary. Knock 'em dead."
  
  And so I sat and patiently listened to Gary explain the background of the whole thing. How my deductions of what Cat had found and what emergency action Horizon had taken in response were indeed accurate. How their script had been for me to die heroically trying to shadowrun my wife away from EvilMcKidnapCorp, and then for it to be tragically revealed afterwards that she'd been a corporate traitor and that I'd died for nothing. People would sympathize with me, revile her, and then not be curious afterwards. I'd be a name on a wall at the Bolts' stadium and perhaps the inspiration for a charity memorial fund for something or other, she'd be a corporate unperson, and nobody would ever know that she'd started to uncover Horizon's greatest treachery about the Emergence.
  
  When technomancers had originally become known to Horizon corp shortly after the Crash 2.0, their highest-end team of social engineers and planners had soon enough worked out a series of possibilities, ranging from best case to worst case.
  
  Alpha had been those future scenarios where the public reveal of technomancers could be handled in such a way that they were not regarded as figures of fear or division at all. To where technomancy would be no more remarkable than any other form of specialized genius, whether intellectual or artistic. It was of course by far the most unrealistically best-case set of conditions, but that's why it was part of a spectrum.
  
  Bravo had been the more realistic yet still relatively cheerful set of scenarios where technomancers would receive no more hatred, fear, or discrimination than the common metatypes or Awakened practitioners already did. So even if people on the level of Humanis would still be shits about it, technomancers could still live freely without any great fear of official discrimination or widespread ostracization.
  
  Charlie is where things started to take a turn for the depressing. Those were scenarios where technomancers would face nontrivial social and legal handicaps simply for being what they are. The registration and licensing laws for Awakened practitioners were already borderline obnoxious in the harsher jurisdictions, but in the Charlie scenarios they'd be the best that technomancers could hope for. Being free to live their own lives, go their own way, would be an effective impossibility - technomancers would need government or corporate protection, with the obligations and limits that brought, to live any real life at all.
  
  Delta was where the dystopian nightmares really got started. That was 'technomancers are unpeople' territory, where they lost all legal rights and were at best treated like the SINless. Or worse, like SINless of significant exploitable economic value. Starvation at best, outright slavery more likely. A Yomi Island for technomancers, covering the world.
  
  Epsilon was of course the absolute worst-case scenario. Genocide.
  
  Originally Horizon had been committed to Beta with a 'It would be nice if we could get it, but it would also be nice if we had a magic wish-granting pony' attitude towards Alpha. That was their original intention when Cat and I had first showed up and signed on, and what Horizon had been gradually working towards with a projected public Emergence date somewhere in mid-2070. And Cat and I would have been entirely glad to be a part of that effort. It was everything that we'd been hoping for when we went to Horizon in the first place.
  
  But the problem had come when Submersion had started to be discovered. Cat wasn't the first technomancer known to Horizon to have submerged, but she'd still been one of the earlier ones. That was incidentally why Singularity hadn't originally called me when Cat had gone under - Tam Reyes had known what was really going on, so he'd been confident that she'd wake up by that afternoon. But even before Cat's own talent of info sortilege had been discovered, other advanced technomancer talents were already starting to be charted. And several of them, the technique known as 'the Archive' in particular, had changed the entire strategic picture as far as Horizon was concerned.
  
  The Submersion technique that they had labelled 'The Archive' let a technomancer dive incredibly deep into the 'Resonance Realms' and eventually come back out with essentially any piece of data that had ever been recorded in the Matrix at one time, whether the original storage media still physically existed or not. It was arduous and not at all certain of success - the nearest analogy was a magical initiate's deep metaplanar quest to find the true name of a spirit or some other ancient lost piece of lore at the heart of the Citadel - but assuming sufficient will, skill, and opportunity to try, as well as at least some knowledge of what you sought in the first place, then it was entirely possible literally no secret that the Matrix had ever held was beyond the reach of a technomancer. They were still hardly certain of that even yet, but just the possibility alone had caused Horizon to re-evaluate the entire technomancer picture.
  
  Because in a world where The Archive was potentially accessible and a world where each megacorporation had essentially equal access to technomancers - Alpha or Bravo - then Horizon was screwed. As the smallest of the megas, a level playing field in this new world of 'we might not be able to keep any deep secrets' meant that Horizon lost, for their entire social engineering long game - their entire edge that let them compete against the remainder of the Big Ten at all - required that nobody publicly know their true objective and the secret methods by which they were trying to achieve it.
  
  Horizon Corporation had been founded by the Horizon Group thinktank of social engineers and media experts in the early 2060s simply to try and find a way to clean up Los Angeles. A quirk of applied social statistical engineering, a vague and partial version of what Isaac Asimov would have called 'psychohistory', had been discovered by them as they'd conducted their initial researches. Oh, it wouldn't do Asimov's dream of letting you predict and manipulate the futures of empires over centuries (spoiler alert, Dr. Asimov - chaos theory, it's a thing), but it was vastly more efficient than all prior known techniques at accurately gauging the attitudes of large populations and why they held them in the short term. For all the billions of nuyen that statisticians and social scientists had poured into refining the art almost since the first widespread customer survey that had accurately predicted the 1916 Presidential Election, polling was still as much art as science. It was like trying to read the future in a fogged-up mirror. But Horizon had discovered a method by which they could wipe at least some of the fog off the glass. Right now the advanced cybernetics teams were trying to refine their super-polling statistical sampling methods into an active mega-database, a hoped-for electronic 'Consensus' that could give Horizon a finger not just on the one pulse they were measuring but on many simultaneous pulses at once and how they all interacted with each other in near-real time, but that trailed off into realms of higher mathematics Gary couldn't begin to understand himself so he just summarized the layman's version his people had given him.
  
  But the Consensus, the statistical methods, had the same limitation any other psychological testing did - if the test subjects knew what you were testing and how, the results were corrupted. And so once the Archive and other technomancer talents existed, Horizon abandoned all hope for Alpha and Bravo and chose their greater good over everyone else's.
  
  Horizon was currently building up to a modified case Charlie, one where technomancers would face serious pressures simply for existing without it actually going to Delta or Epsilon levels. Not that it wasn't a measure of how callous and cold-blooded this 'Dawkins Group' thinktank within Horizon had been, that ultimately their commendation to go for Charlie wasn't based on morality but on the pragmatic calculations that a Delta or Epsilon Emergence would require sufficient social changes as to seriously crimp the bottom line elsewhere. Outright pogroms and concentration camps just ruined the whole economic picture and regional stability for everyone - a brief look at the history leading up to the Great Ghost Dance or the Euro Wars told anyone that.
  
  The modified case Charlie they were aiming at was one where the more ruthless megacorps would be lured into the deeper, blacker end of technomancer research - vivisection, tests to destruction, the usual - and eventually be publicly exposed as such. The public Emergence would occur under conditions of fear and panic against technomancers that Horizon would then publicly act to try and dispel, after having deliberately held back enough to let it build up momentum in the first place. Ultimately they would either succeed in stopping the immediate panic or they would not.
  
  If they succeeded, the state of affairs would be a Charlie scenario where Horizon looked like the only megacorp willing to go out on a limb for technomancers, while the others were either indifferent or outright monstrous. Horizon would thus receive the disproportionate share of technomancer recruitment, giving them the best chance to sustain the viability of their Consensus and related techniques in a world full of technomancers. And if they failed to quell it? Then the world would be in a Delta scenario, which would make it even easier for Horizon to 'win' the technomancer recruitment game simply by offering any alternative marginally superior to all the others. Heads Horizon won, and tails technomancers lost. And all the while Horizon would look like the good guys, because no one would ever know that they'd had a chance to head things off before they even started - and deliberately tanked on it for their own long-term benefit.
  
  Which is why Cat had had to be vanished, and I had to be set up before I could do anything that would publicly cast doubt on that vanishing. Because she'd discovered that the 'new player' in the Emergence came had also been Horizon, undercutting its own more obvious efforts towards Bravo with more subtle yet pervasive undercurrents building towards Charlie precisely to set up the 'It looked like Horizon tried their best but didn't quite pull it off, but they're still your best hope of safety'. Like some demented X-Men What If? where it was revealed that Professor Xavier had secretly found a genuine chance of birthing a mutant/human peace in the 70s but had passed on it because it meant mutants would never need his school to be safe, and thus he'd never have his private army. Not that I think they ever actually wrote that comic, but I'm sure somebody had made it a fanfic somewhere...
  
  "And that is your assurance that she's still alive. After all, she was being groomed to be one of our chief public faces of technomancers for the original Bravo scenario." Gary explained. "So we couldn't kill her ourselves, because her body has to be found. Just vanishing her leaves the suspicion stuck to us, at least in the minds of those conspiracy theorists who are precisely the people we're trying to set up to believe the modified Charlie and indirectly fix it in the minds of the general community for us."
  
  "So you sold her to MCT while making them believe it was an internal betrayal instead of officially sanctioned at the highest levels of Horizon." I replied icily. "And so after MCT finishes using her up as a lab specimen, the later dramatic revelations of their crimes against humanity simply adds her to the casualty list."
  
  "While our spinning it as her self-extracting leaves us off the hook entirely." Gary agreed. "After all, we don't want future technomancers asking questions like 'Why should we seek sanctuary at Horizon if they can't protect us?', but a scenario where she trusted MCT to give her a better deal and they rammed needles into her brain instead only sells our desired message even harder."
  
  "Does MCT have the slightest idea that you're setting them up?" I probed.
  
  "Are you kidding?" Gary scoffed ."It's MCT, they've always substituted 'brutal and methodical' for 'genuinely intelligent'. This is why we didn't pick NeoNET for the patsy, despite them having gone in the hardest for the worst sort of mad science experimentation. Richard Villiers is an outright legend at corporate intrigue, and Celedyr is a Great Dragon. But the executive suites at Mitsuhama are far less famous for subtlety."
  
  "Do you think they've killed her yet?" I asked softly.
  
  "Doubtful." Gary answered calmly. "She's an advanced, Submerged technomancer who has over a year of Horizon's research into the best training and development techniques for technomancy in her head. They won't carve her up until they've finished draining her of everything she knows first. As I said, brutal and methodical."
  
  "Okay, I think we've covered just about everything." I said. "The one thing I still don't understand is how the hell you think this way at all."
  
  "What way?" Gary replied.
  
  "You say you're trying to just make the world a better place. You are trying to make the world a better place. If Horizon was just playing the 'mo' money' game like the other nine are, you'd have done a lot of shit differently underneath even if you kept playing to the same surface image. And you're not." I shook my head. "So how do you have so little damn empathy for how you go about it? Do you not understand that a decent world to live in is built out of basic human decency?"
  
  "But that's precisely what we're trying to maximize!" Gary said. "Our personal systems, our indirect behavioral modification techs, our statistical modeling and memetic influencing, it's all to encourage things like cooperation, charity, and kindness-" Gary stopped, and blinked. "And then we-" he trailed off again, his head starting to shake from side to side. "What the hell did I just tell you?"
  
  "My first answer would be, 'a lot'." I mocked him mercilessly.
  
  "But... the Consensus! The long-range plan! The primary goal!" he raged. "What the hell was I thinking?"
  
  "It finally wore off, then?" I looked up and spoke to the person who'd been standing out of Gary's view in the corner directly behind him since just before he'd woken up.
  
  "Even my endurance has limits, Alex." Jane said, pacing forward like a lithe tigress.
  
  "What the hell?" Gary said, turning to look at her in shock.
  
  "Hi Gary!" she mocked him in a sarcastic falsetto. "I'm the 'side-piece'!" Her voice lowered as she continued in a voice that could have raised frostbite on a fire elemental. "And tonight's lesson has been 'How the use of mind-control magic in clandestine operations really works.'."
  
  "Complacency." I followed right on the beat, as Gary's head swiveled like a spectator at a table-tennis match to come back to me. "And the Control Emotions spell. I got you spun up with good old-fashioned talk no jutsu, and then she massively reinforced your feeling of being the one really in control of the situation and held it there at the opportune moment. And so you sang about Horizon's deepest secrets like a canary, because during the relevant moment you couldn't remember all the reasons - all the fearful, suspicious reasons - that you shouldn't have."
  
  "You're both dead." Gary spat. "You haven't won, you've only doubled down on nothing! A minor advertising exec, or a mage, or whoever the hell she is - she's no more useful for going up against our PR machine than you are! And that's assuming you even live to cross the street, whether you kill me right now or not!"
  
  "Oh we'll be fine, Gary." I said. "You're going to stay the night, and tomorrow morning you're going to tell everyone that everything's fine. So no one will be coming after us, because no one knows anything ever went wrong tonight."
  
  "Why would I possibly help you hide any of this?" Gary said.
  
  "Did you know that my father was once a rather influential figure in Tir Tairngire, Mr. Cline?" Jane said icily. "Because he was. I'm not really a fan of the place myself, but I still have connections there." With an arrogant flourish she reached into her pocket and smoothly drew a small ampoule filled with a clear golden liquid. "Connections who can get me things like this."
  
  "Laes." Gary breathed. "That drug the elves came up with-"
  
  "-to neuralyze border-crossers who saw the wrong thing but they couldn't afford to just execute." I said. "Selectively targets the hippocampus to inhibit the transition from short-term to long-term memory in a way that even a hardcore alcohol bender can't manage. We put this in your arm and you don't remember anything that's happened for the last several hours. Not even a magical mind probe could get it out of you later, because the long-term memories will have never biochemically 'fixed' in your brain cells in the first place. And then we just pour some booze down your throat-"
  
  "Well, not exactly down your throat." Jane corrected me with a nasty smirk. "But it will get to the same place in the end."
  
  "And you leave here tomorrow morning with not the slightest idea this interrogation ever happened, or that she was ever here. You just remember that you and I ended up drinking into the wee hours of the morning while you slowly and laboriously talked me into it. And then you walk away cursing your hangover but resting assured that it was entirely worth it. No more of your pawn going off-script and wallowing in depression, no more risk of suicide... no, I'm going to finally do what I'm supposed to do. Go charge off after the bread crumbs you laid for me, the ones I was supposed to follow to my death."
  
  "You'll never get away with this." Gary said, shocked. "You'll be noticed- traced-"
  
  "Even you don't get a blood test every day." I said. "And you would not believe how fast traces of this stuff decays in the bloodstream."
  
  "The Tir Peace Force and Telestrian Industries spent a great deal of money refining the initial research." Jane said. "Would you roll up his sleeve, please?" she smiled triumphantly at me.
  
  "I would be honored to, my lady." I smiled back at her, and did so while she deftly swabbed his arm, loaded the airhypo, and jabbed it lightly into his biceps.
  
  "There we go." she cooed at him nastily. "Now just a few tiny dabs of magic, and there won't be a detectible trace on you even in the astral when you leave here tomorrow. But there will still be more than enough post-hypnotic suggestions that all you'll know in the morning is the script Alex already outlined for you."
  
  "We-" Gary slurred as the drug started to take hold. "We only wanted- what was- the best... for..." he trailed off as the laes took effect and he fell unconscious.
  
  Jane's brow furrowed with sweat as she started casting more spells, to both check on the progress of the memory erasure and reinforce the suggestions.
  
  "Are you all right?" I asked her, noticing her start to strain.
  
  "Drain." she acknowledged. "I did a lot of sustained casting tonight. But it's just a headache, I'll be fine after a nap."
  
  "I just..." I said softly, appalled down to the bottom of my shoes. "He honestly thought it was okay to betray and murder his own trusted employees just because it served a 'Greater Good'." I spat. "He didn't even begin to see the contradiction!"
  
  "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." Jane quoted. "C.S. Lewis."
  
  "Horizon's like some goddamn demented cargo cult of 'goodness'." I agreed vehemently. "Like the crazy-ass HIP system on a global scale. If we use Skinner Box type crap to make everybody act nice, then the world will really be nice! But that's not how it works!" I said. "You can't just copy the outward forms of decent behavior and expect that to magically make the world a better place on the inside! That's like the Pacific jungle tribesmen believing that if they built enough idols imitating World War II airstrips, then the airplanes would come back!"
  
  "I know." Jane put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "I-" she sighed. "It would have been nice if one of the megacorps had actually realized they needed to genuinely try and be better people. Instead, we find out that while they might have honestly believed that's what they were doing..." she trailed off, at a loss for words.
  
  "... they were just the blind trying to morally uplift the blind." I said. "And so they fell for the most horrible belief of them all - the delusion that you could make people better." I said passionately, rolling fully into the 'Firefly' quotes for the second time tonight. "And I do not hold to that. So no more holding back." I finished resolutely. "I aim to misbehave."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: And this, my friends, is how you abduct and interrogate the CEO of a AAA megacorporation and get away with it scott-free.
  
  And you just wanted Alex to rampage and kill people in a righteous John Wick fury. Which, sure, that's always fun, and I do believe we're just about to get around to doing that. But first, I wanted to try something new.
  
  BTW, the dark secret of Horizon plot that I just laid down here? This shit is like... at least 75% canon, and the other 25% is me filling in blank spots and interpolating, not actually changing any canon. The Consensus really did go that far off-course eventually, as mentioned by commenters earlier in thread, and the 'Twilight Horizon' arc really did reveal that Horizon had deliberately punted on trying to use its PR to ensure genuine equal rights for technomancers, instead preferring 'we did a good try but failed' to make other places suck hard and Horizon extraterritorial turf one of the very few nations where technomancers got a fair deal... with the express goal of trying to hog the lion's share of technomancers by manipulating them to self-select for Horizon.
  
  As for all the Firefly quotes, there are some temptations a man just cannot resist. And won't even try to. *g*
  
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  Content Warning: Mentions of World War II history. The bad parts.
  
  As Awakened practitioners, neither Jane or I could have even the lightest cyberware implantation without seriously inconveniencing our magic at best. But the latest generation of 'trode headbands were slim, lightweight, and almost as easy to slide on and off as a pair of sunglasses. They'd really overcome all that cumbersome fitting around and getting it stuck exactly on your head and calibrations and all in the past several years. Give it another few years and they'd probably make them little discs you could just glue to your temples and sync to your PAN like Bluetooth earbuds used to.
  
  Which is how both of us were able to enter full-VR Matrix space for the meeting. The 'JackPoint' VPN had been founded and was still administered by Fastjack, one of the very first deckers to enter the shadows and still a street legend to this day to this very day. It had started out as just a private chat forum for him and some friends and acquaintances after he'd left the old Shadowland network following the death in the Crash 2.0 of his old friend Captain Chaos, the chief sysop of Shadowland Seattle and one of the founders of Shadowland. And over the next several years JackPoint had expanded from there to perhaps the most select and exclusive of the various online runner havens.
  
  Now it wasn't necessarily true that everybody who was anybody was here. There were top-tier runners who were peers to most JackPointers who'd never gotten in the door simply because they didn't know any other members, or had no interest, or had been refused membership for conspicuous assholery. But if you got an invite to JackPoint then that meant you had already been acknowledged by several of the very top shadowrunners in the world as having at least the potential to make a prime runner one day with the right seasoning. Even the relative newbies on the forum were still people with a respectable track record in the biz and a great deal of talent, and the more senior members one and all prime runners whose names were known from Seattle to the South Indian Ocean. Pistons and Fatima were considered two of the very top shadowrunners in Seattle and with damn good street rep in several other hotspots as well, and by JackPoint standards they were merely one of the gang.
  
  But they were both JackPoint members, as was Frosty, and when that many regulars agreed you had something important to share then they were allowed to invite a guest. Which is how I'd ended up here, 'wearing' a generic off-the-rack piece of digital avatar clip art that was the closest in appearance to my old runner persona and attending a virtualspace meeting with them and several other people I didn't know in one of the Point's secure Matrix meeting rooms.
  
  "And that's their master plan." I finished my presentation, dismissing the tri-D display I'd been using to display supporting evidence. "Straight from the horse's ass's mouth."
  
  The anime-gorgeous figure in stylized steampunk power armor that was Pistons' digital avatar ratcheted her jaw back into place and stared at me as if I'd grown a second head. "You two kidnapped the CEO of Horizon, then wrung him dry like a used bar rag, and picked up a drekload of "kill yourself before reading" level Ultra material that could potentially destroy his own corp if it ever went public... and all without leaving a single scratch on him? He doesn't even remember it happened, and Horizon is still entirely clueless?" She sputtered almost like a leaky hose for several seconds before regaining human speech. "Seriously, did that just happen, guys? I'm not chipping a bad action sim right now?"
  
  Fatima's 'basic ork street sam' avatar - it was obvious to tell that she didn't go full-VR in the Matrix much, it was a generic off-the-rack like mine and not a custom sculpt - affectionately dope-slapped her wife on the back of her helmet. "That's your only outrage? Instead of sharing my own vast personal anguish that we weren't invited? Come on, Wild Man, I thought we were friends!" she whined.
  
  Frosty's 'I am basically cosplaying as myself' sculpted avatar facepalmed. "Not that I don't love a good ego massage as much as the next woman, but if we could get back on topic...?"
  
  Smiling Bandit's cartoonishly grinning, bandanna'ed, and serape'd Old West bandito of an avatar turned away from where he'd been raptly staring at the data display. "Cases 'Alpha' through 'Epsilon'. Even by megacorporate standards, that is still... appallingly clinical." he ground out distastefully.
  
  "Horizon and their own well-deserved reckoning is a topic we will revisit, but you'll understand that my own concerns are more immediate right now." I answered stoically.
  
  "You are correct, and I apologize." Bandit said compassionately. "A true respect for all life is achieved by first respecting individual lives. What progress have you made on that front?"
  
  "You know that I started trying to trace Netcat by ritual magic as soon as I'd found out she'd been kidnapped and could get a material link off of her hairbrush, even before we'd managed to put the arm on Cline." Frosty replied. "The problem is that while I'm getting just enough of a response to confirm that she's still alive-"
  
  "Thank God." Pistons exhaled heavily.
  
  "But I can't complete the trace. Astral barriers and wards don't necessarily stop a ritual link, but they do make it harder. But the real problem is that she's not only behind a fairly hefty set of them but also that wherever she is, it's got a nasty astral background count, and all of that put together kicks it over the threshold I can penetrate." Frosty finished. "You all know I'm good-"
  
  "You're the single most powerful magician on JackPoint except for that Harlequin lunatic." Fatima said flatly.
  
  "Who is out of contact right now, and who would not give a damn even if we did somehow contact him." Frosty enunciated icily, every word coming out like she was slicing chunks off an iron rod. Okay, definitely something personal there but it's not my business unless Jane wants to share. "So we're not getting any further that way."
  
  "I know magic doesn't work the same way like a Trace program, but you said you get so far and then are blocked before you reach the end, right?" Sounder the smuggler/rigger asked, using another generic avatar like most of the non-deckers in here were. "So did you at least narrow down a region to search?"
  
  "Astral geography only corresponds one-to-one to meatspace geography if you're in the near - the border zone - of the astral plane." Frosty shook her head in frustration. "Ritual magic links hop up into the deeper astral and then back down to the near astral at the other end, just like a semiballistic goes up to bounce off the ionosphere before coming back down to land. Only in the deep astral it's completely irrational geometry, not a ballistic curve you can plot mathematically. All I can tell you is that she's not dead because the material link is still mystically connected to something. But as far as magic knows 'Cat could be anywhere on Earth."
  
  "Which is why we hit the streets. Once Gary confirmed that 'Cat had been internally taken and sold by her own corp, and which corp she'd really been sold to, we had enough to start on the other end." I explained. "Because if MCT was buying 'Cat without knowing that her old corp was willingly selling her, then the first obvious question is 'Who was the middleman?'"
  
  "Exactly. MCT thinks that they bought her in a standard 'involuntary extraction' scenario. But you usually commission those, and unless Horizon somehow has a mole in place as a senior MCT Johnson then they actually didn't. Which means...?" Pistons.
  
  "Open bounty." Hard Exit, one of the best extraction specialists in the biz and ex-CAS Marine Corps spec-ops and an ex-SWAT hostage rescue team leader, agreed. "'Word on the street is we'll pay hot nuyen for anyone from this lab!'. Which means fixers would know."
  
  "So we found out which fixer in town had been offering an open bounty for a Singularity researcher from 'Cat's lab, and lo and behold, it's a guy known for doing steady business with MCT. And who had recently closed that bounty."
  
  "It's sometimes a bit tricky to make a fixer sell out his client." Pistons sighed. "I hope you didn't need to get rough."
  
  "It was handed over practically gift-wrapped, because the runner who did the job went behind his fixer's back after the pickup and dealt directly with the client. Total rip-off." I snorted.
  
  "You're joking." Fatima said, aghast. "What was this, the second coming of Green Dreams?"
  
  "Sometimes even a veteran runner is just a short-sighted greedy shitbag." I eye-rolled. "It was a hobgoblin named Clockwork. A thoroughly sociopathic piece of trash that would have made you ashamed to be an ork." I replied.
  
  "Drek, I know him." Sounder moaned. "Yeah, he's so twisted that he meets himself coming around corners. I'm not a saint, but if you pay your money then you'll get your ride with no strings attached and no comebacks. And at least my human cargo rides with me willingly."
  
  "Knew him." I corrected her. "And yeah, he was so greedy and short-sighted he not only burned his fixer and got ratted out in ten seconds thereby, but also didn't spot that the 'co-worker who wanted her out of the way for a promotion' who was delivering 'Cat to him practically gift-wrapped was actually Horizon itself setting MCT up through him. Although I doubt he'd have cared even if he had noticed. But to cut a long story short, we got Clockwork to tell us where and how he'd made the hand-off to MCT and now he's feeding the fish off of Coast Town."
  
  "I'll turn over a glass for him." Sounder snarked back. "After first emptying it in celebration. So, you're paying my consultant fee because you know the starting point of MCT's pickup team and I know the best routes for moving anything up or down the West Coast?"
  
  "Exactly." I said. "They made the pickup at this dock in the Port of Los Angeles." I said, opening a new window and highlighting the spot on the map. "Which leaves us with a lot of the Pacific to potentially cover. so I'm hoping you have contacts-"
  
  "Yeah, good thing that you called in an expert." Sounder interrupted. "'Because I can tell you right now the dock's almost certainly a blind. That pier is part of the dedicated freight terminal where the car carriers pull in to drop off the latest load of imports, and they never handle any other traffic. And while Nissan Explorer and her sister ships all do get back to Japan on the return leg, they are all the literal slow boat to Japan and really not set up for guest quarters. So if I were an MCT high-end op squad then why would I want to spend a week living practically in the bilge when I could just load her on a private jet and be back home eating gourmet sushi after a few hours in a leather bucket seat? There's at least five places within an hours' drive of LA where I could land and fuel a Gulfstream for a trans-Pacific hop where the Customs people wouldn't slow me down at all, especially not with an MCT logo on my tail. And sure, they might have just used the wrong pier to avoid Clockwork knowing what ship, but even a luxury cruise liner would still run into the 'why aren't you just taking a plane? Do you literally have all week to dawdle around?' factor."
  
  "Fuck." I swore. "So we've got nothing."
  
  "Maybe not." Sounder continued. "Because Port of LA means Clockwork had to drive across most of the town to get her there and get through all the port security and the Customs barriers to get to that pier, and he wouldn't know that Horizon corpsec was deliberately turning a blind eye to his entire run. There is no way he wouldn't have bitched and moaned with everything he had in him for the client to move the drop point to somewhere safer for him - and I'd actually agree with him there, because who puts up with idiot Johnson ideas unless you absolutely have to."
  
  "So since he obviously did absolutely have to, then why did MCT insist so much on it being there specifically?" Hard Exit followed along. "You've got an idea?"
  
  "The thing that everyone forgets about seaports is that the part that touches the water is only half of the operation." Sounder lectured. "The Port of Los Angeles sees over one million metric tons of cargo move through it per day. So once you've gotten that much crap off of the ships, then how do you move it all inland?" He raised a finger and wiggled it, and the virtual display zoomed the map out and swiveled it over. "We'll leave out the wheeled vehicles for right now because MCT wouldn't know the fix was in either. So they wouldn't have risked dragging Clockwork across the city and into the port complex either, not just to do a handoff that could as easily have been done behind any random truck stop. So that means we're looking for a method of transportation that has a fixed terminus at the port, but which isn't a ship. And that means we're looking at..."
  
  The display came to a halt.
  
  "The rail yard." I agreed, legitimately impressed by Sounder's feat of deduction. "Perhaps the largest on the Pacific coast, and an endpoint of most of the major trans-continental rail lines. They shipped her out by train."
  
  "So we're looking for an MCT black site at or near a rail stop you could eventually reach from the Port of LA rail terminus, that's far enough away it's a better idea to take the train than to drive but not so far away that you'd want a plane." Frosty agreed. "Considering that we started from 'anywhere on Earth' to narrow it down this far, that's still major progress. Thank you, Sounder."
  
  "All part of the service." she accepted amiably.
  
  "It's still a lot of territory, though." Smiling Bandit said. "Any ideas on narrowing it down further?"
  
  "I have one." Fatima contributed. "Okay, if this had occurred prior to late summer 2068 then the obvious no-brainer answer for where MCT would have taken Netcat is...?"
  
  "San Francisco." we all chorused.
  
  "Home of 'General' Saito's rogue 'Protectorate State' that he and his Japanacorp puppet masters set up after the official Imperial Japanese occupation of the Bay Area ended in 2062." Fatima agreed. "Their own private police state where you could get away with crap that even the people who originally thought up Yomi Island would think was too much. And remember, we're already presuming that MCT has an ongoing Mengele-style project involving technomancers."
  
  "It's not a presumption." Smiling Bandit corrected her mildly. "We have evidence."
  
  "At least enough for probable cause, if not enough to convict." Hard Exit contributed.
  
  "My point is, they lost that city when Saito finally fell just a couple months ago and the Metahuman People's Army and the People's University and the October 25 Alliance-" Fatima continued passionately.
  
  "And Ares, and NeoNET, and..." Pistons put in mildly.
  
  "-finally kicked Saito's renegade army back to Japan and put his ass in front of a war crimes tribunal." Fatima continued stolidly.
  
  "Which means they either had to abandon their whole local operation - and we know it's still in Western North America from the rail yard clue - and are busy working in a hasty-built new setup somewhere, or they saw Saito's fall coming and moved their lab earlier that summer." Sounder analyzed. "You want me to start shaking the trees in San Fran for any rush 'black' shipments that would involve a lot of high-end researchers and imprisoned 'research subjects' then?"
  
  "The problem there is that the bulk of my time in recent months has been devoted to gathering all of the information I possibly can on megacorporate research in this field, both licit and illicit." Smiling Bandit said. "And while my knowledge is obviously neither complete nor conclusive, I have nothing that even hints at such an evacuation rush by MCT - at least not for a project like this - in the relevant time period."
  
  "Occam's Razor; despite the obvious convenience of that location during the Saito era, their secret technomancer 'research facility' was still never in San Francisco to begin with." I said. "And yeah, we don't rush out and marry that conclusion right now, but we do brainstorm it. Does it seem likely to anyone?"
  
  "Oh, it's very likely to me." Fatima agreed. "Because- okay, you all know why I'm deeper into the history of the San Francisco occupation and the Orkland resistance more than the rest of you-"
  
  "It was all I could do to keep you from running down there to enlist full time." Pistons groaned. "And I didn't mind going down there all those times with you to temp, but we were kinda needed where we were too!"
  
  "My point is, what isn't common knowledge - unless you were there at the time - is that however draconian Saito's anti-metahuman policies were throughout the Protectorate era, at the very beginning they'd been even worse." Fatima said.
  
  "Um, what exactly is 'worse' than full apartheid, 24-hour internal passports, and getting beaten half to death in the streets for walking while tusked?" Frosty asked with morbid curiosity.
  
  "The Final Solution." Fatima chilled the room with her observation. "In the earliest months of the occupation Saito was laying the groundwork for full-on concentration and extermination camps. Ship all the 'undesirables' out of his 'Protectorate' and work the useable ones until they weren't useable, then throw them in the ovens alongside all the ones who were too weak for the labor camps at the getgo. Links! Recht! Links! Recht!" she called the horrible cadence.
  
  "Don't be stupid, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party." I groaned. "But wait, are you saying Saito actually started to build his camps? It wasn't just a wish list?"
  
  "Built them? He'd actually started to fill at least one of them before his megacorporate masters yanked his leash up tight. Oh, not because of any ethical concerns, but because it would have been a giant waste of money." Fatima sighed. "Much cheaper to just fence all us tusked people out and make us live across the bay where we're still exploitable, but have to pay for our own food and housing and own commute to work. But three guesses who the main dissenting vote was in that discussion, and who had actually been contracted to build the camps?"
  
  "MCT." Sounder spat. "The same people who were the worst corp during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, especially on Yomi Island."
  
  "And then the rest of the Japanacorp block takes Saito's toys away from him, and MCT is left with at least one if not several concentration camps that they have no further use for..." I snapped my fingers.
  
  "Where were these camps?" Sounder asked. "Because if they did the same as the Nazis did and used trains to ship the victims out to them-"
  
  "The western Mojave, vaguely in the vicinity of Barstow." Fatima answered her. "Nice empty desert, lots of privacy, and has a history of being somewhere that most of the AAAs liked to put remote sites."
  
  "And in addition to being largely a megacorp town whose main business is logistics, Barstow is also one of the historical junction points on the old Union Pacific railway all the way back to the days of the original trans-continental railroad." Sounder agreed. "It adds up."
  
  "Ideally placed." Fatima agreed. "And so after the plug was pulled on Endlosung West, and MCT had finished emptying out the now-defunct camps, then what would they do with the real estate? Because megacorps are very much 'waste not, want not'. type people." Fatima glowered. "I don't know, but 'repurpose them as research black sites' is one of the first guesses I'd make."
  
  "Wait, they massacred the inmates they already had instead of letting them go?" Frosty asked quickly.
  
  "Nobody ever saw any of them again." Fatima agreed sadly, before her eyes opened in realization. "Of course! The background count!"
  
  "Massacres, epically concentrated or prolonged metahuman suffering, other atrocities of that scale... they permanently taint the local astral plane." Frosty agreed. "There's a reason that no one even remotely sane tries to assense or project while standing at the old site of Auschwitz or any of the other Nazi death camps. The astral there is so warped that the average mage would be lucky if their brains didn't liquefy and run out their ears from that kind of extreme metaphysical trauma."
  
  "And you said that wherever Netcat was being kept, it was in an area of a high background count." I followed along.
  
  "Exactly. Oh, not full-on Auschwitz level, or I'd have heard the echoes of the fallen screaming even through that faint a link." Frosty agreed. "But an old death camp that had massacred its first load of inmates before being closed-out and buried would be just the thing to produce the kind of background count that I caught a whiff of."
  
  "It's still all speculative, but now that Pistons and I have a small, discrete number of locations to examine it should be relatively short work to confirm whether or not any of those sites is still being used. Especially if transport data turns up any railroad activity to those camps during the relevant time period, as while Barstow and the trans-continental line itself would of course be heavily trafficked I cannot imagine the local spur lines being similar." Smiling Bandit thought out loud.
  
  "I doubt they'd be either," Sounder agreed.
  
  "I can't do much to help you plan the op in detail until I know exactly what terrain I'm planning for." Hard Exit chimed in. "But if it actually is one of these places, then I can already tell you that we are in for one cast-iron bitch of an op. It's the middle of a desert, you're wide open all the way to the horizon! It's only in the sims that you get a convenient sandstorm at just the right time to sneak you up to the wire, and even then none of those hack writers have ever actually fought in a sandstorm!" she swore.
  
  "I have." I moaned with certain mercenary memories. "And it fucking sucks. Given a choice, I'd sooner fight in a basement."
  
  "With grenade launchers." Hard Exit agreed readily. "So, we can already discuss a general concern for anywhere we'd hit but which would be particularly nasty if it's one of these old camps." She curled her lip. "How do we keep them from killing the hostages before we can secure them? Places like this, they'll have a prearranged plan to flush the site as soon as it looks like they're going to be 'compromised beyond retrieval'." she finished tonelessly.
  
  "Automated or manual?" I thought out loud.
  
  "MCT loves automated." Hard Exit agreed. "But even if the automation fails, the guards can still just go down the row of cells and shoot 'em in the head."
  
  "The encouraging news is that we're not up against full-on zero-zone level security." Pistons said encouragingly. "Because that shit would be practically visible from space, so we'd already know where our site was. Which means we can go for an inside-outside play. We infiltrate and secure the command center before the big guns show themselves on the horizon, then hold that down while they break open the containment area and start loading the evac transport."
  
  "That play only works if the only destruct switch is in the command center." Hard Exit said. "I've hit these kinds of black labs before. There'll be one in the command center, yes. But there'll at least one more in local cell block control. And if they're really fucking paranoid, then the middle-rank researchers or guards are allowed to decide on their own initiative if it's time to do an 'emergency close-out' instead of waiting for a commander to pull a switch and they've all still got their gunbelts."
  
  Smiling Bandit sighed. "Even in the reasonable presumption that our decking team can obtain control of the local host systems very early in the operation, if they are sufficiently decentralized then-" he trailed off. "Options are limited."
  
  Hard Exit sighed. "You know the old joke about walking uphill to school both ways? Hostage situations are the absolute worst, because they're the one tactical situation where it's downhill both ways. They start out poor and exponentially decay from there, because the longer a stand-off drags out the less chance the hostage-takers have of ever escaping alive. And they know it, which is why the hostages have less and less chance of escaping either."
  
  "We have to try." Frosty said before I could say anything.
  
  "I agree." Hard Exit nodded. "You don't leave your own behind, not ever. But..." she sighed. "Maybe we can find an exploit once we have a specific site to plan for, not just a set of general observations. But right now, we're waiting on finding the site."
  
  "Bandit and I will get to work on it right away." Pistons agreed. "And when the results are in, then we'll meet up back here. Until then, everybody get some rest."
  
  "Everybody who's being paid, your retainers will include the upcoming on-call period. Everyone please be ready to move on short notice and don't get tangled up in any other business." I said professionally, standing up.
  
  "We'll get her back, Wild Man." Fatima said compassionately.
  
  "We did the impossible run once before." Pistons backed her up. "And we'll do it again."
  
  "Oh, this story I just have to hear sometime." Hard Exit tried to distract me. "All right, everyone, Pistons already called the pro play. Except for the deckers, we all pop our plugs and go take care of meatspace maintenance. And we'll all be ready to saddle up when we have the next step."
  
  With a general chorus of agreement, the meeting adjourned.
  
  
  
  "Fuck!" I sobbed helplessly into Jane's side as she cradled me in her arms. We were both sitting side-by-side on one of the futons in the safehouse. I'd barely been able to keep it together long enough to log off after hearing Hard Exit's cold professional appraisal of exactly how unlikely a successful rescue was from a corporate black site with those kinds of paranoid prisoner-destruct rigs.
  
  "Alex." she said softly, her chin tucked on top of my head. "We'll get her back."
  
  "It's my fault she's gone in the first place." I cursed. "Me and my brilliant idea to sell out to Horizon!"
  
  She didn't bother trying to argue the flaws in that logic, but just let me sob in silence for a minute or two. "My father is one of the most ancient and powerful mages in the world. And he's not an easy man to get to know, to put it mildly. I didn't even meet him until I was in my mid-twenties, and I didn't even know he was my father until several years after that."
  
  I wasn't so lost in grief that I couldn't still realize that Frosty was needing to make a great effort to actually talk about her past at all, and that she wouldn't be doing so unless she'd felt a gravely compelling need. So I choked back the obvious stupid things I could say and simply pulled away far enough to listen attentively instead of wallow.
  
  She met my silent nod to continue with a thankful nod of her own, and did. "My power focus was a gift from an old friend of my father's when I was a young woman." she began, holding up her right hand to display the elaborate orichalcum ring shaped like a twisting dragon prominent on her finger. "I'd only met him that one time. I'd been too ignorant, too cynically all-knowing in the way only an overgrown adolescent could be, to even understand what he was trying to offer or to realize understand that trusting him would have been one of the wiser decisions I could have made. No, I was barely into college and I thought I knew everything, so I told him to go take a flying leap. I didn't need anyone, and I could make my own way in life. So he respected my wishes and left, and I never saw him again. And when I was finally old enough to realize who he'd been and the sheer enormity of what I'd been offered..." Frosty wiped away a tear of her own. "By the time we had any chance to reconnect at all he'd been murdered, and I never had the chance to apologize to him. They never even found his killers."
  
  I squeezed her hand in silent reassurance, and waited for her to continue at her own pace.
  
  "But by the time he'd been killed, I'd already received a second chance." She chuckled sadly. "And it started with me being 'involuntarily extracted', would you believe? I'd been a girl in an orphanage who'd struggled to pay her own way through college, and had gotten a job as a secretary with a minor local corporation. In-between my hanging out with a local gang." She rolled her eyes. "Go ahead and laugh, I certainly did in hindsight."
  
  "Your second chance was...?" I rescued her dignity with the question.
  
  "At developing my true potential." she said. "Because I hadn't even known I was a mage until my mentor showed up."
  
  "Wait, your father's old friend had given you a power focus without even telling you were a mage? Without explaining what it was or what he was really offering you a chance to learn? Talk about pulling a Dumbledore!" I said, confused.
  
  She laughed briefly, then wiped away a tear. "Oh God, if I'd only had a chance to make that joke to him! He'd have laughed until the windows blew out." She sighed. "It was elven politics. The person who gave me this ring was... well, he and my father respected and admired each other very much, but they weren't allies. They'd been enemies in the past - politically, not personally. Approaching me and trying to offer me his mentorship was... well, he was sincere in thinking I'd make a good student. He wasn't the type to be insincere. But he was also good at serving multiple goals with a single course of action, so-"
  
  "He was trying to signal a wish for an alliance with your father, by doing a kindness to you." I analyzed.
  
  "In a very tense political situation, in a culture - well, subculture - where the proper gestures and etiquette had to be followed just so. So he wasn't allowed to even begin to look like he was trying to intimidate or manipulate me into it. Which is why when I told him to go take a flying leap without even giving him a chance to fully explain himself, he wasn't allowed to ignore my clearly expressed wishes and stick around to explain." She lowered her head shamefully. "Sometimes I still wonder if I hadn't inadvertently ruined the entire effort by being such a brat... would it have worked? Would my father and him have realized they had at least some common cause versus a common threat in time, instead of being unable to reconnect due to damn stupid elven politics?" She sighed. "If he'd had just one more key ally when he most needed one, then would he have not died?" She looked up at me, sober as a Corporate Court judge. "And please believe me, it was truly a great tragedy that he did."
  
  "The key word is 'inadvertently'." I reassured her. "You had no way of knowing that such a choice would echo with such hidden significance lat-" and then I ground to a halt. "You snuck right up on me with that one."
  
  "I did." Jane admitted freely. "I still regret his death, but I finally - after far too long - was able to grow up enough to accept that even if I'd made a wrong decision, even if I'd been a stupid petulant child, that didn't mean I owned every mistake that was ever made. I didn't kill him, or conspire with his enemies to do so, or even arrange the entire deep background of elven politics that put the whole thing into a position where the ignorant whims of a college girl could even potentially affect anything significant. Does any of this sound familiar?"
  
  "Jane, I intellectually know that I had valid reasons for - and yes, Catherine had a vote as well, and made it alongside of me - our original plan to try and help the Emergence. And that at the time, with what we could possibly have known, that trusting Horizon to the limited extent that we did wasn't crazy. Hell, Cline told us that we'd been right at the time and only retroactively been made wrong when they shifted to case Charlie in mid-stream. But that still doesn't mean my heart knows what my head knows."
  
  "Your head didn't know it either until just now, so I still helped there." Jane said compassionately. "And I know - oh God, how I know - that it takes time for the heart to catch up to the head. I'm just saying, please don't take as intolerably long as I did, all right?" She drew me back into a gentle hug. "You don't have to do this alone."
  
  "Not like you did." I said, hearing what she wasn't saying and feeling her tense. "I'm sorry that happened."
  
  "That wasn't the worst-" she blurted, and broke off. I said nothing, but just hugged her a little tighter.
  
  "You don't have to tell me anything, of course." I eventually said as we resumed our places. "But... it helped me to listen to you just now. If it would help you, I can certainly keep listening."
  
  "I'm not-" she began, before nodding. "No. It's actually relevant in a way. You deserve to know what you and Catherine mean to me, that I'm as willing to commit to this op as you are-"
  
  "You don't need to prove your commitment to this op." I cut her off. "I'll take it on faith. I do take it on faith."
  
  "I may not need to." she conceded slowly, reluctantly. "But... I want to."
  
  "Then I'm sorry I interrupted." I apologized.
  
  "I mentioned that I was involuntarily extracted." she began tightly. "The man who arranged for his team of runners to kidnap me was the same man who was my first teacher in magic." She held up a hand to cut me off. "Trust me, I know how that sounds." She sighed. "Of course, that's not why he originally had me extracted. He told me that unknown to me, I was ritually linked to a man who was his enemy, a man who could conceivably threaten me at any time through the mystic link. And that he was sorry for the kidnapping, but he had reason to believe that this man was on the move and that danger was imminent. So he had me brought in and offered me a solution - my aid to him in helping deal with this man, and in the process I'd help myself by breaking the mystic link."
  
  "You said you weren't even aware you were a mage then, so your only value to this mentor at that time would have been as a material link for ritual sorcery." I said. "And I'm guessing the other man, the one you were linked to, was your father? But simple blood relationship doesn't work like that in magic."
  
  "It was my father." she agreed. "And no, it doesn't. The link was something else, I'll explain later. But to bring it back to where I'd left off - yes, it sounded dangerous and risky. As well as the fact that I'd been dragged there. But there'd been a second team of runners that my mentor's team had fought off when they'd extracted me - my father's men, of course - so I was certainly willing to believe at the time that I was under threat from someone. And the man who would become my mentor was right there ,and he was incredibly charming and persuasive and..." Jane shook her head. "Oh, he could talk the birds down out of the trees when he really tried, that man! And not with magic, either."
  
  "So you cooperated with him in the ritual." I said.
  
  "I did. He swore he'd do his best to keep me from coming to any harm, and that it was the only way to break the link, and be an opportunity for him to track his elusive foe..." She firmed up her lip and continued painfully. "And by the time it was over, I'd almost lost my leg and would spend the next year in hospitals and physical therapy." She shook her head. "The best magical healing available in the world, the best of modern medical care, and months of grueling effort, and I still came that close to being a cripple for life. My left femur had exploded, for God's sake!"
  
  "The femoral artery runs right down there!" I cried in shock. "How the hell are you not dead?"
  
  She held up her thumb and forefinger, each touching the other. "It was that close." she agreed. "My mentor was- oh, let's name names, the euphemisms are getting intolerably cumbersome." She spat. "It was Harlequin. You heard his name mentioned earlier tonight."
  
  "So he saved your life." I said. "The obvious question begs - what had threatened it?"
  
  "Well, at the time I believed that my father had detected Harlequin's effort at breaking the link - which was a specially enchanted spell lock of a kind well beyond the normal capacities of one that had been surgically implanted in my thigh bone as a small child, to clear that up - and had immediately tried to attack him back through it, not caring that he'd cripple or kill me in the process. Meanwhile, Harlequin had saved my life and my leg at considerable effort and great expense of his own."
  
  "And then he told you 'Jane, yer a wizard!' and took you off to Hogwarts." I tried to lighten the mood.
  
  "I only wish it had been Hogwarts." she muttered. "But yes, he did. And of course I'd thought he hung the moon. Ordinary little Jane Foster, a no-account girl from a no-account town, was actually a powerful wizard herself and learning from a magical legend - however publicly unknown or 'eccentric' he might have been at the time?" She sighed. "Dreams come true."
  
  "From your tone of voice earlier tonight, I'm guessing that eventually there was difficulty." I probed diplomatically.
  
  "The miserable lying goat-felching son of a bitch had blown off my leg in the first place!" she exploded furiously.
  
  "... I'm gonna need a picture of this guy so I know who to punch in the dick if he shows up." I eventually managed to get out.
  
  "Bad idea. Even you aren't that unkillable." she immediately shot back. "... I think. Anyway, yes. He hadn't even told me the man at the other end of the link was my father, or what the whole drama had really been about. It had all been half-truths and pretty distractions. The real story was, the two of them had been in a vendetta for ages over something so petty even my father couldn't explain to me later without making it sound stupid. But neither one would back down, because old, proud elves."
  
  I kept quiet and let her take it at her own pace. She squeezed my hand again in thanks.
  
  "I'm not saying he deliberately blew it off, mind. But it had been entirely his fault. His 'breaking the link' story was true, but the main thing he'd been trying to do was score points off my father. An intimidating gesture of 'I could have killed you with ritual magic through this link, but look, just a harmless near-miss! I win, now back off!'." She thumped her free hand angrily on the futon. "He didn't even consider the possibility that my father might react like it actually was a deadly attack, because how could he know Harlequin would pull his shot at the last second? If you fired a bullet right over someone's head to 'scare' them, would you have the gall to act surprised if they drew and fired back because they thought you were aiming at their head?"
  
  "Of course not." I agreed. "So, your father did hit your leg, but Harlequin was to blame for provoking the shot?" I tried to understand.
  
  "Not even that much." she surprised me. "My father of course knew where exactly the other end of the link was. He'd originally implanted it in me the first place, after all. So his counterattack had been specifically tuned to ignore the person the link was bonded with and instead hit only Harlequin, who my father had recognized as the attacker and knew the astral signature of intimately. I would have been completely unharmed."
  
  "Would have." I echoed. "So what went wrong?"
  
  "On the list of things 'Harlequin failed to consider beforehand' we also had that his own defensive spells had been set to automatically reflect any attacks my father made on him back to my father. So my father's counterattack went back down the link, ignored me just as it was intended to, leapt out to Harlequin... and his own defensive spells reflected it back. But, of course, my father wasn't actually there."
  
  "So the reflected spell went back only as far as it could reach - back to the material link - and fried your leg in the process." I said. "And Harlequin never told you what really happened."
  
  "No." she spat. "He let me believe that my father had had no concern for my life at all, that he'd even callously tried to maim me as means to an end, for years. Even his later dramatic revelation that the man at the other end of the link had been my father had been-" she said. "Of course my father later on tried to contact me and explain his end of things. And of course I told him to fuck off."
  
  "This Harlequin-" I trailed off, afraid that the only words I could find at the moment would be so angry as to spook Jane into not continuing.
  
  "Yes." she agreed anyway. "And the real hell of it is that I don't even think it was entirely intended as manipulation. Oh, it at least partly was. That man can't take a crap without the process of wiping his ass being at least partially aimed at some kind of intrigue." she swore. "And my father has the same character flaw, but at least he-" she trailed off. "It's complicated."
  
  I silently gestured at her to please help make sense of what she'd just said.
  
  "Eventually my father managed to sit the stubborn little girl down and get his side of the story out - and by this point I'd been taught enough advanced magical theory that when he laid out the exact dynamics of the ritual and the shield involved, I could independently verify what he was telling me. And just how depressing is that, that the situation was so screwy I literally couldn't take the word of my own father that he hadn't intended to hurt me without checking his math first." she facepalmed. "At any rate, I finally knew the truth."
  
  "Why had he implanted you with some weird mystic link in the first place?" I asked her. Because that part had been nagging at me since she'd first said it.
  
  "To keep track of me, of course." he said. "All my life, when I thought I'd been alone and abandoned, he'd always been aware of me through the link. Oh, not in the surveillance way - he'd have had to do a full ritual to just trace my location, as with any other material link. But it always kept us bonded on a subliminal level. For as long as I carried it he'd always know if I was still alive, and if my life was in any great peril or not." She shook her head. "Harlequin had let me believe that the mysterious mage who'd put the link in me was some type of threat that i needed guarding from until he could remove it, and all the while the truth had been that the only reason I was carrying it was so that the father I never knew had a constant reassurance of my safety."
  
  "So Harlequin never directly lied to you, but he let you misguide yourself right down the wrong trail of assumptions over and over again without ever trying to correct you." I shook my head. "Call me Captain Obvious, but that's the exact opposite of being a good teacher!"
  
  "No, really?" she joked weakly before forcing herself onward. "I'd never met my father before then, of course. He'd left my mother before I'd been born. But my mother was still able to contact him, and when she knew she was pregnant she'd told him. According to what he said, he'd even made it into town to attend my mother during the birth. That's when he put his magical tracking tag in me, shortly after I was born."
  
  "Did he tell you why he didn't stay?" I asked. "Or come back to take you with him when your mother passed?"
  
  "I never got her version of the story, remember. I didn't even know who she was until my father finally had a chance to tell me, she'd died when I was that young. All I ever knew was the orphanage. But according to my father's version of events, my mother and him had been from two different worlds. That hadn't stopped them from being with each other, but it certainly stopped him from marrying her. The founder of Tir Tairngire, the legendary Prince who was the perhaps world's richest and most powerful elven supremacist nation-builder... and some obscure human from Columbus, Ohio?" She shook her head. "That doesn't exactly spell 'politically viable marriage', now does it?"
  
  "I have a reflexive reaction to say 'That's disgusting', but also memories of Cat and I initially angsting over the 'SINless/college girl' divide separating us until we made the point moot by both running off to join the 77th." I said. "So as imperfect as that sounds, I can't say I don't understand how it happens."
  
  "I actually agree with you there." she shook her head. "My mother might not have died of VITAS-III if she'd moved to Tir Tairngire to be with my father - as a discreet mistress, even, if not a wife - but she might well have died even sooner from a fatal overdose of Tir politics." She sighed. "It was a poisonous, poisonous place in many ways, the old Council regime. Especially at the top."
  
  "Is that why he didn't want to raise you there after your mother died?" I wondered. "Because even being a poor orphan in the UCAS would have been better for you than growing up in that type of atmosphere?" I trailed off.
  
  "That is a question he wouldn't answer." Jane replied. "Although to give him credit he didn't deflect or dance or demur like someone else would have, he just politely said that he didn't want to talk about it."
  
  "Respectful at least, if not informative." I conceded.
  
  "So yes. That's when I found out that my mentor had been-" she shook her head. "But of course it wasn't as simple as that. Recruited under false pretenses or not, I'd still agreed to be his apprentice. I was obligated, and that obligation didn't expire simply because I'd found out he was a manipulative weasel who'd been too cowardly to own up to his own mistake before I committed myself to him."
  
  "You'd think it would." I said.
  
  "Oh, it would - if the would-be apprentice had known to put stipulations into her agreement of service before committing to it such as 'You pull this kind of drek and I am out of here'. Which of course I didn't, because again, didn't know a damn thing and also thought he'd hung the moon."
  
  "What exactly are you obligated to do for him?" I asked gently. "Are there any limits?"
  
  "He could in theory do exactly what you're surmising, because in my total ignorance and vulnerability I'd committed to no limits at all." she said, and my blood chilled. "In practical terms, however, there's a certain absolute limit of the abuse he could inflict on me before my father just said 'Fuck this' and went on the rampage. Which is something Harlequin's legitimately trying to avoid, because their being evenly matched means he doesn't know who the winner would be." She sighed. "And then there's the fact that while my father certainly loves me, and he's stopped being so immediately involved in Tir politics and is working with the Dunkelzahn Institute now, he still has a lot of beliefs and a willingness to be ruthless that I just don't share and am not sure I want to." She held up her hand and waggled it back and forth. "So here I am, caught betwixt and between."
  
  "What's your plan?" I asked, knowing full well Jane would not appreciate the usual male impulse to try and fix a problem of hers as soon as she told anyone about it.
  
  "To serve out my time as his apprentice - it is a finite term of service, at least - without getting sucked any deeper into his ocean of self-inflicted drama than I absolutely have to." Jane agreed. "There's a reason I volunteer for so many important missions fighting - those certain types of spirits - that coincidentally require me to spend lots of time journeying to far-away places far away from my "mentor", who is a scatterbrained enough type of teacher he appreciates the increased free time anyway. Plus doing favors for other powerful friends, such as the Orange Queen."
  
  "I see." I said. "But you mentioned why you're committed, and this doesn't quite relate...?"
  
  "I loved him." Jane said sadly. "He wasn't the first man I'd slept with, but the first one I'd given myself to for any reason other than just a friendly hook-up. As I told you, there was a period of time when I'd all but worshipped him."
  
  "He slept with you... when you were that ignorant of the true everything about the situation, and that emotionally vulnerable, and under such false pretenses such as not telling you the truth about your leg, your father, your everything-" I broke off, furious to the tips of my toes. "I don't care if he's Dumbledore, Gandalf, and Doctor Strange all put together, if he ever shows up near me I will beat his ass until he needs a year of rehab to put his skeleton back together." I spat.
  
  "Remember when I said that I honestly wouldn't have minded if you and Catherine had just seduced me for business reasons?" Jane said sadly. "I meant it. Because even a cold-blooded business transaction would still have been far more honest about it than he'd been." She trailed off, tearing up. "And far more kind."
  
  "You come here." I said, pulling her into a hug and letting her sob softly onto my shoulder briefly.
  
  "But that wasn't what you were doing." she eventually continued. "You and Catherine - whatever you were feeling, I was feeling, we were feeling, it was just... feelings. No agenda, no purpose..." She looked deeply into my eyes. "No secrets, and no lies. Just this." she laid her hand on my heart.
  
  "Jane-" I began, not even sure of what I'd say.
  
  "This isn't the anguished declaration of love, Alex." Jane smiled slightly, but without any anger. "You and Catherine were right that none of us even know what this is yet. I'm just acknowledging that whatever this is, you meant every bit of it without the slightest trace of deception. And that by itself is such a precious gift-" She said. "You are a good man, Alexander Kincaid. And Catherine's a good woman. You do not deserve the treachery that's been done to you, or the suffering you are both undergoing. It's not fair, it's not right, and it's not-" She stopped and caught her breath. "And it's not going to happen. Not on my watch- on our watch. So we are going to cry it out tonight, and then we are going to put on our war faces and go out there and get her back if we have to fight our way through the entire goddamn world together. You copy me, Wild Man?!?"
  
  "Five by five, Frosty." I replied firmly.
  
  "Good." she softened, and we each sat in the other's arms.
  
  Soon enough, the mood began to shift, and Jane hesitantly asked "Do you want me to stay?"
  
  "Very, very much." I agreed, equally as softly... before letting her go and pulling away, praying to God that she wouldn't misunderstand. "Which is probably why you'd better go."
  
  She leaned over and kissed me on my forehead. "Hearts versus heads yet again, it seems. But you're right, we shouldn't."
  
  "I'll see you in the morning." I agreed as she stood up and went to go to her own futon in the next room. "Sleep well."
  
  "You too." she smiled lovingly, and then she was gone.
  
  I laid down and rolled back onto my futon, staring up at the ceiling until my eyelids grew heavy and I could finally rest.
  
  For the first time since Catherine had been taken, there were no nightmares.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Well, we see our heroes on the trail and starting to gather allies. Also, people talk about feelings.
  
  BTW, yes, that final exchange is ripped straight off from the film version of the John Grisham novel "A Time To Kill". So if I ever plagiarize you that blatantly, you'll at least get a credit. *g*
  
  My interpretation of the canon surrounding the events of Frosty's origin arc are not necessarily canon, but they do not actually contradict canon at any point that I know of. I'm just filling in a lot of blanks.
  
  Speaking of canon - Sounder and Hard Exit are both canon sig NPCs. Smiling Bandit as well, although since characterization info on him is so sparse (even if bio data is not) I'm having to roll his own dialogue as compared to having fairly adequate voices already for the two ladis. And so you get the sort of eccentric supergenius techno-hippie who'd pass up a guaranteed shot at the highest tiers of megacorporate research and a probable Nobel prize solely because he disagrees with their scientific ethics, hence 'all life matters'.
  
  The MCT/Saito concentration camps in the Mojave are not canon. They are, however, from the truly awesome fanmade campaign "CalFree In Chains", for the Shadowrun: Hong Kong video game by Harebrained Studios. I wrote a review of it on Spacebattles. Trust me, it is the good shit. I have paid for CRPGS I enjoyed less.
  
  Oh, and since it's already an open secret to anyone who has any edition of Jane's character write-up, the mysterious figure who gave Jane her power focus? Dunkelzahn.
  
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  "Did you find it?" I asked the angry white-haired teenager desperately.
  
  We'd rented time on Asgard for a fast scan of all the suspect camp sites, and when one of them showed the IR signatures of a large population in residence as opposed to just maintenance crews they'd focused their attention on it. Some more fast hacking had turned up a single train taking the spur line in over the past week for supplies. The timing wasn't quite right for it to have been Netcat, but it bumped the camp up to being a probable enough site that it was now worth hacking Mitsuhama's freight depot in nearby Barstow. Knowing the time of Netcat's arrival at Port of LA meant we knew her probable departure window, and a simple computer search narrowed down the only train on the LA-to-Barstow run in that window and its exact time of arrival at the Barstow depot.
  
  Of course MCT had gone to the precautions of blanking out the freight yard's security cameras for the moment when they'd offloaded their 'special cargo'. But that's precisely what Bandit and Pistons had looked for, a suspicious gap or a loop of reused footage in the logs. It was only a freight depot, not a high-security black site, so pulling a dump from their site security host was not at all challenging for hackers of their caliber. Sure enough, they'd found the blank spot... and then a peek at traffic and other publicly accessible cameras on the road outside marked the departure of two armored SUVs from the freight depot immediately after the suspicious blank spot, and put those SUVs solidly on the road out of Barstow and down to the same camp we'd already marked.
  
  So we now had a target. And armed with the knowledge I'd brought him just now, Smiling Bandit had had an idea. His own shadow-researches into the phenomenon over the past year had eventually drawn several other technomancers, SINless ones living off the grid and surviving as shadowrunners, to get in tentative contact with him and work with him towards trying to understand their nature and better handle their powers.
  
  And the most talented of those outlaw technomancers, a kid barely past high school age who called himself "Puck", had already found the key to Submergence on his own, just as 'Cat had. So once we'd primed him with the knowledge that the particular technique was possible at all, he embarked his first trip into the resonance realm we now knew was properly called 'The Endless Archive'. And he'd just returned from it, and now we were all back in the JackPoint conference room we'd originally used and frantic to start the next step of planning the op.
  
  "Yeah." he said. "But it's weird. Getting past the Threshold was the same rough go it always was, but the Endless Archive..." he whistled in awe. "Endless bookshelves that weren't bookshelves, a weight on your mind that echoed like infinity but didn't press..." his voice turned sour. "Infinity squared worth of datafiles and cross-linked references, and no index. I'd thought I was going to have to stay in there until my meatbod died of dehydration to find anything, but as soon as I start looking for data on the camp suddenly this sprite jumps out of nowhere and literally shoves this datafile into my hands."
  
  "So open it already!" Jane cried.
  
  "I can't." Puck said challengingly, before semi-apologizing. "It's code-locked, and the encryption was done by another technomancer. I could try to hack it, but I'd only get one chance before it wiped and it won't let me copy it either."
  
  "This is unprecedented. The symbolic archetype of the Endless Archive might require a great search for knowledge before yielding it, but the knowledge should by clear ontological-" Bandit began.
  
  "He means it should be in a readable format." Pistons translated from ascended high Matrix nerd. "Because the Archive intends that it should be read. The puzzle has to be possible of solution, so, put it up."
  
  "Right." Puck agreed, glad to pass the buck. The password prompt displayed in a virtual window.
  
  1*/**/1*97
  
  "A date?" Hard Exit asked. "Nineteen-something seven... 1997, maybe? What happened in 1997?"
  
  "The Seretech decision." Fatima answered. "Because I can't imagine it's asking for 1897 or any earlier."
  
  "The Seretech decision was 1999." Pistons corrected her. "So I don't know... hey, Wild Man? Are you okay?" she said, finally noticing that I'd been bluescreening and staring at the prompt the entire time.
  
  "I..." I began. "I know what date it wants." I said softly. "I just don't know how."
  
  "Careful!" Jane said. "If we crash this-"
  
  I ignored her as I began to type. One by one the numbers filled in.
  
  10/14/1997.
  
  October 14th,1997. The date Alex Kincaid had been born, on an Earth that had never known megacorporations or magic. A date that only one person ever born in this world had known.
  
  And everybody else's jaw except mine dropped in shock as the file packet descrypted to start playing a video message.
  
  "Alex. I know you'll have found out about the Archive by now. Because you would have never stopped until you knew who had taken me and why."
  
  "Cat?" Pistons sputtered incoherently.
  
  "My first Submergence involved my connection to the Deep Resonance still being sustained despite my having been kept inside a sealed Faraday cage at the time. It wasn't until several days after I got here that I realized that meant I could hope to Submerge again, even from inside this confinement. It... it wasn't easy, but I did it." Cat's image smiled tremulously.
  
  "Since before time and space were, the Tao is. It is beyond is and is not." Smiling Bandit murmured in awe.
  
  "I'm in a secure black site, the kind where no data about its innermost contents is even allowed to exist unless kept wholly offline from the Matrix. And Picador taught us both that fighting a battle without a good map was like hiking through the desert without any water. So if you wanted to find the schematics for this site, then you would have needed to seek them in the Archive. And when I finally realized that libraries exist to check books in as well as out, I knew where I could leave this message for you."
  
  "Clever girl." Sounder whistled respectfully.
  
  "My sprite had orders to share this datapacket to anyone who entered the Archive searching for information about this site, for as long it had anything left in its allotted quota of tasks. If the person who sought that information was helping you rescue me then they would obviously have to bring it to you. And you and I are the only two people who could unlock it."
  
  Jane shook her head wonderingly from side to side, squeezing my hand as tightly as she could.
  
  "Enclosed in this file is as much data on the complex as I had time to find in the Archive. Including the full schematics for the surface complex and the hidden sublevel. But most importantly, this file also contains all the details of their 'emergency specimen purge' systems and procedures."
  
  "That could be the exploit we need!" Hard Exit cried eagerly. "Pull it up, pull it up!"
  
  "There are seven 'test subjects' in addition to me here. Their names, photos, and biometrics are in this file so you'll know who to rescue. Starting from immediate proximity to us 'research subjects' and working outwards, your first obstacle is that we have our own implanted destruct systems. But because we're all technomancers they couldn't implant us with cortex bombs or put us in remote detonation collars. Instead they used 'dead-man' toxin carcerands."
  
  "Bandit-?" I asked alarmedly, but he'd already hit 'pause' and was already pulling up and scrolling through the data on his own sub-display.
  
  "I recognize them." he said calmly. "It's a standard Mitsuhama product they use to help prevent escapes from high-security prisons. The carcerands are small organic molecules shaped like hollow spheres that naturally decay from exposure to blood proteins, and which can carry a chemical micro-payload inside the sphere. MCT loaded them with neurotoxin and used a 72-hour decay cycle, but one which can be inhibited and the organic 'shell' renewed by exposure to the right immuno-booster." He looked up. "Don't get your corporate-provided shots every day, you die in less than half a week. A lethal biochemical leash that guarantees that even if a prisoner escapes or is rescued, they still won't get very far. But-" he held up a finger to cut off our inevitable reactions. "They'd be of limited utility if you couldn't remove them from someone's system entirely, because some prisoners do need to be eventually released. So there's also provision for a permanent neutralizing agent, RNA-keyed to each individual batch of carcerands." He smiled at us. "And Netcat's just given me the key. I can prep a batch of antidote in less than an hour, and all of the rescue team can carry injectors. We'll have up to two days after releasing them to cure them, but there's no reason not to do it as soon as we get their cell doors open."
  
  "Um, how are you going to get the antidote to us from your lab?" Pistons asked. "I'm pretty sure that your fortress of solitude doesn't have a handy Wuxing Worldwide Shipping dropbox."
  
  "I'll meet you at the assembly point, of course." Bandit said matter-of-factly before smiling slightly at the reactions. "Yes, we all know my usual desire for privacy but this is literally a matter of life-and-death. So I look forward to seeing you in person for the first time."
  
  "... don't shave first, okay?" Fatima asked him dazedly. "I've had a bet with Pistons for years that you do the full mountain-man routine and I wouldn't want you to accidentally destroy the evidence."
  
  "No spoilers." he quirked his lip, and we resumed playback.
  
  "Our nextmost immediate danger is our immediate handlers and guards. Their orders are to shoot us as soon as the command is given by either voice or Matrix code. If rescue teams look to be about to breach the inner containment zone, then they are supposed to purge us immediately even without orders."
  
  "Not unexpected, but definitely tricky." Hard Exit said, starting to study the floor plans and patrol routes Netcat had provided.
  
  "Last are the sublevel's old fire suppression systems." Netcat continued. "Which also do double duty now as an execution system. The secure lab sections are of course sealed and airlocked, that's standard for any high-level bio-research facility, and the emergency firefighting system started out as the standard Halon flood for compartment fires. But in this case, they replaced the inert Halon gas with carbon dioxide."
  
  "Shit." I swore, pre-empting Bandit's own incoming biochemistry lecture. "Everybody thinks CO2 is harmless, but in an airtight sealed compartment an overdose of it can be as lethal as nerve gas. A high level of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream is the body's natural trigger for the respiratory reflex. So you can't hold your breath in a pure CO2 atmosphere, not even for a second."
  
  "And when your bloodstream is hypersaturated with it, it actively displaces already-bound oxygen from your red blood cells." Bandit agreed. "Immediate unconsciousness followed by death from hypoxia within sixty seconds. Unless you are already wearing an oxygen mask before the CO2 flood is triggered, you've had it. And according to this file the guards and staff go masked in the sealed compartments, but the prisoners don't even have loose masks available to grab."
  
  "MCT." Jane snarled venomously. "They can't spell subtlety with a dictionary, but they are relentlessly thorough."
  
  "Uh, how do they not lose all their test subjects every time somebody tosses a cigarette butt in the wrong wastebasket?" Sounder asked.
  
  "Good question, and the answer is 'Each cell is also individually airtight and pressurized.'" Hard Exit answered. "And yeah, we can use that."
  
  "The extinguishing systems can be triggered for each containment cell by a button outside the cell door. To trigger them anywhere else in the sealed complex requires you to be either in the security station on the confinement floor or the complex's central command center." Cat's image smiled. "But, since they repurposed a pre-existing firefighting system as their execution system, it still uses the original hard lines. Which were designed for damage control, not paranoia."
  
  "With what Netcat just gave us... if we can jack the underground complex's central host, we can lock down the entire purge system!" Pistons said. "That just means we need the host and the guards! It is set up for the inside-outside play!"
  
  "It would have to be one hell of an 'inside'." Hard Exit said. "Because yeah... the surface complex, the hardened and secured elevator shaft, the sentry guns, the small army of corpsec goons, the containment barriers, the paranoia bunker sub-level... it all adds up to one giant stack of shit, but nothing we haven't all run before. Especially with how many guns are riding on this one. But even if we somehow lockdown the entire host before they even see us - and let's not forget that the basement levels are isolated from the Matrix, so we'll somehow have to get a relay in there physically - there's just no way we can get down to the bottom level fast enough to beat the guards just doing it with their bare hands, even if none of their purge systems work."
  
  "Then our insider has to already be inside the cell block when we open the dance." I said.
  
  "... Wild Man, I once went into the Azzie pyramid in Denver with six shooters, and came out with two of them but also with the people we'd gone in to rescue. And then we had to walk across the entire Aztlan sector in Denver to reach a border checkpoint on foot. That's how I got my name, it was the hardest exit and exfil anyone had even heard of." Hard Exit said. "And even if I started at the bottom of that hole with my full combat loadout, I would not get halfway to the objective before I was toast-"
  
  "I can do it." I said calmly.
  
  "You might be the greatest marksman around, Crackshot, but you are not bulletpr-" Hard Exit remonstrated.
  
  "I can do it." I shut her down hard, and then sighed. "Frosty? Tell them."
  
  "... about that?" she said incredulously.
  
  "About that." I nodded. "Starting from the cell block inside-out is the only way we can pull this off. So..."
  
  "Drek." she swore passionately. "Okay, folks, speaking of Azzie pyramids, you guys should already know about the Northwest Complex run in '65 even if the team that did it never came forward. Well, confession time. I was the Johnson on that run and I also went in with the team. Our first gun was Sergeant Ivan. Some of you might have known him before he passed away last year."
  
  "Of natural causes, in his sleep... in the Seattle shadows." Pistons said reverently. "They should've given the old bastard a statue for pulling that one off."
  
  "Our rigger was Caveman." Frosty continued.
  
  "Good guy, and an ace pilot." Sounder agreed. "But you run the routes long enough and the law of averages is gonna average." she sighed. "And I'd always wondered if he'd been the extraction for that run, but he kept the confidentiality."
  
  "But the rest of that team is in this room right now. Fatima was second mage, Pistons was the hacker, and Wild Man was the second gun."
  
  "Huh, common ground." Hard Exit raised an eyebrow to me. "But no offense, my pyramid was still rougher."
  
  "Not this part." Frosty said. "You guys remember the ending, right?" she said to Pistons and Fatima.
  
  "Hell yeah." Fatima nodded vigorously. "The Azzie blood mage had jacked our extraction chopper and was making off in it, and Wild Man's the only one who caught up before it left the pad. He'd zapped the mage and snapped Caveman out of the Control Thoughts, but the mage blew him right out the chopper door with his last move. If Ivan hadn't made us all get set up for a possible BASE jump as the backup extraction route, he''d have lawn-darted from a thousand feet." Fatima explained for the benefit of the others.
  
  "You two might remember that I'm the only one who made it to the edge of the roof in time to actually see him land." Frosty continued. "So here's the part I never told you. His parachute didn't open."
  
  "... the fuck?" Pistons almost disconnected herself the Matrix with the sheer force of her mental BSOD.
  
  "I saw, with my own two eyes, this man do a terminal-velocity faceplant onto a tank and walk it off." Frosty explained passionately. "Somehow he takes the physical adept armor-skin power beyond any known limit. I don't even know how. Weird-ass SURGE mutation is the least crazy theory, but again, no clue. The point is, he's literally bulletproof."
  
  "You have an open invitation to my laboratory at any time you wish." Smiling Bandit begged me. "No invasive procedures, full informed consent at every step, just please let me gather some data."
  
  "... honestly, I'm thinking I'll take you up on that." I reassured him. "And yeah, folks, even I didn't know I could do anything like that until after it happened. And afterwards... I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings by not coming clean, but who the hell do you even tell about this kind of shit? I'm still amazed Frosty didn't convince herself she'd just seen some swamp gas, and she didn't even admit to me that she knew until earlier this year."
  
  "... that's why you ditched the shadows right after the Complex run to end up in Urban Brawl as soon as you could rehab a SIN for yourself?" Fatima asked me wonderingly. "Because you thought it wasn't fair to shoot people who couldn't hope to shoot you back for real?"
  
  "That wasn't even the primary reason." I corrected her. "But yeah, it was a reason that was there. But that was then, this is now, and I don't want to fight MCT fairly at all." I said.
  
  "I would call this puree of bullshit except- no, wait, I do call this puree of bullshit." Sounder broke in. "Dude, your money's been good and you have some seriously high-rep people vouching for you, but that just does not stretch to believing this kind of crazy. Even Plan 9 wouldn't believe this one and honestly I'm amazed Bandit did. No offense." she turned aside to him.
  
  "None taken." he replied politely.
  
  "Well, the simplest way to stop the skepticism is I just let Hard Exit try to pop me one when we rally up in meatspace." I headed off the gathering sentiment. "At which point I've either proven my bona fides, or I'm officially a crazy man and its time to take your advance and abort."
  
  "I was actually trying to figure out a way to ask politely." Hard Exit admitted embarrassedly. "Any preferences on where you want your easily-fixable flesh wound?"
  
  "Dealer's choice, it won't matter anyway." I said amusedly.
  
  The sound of Puck's voice was shocking, as we'd honestly gotten so caught up that we'd temporarily forgotten he was there, and he'd been sitting way back in the corner watching all of us like a wary animal. "You're different too?" he asked me.
  
  "Yeah." I agreed.
  
  "That's why you helped her? Why you spent that much time trying to help all of us?" he continued.
  
  "I helped her because she was the woman I'd fallen in love with. Remember, Cat didn't know she was a technomancer until we'd been together for years." I corrected him, and watched his body language micrometrically relax as if I'd passed a test. "But yeah. I joined the 77th because it was a place I didn't mind waiting for 'Cat to get healthy and find her footing. I joined Horizon because it was a place her and I thought could help the Emergence." I shrugged and metaphorically pointed at the datafile icons in our virtual room's 'whiteboard' representing what I'd gotten out of Gary Cline. "And if not remotely in the way that we expected, we kinda did."
  
  "Yeah, you did." Puck agreed even more nervously.
  
  "What's wrong, Puck?" Smiling Bandit asked him worriedly.
  
  "His plan won't work." Puck said.
  
  "I could've told you that." Sounder scoffed.
  
  "No, he's telling the truth." Puck rounded on her. "Or at least his biometrics indicate that he is. I meant that the inside-outside play is only half of the equation. There's also that someone has to open up the offline systems from the inside of the sublevel before you hackers can actually do anything. And in addition to the purge systems, there's all the automated security and containment barriers that need neutralizing before the people coming down from the surface can hope to secure the site."
  
  "I was waiting to hear Wild Man's idea on that." Pistons admitted.
  
  "I was still trying to think of an idea." I confessed. "I mean, I'm not a meathead, but I can't punch my way through the place and sit around in VRspace trying to open up a hard line from the inside out simultaneously."
  
  "Which means someone else has to go in with Wild Man to do the inside component of the hack that he can't." Puck agreed, white-faced. "Someone with the Resonance, because Pistons or Bandit wouldn't be able to take in their gear. I have to go in."
  
  "Puck, you've already been in a place like that." Smiling Bandit said, aghast. "You barely escaped the Renraku Arcology alive! Willingly serving yourself up to a Mitsuhuma 'destructive research' lab ...?"
  
  "I know." he whispered. "I'm-" he broke off. "I don't want to do it. But I have to do it. If I don't then I'm leaving eight innocent people to die. Die the same way I almost died, for an even worse reason."
  
  "I'll be with you every step of the way." I assured him. "You know who I'm fighting for and why. You'll count towards that just as much as she would, as any of them would."
  
  "I know." he agreed. "But it's okay if-" he sighed. "When Deus had me, I did bad things." he whispered. "I helped him."
  
  "He made you help him." Smiling Bandit urged him. "It wasn't your fault."
  
  "I'll help you do it." Puck ignored him, talking to me. "We'll get them out, and it's okay if I die doing it." He waved off Bandit's reaction. "I don't want to, I'm not trying to, but-" he shrugged. "If I did then it would only be fair. So I go last, do you understand me?" he begged me. "Get her out first, get them all out first. Then come back for me."
  
  "This is what you want?" I asked him.
  
  "It's what I deserve." Puck replied stolidly.
  
  "That is not the question he asked you, Puck." Jane remonstrated with him.
  
  "... I'm just hoping we win." Puck evaded and then crossed his arms and stared at us mulishly.
  
  "Puck-"I began.
  
  "Her message wasn't finished." Puck interrupted us before we could press further, and the playback resumed.
  
  "Alex- Jane- whoever else answered the call, whoever else will come. If I don't get a chance to later, then let me thank you all now from the bottom of my heart." Cat finished. "It's been rough, I won't deny that. The interrogation's been what you'd expect." She smiled. "But they underestimated me. I remembered the POW training and it helped. I only gave them what I wanted them to hear. It's not like we care about keeping Horizon's trade secrets anymore, do we?" Cat snorted. "They have no clue who's coming for them. They don't know about Netcat or Wild Man or Frosty, just about Catherine Kincaid and her husband Alex and their lover Jane."
  
  "Oh just tell everyone why don't you?" Jane muttered, her palm not covering enough of her face to hide the incandescent blush.
  
  "If this will be the last time we can talk then please understand. If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't change a single thing. It was all worth it, every moment. I'll treasure them forever. And if the worst occurs, then I know you'll grieve... but I pray that your grief will pass in time, and you can one day learn to be happy again."
  
  I took Jane's hand in mine, not even caring who saw now.
  
  "Jane, please take care of him for me, all right?" Cat asked. "And you let her take care of you, you lovable stubborn ox. You promise me!"
  
  "I will." I murmured.
  
  "Now get to work, and I hope to see you soon. I love you."
  
  "We love you too." I alone heard Jane whisper.
  
  "Okay, people." I said as I stepped forward and grabbed the reins. "You all heard the lady. Let's get to work."
  
  
  
  Many of the pieces we would need had already been moving, even before we had a final location. The rest were summoned and would be on station in time. It took slightly over a day after the receipt of Netcat's message to finish putting everything in place, and those of us with savings to spend had needed to spend a good chunk of them on hiring even more support than the core team we'd assembled. Still, this op would not only save multiple innocent people - and the woman I loved - but on a larger scale, it would hopefully become a key part of the Emergence. And not only any corp's schedule, but on ours. This time the shadows would set the pace for the rest of the world and not vice versa, and the prospect of that alone brought more runners to our banner than we'd imagined possible.
  
  To reduce the chances that MCT would take us to another facility than the one we wanted them to take us to as far as we could, we'd chosen San Francisco for the handoff. Fatima had an extensive network of friends and contacts there and it was the work of only several hours for them to run down one of the very discreet fixers and bagmen that was actually the local point of contact for MCT's hush-hush technomancer bounties, and hand him the windfall of his career. One confirmed young technomancer and one probable older one, both at once!
  
  So the black SUVs arrived, picked me and Puck up from the 'bounty hunters' Fatima had recruited from the Orkland sprawl, scanned us, scoped us, and drove us to the nearest rail yard to load us on the train. Oh, there had been refinements added to the process, such as our dropping almost twenty thousand nuyen alone on two hastily-obtained canisters of the most highly-rated nanopaste disguise possible. It wasn't just the part where my real face was on posters worldwide, after all. Puck didn't want to be leaving his real face behind in any MCT records either, even though we'd do our absolute best to leave none.
  
  Puck had 'charged up' the tiny amount of computer memory available on an injectable RFID tag with one of his sprites - the tiniest weakest one he could make, and it still barely fit - so that a hasty scan would at least register something vaguely akin to a Resonance effect about me, like that of a 'wild' technomancer who had yet to become aware of their powers. It wouldn't remotely fool an actual probe, but the science of detecting technomancers was still incredibly crude and haphazard this early in the game.
  
  As it turned out MCT liked to use the train because a megacorporate train car, with the logo clearly displayed, satisfied the Business Recognition Accords' requirements for megacorporate extraterritoriality. It was a continuous and contiguous bounded space with an intuitive separation between it and its surroundings, it was clearly posted as megacorporate territory, and there was ownership paperwork on it. The fact that it was a mobile structure didn't matter, the inside of the train car was MCT extraterritorial turf and not subject to any jurisdictional system. Which meant no customs searches and no inspections of any kind. The cargo couldn't even be looked at without MCT permission, even if any cargo actually being offloaded from the car would be treated like it had just left a Customs bonded warehouse. Just the thing for smuggling your unwilling human cargo across the state on its way to your ultra-secure "crimes against humanity" research black site.
  
  Of course, as the other end of the train ride was done in the MCT-owned freight depot in Barstow there was no risk of search while being offloaded there either. And while automobile traffic wasn't extraterritorial like the contents of sealed train cars, this far out in the Mojave - and in a town as heavily corporate-dominated as Barstow - it was a null risk. MCT had worked out a system for transporting experimental subjects to their black site that covered all the known bases coldly and methodically, and then they stuck with it through thick and thin.
  
  We didn't exactly have a window seat from our position in the back of an armored SUV with blacked-out windows, while wearing manacles and wireless-opaque bags over our heads, but as the car drew to a stop we knew that we were arriving at our destination. Whatever security system this facility had set up at the gate did its job, the guards gave the proper countersigns and responses, and we heard the gate open through our hoods as the SUV got into motion again. After a minute or two of driving, and another halt while we waited for a garage door to open and then close behind us, we pulled to a halt inside a garage.
  
  "All right, freaks, from now your powers won't help you. You're inside an RF-sealed enclosure and none of us are carrying anything you can hack. So the hoods come off so we don't have to lead you by the hand, but-"
  
  The other guards matched deeds to words as Puck and I were manhandled outside the SUV and the bags were roughly yanked off our heads.
  
  "-if you act up, you get this." The talkative guard said, holding up a shock prod and deliberately hitting the switch to let the tip arc and spit sparks.... before ramming it into Puck's gut.
  
  "AGGGGGHGHH!" he screamed, going to his knees. "I didn't do anyth-"
  
  The guard hit him again. "No talking!"
  
  Puck clenched his jaw and stared up at the guard with bared teeth. The guard nodded, then turned to me and gave me the baton. I suitably cried, clenched, and fell. The armored helmet and visor hid the guard's face, but his body language screamed just routine. I was reminded of Lois Bujold's comment that there was nothing worse than a bored killer in a uniform, because it meant that somewhere above him in the chain of command were the sort of people who turned other persons into unfeeling weapons. Eventually, Zappy the guard got even more bored and finished up, and they waited for us to painfully stagger back to our feet.
  
  "Move." the guard said curtly, and we moved.
  
  The interior loading dock we were crossing was a large empty space not remotely being used at capacity. The ample parking space for large trucks or busses and the multiple lines on the floor, along with the complete lack of cargo-handling equipment or any empty holes in the concrete floor where it could have been mounted, told me that this loading dock had originally been built to handle the sort of 'cargo' that moved itself. The old and faded but still legible wording painted on the floor or stenciled on the walls and ceiling only underlined that impression.
  
  DETAINEES ARE ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN TO:
  * Physically resist in any fashion.
  * Passively resist in any fashion.
  * Refuse to move when ordered.
  * Refuse to stay in place when ordered.
  * Speak to each other without permission.
  * Speak to a guard without invitation to speak.
  * Cry out, engage in public demonstration, or otherwise disrupt an orderly in-processing experience.
  * Fail to comply with other necessary instructions in a prompt and respectful fashion.
  
  DETAINEES ARE WARNED THAT NONCOMPLIANCE WILL BE PUNISHABLE ENTIRELY AT THE DISCRETION OF CAMP PERSONNEL.
  DETAINEES ARE WARNED THAT PUNISHMENT MAY ENCOMPASS PHYSICAL MEASURES UP TO AND INCLUDING IMMEDIATE LETHAL FORCE.
  
  So this was the first fumbling steps that Saito had taken towards buliding his dream world. God Almighty, it was seven years later and MCT still hadn't so much as painted over the fucking signs.
  
  Once past the welcome wagon we were immediately hustled through the ground-floor building - an empty, dusty complex that had once seen hundreds of metahumans moving through at a time on their way to their last stop - and taken through a nasty set of checkpoints and recently-remodeled narrow, switchback corridors to end up at an armored security barrier backed up by rigger-controlled fixed-mount minigun turrets that crouched at the top of a gleaming black freight elevator. The guards stopped well short of the thirty-foot section of open floor in front of the miniguns that was marked in brilliant yellow-and-red cross-hatched paint. This paint looked relatively fresh and new, as did the warning signs.
  
  UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ENTERING THE MARKED EXCLUSION ZONE WILL BE IMMEDIATELY FIRED UPON WITHOUT WARNING.
  
  Real subtle there, MCT.
  
  Another group of guards, more heavily-armored and in airtight pressure helmets instead of just ordinary SWAT gear, stood waiting for us at the top of the elevator.
  
  "Halt." the electronically-distorted voice of the chief guard on the elevator detail said. "Okay, deactivate the turrets."
  
  The red warning lights on the sentry turrets went green.
  
  "Now you move." they said to us, and we shuffled across the death zone and towards the elevator. Once we were off the marked section and behind the arc of the turrets the chief guard muttered into his radio and the lights on the turrets went red again. Wow, they really didn't want anyone to escape. Presumably the Welcome Wagon guns were directly controlled by fiber-optic hardline, with no wireless for an escaping technomancer to even dream of hacking. But yes, even if a lab subject somehow got loose, and somehow got all the way through the sealed sub-level to the main shaft and up, he'd be immediately immolated trying to cross the death zone around the shaft head. Even most of MCT's own guards weren't allowed to approach the elevator and go down, unless they were specifically part of the secure lab detail. To stop shadowrunners from taking out a surface patrol and using their uniforms and RFID tags to get down the hole, presumably. Brutal but thorough indeed.
  
  We were almost eighty feet deep into the Earth by the time the elevator stopped. The doors opened and we were greeted by our new home; the subterranean black site itself.
  
  According to the files Netcat and Puck had turned up from the Archive, the black site complex was younger than the camp above. Only several years old, its initial construction having started shortly before the Crash 2.0. Originally intended for secret research into and manufacture of Level 5 bioweapons, the lab had never been used for its intended purpose. The Crash had halted construction for a while, and by the time it had renewed the megacorps had already been slowly, dimly, awakening to the existence of the technomancers. Apparently the frantic 'reflash watch' programs they'd had scouring the Matrix for any anomalies that might signal the possible return of Deus had instead started catching other, unrelated 'anomalies'. Metahuman ones.
  
  A self-contained buried sublevel separated into the main section and the sealed black-site lab itself, the guards and scientists and support personnel lived down here. Like nuclear missile submarine crews of old, they rotated long periods 'downside' with long breaks upside. The absolute minimum of metahuman traffic moved in and out - no shift changes, no daily commutes. The MCT staff had their own quarters, break rooms, recreational and dining facilities, etc, etc. down here. They even had their own clinic.
  
  And then, in the separate and airlocked section of labs and cells and cubicles that was the old hot labs, we had the eight captive 'test subjects'. Which number would go up to ten as soon as we were in-processed and shown to our own airtight cells, where we could be suffocated with a button push either individually or collectively.
  
  The MCT scientists stripped us, cavity-searched us, and scanned us in every orifice. We were fortunate they didn't detect our nanopaste disguises, but then again even MCT was not quite paranoid enough to imagine a scenario where someone deliberately got themselves abducted into a black-site "bio-research" lab as a naked and helpless prisoner. Plus, the stuff wouldn't have been good for covert ops if you could so easily pick it up with even the good scanning equipment, given the usual run of places that users of this stuff would normally be infiltrating.
  
  One of the scientists who'd finished giving us our preliminary examinations explained to us the meaning of the injections we'd just had - the toxin carcerands, of course - and outlining how escape was impossible and this was the rest of our lives and we should be proud to contribute to the cause of human advancement blah blah blah. But eventually the ordeal ended and we were dressed in prisoner coveralls and straightjackets, stood up, and marched out of the examination room and down the hall.
  
  "You two will start out in Lab Alpha, undergoing basic evaluations. Depending on what the results are, you'll be moved to one of the other labs if need be. It all depends on what kind of work needs doing and which lines of research are progressing how quickly." the junior scientist escorting us to our cells - well, the guards were doing the escorting, he was just supervising - explained. "Some sections simply require you to lie there while we examine your neurology in detail. Others require participation in various drills." He stopped and adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. "Failure to participate will result in heightened compliance measures. It is recommended that you not be recalcitrant."
  
  "Was anyone else recalcitrant?" I couldn't resist asking, and the nearest guard's reflexive move to club me one was stopped by the scientist's upraised hand.
  
  "No, that was a valid question. And the answer is, yes, some subjects are." He smiled thinly. "At first. But soon enough, they learn why they should stop."
  
  "And if they don't?" Puck said quietly.
  
  "Then they stop anyway. If you understand my meaning." he chuckled. "No further questions."
  
  "Subject Nine, enter the cell indicated." one of the guards said as we reached the row of sealed compartment doors down the one side of Lab Alpha. One of the doors unsealed simultaneously with the guard speaking so. There were five of them - only one had an occupancy tag on the outside, a laminated picture of one of the eight technomancers we were here to rescue. Not Cat. Apparently the sealed labs used throwback equipment, physical interfaces and no Augmented Reality or wireless equipment. Which made sense if you were imprisoning angry technomancers. I really hoped Puck would have something to work with...
  
  Puck locked eyes with me. I was sure he'd been repressing flashbacks and PTSD the entire trip down here, given how I'd been told he was a survivor of the Deus AI's mad science empire in the Renraku Arcology. And now he had to willingly enter a sealed, armored box where he could be killed at the push of a button-
  
  We'd discussed this part before we'd ever gotten this far. If I could draw the guards heat to me as 'resisting prisoner', as opposed to making them think 'rescue attempt', then they wouldn't be using the purge systems. As Sounder had brought to light, one of the reasons prisoners were kept in individually-sealed killing jars as much as possible is so that they wouldn't die if an actual fire required the extinguishers in one of the lab areas or connecting corridors and support spaces to be used. So for as long as nobody was motivated to activate the purge in Puck's cell, being inside the small pressurized armored room was paradoxically the safest place for him. No risk of catching a stray round, for one thing.
  
  The moment passed and Puck stepped back into his own private hell, and the door sealed behind him.
  
  "Subject Ten, enter the cell indicated."
  
  I ignored the guard and took a deep breath. I deliberately began to release the iron control that I'd been clamping down on my thoughts, my actions...
  
  "Subject Ten! Comply immediately!"
  
  I thought of Cat being walked or dragged into this place. Her growing despair at seeing the sheer layers and layers and layers of cold, mechanized death that were wrapping further and further around her...
  
  I thought of her in an interrogation chamber, being worked over by MCT 'specialists'. Rape was vanishingly unlikely, as were things like mutilation - that would have been sadism, and recreational sadism at that. No room for private self-indulgence in Mitsuhama's cold, methodical machine. But that still left a lot of room for things like sleep deprivation... waterboarding... scientific beatings... neurochemicals... electric shocks...
  
  "Reaction force to Lab Alpha, Subject Ten is erratic!"
  
  I thought of Cat alone in the dark, undergoing sensory deprivation, of being unable to escape her own nightmares whether waking or asleep. Hemmed in by multiple layers of RF-sealed walls and doors, cut off from the Resonance that had over the past months become as integral a part of her sensorium as her sight or hearing.
  
  I thought of her clinging to her faith that I would come for her, that we could come for her, but her faithful heart also being at war with her logical head, telling her that I had an entire world to search for her and for all my impossible strength might very well never find her at all , that MCT could and would kill her the instant the complex was in serious danger of being breached, of all the weight of an entire monolith poised to crush her life out in an instant.
  
  I thought of a brave, intelligent, woman who could find an impossible way out of this trap anyway. Who refused to despair even when poised on the lip of a fearful abyss that made the Dweller on the Threshold look like an unlocked screen door. Who even when entirely cut off from the electromagnetic spectrum, when deprived of anything remotely resembling an electronic system accessible to hacking, let alone a 'Resonance well' as the technomancers termed places in the Matrix particularly friendly to Submersion, had still sought within herself and found a path to the Endless Archive. And had then done what no technomancer before her had done, and used the connection to give knowledge as well as receive it, to leave an impossible message in a bottle in an impossible place beyond the material universe that had been the only thing giving us this chance to save her and everyone else.
  
  I thought of a woman who, even when betrayed by one megacorporation and subjected to unimaginable brutality by another, naked and helpless in a soulless blighted pit of a death camp where she could literally die at any random instant, still had the kind heart to urge her husband and lover to find happiness where they could. To go on without her if need be, with all her blessings.
  
  I thought of a woman whose very last words on this Earth might turn out to be "I love you."
  
  "Subject Ten! You will comply immediately or we will fire!"
  
  I raised my head, opened my eyes, and turned to look the shouting guard square in the eye.
  
  "Go to hell."
  
  And I tore my straightjacket into ribbons like it had been wet tissue paper, raised my fist, and effortlessly put it square through his helmet's faceplate and out the back of his skull.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Now you can finally start to play the Doom music, guys. I know it was a long wait, and we're still not going to immediately leap into headbutting entire planets into Utopia or shit like that... but ordinary, even very high-level street legend 'ordinary', shadowrunning is about to start falling into the rearview mirror.
  
  My biggest obstacle in scripting this arc was figuring out how to make Netcat not a princess waiting in another castle while simultaneously not leaning too hard into 'Why didn't you just wait? She'd have broken herself out at the rate she was going' Mary Sue territory. It was a rather difficult Scylla-and-Charybdis thing to navigate. It wasn't until I finally had some inspiration there that I could write the rest of this.
  
  And yes, in this timeline Puck is going into the depths of a black site with a team of runners to save Netcat, not the reverse. You know how I love irony. :)
  
  I would like to thank Daemonflayer for his post about Puck earlier in the thread, which led me to take a look at his character with new eyes. I still maintain that Puck did some heinous shit, shit I won't forgive him for, in 4th edition. But that was well after 2070, and it's still late 2068 right now. I hadn't stopped to consider that prior to the canon Emergence, prior to all the shit around that after that, he was still a struggling young man who'd been horribly used and misled. Oh, he's still got some noteworthy sins on his balance sheet, but... well, this time around our heroes started the shadows looking for technomancers earlier, which had people like Smiling Bandit searching earlier, which gave people like Puck a chance to actually not be alone with their struggles.
  
  And so, new world, new Puck. Because sometimes I just do an act of grace, even to a character whose canon self I would condemn.
  
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  Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam.
  
  The shotguns of the guards sounded faintly in my ears, as if it were but distant thunder rumbling over the horizon. The flechettes spattered against my skin like raindrops.
  
  That very first fight just as I'd first arrived. Those two razorguys who'd blitzed the girl I'd been bodyguarding, the one who later liveblogged it. The Aztechnology Pyramid in Seattle. When that damned tank had almost killed us in Africa. Even the game-winning shot during the World Cup. On those and several other occasions I'd been dimly aware of something more, something greater than merely a physical adept who somehow sidestepped the usual power caps.
  
  I hadn't known what I'd been subliminally sensing at the time. I'd barely been aware that I was sensing anything unusual at the time, and I'd never pondered it afterwards. The press of events surrounding those moments had entirely drowned out any need for advanced introspection. And for that matter, I still didn't know exactly what I was feeling now. But it certainly wasn't a subliminal awareness anymore.
  
  My ability to expand my awareness, to enhance my intelligence and overall mental capacity, was also the one ability that I had been most reluctant above all to experiment with. Despite their own significant potential for abuse my other abilities were still entirely within my control. No matter what my strength, I could still choose to not be a bully. No matter how handsome or charming, I could still choose to not seduce under false pretenses. No matter how stealthy, I could still choose to not murder or thieve. But all of that depended on my retaining the sanity to make proper choices, to have the judgement and self-awareness to know right from wrong and the self-control to effectively act upon the difference.
  
  And any genre fan had already read countless tales of people imbued with mysterious powers to rapidly and easily augment themselves mentally who had then overindulged and entirely lost their sanity in the process. Who'd crippled their ability to exercise rational judgment before they'd even realized it was at risk, and who had no hope of realizing what they were becoming or reversing course in time without it. Who'd turned themselves into inhuman monsters without even intending to because the mentalities of gods had never been intended to be channeled so rapidly, so forcefully, through fragile human neurons and psyches. Gary Mitchell, Divis Mal, Tetsuo, Coin, Jean Grey, Dr. Manhattan, Willow Rosenberg... The list went on and on. There were so many cautionary tales of what could happen when fallible human minds started overclocking themselves too far and too fast.
  
  So I'd chosen to let myself mentally evolve at a natural pace as best as I could, and not to force it. To merely educate myself into a highly skilled polymath when I could have raced ahead to become a peerless supergenius. To value the individuals around me and to foster connections, to not even dream of walking the path of the Lonely God. To treasure the touchstones that kept me grounded. But now the very dearest of those touchstones was in mortal peril, and I could not save her if I refused to fly.
  
  And thus I imagined the mysterious force within me asking for permission to answer my deepest need as opposed to merely my desire, and my entire heart and soul joined as one to tell it... yes.
  
  Everything around me became crystal clear. Every possible detail of my environment simultaneously impinged upon my awareness. Microscopic patterns of wear on web gear and armor joints stood out as if they were holographic highlights. Infinitesimal subtleties of posture and movement cried out clearly even through heavy armor. That guard's place in the formation forced him to shoot to his weak side, but his partner was left-handed. That guard was overconfident. That one was confused. The fastest draw. The best shot. The most skilled melee combatant. The one who hadn't fired yet because he was on the radio to the guardroom, and the one who'd be quickest to attack, and the one most likely to panic...
  
  Netcat's files had given us the full layout of the sub-level and a personnel roster up to date as of the moment she'd uploaded it.. I knew every room and corridor in the sealed inner section where they held the technomancers. Barring last-minute roster changes in the past several days, I knew exactly how many people would be on shift. I knew the places SOP would have them stationed, and their initial response plans.
  
  My expanded might thought so swiftly, calculated in so many parallels, that the first volley of fire was still flattening against my skin as I finished computing the tactical tree for the upcoming engagement in my mind, noting the likely shatterpoints and branches, and outlining several possible contingencies. I even had a corner of my mind free to marvel at how everything was so clear, so centered, so focused. Where was the berserker fury? Where was the elemental outpouring of destruction, to crush all that stood in my way?
  
  But then it became clear to me. The common lexicon drew very little distinction between 'rage' and 'wrath'. After all, weren't they both just words for being really, really angry? But no, there was entirely a difference.
  
  Rage was fire and fury. Rage was an explosion that leapt out to indiscriminately spend itself down the nearest and most immediate channels. But wrath was entirely different. Wrath did not lash out blindly, it chose its targets with a singular, undying will. Wrath was commitment and focus. Rage could be terrible, but wrath was inevitable.
  
  And at this moment, so I was I.
  
  The man I'd just decapitated with a punch was still only beginning to slump to the floor when I opened my clenched fist and casually flicked my hand with impossible precision to splatter his blood and brains off of my fingers and across the faceplates of three of the five guards still standing. In a single continuous motion from my turn I sidestepped further to that guard's weak side, his second shotgun blast failing to follow my movements and instead rippling the air immediately behind me. The fifth man's line of fire was blocked by the fourth man for just an instant, and that gave me enough time to plant my lead foot and kick. My blow simultaneously tore the shotgun loose from the hands of the man who'd just missed me and sent him stumbling back hard into the fifth man, leaving them both falling back onto one of the lab benches.
  
  Just as I had with the knife of the ork in the alley, I effortlessly reached out and caught the weapon of the man I'd just disarmed before it could fall. While normally a megacorporate facility like this would have had all weapons code-locked to individual users, whether by biometrics or implanted RFID tags, the unique security concerns of technomancers meant that all equipment in here was as non-wirelessly-networked as possible. So these men were armed with simple non-smart-linked, non-safety-locked laser-sighted weapons no more advanced than the ones of a generation ago. Still more than serviceable for killing, particularly when used by heavily-armored men against unarmed prisoners at short range, but also still unsophisticated enough they could be turned against their wielders as simply as grabbing one.
  
  Admittedly, the fact that these men were in heavy security armor and using weapons optimized for non armor-piercing, as an extra precaution against a prisoner seizing a weapon, was a bit of a complication. But even the best armor didn't do much for you when the muzzle of the weapon was directly up under your chin, and so died one of the blinded guards before he could even begin to re-orient. I brought my borrowed weapon up in a flashing swing to knock aside another man's weapon, leaving him expending his follow-up shot into the ceiling, and then stepped into the third for another point-blank execution. The two men I'd sent dogpiling onto the lab bench were just starting to gain their feet when I slowed them up for another second by throwing my 'borrowed' shotgun at the topmost man's helmet hard enough to momentarily rattle him, and then I grabbed the second man as he was trying to frantically wipe his smeared faceplate clear enough to see and spun him around as a human shield while my free hand yanked his pistol out of his holster. Two quick shots found the tiny gaps in the armor joints of the men by the workbench with even more impossible precision, and then the man in my grip went with a clean neck-break.
  
  I looked around for the sneering little scientist who'd been giving us the speech and saw him slumped against the wall by Puck's cell door, already dying from a stray shot from one of the guards. That would be inconvenient, as our plan had been to extract as many of the researchers alive as possible. Still, he wasn't dead yet and that meant his thumbprint would still work on the lock for the cell, at least for the next couple of minutes. Saved me from having to rip it open. A few more quick shots from my pistol destroyed the security cams in the lab - not that they were normally that obvious to sight, but in my current state of heightened awareness they might well have been.
  
  Puck's wide eyes met mine as the door swung wide. I nodded to him and then quickly turned and bent down to draw 'random' blood smears on the helmet of the man I'd killed with the neck-breaker. "Can you connect from here?"
  
  "No immediate links available." Puck answered, still looking around at the carnage in either awe or shock. "Maybe I can do something with the lab terminal-"
  
  "I left this one's armor intact for you to use. Put it on and if you can't work from here, then head for the security station once I've cleared the corridors enough. You should have a direct hardline connection to the central systems from there, even if nowhere else."
  
  "Got it." Puck nodded. "Good luck."
  
  I smiled at him, finished swiping the few most immediately useful things from the dead, and then ran for the door. Whiie the lab director or his security chief would be reluctant to enact the purge prematurely - they had a lot invested in this research, after all. But we still had a narrow time window before the lab director or his security chief finished running around their decision loops for long enough to decide that the situation was beyond salvage anyway.
  
  The six men I'd just killed had been the two guards originally escorting us and a four-man reaction team they'd called as soon as I started signs of resistance. The explosion of violence I'd just enacted would have the men in the security station putting the entire lab section on alert. So right now all of the other labs were sealing up tight to keep the active shooter from reaching them, while everybody else on guard shift and not already in the labs would be forming up into teams and converging on my location through the hallways.
  
  I set off at a dead run direct for the main airlock leading out of the sealed section to the staff living quarters of the sub-level, where the elevator to the surface was already located. Let them think I was a berserking prisoner making a blind run for it. They'd already have a pre-established drill for that, methodically calculated with precision and set up to take optimum advantage of their home field as best as they could. Which was just what I wanted. After all, there were far fewer correct answers to any given question than incorrect ones, which meant under the right circumstances it was easier to predict competent opponents than stupid ones.
  
  As I was heading away from Lab Alpha and back towards the airlock, a pair of guards blocked the hallway ahead of me almost exactly on schedule. Ignoring them for the moment I converted my headlong run into a diving forward flip, used my infinitesimal instant of being upside down in mid-air to snap two quick shots through the gaps in the armored neck joints of the pair of men coming up behind me, then smoothly tucked into a roll beneath the volley from the men in front to kill them with two more pistol shots to the same weakness in their armor. Having barely broken stride in the process, I resumed my run, only to suddenly break into a baseball slide just as I reached the corner.
  
  With the sudden change of my profile from 'standing' to 'prone', the rigger-controlled turret covering that hallway junction put the burst of minigun fire just over my head instead of into it. Not that I would actually be injured if it hit me, but on the off chance of any security logs actually surviving this run I'd prefer it if the video evidence of my rampage 'merely' had me displaying entirely implausible levels of skill and cinematic toughness as opposed to explicitly advertising that I was an Outside Context Problem come visiting. And so I let the minigun fire narrowly miss me while I tossed a 'borrowed' frag grenade with preternatural accuracy right into the exposed turret mount, and let the immediately following detonation blow it into a sparking, shuddering wreck right before it could finish adjusting its arc of fire.
  
  A burst of pure mana erupted around and within me. One of MCT's security mages had arrived, and he'd gone straight for the kill. The mana spells were the most elementary and yet often the most effective class of offensive magic - they channeled destructive magical power directly into the aura, ignoring all things of the material universe as if they weren't there and harming only living or magical targets. The weakest mana bolt cast by the rawest apprentice could penetrate any arbitrary thickness of laminate armor - provided it was transparent, as line-of-sight was still a requirement - to kill a target on the other side as if they'd been firing through so much air. They still had to overcome the resistance posed by a target's willpower or magical defenses, but they were still a logical first choice to use on a man who'd recently demonstrated that he could ignore gunfire.
  
  I ignored the mage as readily as I'd ignored his spell to concentrate on the man next to him. The arriving six-man specialist team who'd rushed right to take up a final defensive line around the airlock had included a mage, a heavy weapons trooper, and four elite shooters, straight out of the manual. Although the APDS-loaded assault rifles on the shooters was entirely per SOP, I'd been expecting a Vindicator minigun or perhaps an assault cannon on the heavy weapons trooper as opposed to what he was carrying. Which was a Mitsuhama knockoff of the Ares MP Laser man-portable energy weapons system.
  
  I had no real fear that my invulnerability could be compromised even by a cut-down version of the anti-vehicle laser cannons they mounted on AFVs, even one that required a substantial and bulky battery pack just to hold twenty shots' worth of juice. But I still didn't want to get hit by one of those things on-camera if I could readily avoid it, so my first shot went into the gunner's eye socket via the targeting scope of his laser cannon than into the mage. Which gave the mage a chance for his follow-up attack, a powerball charged with everything he possibly had, to erupt around me. A physical instead of a mana-class spell, the area-effect attack managed to blow my remaining clothes into scattered rags and wreck every weapon I had on me even though it didn't touch me.
  
  Which was of course the cue for the riflemen to volley fire. My superhuman speed of reaction put me prone on the deck to evade the first shot, but it would have been the work of a moment for them to simply adjust fire downward. So both my hands reached down with fingers outstretched to claw through the armored floor plates, and with a heave of my forearms I tore up an entire square section of the armorplast and then crouch-walked forward as I brought it to the vertical like an improvised wall. My shield bought me sufficient time against the incoming hail of fire to resume standing, but I could already feel a third spell - a powerbolt - crack it down the middle even as the APDS rifle ammunition began to chip it.
  
  So I let go, and then with impossible balance and poise had my foot snap out in a crossover sidekick for my heel to land micrometrically above the exact center of gravity of the floor plate. It rocketed sideways down the corridor, the center of gravity staying precisely on the arc I'd calculated for it as the rest of the plate slowly revolved around it, and after going through a full 270 degrees of spin the plate slammed edge-first directly into the faceplates of all five men. After all, what formation allows five men in a hallway to all have a clear shot at the same target? A side-by-side phalanx, of course. So while the impact didn't quite tear their heads loose from their necks, the almost two hundred pounds of armorplast traveling at a speed more appropriate to a major league fastball slamming directly into their foreheads did certainly cause enough whiplash to snap five sets of cervical vertebrae as easily as breadsticks.
  
  I darted forward to open the inner airlock door and noted with a touch of admiration that somebody on the other side had been thinking very fast. According to the indicator the outer door had already been opened, and was being kept open so that the purely mechanical safety interlock would still make it impossible to open the inner door even if all the lock control systems were otherwise hacked. Not only would this keep me penned in the sealed lab, it would make it impossible for me to barricade the airlock door from my side by leaving the inner door wedged open. Point to MCT.
  
  So I wedged the inner door shut instead, by using the laser cannon's reinforced chrome-iridium barrel as a giant armored door bar and wedged it in to where the dogs of the hatch couldn't turn. I had enough to do with hunting down and killing all the rats already in the innermost section of this trap, the rest of the base could simply wait their turn.
  
  I calculated furiously even as my hands finished barring the door. The guards in the inner lab section have just seen their preset script collapse and are going to have to start freelancing. Headcount of men I've already killed. Exact subtleties of timing and approach. Distant echoes subliminally perceived cries for help, shouted commands... patrol routes... time-and-motion calculations...
  
  I headed for the chief researcher's office, hefting my new hypervelocity assault rifle. Loaded with armor-piercing-discarding-sabot ammunition, this was just the thing for chewing directly through the heavy body armor on the guards. I killed another two-man team on my way there, hearing their approaching footsteps before they'd even rounded the corner and catching each of them with a neat burst to the head the instant they'd come into line of sight. Stepping over their bodies literally without breaking stride, I sneered at the sealed office door - a simple interior door, this one, not an armored airtight hatch - and booted it. The rifle left my hands in a lazy toss the instant the broken door cleared my line of sight enough to see where my target was standing, slammed sideways off the head of the man hard enough to daze him, and neatly bounced right back into my hand as I stepped into the office and caught the crumpling man by the collar with my other hand. The pistol he'd been holding in his shaking hands to try and defend himself with fell to the floor, unfired.
  
  "I know you can hear me, assholes, so back off!" I shouted. "Unless you want this fucker's brains to be paint!"
  
  "How are you doing this?" Dr. Charlton - it was on the nameplate on his desk - gasped. "These powers are entirely unprecedented for virtuakinetics-"
  
  "I'm a physical adept, you drekhead." I growled in a coarse, lower-class accent. "Your idiot bounty hunters grabbed me when I was out with one of them and just thought we both were. Didn't they say something about 'possible only' and 'verify once I was here?'"
  
  "Ah-ah-" he babbled in terror as I manhandled him back down the hallway. "If- if you're not really a valid research subject than we can, ah, ah, possibly negotiate a release-"
  
  "That's what I want." I agreed. "Of course, it ain't like I'm gonna trust you fucks so the first step towards you not getting wasted is we go to the chief screw in this madhouse and talk to him." I stopped at the first junction coming back from his office. "Where the fuck is he?"
  
  Dr. Charlton frantically pointed towards the security station - I knew it where was already, of course, but this was a role-play - and off we went. Soon enough I was confronting the chief guard of the sealed section and his surviving men - all eleven of them - through the window of the enclosed station. My enhanced hearing could dimly pick up the talk from inside.
  
  "Arakashi-san, he has our chief researcher!"
  "The priority is immediate containment! Researchers can be replaced."
  "We do not have to actually yield to his demands, nor should we! Simply pretend to allow him to escape and then confine and destroy him in the elevator shaft!"
  "We will take this under advisement. For now, you have your orders."
  
  "Let me in!" I said, the pistol barrel directly underneath Dr. Charlton's chin.
  
  "I cannot-" the chief guard began.
  
  "Motherfucker, did you think I did not notice all your guys were wearing sealed helmets? I am not waiting around for you to say 'fuck it' and pump in the Seven-7. We continue these negotiations in the only room in this place I am sure the gas vents don't go into. Yours."
  
  "That will not be-"
  
  "As soon as I think I'm dead anyway, what happens? Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven!"
  
  "WAIT!" he cried. "Let me move some of these people out so you can come in first!"
  
  My enhanced hearing picked up the footsteps of men moving out the rear entrance to the room... and some suspiciously muffled noises even closer. The guards I could see continued holding their corners to each side of me down the corridor.
  
  "Oh thank God!" Dr. Charlton breathed in relief.
  
  "Okay! Go around to the right, the door will be unlocked!" the chief guard called.
  
  I deliberately didn't look up at a certain pair of ceiling corners in the little alcove-hallway that led to the security booth's front door. I'll give MCT an 'A' for effort here, the advanced ruthenium-polymer chameleon jumpsuits on those cyber-ninjas was doing a wonderful job of cloaking them on both visible light and IR frequencies... but to astral sight? They were literally Day-Glo silhouettes against a black background.
  
  So I obligingly walked into the trap, less obligingly shoved Dr. Charlton in through the open security room door as I leaned to the side just enough for the one cyber-ninja's mono-edged katana to go over my left ear instead of thrust through my skull as the other one's slash at my spine fell just an inch too short, and crushed the first ninja's skull with an elbow strike while I reached up and elegantly redirected his dying slash with a deft butterfly tap to his wrist so that his sword cut his partner's head off instead.
  
  To be fair, both of those guys had been implanted with some of the most advanced move-by-wire central nervous system augmentation around - the stuff that had been real popular in the early 2060s but had started falling out of favor when it turned out there was no real way around the 'you almost inevitably end up a severe Parkinson's case inside twenty years from the destructive overclocking'. But you still occasionally ran into people who'd gotten those mods back before they'd fully appreciated the side effects, and when they worked they let people move with a swiftness, dexterity, and superhuman speed of reaction not even the highest-grade deltaware wired reflexes could match and even most physical adepts couldn't dream of seeing.
  
  I went through this latest pair of tackling dummies without any real effort and curled a lip with sardonic amusement as I took up my latest addition to the weapon collection. Really, they handed me an advanced composite katana with an advanced monofilament inlay edge designed for slicing right through modern body armor just like that? Were they trying to bore me to death? Well, now that a weapon positively optimized for allowing a superhuman melee specialist to kill as many men as quickly as possible at short range had literally just fallen right into my lap, I might as well finish up on that chore.
  
  The chief guard shrugged off his frozen panic just in time for me to cut his first bullet out of the air - no, of course the katana didn't shatter, you could literally split a soft-nosed pistol bullet with a butter knife if you hit it edge-on - and then split his head. I slammed the still-prone Dr. Charlton to the floor as I used him as a springboard to come up-and-over and kill one man with a slash, rebound my extended foot off the wall and cut down another man en passant, then spin and thrust up under my elbow and behind me to catch a third man in the heart. I pulled the pins on two flashbangs from a dead guard's web gear and didn't even bother to remove the grenades as I just tossed his entire corpse back out the door, and used that momentary distraction to get back out in the hall, with the katana in one hand and an ADPS-loaded SMG in the other, to deal with the remaining men.
  
  By the time Puck arrived in his borrowed armor I'd put Dr. Charlton in a chair in the corner - one of the very few not coated in blood - where he remained huddled in near-catatonic terror while I methodically worked the keyboard. Yes, actual manual input, how very anti-technomancer retro. The security displays obligingly told me what I wanted to know. Five remaining labs besides the one we were in, all the 'research subjects' confined back in their cell-capsules as per lockdown protocols, fourteen remaining research staff... and, yup, clean sweep of all the guards on this side of the airlock.
  
  "All right, I'm in." Puck said as he appropriated the now-deceased security rigger's couch and closed his eyes as he mentally connected to the systems. "Okay, now."
  
  I reached out and physically ripped loose the right junction box in the maintenance space just off the security booth. Since the CO2 purge systems were piggybacked on the original fire extinguisher systems, the cable runs for them ran right through here. I hadn't dared to physically tear out the hard lines until Puck was on station to block any last-second button pushes from the main facility control center outside the sealed lab - they'd obviously do that as soon as they realized what our true objective was, of course - but now that he was here, it was time to make absolutely sure that danger would be spiked.
  
  "Status?" I asked Puck.
  
  "The researchers don't know what to do, and nobody's told them it's more than just a loose subject so they're not even thinking of purging on their own." Puck reassured me. "I already let the other one in Lab Alpha out and put him in a safe place, so we can use that room."
  
  "And use it we will." I agreed. "After you cut the sealed section's PA systems out of circuit from the main, then use the chief guard's voice to announce that the intruder has been killed and the lockdown is over. Then order all the remaining researchers to secure their research subjects intact, and report to Lab Alpha for a headcount. And lock 'em all in there in as soon as they're all present."
  
  "On it." Puck nodded, and smiled for the first time since this had started. "I'll start working on the main computer as soon as they're all locked in. Your wife is in Lab Bravo-Two, and-"
  
  I was already halfway down the hall before he could finish the sentence.
  
  Although while I was certainly frantically rushing off, I was not frantically rushing off to immediately fling myself into the arms of my beloved. For one thing, I was not only buck-ass nude but also literally soaked from head to toe in the blood and dried brains of my enemies. So despite my haste I would still have to at least stop long enough to take a quick shower, and then find some clothes to wear. Plus I'd have to make sure that our ruse had actually worked and I didn't have to actually go roust out any stragglers or have any last-minute hostage stand-offs over the life of one of the research subjects.
  
  But it only took a few minutes to handle those necessary chores, and with my heart beating a mile a minute I finally approached the lab Puck had designated. My jaw clenched and my stomach fell as I saw that she was comatose and lying on a diagnostic hospital bed with literal electrodes on her head-
  
  Forcing myself to stay calm and check out the status displays and her attached chart was the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life. Subject Eight, the cold and merciless documentation said. Subjected to four days of 'augmented interrogation' after in-processing - a small corner of my mind noted that at least I'd guessed right about the lack of rape or permanent injury, even if the chemicals and waterboarding had gotten pretty harsh - then they'd started the neurological studies. Anomalous coma and unresponsive for days 5 and 6 - that must have been when she hacked the Archives - and then...
  
  I finished going through her chart, noted her diagnostics, and let my paramedical training walk me through the necessary procedures. A nearby medical supply locker gave me the proper injection, and I slotted it into her IV and waited.
  
  Her eyes opened, and after far too long a moment they focused on me. The sheer coruscating hatred that she radiated back up at me sent me into a screaming panic. Oh my God, somehow they've wiped her mind-!
  
  ... and then I realized that I was still wearing a fake face and a 'borrowed' MCT lab uniform.
  
  "Uh... you want to just log off and go hang out or something?" I facepalmed while experimentally verifying that my immortality did in fact also extend to not dying of embarrassment.
  
  Cat's eyes widened like a squirrel's at not only hearing my voice but also hearing me repeat the first pickup line that I'd ever used on her, and then she began laughing so hard that she almost set off the medical monitors.
  
  
  
  "Where are we?" I asked Puck as I re-entered the booth. Cat was in good shape - relatively speaking - because even though the first round of interrogations had finished she'd still been earmarked for eventual follow-up interrogations about Horizon's research at length. So her records had been flagged for 'no destructive procedures'. It had still been no picnic, and I was already hoping Smiling Bandit or someone else on JackPoint knew a good psychologist for a post-trauma checkout and if necessary counseling, but she was alive, she would recover, she was still here-
  
  "The main server is crushed." Puck grinned nastily. "It was tricky getting an outside line open, but their security deckers didn't have much experience at dealing with sprites. They were so busy suppressing me that they ignored what my sprite was doing to re-enable the external hardline until it was too late. And once the JackPointers could come in-"
  
  "Any risk they can cut it off again manually from this end?" I said. "Or just crash the host? Even Bandit and Pistons were not entirely confident of the odds of working through such a narrow external connection."
  
  "There was a last-minute change of plan." Puck said. "While you and I were out of contact on the way here-" he shook his head wonderingly. "We'd kept the full scope of the operation as discreet as possible from the second wave of volunteers before the final kickoff, but this guy called Slamm-0 had put together enough of the pieces to figure it out anyway. Apparently he was a fan of Cat's Matrix research or something, so he'd already known-" Puck shrugged. "At any rate, he knew what we were going to do before Frosty did the final briefing. So he did what Bandit and Pistons didn't do, because he was too clueless to know that Bandit had already written off asking him to roll on this one due to his blowing Bandit off about the Emergence project some months ago."
  
  "Fastjack deployed on this one?" I asked incredulously, knowing exactly who Bandit had complained about being unable to reach before. "No wonder they crushed the main host as soon as you got the door ajar!"
  
  "And all because this guy barely older than me in Seattle was smart enough to figure it out and dumb enough to not know not to leak it." Puck agreed ruefully. "This whole op has been nothing but non-stop weird."
  
  "The story of this guy's life." Cat joked from where she was still in her wheelchair. "But it grows on you after a while."
  
  "What are the rest of the sub-level guards doing?" I asked, switching back to professional mode.
  
  The main display in the security booth switched to a picture of the scene on the outside of the airlock. Wait, that was a demolitions team!
  
  "You think you might have called me?" I asked Puck.
  
  "I would have if they were ready to go, but they're still trying to figure out a way to breach a level 5 security barrier they engineered to not be vulnerable to a hostile team of sappers." Puck explained. "So it'd be at least ten more minutes before they got enough explosives ready, if not twenty. Especially given that they're distracted by none of their automated security working anymore and-"
  
  The display switched and split to show multiple camera views of most of the rest of the guards stacked up on the bottom of the elevator shaft, ranging from the immediate defensive line ready to enfilade the elevator in multiple overlapping fields of fire to the secondary and tertiary lines behind them in the corridors leading away from the shaft bottom.
  
  "-they're about ready to deal with that."
  
  "The topside teams got through?" I said relievedly.
  
  "Got through?" Puck said proudly. "Here's some playback."
  
  The vision block switched to security recordings of the recent action topside that Puck now had access to from the thoroughly compromised central computer, some of it even from the overhead patrol drones circling the camp. The images switched one to another in a hurried montage-
  
  The sudden panic on the faces of guards as Fastjack, Smiling Bandit, Pistons, and all the other deckers who'd volunteered crushed all the camp's systems and jacked the rest. Which meant that their own drones were starting to shoot down at them, and all their air-defense artillery and most of their fixed gun emplacements were offline-
  
  The main gate of the camp being blown open from half a mile away by a 125mm railgun, a weapon normally used as the primary armament on first-line main battle tanks, except this one had been retrofitted onto a heavily-customized vectored-thrust Banshee LAV. One whose chameleon paint was currently set in an entirely non-military bright red-and-yellow pattern and with nose art proudly proclaiming it to be The Screaming Rat Frag II, which was leading a small convoy of other vehicles of every size and description right down the entrance road and towards the wire-
  
  Sounder's helicopter swooping in low to let a team led by Hard Exit fast-rope right onto the roof of the camp command center, before moving off to start delivering close air support with the nose guns-
  
  Pandemonium erupting among the hastily-forming MCT defensive lines as heavy sapper charges detonated in the background, as men I recognized as being from "Rifleman" McCord's Bravo Company, a specialized unit of mercenary commandos led by an old friend of Picador's, leapt out from where they'd infiltrated the camp immediately before the battle and started their particular brand of chaos-
  
  Pistons and Fatima leading more runners I didn't recognize across the same concentration camp loading dock I'd crossed only - God, had that been less than an hour ago? - as they fought their way in towards the top of the main elevator shaft-
  
  The camera views switched back to the men stacked up at the bottom of the shaft. "They're about to breach." Puck said.
  
  "Can you use the sentry guns on them? Clear the entry team's path?" I asked.
  
  "They manually blew their own gun turrets as soon as they realized they weren't getting control of the guns or the electrical power distribution back." Puck said.
  
  "Shit! And if I open the door to go out and help them, I risk all the helpless people in here-" I agonized in indecision. "Fuck it, our turrets still work. I'll-"
  
  And then the elevator doors began to crack open and the decision was taken entirely out of my hands.
  
  At least fifteen men were already dialed in on that door, with everything from hypervelocity assault rifles like the one I'd recently used to assault cannons, grenade launchers, sec-mages, and even two more laser troopers. Sergeant Ivan on the best day of his life couldn't have hoped to survive a tenth of that fire, and that old troll had been so tough he'd been almost as unkillable as me. I winced inside as I realized that I was too late to stop friends of mine from dying-
  
  And then the elevator doors stopped after they'd opened only a bare couple inches, and before the guards could catch up to what had just happened the biggest damn fireball that I had ever even heard of erupted in the center of that room. As an indirect area spell the casting mage had only needed line-of-sight to the center of effect, and the blast wave would erupt out and hit them from there. Every guard within radius of the effect was taken completely out of action, literally sent flying from the force of the blast as they were cooked at least halfway to death inside their armor.
  
  The doors resumed opening to reveal Frosty standing dead center in the formation, literally crackling with power like an angry goddess. Flanking her as she stepped out and started burning down every MCT guard she could see with mana bolts were Hard Exit and Rifleman, both of whom immediately dashed on her left wing and right wing with literally eye-blurring speed. Breaking Hard Exit's own rule about not fighting in a basement with grenade launchers, they each pumped a thermobaric from their underbarrels into the two nearest clumps of the secondary defensive line outside the room and then started serving APDS headshots with a cybernetically-augmented or adept-augmented speed and murderous accuracy almost rivaling me.
  
  A round dozen of other JackPointers piled out from behind them and made sure the dying guards on the floor were actually dead before peeling off behind the point team to go join the fun. By the time that was done the elevator finished coming back down with another load of shooters underneath the command of Bravo Company's XO, who peeled off to go make sure the staff quarters were secured while the first team hurried to join Frosty's ongoing one-elf rampage of destruction towards the airlock. I was going to have to talk to her about that later... well, maybe not.
  
  I stepped back to lean down and let Cat get an arm around me to hug and be hugged, as we both teared up in relief. The plan had worked. The inside team of me and Puck had secured the sealed lab and removed all immediate threats, then we'd opened up the hardline so the hackers could take the central computer for the sub-level to match the job they'd already done topside. Meanwhile, everybody we'd assembled for the assault left their prepared positions nearby in the Mojave and ran for the wire as soon as MCT was restricted to small arms and the few combat vehicles they'd been able to get into action - which had mostly been dealt with by their own hijacked close-air support drones.
  
  Almost two dozen JackPointers ranging from old friends to total strangers whose names I still didn't have had joined the Bravo Company detachments we'd hired as force augmenters for the assault. As soon as Fastjack's team up top knew the kickoff had started, they'd moved in. A killing jar worked as well to keep people out as well as in, so all we'd had to do was bar the airlock from the inside and wait for the siege to be relieved-
  
  "There you are!" Frosty's shout interrupted us as she burst into the room and immediately moved to kneel down in front of me and Cat while she frantically started casting diagnostic spells. "Are you all right? Did Wild Man already get the ones who tortured you or are there any left for me? Do you know how worried we've been? Answer me, dammit!" Jane begged before looking up at me. "Why isn't she talking? Did they-?"
  
  I put my hand over Jane's mouth.
  
  "I was just waiting for a chance to get a word in edgewise." Cat said gently.
  
  Jane glared heatedly at us both. "Did you plan this? Just to get me to embarass myse-" and then she stopped herself and shook her head, breaking out into helpless laughter as her eyes started to tear up. "Hey you." she said softly to Cat.
  
  "Hey you too." Cat leaned forward out of her wheelchair to hug her and Jane hugged back. "It's okay, Jane. I'm all right. I'm here."
  
  "Yeah." Jane exhaled, before making a valiant effort to get her war face back on. "So. The chair?"
  
  "Just a precaution." I said. "As soon as Bandit clears her, she can walk with us right out of here."
  
  "Speaking of that," Smiling Bandit broke in, "Puck already has his, but you're both going to need your antidote injections." He leaned over and expertly gave one to Cat, then to me. "There you go. I'll want you to get a blood test tomorrow to make sure it took, but you've got at least 48 hours until the earliest possible danger period can start and I just doublechecked in the lab computer that the RNA keys you got to me are still current."
  
  "Good." Cat exhaled in relief.
  
  "Make a hole!" Pistons cried loudly as her and Fatima finally forced their way past the crush and joined the tears and hugging parade.
  
  "Not to be a bastard, but clock's ticking." Rifleman broke in.
  
  "Major McCord?" Cat greeted him puzzledly. "Not that I'm not happy to see you, but I was expecting the 77th to deploy on this op if anyone did."
  
  "Corporal Connors." he greeted her with a wicked grin. "As to that, Carmen sends her warmest regards and you'll see her soon. But right now she's got a different tasking."
  
  "Yeah, her job is to take him into custody." Hard Exit grinned amiably.
  
  "What?" Cat asked confusedly.
  
  "It's a Kansas City shuffle." Pistons explained to her. "Officially, concerned parties of an unspecified nature hired Bravo Company to search and destroy a particularly nasty biowarfare lab that they'd just gotten intel that MCT was running. And so Rifleman's troops came in and did their usual superlative job... all by themselves."
  
  "But lo and behold, when we get here we don't just find a hot bio-lab, we find 'crimes against humanity' level research involving experimenting on innocent metahumans!" Rifleman grinned. "So since we don't have the capacity to secure and medevac that sort of humanitarian crisis all by ourselves, we're forced to break stealth and call for assistance."
  
  "Enter the 77th Independent Rangers, 'coincidentally' nearby on a training mission in the old Mojave maneuver grounds and old friends of Rifleman here." Fatima chimed in. "Who will, precisely as the Mercenary Guild canons require, coordinate with local authorities to legally resolve the situation and take all suspect parties into custody."
  
  "Especially us nasty non-Guild, half-merc/half-runner PMC covert tactical teams." Rifleman said amusedly. "So there we are, suffering the horrors of being 'detained' by some of my best friends. Who are also a large enough independent mercenary force that the MCT reinforcements currently trying to rush here from Barstow are having problems getting past a rather large and insistent roadblock and won't get to 'detain' us themselves."
  
  "So everybody's back in CalFree territory by the time the reinforcements can get unstuck, not MCT extraterritorial turf, meaning that MCT loses the jurisdiction fight there. And by that time, all the runners who were never here in the first place, along with any of the rescue victims who don't want to be officially rescued, will be smoke in the wind." I explained.
  
  "But doesn't that leave you stuck in a rather large crack, sir?" Cat asked Rifleman.
  
  "The odds of California Free State deciding to extradite us to MCT are negative point zip." he snorted. "Leaving aside the current political situation and the number of people who owe other people involved in this op some favors-"
  
  "Plus the part where the fix is in, given that the local CalFree official who'd be the only one who could extradite the trespassers before it escalated to the governor is currently enjoying the brand new Mitsubishi Nightsky someone bought him for an early Christmas present." Frosty chuckled.
  
  "And as soon as it gets to the governor's mansion then it's... wait, the corp with the most influence there right now is Horizon!" Cat said, before catching on. "But they want other corps to be revealed as being awful to technomancers, as part of Case Charlie! So even if they curse that the Emergence is kicking off early, they'll roll with the punch because they've got no other choice-"
  
  "MCT bad, heroic rescuers good, slaps on the wrist all around and please don't do it again." Rifleman nodded. "Damn sure beats the last time I got caught on the wrong side of a border after pissing in one of the big boys' coffee mugs. And yes, MCT's going to put me on their shit list. They suck anyway, and I've already way up on the Azzies' shit list so they can just take a number and wait." he finished arrogantly.
  
  "And it's not like anybody's going to tell them that you were one of the technomancers detained here."I agreed. "So right now they're wondering where I got lost to, but that's hardly conclusive enough to stop them from doing what they need to do to roll right into the play here."
  
  Hard Exit tapped her headset. "Okay, they're getting close. We've got fifteen minutes at best, so time to start rolling. Bandit, is everyone who said they're leaving with us cleared to move?"
  
  "Yes." he said. "Butch should have no problem treating them on her end. In my persona as the 'biohazard consultant' the Major hired, I have to stay here and play along." He smiled. "Which coincidentally leaves me able to officially testify on everything I saw in this lab, in sufficient expert detail that MCT's usual spin brigade will not find it so convenient to slip away, as well as ensuring that any lab records that would prove problematic to the desired scenario are... de-emphasized?"
  
  "Plus we took the chief researcher and most of his staff alive, and some of them are going to CalFree and some others are leaving with us to be dropped off with various other alphabet agencies in the UCAS." Fatima explained.
  
  "I didn't take all those CIA contracts just to lose the phone numbers when they could be useful." Rifleman nodded.
  
  "How did you set all this up in barely eleven days?" she asked me in wonder.
  
  "It wasn't easy!" I cracked, before continuing more soberly with a nod to Jane and all the rest. "And I had a lot of help. Some friends, some friends of friends-"
  
  "And a lot more enemies of Mitsuhama." Fatima joked.
  
  "We need to start moving, people, it's getting close up there." Hard Exit nudged us gently.
  
  Jane helped me get Cat to her feet as we prepared to leave. "You heard the lady, time to go."
  
  "Go where?" she asked. "It's certainly not like Horizon's a valid option." she sneered in their general direction.
  
  "For right now, back to the shadows." Jane and I nodded to each other. "In the long run? ... not gonna lie, I wasn't making any big plans for past today." I looked at Cat soberly. "Not until I knew who I'd be planning for."
  
  "So you're saying that after burning down pretty much everything we'd built up to date, your only plan for beyond that point was 'wing it'?" Cat replied, but with the beaming smile on her face entirely belying her words.
  
  "Worked out for us so far, hasn't it?" I smiled back. "Let's roll."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Jesus fucking Christ, this chapter is maybe the hardest one I've ever done. For any story, not just this story. I am still terrified it's not gonna entirely work out after that much build-up. And I actually ran out of ways to creatively describe killing people towards the end, hence, y'know, not. Let me tell you, action movie fight choreographers ain't paid enough.
  
  As to the lack of a smoking crater and Omni-Man level splattering, note that the long game they're setting up (some of which you just heard) requires a certain level of plausible deniability re: the forensic evidence left behind - and even then Bandit's gonna have to do some serious crime scene cleanup, one of the reasons he's staying behind. Also, even though Wild Man is unleashing the thunder more now he's still not going to waste effort. They're dead, he won, he moves on. Making a splatter art project out of it is not his style. And we still got into the seriously bullshit range with some of those moves, like, come on. *g*
  
  I didn't name all the JackPointer cameos for the same reason the 77th is not actually on-stage, conservation of detail. Also to let you imagine that maybe your fave boy was there, even if he wasn't mentioned. Word bloat kills momentum, and this chapter was all about momentum, climax, and then denouement. But even the cool-off has to be paced.
  
  Furthermore, you finally get the reason he was so reluctant to ramp up his IQ so superhumanly. Anything else he ramps up, he can still be sure he can ramp down. He starts pushing the 'mutate brain' button on his powers with an incomplete understanding of what his power does... well. It's the same logic that makes you not chart the limits of your invulnerability by shooting yourself in the head. What if you misunderestimated? What if? Seriously, check out that list of names, and marvel at how incomplete it is.
  
  For those who think Bravo Company is way too convenient - they are canon, what they do is canon, who owes them favors is canon, and Rifleman and Picador being best buds is canon. So while it certainly was convenient for me, I didn't hack them up just to make it easy for myself. They were already there in the SR toolkit.
  
  Lastly, I have minor outpatient surgery coming up in a couple of days - nothing huge, just a little procedure - so there will be a short writing break after this chapter or the next.
  
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  "It's good to see you, Gary." Sarah McClain shook my hand. I didn't need my AR display and facial recognition/real-time database lookup algorithms to remind me that 'Fireball's' social relevance was the team captain of LA's - which really meant 'Horizon's', of course - Urban Brawl franchise. Nor to remind me of all the pending action items linked to the Bolts, especially not the most vexing of them all-
  
  "I wasn't aware you were a fan of the opera." I answered her amiably. Because I wasn't, there were no indicators of a prior interest in the field at all. No prior purchases of tickets, no streaming downloads of opera-related media-
  
  "Well, it's never too late to try new things." she answered me, before continuing more soberly. "Oh, and along that line I have a heads-up. He hasn't set a date on the announcement yet but Andrew - you know, Silver Streak? - just decided to retire."
  
  "Damn." I said passionately. "With one of the team's best scouts already missing, we're soon to lose the other one?" I observed the obvious, and raised an inward eyebrow at McClain's momentary wince. "I'm sorry, I know that sounded insensitive."
  
  "No, no, it was the obvious thought." she replied. "Pity about what happened."
  
  "A great pity." I answered with my best commiserating smile. "But-" I allowed my expression to appear downcast. "I think I can understand why."
  
  "Sir?" she asked me anxiously.
  
  "Our investigators have concluded that it was almost certainly MCT who'd involuntarily extracted Catherine, but-" I sighed lugubriously. "You of course saw the breaking news about the 'technomancer' research lab of MCT's that was publicly exposed several days ago?"
  
  "No sir, I was entirely unaware of the lead worldwide breaking news event of the past seventy-two hours." she snorted mildly.
  
  "What you are almost certainly genuinely unaware of is that Catherine also had those abilities. Tam's people had been working in secret to try and find better ways to safely develop them-" I waved my hand dismissively. "The point is, by now our intelligence section is almost certain that MCT was the corporation that had involuntarily extracted her."
  
  "But... she wasn't one of the five people those mercenaries recovered from the lab." Sarah said soberly. "Which means she's-" Her expression fell. "That's horrible."
  
  "It entirely is." I nodded. "And of course, wherever he might be right now Alex will also have seen that news." I sighed and shook my head. "I don't think he's going to be coming back, Sarah."
  
  "Neither do I, Gary." she said, staring me levelly in the eye. "I just hope that wherever he ends up, it's a better place."
  
  "I entirely agree." I reassured her, while thinking into my trodes to send a private text.
  
  "Sir?" Sandra DeVries, the Dawkins Group assistant VP tasked to the Emergence project who was currently in her public persona as an anonymous mid-ranking senior executive assistant of some type, quietly came up alongside me as she responded to my message. "If I might have a moment?"
  
  "Of course. Excuse me, Sarah, I have to take this." I said, and left with him on my way to head up to my opera box. Ah, the good old 'I'm being paged' excuse, a time-honored favorite for escaping unwanted conversations.
  
  "You're late." Tam Reyes greeted me nervously as I joined him in the box. "Wasn't the whole point of this appearance to show how confident and life-goes-on and everything we were, even in the middle of something as huge as the Emergence?"
  
  "Just because it wasn't entirely on our schedule doesn't mean it's not working, Tam." I turned to the third member of our entourage, blandly anonymous as always. "Sandra?" I asked her.
  
  While we were clearly visible to the crowd in my private opera box, the transparent armor-glass barrier intended to minimize the risk of snipers also did a wonderful job at keeping private conversations private from the crowd. There was even a subtle holographic distortion effect that kept us looking entirely au naturale while still making lip-reading and other such reconstruction impossible. We certainly wouldn't have talked about such matters in public if we weren't private, and just because the demands of public imaging required me and Tam to take time out of our schedules tonight to appear unconcerned and confident to the world that didn't mean we'd waste any valuable brainstorming time.
  
  "Dawkins concurs." she reassured us both. "Even though the public revelation of technomancers in the Barstow Incident was entirely a black swan event, it had the good fortune to line up with two of the primary meme complexes we wanted to advance for Charlie. 'Technomancers are not monsters', which a good victim scenario as a first impression is always nice for selling. And 'Technomancers are under threat', which MCT couldn't have done a better job of showcasing if we'd written them a script. The initial revelations already started those processes, all our post-incident response needed to do was keep pushing it. Which we have."
  
  "There was a third primary meme-complex to Charlie." Tam reminded us forcefully. "'Technomancers should come to Horizon, we will guarantee your freedom'. And how's that one selling?"
  
  "It's a work in progress, Tam." I remonstrated with him. "But we've certainly got a fertile field to start planting those seeds."
  
  "I wish we knew just who the hell paid for that strike on MCT's lab." Tam fretted. "I know everyone else thinks it was us, and I even know why we're letting everyone else keep thinking that, but that still doesn't mean we don't have a need to know."
  
  "Right now it's almost certainly looking like the UCAS government." I told him. "McCord's 'independent' contractors might as well just be a deniable sub-compartment of the CIA anyway, they've been Deputy Director Cole's pets ever since Campeche."
  
  "If a major national government became aware of technomancers, their analysts should be able to at least partially compute the broad cases of a public Emergence as well as we could." Tam conceded. "And depending on exactly who won the argument inside the Beltway they could be aiming at anything from Bravo to Delta, any of which would fit the MCT strike. And all five of the research subjects recovered alive were UCAS citizens."
  
  "I will disagree with Gary only to the point that while the UCAS government is certainly the most likely suspect we have for who was backing Bravo Company, we still have no real evidence in that regard." She shrugged. "Not that that's surprising, given that the only proof would exist in McCord's head and we haven't had a chance to talk to him at all."
  
  "I would say that the unusually rapid speed at which the CalFree state government extradited the detained Bravo Company operatives - including Major McCord - back to UCAS jurisdiction is at least some indirect evidence that the fix was in." I observed. "It's not as if we haven't known that there's more than a few people in Sacramento who believe in keeping the old motherland sweet towards CalFree."
  
  "Valid." Sandra concluded.
  
  "Any word on the Kincaids?" Tam inquired. "Especially Catherine? Because we really can't afford-"
  
  "Mrs. Kincaid is the worrisome one." Sandra agreed. "You know I argued at the time for just executing her ourselves, regardless of scenario benefits or future risks. Once we knew she'd started to put the pieces together, we should have made absolutely certain she was dead. Ourselves."
  
  "You know why I veto'ed that." I said. "And it wasn't just because I loved a good script. We'd simply put too much work into building a public awareness of her, even low-key, as part of the original Bravo script and her intended role as its poster girl. Still, we know she didn't turn up among the lab's survivors. All five of them are still in the protective custody of the state, busily testifying against their kidnappers. So either Catherine's in another MCT facility somewhere slowly dying, or this one already killed her. Either way, we win, and 'Crackshot' can just crawl off and die in any gutter that will accept him." I shrugged. "It's annoying to not be able to start running our pre-prepared scripts there until he does us the courtesy of popping up again - alive or dead - to let us know which one to use, but-"
  
  "I know, I know." Tam said. "I helped set up her capture in the first place, you might recall?"
  
  "Of course you did, Tam." I said. "You did good work. You always do good work." I nodded and looked out at the crowd waiting for the opera to start.
  
  "I'm not as sanguine as you are about Mr. Kincaid, sir." Sandra said worriedly. "According to the profile we reconstructed for him, the man was a highly competent shadowrunner and mercenary. He should have done something by now, and yet-" she shrugged. "It's quiet. Too quiet."
  
  "Famous movie quotes are my shtick, Sandra." I said tolerantly. "Relax. I'm sure everything will be-"
  
  And then the commlinks of everyone in the opera house began beeping a particular shrill pattern that was never heard in normal operation, as AR displays and backup audio speakers both began playing an override broadcast.
  
  "This is the Emergency Broadcasting System with an alert override for all citizens of Los Angeles, Orange, and Brown counties. All citizens are requested to tune into public-access AR as soon as possible. This is not a test. Repeat, this is not a test."
  
  "There was nothing on the threat board!" Sandra said immediately. "What's going on?"
  
  "I'm in AR, but the alert message is just looping. There's no flash." Tam said.
  
  "Sir!" my security chief said as the door opened behind us. "We don't know what this is yet-"
  
  "No one does." I interrupted him curtly. "I'm not evacuating until we have some idea of what's going on."
  
  "Sir, right now I want you at least out of the room and into the opera house's basement shelter." he insisted. "Security override protocols, we are moving now."
  
  Sandra got up and waved to us. "He's right, we're too exposed here. And this might be an earthquake warning, at which point we'd damn well want to be in a seismic-rated shelter instead of the second floor."
  
  That certainly made sense. We all got to our feet and left the opera box as my bodyguards linked up with the on-site reaction team and bubbled up around us as we headed towards the stairwell.
  
  "Let's go let's go let's go!" my security chief spoke urgently into his commlink. "Simstar and Hotspot plus one are moving, clear stairwell five all the way to the basement!"
  
  "The actual alert broadcast's starting to play." Tam said as we headed down. "I'll send it to your PANs- wait, what the hell is this?" he sputtered.
  
  "Citizens of Los Angeles and Horizon, the following QR text-string will, if inputted into the pay-per-view download of this afternoon's 'Los Angeles Bolts vs. New York Slashers' Urban Brawl match, unlock a hidden set of files inserted via steganography into the recorded simsense track from star scout Andrew 'Silver Streak' Koznowski. Those files will mirror the content about to be streamed right now." a woman's voice, electronically distorted yet still damnably familiar, spoke as a blackened silhouette appeared on the visual feed.
  
  "A pirate broadcast?" Tam sputtered. "Into the EBS? How the hell- okay, our security spiders should already be on this but you've got to get me somewhere I can dive into VR and start tracing this!"
  
  "We're almost at the shelter." I said grimly. Because the last time anyone had successfully hacked the Emergency Broadcasting System had been in goddamn 2035, and even if that had been the newly-founded nation of Tir Tairngire doing it to the entire nationwide grid instead of merely a local one this was still very very bad-
  
  And then the woman continued speaking in an entirely recognizable voice as the electronic distortion cleared to reveal:
  
  "My name is Catherine Kincaid." her image spoke upon the screen. "Some of you might already know of me. A great many more of you already know of my husband."
  
  The camera view expanded to reveal the iconic features that we'd made famous worldwide, looking insufferably sober and professional and grave.
  
  "And I am Alex Kincaid. Up until recently we were both citizens and employees of Horizon Corporation, as an Urban Brawl starting player and a senior Matrix researcher respectively. For the past two weeks we have technically been on leave of absence. But as of this moment, we both officially tender our resignations."
  
  "Horizon has been very much in the press over the past several days, both about the Barstow Incident and the 'technomancer' phenomenon that this incident has brought to the public's awareness." Catherine continued speaking. "But at least some if not all of the AAA megacorporations have already secretly been aware of technomancers for years. And I can say of my own certain knowledge that Horizon was one of them, because I myself am a technomancer. And I never concealed my gifts from them- indeed, I'd sought employment with Horizon seeking their help in understanding what was happening to me, and in further developing my abilities in a safe and humane manner. Just as they'd originally consented to hire me for a chance to obtain another technomancer to study, in a safe and humane manner. And for many months, both they and I each stuck to their side of the bargain." She smiled sweetly. "My husband wasn't part of that bargain, by the way. He's just legitimately that good at shooting people."
  
  "How? HOW?" I said numbly as the security people finished ushering us into a shelter and we sat down. Sandra and I traded equally shellshocked looks as Tam closed his eyes and went fully into the Matrix.
  
  "We knew that Horizon was grooming Catherine to eventually become a public 'face' of technomancers when they decided it was finally time to reveal the truth to the public." Alex's image picked up. "The fact that I was already becoming a famous public figure on my own only made their decision that much easier. As my lovely wife said, it was a bargain. We'd receive their help and security, they'd receive loyal employees who could help further their corporation's image and interests. The same deal that anyone expects when hiring on to a corporation, and that most of them get."
  
  "Until Horizon betrayed us." Catherine said grimly. "And so we're 'borrowing' a little time on the EBS system for the LA grids - courtesy of our ex-friends at Horizon - to make sure as many people as possible hear the truth."
  
  "And remember, even if this broadcast is interrupted the advance copy of it is already in the hands of the over forty million customers who have already purchased and downloaded/streamed their copies of this afternoon's Brawl game." Alex cut in. "And the opening moments of this broadcast gave virtually everyone in LA the key to unlock the hidden copy embedded in that game. I encourage anyone who feels the urge to share that key on their social media." Alex explained.
  
  "Find that broadcast source." I snarled venomously.
  
  "Sir, the advance copy scheme means even if we kill this broadcast, it's still too late-" Sandra began.
  
  "I know that!" I rounded on her. "But if we can find where they inserted the EBS tap we still have a hope of catching them! Even if that broadcast is pre-recorded, they still have to be hacking it in and they have to be doing that right now-"
  
  "It's Catherine." Tam muttered from where he was on the couch. "She's doing the hack herself. I can sense her Resonance impression on the grid."
  
  "Find her!" I screamed. "Where she is, he'll be there too! And getting at least one of them alive and forcing them to issue a retraction is the only hope we have of-"
  
  "Good God." Tam interrupted me. "Sir, the EBS override... it's coming from your house."
  
  I felt a hand reach into my chest and squeeze. "What did you say?"
  
  "From your own house! Specifically, from the Matrix command terminal for in your house's panic bunker!" Tam babbled. "Right, I'm going in!" The EBS broadcast suddenly greyed out into static as he closed his eyes and went on the attack. Our security hackers were apparently not getting much done versus a technomancer of Catherine's abilities, but Tam was a technomancer himself and more experienced-
  
  "That's part of our secure command-and-control grid!" I realized. "No wonder they can hack the regional EBS from there!"
  
  "Shit!" Sandra swore. "I thought McClain's kinesics were off!" She turned to me. "The advance copy inserted into one of the Bolts' simsense feeds, their team captain here at a place she'd normally never attend - they were in on this! McClain's job was to make sure you were here tonight, instead of being held up at the last minute, so they'd know your home was clear to raid!"
  
  "She's fired." I cursed. "They all are. I don't care if we'll never have any proof, they're fucking gon-"
  
  "AIIIIIIIIIIII!" Tam suddenly screamed and jerked, and then fell limp. One of my security people ran over and took his pulse, then pried open his eyelid to look at his pupil dilation.
  
  "He's alive, sir." the man said. "Looks like non-lethal black IC of some kind. We'll call a medical team for him, but he'll be out for at least an hour."
  
  The glitched-out broadcast resumed. Sandra and I watched helplessly as Catherine and Alex resumed talking.
  
  "Sorry folks." Catherine said winsomely. "My former boss and I were having a vigorous debate over who exactly had Matrix right-of-way tonight." She smiled wickedly. "He lost. And we now resume our regular broadcast."
  
  "They are live-monitoring the hack then." Sandra agreed. "They'll still be there."
  
  "Status on my house?" I asked my security chief.
  
  "Fast-response teams will be there in just a couple of minutes, but-" he shrugged. "Sir, your house was designed to withstand a dedicated assault force. Especially the panic bunker. Even assuming that they haven't compromised any of the automated defenses for themselves, which given the level of hacking capability they've displayed so far is a vastly optimistic assumption-" He sighed. "The passive barriers alone will require extreme effort to blast through in a hurry. And worse yet, we designed your bunker to have multiple possible escape routes."
  
  "You won't be able to stop them from at least mostly completing this broadcast." I snarled. "Even so, they are not getting away! You have global unrestricted authorization! Surround the entire neighborhood with an army if you have to, just get them!"
  
  "Even with her abilities and his apparent covert operations skills, how did they get in?" Sandra wondered out loud. "You had top-end magical security as well, including bound elemental spirits on patrol."
  
  "We'd just paid him five million nuyen as a signing bonus." I snorted. "Apparently he spent some of it hiring help."
  
  "Horizon originally had the best of intentions." Alex's recording spoke. "But all too soon it went sour. They betrayed me and my wife. No, they betrayed us all." He sighed. "But for something this significant, for an accusation this grave, you deserve more evidence than merely my word against Horizon's. Which is why we will bring you this recording of Horizon CEO Gary Cline himself speaking in confidence. For reasons that will shortly become obvious any details that would allow viewers to positively identify where or when this event took place will be blanked out of the recording - not even digitally distorted, but outright erased. But the recording itself is genuine, and any level of data analysis that anyone cares to apply will verify that this was indeed Gary himself saying precisely what the recording claims he says, with no forgery or synthesis whatsoever."
  
  And then the bottom outright fell out of my world as the camera view switched to a recording of me in a chair, with my hands manacled over my head in a pair of padded troll-strength manacles straight out of a BDSM shop, cheerfully babbling away about everything. About the plan to sell Catherine to MCT and then set Alex up to die pursuing her, all for the sake of our script and to cover up our guilty secret. About those guilty secrets - cases Alpha through Epsilon, our pivot from Bravo to the modified Charlie, our desire to try and monopolize technomancers as much as we could and why. About the Submergence, and the Resonance Realms, and the simple possibility that technomancers might be a unique Matrix resources counterable only by other technomancers driving us to such lengths to bias an Emergence scenario in our favor.
  
  "This has to be a forgery." Sandra said. "You were never out of contact- there was no missing time- you wouldn't ever say any of this! 'You' aren't even showing hesitation or fear kinesics, there's no coercion here at all!"
  
  "And that is your assurance that she's still alive. After all, she was being groomed to be one of our chief public faces of technomancers for the original Bravo scenario." 'I' explained. "So we couldn't kill her ourselves, because her body has to be found. Just vanishing her leaves the suspicion stuck to us, at least in the minds of those conspiracy theorists who are precisely the people we're trying to set up to believe the modified Charlie and indirectly fix it in the minds of the general community for us."
  
  And then the horrible recording cut off and finally switched back to the broadcast. There had been no hint of anyone else talking, no questions from an interrogator. Just me giving that damnable monologue from front to back, with the camera focus so tight upon my chair that all anyone could see was me, the support pillar I'd been chained to, and glimpses of a concrete floor such as could be found in any utility room or basement.
  
  "That suit." I whispered. "I was wearing that suit the night I-" I gulped. "The night I went to Kincaid's house. I remember those scuffs on my shoes, the ones that made me have to throw away that pair-"
  
  "Sir?" Sandra said, staring at me.
  
  "I spent the whole night there, talking him into it." I muttered to myself as if in a trance. "And drinking with him, to help sell it. I had such a hangover the next day-" I turned to look at her. "Enough to leave all my memories of that night... patchy."
  
  "Laes." she swore incredulously. "It must have been! So he lured you in, somehow got you to talk willingly with social abilities he's not even on record as having, and then dosed you- and covered it all up as a drunken bender! So even the memory blackout wasn't remotely suspicious, because that's what happens when you get that dr-" Her jaw dropped. "We'd assessed him as a competent operative, but this goes vastly beyond 'competent'! Not even Dawkins would try to pull this off versus a target on your level, let alone credibly hope to succeed! Even if he was working with the UCAS too, or whoever else was behind McCord, then still-" she trailed off in gaping incredulity.
  
  "Remember that it's easier when it's an inside job." I swore, before bursting out in an anguished howl. "FUCK! So on top of our ENTIRE Emergence scenario being in ruins now, I've apparently been mentally compromised and I don't even know how!" I moaned. "John?" I turned despairingly to my chief bodyguard. "You'll have to enact the protocols. Tell the Board... tell them that I'm out of action. Until I can get checked out and cleared, I can't be in charge." I thought the proper commands into my commlink for voluntarily stepping down in the event of medical incapacity, then took it off my belt and handed it to him.
  
  "I'll arrange for immediate transport to the proper facility, sir. Ms. DeVries is already here to represent Dawkins Group in this matter." John reassured me. "You'll be all right."
  
  "Nothing will be all right." I muttered. "Rewind the playback and put it on the room's screen. What did they say afterwards?"
  
  "So now you know why." Catherine said. "And while we'll still be coy on some of the details of how, I will say that I was also present in the facility at the Barstow Incident. However, I remind people that the first peacekeeping force on-scene to detain and investigate was not the CFS authorities, but instead the licensed and bonded free company of the 77th Independent Rangers." She smiled. "Which is where Alex and I both worked before joining Horizon. That's public record. So yes, I asked several of my old friends to help me slip away quietly instead of medevacing me back to Horizon as would normally be done with one of their corporate citizens recovered under distressing circumstances. After all, my life would have been under immediate threat there. And then my husband and I debated what to do next. And our decision was - to find out the truth of why this had been done to us, and then to reveal it. So here we are."
  
  "Yes, up shit creek without a paddle." Sandra swore trenchantly.
  
  "We don't want to ruin Horizon." Alex said compassionately.
  
  My jaw dropped all the way to my shoes. The sheer gall of the man!
  
  "We don't even blame Horizon - as a whole - for what was done to us." Catherine continued with the same faux-compassion. "We blame Gary Cline, and Tam Reyes, and their 'Dawkins Group', and the other higher-ups with their own little conspiracy within the corporation, drunk on their own hubris. Oh make no mistake, we'd love to be able to watch you and Tam and all your friends burn on a funeral pyre formed out of your own murdered dreams, Gary." Catherine said viciously. "We'd watch, and laugh, and film it all to watch again as a happy holiday movie every year. But we're not willing to sacrifice the lives and well-being of innocent people just to get something we want. After all, we're not you." she spat.
  
  "We're exposing your plans to exploit technomancers, so that they'll know the truth and not be lured in as your unwilling pawns." Alex said. "If any of them still wish to trust you even after knowing the truth, then that will be their choice, but they won't make it blindly. If Horizon can find a new way, a better way than this, to do business? Then your corporation will recover and go on. Go on to do genuine good in the world, not your blind and blinkered Potemkin-village illusion of it. Now, I seriously doubt that Horizon will ever manage to do so under your leadership, Gary, but it's not my place to either keep you on or fire you. That is a decision the Board of Directors will have to make, and I encourage them to think long and hard about what they really want to be their corporation's legacy in this world before making it."
  
  "But as for punishing you personally-" she shrugged. "How can we? You and your co-conspirators are the senior executives and owners of a duly chartered AAA megacorporation. All of your decisions and actions that we have evidence for are covered by megacorporate extraterritoriality. Only two courts in the world can hope to sit in judgment of them, and we do not expect the Corporate Court to even take notice of this matter. Every megacorporation is expected to handle its own internal problems, after all. And its own disgruntled former employees."
  
  "But the other court is, of course, the court of public opinion." Alex smiled. "And your indictment in that court is what we are broadcasting now. Soon enough, the jury will finish reading the evidence and begin to cast the votes for your verdict." He paused dramatically. "If I were you, I would seriously think about plea-bargaining before that verdict was read into the record."
  
  "We're not stupid." Catherine said. "We know that after how we've provoked you here, you'll be out for our heads. And to be death-marked by one of the Big Ten is a frightening prospect indeed. Still, people have survived that before. Even Major McCord, who helped rescue me, is a living example of that principle."
  
  "And that about wraps it up. Oh, we've got quite a few more things we'd like people to know, but those things are all in the files appended to this broadcast or the earlier embedded seed copy." Catherine said.
  
  "Always remember, everyone. No matter how they clamp down, no matter how horrible the odds are, you still have a choice. Even if those choices involve a lot of risk sometimes, you still have the ability to stand up and say No. You may pay me, but you do NOT own me." Alex orated passionately
  
  "It's hard to do that sometimes - it's definitely going to be hard for me and my husband, in the days to come." Catherine said bravely. "But I genuinely believe that we can do it together. And while I pray no one else ever faces the same type of choices we had to, I know that too many people will. I wish them all at least as much fortitude, and as much fortune, as we have been privileged to possess."
  
  "This is the Kincaids, signing off. Alex wrapped up. "Good night, and God bless."
  
  And then the broadcast winked off and left us staring at a blank screen until the network engineers finally managed to reclaim the channel, now that Catherine wasn't actively holding it anymore.
  
  And before either of us could speak, my commlink chimed.
  
  "Mr. Cline?" my chief bodyguard asked me. "The touchscreen's asking for your thumbprint."
  
  I reached over and touched my thumb to the screen, as gingerly as if it were an unexploded bomb.
  
  "Tap the screen again when you are in a secure location and with only those cleared for Daedalus-Black level material." Catherine's voice sounded from the speaker.
  
  At Sandra's nod, the security detail withdrew from the room to leave her and I alone. A second press to the screen resumed the playback.
  
  "This is the part of the message we aren't putting on the public airwaves, Gary." Alex said coldly. "The recording that was broadcast was abridged - I'm sure an eye as experienced as yours already spotted the camera cuts. You talked about more than just the Emergence or how you'd betrayed us. But I wasn't going to mention the Consensus on the public airwaves."
  
  Sandra and I both gasped in terror. I'd even talked about that when compromised-?
  
  "What we said was true. We don't want to destroy Horizon. As awful as what you've done is, the rest of the Big Ten are quite often worse." Catherine spat viciously.
  
  "But that doesn't mean you're any better, for all your pretensions." Alex continued. "You can't trick people into being good. You can't force them to be kind. You can't dictate that they be honest. Empathy, compassion, integrity, these and all other such forces are internal motivations, not external. Horizon needs to use the window of opportunity we're giving it to find a better way to do business than trying to use applied psychohistory to gaslight the planet, or else it's going to be the next CATCo even if we do nothing. Your reach will exceed your grasp if you keep going this route."
  
  "How is this even on my commlink?" I asked dazedly.
  
  "If Kincaid and his allies had custody of you all night, they had that many hours to hack your 'link'. Even if they touched nothing on it, simply having a copy of all your passcodes would make it trivially easy for them to remotely log into it later." Sandra thought out loud.
  
  "No wonder they got into my house so easily." I gritted my teeth. "They had a copy of all my keys."
  
  "But that's philosophy, and right now we need to concentrate on the practical bits." Catherine said. "We all know that if the Consensus and the long-range plan were ever publicly revealed, Horizon would be doomed."
  
  "But we won't do that." Alex continued. "The Board of Directors has our word of honor - we'll take that secret to our graves."
  
  "Translation: kill us and our shadowrunner friends will have it all over the evening news." Sandra muttered despairingly. "And the 77th. And the man Aztechnology couldn't kill for fifteen years."
  
  "If you'd just stuck to your original plan, Horizon would be on top of the world right now." Catherine said icily. "But when push came to shove, you reverted back to the same idiotic zero-sum value system every other megacorp is trapping themselves in. So much for 'Horizon social responsibility'." , My head began to swim from the sheer scope of the devastation looming over us, and the epic misjudgment I'd made-
  
  "So long, Gary." Alex gloated. "And never forget - you can't stop the signal."
  
  My commlink switched itself off. "P-preliminary... damage assessment?" I whispered drunkenly into the silence left behind.
  
  "Horizon might survive." Sandra said softly, turning to look me fearfully in the eyes. "But not us."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: I'm honestly surprised that more people didn't twig from the moment I first ended chapter 16 with the Serenity quote that the ending of the Horizon arc would of course be a version of the Miranda broadcast. So now everyone knows the truth about the Emergence... which feeds right into case Bravo, as it casts the technomancers as both a valuable resource (hat tip to everyone who pointed out that 'fighting Resonance with Resonance' is the main way to get all the major players to see technos as 'must recruit', not 'must oppress') and as the underdog victims oppressed by evil monoliths. As well as utterly nuking Horizon's own attempt at tilting that table.
  
  And yes, Sarah and Andrew were totally in on it. I mean, she's an ex-cop (it is mentioned in passing that she was Lone Star FRT when she was young, before joining Urban Brawl) and he's Alex's bro, and they're both old enough and established enough to just retire from the game with no skin off their ass. Tell them about the betrayal and prove it, they'll help. So he allowed them to stealth piggyback his game-cam feed to insert the trojan, she acted as the spotter for the run on Gary's house, and it's absurdly impossible for Horizon to suppress the broadcast because even if they somehow wipe every commlink in LA over 40 million people worldwide downloaded that game, and all they need to unlock the steganography package is a simple QR code that anyone can text from anywhere.
  
  So no Queen Elizabeth's Hospital massacre, no 'AI pawns' panic, no technomancer witch hunts, none of that canon shit. And while dark experiments may still go on at other megacorps, the political climate surrounding those experiments is now far more poisonous to such megacorps. Which means they have pragmatic reasons to dial that shit way back. Our heroes won. The Emergence has been utterly derailed into a better time track. The most immediate of Alex's self-imposed "main quests" has been cleared, and he's now free to potentially work on other ones.
  
  Admittedly, they themselves are dealing with a bit of a 5-star wanted rating right now but hey, they'll have a clever plan for dealing with that as soon as I actually think of one. So, this will be the last chapter before that aforementioned outpatient surgery thing, so, no updates for a couple days while I prep and then recover.
  
  As to how they got past the one element of house security the passcodes wouldn't touch, the magical element, the answer is of course 'Jane did that'.
  
  (update) Nalanaya pointed out a rather large plot hole in the original version, so the chapter has been rewritten that the threat about the Consensus was sent privately to Gary Cline and not part of the public broadcast.
  
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  The great dragon curled her lip, dramatically baring one giant fang, as she exerted all her vast magical power and will to crush me. Vast magics and an even vaster willpower swirled all around us, the intangible becoming real here in this Place deep in the heart of the metaplanes to which she had lured me before striking.
  
  "Yield, Alexander Kincaid!" Hestaby cried imperiously. "By services done and favors owed, I request and require your vassalage! Submit! Submit as one who recognizes that they should, who recognizes me as having the right to command you! Submit as a member of the Younger Races, a Name-Giver, to one of the eldest and a true Name-Maker! Bow your head, bend your knee, and swear unto me your obedience in all things forevermore!"
  
  "No." I replied, the invincible diamond-hard certainty that I could draw upon not merely armoring my soul but in this moment somehow comprising my soul. The Orange Queen's vast power, her millenia of experience, her sheer draconic urge to dominate, clashed against me to no avail. Even though she shone as vast and terrible as a star here her best efforts moved me no more than the solar wind could shift the orbit of Jupiter... if that much.
  
  "I have asked thee twice!" she roared. "If refused a third time, I shall strike thee down!"
  
  "You will try." I stood resolute.
  
  "So be it!" she declared firmly, and her giant jaws gaped and spewed forth a fire that blinded the world and dissolved the very astral plane around us-
  
  -and my eyes opened simultaneously with the Orange Queen's as we regarded each other calmly, eye to eye, in our own physical bodies again. We were both in one of her private ritual chambers deep within Mount Shasta. I lay on my back within several concentric circles of runes, lines, and glyphs, and she was standing over me in her human form. I reached up and let her graciously help me to my feet.
  
  "How much were you holding back that time?" I asked her.
  
  "I wasn't." she shocked me with that simple admission. "Oh, I would not have harmed you even had I penetrated your defenses, but after you withstood me so well during the preliminary rounds-" She permitted her body language to show honest amazement. "I did everything that I could to break your will and control your mind, sparing no quarter. And yet you did not even struggle to resist me. I have met the rare practitioner of the Younger Races that I could not easily overcome, but even they would hold me off only with great effort." She stared me levelly in the eyes as we stood facing each other in the center of the ritual circle.
  
  It was commonly known that dragons could not use human speech when in dragonform, requiring them to either use metahuman 'translators' or shift into humanoid form themselves to speak on a microphone. Dragonspeech was telepathic; everyone knew that a dragon could both make any living mind within its range 'hear' them clearly. Less people knew that a dragon could also detect surface thoughts - I certainly hadn't when I'd first met Hestaby. Fewer than that knew that with a deliberate effort, an experienced dragon could use their native dragonspeech as a mind probe. If sufficiently skilled, they could do so without notice. However, I had since my first meeting with the Orange Queen met someone who had knowledge of dragonspeech and who had drilled me in the methods used to block mind probe spells cast by metahumans, that also served me here.
  
  "What do you know of the Fourth World, or earlier?" Hestaby asked me soberly as I felt her mind touch my own.
  
  "What is common knowledge on Matrix sources or among the shadow community. What I have inferred from what I've read or various remarks made by Frosty, who I am certain has been initiated into at least some of these ancient secrets herself; by her mentor or her father, if not you." I very carefully did not think of what I had learned from the Shadowrun computer games in the other world. My perfect memory let me re-evaluate even the faint impressions of our first encounter in hindsight and confirm that Hestaby hadn't gone any further than my surface thoughts in our first meeting, and I'd learned at least the basics of shielding my deeper thoughts since then.
  
  "And that is all you know of the prior cycle? Nothing else you have heard or known? Not even in dreams or visions?" she pressed. She raised an eyebrow. "I cannot aid you if you do not tell me things that could have a bearing on this mystery."
  
  "I regret that some mysteries aren't mine alone to share." I responded politely. "And I could not answer your questions without risking them."
  
  "I already know Jane Foster's, if that is what restrains you." Hestaby replied amiably.
  
  "With respect, Orange Queen, I do not know that." I temporized. "Also, it is not her secret alone to which I refer."
  
  She accepted that with visible reluctance, but a vow of secrecy was a thing even dragons highly respected... even if that wasn't exactly what was holding me back here. I felt the touch of her mind withdraw from mine.
  
  "I see." she nodded. "One last question, then. Are you aware that when you draw upon your powers in the manner that you just did, you are not using magic?"
  
  "What?" I jawdropped. "But then what am I doing?"
  
  "These circles we stand in?" Hestaby deflected. "They are not actually there to contain possible backlashes from the working as I had said earlier. I confess to the deception, as I thought it necessary to avoid possible bias in the testing." Hestaby explained.
  
  "They're astral detection arrays of some kind." I realized. "To measure exactly what source of astral energies I was drawing upon and how many, while my entire consciousness was not only in the metaplanes but also highly distracted."
  
  "And while you were undergoing a trial in the Place of Testing in the deep astral that would have required vast magical power to resist mine... if you had been resisting with magic." Hestaby agreed. "But my working detected no fluctuations in the astral within this sealed ritual chamber save that which would be entirely normal background count. So I can now state with confidence that while you are clearly a powerful Awakened soul, you are equally as clearly drawing upon something that is not any form of magic that I understand or can detect as such, and which makes you significantly greater than human in many aspects both overt and subtle. Which, when all taken together, gives me the first great clue as to what you are."
  
  "FInally." I couldn't help blurting out, before apologizing. "Sorry, that was rude."
  
  "No offense taken." she smiled, ushering me out of the circle and to a nearby low table where chairs and a tray of refreshments had already been set up. "Even before we began, I had anticipated a lengthy conversation at the end of today's testing. And so, while we yet remain in this private space, I will explain these things that should be discussed as little as possible outside such a guarded space. And so we first begin with some necessary background..."
  
  Even if one is summarizing greatly, and almost certainly abridging besides, you still don't get through a history of the ages of the world in just a couple of minutes. Hestaby spoke to me of the Cycles, of how the ancient world had been a time ruled by the dragons before the coming of the younger races. Of how the Horrors from beyond had come to ravage the world, a relentless Scourge that even the massed might of dragonkind at its height could only delay and not stop. How after centuries of attrition the surviving dragons had hidden themselves away in deep shelters, to wait for the Scourge to finish despoiling the world until the mana level had dropped so low with the devastation of all life that there was no longer enough to sustain their presence in this world. Thus ended the First World, before which lay only creation legends that were murky myth even to Great Dragons. The Second World, the first great age of magic and the birth of the Younger Races, was ended by the return of the Scourge. And that was when everyone understood the cycle would recur, and that for life to survive on Earth each era of magic would have to prepare great shelters or 'kaerns', deeply buried, where survivors could remain safely confined for the several centuries it took for the surface world to be reclaimable. Talk about "War. War never changes." And so the Second World died to the Scourge and eventually made way for the Third, and then as the mana finally returned enough for things to progress beyond mere muscle and iron, to allow the return of magic and magical races as well... then so began the Fourth World.
  
  "Of course, even I am not old enough to remember those most ancient of days firsthand. And most of the details of them are not relevant to your question. But it is necessary to lay the proper groundwork before the references I am about to make can be understood." Hestaby concluded, pausing to take another sip of tea. "The Fourth World, the time of old Barsaive, is where my own personal experience begins." she continued.
  
  "That would make you one of the younger Great Dragons, wouldn't it?" I asked curiously.
  
  "Two such intelligent and forceful women share your bed, and you still have not been taught it's impolite to ask a lady her age?" Hestaby grinned impishly at me. "But yes, I am not among our eldest. I am, however, even further from being among our youngest," She sighed mournfully. "And our eldest... he was a very great friend of mine. I still miss him."
  
  "Dunk-" I cut myself off, having begun to learn about dragons and names. "The former President?"
  
  "It is not unmannerly for you to use his name, even when speaking directly to me, for you are not a dragon. But yes, I am indeed referring to him." she replied kindly. "Should you ever encounter another dragon who might be stricter about the proper usages than I, the use-name that I would have publicly addressed him by was 'Far-Scholar'."
  
  "Thank you." I said politely. "So, you mentioned 'personal experience.' I presume this means you actually saw something like me in the Fourth World?"
  
  "Yes." she nodded. "Oh, not entirely like you. Indeed, you differ from what I am thinking of in several significant aspects. Still, it is the only phenomenon even remotely within my experience that could explain you, and so I advance it as my primary theory even in the absence of significant proof." She took a deep breath. "I am certainly you have already begun to suspect that you are not entirely mortal. If my own suspicion is true, you certainly are not."
  
  "You don't mean that just in the sense of not aging normally." I almost-asked. "Not with this much buildup."
  
  "No." she said, soberly. "There are only two times before I have ever witnessed an ostensible member of the Younger Races be as unassailable in either body, mind, or spirit as you without magic as I understand it being involved. One of those times involved a mortal being used as a vessel for a Greater Horror."
  
  "Which Frosty already tested for, even if she didn't tell us exactly what she was testing for at the time." I agreed.
  
  "Jane is a very intelligent and conscientious young woman with an admirable sense of loyalty." Hestaby agreed. "Which some others have not appreciated as much as they should have. But yes, you clearly are not one of those. Even if her test had not already proven conclusive, such a thing could not have been concealed from my own recent examinations. Which leaves me with my other possibility. That you are, or are becoming, a Passion."
  
  "Which is?" I begged the obvious question.
  
  "A phenomenon not completely understood even in the Fourth World, to say the least. Not even to Far-Scholar, let alone me. But even if no scholar among either dragons or Name-Givers knew the truth of why and very little of how, the what was a widely known and comprehensively documented ocurrence. And the term 'Passion', of course, is merely my English translation of the label for a thing that in the Fourth World was certainly not merely a referent for 'a strong and difficult to control emotion'." She paused and continued. "Loosely translated to the contemporary lexicon, a 'Passion' would be a divine being."
  
  "... you think I'm a god." I said, absolutely flabbergasted. "Or demi-god."
  
  "Yes." Hestaby said, matter-of-factly. "Oh, I am well aware that I am not omnipotent. Even with all our power no dragon survives long enough to be called a 'great' dragon without a finely-honed sense of risk assessment, which requires a certain irreducible minimum of self-awareness. So I am neither boasting nor blind to reality when I say that literally no mortal being could resist me as you have. Oh, I can think of a definite number of them that could resist me... but not as effortlessly as you. Not without drawing upon at least some trace of any of the many forms of magics I at least I partly understand. So if you are not mortal, then what are you?" She analyzed out loud. "You are clearly not one of the Scourge. Equally clearly you are not a spirit, Great Form or otherwise. Your blood and genetics are solely those of an ordinary - if physically and mentally exceptional - human of the Sixth World, with no traces of any tampering, construct nature, or unique SURGE mutation. You do not even have any of the latent genetic markers common to Awakened practitioners and yet you clearly are Awakened, yet another clue to your somehow being linked to a force greater than magic. And so out of all the possibilities that I can imagine that leaves only the Passions themselves, or possibly the Questors they have on occasion mysteriously augmented even if you are orders of magnitude more powerful than any known Questor. And even if there is also much about you that fits no Passion known or conjectured."
  
  "What do you know of these Passions?" I asked, my mouth dry.
  
  And so Hestaby told me of the various Passions worshipped by the people of Barsaive, both the twelve conventional ones and the three 'Mad Passions' that had been twisted into corrupt mockeries by the Scourge. As to how they shared many qualities common to deities from human mythology and were almost certainly the dim and distant inspiration for at least some of it. That some thought they were embodied representations of the forces that had made the universe, and some others thought they were ascended mortals, and some others that they were merely incomprehensibly powerful free spirits, and other theories as well. That the power level of Passions had erratically ranged from merely exceptional humans to forces of nature in metahuman form that wreaked destruction even an elder Great Dragon would step wide from. That they sometimes inspired mortals in dreams and visions, and sometimes empowered mortal worshippers with fractions of their might in return for fanatic devotion, and sometimes appeared themselves in mortal form.
  
  "But they also embody... well, passions." I played devil's advocate. "Which I don't. I have a multifaceted personality, not a single set of overriding drives. Lochost is the Passion of Rebellion, Change, and Freedom; many things I've done could fit him, but not the period of time where I was legitimately trying to fit in at Horizon. Thystonius is the Passion of Physical Conflict and Valor, which certainly fits much of what I've done... except Thystonius disdains killing, especially in cold blood or for revenge, and ahhaahaha, no."
  
  "Even more far-fetched candidates such as Upandal do not fit you - while you fit his motivations for perseverance, planning, and a desire to build lasting and beneficial change, he also embodies the glory of the artist and sculptor, the pride of taking credit for a Great Work, whereas you are entirely content to play a humble role while achievements go uncredited so long as you achieve." Hestaby nodded. "No, your personality does not even fit a Quester of any Passion I know of, let alone an embodied Passion themselves."
  
  "What makes you think an 'embodied Passion' is even possible, much less one that was born human and believed himself one for all their life up until now?" I probed.
  
  'Because I already know of one other such example of that occurring even as we sit here and speak." Hestaby shocked me yet again. "I will not mention where or who - I have my own vow of secrecy there that I must respect." she said. "But the young scion in question was born of two entirely normal parents, as you were, is from all known examinations genetically human with nothing else about them - as you are - and has certainly performed feats of power well beyond any conventional mystic explanation. The general consensus of those who know of such things is that this individual is almost certainly the rebirth of the one-time Mad Passion of Bureaucracy and Slavery, reduced to nothing and now slowly growing from mortal seed back into a new Passion of Organization and Community. Or perhaps Rulership, if it is Re-Naming as well as re-birthing..." She trailed off. "Purification by rebirth and renewal, in a new turn of the Wheel, reclaiming what was once thought irretrievably fallen as once thought inviolate rules turn out to change with time and tides like any other." she continued in quiet awe. "A reminder that in the eyes of the Universe, even us elders are sometimes no more or less than any other of the Earth's creatures."
  
  "And you believe that I am undergoing the same type of rebirth?" I asked.
  
  "I do." she said. "I could even name my suspicion of which fallen Passion is attempting to rebirth itself as pure again through you as a vessel. But I will not, because if you are then you will know yourself in the fullness of time, and if I am wrong I do not wish you to waste time chasing a false self-image. Even when simple magic is involved, let alone possibly divine forces, doing that can potentially lead to far graver consequences than merely wasting time in blind alleys. Your initial instinct to develop yourself only at the pace you were comfortable with and to try and remain true to yourself and your core values throughout was the correct one - it is by far the soundest advice I could give to anyone in your position."
  
  "So what do we do now?" I asked.
  
  "I let you go." Hestaby said. "If you are a Passion rebirthing, then I only delay that process by trying to sequester you or set you in any mold that you do not choose. And if you are not, then you are something with the power to potentially resist any force at my command and of entirely unknown nature, and simple prudence would dictate that I observe and evaluate further developments about a phenomenon such as that while it is outside my home."
  
  "That seems a paltry return on your investment so far." I thought out loud. Because while she'd just said was certainly what I wished to hear, that was only more reason to look the gift dragon in the mouth.
  
  "Which brings me to the final item on this agenda." she said soberly. "Alexander, while it is as yet uncertain what precisely you may be, it is certain that you are not mortal." She looked at me soberly. "You will not age. You will not sicken. And given the forces both physical and mystical you have already resisted..." she exhaled heavily. "I tell you this with great reluctance, and largely because you are intelligent enough to deduce it on your own. As I cannot hope to control you, neither can I hope to kill you. I cannot physically strike with an impact greater than those which you have already been known to survive, and if you can so effortlessly resist the full force of my magic in any format than my concentrating that magic into more lethal formats than I have already used is vanishingly unlikely to do any good. And if I cannot slay you... that is not sufficient cause by itself to declare you either invincible or unkillable, but it certainly does mean you have very little cause to fear death at the hands of any remotely conventional opposition."
  
  "You can't kill me, and you can't control me. So it's either enlist me voluntarily, confine me forever, or let me go. Since you currently want me to grow further via a process that requires me to have the widest self-determination possible, that leaves out the first option. And since I'm not currently an enemy and door number two would make me an enemy, Hobson's choice says door number three." I analyzed.
  
  "Entirely." Hestaby agreed. "And even indirect coercion would be futile - and worse yet, foolish. I am not unaware there was more reason than simply a desire to continue her recuperation that has prevented your wife from joining you here at my home, and I am entirely aware of what happened to the last fool who tried striking at you through her."
  
  "My regrets if that did excessively harsh things to your stock portfolio." I semi-apologized.
  
  "I had no substantial investment position in Mitsuhama, and the Barstow Incident was sufficient foreshadowing - at least to me - to allow to me quietly divest my Horizon-related holdings in time. So no, you did not." she said agreeably. "Although I am mildly surprised you did not have Jane forward me word of your intentions in advance."
  
  "Which individuals comprise Horizon's board of directors is publicly unknown, and you were an early significant ally of the corporation in their efforts in Tir Tairngire." I said. "You are also vastly wealthy in your own right, and Far-Scholar set the precedent for a Great Dragon secretly owning substantial stock positions in a AAA megacorp or two."
  
  "Ah." she nodded. "Yes, as far as you could know at the time I might very well have been one of Horizon's oh-so-secret board of directors. No wonder you neither gave me the slightest forewarning of what you intended or requested any of my aid in executing your coup. I certainly cannot fault your reasoning there, even if your conclusion was ultimately incorrect." She nodded. "But to return to the topic, as you have already deduced I cannot offer unjust indignity to Jane's person without not only alienating you but needlessly making foes of both her father and her teacher - by courtesy so called - in addition. Which would be an entire separate category of foolishness on its own." She smiled. "And all of those reasons would still apply even were I as ruthless as Gold-Master or as arrogant as his brother Elfbane, and I am emphatically neither."
  
  "And neither of us age, so when I do finally finish digivolving into whatever my final form is then on that day it'll be nice for you to have a vastly powerful friend." I finished. "Simply put, you can afford to be patient."
  
  "And it's not as if we're going to throw each other's commcode away in the interim, although for obvious reasons neither of us can use it too frivolously." she nodded. "So in return for the aid I have already given you in helping determine more of your nature I request and require only one thing - your oath that you will reveal my theory regarding your true nature to no other soul in this world without my permission, until it is known whether or not my theory is correct." She raised a hand to forestall my objection. "Your simple word of honor will suffice. It is not only foolish in the extreme to attempt to bind a Passion or proto-Passion, it may well be metaphysically impossible."
  
  "Orange Queen, it is ethically dubious in the extreme for me to not have the lifespan talk with my wife as soon as practical." I said.
  
  "I agree with you there, but it would still be unwise." she said. "Catherine's mind is unshielded - to share that deep a secret with her effectively gives it to any other dragon or spirit or elder mage whose curiosity is raised enough to probe her at all. You cannot tell her unless you wish to tell everyone, and I certainly do not wish to share my theory with my peers until we can demonstrate if I am correct or not. Never forget, Alexander, that you are not mortal. You must start leaning how to think ahead over a far longer time scale than the immediate, for you will no longer have the option of merely postponing the consequences of your decisions for a few short decades so as to avoid having to deal with them."
  
  "But-" I agonized. How the hell do I not tell my wife I'll inevitably outlive her by centuries? Because the idea that Hestaby was lying to me about my projected lifespan was absurd - it would be far too stupid and pointless, and she was neither.
  
  "Again, I understand." she said kindly. "But you still should not. And in recompense for this heart-wrenching request that I make of you I will offer you a hope of succor - the identity of a trustworthy confidant who can help you start adjusting to living on an entirely different time scale." She shook her head at the obvious objection. "No, I do not mean me. Or anyone else who might possibly harbor a malicious agenda for you, as you and I are both already and separately certain that she does not."
  
  "How can you say that unless it's someone we both know personally-" I goggled as I realized who was almost certainly the only person who fit that description. "Jane?"
  
  "Is as unaging as you or I am, even if she is not remotely as durant." Hestaby confirmed. "Did you ever suspect that she held a great secret of her own?"
  
  "She's straight up told me that she had huge secrets she couldn't share." I admitted. "It's why she left me to face the Dweller alone on my first journey to the metaplanes, because she had a hidden truth she could not take any risk of it exposing. But I hadn't remotely expected this."
  
  "Few people do." Hestaby acknowledged. "And I would be violating a pledge of secrecy of my own to tell you even this much, or the rest that I am about to share... except you are not mortal, and I promised only to withhold it from mortals." she grinned. "So before you depart Mount Shasta allow me to speak to you of the ancient children of the dragons... or as they are more commonly referred to, the 'immortal elves'."
  
  
  
  The first thing we had done after the raid on the MCT camp - or as it was being commonly referred to in the media, "the Barstow Incident" - is recover and catch up with old friends in the 77th's camp. Then we'd composed the exact details of our press release, secretly made contact with Fireball and Silver Streak to help arrange for its distribution, and then hacked the Emergency Broadcast System from the dedicated Horizon secure systems terminal in the subterranean emergency bunker underneath Gary Cline's house. Between Jane's ability to deal with all the magical security and the passcodes we'd pulled from Gary's commlink when we'd interrogated him, getting into his house was easy enough. Oh, there were also guards and patrolling drones to deal with, but nothing that could even slow me down. I hadn't even needed to seriously injure any of them.
  
  So after escaping Gary's beachfront mansion via Sounder's smuggler submersible, we'd stopped off at San Francisco to leave Catherine with Pistons and Fatima while Jane escorted me to Mount Shasta for an appointment I now didn't have the excuse of megacorporate employment to put off for much longer. While this was an obvious precaution on our parts against the possibility of Hestaby 'altering the bargain' Vader style, the primary reason we'd done it is because Cat had not escaped eleven days of torture and trauma in an MCT black site unscathed.
  
  Oh, physically there would be no scars. MCT were brutal but not clumsy, and as Cat had been intended for a more long-term interrogation process they'd been careful about doing permanent damage. But mentally... Cat had not bent and neither had she broken, but that was anything but the same as being unwounded. For all that she was as brave as any of us she was still the youngest, and had never before experienced such a deep personal betrayal as the one Tam Reyes had given her when he'd arranged for her to be captured and sold to MCT simply because Befehl ist Befehl. That sort of thing left scars on the psyche. I hadn't needed anyone to tell me that Cat's barely controllable anger at the mere mention of Horizon was not a healthy sign. And Jane's own experience at dealing with such a deep emotional wound by finding out the truth about Harlequin's actions and her own apprenticeship is why she'd agreed with me that finding Catherine someone she could talk to about it before things had a chance to fester and leave her struggling internally for years - as Jane had - was our first priority.
  
  The shadow community did not exactly have abundant professional mental health resources, or abundant professional resources of any kind save those devoted to the specialized services that runners required such as street docs, fixers, and underworld armorers. But one of the exceptions was the Orkland shadows across the bay from San Francisco, for that was where you could find the People's University. A co-operative effort formed by runners, independents, and eccentrics of all sorts during the Imperial Japanese occupation of the Bay Area, the People's University of Oakland had been an unaccredited and unofficial long-term project intended to combat the poverty and oppression of the occupation by not merely attacking the enemy - that had been left to other groups such as the Metahuman Peoples' Army and the October 25 Alliance - but instead by uplifting the community. By giving the poor and SINless of Orkland access to educations they would otherwise never have had and the opportunities that came with them, the University had set out to start breaking the cycle of poverty at its root... and while they hadn't turned the Bay Area into Heaven, they could argue with confidence that they'd made a key difference in keeping it from sliding into Hell.
  
  Although the University had escaped ongoing efforts by the Japanacorps and occupation troops to attack its hidden and 'floating' classrooms by going fully online in 2058 thanks to a bequest from Dunkelzahn's will - one that had gifted them with the Matrix infrastructure and vast electronic library necessary to set up a full-feature online Matrix learning environment - they still only took students from the Bay Area, due to limited resources. Although more and more Neo-Anarchist enclaves, semi-feral sprawls, and other 'unconventional communities' were setting up free schools of their own now, as the People's University of Oakland freely allowed any such community effort they accepted as genuinely not a corporate front to copy the source code for their online educational tools and their library. And while the Matrix-based university setup allowed them to potentially get instructors from anywhere in the world, the bulk of the old University staff and professors stil llived in the Bay Area. Including one professor of psychology that Fatima had known, that had been willing to evaluate and counsel her.
  
  "How's she doing, Doctor?" I asked the elderly dwarf. With Catherine's permission, of course, or else even as her husband I wouldn't have been told much.
  
  "You did the right thing by not letting her self-isolate immediately after her trauma." Dr. Lacombe answered. "And as paradoxically as it sounds, having you to worry about during your recent shadowrun - no, I didn't ask her what it was - helped keep her focused outwards and not inwards during the critical time period." She snorted. "Of course this is inexact terminology verging on bad trid psychobabble, but as you don't have a degree in the relevant field it's the best I can to to translate what's going on into language you can actually grasp."
  
  I let the fussy old academic's mannerisms roll off me like fog - I was pretty sure she deliberately played that up to hit people for reactions anyway - and concentrated on the important thing. "So while Cat's not going to be magically better, she'll be able to move on instead of being stuck?"
  
  "She has every prospect of doing so." Doctor Lacombe agreed. "I wish I could retain her for some follow-up sessions, but I haven't been with the University for over a decade without knowing that it's a miracle a runners' schedule would let her stay even for these past few weeks."
  
  "Actually, we were discussing the possibility of moving into the community for a while." I said. "At least for several months."
  
  "I'd be entirely glad to keep seeing her." she nodded.
  
  "Which brings me to the last question. How much-" I was cut off by her firmly upraised hand.
  
  "I'm doing this as a favor for a friend. Save your hard-earned nuyen for your family." Dr. Lacombe said stubbornly.
  
  "Ah. Well, as to that..." I began sheepishly.
  
  
  
  "We made HOW much?!?" Catherine asked me incredulously as Jane and I caught up with her in our new - at least for the near term - apartment in Orkland.
  
  "Almost thirty million nuyen." I repeated. "Note, that's just our - as in yours and mine - share. Jane cleared twenty million nuyen of her own."
  
  "I'm a bit more conservative of an investor than you are, Mr. 'I'm throwing all of our life savings into this'." Jane said amusedly over her glass of juice.
  
  "Where did this even come from?" Cat continued agape, staring at the various financial readouts of all the anonymous numbered accounts and shell setups that I'd just uploaded to her AR.
  
  "We had advance warning of two events each of which was going to cause a major stock hit for a AAA megacorp, remember?" I pointed out. "How much do you think a person could make if they went big on short-selling at the opportune moment?"
  
  "Damn." Cat swore. "But wait, this would still take a stock market expert with proper connections into the trading networks to set up, and you're neither."
  
  "Mr. Bonds." Jane explained. "JackPoint's resident outlaw stockbroker. Guy used to be with Brokerage X before they finally got caught up to by the corps. But he's still out there doing it on his own, and his motto is still 'With all the other laws we routinely break, why should shadowrunners hesitate at insider trading?'"
  
  "And he was heavily vouched for by all of the old-timers we'd already read in during the planning phase, including Jane, so in the interest of not going back to beer money runs after I ran the piggy bank dry financing the whole op - you would not even believe what it costs to rent Bravo Company even for a short-term contract, let alone the other people who needed paying - then I dumped every nuyen we had left into the short-selling scam that Bonds was going to run." I sighed. "It's not as if I was going to need it if I'd swung and missed."
  
  "I didn't quite bet my life savings, but I did have a very nice nest egg that I was willing to risk a substantial piece of." Jane added. "And now I won't have to work for years, except on my own projects or my mentor's. And all of the other runners involved in the op risked at least some of their own money - or some of the money we'd just paid them - and while they didn't clear meganuyen on the hustle like we did because they hadn't bought in as heavily as we had, they still walked away with a lot more in their pockets than they were expecting to."
  
  "I even made enough to pay the 77th a fair wage for their contribution, even if making the Major actually take the money almost required holding her down and shoving the credchip up her sinus cavity." I snarked.
  
  "So we're actually richer now than we'd ever dreamed of being at Horizon." Cat said, still catching up. "Even if we both burned our SINs and Fastjack help clean up any traces we missed-" She shook her head.
  
  "Welcome to the shadows." I acknowledged. "Although maybe not the conventional shadowrunning experience..."
  
  "Not with thirty million reasons to be unconventional, no." Cat grinned lopsidedly. "It's nice to not have to worry about ever missing a meal, but what do people actually do with that kind of money? Especially when they need fake SINs to just go to a decent shopping district?"
  
  "Well, nothing about you has ever been conventional." Jane teased me. "So why would you start now?"
  
  "And that leads me to the last topic on the agenda." I said gravely, and the entire mood of the room shifted. "Dear, Hestaby told me something that I think you really should know."
  
  "I thought she'd also told you not to talk about that!" Jane said alarmedly.
  
  "She made me swear not to tell anyone else why she believes I'm different until she could either confirm or deny." I corrected Jane. "She didn't actually say that I couldn't talk about at least some of the differences, and you know how careful dragons are about exact wording. She was deliberately leaving the option open for me to tell Catherine while encouraging me not to - but not forbidding me to."
  
  "... you're right, she did." Jane agreed, thinking back on over exactly what Hestaby had said and how she'd said it.
  
  "Tell me what?" Catherine said alarmedly.
  
  "Nothing that poses any danger to you or me." I reassured her. "Nothing... duplicitous, or involving stealth or malice. Just... something that was a rather large emotional shock to me, and that I should in fairness share with my wife as soon as practical. But-" I raised as a finger. "You've already had a serious emotional shock very recently, and it might not be wise to dump another one on you - even an entirely unrelated one - in rapid succession. Which is why instead of just hiding the topic until I think you're ready. I'm sharing as much as I can with you to let you decide if you're ready, or if you want to postpone this until..." I diplomatically trailed off.
  
  "I see." Cat said soberly, her gaze blank as she focused inwardly on her own thoughts. She shook her head after a long, nervous pause and turned to Jane. "You've already been told?"
  
  "Yes." Jane said, and rushed to reassure her. "Hestaby did that, not Alex."
  
  "Ah." Catherine exhaled. "And... it's something that you can help him with? To support him through, even when I can't?"
  
  "... it is." Jane admitted softly.
  
  Catherine breathed deeply several times. "Then... I certainly want to know, but that's not the same thing as saying that I need to know. Because I don't, not immediately. This has been a difficult enough... transition period... for me already. So if you think that having this all dumped on me right away might make it worse for me, then I can... I can wait to take it at a healthier pace."
  
  "Thank you." I said to Catherine, squeezing her hand gently. "I know that was very difficult for you to say."
  
  "It was." she admitted frankly. "But as much as this whole damn situation is trying to give me trust issues, if I can't still trust you two then I really will have gone crazy. So that's what I'm going to do."
  
  I drew Catherine into a strong, loving hug across our kitchen table as Jane laid a supportive hand on each of our shoulders. Because for all that I was supposedly evolving into some type of god, at this moment it was far more important that I be the man she'd married.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: No, I don't have people magically bounce out of life-changing experiences without so much as speaking to a therapist, not this time. And yes, Hestaby drops a drama bomb. Several, in fact. And you can see how what she's doing also serves her own private little matchmaking scheme
  
  Note, in my original schema we would have reached this moment with [MYSTERY BOX] still sealed, leaving the readers to speculate that Hestaby's theory was correct until they found out later that no, she was wrong. So in hindsight it's a good thing I popped the lid early, because readers would get massively cranky if they thought the author was playing tricks on them. Even though it should always be kept in mind that things said in character voice are never guaranteed to be true or correct, even if things said in omniscient narrator voice should be.
  
  Spoiler alert: Hestaby is wrong about him being a reincarnating Passion, of course. Hestaby is simply interpreting what she's seen and tested through the lens of what she knows about how the universe works, and reaching the most reasonable conclusion she can from her available data. It's not her fault that nobody told her that bullshit OCP CYOAs exist. But as she herself pointed out in her very same speech (foreshadowing!), it's entirely possible to reach an erroneous conclusion from entirely reasonable logic if you're lacking key data.
  
  And even Hestaby still admits that her hypothesis is unproven, and the main reason she's doing plan 'wait and see' is to test her hypothesis. She's not stupid. But she can still be certain that Alex is unaging and beyond her power to either kill or coerce - she's experimentally verified at least two and a half of those three possibilities - so "let him go his own way on good terms and let a lasting friendship slowly evolve from there" is one of her best plays even just from the POV of cold logic, leaving aside that she personally doesn't like being Big Dragon McNasty anyway.
  
  Oh, the other proto-Passion to which she referred? Emperor Yasuhito of Japan. In canon the mysterious 'This shit is not remotely within human capacity' surrounding his basically being unkillable by fate and his dominance over the kami of all Japan was never explained. So no, not canon. But in this timeline I am fanon'ing up exactly what Hestaby just said in the story. So she has even more reason for leaping to the conclusion that she did here, she already knows it's a genuine possibility.
  
  And yes, everyone on JackPoint got paid for their contributions... and then they saw the nuyen they risked buying into Mr. Bonds short-selling-on-margin scam show a huge return on investment, because how often do you get a guaranteed chance to dump two AAA stocks over the same long weekend? Wild Man is really popular among his peers right now.
  
  "Befehl ist Befehl" is of course 'I was only following orders!' in the original German.
  
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  "Halt! Halt or we fire!"
  
  I ignored the cries of the police as I dropped my commlink and ran across the street and towards the alleyway on the other side. I'd gone to considerable trouble to set up this meet with this particular Johnson from Ares, and the SFPD had interrupted it barely seven minutes in. I could tell from how the responding cars were straggling in one or two at a time that they hadn't had any time to prepare an ambush, but that hadn't changed the sheer alacrity with which they'd scrambled to take both me and the Johnson into custody once someone had overheard what we were talking about and called it in.
  
  Several bullets from the nearest officers started spalling off the sidewalk at my feet and off the nearby wall as they did their best to draw a bead on me and missed. None of the responding officers appeared to be chromer cops - we'd gotten the nearby patrol units doing an immediate response - but I definitely didn't want to still be here when the fast-response team showed up. But without augmentations of their own none of them had a hope in hell of keeping up with me, even when I was using only a fraction of my real top speed. So all I had to worry about was them calling ahead, or about-
  
  A look over my shoulder and a quick but searching glance at the sky revealed the low-altitude surveillance drone swooping in to in to keep track of the fugitive. At an altitude of almost two hundred feet I'd have to reveal Crackshot-level marksmanship to actually hit it on the run, and for as long as it was up there I'd be marked and tracked to the nearest square foot by the cops. Even full adept speed couldn't outrun the speed of light, and every new responding unit would be vectored in ahead of me, to cut me off wherever I ran.
  
  "Police radio says that they have the Johnson in custody and that they just recovered the commlink you dropped." Cat's voice sounded in my earpiece.
  
  "Plan A it is, then." I calmly replied, and stopped most of the way down the alley to boot the back door of the adjacent apartment building. Ducking inside broke the drone's line of sight to me, and as soon as I was certain I was unobserved I dropped the Physical Mask spell and recast it.
  
  Now disguised as an elderly Hispanic man instead of the petite hook-nosed blond Caucasian woman that the police had been chasing, I immediately stopped running and instead shuffled slowly towards the front door of the apartment building. Shortly before reaching the lobby I stepped aside to allow the pair of panting police officers who'd just rushed in the front door to rush by. I answered their hasty question of if I'd seen any short, ugly blond women go by with a polite denial, and continued shuffling out the door and onto the sidewalk.
  
  Prest-o change-o, one clean getaway.
  
  "Status?" I murmured into my throat mike.
  
  "A supervisor just arrived on scene and they're calling Homicide." Cat said. "Mr. Johnson's wearing cuffs in the back of a cop car. Looks like they've bought it."
  
  "All right, I'm walking home. See you in a few. Out."
  
  "Just like old times. Out."
  
  The defeat of "Protectorate General" Saito earlier this year had not been an instant cure for the decades of human versus metahuman tensions in the Bay Area. The Imperial Japanese and their anti-metahuman apartheid had been deeply welcomed by the Humanis Policlub as well as the Free State's own homegrown anti-metahuman militia, the 'Native Californians'. Furthermore, the removal of the Protectorate did not mean that the Japanacorps that had sponsored it were also gone - they still had their extraterritorial enclaves in San Francisco, they still owned everything they'd owned prior to the pullout, and they still employed over forty percent of the Bay Area's citizens. They just had to comply with the laws of the California Free State now instead of having a local puppet government that rubber-stamped every abuse of power they cared to indulge outside their own sovereign territory. Which was admittedly still a vast improvement over the outright tyranny of the guy who was only held back from implementing the Final Solution because the megacorps thought it would be too expensive, but was still a far cry from a functioning city.
  
  San Fran and environs had by the grace of God at least avoided the historical mistake of people who had just liberated occupied territory of immediately swinging to savagely punish any and all 'collaborators' - read, 'anyone who looked even halfway like the invaders' or 'anyone who had just tried to keep their heads down and not make waves during the tyranny in the streets period'. That sort of backlash just tore apart already wounded communities when they were the most vulnerable.
  
  So it really hadn't helped when someone had shot Nicole Fernandez, the first Mayor of post-occupation San Francisco. She'd died a couple of weeks after the Barstow Incident while in the midst of delicate negotiations about rejoining the metahuman-heavy East Bay area to the rest of the city. The tentative unity coalition that was reclaiming the city had almost fallen apart upon Mayor Fernandez' death, and her deputy mayor Greg Capito had only begun to mostly pull things back together. Even then the metahumans were still accusing Humanis of arranging her death because she was in favor of metahuman rights, the humans were accusing the radical metahuman groups of doing it because Nicole Fernandez had been human, and while things hadn't devolved to open riots yet the early rebuilding efforts were almost completely stagnating due to everyone's suspicion of everyone else.
  
  Which is why as soon as I'd returned from Mount Shasta and we'd had some free time, I'd decided to find out who'd actually shot her and why. Or, more accurately, my lovely and talented wife had done the bulk of the finding out while I then figured out how to get the proof into the hands of the authorities. Given the nature of the victim and the extreme political tensions the SFPD had done a first-class effort into investigating the case already, but that just meant Cat had more reading material to go through when she 'borrowed' a copy of the police evidence files. Municipal law enforcement systems weren't a job for weekend hackers, but neither were they the kind of downtown glaciers that an A-list hacker - such as my wife - regularly helped shave the ice off of while shadowrunning. Her info sortilege then let her put patterns together on a superhuman, intuitive level that regular detectives could not, and the trail had led us right to the local Ares Macrotechnology office.
  
  Turns out that Ares had been expecting for most if not all of the rebuilding contracts for the Bay Area's infrastructure, particularly the parts of it in the East Bay region that had been neglected for decades, to fall right into their lap after they'd gone to all the efforts of helping arm and fund the final push of the San Francisco liberation groups during the fall of the Protectorate. So when Mayor Fernandez instead had pulled off her political coup of getting the defeated Japanacorps to heavily buy into a city-administered reconstruction fund - by pointing out that win, lose, or draw, unless the Japanese megacorps intended to abandon all their San Francisco operations then they still needed a functioning city around them capable of housing, feeding, and transporting the approximately forty percent of the working population that were still their employees and that they'd damn well better chip in for reasons of their own self-interest - Ares had decided that the city of San Francisco could use a somewhat less talented mayor. One who would still be able to lead the unity coalition trying to set up a stable post-Protectorate government again on inertia, but who wouldn't be the sort of cunning planner that could sidestep one megacorp's attempt to buy themselves a new city cheap by figuring out how to get three more to pay for the privilege of losing. One of Lester Brown's 'Native Californian' thugs had been the triggerman, but it had been Ares that had paid his action cell in cold hard nuyen for the job and had gotten them the deployments of Mayor Fernandez' security perimeter that day.
  
  Which is why, in my temporarily-adopted persona as an alleged 'Native Californian', I'd called the Ares Johnson who'd brokered the hit and threatened to blackmail his ass over the Mayor's assassination, and I had proof, and he'd better meet me alone or else my friend would release everything, the age-old drill. And I'd set the time of the meet for a bare half hour from the time the carefully-anonymized commlink call had interrupted him at lunch, so he'd only just had enough time to get in his car and head over to where I'd demanded he meet. Of course he'd also paged for an Ares security team to come plug the leak, but it would be his job to keep me there and talking long enough for them to catch up. So I'd let him draw me into a round of fruitless negotiations, threats, and counter-threats while I dramatically waved my disposable commlink full of proof - real proof, in fact, hacked from the local Ares office's own nodes by Cat - and waited for events to catch up.
  
  Because the outdoor tables in front of the little pizza joint where I'd set up the meet had already been under SFPD surveillance, thanks to the narcotics ring selling out of said pizza joint. Which means as soon as we'd started talking about Mayor Fernandez' death and Ares-hired hitmen and proof, the cops in the second-floor apartment across the street with the telescopic cameras and shotgun mikes already aimed at the storefront we were sitting in front of heard every word even despite our discreet murmuring. The instant an actual admission had left Mr. Johnson's mouth, they had of course called in every unit in the precinct to come rush our location ASAP, and they'd arrived first. Especially given that thanks to Cat's twiddling of Mr. Johnson's commlink, his own call for backup had mysteriously gotten redirected.
  
  Between what he'd already said on tape and my own 'dropped' commlink full of conclusive evidence, Mr. Johnson was going away. Megacorporate extraterritoriality wouldn't save him, because he'd been off of Ares soil for conspiracy to commit a crime that had also occurred outside of Ares jurisdiction, and the evidence in my commlink was admissible in the CalFree court system, illegally obtained or not, because the illegal acts had not been committed by the police or at their invitation and because the commlink had been recovered at the scene of a crime.
  
  So whether Mr. Johnson lived to go to trial or Ares plugged their leak by managing to have him plugged in custody, either way the entire town would still know exactly who'd killed Mayor Fernandez and why. Even the Johnson's death wouldn't stop that... while it would allow Ares to deny that it had been anything but the act of one rogue employee, it would also be considered an open admission of guilt as far as the court of public opinion was concerned. Especially given that the identity of the Native Californian triggerman and the financial details of the payoff were among the files on that commlink, meaning another SFPD fast-response team would be booting their door as quickly as a judge could get electrons on an arrest warrant.
  
  Mission accomplished. All the suspicions and finger-pointing among the various factions of the city would die down with the reveal of the actual killers. The Humanis faction would be suitably pilloried and shunned, the downtown moderates and the East Bay metahumans could start trusting each other again, and the rebuilding coalition could start getting back on schedule. Not bad for two days' work.
  
  Well, that was the easy part over and done with. Now would come the tedious part.
  
  
  
  The first piece of advice they gave people living in the Witness Protection Program was to change. Change your hobbies, change your style, change your job if you could manage it. If you liked to go out and dance in nightclubs, stay home and watch TV instead. If you always dressed in t-shirts and jeans, buy some polo shirts and slacks. If you were a used car salesman, study to become a real-estate broker. Or in my case, if you were widely known as a badass physical adept and one of the greatest pistol marksmen in the world then become a magician instead.
  
  I'd been studying magical theory on the side almost since Jane had first tricked me into casting a manabolt, although not as a particularly high priority given everything else that had been going on at the time and the potential 24-hour surveillance I'd been living under. Still, it had more than prepared me to actually start using magic once I'd been free of that. Hestaby had carefully drilled me in the foundations of sorcery as part of my testing and evaluation at Mount Shasta, both to see what sort of magic I could cast and how quickly I could pick it up. While Jane was still far above me re: sheer depth of mystical knowledge and mastery of spells and conjuring, with the sort of instruction I had available and my own superhuman ability to learn I had still only needed weeks to pick up enough of the fundamentals to be a basically competent street mage. And where I still lacked skill I had more than enough raw power to burn - both in the sheer force my spells could hit with and in my endurance. Indeed, Hestaby had done her best to push me to my limit re: how many spells I could cast before the Drain exhausted me and in the process we'd discovered that I didn't seem to have any Drain from spellcasting. Which put me in a category normally inhabited only by powerful spirits and Great Dragons.
  
  Yeah, I was definitely going to heed the Orange Queen's advice about sticking with my instincts and not rushing ahead further than I was comfortable with if I had this kind of mojo potentially on tap. Magic could go very, very, very wrong if you went crazy with it - just ask any toxic shaman about that! If you could even go near one without your liver being eaten with some fava beans and a nice chianti, that is, given that the most stable toxic practitioner was still down around "Poison Ivy on a bad week" level insane.
  
  Still, between my being a mage and Cat not openly getting a job in the Matrix field, all it took on top of that was some elementary physical disguising for us to entirely not be the human-elf married couple that you were looking for.
  
  Gary Cline had immediately retired for reasons of poor health, then quietly vanished into Horizon's psychiatric care system. Tam Reyes had been charged by Horizon in their own internal justice system with intercorporate espionage in collusion with MCT and conspiracy to murder an unspecified yet valued Horizon employee, then had his sentence commuted to "voluntary" participation in Horizon biomedical studies regarding technomancers. Horizon never admitted the existence of anything called the 'Dawkins Group' in the first place, but word in the shadows was that it was being drastically re-orged and that several senior Dawkins Group executives were no longer on the employee rolls but nobody seemed to know where they had gone. We'd each burned our SINs before we'd even had a chance to find out what disposition Horizon would have made of our cases - like hell were we ever sticking our heads back into that particular silken noose - so legally speaking we didn't exist to have any possible warrants on us. And practically speaking, we'd deliberately calculated the exact tone and tenor of the revelations at Gary's house, both public and private, to make sure the Board of Directors got the message 'Cut your losses here and it's no further grudge on our part', in addition to making us turning up dead far worse PR for Horizon than us quietly fading away. Indeed, from all that we or JackPoint could see, Horizon had accepted the terms and it would be live and let live from now on. Not that a prudent person wouldn't still take precautions.
  
  As far as Urban Brawl was concerned, that phase of my life was over. And while pro sports were fun and the World Cup ring was still a nice trophy, it's not as if it had been my driving passion in life or that I'd be particularly heartbroken at missing out on it. Regarding my old teammates, Sarah and Andrew had both retired "in protest over how badly Horizon had treated a valued teammate", and more than a few of the rest had taken advantage of the controversy to bail out of their own contracts and go free agent to other teams. The Bolts definitely weren't going back to the World Cup this year, and would need to import a bunch of warm bodies from their farm team just to have a full playable roster at all. And word on the sports beat was that Sarah was in talks to become the new head coach of the Boston Massacre, with Andrew as her offensive coordinator. Well, good for them.
  
  Jane had left shortly after I'd gotten back from Mount Shasta, because she was starting to come up short regarding how much time she could devote to our own pet projects before either Harlequin or her father noticed what she was up to. So she was back dealing with their nonsense for the immediate future, leaving me and Catherine in San Francisco with almost thirty million nuyen to our name, a new pair of fake SINs to live under for the nonce, and some idle hands to put to work.
  
  I'd had three main priorities to work on for the past several years. First up had been the Emergence, because Cat was far more vulnerable physically than I was and handling the public reveal of technomancers in a good way was both a good act and major benefit to the world in its own right as well as being vitally necessary to my wife's future welfare. Second up had been finding out what the hell was going on with me, a process that had just taken a major leap forward with Hestaby's revelations at Mount Shasta, even though neither she nor I were at all certain yet that her hypothesis was correct. And last had been my general desire to find a way to do lasting, large-scale change for the better in this dystopian world - the set of vague, long-term goals that I'd loosely grouped together under the umbrella of "Project Archimedes".
  
  But now that I had funding, time, and a lack of higher-priority projects needing me to turn my attention to them first, it really was about time I got started. And the Bay Area was a fertile ground for at least some small-scale - relatively speaking - experiments in social improvement. I mean, if there was one thing the whole Horizon mess had taught me it was the nigh-incalculable amount of damage you could potentially do when you combined hubris and large-scale social manipulations. Even if I had a mysterious power that made me able to succeed on levels and in ways few other beings could match, that didn't mean I was all-powerful and it damn sure didn't mean I was perfect.
  
  So given a major metropolitan area currently entering a transitional period underneath a coalition of the willing and with no megacorps as yet getting their fingers too deeply into the whole pie a la the United Corporate Council in Seattle or LA's being a wholly owned subsidiary of Horizon or suchlike, and with neglect and depleted infrastructure from decades of low-intensity urban warfare and the damage from Winternight's tactical nuclear EMP strike on the old San Francisco airport as part of their worldwide attacks during the Crash 2.0... well, I had all this nuyen sitting right here, so why not start investing some of it in the community?
  
  And that's how Cat and I founded our own little corporation. Aurora Development, Inc., was a privately held venture capital firm with a charter written so vaguely that its business model could potentially involve anything from dancing skyclad underneath the harvest moon to trying to terraform the Gobi Desert. It was owned through several layers of shell corporations themselves incorporated in two international tax havens to eventually end up at an electronic PO box in Hong Kong. It wasn't exactly the sort of professional job that could hold off a major corporation's market intelligence or forensic accounting teams, but it would do to keep the city government or local entrepreneurs from running it all back to two people in a modest apartment in the Berkeley sprawl. I'd spent a year in business studies at Horizon, which at my learning speed meant that I was more than prepared to test out for a four-year degree by the end of it even if my official rate of progress had been held back to what was publicly plausible. So this basic a job of financial setup and business management was well within my capacity.
  
  Cat didn't dive back into the Resonance Realms for an edge anymore than I was going to immediately essay the metaplanes again. That sort of vision quest, whether magical or digital, was not done casually even if you were relatively powerful and experienced. But between my augmented intelligence and her information-gathering talents, we were still much further ahead of the curve than any investment start-up of our size would normally be. Particularly noteworthy in this regard was Cat's first technomancer Submersion echo. Info sortilege couldn't magically give answers out of nothing but provided that the correct conclusion could have potentially been reached from available data, then it would almost always significantly shortcut the process of reaching that conclusion.
  
  As a trained signals intelligence analyst from her time in the 77th Cat knew full well that the major bottleneck in espionage was not in information-gathering but instead in information processing. Time and time again the major intelligence agencies of the world, when caught flat-footed by world crises, had discovered in hindsight that the clues necessary to see things coming had been buried on their desks the whole time. The problem was in being able to figure out which few dozen pieces of intel in the middle of literally millions upon millions of pieces of raw data were actually significant and which were not, a job that was far too often completed only well after the press of events that made the point moot. But the Resonance was essentially a set of data-based superpowers that quite often bent if not outright broke the common understanding of information theory, and in extreme cases such as the Endless Archive outright violated the laws of information thermodynamics.
  
  So unlike most other firms in our position we usually knew which local contracts and reconstruction projects were valid and which were boondoggles, which ones were being bid on by companies that had good track records and which ones were being flogged off to incompetent or corrupt operators, where the fix needed to be put in to grease the wheels, and where the parasites were trying to suck things dry. And thus we were actually making a reasonable profit on reconstruction contracts - not that profit was our goal. Expediting the process of rebuilding the airport, of getting the East Bay hooked up with a set of proper Matrix and public utilities, of expanding the mass transit grid - all of these things would, as near as we could figure, help jump-start the process of rebuilding a depressed economy and indirectly encouraging local businesses and economic independence. And we had street-level feedback via acquaintances at the Peoples' University as well as our own information-gathering experts to let us know which initiatives were actually working as intended, which ones were suffering the Law of Unintended Consequences, and which ones were straight-up failing.
  
  The process was anything but an unqualified success. Oh, I could ramp myself up to be superhumanly skilled and intuitive at making business decisions - the raid on the MCT lab had taught me a lot about amplifying my thought processes with less risk, even if I still had a definite and finite boundary I didn't want to try expanding past just yet - but that didn't make me God. The further outside of my immediate reach something was, the less control I had over the outcome. And for something as large as the economy of one municipality, let alone anything larger, the day-to-day decisions of thousands if not millions of other people could potentially change things in the blink of an eye... and worse yet, I couldn't anticipate what all those decisions would be ahead of time, I was reminded of a Larry Niven story about a hyperintelligent mutant whose logic was so impeccable that it could perfectly predict the actions of any sentient being of remotely human-scale intelligence provided it had useful information about the being's motivations and environment. Knowing the desired goal, knowing the personality involved, and knowing the opportunities available would always let it be one step ahead.
  
  Until the day one of its opponent had made a tactical decision by flipping a coin twice, out of the being's sight, and going off of that. All of the intellect in the universe couldn't predict an act of random chance, or with insufficient data to even vaguely solve the equation. And while the mutant had solved the problem in its story by simply having enough contingencies set up that it didn't matter which one of the four choices its opponent had made because it had something in place to deal with whatever it might be, that had been for a small-unit tactical situation occurring in an environment that it controlled completely. Whereas I was dealing with a large-scale problem of economics, psychology, and quite often criminal conspiracies, in a city-sized environment I certainly did not control at all.
  
  So we made our investments - and occasionally commissioned shadowruns as Aurora Development's own "Mr. Johnson" or did them ourselves - and took notes on the results, kept learning from experience as to what worked and what didn't, and then went back for another round. And thus 2068 drew to a close and 2069 loomed large on the horizon.
  
  
  
  "Merry Christmas!" Cat said, hugging Jane warmly. I let the ladies have it out and then stepped in for my own hug and kiss, as we led Jane into our apartment.
  
  "I'm really glad you could come." I said, ushering her inside. "No problems with not being anywhere else for the holidays?"
  
  "My father really isn't much into celebrating Christmas." Jane replied dryly. "And as for my mentor, we've had about as much of each other as we can stand over the past few weeks."
  
  "Well, at least you can hang all that up for a while and come rescue us from having to spend the holidays with no guests." I said sincerely.
  
  "Oh, I entirely intend to." Jane agreed cheerfully, throwing herself bodily onto our couch and stretching so hard that we could hear her vertebrae crack. "So, what have you two been up to?"
  
  We spent a cheerful Christmas Eve catching up and demolishing a hand-cooked holiday dinner, and then we all retired to the bedroom for the first chance we'd had at a threesome since before Cat's abduction. Jane and I had slept together regularly at Shasta - with Cat's knowledge and permission, of course - but Cat had not wanted to mix sex and immediate post-trauma recovery, so her and I hadn't resumed marital relations until a couple weeks after Aurora Development had been underway.
  
  Not that her abduction was the sole cause of that. Cat had always been borderline hypersexual her entire life, but she'd eventually admitted to me that confronting the root cause of her tendency towards that and facing up to it consciously had been the trial the Dweller had made her face on her first Submersion. So while Cat still had an entirely healthy sex drive the concept of 'pacing oneself' was now more on the table. I certainly hadn't had problems keeping up anyway, demi-godly endurance and all that, but there was still such a thing as a mental satiation point. And to be honest, I had occasionally wondered from time to time at if what had been driving all that enthusiasm was something Cat had been entirely comfortable with, or had been some type of subconscious insecurity or something. Not that I was going to pry any deeper than she was willing to let me, barring an immediate crisis of some kind.
  
  But right now, no one was holding back on anything. Jane wasn't quite as bisexual as Cat was - the idea of sleeping with her without me also in the same bed wasn't quite in her wheelhouse - but she still had no aversion to sleeping with Cat as part of a threesome, and outside the context of sex had at least as much affection for my wife as she did me. And recent psychological growth or not Cat was still kinky enough to enjoy watching us both almost as much as she enjoyed participating. And even the non-partially-divine among us were both in peak physical condition and fit to go a long, long while, so it was a good thing that magic could be used to quickly clean the bedsheets, I'm just saying.
  
  "I really missed you guys." Jane said contentedly as she lay in-between us, we having made our special holiday guest the center of the sandwich for the first round.
  
  "We could tell." Cat giggled, her head still pillowed on Jane's ample breasts.
  
  "Nothing too stressful happened, did it?" I asked more soberly from Jane's other shoulder. "Because you seemed more than a bit wound up."
  
  "Ugh, you don't even want to know." Jane groaned. "But no, he mostly behaved himself this time. It's just..." she sighed. "We can talk shop tomorrow. For right now..."
  
  "Top or bottom?" I asked her affectionately.
  
  "I still need to return the favor to Cat." Jane replied. "So you, lean back and spread 'em so I can get a taste. And Alex... well, you'll find something to amuse yourself with back there, I'm sure." she teased.
  
  I could already feel myself recharging for another round as I knelt behind Jane and squeezed her hips just the way she liked it. "Brace yourself." I smirked as I lined up with her pussy and thrust.
  
  "Big talk from- mmmph!" she grunted happily, as I got down to brass tacks and then so did she.
  
  "I am so spoiled by both of you." Cat moaned. "And I'm giving you guys- oh! -a couple centuries to stop doing that!"
  
  
  
  "So you think Hestaby is matchmaking us?" I asked Jane as we stood alone on the balcony the next morning. Cat was still sleeping in, but both Jane and I were early risers.
  
  "Almost certainly." she replied softly. "I went back and replayed all her conversations in my head, and in hindsight the pattern stood out. Every time she talked about me to you, she used my name - usually with a compliment mixed in. But whenever the Orange Queen referred to Cat it was never even slightly derogatory, but it was..."
  
  "Depersonalized." I nodded, my own perfect memory easily going over all the data at Jane's prompting. "Using Cat's actual name less than half the time, and usually referring to her just as 'her', or 'your wife', or similar. And with no insults, not even subtle ones-"
  
  "You'd have noticed that and become immediately defensive." Jane agreed. "And even an unsubtle dragon is still damn subtle by any other standard, and she is not an unsubtle dragon."
  
  "-but fewer compliments. And then there was what I can't believe I missed, regarding the lifespan talk." I moaned, slumping my head down onto my forearms as they rested on the railing.
  
  "That we missed." Jane said. "And it's a measure of how good dragons are at manipulation that it wasn't immediately obvious. Honestly, Catherine's an elf. Even without being my particular substrain of elf, she's still good for at least three centuries. Until the revelation that you don't age normally entered the picture, she was going to be the one who tragically outlived you!. And yet-"
  
  "And yet we hadn't even thought of that yet, because we were young twentysomethings in love. But I should have thought of it, as soon as the lifespan thing was brought onto the table at all. And yet Hestaby was so good at winding me up while 'compassionately' pointing out that I'd had the great good fortune to meet a fellow immortal-" I shook my head. "I missed it entirely, and I am not a guy who normally misses things. Especially when I'm trying not to."
  
  "Never deal with a dragon, chummer." Jane quoted the common street folklore. "Millenia of experience counts for a lot, even when up against with someone who's as... uniquely gifted... as you are."
  
  "No fooling." I said. "I'm just lucky that her maneuver here wasn't something more overt. But subtle or not - hell, gentle or not - it's still her trying to play us. But to what agenda?" I wondered out loud.
  
  "She's a Great Dragon, so it's probably half a dozen things at once." Jane muttered darkly. "But..." she hawked and spat off the balcony. "God damn it! I have had it up to here with being a pawn that elders just want to move around on a chessboard! Can't I be allowed to have just one fucking thing for myself, one relationship that isn't a trick or a trap or a-"
  
  I tested the waters with a very minor tensing of my arm as I laid it across her shoulders, and then read her signal of leaning into the hug to pull her close and hold her tight. "At least the ones you gave your heart to are not the ones tricking you this time."
  
  "No, you're not." she agreed tensely. "But even so, knowing that someone else is trying to take advantage of it-" Jane shook her head.
  
  "It makes you feel like gnawing your leg off to escape a trap." I agreed. "So... was last night you saying good-bye?" I asked softly, legitimately afraid of the answer.
  
  "... no." Jane relieved me with an equally soft whisper. "I..." she shook her head. "I know what your hearing is like. You probably heard what I whispered during that Matrix meeting on JackPoint, at the end of Cat's message, even if nobody else did."
  
  "That you loved us too." I acknowledged.
  
  "The l-word just slipped right out of my mouth." Jane sighed. "We always knew it wasn't a fling, but to find out it had gone as far as that-" she shook her head. "How does someone just... move into a human heart like that?" she asked confusedly. "Just... be themselves, and yet you can't pin down when things became so that you'd always feel like something was missing if they weren't there?"
  
  "A question I asked myself more than once after meeting Cat." I said to Jane. "And that I've been starting to ask myself again."
  
  "... I'm glad to hear that." Jane smiled sadly. "But it still doesn't change that by falling in love, we're somehow playing right into a dragon's claws."
  
  "Are we?" I challenged her. "Hestaby's thinking that she can somehow manipulate us together by a shared separation from mortality. But we'd already let you into our hearts-"
  
  "And several other body parts." Jane joked weakly.
  
  "-all before I had even a suspicion that you were unaging, let alone that I was." I pointed out. "And even more so in Catherine's case. What the Orange Queen thinks is motivating us is demonstrably not what is actually motivating us, or what will be motivating us in the future. And that does matter as far as knowing if we're being manipulated or not, even if some of our actions are still conforming to her schedule."
  
  "That latter is even a help in a way, because nobody digs into why their plans are going off the rails when they appear to still be on them." Jane agreed. "It's just-" she angrily twitched her shoulders. "Harlequin has plans for me. My father has plans for me. And now she has plans for me. What about my plans for me, dammit? When do I get a vote?"
  
  "What are your plans for you?" I asked as non-challengingly as possible.
  
  "They're-" Jane began, only to cut herself off and turn away to look back at the horizon. "Okay, okay, I get the point." she muttered darkly after a long pause. "Why do you have to be so damn insightful?"
  
  "Insightful, nothing, I've spent the past several years wondering what my plans should be for me." I said. "It's why I can recognize the symptoms on someone else."
  
  "The real obstacle to effective planning here is that only two of us have access to all the information, but three of us should have a vote." Jane pointed out. "And while we can - and unless I entirely miss my guess are going to as soon as she wakes up this morning - tell Catherine about your lifespan, we still can't dare to mention mine. Or anything else related to it, especially not my father or the truth about the founding of the Tirs or immortal politics in general." Jane spat out. "Which really sucks when the task at hand is us planning how to navigate those political currents, because- well, I've always had to put up with them, but now they're starting to draw you in as well."
  
  "Apparently so." I acknowledged. "Still, if Hestaby is trying to set us up as a little immortal breeding pair for some reason, then she's almost certainly working that scheme on an immortal's time scale. Especially given her parting caution to me that I had to learn - that I had to let you teach me - how to think ahead in terms of decades and centuries, not just years."
  
  "Well, there she's not wrong." Jane agreed. "Even if I'm only an eyeblink older than you are in immortal terms."
  
  "Guys?" Catherine called from inside the apartment. "What are you doing freezing your asses off out there?"
  
  Jane dismissed the spell that had been maintaining an anti-eavesdropping bubble around us with a single curt motion of her hand. "Talking shop." she answered truthfully but incompletely.
  
  "Then talk shop inside." Cat replied affectionately. "Because it's time for breakfast."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Apparently I'm really not much for writing lemons, even when I try. That's the most descriptive I've gotten in umpteen chapters and it's still barely anything by QQ standards.
  
  And hey, people are actually starting to work on things more subtle than face punching! And we finally begin some uplift, however relatively small-scale! Pilot projects are a great way to learn by doing, after all.
  
  And yes, Jane finally used the l-word. In fact, she first used it about four chapters ago. Did anyone notice? :)
  
  I would like to thank my readers who pointed out that going by even normal elven lifespan, the lifespan talk should not be any urgent concern yet. Because that helped me set up this sequence.
  
  Now I just have to figure out what the next arc is really going to be about, because unlike when I was heading into the last one I don't even have a mental outline yet. But at least I have a starting point now.
  
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  "So, only one and a half million nuyen in the hole?" Jane asked amusedly. The latest relationship upgrade had seen her moving into our apartment as a permanent houseguest - or, more accurately, us switching addresses to a larger and better outfitted condo because our original space would have been a bit cramped over the long term - and it was now only a day before New Years' Eve.
  
  "Out of over five million invested." I replied. "And the water treatment plant will be back online in the East Bay by spring, and that's when we'll make back the losses and more. As well as ensuring that the East Bay's main water supply is run by an independent outfit instead of giving a Shiawase front control over the main water valves and all the leverage that implies."
  
  "What's your plan for when Shiawase comes looking for who ruined their deal?" she asked us.
  
  "They already did, and got as far as the 'local Aurora rep'." Cat said, nodding towards me. "At which point we offered them a rather substantial contract for upgrading and refurbishing the local water and drainage lines from the plant. The occupation government was shorting the East Bay's infrastructure and upkeep for over thirty years, after all, so somebody with hefty resources was still going to have to do it."
  
  "And it's not as if Shiawase can come back and steal the pipes out of the ground later." I pointed out. "As opposed to them having day-to-day control over the water plant itself. But it still gave the local Shiawase rep a success to report back up the chain to his boss."
  
  "Sounds like you're settling in to your new business career." Jane nodded. "You guys think it'll last?"
  
  Cat shook her head. "If we can get another year out of these fake SINs, we'll be lucky. More likely it'll be maybe six months. I'm pretty sure at least some of the local megacorp players already suspect that they're just cover IDs. No, this is just us keeping busy while we let the heat die down a little."
  
  "We're not really turning out to be 'take a vacation' type people." I admitted ruefully. "Plus, you know about Project Archimedes. Even if I'll have more time to work on it than I originally thought, I still have to start gaining business and project management experience somewhere."
  
  Jane looked pensive. "It's nice to have a plan for your life, but are you sure that's the life you want? Executive suites and backroom deals?"
  
  "It hasn't been fun so far." I agreed. "But... Jane, the person who gave you your ring. It was Dunkelzahn, wasn't it?" I asked her while pointing at the orichalcum power focus in the form of a coiling dragon displayed prominently on her finger, and Cat gasped.
  
  "Yes, it was." she admitted tightly. "How did you know?"
  
  "It was in his will, Jane." I said tolerantly. "To Jane Foster, I leave you the dragon ring that you wear, a small token from an old wyrm, as well as my everlasting respect. You are indeed worthy of your heritage and I hope that you are proof of what is to come for us." I quoted. "The only reason more people don't make the connection is because you've got your ring coated to look like ordinary platinum jewelry, and pretty much anybody who knows it's a genuine power focus also knows you only by your call sign."
  
  "I had no idea that you knew him!" Cat looked at Jane as if she'd grown a second head.
  
  "I met him once." Jane moaned embarrassedly. "Briefly. And I had absolutely no clue who he was at the time."
  
  "And I am still entirely missing part of the story here!" Cat said suspiciously. "When were you two even talking about things like this?"
  
  "While you were kidnapped." Jane said reluctantly. "It tied into... things that could have potentially affected mission prep." She glared at me. "And into other things that I don't like talking about."
  
  "Sorry," I apologized. "I don't even know why-" I sighed.
  
  "Yes you do." Jane said insightfully, and leave that lay as she turned to Cat and recapped the story she'd once told me about her father, Dunkelzahn, and Harlequin.
  
  "Okay, that makes some other things you've said make a lot more sense in hindsight." Cat agreed meaningfully. "But I believe someone else was making a point at the moment?" she finished as the two women in my life turned to give me some stink-eye in unison. Yes, it really had been a bit unfair of me to touch on things told me in confidence like that, even if the individual deduction I'd made could have been independently redone entirely from data not in confidence...
  
  "My point was just to segue into Dunkelzahn's will, actually." I said embarassedly. "And his preface about how the world was at a tipping point, and how it would be up to anyone who could do anything about it to try and help with that regardless of what their role was conventionally 'supposed' to be. And it turns out that I can do a lot, so..." I shrugged. "I'm trying to find the best way to use that."
  
  "Fair enough." Jane conceded. "I just... have already had a ringside seat to watch what power can do to some people. I really don't want to see it happen again."
  
  "That's why I value the support of both of you so much." I agreed. "Because while power might not be inherently corrupting, it's really good at letting people feel free to take the brakes off any existing capacity for corruption."
  
  "Case in my point, my ex-boss." Catherine frowned thunderously, before exhaling deeply, once, twice, thrice. "Although I hope Horizon isn't going too overboard with what they're doing to him." she continued after finishing her relaxation exercise.
  
  "As near as Puck has been able to find out, they haven't." Jane reassured her. "Some of the JackPointers are still making a project of following up on the Emergence, even after the favorable public reveal. Reyes might have been demoted from VP to sequestered lab rat, but they're still not going anywhere near NeoNET levels of 'research' with him."
  
  "Ugh, NeoNET." Cat frowned. "That black lab of theirs that Sunshine's team found in Denver earlier this month was almost as disgusting as MCT's."
  
  "Speaking of that, Smiling Bandit's asked us if we'd have some time free in the near future to help go dig up another MCT black site that he thinks they're setting up in Hong Kong." I asked Jane. "Want to come along?"
  
  "HK shadows are tricky." Jane cautioned us. "It's a whole different world over there, and JackPoint rep doesn't really count for anything if you aren't plugged into the local guanxi networks. Which I certainly am not."
  
  "Yeah, it's going to be strictly friends-of-friends or maybe even rent-a-friend over there for us." I agreed. "Still, it's not like we can just sit around and push paper all the time, now is it?"
  
  
  
  "Fuck!" I swore viciously as the news came in. The three of us were in our rented room in a Dynasty Mansion - one of a chain of run-down motels located all over the Hong Kong sprawl. The desk clerks were famous for not checking IDs or remembering faces, the most acceptable form of payment was in anonymous certified cred, and there weren't even any security cameras. Which made them a popular place to stay for many runners, whether locals or gweilo like us - even despite the fact that the ambience was barely one step above a Barrens flophouse.
  
  The news article detailing an explosion at our address had immediately tripped one of Cat's searchbots. A hasty Matrix investigation turned up the whole sequence of events. Specifically, a bomb had destroyed our new apartment less than six hours after we'd left for Hong Kong. According to the SFPD crime scene report the explosive device had been a milspec anti-vehicle mine taped to the ceiling directly underneath our master bedroom, and timed to go off at 1am. Three people had died as a result of the explosion, and five more had been seriously injured.
  
  "And you'd both have died if we'd been there." I said grimly as we closed our AR windows from where Cat had been scrolling the forensic reports for us. "The middle of the night when we'd all normally be sleeping the sleep of the sexually sated? You wouldn't even have known what was hitting you."
  
  "And neither would you, if you'd been even slightly less invulnerable." Cat said soberly. "But the sheer overkill and precision of the attack shows that it was intended to kill someone they did know was superhumanly durable. The plasma spike from that shaped charge would have torn the guts out of a Stonewall main battle tank, and the demo tech who'd planted it had the layout of our apartment and had put it exactly under our bed."
  
  "What's particularly noteworthy is what happened to the person who had the apartment underneath yours." Jane said soberly. "Judging from the lack of forced entry indicators and the placement and condition of the knife wound, someone talked them into opening their apartment door and then did a quick expert shanking as soon as they had an opening. But then they stuffed the corpse in a garbage bag and carried it down to stuff into the maintenance space in the basement." She looked up. "The assassin wasn't taking any chances that something would go off-script, so he made sure that there wasn't even a statistical risk of the smell leading anyone into the apartment. No one would have opened that space again before the next morning at the earliest, and even if they had it would have been hours before the police could get a warrant to search the house too." She shook her head. "Your average hired bomber doesn't even have access to that kind of ordnance, let alone has that kind of chess-player's mind. Somebody paid a lot to have you killed."
  
  "And whoever it was didn't want to take the slightest chance of meeting us." Cat analyzed. "Time of death on poor Mrs. Haversham suggests they waited until we'd left that afternoon to plant their bomb, and using a mechanical timer instead of an electronic one or a command-detonator means they not only didn't want to stay anywhere near the scene of the crime but didn't want to take the slightest chance I'd sense anything."
  
  "If it wasn't for the fact that we'd already had our luggage in the trunk that morning so anyone watching us leave that afternoon would have thought we were just heading out to dinner and not to the airport-" Jane shook her head. "Well, at least our would be criminal mastermind isn't perfect."
  
  "But they're still very, very good. And from their choice of murder weapon, they already knew I was bulletproof. And that you're a technomancer. And from the total lack of any Awakened element, such as using a tasked spirit to manually set off the charge, that you're a magician." I swore viciously. "They knew a lot about us. Do you think it's Horizon or MCT?"
  
  "Insufficient data." Cat said, and Jane nodded along with her. "Although I will have something else to look for now when we go through the files of MCT's laboratory here."
  
  I suddenly slammed my fist into my other palm hard enough that if I'd hit anything else in the room, I'd have sent it through the wall. "I almost lost you both." I said softly. "And even though I didn't, all those innocent bystanders- if I hadn't-"
  
  "Hey!" I was suddenly group-hugged by both ladies. "Don't do that!" Cat begged me. "You can't-" she looked me in the eyes. "You can't torture yourself like that. Even when they're aiming at you, they still did the wrong thing. It's not your fault when you're the target. They invaded our life. They pulled the triggers."
  
  "I made my own choices. As did both of you." Jane agreed with her. "We're all professionals, and we all know the risks."
  
  "And we still all fucked up." I swore, "me most of all. There's a reason runners don't try to settle down with the white picket fence, and I entirely ignored that!"
  
  "I could still have been the primary target and not you, Alex." Jane pointed out. "I'm not bulletproof, but I'm still a really hard target and a lot of people out there already know that. Vaporizing my bedroom in my sleep with a bomb would be one of my top plans for killing me."
  
  "How many people would know that our new condo was 'your bedroom'?" I pointed out the flaw in her logic. "Especially so quickly?"
  
  "Aimed at you or not, I'm not letting you do some stupid 'I must leave you to guarantee your safety!' thing any more than I would him!" Cat insisted to Jane. "So don't even try."
  
  "Catherine, it's me." Jane said wearily before they both turned towards me.
  
  "I wasn't planning on it!" I demurred, powerless in the face of both those concerned glares. "But-" I pushed aside my angst for the moment and focused. "Okay, Cat? Execute the emergency liquidation contingency. As of now Aurora Development is done, we need to dump all the existing contracts in progress on the rest of the East Bay consortium and fold up the holding corporations while we cash out. Also, we write off everything else we left in San Francisco. For the immediate future we're living out of suitcases."
  
  "Check." she agreed.
  
  "Jane, we still have to finish this run first because those imprisoned technomancers aren't going anywhere without us-" I began.
  
  "Assuming they're still alive." Cat sighed.
  
  "Which we are, until we get in there and find out for certain. So we still have to make the meet in ninety minutes. Only we're going to postpone some of the legwork phase so Cat can ride along on that meet as opposed to the original plan. Because if there's a high-end assassin out for us then we'll have to go on the buddy system for a while. Neither of you is alone at any time; I'm indestructible bait, you two aren't." I finished
  
  "Understood." Jane nodded.
  
  Charlie Chan's was an upscale restaurant in the Wanchai-Causeway district, just east of Victoria Peak and located smack dab in the middle of Hong Kong's swankiest, artsiest boutiques and residential district. Made up as an old Shanghai speakeasy, complete with brass lamps and jazz singers, it was a high-end tourist trap - as if being named after that cheesy old television series wasn't enough of a clue - where the international business crowd came to wine and dine with up-and-coming Hong Kong entrepreneurs. But if you could dress and act upscale enough, it was also a good place for out-of-town runners to connect with several of the local fixers. And the simstar-handsome gweilo swaggering into the joint with a drop-dead sexy elven lady on each arm was certainly upscale enough to draw more than a few admiring looks even from this jaded crowd. Frosty was in a neat businesswear suit subtly cut to emphasize her muscle tone, and Cat was in a sexy yet demure dress, while I was in a Vashon suit and tinted gold-rimmed spectacles. Finding a good tailor on short notice in Hong Kong wasn't cheap, but when you were trying to leave a certain impression then you paid the business expense and liked it.
  
  "Please honored sir and madams, follow me." the young hostess said in excellent English and led us to our table. Tang Keung was, publicly, a distinguished local entrepreneur and philanthropist. Equally as publicly - but in a very private way - he was a Cho Hal, or "Straw Sandal" for one of the subordinate Triads underneath the overall umbrella of the Red Dragon Association, the dominant Triad of Hong Kong. We'd put the word out in the places where you put that kind of word that we represented foreign interests who would pay generously for certain information and support services, and had been notified via a discreet electronic drop-box of when and where to make the rendezvous with one of the Red Dragons' middle-men and negotiators as soon as we'd arrived in Hong Kong.
  
  "My friend!" he greeted us effusively, despite having never met us before. "Welcome to Hong Kong. I hope you have found our hospitality to be pleasant?" His smile twisted slightly as he discreetly undressed both Cat and Jane with his eyes. "Although clearly you are a man who does not lack for a very comfortable situation anywhere he travels."
  
  "You flatter us, Mr. Keung." I said politely and Cat and I sat down. Jane, in her pose as a bodyguard, followed suit only after scanning the room and nodding respectfully to the female ork in a suit that was Mr. Keung's bodyguard.
  
  "I had expected only two for dinner, not three." he probed. "Our hosts will find it little trouble to set another place, of course, but it is surprising."
  
  "But how could I pass up a chance to meet such an enterprising gentleman?" Cat smiled winsomely. "I do hope I didn't offend by only asking my partner at the last minute if he could invite me along."
  
  "A woman of your beauty never offends with her presence." he accepted the polite deflection, and then turned to speak to the arriving waiter.
  
  It was rude to talk business during the meal, so we let him charm us about nothing as he ate generously on our dime - as the supplicants, we were paying for it even despite his having gotten the reservation. But the people who ran Charlie Chan's understood how the game was played, so our table was far enough away from other diners to avoid being casually eavesdropped upon and had excellent counter-surveillance technology. But eventually we finished the meal - and the food was legitimately damned good - and got down to business.
  
  "I have been able to confirm your own information." the Triad fixer began over the after-dinner drinks. "There is indeed a sealed ward within Queen Elizabeth Hospital. Officially it is a new neuro-psychiatric ward for violent patients, but the pharmacy never delivers any psychoactive drugs there save for a few sedatives. Not in anything like the variety or quantity that the original N-P ward does. And likewise, none of the staff of this closed ward are internal transfers from or otherwise interact the staff of any other ward in the hospital. They are all external hires."
  
  "Comprehensive information indeed." I complimented him.
  
  "In Hong Kong, our organization are benefactors of the common man. Humble, hardworking people... such as those who are service staff or clerks within MCT's showpiece of Hong Kong's finest teaching hospital." Keung boasted.
  
  "With such a wide network at your disposal, I have no doubt that you were able to obtain floor plans." I flattered him.
  
  "All of the information that you requested is on the chip." he said, gesturing for his bodyguard to place it on the table. It lay between us as Jane reached into her pocket to lay a certified credstick next to it on the table. Mr. Keung picked it up, smiled, and discreetly tucked it into his lapel pocket, and Cat grabbed the chip, slotted it into her commlink, and closed her eyes briefly as she pretended to use the trode headset she didn't actually need.
  
  "Then that brings us to just one more request." I said, and noted the tiniest expressions of tension on Keung's face as I brought in a new variable. He opened his hand expressively and gestured for me to continue.
  
  "I have recently learned that It is likely that information about me and my associates may soon be urgently sought in the Hong Kong shadows, over a matter unrelated to our current business." I began.
  
  "Sir." Mr. Keung looked at me sternly. "My associates and I would never be indiscreet, and I find your implication unpleasant."
  
  "I apologize for my unclear manner of speaking." I hastened to assure him. "My request was that should such a query happen to reach the ears of you or your associates, that you might feel indulged to be indiscreet." I smiled. "In a particular fashion."
  
  "Ah." he relaxed, now understanding that I was offering to pay extra for misdirection. "We could be amenable to that, provided..." and the next round of haggling began.
  
  
  
  "Dual-wielding pistols? What's next, a flight of white doves?" my wife teased me as we got out of the van we'd stolen and walked towards the discreetly hidden side entrance.
  
  "We're deliberately trying to be noticed, remember?" I reminded her. "So the new plan is for me to shoot a lot of people in a really flashy manner. It's an MCT vivisection lab anyway, they've got it coming."
  
  "Look at this place, it's practically designed to let you smuggle bodies in or out." Jane snorted as we approached the back door. "You wonder if the architects ever wondered 'Why am I remodeling a hospital to have a rear entrance that has convenient discreet elevator access to the morgue and several of the wards, when we already have an entrance for the coroners' vehicles to use?"
  
  I was sustaining a Physical Mask spell over all of us to fool the cameras over the door. Currently we appeared to be three vicious-looking Hong Kong gangers from the Black Chrysanthemums, a vicious new Triad recently imported from Macao that specialized in human trafficking - alive, dead, or in pieces. Cat had turned up information on when the Black Chrysanthemums would be making a pickup, and we'd intercepted the pickup team and taken their places.
  
  "Open up, you lazy bums!" I yelled in Cantonese at the intercom.
  
  "Keep a respectful tongue in your head or we'll tell your bosses to cut it out." the hospital staffer snarled back. "Just have the money ready."
  
  "Time is money!" I sneered back. "So hurry it up!"
  
  The door opened to reveal two morgue attendants pushing gurneys loaded with tonight's 'volunteer' cadavers for the organ harvesting trade, freshly picked from among SINless corpses that wouldn't be missed. I paid them with the certified credsticks the Chrysanthemums had already had on them, and they shoved the gurneys at us and hurriedly walked away.
  
  "Cameras will be off for the next fifteen minutes. Just leave the carts in the corner over there when you're done with them." the senior of them said curtly while they turned to head back to the morgue.
  
  "We know how it goes." I scoffed at their retreating backs.
  
  "Well, he's not lying about the cameras." Netcat said. "And wow, fifteen whole minutes. I won't even have to piggyback their hack and extend the clock."
  
  "According to the plans, the back elevator to the lab ward is this way." Frosty said as I dropped the illusions. I flexed my fingers and drew both heavy pistols, as Cat readied her SMG and Frosty flexed her fingers to cast.
  
  "Here we are." Cat said, and laid a hand on the touchplate. "Wireless-disabled, as if we needed any more proof the technomancers were here, but skin conductivity lets me..." She chewed her lip briefly. "Done!"
  
  The cheerful ding! of the elevator doors opening was an odd punctuation to the tenseness of the moment. We stepped into the car, and rode it up to the 17th floor.
  
  "Arriving in three... two... one..." I called.
  
  The doors opened, and I stepped out. The astonished jawdrops of the two guards posted at the elevator lobby only gave me better aiming points for the bullets I pumped into their mouths and out the backs of their necks.
  
  "Showtime." Frosty agreed, and fried the two guards inside the transparent security booth with a manaball before either of them could even touch an alarm. She then positioned herself to hold the corner as I turned to face the ward and start pumping bullets through the locked security gate at every guard I could see down the hallway.
  
  "Contact rear!" Netcat called, and I heard her SMG snap off a quick three-round burst as a third security guard came charging out the bathroom door to fall dead as she put a neat line of APDS through his armor vest. Unlike the Barstow site this particular black lab was using secrecy and camouflage as its primary method of security, not a hardline philosophy, so while the guards here were presumably Mitsuhama elites they were still only dressed in good-quality sec-guard gear and not heavy military armor. But we'd loaded up on some of the finest milspec weapons and ammo that nuyen could buy in the Night Market before coming here tonight.
  
  "Clear!" Cat called, and Frosty held the room while Cat and I checked the bathrooms. Nobody else.
  
  "Breaching!" I called, and blew the barred security gate - mechanical locks only again - with a small charge and stepped in with both my pistols raised. Netcat slapped her hand on the door into the security booth, thought it open, and went inside to start working her magic on the systems. Frosty advanced with me to the first major hallway function and then planted herself as a turret and strategic reserve, and I went to clear the floor.
  
  Less than five minutes later I returned, my face set in a stone mask. There had been three technomancers here. Only one of them had still been biologically alive at the time we'd arrived, with the other two already having their brains in sections. And the survivor had been so lobotomized by what they'd been doing to his brain that so much as trying to remove him from the life-support machines would kill him.
  
  "Anything?" I asked Frosty.
  
  "No." she said sadly, lifting her hand from his brow. "You and I could pump enough healing magic into him to get off the machines, maybe, but his brain's a blank."
  
  "I've pulled all the records." Netcat said venomously. "As well as everything your body cams picked up. People will know what happened here."
  
  "Right. Okay, we'll use option three." I said.
  
  "Should I...?" Frosty said questioningly, as I saw a manabolt start to dance on the tip of her finger.
  
  "Leave him for the first responders." I shook my head. "It's not much of a chance, but it's still a chance."
  
  "You're right." she agreed soberly. "Time to go."
  
  "Just one last thing..." I agreed, and turned and concentrated on casting a fire spell. Frosty could have easily done this herself, of course, but I could use the practice.
  
  The blaring of the fire alarms and sprinklers announced my success. "Time to go!" I called, and we headed back out.
  
  "According to the schematics, that minor a fire - particularly in that particular sealed lab - has virtually no chance of spreading." Cat analyzed out loud. "But after what I did to reset the alarm thresholds, it'll look like there's a major uncontrolled blaze up here."
  
  Which would of course mean that the fire department would respond regardless of how much MCT might not want them up here. Megacorporate extraterritoriality didn't extend as far as forbidding emergency services to stop a major out-of-control fire in a hospital - not unless the facility had a dedicated on-site fire department of its own, which Queen Elizabeth's did not. MCT 's contract with Yokogawa Emergency Services, the contracted municipal fire department and ambulance provider for Hong Kong, allowed Yokogawa pre-authorized access during fire incidents above a certain threshold. So they'd be all over this floor before MCT's own clean-up could even hope to begin, especially given that we'd kept alarms from going out about our initial intrusion and literally left the back door open for the fire department to follow right up to the secure lab. We'd even left a stolen van with some stolen corpses in it at the back door for the HKPD to notice and draw attention right to those doors.
  
  Hopefully this time MCT would begin to get the message.
  
  
  
  "... and according to Knight Errant Security Services the body of the chief researcher in the secret laboratory at Queen Elizabeth Hospital has been positively identified by DNA sampling as that of the infamous Dr. Ronald Thomas Halberstam, a fugitive from UCAS justice for his role in the deaths of nine children aged 11 and under during his illegal metahuman experimentation into mind-machine interface technologies. Mitsuhama Computer Technologies denies all knowledge of their employee's criminal past and maintains that his assumed identity of 'Dr. Shalbermat' was believed by them to be entirely genuine at his hiring. However, given Mitsuhama's involvement in a similar facility conducting inhumane research on involuntary technomancer subjects near Barstow, California Free State, their denials have been found by many parties to be unconvincing.
  
  "Although megacorporate extraterritoriality means that no prosecution could be successfully brought against MCT or any of its surviving personnel for their role in the activities alleged to have taken place at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Chairman Deng Kai-San of the Hong Kong Executive Council has stated that MCT must still satisfactorily account for its alleged activities if it wishes to avoid 'punitive renegotiations' of several of its contracts with the Hong Kong Free Enterprise Zone-"
  
  "Well, we won." I said as Cat switched off the AR feed of the morning news. We'd never gone back to the Dynasty Mansion after the run. Our new digs were a small houseboat we'd rented for the short-term, one of the thousands of boats floating in the great sprawling network of rickety bamboo docks that had sprung up like a floating shantytown around the old Kai Tak airport. The infamous 'Night Market' was the biggest open-air black market in Hong Kong, a giant bazaar and flea market of everything from rice noodles to RPGs. The freelance smugglers brought the goods ashore at the shantyport, and the old runways and fields of the airport were no longer visible under all the booths and stalls and sheds and even new permanent buildings of the Night Market itself. Run underneath the loose supervision of the Ten Thousand Lions, formerly a cluster of subsidiary gangs underneath the old Yellow Lotus Triad who'd been left behind when the Yellow Lotus recently lost their war with the Red Dragons and been run out of the city who'd then rallied and reformed themselves as a new Triad of their own, Kai Tak was a good place to be if you wanted access to good gear and better discretion. So long as you paid tribute to the Ten Thousand Lions - and not even that large of a tribute, given how keeping the trade free and fast was how the Night Market made its money - they didn't care who you were and they didn't talk about you to anyone else. And anyone who did talk... well, as the local saying went around here, the night was long and the blade was sharp.
  
  "Yeah." Cat sighed. "One or two more big PR hits like this and MCT's board will hopefully stop trying to run their secret brain-eater labs and just hire for technomancer research subjects like everybody else from MIT to Saeder-Krupp. As opposed to all this torture/kidnap/brains-in-jars crap."
  
  "I hope Puck and Bandit are having as much luck trimming NeoNET's wings here as we are MCT's." Jane nodded. "Celedyr is one stubborn dragon."
  
  "Well, it's not as if we won't have free time of our own now that my San Francisco project is a bust." I groused. "Although we'll still have to get the mad bomber off our tail first."
  
  "If he wants to come to Hong Kong after us then we'll know in a couple days." Jane analyzed. "Until then, might as well take the downtime and check out the sights in the Jewel of the Far East."
  
  "I'm lucky I can use my abilities to thread a good Cantonese skillsoft, or else I'd need a translator just to order lunch." Cat noted. "When did you two learn the language?"
  
  "About five years ago for me." Jane said. "As for him...?"
  
  "Yeah." I shrugged sheepishly. "Sorry. I really wish I could share some of this."
  
  "Well, if you ever figure out how what's in the mystery box got to be there in the first place, then maybe someday you will." Cat agreed.
  
  "Did you hear the rumors about a technomancer tribe living with the hacker enclave in Whampoa Mall?" Jane asked.
  
  "I was actually going to go check that out this afternoon, if you wanted to come with." Cat agreed. "Although I can pass on it if you don't want to be dragged there on the buddy system."
  
  "It could be interesting." Jane admitted. "You coming, Alex?"
  
  "No, no, you two can make a girls' day out of it if you want." I demurred. "I was thinking I'd just surf JackPoint for a while, try to see if there's any leads on what's going on or at least build up a nice clip file for Cat to start info sortilege with when you get back. Maybe check out the local feng shui."
  
  "Take care of yourself." Cat said as I got kissed on both cheeks and then watched my ladies head on out without me.
  
  I did actually surf JackPoint for a while, catching up with Bandit and Puck and also uploading all the paydata we'd scored from the QEH run - both the stuff contributed for free to the ongoing 'Make life miserable for vivisectionists' project and the more humane but still valuable stuff I was going to put up on the online data auction so as to help make back the expenses of the run. Even if you had a couple dozen meganuyen in the bank and even if you were doing public service running, you still had to pay attention to the budget at least a little.
  
  But mostly I was checking out the local feng shui. Given the sheer number of coincidences in my life so far, the most recent being the fortunate timing that had let my girls miss certain death by mere hours, I was genuinely starting to wonder if there was some kind of fatebending element at least partially entwined with my... mysterious whateverness, the things that had made Hestaby start seriously thinking I was some type of demigod. I still wasn't remotely sure what to believe, but I definitely knew enough to make me want to keep looking.
  
  And while I was hardly going to be an instant geomancer in a day, or even a month, the locals here were used to Western magicians coming over and suddenly running into the mystic traditions of the East and trying to reconcile them with what they already knew. Because one of the largest 'superstitions become real' that had come in with the Awakening was qi and feng shui. Practitioners of Chinese geomancy regularly pulled down six and seven-figure consulting salaries in Hong Kong as even the largest megacorporations paid them to calculate the effects of architecture, of site placement, even of traffic patterns. The theories of the healthy circulation of qi and the bad effects of stagnant qi were everywhere, and even though the phenomenon was incompletely understood - at best - the fact remained that things like angling the side of a skyscraper to reflect a ley line down towards the harbor, or moving an interior partition to allow qi to flow smoothly rather than eddy and stagnate, would actually show up as good or bad luck later on.
  
  Indeed, the entire plot of the SR: Hong Kong computer game had been about a giant geomantic construct called the Fortune Engine, which had been built by a corporation named Tsang Mechanical Services allegedly to improve the giant eddy of bad qi that had collected around the Kowloon Walled City but in actuality had been a scheme by CEO Josephine Tsang to assure her wealth and fortune at the expense of everyone else in Kowloon by secretly altering the Fortune Engine to funnel all the good qi to her. As well as the entirely unanticipated third factor that had interfered with that plot-
  
  But as my researches after first arriving here had shown, Tsang Mechanical Services and Josephine Tsang had never existed in this world. Neither had any of the other NPCs or plots specific to the Harebrained Studios computer games, at least as I could determine. Apparently this timeline was dictated by the tabletop game and the tabletop game alone, which I had fragmentary knowledge of at best and even that little only via osmosis as a fan of the videogame franchise. So despite being here at the Kai Tak Night Market, which the 'home neighborhood' of Heoi in the game had actually been a part of, I still hadn't found any traces of the alleged events of the game. No electronics vendor named Maximum Law, no giant neon sign, none of the other NPCs or vendors from the game existed here, not even in memory.
  
  So after doing my walking tour of the market I bought some introductory texts in very basic feng shui theory from a local lore store, and took them home to start reading through. Maybe I could find something in here to confirm or deny the suspicion that I was somehow affecting probability, and if so, how I might be able to consciously get a grip on that phenomenon.
  
  The girls came back from their afternoon out - as it turned out, the 'technomancer enclave' in the Whampoa was one local technomancer who'd gone there and was still barely fitting in to the local hacker tribe - and we sat down to a leisurely dinner. The feedback loop I'd set up with the Red Dragons still hadn't called to let me know of anyone making inquiries, so our assassin from San Francisco had either yet to find out where we'd gone when we'd left town or was still in wait-and-see mode. And so our second day in Hong Kong passed, and I went to bed.
  
  And that night, while my girls slept peacefully on each side of me, my eyes snapped wide open. Because that night I'd dreamed. I'd dreamed of the Kowloon Walled City, perhaps the most blighted slum on Earth with the most twisted and toxic astral space imaginable short of the Chicago Containment Zone. Only several miles north of Kai Tak, the division between the rest of Hong Kong and the impossibly overcrowded and crumbling tenements of the Walled City was essentially the division between heaven and earth. It made the Barrens look like a picnic, and unlike the Barrens didn't even have enough land for the desolation to spread out. There were crumbling buildings in the Walled City literally only being held up by the fact that their neighboring buildings were so close that they didn't have room to collapse.
  
  And I'd dreamed of more than just the Walled City. I'd dreamed of whispered voices I couldn't understand, shadows I couldn't see, nightmares I could barely name. I'd dreamed of malice, and hatred, and sheer grasping hunger. I'd dreamed of the Yama Kings. And one of them in particular.
  
  Qian Ya, the Queen With a Thousand Teeth. The godlike eldritch monstrosity that had been the true boss villain of SR: Hong Kong. She was the first thing I'd found from those games that was still real in this timeline.
  
  And less than five miles away from me, I could feel the weakening hole in the fabric of reality through which she was just about ready to come to Earth.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Yes, I blew up the corporate thread right away. Trust me, that had a point. Our hero's progression towards success can't be too straight a line, or else shit will get dull.
  
  As to whether or not our hero actually is manipulating probability around him or if this shit is really just coincidences? Yeah, not gonna answer that one yet. I mean, hey, the SR games - video and tabletop both - never got into fully explaining how feng shui worked and what its limits were, so why should I?
  
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  I knelt on the roof of the houseboat in the night underneath the waxing moon, deep in meditation.
  
  Qian Ya was clearly masking her approach from the rest of the city, given the general lack of distress and horror on the astral plane. Every mystic sensitive in the city would have been having nightmares if she hadn't been. Although now that I was looking closer, perhaps "approach" was the wrong word. There didn't seem to be any sense of movement from her, just a steady, lurking presence.
  
  I left my body and floated upwards on the astral, rising high enough to gain a panoramic view of the Hong Kong sprawl. My ability to see through all known forms of astral Masking like it wasn't there, however powerful, was something I normally tried to throttle down whenever I astrally projected. Seeing too much at once was a rather painful sensory overload. But my tentative beginnings at sounding out the feng shui of the local area had somehow brought my dreaming awareness directly to the Queen With a Thousand Teeth's astral doorstep, so I was just going to have to risk looking.
  
  My astral stomach clenched with nausea as I looked away from the rest of the city towards the Kowloon Walled City. The gleaming golden beacon that was the powerful astral nexus formed by the unique geomancy of the Wuxing Skytower, the roiling multi-colored astral tides produced by millions of metahuman beings and their emotions and passions all crammed into one sprawl, even the dim and ugly patches produced by concentrations of pollution in the harbor or industrial spills on land... all of that seemed to shrink to the peripheries of my vision as I stared into the heart of hell on Earth.
  
  The Kowloon Walled City was actually the second of its name. Originally formed out of an old Chinese military fort, the 6.4-acre enclave formed by the old fort walls had become a run-down slum neighborhood after Hong Kong became a British enclave. The population had swelled dramatically with refugees during World War II, and by the 50s had become an overcrowded Triad-controlled den of every form of vice and criminal activity where the police did not dare to go at all. Much like the Seattle Barrens.
  
  After the city of Hong Kong reverted back to Chinese control, the government evicted everyone and demolished the entire zone, turning what was left into Kowloon Walled City Park. And so manners remained until 2018 brought about the collapse and breakup of China back into splintered warring states, and in a tragic repeat of history the early 2020s had Hong Kong flooded with refugees... most of whom ended up concentrated in the Kowloon District, and the most unfortunate of all of them shoved into the Walled City. Whereupon they built shantytowns, and then tenements, and then built more of those on top of what was already there, until hundreds of thousands of suffering metahumans were trapped in a lawless enclave under worse conditions than the original Walled City had ever been. I had literally seen neighborhoods in Lagos that were better off, and I don't mean on the Islands.
  
  Any elementary practitioner knew that large amounts of metahuman suffering could pollute the local astral space, and my adept astral perception had more than confirmed that fact in Lagos. And then there had been the nasty background count in the former Protectorate death camp that MCT had used for its black site - Frosty had been exerting her powers to an extent she'd have have found strenuous under normal conditions, and with the additional strain caused by the background count in the camp she'd damn near knocked herself out. It had taken her a day of bed rest afterwards just to lose the migraine. But even that background count hadn't been as nasty as this.
  
  The astral space of Kowloon was not much worse than average outside the walls, but the instant you crossed the boundary into the Walled City things immediately jumped to a level of awfulness I'd never before seen firsthand. It was like looking at a giant gangrenous wound standing out in sharp relief against an otherwise healthy limb. I honestly wondered how nobody else had ever remarked on this before - even the various Matrix postings about the Walled City had merely said that it was bad, not that it was this bad.
  
  And then I looked closer at the walls and I realized the truth. The symbolism of the old fort walls, the sense of separation from the rest of the city, was being deliberately fostered and used by something in there. The Yama King, or Kings, lurking inside the Walled City were cloaking their depredations from the rest of the city at large, remaining horrible rumors and whispered legends only. And just liked I'd reversed MCT's own precautions to turn a structure they'd intended to confine prisoners into a safe enclave within which to stand siege, they'd operated on a level of inverted symbolism and twisted ley lines to turn what had once been walls intended to protect from without into a structure intended to imprison and conceal.
  
  I realized with horror that Qian Ya wasn't approaching the Earth. She was already here.
  
  And she had been here for God only knows how long. And while the lack of city-rending catastrophe so far indicated that she clearly wasn't in the process of leaping out to devastate everything, she was still- I shook my head. It didn't matter whether she was merely building strength for an eventual breakout, or content to stay in there indefinitely and feed off her captive population with no larger ambitions at all. Neither alternative could be borne. Making that decision had taken me no time at all.
  
  It was the other choice I was pondering that kept me poised in an agony of indecision for a long, long while.
  
  But eventually I chose.
  
  
  
  I walked in through the gate of the Walled City, and no eyes took note of my passage.
  
  Stealth was a thing many physical adepts specialized in, and at the higher levels the feats of an adept of the Invisible Way could match outright ninja movie bullshit. On top of that I had magic, and an effective immunity to Drain. And I also had astral Masking as nigh-perfect as my own ability to assense through Masking was. So as I strode inward towards the heart of the city, I was more than merely a shadow, more than just a ghost. I was both Is and Is-Not, fit to steal into even the lair of a Yama King without it having the slightest awareness I was coming. I certainly hoped.
  
  I wasn't an idiot. I knew perfectly well that even if Hestaby's estimate of my power were entirely correct, I was marching off to a fight I might very well not win. Worse yet, I was marching off to it alone. Both my girls still lay peacefully abed miles behind me, and I hadn't even dared to wake them to say goodbye. Because nothing I could possibly have said would have stopped them from coming with me... and even if I really was a level of existence akin to a nascent deity, so was the monstrosity I was about to face. And not even Jane, let alone Cat, could survive anywhere near such a direct clash of demigods.
  
  I'd composed an e-mail message to Hestaby explaining what I was doing and why... along with a delay-mail setup so that it wouldn't actually transmit for eight hours. I figured that by then this would all be over, one way or the other. Among other things, I'd stick her with the job of saying goodbye to them. If the Orange Queen wanted to demand that I keep secrets that made it so damn impossible to explain the truth of things to my wife, then she could eat the karma for it if this all went wrong.
  
  I slipped through spaces in-between crumbling buildings barely wide enough for a man's shoulders. I parkoured up and around late-night crowds and patrolling gangers without a single sound. I had started at the main entrance to the city and begun spiraling slowly inwards from the walls, always turning left. And with every step I tried to reach out and sense the thick astral sludge around me, to wade through the toxic essence without being tainted, to know...
  
  Every loop around the inside of the city, every block inwards, brought me closer and closer. I traveled with the eddies rather than cut across them, harmonized with the ebb and flow rather than force my way through. My current understanding of geomancy wasn't even that of a tyro's, but even I knew the most basics of basics. Life was breath. Breath was life. And as tormented as they were, as twisted and maddened as some of them had become, as toxic as many of the urban shamans and wu jen in here had become, they were still alive. Still metahuman. Still ultimately the same at their base as I had been, as I still was.
  
  And the more attuned I became to that background, the more I was able to filter out the toxic fog, the more sharply other things began to stand out. I could hear the chittering of insects, the whispered temptations and threats of shadow spirits, the sheer gloating lusts of things I barely had names for. And standing out among them all were looming presences, diffuse yet immense, that I knew were the Yama Kings.
  
  To the best of anyone's knowledge they did not have a hierarchy or a court. They fought against and consumed each other as readily as they did any other victims within their net. But even when all else was stripped away from a being there was still strength and still weakness, and with no other code or community to sustain them they would fall back on the raw dynamics of power. The strongest took what they wanted, and the weaker fought over what was left.
  
  Every spark of anger, fanned into a fury.
  
  In the hour and more I spent walking the inward spiral I saw enough individual tales and tragedies for years of storytelling. Here an orphan, selling herself to men with lusts barely above those of animals for the food to avoid starving. There a knot of Black Chrysanthemums, the dominant Triad in the Walled City, here to set up their 'slave training' houses for their living "human cargo" and harvesting setups for the dead in a place not even the most dedicated police task force would dare raid.
  
  Every moment of pain, a wound that never heals.
  
  There a madman who could no longer drown out the voices of the spirits whispering in his untrained ears, hanging himself from a windowsill. There the people cutting him down, too exhausted by the endless horror of living here to have any empathy left for his plight and only annoyed that he had cut through an electrical cable they were using to gain the wherewithal to form the noose.
  
  Every bond of love, withered to naught but bitterness.
  
  So this was what living in a toxic zone was truly like. The twisted astral space, the blight on reality, didn't outright control anyone's thoughts or actions... but it was like an invisible weight on the mind, dragging on every step. Being unable to consciously perceive the astral didn't mean you were deaf to it, after all. The living exuded mana, just as mana affected life.
  
  Every noble sacrifice, repaid with nothing but loss.
  
  Jesus Christ that shit was depressing.
  
  As I drew closer and closer to the heart of the darkness, the despairing pulse that echoed on the fabric of reality grew louder and louder in my ears. I imagined that this close to Qian Ya literally no one could sleep without nightmares, and even waking daydreams turned rancid. No wonder the streets were clearing even of beggars and madmen, and the animals had long since fled.
  
  I looked slightly from side to side, noting the subtle distortions in reality. I was entering an alchera, a piece of complex astral geography that had materialized at least partially in the physical world. Tales of vanishing villages like Brigadoon, reported ghost islands in the Bermuda Triangle, these bits of fiction and Fortean folklore were in Shadowrun all ultimately referring to alcherae. And this was no ordinary alcherae, but one somehow suspended and intermixed with an astral rift.
  
  So, a pocket reality coadjacent to the material plane. One that normally could not be entered without the Queen's permission. My ritual walk of the spiral, my symbolism and intent, my synchronizing myself to the despairing drumbeat of the polluted background count while refusing to let it actually touch me within, had let me slip inside against her will. Even when guided largely by instinct and guess, I had found the key to enter into the heart of the lair without her even knowing.
  
  Well, either that or she'd known I was coming the whole time and had just sucked me right into a trap. But there was only one way to find out.
  
  I turned the last corner and came around a perfectly ordinary corner made of wet and reeking garbage-stained bricks to come out into a perfectly ordinary filth-ridden alleyway, where a low cement arch blocked out the dim moonlight to leave the shadowed area underneath it a pitch-black void that only my preternatural vision penetrated. No glorious godly palace or epic hellscape of terror for the Queen With a Thousand Teeth, for such trappings and presentations would matter only to mortals. This anonymous alleyway in this anonymous slum needed no aesthetics, no statues or banners, to be important. It needed only the Queen With a Thousand Teeth to be present, for even the lowliest and most common place would become a place of significance merely because She was there.
  
  She stepped forward out from under the arch, half again as tall as I. An impossibly fine and storied robe and an exquisite golden mask shimmered and gave way to a horrifying disgusting mass of eldritch not-flesh and a slavering maw full of infinite teeth, then morphed back again. There was no illusion for me here to see through, just the reality of the Yama King itself. The Queen could appear as either thing that I had just seen, or any other visage it cared to portray, and each one would be equally as real. Or equally as un-real.
  
  You are a clever mortal indeed, to enter here so quietly. the words seemed to fill the air around me with nothing so crass as actual sound being involved.
  
  "Is that all you see?" I asked her curiously.
  
  I should see anything else but a mayfly, foolishly come to barter the rest of its life as the price for a moment of my amusement?
  
  "And how's about now?" I continued, dropping my Masking and letting it stare directly into me.
  
  Amusement indeed, if you believe that is power. I would call you an insect, but insects are at least resilient.
  
  "Can you tell why I have come?"
  
  ... curious. Qian Ya said after a considering pause. The lusts and fears of mortals, I have tasted so many. So very, very, very many... But you... you reek with fear for those you 'love', yes, that at least is typical. And guilt... shame... lust for greater station... the desire to strike down your enemies... the blind rutting that seeks many mates but no children... all of these and more are but more of the typical thoughts of your kind, that which lies below the worms.
  
  "I'm not hearing the curious part yet."
  
  Power. All that lives ultimately craves it, from the lowliest virus to the greatest spirit. And the more capacity for thoughts and dreams, the greater the craving. No sapient being, whether Name-Maker, Name-Giver, nor Name-Eater, does not yet feel the need for still more regardless of how high it may climb. And yet... the Queen's voice trailed off in what in any other being I would have called confusion. No element of your soul, from the highest to the lowest, feels the slightest urge for greater power. You slay, you dream, you lust... yet you do not struggle? Never before have I beheld the like.
  
  I called upon that sense of inevitability I had touched so deeply once before to keep me from falling apart in an existential crisis. Because several of the possible implications of what the Yama King had just said...
  
  "Does that lack of struggle include the Passions of old? The beings believed gods by the prior world of magic?" I asked.
  
  I am the Queen With a Thousand Teeth. Lies are for those lesser beings weak enough to need them. I speak only truth, and I said never. The Passions of the prior cycle, they struggled mightily. Against each other, against the Name-Makers, against the Name-Eaters, and against themselves most of all.
  
  "So what am I, then?" I shouted.
  
  I... do not know. the Queen admitted reluctantly. I can't imagine it had ever had to say those words before to anyone, let alone to a human. If I was still human.
  
  "I see." I exhaled expressionlessly. "Well, that answers one of the two questions I came here with tonight, then."
  
  And what was the other?
  
  "If I fought a Yama King to the death, who would lose?"
  
  The terrible laughter of the Queen echoed through our little world. This I know, and know very well indeed. But you are foolish to choose such terms, when I cannot die here.
  
  "I suppose that would make three questions, then." I smiled thinly, and then I balled my fist and struck.
  
  YOU DARE! Qian Ya said, reforming almost instantly from where she had been vaporized by my killing hand. A searing wave of mystic energy imploded on my position... and left me entirely unmoved.
  
  Qian Ya shrieked as she yet again 'died' and reconstituted, my next blow having shredded her as easily as my first.
  
  YOUR SUFFERING SHALL BE ETERNAL! I AM VASTER THAN YOU CAN ENCOMPASS! it howled and rained blow after blow down upon me from its impossibly vast war-form, each tentacle striking with impossible grace and with a force sufficient to shatter armor plate.
  
  I grabbed two of her tentacles, one in each hand, and pulled.
  
  RELEASE ME AT ONCE! it shrieked. AT ONCE!
  
  "You do realize that your demands are a form of begging, right? I thought Yama Kings didn't wheedle." I said as I plunged one hand deep into the seething mass, ignoring a sheer sense of corruption that promised to rot the claws right off a Great Dragon as readily as I ignored anything else.
  
  WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU WILL EARN ANY REWARD FOR YOURSELF OTHER THAN TORMENT BEYOND IMAGINING, INSOLENT ONE?
  
  "The same thing that made me think that coming here tonight and picking this fight was a valid plan." I grinned at Qian Ya. "It seemed like a good idea at the time!"
  
  MADMAN! YOU MAY SOMEHOW BE TOO DURANT FOR ME TO WOUND EASILY, BUT YOUR ENDURANCE MUST HAVE A LIMIT!
  
  "I could say the same for you." I said, unleashing my magic into the struggling Yama King and aiming for hurt rather than kill.
  
  YOU. WILL. NEVER. BREAK. ME! it snarled.
  
  "One of us is actually feeling the strain, and the other one is walking it right the fuck off." I said. "What does that tell you about who's going to outlast who?"
  
  MY WILLPOWER IS A BOTTOMLESS WELLSPRING, AND YOU ARE THE FOOL ATTEMPTING TO DRAIN IT WITH A SPOON! TORTURE ME FOR ETERNITY AND I WILL RESIST FOR ETERNITY. AND THAT ONLY MAKES YOU MY PRISONER!
  
  "Yeah. Doctor Strange said the same thing once. You know what Dormammu should have said in reply?" I nodded grimly and bore down even harder, clashing my naked will directly against Qian Ya's. "I'd like to test that theory."
  
  The answering shriek of the struggling Yama King probably echoed off of the far side of creation.
  
  
  
  I walked out of the heart of the Walled City as easily as I had entered. Qian Ya had struggled almost until the dawn, but it had finally yielded. And given that it had committed to a fight to the death, its violation of its word and its own nature had allowed me to exact any penalty from it that I cared to demand. So I'd followed through on the Doctor Strange bit it had inadvertently referenced and set the recompense that it owed me as 'Withdraw entirely from this dimension, take every single bit of nastiness and minion you brought with you back with you, and never return.' And Qian Ya had, because it had had no choice.
  
  Ultimately the Queen With A Thousand Teeth had proven to be neither a Horror nor a god, much less any kind of infinite undying force. It and its fellow Yama Kings were free spirits - immensely vast, almost uncountably ancient and powerful Great Form free spirits, but free spirits nonetheless. Shadow spirits of the worst kind, which fed upon mankind's flaws, terrors, and lusts, they had been summoned by the extremely rare metaphysical conditions caused by such a bounded enclave of suffering as the Walled City and devoured and preyed upon it as their own private game preserve, conforming to or perhaps bound to the classic portrayals of Chinese mythology that had formed the collective beliefs of all its inhabitants.
  
  Qian Ya had not been the only Yama King in Kowloon. Chih-Shiang, Judge of Souls, who flayed metahumans who were driven to them by guilt over the crimes they had committed and believed his lies that allowing him to scourge them free of sin would allow them to escape. Vam Ly, the Ebony Queen, who was not one of the invae but who worked with them and aided the insect hives in their own lurkings and feedings in the Walled City in return for feeding off the horror and terror they caused. Fu Mang, Serpent of the Setting Sun, who promised wealth and influence to anyone who could offer him forty-four hearts torn from the chests of family and friends while they still lived. All of these and more had lured here, feeding and desporting themselves on what Qian Ya, strongest of them all, had not taken for itself. All of them had fled in terror upon seeing me break and banish their strongest, running away before I could also break and permanently banish them.
  
  And on their departure the toxic space of the Walled City had faded. Oh, the background count was still nasty - but only Barrens nasty, not 'uniquely seeping hell on Earth held back only by the unique feng shui of the entrapping walls' nasty. The differences were already starting to show subtly in the demeanor of the inhabitants, the lessened fear on the parts of the victims or the lesser intensity of the rapaciousness of the victimizers. Even the streets somehow looked cleaner and the air tasting less foul, despite all the garbage and pollution of the day before still being physically present.
  
  "Greetings, banisher of evil." I was greeted in exquisitely fluent English. I turned to see the astral form of an elderly sage, that then blurred and became that of a great red-scaled dragon. "Those of the Younger Races commonly address me as 'Lung'. By what name are you called?"
  
  "Greetings, Wind Master." I bowed respectfully to the Great Dragon Lung. "And I am called Wild Man by some."
  
  "Wild Man." Lung bowed back to me at the same precise angle. "A name that well suits one who would contend alone against a spirit of such power." He looked around meaningfully. "Their usage of the walls as concealment as well as confinement was quite clever, and predated my own detailed attention to affairs in this area. I would not have left this deep a rot to fester upon the skin of the world, had I known the true scope of the problem. But now you have solved it for me, and that leaves me with another problem."
  
  "My knowledge of etiquette is far less complete than yours. so I do not know how I might allow any debt you feel to weigh as lightly upon as you as possible without offering insult." I said.
  
  "I am not one who is quick to take insult where none is intended, unlike some." Lung replied urbanely as we strolled along towards the Walled City's gates. "Although I do occasionally suffer the failing of curiosity."
  
  "Why did I do it?" I guessed at his intent, to meet the slightest of confirming nods at my sally. "To be honest, I'd initially overestimated the problem. And by the time I'd realized that the situation was actually self-containing, I'd... I'd looked too closely to look away."
  
  "Your aura is indistinct to me, but your voice and posture are not as guarded." Lung said. "You doubted your odds of victory, and not trivially. And yet even after you knew the danger was not immediate, you attacked alone without seeking aid. And the manner in which you address me by itself suggests that you know at least one of my peers."
  
  "I wasn't seeking death." I answered what was not directly asked again. "I just..." I searched for the exact words. "Needed to know, and not merely guess at, the limits of my life."
  
  "And have you found them?" Lung inquired sagely.
  
  "Not yet." I admitted. "I'm not even certain how my life is affecting the lives of others around me."
  
  "Few of us ever entirely are." Lung nodded.
  
  "Wind Master, you are justly famed as the greatest geomancer in the world. If you feel that you owe me a debt, then could you answer a question for me?"
  
  "If it is a question I can answer, certainly."
  
  "Do I warp the fates of others?" I asked him. "Consciously or otherwise, do my desires twist what others should be free to choose?"
  
  "Hmm." Lung hummed sagely. "May I essay a brief experiment?"
  
  I turned to face him and opened my arms. Several ley lines somehow flashed into visibility and pressed upon my aura... but instead of feeling a push, my aura instead somehow echoed like a bell without sound.
  
  "Curious." Lung said, raising his eyebrows. "You do have a rather idiosyncratic interaction with the flows of Fortune, but... no, it does not distort the fates of others. At first approximation I would judge that it merely safeguards your fate from being prematurely ended, and perhaps to a lesser extent the fates of those you care for."
  
  "That is greatly reassuring." I exhaled. "I am certain you know more than most that the heavier a weight you can bring to bear upon the world, the lighter a touch that you often need."
  
  "A lesson few of the young, let alone the Younger Races, are quick to learn." Lung agreed. "If I may indulge my curiosity again, I also sensed old traces of familiar magics in your aura... you have recently faced the Orange Queen in mortal combat?"
  
  "A mere test of my resilience only." I demurred. "She and I have never been foes."
  
  "You have already admitted to me that you threw yourself against the Queen WIth a Thousand Teeth at least partly to test your capacity. So you do not entirely know what you are." Lung deduced. "So you sought the Orange Queen's aid in attempting to find out."
  
  "No, I do not." I admitted. "And yes, I did." I mean, he'd already gotten that far on his own, and I was not going to piss off the Great Dragon by wasting his time denying the obvious. Even if he couldn't kill me, he could damn sure make life unpleasant.
  
  "Nor do I." Lung said. "What was her theory?"
  
  "She swore me to an oath not to tell anyone until it was known whether she was correct or not." I stated. "Although... I am now almost entirely convinced she was not." I thought briefly. "Qian Ya spoke to me of Name-Givers, Name-Makers, and Name-Eaters. May I ask what those are?"
  
  Lung amiably gave me a brief explanation on what was known about Names. Naming an object or a person helped define it, and gave it power. Name-Makers could Name themselves easily, and others with difficulty. Name-Givers could not Name themselves, but were given their Names by other Name-Givers... but could Name anything else with ease. And Name-Eaters could be Named by others but could Name nothing, and if they corrupted or obtained the consent of another being could destroy their Name.
  
  "And the Passions, what were they? Givers, Makers, or Eaters?" I inquired.
  
  "Name-Makers." Lung answered me.
  
  "And I am...?" I queried further.
  
  "A Name-Giver." Lung said, already seeing where I was going. "This much is certain."
  
  "Then the Orange Queen's theory was wrong." I concluded. "And yes, she had thought I was a rebirthing Passion."
  
  "I might have reached the same conclusion as well, had I not had the opportunity to observe you so deeply in a moment of crisis." Lung said. "And if I did not have certain specialized knowledge that she does not."
  
  "You saw the battle." I deduced.
  
  "Once the Queen With a Thousand Teeth began to draw upon its full strength, the resulting flux in the dragon lines drew my attention." Lung admitted. "I arrived to see you contending most impressively versus it. At no point did I see any need to interfere."
  
  "Thank you for helping me resolve my doubts, Wind Master." I said. "I feel that any debt you might owe me has been paid."
  
  "I had thought I would only foster doubts with my answer, not resolve any." Lung inquired curiously.
  
  "Oh, I'm back to not having a clue as to what the hell I am or why." I admitted freely. "But now I'm released from a vow that required me to withhold an important truth from one that I love. And that's honestly more important."
  
  "Is it truly?" Lung inquired sagely.
  
  "It is to me." I affirmed.
  
  "Then I suppose it truly is." he replied in that annoying Zen koan manner only the greatest of Chinese masters could achieve. "Good fortune to you, Wild Man. I thank you for the service that you have rendered me, and wish you well in your travels."
  
  "And I as well, Wind Master."
  
  
  
  "Where the hell have you been?" Cat glared at me as I stood upon the deck of our houseboat. I'd deleted the still-in-abeyance email to Hestaby as soon as I'd re-entered Kai Tak's wireless coverage, but I hadn't made it home in time to beat the alarm clock. Jane stared at me over Cat's shoulder, her face halfway between frustration and a knowing resignation. Not that she could possibly have seen what was going on last night, but she knew more of what I'd been struggling with recently than Cat.
  
  "Doing something stupid." I eventually admitted sheepishly. And inwardly I reflected on the sheer WTF of the fact that I could speak calmly with Great Dragons, fearlessly contend against spirits so powerful they might well be gods, and still instinctly flinch from the thought of being chewed out by my wife or our mistress. Or worse yet, being forced to sleep on the couch.
  
  And then I laughed, at the thought that for all my vast and mysterious power I could still be so human in many ways.
  
  "Do I even want to know?" Jane sighed. "Or can we at least get through the day without another house exploding?"
  
  "Let's go inside and get some privacy spells up." I said. "I've got a lot to tell you both."
  
  So over breakfast I finally unburdened myself entirely. Cat heard Hestaby's theory for the first time, now that I was no longer enjoined form keeping it a secret due to her being wrong. Jane heard of my other-worldly origins for the first time, and didn't that just knock her for a loop. By the end of the conversation I'd basically unloaded every secret I'd been keeping, even if I'd still kept someone else's.
  
  "So... you're basically invincible." Cat said numbly. "A Great Dragon did her best to break you and didn't even slow you down, and now you just fistfought a god-"
  
  "Great Form free spirit of extraordinary magnitude." Jane corrected didactically.
  
  "For all intents and purposes a god." Cat insisted firmly. "And won." She seemed to wilt. "What do you need me for, then?" she blurted in a panic.
  
  Cat turned to Jane in jaw-gaping shock when Jane dope slapped her on the back of the head. "Don't be an idiot, Cat!"
  
  "I am not being-!' Cat began, to trail off. "I mean..." She sighed. "I can shoot a gun okay, punch a guy okay, and hack computers with my mind. But he can..." she waved her hands wildly. "Be undefeatable! So what the hell do I meaningfully contribute on that kind of scale, okay?!?"
  
  "And?" I pointed out. "Suppose I really am that arbitrarily powerful and not just 'okay, he's more powerful than Qian Ya'. That still isn't everything!" I sighed. "Have either of you ever read an early 21st-century manga called 'One Punch Man'?"
  
  "Never heard of it." they both answered.
  
  "It was an action comedy series about a man named Saitama, a superhero in a superhero world who was so powerful that he could literally take out any conceivable opponent with a single blow. He went the entire series looking for a good fight, and never found one. He was absolutely invincible." I shrugged. "And he was also passed over for promotion multiple times, repeatedly had the credit for his deeds taken by other people, lived in a shitty apartment, and could barely make ends meet. Because being unable to lose a fight wasn't the same thing as winning at life."
  
  Cat started to object to that when she noticed Jane nodding sagely. "You actually agree with him?"
  
  "Cat, I'm the apprentice of one of the world's most powerful mages who is simultaneously one of history's greatest metahuman trainwrecks, remember?" Jane pointed out. "I don't need an ancient manga to teach me the lesson that vast power doesn't guarantee contentment, or being a well-adjusted person, or making remotely good decisions at all." she spat. "I just have to go back to him and I get that lesson repeated every damn day!"
  
  "So I'm still good for keeping up your spirits?" Cat sulked. "Great, I'm a morale officer. I was trying to get past that phase."
  
  "You're an intelligence officer." I countered. "Seriously, looking back? The quality of the plans being made around here took a notable downturn as soon as you didn't have access to all the relevant information. Stupid secrecy oaths." I cursed.
  
  "Okay, that's a valid point." Cat said a little less gloomily. "And..." she looked back up at me. "It was really angsting you that much you couldn't share the truth with me, that you went out and picked a fight with a Yama King to try and cut the Gordian knot as quickly as you could? Because now that you bring it up, what you did was really kinda obvious in hindsight regarding 'I'm going to do this so that Lung owes me a major solid so I can get to ask him those questions'."
  
  "You see what I mean about the quality of your thought processes?" I reassured Cat. "Because yes, that's exactly why I did it. I wasn't expecting to get any puzzle pieces from Qian Ya itself, but I did figure in advance that helping cart that large a load of trash out of Lung's backyard would be worth a geomancy consultation I couldn't hope to get any other way." I shrugged. "Because given how coincidence was starting to get abused around me, the question of 'Am I somehow fatewarping the people close to me?' was a topic that I didn't want to wait for an answer on."
  
  "So, what did he say?" Jane probed.
  
  "That I do actually seem to have feng shui distort a little around me... but only in the 'keep me and probably my closest people safer' sense." I shrugged. "Doesn't interfere with free will otherwise, just helps us do things like luckily zig when an assassin's bomb zags. Although since we don't remotely know the limits of it-"
  
  "-we don't suddenly start acting like we're all bulletproof." Cat agreed. "Including you, even if you literally are!" she snapped at me. "Don't think I'm not still upset at the risks you ran just now!"
  
  "I have no intentions of doing anything like that again any time soon." I rushed to assure her.
  
  "I'd find that more comforting if I didn't already know you had no intentions of doing this when you first went to bed last night." Cat said wisely. "But-" she leaned over and took me into her arms. "I'm sorry." she said gently. "I just-" she shook her head. "I could pick up that you were holding something back these past several weeks - both of you - and as much as I love you both, I couldn't help but-"
  
  "Suspect that we were lying to you by omission?" I said. "Keeping secrets from you that we shouldn't have?" Cat's face started to twist up in shame before I cut her off by going "You were right, because we were." I admitted, disgusted with myself. "I should never have let Hestaby get me to make that promise to her in the first place."
  
  "It's not as if refusing a Great Dragon to her face is ever a great idea." Cat consoled me. "Even when she's being polite." After a brief pause, she continued. "Especially when she's being polite."
  
  "In hindsight, it was just another wedge she was trying to subtly drive in-between us." I agreed. "Which brings me to another knotty topic-"
  
  "The dragon matchmaking." Cat anticipated me. "Yes, you touched upon that earlier. But why would Hestaby hate me so much?"
  
  "It's not so much we think she hates you as it is that we think she's got an agenda that's best served by making me his primary point of attachment." Jane replied. "But whether it's to get a hook into my father through me or just to get a hook in me or something else, we don't know yet. Trying to think like a dragon is never easy."
  
  "I can only imagine." Cat agreed with relief. "But I'm glad you guys didn't mean to, or want to-" she almost drew Jane in for a hug before stopping short. "Which is why I almost don't want to ask this next question."
  
  "Cat?" Jane asked warily, sensing the sudden shift in the mood.
  
  "Jane... what's an 'immortal elf', and why are both of you so convinced that you are one?"
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Yes, you get two chapters in one day. Sometimes inspiration just rushes, and sometimes it stalls.
  
  And haha, here you thought I couldn't find a bigger cliffhanger than 'A Yama King is breaking through to Earth!' As to how the heck Cat even knows to ask that question? Next chapter.
  
  But yes, we see the continuity differences between the computer game Yama Kings and the tabletop game version.And yes, Alex is slowly and painstakingly gathering more puzzle pieces about what he is, one tiny piece at a time. Don't expect an immediate finish any time soon, but the progression is not zero.
  
  As for the 'fatebending', I call your attention to this phrase from the Conquest CYOA option (which, I remind people, is available in the OP.
  
  And on the flipside, you can also never be surprised (and thus overwhelmed) by any factors you would choose to struggle against if you knew of them, for your will cannot be so easily overcome. If unseen enemies were to conspire to assassinate you, you would find it in yourself to dodge the killing bullet or purge the lethal dose from your flesh.
  
  So the 'coincidences' that have been keeping Alex (and as a penumbra effect, the girls) alive are not coincidences, they're a measure of the survival-oriented luck and instincts promised by this clause. Most of the other coincidences were just coincidences.
  
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  I held up my hand to cut off Jane's immediate reaction. The last thing we needed right now was to try denying it, as Jane would almost certainly do by reflex. Cat's body language had no uncertainty at all - she wasn't just taking a shot in the dark, she knew something.
  
  "How did you find out what you already know, and is the leak likely to be traced to us?" I engaged her professionalism instead.
  
  "I overheard you talking that Christmas morning on the balcony, and obviously not." Cat answered soberly. "And I'd thought I was just going to be snooping on you two having a cute moment together, and instead I ran straight into that."
  
  "We had privacy magic up!" Jane said, still shocked.
  
  "... which prevented anyone from overhearing us magically or any sound from carrying beyond the edges of the balcony." I realized. "But it didn't do anything to stop electronic surveillance, because we always let Cat take care of that when we're together. It's a habit we don't even think about anymore." I rolled my eyes at my own complacency. "And we both had our commlinks on our belts, and our friendly neighborhood technomancer not twenty feet away on the other side of the balcony door."
  
  "Oh crap." Jane moaned, her face solidly planted in both of her palms. "I am in so much freaking trouble-"
  
  "The immortal elves are a ruthless, secretive bunch." I explained to Cat. "Jane couldn't even tell me, and didn't. Hestaby spilled the beans to me at Mount Shasta, and even she only dared do so because since I'm not mortal either those ancient pacts technically don't apply to me."
  
  "Great, so just like curiosity killed my namesake..." Cat swore and kicked the table, before calming down and reaching over to take Jane's hand. "If it helps, I'm not mad. I mean, I know we've already had the secrets talk just now, and that's leaving aside how I was still talking to Dr. Lacombe about trust issues... but you were the first person on that morning to say that all three of us deserved to have a vote, and that you hated that you and Alex weren't allowed to tell me everything." Cat exhaled meaningfully. "And even with all the doubts I was having, that still meant a lot. It's why I wasn't ever mad, even when I was... worried."
  
  "Then at least I got that much right." Jane muttered. "But seriously, my father's going to kill me. It's been barely a decade since he brought me in on the secret and I've already leaked it via carelessness?"
  
  "He's certainly not going to find out from anyone in this room." I said firmly, in time with Cat's own vigorous nod.
  
  "The way we work, that actually is at least a short-term solution." Jane agreed ruefully. "Alex, you'll have to tell Cat everything that Hestaby told you. I still need to be able to truthfully say that I did not willingly leak a single thing."
  
  After bringing Cat up to speed on what Hestaby had shared about the immortal elves and the real history of the world, Cat soberly thanked us both and then sat there for about half a minute, eyes half-lidded and visibly trying to process the enormity of what she'd just heard.
  
  And then she suddenly broke out giggling.
  
  "... excuse me?" Jane finally asked.
  
  "I just-" Cat broke off, and snorted. "Okay, obviously one of the first things I did after hearing you guys talk about immortal elves and Great Dragons scheming to break up my marriage was start digging through the Matrix as discreetly as I could. And JackPoint contains a mirror of a lot of the old Shadowland shadow-files on various topics, including the original Tir Tairngire shadowfile of 2054. I'm assuming that you've read it?"
  
  "It was already out of date by the time it was relevant to me, so, not really." Jane admitted. "Although I've certainly heard both Harlequin and my father either joke or complain about it."
  
  "Ah, that explains why you didn't already know." Cat smirked. "Because now that Alex has confirmed for me exactly which parts of all the rumors about 'immortal elves' and the 'Fourth World' are true, I know exactly how I'm going to get you off if your father - or any of the other immortals - tries writing you up for it."
  
  "Cat, while I obviously agree with the goal I have no idea how you're going to do about that. I don't think the immortal elves even have an objective body of law on this topic, let alone a lawbook left lying around anywhere that you can study up on how to rules-lawyer." I broke in.
  
  "There might not be a law, but there's still a precedent." Cat said smugly. "Are either of you aware of the reason the term 'the Fourth World' - along with all the rumors and legends of a prior age of magic that inevitably devolve from knowing even a basic definition of that term - even exists in the public lexicon in the first place? Even if most people still believe it's just Ancient Wisdom Channel and Dawn of Atlantis style nonsense, you just confirmed for me that the term and the theories associated with it are actually the truth. Which makes an offhand mention from that old shadowfile suddenly far more relevant." Cat 'pinged' both of our commlinks with a thought, and after we assented the shadowfile in question popped up on our personal HUDs with the relevant page helpfully highlighted.
  
  "What?" I beat Jane's astonished reaction by half a second. "The original leak of the term 'the Fourth World' and basic mana cycle theory dates back to when someone surreptiously recorded a closed meeting of the 'Young Elven Technologists' in the early 2040s where they were being lectured on the topic by..."
  
  "... my father?" Jane sputtered incredulously. "He was the original leak?"
  
  "Yup!" Cat said cheerfully. "Entirely inadvertent, I'm sure-"
  
  "It would have to have been." Jane nodded along absently. "The YET was one of the groups he'd founded in the old Tir as a sort of farm team to gather groups of talented young elves that could be further screened for potential recruitment as operatives. So he'd almost certainly have been authorized to disclose at least some of the lesser secrets to them, or at least to the successful recruits-" she thought out loud.
  
  "I think Cat is making the point that the clear precedent was set here that if immortal elven secrets leak out because you were making an authorized disclosure and were then eavesdropped on by a third party, then so long as the eavesdropping wasn't due to conspicuous carelessness or collusion on your part then you're not on the hook for it." I broke in.
  
  "And since your dad was the prior precedent, he can hardly argue against the precedent. Or fail to put his best effort into trying to shut down anyone else who might argue against it." Cat finished proudly.
  
  "Wow." Jane said dully. "Uh... thanks, dad?" She exhaled like a bellows. "Okay, so, we've actually found a way to save my neck even if they find out Cat got read in where she wasn't supposed to be. And..." she started to smile again. "At least nobody in this room is holding anything huge back from anyone else anymore." She paused and looked at us both through narrowed eyes. "I mean, we're actually not, right?"
  
  "I'm the one who stole that leftover spaghetti you were looking for this Monday?" I answered lightly, and Jane stuck her tongue out at me in return, before her expression turned serious again.
  
  "The thing I'm really trying to wrap my head around is that you're somehow from another Earth." Jane held up her hand. "No, don't apologize to me for holding that one back. It's not something you could even begin to tell anyone under normal circumstances. I'm honestly surprised you even told Cat - in your shoes I'd have just held that one back from everyone, forever, and had them take me on 'Foreign Legion' terms. 'No past before the Legion' and all that." She whistled softly. "An alternate Earth... I can't help but try to wrap my head around what that means."
  
  "You're not weirded out by that?" Cat asked her a bit nervously.
  
  "Are you kidding?" Jane replied eagerly. "I'm downright fascinated by that! A living human that's somehow fully materialized in our world from another plane - that's utterly outside the parameters of everything I even remotely know of! I'm pretty sure even my mentor has never heard of anything like this, and I actually saw the outermost edge of known reality with him once!"
  
  "Two questions. First off, am I human? And second, the outermost edge of what now?" I asked.
  
  "In order, whatever you might be now - which I seriously doubt is inhuman in any way - by your own account you were entirely normal prior to your transference to this world, and I'll explain later." Jane said analytically. "Furthermore, assuming that Qian Ya wasn't lying-"
  
  Cat held up her hand, palm out, and after a few seconds continued. "Common folklore on MagickNet agrees that the Yama Kings must speak truth and are bound by their word. Which doesn't necessarily prove that it was being honest, but is at least a good starting point."
  
  "You have a MagickNet account?" Jane asked her curiously.
  
  "No, but you do and I've been in your commlink how many times?" Cat grinned impishly.
  
  "Please do not do that again without asking me first." Jane said calmly after a long pause, and Cat dropped most of her grin and nodded apologetically.
  
  "My point is that in addition to Qian Ya not seeing anything special about Alex until after he started actually using his powers, neither the Orange Queen nor Wind Master could gain the measure of his abilities with mere passive analysis." Jane continued didactically. "She had to actually attack you to see how your defenses would react, and he actually had to try altering feng shui in a tight focus around you - at least, that's what your description of what he did with those ley lines appeared to indicate - to see something of how your powers would defend your fate. So whatever your power or powers are, they are very likely reactive in nature."
  
  "That... would match the gut feeling I've had ever since I cut loose in the MCT black site." I agreed. "That my power was giving me what I wanted to a limited extent, but what I needed even more. So, you think that it reacts to necessity?"
  
  "To necessity, or to challenge, or to perceived threat, or to non-perceived threat-" Jane shrugged. "We're guessing here. But even wild-ass guessing goes better if you observe, then hypothesize."
  
  "It's 'test' and 'refine' that's going to be the tough end of the process, especially 'test'." Cat agreed.
  
  "That's for another day." Jane nodded. "For right now the last question I wanted to ask is... all right, starting at the beginning, These powers were given to you either by randomness or by design."
  
  "What if they were latent in him all along and only expressed when he shifted worlds?" Cat asked.
  
  "That would not change the either-or, it would merely change at what time the actual giving of the powers occurred." Jane pointed out. "Now, if it's randomness then we've got nothing further to think about here, so for purposes of hypothesizing right now we'll assume design. Which of course leads to the follow-on questions of 'who' and 'why'."
  
  "Since 'who' could literally be any unfathomable entity either inside or outside of the known metaplanes, I'm assuming you're starting at the 'why' end." I replied.
  
  "Exactly." Jane said. "And if I had a big gift of power I was going to grant to a selected someone, the first thing I'd do is judge the potential candidates for who would be the most likely to do things with that power that would best suit whatever my goals were." she continued. "Is your current appearance your original one?"
  
  "Not hardly." I admitted reluctantly. "Oh, my ethnicity, hair color, and eye color are the same." I frowned slightly at a set of odd memories. "Even my weight didn't change much from before to after, and that could have just been me not weighing myself immediately on arrival. But I was a dumpy short guy who suddenly became a chiseled and handsome tall guy." I sighed ruefully. "No girl who looked remotely like either of you would have given me a second glance then."
  
  "So you likely weren't selected for any particular physical quality." Jane powered right past my embarrassment. "And we already know that your baseline intelligence was notably boosted and that you can boost it even further with an act of will, so likely not mental either. That leaves emotional, spiritual, however you care to define it."
  
  "Alex is the kindest, most decent, and most honorable man that I've ever met." Cat said with quiet pride.
  
  "That we've ever met." Jane corrected her mildly, and I blushed with further embarassment. "So, I'm guessing that whatever wanted to give him vast power chose someone with a vast sense of responsibility."
  
  "I am continually amazed at how much vintage media you know that nobody else I've met here does." I looked at Jane. "You're sure you were only born in 2031?"
  
  "Harlequin has an ungodly collection of it, and pretending to be engrossed in it was originally one of my best ways of having to talk to him less." Jane admitted. "Then I got into a lot of it on its own merits. And quit changing the subject."
  
  "It makes sense, as much as anything we can't prove and can't test makes sense." I agreed. "I've had that suspicion myself, it's part of why I started Project Archimedes."
  
  "There you might have been overreaching- oh, I'm not criticizing the validity of trying to do something good with your gifts, I just mean that it doesn't necessarily follow logically from the premise." Jane pointed out. "It could just be that 'will not run amok like some power-mad idiot' was the selection criteria and whether you actively did good or just refrained from being bad was all the same to whatever altered/changed/empowered you."
  
  "Call it the Mystery Box." Cat said. "It needs a label or the euphemizing will get cumbersome, and 'Being X' contains the implicit assumption it was an actual being instead of something impersonal. So, whatever/whoever/whyever gave him the gift, it still came in a mystery box."
  
  "Works." Jane ping-ponged.
  
  "Doesn't work." I said. "My ethical qualities were affected in the transformation too. In my prior life..." I trailed off, not wanting to talk any further. "I was lazy. I was bad-tempered. I was an underachiever, and an introvert-"
  
  "That last one is not a moral or ethical quality, it's a social trait." Jane cut me off firmly. "And we already know that you can boost your willpower - you'd never have mentally tanked a Great Dragon's mind control spell if you couldn't - so did you have any character flaws then whose absence now is not explainable by your just having a greater ability to resist temptation? Did you lie?"
  
  "I lie now." I pointed out. "But no, not to any great extent."
  
  "Did you steal- I mean, you were from a pre-Awakening Earth that didn't even have megacorporate extraterritoriality, so shadowrunning and the necessity for shadowrunning didn't exist then. Were you a criminal then?" Cat said.
  
  "No." I agreed.
  
  "Did you cheat? Were you a bully? Did you take pleasure in the misfortunes of innocents?" Jane probed.
  
  "I didn't." I admitted. "Of course, it was hard to be a bully when you could get your ass kicked by anyone with a functioning set of reflexes."
  
  "You can bully the hell out of a person without so much as raising your voice, let alone your hand." Cat said darkly. "Trust me."
  
  I gave her a sympathetic nod and continued. "So you're thinking I was chosen for the minimum likelihood of abusing my power."
  
  "As first hypothesis, yes." Jane agreed. "Which hypothesis hardly solves the entire mystery for us, but every little puzzle piece helps."
  
  "Also helps clarify future goals." I admitted.
  
  "And that's about as far as we can take this right now." Jane surprised us. "Because while I wanted to at least get the beginnings of some thoughts down so that we'd have something to let percolate in the backs of our heads, there was a more immediate topic I was going to raise this morning before your walkabout and its subsequent revelations distracted us." She looked at us both. "I'm thinking our attempted assassin might be from JackPoint."
  
  "I don't follow." Cat said. "There isn't any data suggesting it."
  
  "Not to me either." I said, ramping up for a mentat-style review. "Wait, is it an absence of data that made you-?"
  
  "The curious thing the dog didn't do in the night-time." Jane agreed.
  
  "Famous old detective story where the detective figured out the guard dog not having been heard barking the night before meant that the 'burglar' was actually an inside job." I explained for Cat.
  
  "Specifically, what wasn't in the files Cat dug out of the MCT lab we just hit." Jane agreed.
  
  "Well, that could be anyth-" Cat began, only to be interrupted by me.
  
  "My mug shot." I facepalmed. "Doh! The only way MCT would know that I was bulletproof is if our sanitizing of the security cam footage from the MCT black site had missed a spot. But if that were true, they'd have had the face I was using then - and the logical thing to do at all your other illegal technomancer labs is pass out the photo of the guy who wrecked your last illegal technomancer lab to the guards."
  
  "Ugh, I'm slipping." Cat criticized herself similarly. "You're right, if he wasn't highlighted as a high-threat individual for the guards in the hospital lab - and you weren't either - then MCT doesn't have a firm list of which runners were involved in the Barstow Incident. I should message Bandit about that so he can pass the word to the others."
  
  "Do that." Jane agreed. "But yes, apparently MCT has no knowledge of who was at Barstow besides what's been admitted in public media. And your public farewell broadcast to Horizon conceded that Alex might have helped pay for Bravo Company if you read between the lines, but it certainly didn't actually mention he was with them."
  
  "So MCT didn't hire the guy who blew our apartment." I realized. "And neither did Horizon, because while Horizon definitely knows I hired Bravo Company and can even guess I went in shooting alongside them, they'd have no clue I have any powers at all besides my publicly-recorded adept abilities."
  
  "But if the assassin knew the full measure of your invulnerability then he'd have known he wasn't remotely using enough explosives to kill you - and would also know that killing us but leaving you alive would be the worst possible mistake anyone could make." Cat agreed. "So not Hestaby or anyone that she might have leaked to, deliberately or otherwise. The assassin was someone who didn't know you've got any edge beyond being a highly experienced mercenary and shadowrunner except just being bulletproof. Which means that whether it was one of them or someone they went on to tell later, we start with the JackPointers who went on the raid and nowhere else."
  
  "We didn't even tell all of them he was bulletproof, only the initial strategy circle." Jane pointed out. "The second-line crew simply knew that it was an inside-outside play with no real details on inside. So among the inner circle... well, it certainly wasn't Pistons or Fatima."
  
  "Just a wee bit doubtful." Cat drawled ironically.
  
  "Puck has no motive I can remotely imagine and also has the Resonance, which means he could have used a tasked sprite for the detonator instead of a mechanical timer." Jane continued thinking.
  
  "I wouldn't have picked that up unless I was already deliberately looking for it." Cat agreed. "And he'd know that. So no, not Puck."
  
  "Smiling Bandit or Fastjack..." I shook my head. "From everything I know neither one's really a killer unless you're gunning for them first. And if they ever did want to kill a bulletproof man then I imagine they'd just wait until the next time he jacked into the Matrix anywhere and then try to brainfry him through his 'trodes. Or hack a military drone and put an anti-tank missile through his skylight. Nothing that would require them to actually leave their hacker caves, let alone stab someone in an apartment and then rig a bomb to their ceiling."
  
  "Agreed. Which leaves us with Hard Exit, Rifleman, Sounder, and Butch." Jane nodded. "Two of them certainly have the training to pull off that kind of attack, but HE hates wetwork. For all her talent ultimately she's an ex-cop at heart, not a black ops specialist."
  
  "But Rifleman is entirely that kind of specialist." I pointed out. "Bravo Company are a good bunch to know if they're on your side, but they sell wetwork to the spook shops as a routine matter of course."
  
  "Yes, but he also never forgets a debt." Cat corrected me. "And the 77th owes both you and I a huge one, because we arguably saved the company from getting destroyed in the Seven Kings War. We certainly saved the unit from massive casualties and a punitive finding by the Guild, because what would have happened if we hadn't penetrated Global's scam-"
  
  "Yeah, there's a reason the whole unit rolled out to help save you." I admitted. "And Rifleman and Picador are close enough friends that her debts of honor are his and vice versa. As for Sounder, she's a veteran rigger - if she wanted to kill me for God knows what reason, my drone attack scenario would apply to her too."
  
  "Plus she's a smuggler to begin with, not an assassin or a commando." Jane agreed. "So our best guess here is that one of them leaked to whoever our mad bomber was. I mean, people do talk, and when we revealed at least one of your abilities to them we weren't expecting lifelong vows of silence."
  
  "And Butch was just there to hold the field surgery kit while Hard Exit and the rest tested my invulnerability claim. She's got no reason to kill me, and certainly isn't any kind of demolitions expert." I thought out loud.
  
  "When I message everyone about the apparent lack of MCT follow-up on us, should I also ask if anyone told anyone?" Cat asked.
  
  "No." Jane demurred. "I doubt it's any of them either, but we don't want our assassin to know we're potentially onto them and we're already thinking that whoever was the intel source they have a problem with diarrhea of the mouth. Which means..." she rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "If I was a JackPointer who was about to fly over to work in Hong Kong and I was unfamiliar with the town, what's the first thing I do?"
  
  "Search the Hong Kong shadowfiles on JackPoint and then ask around if anyone knew anyone that could be a local point of contact." Cat said knowingly. "Exactly like we did to get steered to Mr. Keung."
  
  "I wonder if Fastjack would be as offended that someone was using his VPN to gather intel on how to better assassinate fellow JackPointers as we are?" I thought out loud.
  
  "Well, there's only one way we'll find out." Jane said wisely.
  
  "Riser." Cat said later that afternoon. "Fastjack wouldn't unbend his rules enough to let a member go through even his low-level file access logs, but if I got picked up as a temporary assistant sysop to use my info sortilege and data sprites to help him organize the archives and doing that just happened to give me a level of access sufficient to peek at those logs on my own, well, that's different." she said. "His self-imposed rules are a little weird sometimes."
  
  "Guy's been jacking in practically since Echo Mirage." Jane pointed out. "A little weird goes with the package."
  
  "I suppose." Cat agreed. "And while a few people have accessed the Hong Kong shadow tour guides in the relevant time period, only one of them is a professional assassin who's known for having a talent for social manipulation, precision planning, and thinking outside the box. So we have a suspect."
  
  "Riser's not just brains but also fairly good muscle - especially close-up. But yeah, he prefers to mindgame before he strikes. And he rolls with a crew that includes a veteran commando. Kai-Lin's primarily a sniper, but he has the training to have planted that mine." Jane agreed.
  
  "Who else is on his crew?" I asked.
  
  "Guy called Seta. Ex-corp mage from MCT, we tangled once." Jane smiled thinly. "He lost." She thought briefly and continued. "A guy called Charlie Broken Horse is their wheelman, but he's not a rigger. Physical adept, at least as good outside of his car as he is inside of it. Their boss used to be a guy called Yankee, but he retired from the assassin biz when he got too much gray hair and is a full-time fixer in Tokyo now. Riser was his former number two."
  
  "Faceman/hitter, commando sniper, former wage-mage, and adept wheelman, but no Matrix support?" Cat asked.
  
  "They temp-subcontract when they need hacking done, but mostly they prefer to keep all their work physical." Jane nodded. "The Smokers' Club is a dedicated wetwork team, they don't generalize."
  
  "Well, us cutting loose our San Francisco investments would tell the Smokers' we're not coming back. That plus their sudden interest in travelogues means they should be arriving in Hong Kong soon." I thought out loud. "Now if I were Riser, how would I go about killing me?"
  
  "He can't go the WMD route." Jane thought out loud. "A few people dead in an anonymous apartment bombing is one thing but he can't use anything with too large a blast radius, not in Hong Kong. So no nerve gas, FAEs, or suchlike. Not only are those not his style but excess collateral in this city can leave you trying to deal with an excess of aggro from anyone between Wuxing and the Red Dragons. The only real 'zero zone' in town is the one you just left."
  
  "So, another trap." Cat said. "But unlike San Francisco, we don't have a fixed address here. Neither will they. How do two groups of transients, both in an unfamiliar city, ambush each other when the first requirement of a successful ambush is having advance intelligence on their target's movements?"
  
  "One side lays some bait for the other and waits for them to take it." I analyzed. "And luckily for us, we've already started laying ours."
  
  
  
  "They're here." Netcat said. "I'm inside their comms."
  
  The nighttime rain drizzled down upon us as we stood outside the derelict theme park in the Hung Hom district. Not yet reclaimed by land-hungry developers due to its proximity to Kowloon, it was being squatted by a detachment of the Black Chrysanthemum Triad.
  
  With Mr. Keung already paid off to let us know if Riser approached the Red Dragons, we'd focused our own surveillance efforts on the Black Chrysanthemums. With the hit on the MCT lab at Queen Elizabeth Hospital having displayed so much of the same style that we'd used on the Barstow lab - and deliberately so, as I'd been taking advantage of the opportunity to start laying a trail of bread crumbs there for any assassin pursuing us from San Francisco even before we'd found out that it was the Smokers' Club - the logical move for a man like Riser would be to approach the one Triad we'd already drawn blood from, as witness the van we'd hijacked and the Black Chrysanthemum organleggers he'd hit. Whether it be for information, backup guns, or gear, it was likely that Riser would go for his usual 'play people off against each other until only I win' approach.
  
  So we got inside his decision loop and waited for word to reach us of some out-of-town runners setting up a meet with the BC Triad, and then cased and crashed the meet. Because the best time to trap the Smokers' Club would be when they were still in the middle of doing their prep work to start building a trap for us. As it turned out, Riser's next plan for dealing with the bulletproof man was going to be poisoning, hence his approaching the organlegging and designer drugs Triad for some extra-strength exotic neurotoxins. And now here we were.
  
  "I can see Kai-Lin up there on that roller coaster." I rolled my eyes. "I thought he was a professional sniper? The roof of that theatre would still have given him good elevation on most of the park but wouldn't make him so goddamn visible to anyone with good optics. And it would also give him more lines of retreat then he's got stuck up on that high perch."
  
  "And it definitely would have made it harder for me to do this." Frosty agreed, and whistled to her summoned air elemental to quietly fly up there and suffocate the man with the sniper rifle. As far away as he was from the Smokers' own mage, he wouldn't have the slightest chance to defend himself and would almost certainly die before he could gasp a word of warning - not that his commlink would have worked anyway, now that Netcat was inside of it. "They've gotten too used to picking their times and places."
  
  "One down." I confirmed, seeing the sniper collapse. "Now we'll see if the Smokers paid for bio-monitors..."
  
  A minute of no reaction visible anywhere in the park was our answer.
  
  "Right." Frosty agreed. "Clock just started ticking..."
  
  "Moving." Netcat said, slipping away into the night and headed for a spot where she could climb up to a handy roof - as it happened, the same abandoned theatre roof I'd just marked as a better position for overwatch than the roller coaster. We gave her thirty seconds and then started our own approach.
  
  "All right, there's Charlie." I nodded towards the flashy luxury sports sedan parked on one of the employee access roads that ran behind the attractions and away from the public spaces. "Good spot for a getaway if Riser has to leave the meet in a hurry. Now, the question is, where's Seta?" I kept scanning. "You'd think he'd be visible on the astral."
  
  "Triangulation on the Smokers' commlinks puts one of them inside that carnival booth. Given that you just marked Charlie and we already know what building Riser went into, that's him." Cat's voice came over our own comms.
  
  "He's masking from astral observation by using the walls, but can still cover the whole front approach to the building Riser's in out the front of the booth." Frosty nodded. "Smart."
  
  "But the BC's know he's in there." I nodded. "All right, I'll take Charlie and get set up. Let us know when you're in position."
  
  "You too." Frosty nodded to me and headed out.
  
  With a simple illusion covering me to look like a patrolling Black Chrysanthemum, I walked openly up towards the getaway car and mana-bolted Charlie Broken Horse to death through the driver's side window. A brief use of telekinesis opened the door from the inside, and I simply stuffed the body in the trunk before changing the illusion to look like the man I'd just killed.
  
  "In the car." I radioed.
  
  "In position." Frosty replied.
  
  "Okay, on my go." Netcat acknowledged. "Starting the hack... three, two, one, now!"
  
  One of the dangers of ubiquitous Augmented Reality was that inexperienced users sometimes had a problem distinguishing AR input from their physical senses when in a hurry or under stress. So when Cat's hack of two of the Black Chrysanthemum guards standing outside the building where the meet was expertly slipped an audio file of gunshots into their AR feeds, they reacted as if the shots had genuinely come from inside the door where Riser was purchasing some specialized chemicals from the BC's laboratory here. Of course their first reaction was to immediately turn and rush to open the lab doors to look inside-
  
  -and that's when Frosty cut them both down with a lightning bolt from where she was lurking down the row of unused carnival booths near Seta's position, while Netcat simultaneously pumped a grenade from her assault carbine's underbarrel launcher right at the booth Seta was lurking in.
  
  And so both sides in this particular black market meet immediately leapt to the conclusion that the other side had betrayed them. Seta immediately radio'ed to Riser that the Black Chrysanthemums had tried to blow him up, the noise and flash of the grenade as well as the angle Frosty had picked making him the only person in the park who hadn't noted the lightning attack. The Triad gangers, on the other hand, had seen the lightning bolt coming from somewhere near Seta's position and immediately assumed he'd done it, but assumed the sound of the exploding grenade had been from the thunderbolt. Kai-Lin, whose position on overwatch could easily have cleared up the confusion - at least for the Smokers - had already been dead for the past several minutes, and I'd just taken out Charlie Broken Horse. And so the Smokers' had instantly been taken from a four-man team expertly covering their weaknesses to two men, each cut off from the other and alone in the midst of enemies.
  
  Seta's attempt to go invisible and slip out was ruined by Frosty's dispelling his magic, which left him out in the open and caught in a crossfire from all of the surviving BC's. Netcat didn't even need to finish him off with her rifle from her vantage point. Now all that remained was to see if Riser would be able to-
  
  The back door of the lab flew open and Riser came running out, smoking pistol still in one hand and a small carrying case in the other. "Charlie, I'm coming in hot! Kai-Lin, status on Seta? Kai-Lin, report!" I heard his voice blaring from Charlie's commlink.
  
  Riser pulled open the passenger side door, got in the shotgun seat, and I politely waited until he'd put the carrying case down before I backhanded him unconscious.
  
  A discreet manaball took out the several BC's rushing to cut off my escape without drawing any attention from the rest of the park. Gunfire continued to echo from the grounds of the park as I stopped and unlocked the rear door for Frosty to get in.
  
  "What are they shooting at out there?" I asked as I turned around and headed for Netcat's pickup point.
  
  "An illusion of Kai-Lin blazing away full-auto from the top of the roller coaster." Frosty said. "Just a thing I thought of to help cover our escape. After a minute the illusion will start to fast-rope down and then 'fall to its death' while my elemental tosses the real corpse off the top of the coaster, then it'll dispel itself."
  
  "Clever." I acknowledged her last-minute refinement as I stopped the car again. Netcat opened the passenger side door and rolled Riser out, while Frosty likewise got out to help load him in the back seat next to her. Then she claimed shotgun while Jane made sure he was disarmed and restrained, and we headed off into the night.
  
  
  
  "The Cutters." I said, still appalled from what I found out. "All those bystanders dead, our home blown up, you two almost killed, Aurora Development and the Project Archimedes pilot project for San Francisco... all gone because a jumped-up street gang had ambitions in the East Bay area, and our reconstruction work was making the neighborhood not blighted enough for their crime!"
  
  "Get successful chapters going all up and down the West Coast and as far inland as Denver, start thinking you're the next Mafia." Jane said with equal disgust. "Fifty thousand freaking nuyen. That's all we would have died for? That's all they did die for?"
  
  "Well, that plus the huge boost to his rep for taking out a JackPoint A-lister like Frosty." I sighed. "So, fifty thousand nuyen, doing a solid for his old friends - because Riser's an ex-Cutter - and a big rep and ego boost. That's what all those lives were worth." I shook my head. "Fuck."
  
  "You're upset at more than just the collateral damage." Cat said empathetically. "Because I know you're not upset at what we did to them."
  
  "Sons of bitches had it coming." I agreed wholeheartedly. "The Smokers' Club is dead, and as far as the world knows they tried to rip off the Triads and got wasted in return."
  
  "Even Riser's and Charlie's bodies never being found just pisses on the bastards' graves even more." Jane gloated. "Their final legacy is to be remembered as chickenshit bastards who ran out on the rest of their team, but still couldn't make it out of Hong Kong alive."
  
  "And we were never there." Cat agreed. "So why so glum, chum?" she turned to me.
  
  "We did everything right, we paid off the right people, cut good deals, made sure everybody's rational self-interest was better served by going along... and the whole thing got wrecked in a single night by stupid, blind greed. And it wasn't even a megacorp crushing things underneath their titan fists, but an overlarge street gang that happened to know a hotshot assassin who-" I shook my head. "I don't even blame Sounder for telling Riser about my bulletproof skin, he was an expert con man and he played her like a fiddle."
  
  "So we start again somewhere else." Cat said optimistically.
  
  "And most likely, it gets wrecked again by something else." I sighed. "A junior exec who cares about an attaboy from his supervisor more than he cares about a business plan that is far more profitable for the company but wouldn't give him the credit, a crooked cop who'll harass a shopkeeper into penury with bogus write-ups because someone else's life's work isn't worth as much to him as the few hundred nuyen he's being slipped by a chain store to drive a local shop out of business to make a few percent-" I waved my hands. "All those things and more, and they're potentially everywhere. How do you fix social entropy? How do you build castles out of sand when you're trapped below the tide line?" I sighed. "I know you'll say I shouldn't give up after the failure of just one pilot project, and maybe you're right. But right now I'm starting to be afraid that Project Archimedes is simply a bust in its present form. If I try to be restrained - to not abuse my power - anything I start to build can get knocked over too easily by any number of potential Risers and potential Cutters. And if I take the gloves off and try to strike with enough force that my efforts can't be knocked off course by anything-"
  
  "Then you're willfully ignoring the human cost in favor of the bottom line." Jane agreed soberly. "The exact thing you're trying not to do."
  
  "Damn." Cat realized. "It's..." she shook he head. "I think I see what you mean. It's not that you're not smart enough, or not strong enough, or not good enough. It's that you're just one man... well, and two women." she said with a brief flash of humor. "But no matter your individual amount of power, you'd still need to have a megacorporation to hope to act on the scale of one. Even Lofwyr needs Saeder-Krupp to be the big scary dragon instead of just being a big scary dragon."
  
  "And are my powers even the sort of thing that lets you outcompete all the others as a megacorp exec?" I shrugged. "I can punch gods into submission, but the problem here is just not about punching. Even if someone could skin Lofwyr for a pair of shoes, that doesn't mean they could necessarily match his experience and ability at running a business."
  
  "And given what the business environment is like at that level, it's arguable that even if you could match both of those you still couldn't hope to match his results without also adopting at least some of his methods. And then we're back to those certain ethical questions." Cat commiserated.
  
  "Drek." I swore vehemently. "Is this how everybody else who started off wanting to reform the system ended up being captured by it?"
  
  "Probably." Jane agreed ruefully, and reached out to pour us all another shot. We raised our glasses and sipped the next round of booze as we sat around our little kitchen table.
  
  "So, where to next?" Cat said after an uncomfortable silence.
  
  "Well, Smiling Bandit gave me an open offer to come visit him at his lab." I said eventually. "I suppose it's only fair that we take him up on it."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: The amusing part is that Ehran's being the original leak for basic 'mana cycle' theory to the public is canon. It's on page 140 of 2e's Tir Tairngire sourcebook. And Shadowrun supplements used to be written with the majority of the information laid out in the format of in-setting documents being discussed and analyzed on Shadowland, both to allow info to be retconned later (as it was being said in NPC voice, not omniscient narrator voice) and to clarify that yes, this was allowable in-character knowledge for PCs. So when Cat is literally reading the game sourcebook to them here, that's entirely non-meta and rules legal.
  
  And yes, our heroes are starting to analyze his mysterious powers more - and then being smart enough to table the speculation when they hit the limits of available data and wait to see what comes up next, rather than chase blind alleys or get too married to current theories. Which is often harder than merely being smart.
  
  Kudos to Tikitau for accurately guessing it was the Smokers' Club, even if he didn't anticipate that it was for so relatively petty a reason. But hey, ever since Riser posted in Attitude about being proud he could so expertly fake a months-long psycho stalker campaign to drive an innocent Combat Biker star into killing herself because another team wanted her out of the game, I'd always thought he was a motherless piece of crap. So here's to the Smokers' - fuck them, and I'm glad they're dead.
  
  To those wondering 'Where's Ladybug?', she was a recent recruit to the Smokers' in 2072 and it's currently early 2069. So no, we don't have to kill the preteen technomancer. (And isn't Riser just an even bigger bag of crap that he yokes a kid younger than dev/grrl into hardcore wetwork.)
  
  As for the end - yes, our hero is starting to wonder if trying to bail an ocean of social entropy with a spoon is the right idea, or if he should try to come at the problem from another end. Which makes sense, as the author is wondering that too. *g*
  
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  cliffc999
  cliffc999
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  So what the hell is up with this 'Wild Man' guy? He's done maybe four runs that anybody's heard of and played one season of Urban Brawl, and a whole lot of people I used to think were serious runners now all agree he's supposed to be hot shit? I'm the Most Wanted Man in the CAS! I've pulled off prime runs on four continents! What's this weekend warrior done except get lucky a couple times?
  >Kane
  
  Prime runs on four continents, but you've had to flee at least five of them with your tail on fire. You've got all the subtle of a berserk piasma in heat, dude. But the reason people have only heard of a few of Wild Man's runs is because the man's a ghost. I mean, he's not the only guy who's set an MCT zero zone on fire and walked away alive, but he is the only one I know who's done it and MCT still doesn't know he was there. Fuck, they barely even know I was there and I was strafing the place with a 125mm!
  >Rat-Tail
  
  He's definitely got some kind of massive background, even if Crash 2.0 apparently separated him from it permanently. First time I saw him he was working barely above the entry-level tier. I was crew boss on this pickup squad doing this little neighborhood run in Auburn, and it was one idiot newbie who ended up completely blowing his audition, a couple of solid mid-carders, and Wild Man - who'd arrived with the resume of an even greener newbie than the idiot, and ended up carrying the entire damn team through the run. Whole thing turned out to be a Humanis trap that I'd completely missed, but he spotted the hook right before we bit on it and got us all out ahead of the trap. Then he figures out how to run down the Johnson who'd burned us, and we end up leaving the guy stuffed into an Evo corporate prison for all sorts of malicious vandalism and trespassing we'd committed on his behalf, the money he'd been holding out on us safely in our pockets, and Kenny B's plan to ruin Seattle M.O.M. completely vaporized. That man was a veteran operator from the jump, the blankness has to have been him just reinventing his life.
  >Fatima
  
  To be fair, that was also Netcat's first run. You know, where Wild Man pulled her in on his own initiative so she could do the legwork and hacking that would have told you it was a trap? What have I always said about legwork, however boring?
  >Pistons
  
  This again? Here? It's been more than three years, P!
  >Fatima
  
  Oooo, he bailed you out from your own dumb move so now you talk him up. I am so impressed. He do anything else useful in Seattle or was this the high point of his 'career'?
  >Kane
  
  Oh, he did something else useful all right, even if it's still too early to talk when/where on that hot zone. But he contributed at least as much as Ivan did, in the middle of a hellfight even Hard Exit would have considered a rough week. You remember Sergeant Ivan, don't you Kane?
  >Fatima
  
  Some old dead guy?
  >Kane
  
  The old dead guy who once walked 117 kilometers out of northern Tsimshian on foot, uphill in the snow, when you missed pickup because you'd gotten bored and picked a needless fight with the border patrol instead of just staying parked where you were supposed to. Remember him now?
  >Butch
  
  Hey, isn't that the same guy who tried to break 117 of your bones, one for each klick you'd made him walk? That shit was hilarious.
  >Rat-Tail
  
  For the record, Ivan only got up to 43. But then again, he had to stop because 'The Hardest Man In Aztlan' wasn't hard enough to take any more punches without up and dying on him-
  >Butch
  
  Hey, what the hell happened to doctor/patient confidentality?!?
  >Kane
  
  Is somebody's bill late enough being paid to make the doctor a cranky gossip again?
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  Do devil rats spread plague?
  >Butch
  
  User SLAMM-0! has logged on.
  
  So, what's the bullpen topic this morning?
  >Slamm-0!
  
  The life and times of your favorite source of insider trading tips.
  >Pistons
  
  I regret only that I didn't risk more money on that deal. Damn, did that stock scam clean up or what?
  >Butch
  
  Wild Man? What's he done now? And yeah, that gig paid for my new house!
  >Slamm-0!
  
  Well, if we're collecting gossip then I hear that somebody has officially upped his live-in sexy elf count to two...
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  Anybody we know?
  >Slamm-0!
  
  Frosty.
  >Fatima
  
  ... you're joking. She's even better looking then Netcat! How's he doing it?
  >Slamm-0!
  
  Would you like a highly informative and aesthetically pleasing series of instructional videos? Damn, that was one fun night. Almost made me regret I'm not the settling down type.
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  Almost. *sticking-out-tongue gesture icon*
  >Pistons
  
  You have got to be pulling my chain. Frosty got that street handle because if anybody even tried to stick it in, it would freeze right off!
  >Kane
  
  That's not why she got it, Prince Charmless. But yeah, I'm not surprised they made it a triad. With his endurance Netcat wouldn't be able to walk if she had to deal with all that testosterone alone full-time. Rowr.
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  Please, there was this one time with Swedish triplets in Barcelona that I- [1.3 MP deleted by sysop]
  >Kane
  
  Sysop GLITCH is no longer invisible.
  
  Jesus Christ that was gross Kane. I realize this isn't the kiddie pool but some people are trying to eat breakfast here!
  >Glitch
  
  He wants to impress me, he just has to say that they actually called him back the next day.
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  Us being ships passing in the night was unavoidable! I work in the transport industry! And did you call him back the next day, hmm?
  >Kane
  
  Speak of the deputy sysop and he shall appear! And speaking of, any truth to the rumor that Netcat's joining the staff?
  >Pistons
  
  That was just a temp gig to help untangle a big snarl in the some of the pre-Crash 2.0 archives. Turns out the Resonance has a few magic database-processing shortcuts that modern software can't duplicate yet. But she is on the short list if a technomancer assistant sysop is needed again.
  >Glitch
  
  >Sadly, Kane, by the next time I was in LA and available Horizon had already decided to be mind boggling assholes and sell out their own rising stars. So much for having any faith in a megacorp being smart enough to at least concentrate on their own bottom line over the long run and not just slash-and-burn. I'm going to have to start asking for bigger up-front money and less back-end percentage.
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  Hey, at least the Barstow run got you some lovely helmet-cam footage for your next rock video.
  >Pistons
  
  Ah, "Resonance of Freedom". Halfway to platinum and it's barely been out two weeks. Nothing like being at the front of a wave of popular sentiment to sell those chips.
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  I'm just glad all the faces were edited out. But I'm sure Bravo Company loves the free PR.
  >Pistons
  
  Free nothing, they paid for that product placement. *evil laugh gesture icon*
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  Your ability to cash in three-and-a-half times on the Barstow run instead of the only twice that the rest of us mere mortals got is why I will never question your decision to double-dip in shadowrunning and the music biz ever again.
  >Slamm-0!
  
  User LEI KUNG has logged on.
  
  Good morning, everyone.
  >Lei Kung
  
  In North America, maybe, but it's almost midnight in the Far East. Can't sleep?
  >Pistons
  
  I just got the word that one of our members is... well, there's no body yet, but he's almost certainly dead. At least two of his team are confirmed dead and in the morgue, and the Black Chrysanthemums put out a general call very early this AM that he was a '25' - 'traitor'. That notification was just retracted, which means that they must either have him or his corpse.
  >Lei Kung
  
  Oh shit, Wild Man was in Hong Kong! What the hell happened?!?
  >Pistons
  
  Ah, my apologies. Wild Man's team finished the job at Queen Elizabeth Hospital with no problems. I was referring to Riser.
  >Lei Kung
  
  Whew! But wait, the Smokers' Club was in Hong Kong too?
  >Fatima
  
  They arrived early yesterday afternoon, made some inquiries with local fixers, and set up a meet with the Black Chrysanthemums late last night to purchase some goods. And then they apparently tried to kill their way out rather than actually pay for their merchandise, and failed. Kai-Ling and Seta were killed on the scene, and Charlie Broken Horse fled with Riser. I heard about the events this morning, but I had thought at least the two of them had made their successful getaway. But now that the death mark has just been retracted, apparently they did not. I am still waiting for acquaintances among the Red Dragons to tell me precisely what happened, but I know that our community likes to be kept current on when members die.
  >Lei Kung
  
  Even if they're a cold-blooded murdering asshole that nobody likes. And I'm having a horrible suspicion just now. Do the Red Dragons, or anyone else, happen to know where the Smokers arrived in Hong Kong from?
  >Pistons
  
  San Francisco. Why?
  >Lei Kung
  
  Oh that godless asshole! If Riser wasn't dead I'd kill him myself!
  >Fatima
  
  Wild Man was operating out of San Francisco until someone blew his apartment with a precision timed demo strike. Like the kind the Smokers would use. That was the same night his crew flew out to do the Queen Elizabeth run, so the assassin missed his window only by several hours. And they'd asked me to help dump some of their San Fran properties in a hurry shortly afterwards. So they already knew that someone had swung at them and missed, and that they wouldn't be going back to the Bay Area.
  >Pistons
  
  So you think that the Smokers took a contract on Wild Man's crew, flew out to HK to finish the job after the first shot zigged where the target zagged, and... immediately got themselves killed trying to do a drug rip on the Black Chrysanthemums for merchandise that Riser was more than flush enough to just pay for? Wait, are you saying...?
  >Rat-Tail
  
  Well, the last time someone tried to kill Wild Man's wife two AAA megacorps walked away with bloody noses and at least one of them still has no clue that they got played with a 'Let's You And Them Fight'. So if this really was a case of someone setting the least popular Triad in Hong Kong and the coldest-blooded reptile on JackPoint to each think the other was trying to rip them off and mutually annihilate each other in the process, it would not be surprising.
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  It would be just the sort of 'Why didn't we think of that?!?' WTFery that was every other time we let Wild Man make the plans. I mean, in hindsight it's so obvious and yet beforehand...
  >Fatima
  
  Fuck me, the Smokers were not weekend warriors. They're really all gone?
  >Slamm-0!
  
  Within 24 hours of getting off the plane at Chek Kap Lok. This is why I keep telling you Westerners to walk quietly and respect our customs when you come to Hong Kong!
  >Lei Kung
  
  Wait a minute. The anti-tank mine in the apartment instead of just shooting him... he'd have had to have known Wild Man was bulletproof. Riser used info from here to plan his hits?
  >Slamm-0!
  
  Well, using this place to help get better intel for our runs is why we all come here. But yes, there is a general understanding we don't do those kinds of runs on each other. This place won't be worth the opchips it's hosted on if nobody can dare to share useful info without being afraid another member will try to murder them with it. I'm gonna have to talk to Jack about if maybe we need to make a policy announcement or something.
  >Glitch
  
  "Bulletproof?"
  >Kane
  
  Wild Man can bounce APDS rounds with his bare skin. Adept power plus some subtle SURGE mutation is anyone's best guess.
  >Butch
  
  ... you sure it was really APDS? Could it have been a trick?
  >Kane
  
  I saw Hard Exit load her rifle with milspec APDS and put one right into the fleshy part of his leg at point-blank range with my own two eyes. We were doing a lab test of his abilities, and I was on-call to patch the hole in case it turned out he was overestimating his durability. Turned out he wasn't.
  >Butch
  
  Damn handy talent to have in the shadows. Why did he waste it playing Urban Brawl? Between the armor and the gel rounds those guys hardly ever get hurt anyway. The league should never have phased out live ammo, takes all the dramatic tension out of it.
  >Glitch
  
  Well, it is kinda hard to say you're just defending yourself when the people you're shooting at can't really shoot you back. And for all that he's a world-class killing machine, you have to seriously tick off his sense of decency before he'll kill you.
  >Fatima
  
  ... I'll keep that in mind.
  >Kane
  
  Just got an email from Netcat. She's fine, Frosty and Wild Man are fine, and sure enough, the Cutters had hired the Smokers' Club to kill them. Over some stupid petty dick-measuring contest about who got to run what in the East Bay or something. I wouldn't have gotten out of bed for the amount of nuyen that was involved, and yet... Riser just couldn't do enough favors for his old gang buddies I suppose. Or he was trophy hunting. Or whatever. Don't ask me how a sociopath thinks, I have a sanity handicap.
  >Pistons
  
  Did he say anything about what happened to Riser?
  >Slamm-0!
  
  The entire topic of exactly how WM and co. found out about Riser's contract or if they had any contact with Riser at all was conspicuous by its absence. *winking gesture icon*
  >Pistons
  
  Jesus Christ, those guys weren't just vaporized but their street reps got tossed in the same landfill their bodies were, and nobody can even prove Team Wild Man was anywhere near the scene. That is some damn slick work! If anybody knows anyone in Chimaera then they might want to drop a quiet word that this is not a great contract to bid on in the future.
  >Butch
  
  Well, I can certainly say that no in one Hong Kong is going to bid on it. Because I have one more piece of news. Earlier this afternoon, Hsaio Wai-Gong discreetly informed the local community that Wild Man, Netcat, and Frosty were to be "treated with appropriate dignity for as long as they were respectful visitors". The translation of which is 'Unless they attack you first, nobody touches them'.
  >Lei Kung
  
  Hsaio Wai-Gong? The Hsaio Wai-Gong? As in the Shan Chu of the Red Dragons, the Lodge Master of the largest Triad in Hong Kong? He personally put the word out that certain people were to be respected?
  >Kat o' Nine Tales
  
  Yes. No one knows why, and of course no one is going to be so impertinent as to ask.
  >Lei Kung
  
  What the fuck did Riser do to piss off the Red Dragons that badly? Or... what did Wild Man make them think that Riser did?
  >Slamm-0!
  
  I doubt it was related to the affair with the Smokers' Club, actually. The only thing the Red Dragons would do about a treacherous attack on the Black Chrysanthemums would be to point and laugh. No, something else must have occurred, but there's no word of Wild Man's team doing anything other than the shadowrun they originally came to Hong Kong for. And while I did give them an introduction to one of the Red Dragons' Straw Sandals to make some logistical arrangements for that run, that was purely a routine business transaction.
  >Lei Kung
  
  Anything else weird happen in Hong Kong recently? However bizarre or apparently unrelated? Because when it comes to Team Wild Man, "weird" is their middle name.
  >Fatima
  
  The only recent 'weirdness' has been the local geomancers starting to talk about a major shift in the feng shui of the city, and how 'winds of fortune will begin to flow where once was only a stagnant, hidden pool'. Don't ask me what that means, I never had much of a head for geomancy.
  >Lei Kung
  
  I still say this guy is just pulling the mysterious act and letting everybody else's imaginations hype up shit out of nothing.
  >Kane
  
  My only advice there, Kane, is that if you absolutely have to go indulge yourself in some stupid dick-measuring contest then you swing at him first and not at either of the ladies. At least then there'll be an actual chance that he won't take it personally.
  >Pistons
  
  Because you can just ask Gary Cline about what happens when he does.
  >Fatima
  
  
  The large dragon thought briefly. Scrolling on one display screen of the several dozen arrayed in front of the perch in their private sanctum's alert center was a transcript from 'JackPoint' that his sources had been able to obtain. On another was a respectful missive from the Great Dragon Lung. Several more contained corporate intelligence reports and after-action analyses of various past incidents, ranging from California Free State to sub-Saharan Africa.
  
  Wind Master reminds me that in his favorite human language, the ideogram for 'crisis' is formed by combining those for 'danger' and 'opportunity'. the crisp thought rolled out in telepathic dragonspeech.
  
  "Is this a crisis then, my lord?" the tall slender elf asked politely.
  
  It is almost certainly an opportunity. It may yet prove to be a danger.
  
  "I have reviewed the reports, and the involvement of Jane Foster concerns me deeply. To have such strength as to readily banish a Yama King... should the ancient lords of Thera come to wield such a powerful weapon as their own, we would be one of their logical first targets."
  
  Should they be so foolish as to try and grasp him as they would a sword-hilt, then he would only turn in their hand. I cannot yet entirely comprehend Kincaid's motivations but his lust for freedom, his ultimate refusal to fit any mold save his own... these I entirely understand. The dragon's lips drew back in what on a lesser creature would have been considered a grin. And that is as it should be, of course. Those who will not strive to stand deserve only to kneel.
  
  "Yet even the mighty still kneel before the great."
  
  Even I have peers. That is why the traditions of dragonkind are so vital; they are all that separates us from being animals.
  
  "But Alexander Kincaid is no dragon, nor even dragon-kin. And surely he is not a peer to such as you."
  
  He certainly exceeds you in power, and you are already peer to many lessers of my kind. But no, I do not think that he rivals me in might. A precise pause. Not yet.
  
  "... I see the progression. He is either rapidly growing in might, or ignorant of his true abilities and slowly testing his limits - and not yet finding them."
  
  Correct. A probable opportunity in the present. A potential danger in the future. Thus, a crisis and yet not a crisis.
  
  "What is your wish, lord?"
  
  If we are to guide his future, then we must know his past. All of my other servants have tried and failed to penetrate the obscurity that lies before the second Crash. You will take charge of this task personally.
  
  "I cannot guarantee success."
  
  No living being ever can. I have every faith that you will make your best effort. And should that be insufficient to the task then I will do what I have always done. Allow failure to be my teacher, and strive yet again to succeed.
  
  "Have you evaluated the possibility that his past does not exist because he has none? That he may be constructed, and not born?"
  
  Unlikely, but possible. You will of course search for signs of this possibility as well as all others... the dragon trailed off in mid-thought and remained silent for a long time. His servant patiently waited, standing still as a statue, until the dragon spoke again.
  
  I have overlooked a possibility. I commend you for prompting me to realize that, however inadvertently. When a person or object suddenly appears with no known history in the world, there are three potential cases. It's past history may simply be unknown to you. It may have been constructed on the spot. Or it may have been transported from another world.
  
  "My lord, I have not the slightest idea how I would even begin to evaluate that possibility."
  
  Unsurprising, as it would be a task entirely beyond your ability. I will handle it myself.
  
  "A permanent transference of a living being from another plane of existence? I have never even remotely heard of the possibility of such a thing, not in any age of the world. And I have lived through almost as many of those as you yourself, my lord."
  
  Yes, you have. But even I have not lived through them all. And that thought suggests my next course of action. Make the arrangements for Priault and the others to assume my routine business duties while I am in a period of seclusion. I must dare the deepest depths of the Jewel. I must seek the oldest lore.
  
  "As you will, my lord."
  
  I remind you yet again to take care not to molest the persons of either of his mates in the course of your investigations. You are dismissed.
  
  Scale the drake bowed, and then turned and departed swiftly from the chamber as the dragon rose to his feet and headed towards the sealed inner chamber where he kept his greatest treasures. And the Jewel of Memory was not merely his greatest treasure but the greatest treasure of the dragon race as a whole, held in sacred trust by the Loremaster and the foremost repository of draconic traditions, lore, history... and secrets. Created by All-Wings herself, given to her oldest surviving child Far-Scholar upon her death, and now passed down to him, he had of course made a thorough study of all the lore in the Jewel even mostly relevant to the current affairs of both the Sixth World and the ancient survivors of the Second World and onward. But he had had many calls on his time, and so he had never gone beyond that. There had never been a need to.
  
  But now there was such a need, and so he would immerse himself as deeply as he could in the only remaining record of the First World and the inchoate dawn times before. For with the failure of the Orange Queen's theory that Alexander Kincaid was a Passion rebirthing, then no phenemenon known from the Second World onward would fit the available data.
  
  It was a mystery that had to be solved. And if no lesser being could solve it, then Lofwyr would.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: My readers are correct. POV segments are handy things! *g*
  
  Time to take a brief rest and ponder the next arc. I don't think we'll have too many more before we're ready to leave Shadowrun, because we're starting to hit the top tier of things. You don't bring out Lofwyr - and in his role as Loremaster even, not just as CEO of Saeder-Krupp - unless the shit is getting real.
  
  And yes, Gold-Master is that fucking smart. There's a reason the Big D picked him to wear the big shiny dragon hat after he died and his brother wasn't available at the time to do it.
  
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  It was early April when Smiling Bandit and I finally finished helping solve world hunger. Or at least making a good start on the process of.
  
  When the United States had broken up into the UCAS, CAS, and Native American Nations at the end of the Great Ghost Dance, Nevada had originally ended up in the territory of the new Ute Nation. With an economy long since weakened by poor management and corruption, the Crash 2.0 had dealt the last fatal blow to the Ute Nation and it had effectively collapsed and been absorbed into the territory of the Pueblo Corporate Council. But neither Ute nor Pueblo had had any use for the dusty complex of empty hangars and test shacks that had been all that the US Air Force had left behind at the Nevada Testing Range near Groom Lake after the original pullout, and so in the guise of an eccentric old prospector supposedly puttering about in the mountains north of Groom Lake Smiling Bandit had been able to live undisturbed in what had originally been called 'Area 51' for years and years.
  
  Bandit had once been UCLA's top student in his day, easily placing first in every class on biochemistry and genetics. He'd also been sustaining a double major in cybernetics technology, and had had a brilliant potential career ahead of himself as a top researcher in cyberware and bioware. But after seeing what he'd have to look forward to as one of the 'top men' at Yamatetsu or Universal Omnitech he'd chosen instead to drop out of the rat race entirely. In a more normal world he'd have gone on to find a position in academia, or at a smaller and more independent research firm, or possibly as a basement inventor. In the world of Shadowrun none of these opportunities were viable. He was simply too intelligent to be left alone, and once that intelligence was on the radar of the megacorps then they'd never stop attempting to recruit him - willingly or otherwise. And if he proved too unwilling, then they'd immediately shift to disposing of him to prevent the risk of a rival corporation being able to get him. This eternal round-robin of intellectual slavery and 'brain drain' hoarding was what the megacorps referred to by the sanitary euphemism of "involuntary extraction".
  
  I'd defined Project Archimedes as needing both a place to stand and a long enough lever. I was still only barely making headway on either of those, but now I was firming up my realization that even something as basic as finding a crack to jam the lever into was going to be a bitch and a half all by itself. Every time I began to note a place where people of good will might have done something, I almost immediately spotted the reason why they didn't. And the thing that would help remove that roadblock was itself trapped behind another one, and so on, and so forth, until the last roadblock in the daisy chain was being anchored by the first. Everyone so busy scrabbling to make sure they got a bigger piece of the pie that nobody thought of just stopping and baking another pie. As Cat had said in her farewell message to Gary Cline, 'the idiotic zero-sum value system that every megacorp was trapping themselves in'.
  
  My frustrations were hardly unique to me, of course. Smiling Bandit had himself been aspiring towards his own version of Project Archimedes almost since he'd originally dropped out of grad school. His outlaw lifestyle had been for the purpose of either finding a wondrous invention that the corps were hiding away from the world and releasing it, or allowing him to accumulate the funding to eventually make one of his own. Sadly, he'd had only limited success at doing either by himself. Which is why, after Bandit had finished his round of tests on me and gathering his scientific data, I'd taken advantage of the unique opportunity at his lab to start working on at least a little piece of abundancy economics.
  
  Bandit had been raiding various megacorps' scientific research projects for years, both hoping to find a 'silver bullet' the megacorps had been sequestering, as part of his self-imposed duties as a one-man freelance scientific oversight committee, and simply because he combined a vast intellectual curiosity with a prodigious hacking talent. Which meant that when I set out to reproduce a fictional invention I'd first read about in S.M. Stirling's novel Drakon, I had a large and eclectic toolbox to rummage through instead of having to reinvent all the wheels from scratch.
  
  The basic outline of the project was a genetically tailored algae that was a solar-powered desalinization plant. The algae would extract sodium, chlorine, and sulfur from seawater via a subtle trick involving carbon-based polymers and ionic bonds, then die and sink to the bottom of the tank. The fresh water could be drained off the top and the resulting sludge left behind would be a sodium-rich organic feedstock that was by itself useful for all sorts of chemical engineering and industrial nanoforge applications. In theory one of the algae desalinization plants could be run at a profit even if you just threw all the fresh water right back in the ocean. And outside of the initial expenses of constructing the plant, the operating costs would largely involve plant operators, maintenance, and feedstock extraction and basic water purification. The tailored algae would gladly breed more of itself so long as nutrients were supplied - you could use raw sewage for that if you wanted, and the opportunities for waste disposal would make the algae-desalinization plants even more useful ecologically than they already were - and as a safeguard against replication and mutation in the wild, the algae needed a significantly higher sulfur concentration to reproduce than would be found even over an undersea volcanic vent.
  
  So with some basic hydraulic engineering, a few large tanks and pumps, and a few packets of tailored algae, you could set up a self-sustaining process that needed only sunlight, atmospheric nitrogen, a steady supply of raw sewage or any other biomass that you weren't using anymore, and a concentration of sulfates to help kick-start the reaction. The chemical byproducts alone would more than pay expenses, and that left you with tons and tons of pure, fresh water effectively for free. It would be a massive boon to the economies of virtually every coastal nation in the world, and at the same time be so relatively simple to use that even places like Lagos could set it up and run it so long as they had a few packets of tailored algae for starter. And catalytically cleaned fresh water being available for pennies on the ton would eventually change the agricultural patterns of the world. Deserts could be irrigated until they were edens. Corporate dominance over farms by controlling the water supply would be lessened when setting up a rival distillation plant could be done for less than a hundredth of what it would cost now. Even the indirect economic effects of freeing up all the gigawatts of commercial electrical power generation that currently went into fueling existing seawater distilleries to be used elsewhere would raise general prosperity. And, on top of everything else, the Aztechnology dominance over global soy generation would finally take a major hit.
  
  It would have taken years and copious meganuyen to do this the conventional way. However, we'd had a unique opportunity here. Almost of all the molecular 'building blocks' necessary to design the algae had already been in existence; the fields of industrial molecular biology and industrial nanotechnology were established sciences in the Shadowrun setting, even if they were still well away from the holy grail of a Drexlerian self-replicating 'dry' nano-assembler. And since Bandit's primary scientific interests lay in those two fields I'd decided that's where I'd start experimenting with world-improving inventions. I was operating at enough of a handicap as is, so picking a field of expertise where my primary scientific partner on the project was less than experienced would have just been piling on the difficulty even more. I'd had enough of a time rapidly teaching myself at least a reasonable competence in all the relevant scientific fields as is. But what had really made the difference was what my ability to ramp up my mental processing capacity could do in conjunction with Cat's info sortilege.
  
  After I'd described the project goal, Smiling Bandit had used his own PhD in industrial molecular biology to lay out the broad requirements of what we'd need to make it a reality. Cat had gone through his laboriously-compiled archives of scientific data to find the likeliest spots for me to search. I'd then brute-forced memorized all the categories of files she'd localized and used my heightened computational capacity to speed through years' worth of programming and simulator time in mere minutes, narrowing down exactly which components and which sub-components and individual processes from a double dozen and more already-existing industrial biotech products could be extracted, recombined, and tweaked to fill out hoped-for design goals.
  
  Once we had a sample that actually gave promising results in the sample tank of water we'd rigged up in one of the hangars and filled with salt from the nearby salt flat, we moved to Salt Lake City to use the Great Salt Lake as the location for the prototype factory. It turned out that before she'd met Harlequin and started studying magic, Jane had been the senior executive assistant to the head of a small local corp in Columbus. So while we'd been busy at his lab she'd been flying regularly out here to make arrangements to buy an abandoned factory and start having construction crews renovate it and turn it into a suitable pilot plant for the big field test. We had it set up and running by early March, using another set of fake SINs and another disposable holding corporation to run it all through, and after a couple more false starts we'd gotten the product tweaked and solidly dialed in to the final production version. The self-sustaining cycle had been running steadily for a week with no hiccups, and we'd already gotten contracts with two local chemical firms for our feedstock and were in talks with a local bottled water manufacturer to buy our pure water runoff. A corporate negotiator from what Cat had rapidly determined was an Evo shell corporation had even shown up to start discussing a lucrative buyout offer.
  
  We were ready to take the next step.
  
  
  
  The smoking ruins of our pilot plant and all the corporate plans that had relied on it were still on one of the windows on the big multi-window display. Split-screened alongside them were screenshots of news articles, market reports, and even legal paperwork and contracts laying out the whole grisly story for our review.
  
  Less than a week before we would have finished the first 30-day zero-incident test cycle a local team of shadowrunners had broken into the plant during the graveyard shift and burned the entire place to the ground. As the reaction didn't require 24-hour supervision there were no workers there to be injured, and our hired security had been lightly-armed and armored locals who were essentially night watchmen and nothing more; they hadn't even tried to shoot it out with a heavily-armed group of criminal mercenaries who'd come in loaded for bear, but had followed their orders and fallen back and called the cops. By the time the authorities got there the plant was already a total loss, and there was nothing for it to but to sell the remnants - lock, stock, and intellectual property - to the Evo rep for pennies on the dime and cash out and slink away, having barely managed to cut our "venture capital" losses to merely having been wounded instead of outright bankrupted. Just another murdered dream in this world full of stillborn hopes.
  
  "Here's to patent theft!" Bandit, the girls, and I all toasted each other cheerfully, and then we clinked our champagne glasses together and drank in celebration.
  
  We had, of course, seen the whole thing coming a mile in advance. We'd admittedly had a plan 'B' for 'What if Evo hadn't been stupidly greedy and had just paid us a fair price for what they were buying?', but we hadn't needed it. They'd torched the place to the ground so as to be able to buy the rights to our 'unproven' invention - we hadn't finished the initial test cycle, after all - for a song instead of paying a fair rate for a proven property, all preparatory to having a 'new and improved' product come out of an Evo lab in future months that had absolutely no connection to our design, whose patent application had failed when we'd gone broke and lost everything in mid-application anyway.
  
  But no, they'd gone straight for the dystopian bullshit just like Horizon had and by doing so had played right into our hands. Since we had of course kept full backup copies of all of our designs, it had been simplicity itself for Jane to use a few contacts to sell the scientific data to - oh, all through middlemen and front companies and secretly-owned allegedly "independent" R&D firms, of course - Saeder-Krupp, Ares, Shiawase, Aztechnology, and Horizon, just for old time's sake. Right now at least half a dozen AAA megacorps were gladly rushing to try and get their own water-cleansing algae into mass-market release ahead of Evo, each one of them imagining that they were the only ones other than Evo to have it. And by the time they all realized what had gone on, it would be at least a year later and the suspects for the double-dealing would include every member of the runner team that had originally hit the factory, every fixer they had dealt with, and every middleman we'd gone through - as well as the perennial yet unprovable suspicion that one of the other corporations had themselves been stolen from later on by yet more shadowrunners. And nobody would be trying to 'involuntarily extract' the original inventor because it had been credited to an entirely fictitious personality, along with a trail of bread crumbs that if followed would eventually lead corporate analysts to conclude we'd stolen it from whoever its original inventor was in the first place and then buried him.
  
  So we'd have the backtrail cleanly broken off with no come-backs, but the data would be out there in too many places to suppress. And with all the viciousness of megacorporate zero-sum competition incentivizing multiple AAAs to try and exploit it for all it was worth rather than stepping back and allowing a rival to make any nuyen off of it unchallenged. Plus the fact that the product was by itself hilariously easy to pirate, because you didn't even need any bioengineering experience at all to just grow more of your own tailored algae if you could get your hands on any amount of the original product and then some salt water, sulfur, and raw biomass to make your own growth tank with. And even if you did have to bio-engineer it from scratch, any industrial molecular biology setup - even a decent university lab, let alone a small corporation's - would let you do it with a copy of the schematics and formulae. Which of course we still had.
  
  So after we all patted ourselves on the back for a job well done, Smiling Bandit went cheerfully back to his lab and got to work on arranging for under-the-table distribution of the relevant scientific data and algae 'starter packs' of his own manufacture he'd brew up back at his Area 51 lab to quietly distribute among friends and associates. The Neo-Anarchists were certain to love their own donations, that they could use to start setting up agro-communes in formerly unusable areas now that they would have free access to fresh, clean water.
  
  It would hardly fix the world all on its own, but it was a start at breaking up all the various 'hydraulic empires' - both literal and figurative - that helped the megacorps clamp such a tight control over the global economy. As well as start cleaning the environment and helping produce abundant fresh food in formerly dry and desolate regions of the world, and all the secondary economic effects that would result from that such as the freeing up of electrical power from current commercial distillation plants to help raise industry and standard of living elsewhere without requiring the generation of new power planets. Now, if cold fusion were only a fraction as easy to invent as this had been... but, that was a much more long-range project than this one had been.
  
  And so after we'd had the wrap party the ladies and I had quietly decamped to Vegas, where under a newer set of fake SINs we'd gladly rented a luxury suite at one of the Strip hotels and were currently indulging ourselves in a very well-earned vacation. Cat and I had been busy pulling regular fourteen-hour days as researchers while Jane had been working only marginally less hard as a one-woman business startup, so now it was time to just sleep in, order gourmet room service, and do what came naturally in Vegas.
  
  "Ohhh, I can't feel my legs." Cat giggled as we all lay on the big bed one night.
  
  "I can barely feel my tits." Jane snorted drunkenly. "Why do you two always go straight for them so hard?"
  
  "Well, they are kinda hard to miss." I teased her gently.
  
  "It his-isn't like she's flat-chested either." Jane said challengingly. "What, don't you guys love me for my mind?"
  
  "Naaah, we just keep you around because you're a smokin' piece of ass." Cat leered crudely, and Jane's drunken pout was ruined by her inability to restrain her giggle.
  
  "Absolutely." I said, rolling right along with Cat's joke. "It's certainly not because you're one of the best mages we've ever met-" I stopped joking the instant I felt Jane tense up. "Jane?" I asked her.
  
  "It's nothing." she said, her smile becoming forced.
  
  "I clearly said something that hurt your feelings - I didn't mean to, but I did. And I'm sorry." I said as sincerely as I could. "But could you help me to not do that again? Please?"
  
  After a long, awkward pause Jane spoke softly. "Back in Hong Kong Cat was worried about you being so powerful that she wasn't needed. But then we did the big science project, and her abilities were something you can't copy, while I- I was just the secretary." she sighed.
  
  "Jane..." Cat said lovingly. "Neither of us would have known how to set up a project like that, or juggle all those contractors and suppliers and vendors. And it's not like we could have trusted anyone we could hire with the knowledge of what was really going on. That's far more than being 'just the secretary'."
  
  "It's about how my magic is progressing, isn't it?" I said, pushing to clear my head and become fully sober again. "It took you something like fifteen years to get as far as you have, and I haven't even been practicing magic for a whole year yet-"
  
  "-and you're already at least as far as I got in my first five years." Jane agreed. "I know that it's not a contest, and I know I said I was fascinated by the chance to see how your abilities would evolve and I really am, but..." she sighed and looked away. "I'd really liked being the strong one for once." she trailed off.
  
  "You've already known two people who were on a tier of power that you couldn't hope to reach in lifetimes, if ever, and your relationship with one was an epic betrayal and with the other is still... uncertain." I analyzed out loud. "And that's what's really worrying you. The fear that I'll end up the same way."
  
  "Won't you?" Jane said suddenly. "You walk with dragons and immortals, you have plans to change the world... you actually have the power to potentially pull that off, and now you're starting to show the guile..." She rolled over and clutched me tightly as she continued passionately. "I know you're a good man, I know you'd never want to become an immortal bastard like he did, but-" she winced. "My father once told me that Caimbueul - Harlequin - was at one time perhaps the greatest hero he'd ever known. And he still became... who he is." She began to cry drunkenly on my shoulder as Cat clutched her. "What'll I do if that happens to you?"
  
  "You don't let it happen, that's what." Cat said firmly. "Because you'll be here right alongside me, helping me keep him from doing anything stupid." She paused meaningfully and continued. "Stupider." Cat continued more reassuringly. "From everything you've said, your mentor fell from being left alone and abandoned for too long. Keeping that from happening to him is our job."
  
  I tilted Jane's face up and kissed her tenderly. "Jane, if you want to know what I'll still need you for even after I match you as a mage, you just said what." I kissed her again on the forehead. "Have you forgotten that while you look physically the youngest of the three of us, you're old enough that I'm only several years within the half-your-age-plus-seven rule?" I smiled at her and continued. "I can be strong and clever. Cat is a genius with information and analysis. But both of us are still only a few years out of college, while you-" I punctuated with another forehead kiss. "Are a mature, confident - well, usually-" I teased her.
  
  "Harrumph." Jane glowered, but with her weak grin ruining the effect.
  
  "-woman. One thing I already know I can't just wish up with whatever my weird powers are is wisdom. And wisdom really comes from only one place - experience. And that's what you have more of than both of us put together."
  
  "That experience also including a particular skillset for dealing with people way more powerful than you are and still getting them to acknowledge your place at the table." Cat said.
  
  "At the foot of the table." Jane grumbled.
  
  "But they can still you hear from there." I reassured her. "And in my case, at least, I can promise that I'll be listening."
  
  Jane began to relax and snuggle into my chest. "So you say now, but will you still respect me in the morning?" she joked.
  
  "Not if you don't budge over and let me get some snuggling too, you greedy minx." Cat poked her in the cheek, and Jane shifted to do just that.
  
  Jane was more than a little embarassed when she sobered up the next morning but she hadn't been drunk enough to actually forget the details of the conversation, thank God. So we all accepted the emotional turning point without making a big embarassing thing of it - for stuff like this Jane tended to process only at her own speed - and got back to our Vegas vacation.
  
  Later that week, I figured it was time to finally ask a question I'd been saving for a while. We were sitting and enjoying the desert sunset out of our suite's window, having just finished a sumptuous dinner. We'd been in Vegas for over two weeks by this point and while the gambling, debauchery, and luxuriously lazing around was good for a change of pace, there was a fine balance beyond which a vacation turned into a doldrum.
  
  "Cat, privacy please." I asked her while I cast. Jane looked up from her filet mignon as she felt my strongest astral barrier spell quietly settle into place.
  
  "Is something wrong?" she asked, as Cat nodded to me to confirm that we were as clear of electronic eavesdropping as we were now shielded from magical eavesdropping.
  
  "Several months ago in Hong Kong, you said something about having "seen the outermost edge of reality" once with Harlequin." I said. "And that definitely grabbed my attention at the time, but I let it lay because we had enough to concern ourselves with at the time. I figured you'd bring it up later if you wanted, but somehow the topic never arose. So...?" I trailed off questioningly.
  
  "That's right, she did." Cat realized. "I'd forgotten that. Damn, I wish I had total recall too."
  
  "Try seeing if you can pick up an echo for it the next time you Submerge, it would be related to data processing." Jane thought out loud. "And..." she sighed. "I was leaving it lay because-" she held up a hand to forestall my obvious objection. "It's not covered by any secrecy oaths. It's maybe related to a couple things that are, but you already know those things so that's not it either." She sighed. "It's because there are some kinds of knowledge that are dangerous just for speaking about them. Or thinking about them. Simply to know about it leaves you forever unable to look at the universe quite the same way." she trailed off poignantly. "But... you're right." she agreed. "As much as I'd wish to shield you from it, at the rate you're growing you'll soon need to know."
  
  And so, that night, she told us of the Horrors. Via Hestaby I'd already known of the mana cycle and the past eras of the world, and in Hong Kong I'd shared all this with Cat. But we hadn't known that the danger menacing the current Sixth World was as close as it was. Although it would normally have taken over two thousand years from the Awakening for the mana to build up high enough to allow the Horrors entrance to this world, the great surge of mana produced by the Great Ghost Dance had created a high-mana hot spot, a 'Spike Point', by which they could prematurely enter the world. Of Harlequin's recruiting an eclectic group of shadowrunners to go on an extremely strange and prolonged metaplanar quest, so deeply into other metaplanes that they actually seemed to be other lives, other worlds in truth. And of the final battle to bring a mystical voice of legend to the great Bridge that the Spike Point had almost finished creating across the gulf between our reality and the incomprehensible other-place that was the domain of the Horrors, to drive them away from the Bridge long enough for it to be destroyed.
  
  "But surely they've tried again?" Cat said.
  
  "A Bridge has to be built from our side." Jane explained. "And it takes immense mystical power to do so. The Great Ghost Dance was the first attempt. The Aztechnology Blood Mage Gestalt was building up to a second one before someone - one of the Great Dragons, as near as we can figure - smashed that effort in the late 50s."
  
  "Aztechnology is working with- for- the Horrors?" I said, my blood running cold. "A AAA megacorporation?"
  
  "Several of the high-up figures within Aztechnology are... or were." Jane corrected me. "Dunkelzahn's will arranged for the destruction of one, Juan Atzcapalco. Another was the same man we fought and killed at the Bridge, Mr. Darke. We don't know who any of the others are - even the Corporate Court doesn't know who Aztechnology's all of senior shareholders are, just the few 'public' board members, like Thomas Roxborough and Domingo Ramos, that they've acknowledged. That information predates the founding of the Corporate Court and was never officially recorded in Aztlan records anywhere."
  
  "The senior blood mage that we captured on the Northwest Complex run." I realized. "Your father wanted him for interrogation as to who might still be in command of the Horror cultists there."
  
  "Got it in one." Jane nodded. "Unfortunately, he didn't know. He did confirm that Ramos is a senior cultist, which is at least one more piece of significant intel than we had, but-" she shrugged. "And, of course, there's always the horrible possibility of a Horror Cult outside of Aztechnology. We still don't know if Winternight's apocalyptic nonsense was Horror-inspired or just an example of how metahumanity can go that crazy all by itself."
  
  "There was a global high mana surge like none other during the Year of the Comet." I thought out loud. "I'm amazed they didn't make any attempt then."
  
  "That's what we think the Blood Mage Gestalt and the nation-wide network of teocalli - those mana-storing pyramid temples - were for." Jane said. "If they'd still been around in 2061, all that stored magic plus the cometary high mana spike would have let them blow straight through the manasphere with a new Spike Point like a sabot round through butter. As is, we just barely dodged that bullet. And by 'we' I mean 'the world'."
  
  "I see what you mean about it changing the whole way you look at the universe." Cat said soberly. "It's like what you thought was solid reality is actually just a soap bubble, and if it ever pops-" she shivered.
  
  "No wonder you were so frightened at even the possibility that I might have been a Horror vessel." I said, as hindsight reminded me that the only time I'd ever seen Jane be truly terrified of anything was that night I'd first quested into the metaplanes.
  
  "Like I said- the worst-case scenario makes the Crash 2.0 look like a slap fight." she agreed softly.
  
  "How can we help?" Cat asked.
  
  "In the immediate sense, you don't need to- if things were building to an imminent crisis right now I wouldn't be here." Jane pointed out the obvious. "In the long term? Well, that's why I eventually decided to come clean." She nodded to both of us. "For at least three complete cycles the dragons - and soon enough, the immortal elves - have struggled against and survived the Enemy the same old way. And they've always come back, the same old way. And both of you are something unprecedented - him for obvious reasons, but even you are too Cat. Nobody's ever heard of anything like technomancers existing before, and the things you do with information and analysis has already solved mysteries nobody's been able to crack conventionally."
  
  "I think I see what you're getting at. So long as the situation with the Horrors isn't an immediate crisis, you can gradually work on getting us up to whatever kind of 'trusted' status lets us be someone you can officially tell about immortal affairs and/or recruit into whatever network you operate with when you go on those anti-Horror missions by yourself." I nodded. "The most mortal person in this room is still good for several centuries, after all. And if it ever does become an immediate crisis, then you can just drag us in right then as an emergency measure."
  
  "Exactly." Jane said relievedly. "I mean, you don't have to-" she demurred. "I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to sign up for the Lovecraftian nightmare parade. You can just stick with your own projects and I'll help you with those whenever I can be here and just chill and hang with you guys otherwise-"
  
  "You know us better than that." Cat said tolerantly.
  
  "Besides, I sent that Yama King packing pretty handily." I said proudly.
  
  "The Yama Kings, as horrible as they are, are not even a tithe on the Horrors." Jane said so soberly that my attempt to lighten the mood exploded before it even got off the pad. "They're as much a part of the native manasphere of our dimension as we are, however horrid they might be. Towards the end of the prior Horror incursion, desperate races in the past even cried out to them for help against the Horrors despite the horrific prices that they would incur. The difference between the most horrific, negative, and depraved shadow from within the known metaplanes and the most innocuous, fair-seeming aspect of the Horrors that lay on the other side of the gulf is like difference between the Great Salt Lake at noon and the pitch-black bottom of an underground salt dome at midnight." She hook her head. "Ancient legends are that the Great Hunter, mightiest of the Named Horrors and something I am damn sure not saying the proper name of at this dinner table, hunted the mightiest of Great Dragons for sport in the First World."
  
  "Okay, that's legitimately terrifying." Cat agreed, wide-eyed. "But we're not going to see that thing flying around any time soon, are we?"
  
  "No, if the Great Hunter is in our reality then that means that the Horrors have not only arrived but that the Scourge is so entrenched that anything that's going to survive into the next world had better already be in a kaern." Jane agreed.
  
  "If you had a wish list of things that could be done to make it less likely for the Horrors to break through, and a magic wand to wave, what would you wave it at?" I thought out loud.
  
  "Things that might hypothetically be within your capacity, you mean?" Jane said knowingly. "Hmmm... off the top of my head, figuring out a better and easier way of cleansing toxic zones and the associated areas of polluted astral space. That would even tie into Project Archimedes, because even 'contained' industrial waste dumps are breeding zones for various sorts of mystical nasties. That's one thing the megacorps still don't understand, that 'proper management' of pollution only postpones the problem and doesn't solve it. And while they aren't directly Horror-related, the higher the misery level of the planet in general, and the more twisted and fragged-up the astral space, the more that indirectly makes it easier for them."
  
  I sat and pondered that for a while. "It occurs to me that you're describing the work of the Astral Space Preservation Society. And that one of the reasons we could succeed with the distillation algae so quickly is because we had access to a large and eclectic body of prior work in the field, so we wasted no time reinventing wheels and could instead use our unique abilities and synergy to quickly collate and synthesize a lot of pre-existing but disparate pieces."
  
  "Ugh." Jane groaned. "I was not expecting you to say that. But you're right, in hindsight that is an obvious move." She sighed heavily. "Which means that even though I don't want to do it-"
  
  "Jane, is something wrong?" Cat asked.
  
  "The ASPS is administered by the Dunkelzahn Institute of Magical Research." Jane explained. "Which means there's only one way I can think of for the three of us - especially you two strange SINless people - to arrange for the right combination of discreet access to its collected body of research and freedom from immediate supervision to actually do anything with it without having your unique abilities - particularly his - become public knowledge. And even then there's no real way to prevent at least some of his unique nature from becoming known to the person I'll have to ask." She sighed heavily. "I haven't even explained to him that I'm having sex with you two yet, and now I'm going to try and ask him to give you two a job?"
  
  "Oh." Cat said, realizing who Jane was talking about. "Are you sure this is necessary, Alex?"
  
  "No." I admitted. "This is the quickest and most readily apparent next step on both Archimedes and doing something useful to the global anti-Horror picture, not necessarily the best one. But it is the best one I can think of right now. And-" I chewed my lip. "I'm not saying I have a hunch, but I am saying that the calculated risk should be acceptable. Both Hestaby and Lung were more than intelligent and patient enough to work through the logic of why trying to violently coerce me is self-defeating in the long run, and Jane's already explained why immortals have to always think of the long run. Is he more prone to being short-sighted or illogical about things than either of those two Great Dragons?"
  
  "Not hardly." Jane agreed. "Nothing like the risks we'd be running if we were trying to bring Harlequin in. So if we're all agreed...?" Jane trailed off, and then nodded back when Cat and I both nodded our heads. "All right then. Tomorrow morning we check out of the hotel and fly to Boston." She sighed. "And then I have to figure out how the hell I'm going to introduce you two to my dad."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Okay, took a while for me to figure out exactly how I wanted the next arc to flow - I mean, I knew where I wanted it to end, but the process of getting there needed some brainstorming. Even now I'm still going to have to improv the middle some, but at least I've got a solid starting point.
  
  And yes, even if it's at a somewhat more realistic pace than comic-book inventing, our boy is starting to put his mind to work. Even if he's still operating on a theory that being an encyclopedia synthesist is a better aid to progress than being a visionary genius.
  
  The desalinization algae is, as mentioned in-story, stolen gleefully from S.M. Stirling's novel Drakon. Likewise the analysis of useful direct and indirect economic benefits; well, except for the one about electrical power, that was mine.
  
  And no, Jane is not that much of a weepy neurotic normally. (Remember, she was not only quite drunk at that particular moment but Alex had accidentally stepped directly on an emotionally sore spot.) What she is is someone who can deal well with adversity but gets a little paranoid whenever things are going too smoothly; unlike both of our other protags, Jane hasn't had any real happiness in her life that didn't later on turn into bitterness and tears. Well, until now, but she's still getting used to that concept even existing.
  
  As for how her father comes into it, you might recall that it was mentioned earlier that Ehran the Scribe is head of the Dunkelzahn Institute of Magical Research.
  
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  Ehran the Scribe, onetime eminence grise of the old Council of Princes of Tir Tairngire and now Director of the Dunkelzahn Institute for Magical Research, reminded me more than a bit of Charles Dance playing Tywin Lannister.
  
  Oh, the physical resemblance was only moderate; outside of being tall and with white-blonde hair, Ehran was of an entirely different build. On a purely physical level he reminded me of Andrew, of all people - broad-shouldered with thick arms and legs, but with the springy poise and whip-quick movements of a much slimmer man. His hair was worn unstylishly short and his face was clean-shaven except for a single tuft of beard approximately three inches long. He was, of course, dressed in exquisitely tailored clothing of the finest fabric and cut - his net worth was at least in the hundreds of millions of nuyen, after all - but subtly enough to not crassly advertise his wealth.
  
  No, the resemblance was entirely in his attitude. The look he gave me was urbane enough on a superficial level but his eyes were so cold underneath their superficial equanimity that I almost swore I could hear 'The Rains of Castamere' faintly playing in the background. Even the brief outline of immortal elven history that I'd gotten along with what was publicly known of the old Tir regime had been enough to clue me in that this was a man capable of the most ruthless actions if he felt it necessary, and as expertly masked as his voice, posture, and aura were my own unique perceptions saw right through to the heart of the matter. Especially since I'd had quite a bit of practice interpreting the subtleties of a person's astral aura by this point.
  
  And what I saw was not comforting at all. For all his subtly masked hostility there was no rage. There was no disgust. There was almost no emotion at all. There was simply a cold, clear purpose underlaid by a steady, watchful patience. If it hadn't been for the brief - very brief - flash of warmth in his eyes and his aura when he'd first laid eyes on Jane I'd have honestly wondered if he were a sociopath. As is, he was apparently merely very, very cold and ruthless, and self-disciplined to an almost absurd degree. Then again, he'd only had literal millennia of practice at doing that last.
  
  He closed the holographic data display over his desk - apparently he wasn't a fan of Augmented Reality - with an elegant tap of one long finger on the gleaming touch-surface of his desk and raised his eyes to look at me. "Your petition is denied."
  
  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jane tense up from where she sat in the visitor's chair next to mine in Ehran's office at the DIMR headquarters in Boston. Cat was a bit more vocal than that.
  
  "Mr. Ehran, we're not even asking for-" she began, only for her words to be cut off by his glare as sharply as if by a knife.
  
  "You ask for almost unrestricted access to the results of our research, much of it confidential and all of it of considerable value, and in return you offer... considerably less." he finished with a smoothly acid turn of understatement. "The question is not why would I refuse you, but why wouldn't I."
  
  "Father, if you would just give him a chance-" Jane began, only for him to cut her off with an upraised palm.
  
  "No." he replied matter-of-factly to her. "I have a responsibility to the Institute, as well as other responsibilities that are far more important. And none of them would be well served by my deciding in their favor. This interview is over."
  
  I slowly began to rise out of my chair, Cat following me, as I put all the sincerity I could into my one last chance to reach him. "Sir, I realize that I'm asking you to take a lot purely on your daughter's recommendation, but-"
  
  "Pah!" he spat angrily. "Oh, I have no doubt that my daughter trusts you both unreservedly. Mr. Kincaid." he chilled the air. "And I trust her, as well." He shook his head and regained his calm with an effort. "But sometimes that isn't good enough." His mouth firmed again. "Now leave my office, both of you."
  
  Jane turned to look at me apologetically, and I gave her my best sympathetic look back as I took Cat's hand and squeezed it to pre-empt her angry outburst. "We'll wait for you in the outer office, if that's permitted."
  
  "In the lobby." Ehran corrected us firmly, and I nodded in acknowledgement.
  
  "As you say, sir. Thank you for your time." I acknowledged him politely and we left.
  
  "Can you believe the nerve on that stiff-necked old bastard...?" Cat fumed the instant the door shut behind us, and I shushed her.
  
  "Not here, dear." I nodded. "And don't touch the audio-visual pickups either, the last thing we need is to give him an excuse to have us arrested."
  
  Approximately ten minutes later Jane stormed into the front lobby where we were sitting outside the security checkpoint waiting for her. Her face was set in a composed mask but her eyes were moist. We both got up and wordlessly accompanied her outside.
  
  "I can't believe this!" Jane spat as soon as we were outside the DIMR. "I've never asked him for a favor in my life, and the first time I even try to - and not even that big of one - he shuts me down like I'm a deadbeat cousin who hasn't paid him back for the last ten loans!"
  
  "Jane, I think we made a mistake - I made a mistake - when we decided not to bring up the part where you're our lover in our initial approach." I said. "Because either he already knew and is pissed off we tried lying to him, or he didn't know but was intuitive enough to pick up that there was something important we were leaving out. Either one leads him to the same place."
  
  "I'm thirty-eight, for God's sake!" Jane vented. "I am actually allowed to have an adult life!"
  
  "That's not what I meant-" I began, only for Jane to interrupt.
  
  "No. Don't make excuses for that miserable-"
  
  "Jane-" I pleaded.
  
  "I said no!" she cut me off.
  
  "I'm with her." Cat agreed firmly. "That was ice cold. What a jerk!"
  
  OK, there comes a time when a man just has to look the impending soap opera right in the eye and say 'Get that shit out of here!', even if it's going to make both of his ladies extremely pissed at him.
  
  ... but today was not that time.
  
  "All right." I said. "Us not getting to do astral space research here is not the end of the world. We can take a little time in Boston to see what other useful work we can find to do. And maybe to give certain people a chance to reconsider."
  
  I very carefully did not say which certain people.
  
  
  
  Boston was a city you walked softly in. The world HQ of NeoNET was located here, as well as one of the largest high-tech R&D corridors in the UCAS. Ever since they'd lost Silicon Valley in the breakup the new East Coast Silicon Valley was here, in the Route 128 'tech corridor'. NeoNET had a heavy presence there, of course, but so did the three Japanacorps and Evo. All the others were there too, but those were the main players.
  
  When the New York Stock Exchange had moved here after the big Manhattan earthquake of 2005 to rename itself the East Coast Stock Exchange, Boston had become a wholly megacorporate-dominated city. Both intercorporate competition and shadowrunning played it as soft as possible around here, because a pan-corporate effort would descend to squash you like a bug if you played outside the unwritten rules. Even when they hated each other, the Big Eight/Nine/Ten all agreed that the global stock exchange node was too important to risk screwing around with.
  
  Crash 2.0 had taken care of that, when the freshly-upgraded ECSE Matrix supercluster had become the focal point of Deus' attempt to reconstitute itself during the Novatech IPO and had taken down the entire ECSE in the process. The stock exchange had moved back to New York - although still calling itself the ECSE - and the official megacorporate truce had gone with it. But even though the local shadows were playing rougher now than they ever had before, 'rough' by Boston standards was still very subtle by most other place's standards. Around here you didn't kill the opposing security unless the client wanted you to send a lethal message - which made running around here often quite tricky, because the local corpsec was damn sure still trying to kill you.
  
  And then there were the runs that weren't against corporations...
  
  "The New Century Party." Mr. Johnson led off. "Officially, a political party devoted towards 'a melding of scientific and magical principles to create a happier and more prosperous society'. Formed in 2057 as a breakaway party from the Technocrats, and ran party founder Rozilyn Hernandez for President in the '57 election. Unofficially, it's the lobbying group and PAC for the Illuminates of the New Dawn, the largest publicly chartered magical initiatory group in North America."
  
  "Ugh, mage supremacists." Frosty rolled her eyes. "'I can cast spells, that means I should be nobility and mundanes should be commoners!' Not even the Tirs took it that far."
  
  "And their party headquarters is in Boston." Mr. Johnson ignored that urbanely. "In addition, this is one of their prime recruiting centers. MIT&T and Harvard have two of the highest-rated thaumaturgical studies programs in North America, let alone the UCAS, and there's lots of bright young mages who are susceptible to a pitch as to how their talent makes them special and they should work towards an eventual day when being magical means being more fit to rule." A slim manila folder - actual hardcopy! - came out of his briefcase and was laid open on the table. On top was a picture of an intelligent-looking middle-aged black woman. "Which is where this woman comes in. Carol Whelan, formerly of Lone Star's Department of Paranormal Investigation and now one of the senior HR people in the New Century party office here."
  
  "Why would you hire an experienced mage detective for Human Resources?" Netcat asked. "Shouldn't she be in Security?"
  
  "Background checks on new employees is also an HR function." Frosty pointed out.
  
  "Very perceptive." Mr. Johnson smiled thinly. "That is precisely what Ms. Whelan does for New Century. And it is why we would greatly appreciate a copy of her confidential archives regarding the background investigations she performs. Not merely the final reports but also the raw data - interview notes, Matrix searches..."
  
  "Sources and methods." I followed his reasoning.
  
  "Indeed." Mr. Johnson nodded to me slightly. "The desired rules of engagement are no fatalities and minimum noise. If it is not possible to conceal that a break-in has occurred, then you must at least conceal exactly which data were taken." He shrugged. "In aid of this you are free to supplement your incomes on this run by any reasonable means, so long as the primary objective is not compromised and no other party is informed of the nature or timing of your run prior to its execution."
  
  "Do you know where Ms. Whelan stores her confidential files, and if they are Matrix-accessible?" I asked.
  
  "In her office at NCP headquarters. And while the final reports of her investigations would of course be filed in NCP systems, the raw data - particularly that which she gathers in the field - is almost certainly not." he answered.
  
  "If you're looking for patterns and/or sources and methods, do you need all the background investigations she's ever done?" Frosty asked professionally. "And if not, how many would do you need and covering what time period, and what would be the desired sampling?"
  
  Mr. Johnson paused to consider that for a short while. "If it is not possible to obtain a full set, then we would require an absolute minimum of ten non-consecutive case files. Preferably twenty. As Ms. Whelan has held her position at New Century for only three years, cases from anywhere within that time period should still be current enough for our purposes."
  
  "Time frame?" Netcat asked.
  
  "One week." Mr. Johnson said. "I'll leave you a one-use commcode to inform me when you have the data and to arrange a pickup."
  
  After some haggling we managed to get him up to sixty thousand nuyen - which was a bit low for a job like this, but with the caveat that we were allowed to loot things or paydata for ourselves in the process, which many runs didn't allow for.
  
  "Why are we doing this again?" Jane asked when we got back to the business suite we'd rented for the month. "It's not like we need the money. In addition to the piggybank, we actually cleared a net profit on the algae job. Selling the same paydata multiple separate ways adds up."
  
  "Well, we came to the meet because I'd put the word out that we were interested in any jobs that dealt with mystical paydata... which this technically qualifies as, I suppose. But I was about to turn the job down as not in our interest range, and then Cat signaled me to accept. So, since she presumably had a good reason...?"
  
  "Mr. Johnson there was a professional. Blank sanitized commlink, no RFID tags in his clothes, not even any strongly-affiliated fashion labels. " Cat replied smartly. "But I had a hunch as to who might be behind him, so I brute-forced an image recognition search against all publicly recorded employees of a certain local concern." Mr. Johnson's face and public social media profile came up in our HUDs. "Facial recognition matches William Deveraux, 'intercorporate business consultant' under long-term contract to the Dunkelzahn Institute of Magical Research."
  
  "My dad is the one hiring us?" Jane blinked. "But why all the hush-hush? If he needs me for something, he's got my commcode!"
  
  "I think he's testing us." I thought out loud. "Well not you obviously, but me and 'Cat. And since we're trying to get him to...?" I diplomatically went around the topic.
  
  "Ugh. Stupid twisty elven hoops- Jane muttered darkly. "Yeah, I suppose this is proving some kind of point to him.. even if I can't remotely figure out what he's testing for here or why." she muttered.
  
  "Well, at least we can be sure your dad isn't going to burn the run. Not if you're on it." 'Cat encouraged. "So we might as well do the heist. We were getting bored with too much vacation anyway..."
  
  "That's true." Jane agreed. "And the IOND really are a bag of dicks that give magicians a bad name, so, it's not like kicking their pet political party in the sack is going to distress me."
  
  "Given the sheer amount of records they want us to pull - and the fact she might keep the most sensitive ones on physical hardcopy just like our Johnson did - I can't just hit up the Endless Archive for them." Cat said. "Especially given that's a tactic of last resort, not a first one."
  
  "No worries." I reassured her. "I've got an idea."
  
  We spent the next day doing some discreet legwork on the NCP's headquarters - a three-story vintage marble building that occupied an entire full-sized lot in the downtown hub. Astral security was particularly heavy, given the NCP's mystical focus and the support of the IOND.
  
  "Okay, smash-and-grab is right out." Cat said, looking at the data we'd managed to compile.
  
  "No way we could do it by main force without an entirely unacceptable body count." I agreed. "And that's aside from the Johnson's restrictions. The security working there aren't guarding a black site, they're just making an honest living guarding a private building."
  
  "The guard force is subcontracted from Knight Errant." Jane noted. "So we're talking high-end training, high-end gear, and top-end security systems with skilled operators. As well as entirely competent magical security and that's before we get into the IOND contributions to the astral warding, bound spirits, and everything. How do we get past all that?"
  
  "If you got a good look at Whelan's aura, could you match it?" I asked.
  
  "Sure." Jane agreed. "And the lobby scanners aren't quite paranoid enough to require full biometrics, so a Physical Mask covers that. But I'd still need her IDs and passcodes to get through the security. And worse yet, even if I could get myself into her office I still couldn't get anyone else in, and I'd need at least Cat to actually hack her records."
  
  "And even I can't hack all the security systems on the NCP building - especially given that they're smart enough to compartmentalize some of the more important ones from the Matrix." Cat said. "So, I don't see how even getting us a fake 'Carol Whelan' gets two more scruffy shadowrunners into her office."
  
  "Oh, that's the easy part." I smiled and turned to Jane. "You'll just politely email the site security supervisor and ask for two access badges for a pair of discreet late-night visitors... Ms. Johnson."
  
  Jane and Cat both blinked in surprise, and then smiled like sharks.
  
  The first step was for Cat to hack a low-security system at MIT&T - specifically, the appointments computer in the student placement office. While things like pulling student transcripts and obtaining letters of recommendation could be done via the Matrix, the actual face-to-face interviews with prospective candidates would require visiting the campus. Once we knew the timing of her next visit - which was the day after tomorrow, as it happened - it was simplicity itself for Cat and Jane to stake the place out. They were both more than young-looking enough to be plausible as grad students, and while MIT&T security wasn't shoddy the fact that so many people routinely came and went during a normal day meant that all it took to get in position was a decent pair of fake SINs. So after Jane had studied Whelan's astral aura well enough to duplicate it and Cat had had ample opportunity to hack Whelan's commlink and clone her security RFID tags, we were ready to go. Admittedly, both of those jobs usually weren't as simple as I'd just made it sound, but Jane and Cat were well above the average shadowrunner in their professional specialties. So for us it actually was mostly that simple.
  
  Whelan's commlink gave us her day planner as well as access to her email account, so we knew what night she wouldn't be working late and gave us access to send an email from her account to the site security manager to make arrangements to admit two late-night guests for a discreet meeting. Since this wouldn't be the first time Whelan had hired shadowrunners - it made sense that an experienced investigator and ex-cop could also do double duty as a Ms. Johnson at need, and confidential background investigations on harder targets often required 'irregular assets' - her archived emails gave us all the codes and proper formats that were necessary. 'Cat left a tasked sprite sitting in her commlink to intercept Security's confirmation email and reply, and all that was left was the actual heist.
  
  Using Whelan's face, cloned ID, and faked aura, Jane had no problem strolling "back" into NCP HQ after "she'd" left for the day so as to make her discreet late-night meeting. With nanopaste disguises giving both me and Cat different faces and the arrangements made to allow two shadowrunners with those faces on-site for an authorized visit, we were escorted by Security from the back door right up to her office. The guard left us with 'Ms. Whelan' and a polite request to call the security desk when our meeting was done so we could be escorted back out, and we were left alone in her office.
  
  After Cat made sure we were unobserved It took us about fifteen minutes of discreet searching to find not only her stash of offline file chips, but also to find the hidden safe built into an antique credenza. Cat copied the data storage chips into some blanks we'd brought for the occasion, and then we all gathered around the safe.
  
  "Crap." Jane said. "It's astrally warded. Fairly subtle job, too - if you weren't a decent Initiate, you wouldn't even know it was magical. And that's Whelan's own spell signature."
  
  "Why would she be secretly warding something in her employer's own building, which already has extremely good astral security?" Cat asked.
  
  "Because she's working her own angle on something." I thought out loud. "Okay, either of us can pop that ward - you with skill and me with brute force - but as the caster, Whelan will know the instant her ward goes down. And if she has any brains at all, the first thing she'll do is call the security office here and report an intruder."
  
  "That I can delay." Cat said. "One text message to my sprite and it'll use up one of the tasks it has remaining making sure her call gets redirected to one of us. If you can do a reasonable imitation of the guard on duty, that should buy us enough time to get to the door."
  
  "Do it." I decided. "Jane, pop the ward. And I'll stand by just in case-"
  
  Cat sent her message, and then we got to work. The two of us who could astrally perceive saw the ward flare and die as Jane broke it.
  
  Cat cracked the electronic lock on the safe with a touch, and it opened to reveal-
  
  -a fire elemental flashing into view. Apparently Whelan had tasked a spirit of her own to attack anyone who'd cracked her secret vault-
  
  An elemental that barely had a chance to manifest before I sent it right back to the metaplanes with a single blow.
  
  With the elemental dispatched we searched the vault to find another, smaller stash of data chips, almost fifty thousand nuyen in certified credsticks, and an ornate magic dagger. We took the chips and the cash and left the dagger where it was. As a magical weapon focus it would be as mystically bonded to Whelan as Jane's own power focus was to her, and that meant that taking it would only give Whelan a material link by which she could magically track us wherever we went. And while it was possible to break mystic links, we didn't actually need the loot that badly.
  
  The phone on Whelan's desk rang, and I picked it up and listened to her angry voice urgently telling me to sound the alert and send Security to her office. I did my best imitation of a dutiful yet unexcited Knight Errant officer, promised to do exactly that, and hung up.
  
  "Clock's ticking." I said, and we resealed the safe and left. As we'd prudently memorized the floor plans - the basic layout was printed as an AR tag next to the fire alarms, for goodness' sake - we knew the route to the nearest exit, and with Cat to tell the fire escape doors to not announce that they were open we were off-campus and well away before anyone began to get suspicious.
  
  Mission accomplished.
  
  
  
  Despite having passed his test with flying colors, there was no word from Ehran. So late afternoon the next day we finally got frustrated enough for Jane to call him. Ehran's secretary had apparently been directed to pass Jane through to him with no delays, so at least we didn't have to play those games.
  
  "Jane? What do you need?" he asked in a businesslike manner as soon as he picked up.
  
  "This is a conference call with Alex and Catherine." Jane informed him. "And we wanted to know what you needed from us."
  
  "I don't follow." he asked briskly. "I was gratified that you didn't immediately leave Boston, but I didn't want to press you. I had been hoping you would call me back when you were less upset, but-" He paused. "Wait. Have you received any communication purporting to be from me since our last meeting in my office?" he continued quickly.
  
  "William Deveraux - or at least a man with that face - hired us for a shadowrun two days after we'd met with you." I replied. "We finished the run and dropped off the paydata just last night. Are you saying that someone else at the DIMR sponsored that run and not you?"
  
  "Deveraux was in Washington DC last night." Ehran said evenly. "You must have met an impostor."
  
  "Oh crap." Cat swore softly as we all snapped to.
  
  "Someone is playing games with us." Ehran agreed with quiet anger. "Jane, bring them to my house as soon as possible. And be careful."
  
  "We're on our way, Father." Jane said smartly, and we all grabbed our weapons and got moving.
  
  We were barely ten feet outside the side entrance when our car exploded.
  
  My instantaneous reaction was just barely in time to get a blast barrier spell up and deflect the shock wave around us. Given that our car - well, our rented car - was halfway across the parking lot at the time, we would likely have survived the blast even without it. We'd have definitely been injured, though. It was a small mercy that nobody else had been in range of the car bomb.
  
  "Gape in shock, then turn left and walk to the corner as if that was someone else's car entirely." I said tightly. Both ladies fought off the momentary shock and followed my lead. As soon as we were clear of the immediate zone with nobody shooting at us, we moved into a break-contact drill and then quietly faded down a nearby alleyway under illusion disguises.
  
  "Too close!' Cat gasped. "If I hadn't remote-started the car with my mind-"
  
  "Risk calling my father or make it across town on our own?" Jane asked.
  
  "Call him. He knows where we were staying, and a report of an explosion right outside is going to rapidly come to his attention anyway." I decided immediately.
  
  "Right." Jane agreed. Cat hurriedly arranged for a secure Matrix link and Jane quickly brought Ehran up to date on what had happened.
  
  "Okay, he's sending some of his men to meet us. There's a police station a block away, we should be safe enough in the parking lot there while we wait for them." Jane said. "I've got a recognition code and photos of who he's sending."
  
  After about ten minutes of waiting, an armored Nightsky limousine pulled up and a lone elf got out and waved us over. He was very large and muscular by elven standards - almost certainly an ex-Tir special forces type that had followed Ehran out after the prior regime had collapsed.
  
  Jane and the commando traded recognition codes and checked each other's faces, then we were all ushered into the limousine and whisked away.
  
  "This doesn't make sense. I don't believe in split-second spy dramas, so that car bomb was not only planted before we'd even called your father but was intended to kill us the next time we drove anywhere at any time, not because we'd just talked to him. So it's almost certainly related to our run, but if we were being burned by the fake Deveraux then why not just try for us at the meet?" I started thinking out loud.
  
  "Fake-Deveraux leaked our IDs to the NCP, and this is their comeback?" Cat speculated. "No, that doesn't make sense. If the NCP knows that we broke into their building, why not just call Knight Errant? But we obviously aren't wanted by the police, we were waiting just outside the precinct station just now!"
  
  "Maybe Father knows something." Jane said.
  
  "We are actually headed to his house and this isn't another trap, right?" I said, not caring if the several security guys sharing the back end of the limo with us could hear me. The only reaction was I got a slight nod of approval from their apparent squad leader.
  
  "Father lives in Beacon Hill - yes, the oldest and richest neighborhood in Boston, where else would he live?" Jane admitted sheepishly. "And that's where this car is driving towards."
  
  "Well, we'll find out soon enough." Cat said practically, and sure enough we arrived at a very old and distinguished-looking walled mansion several minutes later. We readily passed through the security checks at the gate, and our experienced eyes noted some of the best security that money could buy and an extremely strong set of wards along with several powerful bound spirits on patrol. Yes, you could certainly tell that one of the most powerful wizards among the immortal elves lived here. And judging from all the ex-Tir Ghosts lounging around, one who hadn't let being effectively deposed from his Princedom actually cut him off from either wealth or power.
  
  The guards ushered is in to where Ehran was waiting for us in his sitting room, then discreetly withdrew. A tray of refreshments was already waiting for us at the table, but the doors to the room closed and locked themselves at a wave of his hand. Clearly someone wanted a closed session.
  
  "You're not hurt?" he asked Jane first off.
  
  "No." Jane reassured him. "Alex got a blast barrier up in time."
  
  Ehran accepted that with a nod. "You have my thanks for helping protect my daughter's life." he said graciously, before his expression turned cold again. "So why was it necessary?"
  
  "We thought we were obliging you, sir." I said firmly but not challengingly. "Jane was upset after your last meeting, but never actually intended any defiance towards you." I let myself relax a little. "I'll admit that we may have missed warning signs that something was wrong with the deal, but-"
  
  "I had thought we'd already established that if I wanted something from you, I would ask clearly." Ehran said, turning to Jane.
  
  "There wasn't much clear about our last conversation!" Jane said, trying to keep her voice under control.
  
  "Perhaps there wasn't." Ehran admitted. "Very well. On a more practical level-" He broke off at seeing my gesture, as I silently asked permission to speak. "Yes?" he said somewhat more coolly.
  
  "I think the most practical thing we could do right now is resolve whatever communications breakdown is occurring." I risked saying. "Because if there hadn't been one, our mysterious third party could never have played us one against the other."
  
  "Valid point." Ehran conceded. "So, what version of our prior conversation did my daughter share with you?"
  
  "None." Cat answered him forthrightly. "Jane didn't want to share, and so we didn't pry."
  
  That actually got us a raised eyebrow of mild surprise. "Really."
  
  "They're very careful to respect my personal space, Father." Jane said to him. "Unlike-" and then Jane broke off at my giving her a You're doing this now? look.
  
  Ehran noted this byplay expressionlessly, and then visibly made up his mind. "Very well. On my end, in our last conversation I was trying to caution my daughter to be more suspicious of your motives. And to open her mind to the possibility that you were attempting to seduce her by design."
  
  "Attempting to seduce me?" Jane irrepressibly broke out. "I've been their lover for months! Don't pretend that you didn't know that!"
  
  "What did you say?" Ehran said, by all appearances legitimately astonished, and I sighed inwardly as I realized that what I'd suspected all along had been happening had in fact definitely been happening.
  
  "Jane, if your father ever promised you that he wasn't snooping excessively into your private life then I think you just received proof positive he was sincere." I interjected. "Because if that isn't the face of a man who was legitimately flabbergasted by what he'd just heard, I've never seen anyone flabbergast."
  
  "... you honestly didn't know?" Jane asked Ehran in a small voice.
  
  "Jane, I admit that I have not always treated you as well as I should have, but I have never actually broken my word of honor to you once given." Ehran replied ruefully. "It was... difficult for me to gain as little of your trust as I have managed to. Even if I was utterly beyond all capacity for sentiment - which I am not - it would still be foolish of me to squander it so cheaply after placing so much effort into it."
  
  "So since you had no idea how long we've actually known each other, you thought that Jane had fallen for us as some kind of whirlwind thing and not as a considered decision. Which suggested to you that she was almost certainly being played by an expert honeypot." I agreed with him. "Especially given that the only other time you knew she'd fallen sincerely in love with anyone - to the best of my knowledge the only other time she had - it had been with someone who then cruelly betrayed her on every level."
  
  "Very much so." Ehran agreed, his voice icy at even the indirect mention of Harlequin. "And I am intensely curious as to how you knew about that."
  
  "I told them." Jane said simply.
  
  "... I had not even contemplated the possibility that you would willingly speak of those events to anyone." Ehran said to her. "If I might ask, would you kindly explain to me what other significant facts I have missed?"
  
  And so Cat and I brought Ehran the Scribe up to speed on how Jane and we had met, and what had brought us closer together. With, admittedly, certain abridgements. But with two Great Dragons already aware of many of my oddities we didn't really have much to lose bringing the immortal elven patriarch in on it as well, even if we weren't going to mention things like my extra-universal origin.
  
  Ehran sat and steepled his fingers after we'd finished, silently thinking through what we'd just told him.
  
  "You love my daughter, both of you." he finally said.
  
  "Yes." Cat agreed.
  
  "You want her to be safe, and happy, and not bound by either cruelty or deceit to anyone else's purposes." he continued.
  
  "Yes." I acknowledged.
  
  "Then we share a goal." Ehran said to me simply, and then turned to Jane. "Daughter, I forfeited any right to dictate the course of your life when I chose to not fulfill the responsibilities of a parent. I have never pretended to myself otherwise, even if you may have believed that I did. That is why I try not to press anything upon you that you do not ask for, or at least indicate to me in some fashion that you might want." He sighed. "But I still have wishes for you, of course, even if I try not to burden you with them. It did not occur to me until this moment that you might have interpreted that circumspection - that willingness to respect your boundaries as much as I may - as a further lack of care on my part."
  
  "Oh." Jane said, low-voiced in shock. "I-" she sputtered, before finally continuing. "Okay, did I ever get that one wrong."
  
  "And we are truly blood kin in that regard." Ehran agreed, and a brief silence fell. I opened my mouth to ask a question, and was then cut off by his suddenly continuing to speak.
  
  "On the day you first learned that you were my daughter, you asked me a question that I refused to answer." Ehran said. "And if I had answered it at the time-" He sighed. "Then I would have lied to you, because I would have first and foremost been lying to myself."
  
  "If that's hard to speak of, then you don't have to tell me." Jane said. "It's enough that you even considered-"
  
  "I beg to differ." Ehran interrupted her gently. "A child has every right to expect a parent to provide for them, to at least make an effort to be there for them. And I did not." He reached forward to the tray on the low table in front of us and grasped the bottle of honey mead and poured a small glass for each of us, before picking one up and handing it to Jane. "Back then I would have said that your mother and I had agreed, both for her own safety and in respect of her wishes, that she not be publicly acknowledged as my mistress or come to live with me in the lands that would soon enough be Tir Tairngire - you were born four years before the actual secession of the Sinseareach from the Native American Nations, you might recall."
  
  "I remember." Jane agreed quietly, as Cat and I quietly picked up our own glasses and did our best to blend into the furniture.
  
  "And those reasons would have been true. And I also would have said that given the intrigues I was involved in at the time - my false life as Walter Bright Water of the Cascade Crow tribe, my rise to power as a leading statesman of the early NAN, the formation of the Sinseareach tribe, our planned secession - that for you to be linked to me in any way would have been hazardous in ways you could barely conceive of. In addition to the internal struggles pursuant to that there was also what the UCAS government would have done had they even remotely suspected that a hostage to fortune on one of the leading NAN chieftains existed within their territory. Or what the Ute, or the Sioux, or any of the other NAN most offended by Tir Tairngire's secession might have done later. And those would also all have been true statements." Ehran continued soberly.
  
  "I always wondered how you even met my mother at all, given that she lived in Ohio and you were busy being Chief Bright Water of the Sinseareach at the time." Jane admitted.
  
  "You are already reasonably experienced with the creation and use of false identities from your own experiences, but I will eventually have to tutor you in the more advanced uses of that art before you grow aged enough that concealing your immortality will become a major concern." Ehran agreed. "Even when immersed in Bright Water's life I still maintained several others, although I could spend little enough time in them. As potential bolt holes for later, to manipulate events and perform tasks I could not entrust to others... or simply as a respite, however relatively brief, from the press of activities." He sipped his mead and continued softly. "It is a dangerous state of existence, for an immortal, to lose all desire to enjoy the simpler pleasures of life and focus solely on furthering plots and ambitions." He turned to acknowledge me. "A lesson you would also do well to keep in mind, Alexander."
  
  "I can barely imagine." I acknowledged.
  
  "So mother was a 'respite'." Jane said, her voice refusing to show her hurt.
  
  "Your mother - spirits, why do I not even use her name?" Ehran reproached himself briefly. "Sarah was a remarkable woman. Her achievements were modest, but her spirit-" He shrugged. "I am a vastly wealthy and powerful man with millennia of experience at manipulation and diplomacy. Seduction is very little challenge for me, and so I look for more than superficial qualities in a lover - when I can. Your mother was... kind." he said softly. "In a time period when so many upheavals and disasters were rocking the world everyday, where everyone grew hard and suspicious and focused only on their own survival as a matter of necessity, she was a callback to a more innocent era. An honest, hardworking soul who wished only to live a humble life and be a good neighbor and friend." He smiled in reminisce. "No matter how much we may possess, we always wish the most for that which we do not have."
  
  "The grass is always greener." Cat agreed with him, and reached out to give Jane's hand a supportive squeeze. I saw the corner of Ehran's eyes follow the motion and silently note the byplay, and he continued.
  
  "But my dalliance with her would have remained at that level and naught more - although I would have exerted myself to see she was at least modestly taken care of afterwards - had she not fallen pregnant with you." Ehran kept talking, as much to unseen ghosts in the room now as to Jane or us. "One of the less obvious changes that separates you or I from the general run of elvenkind-" he kept going with a brief nod towards Cat. "-is drastically reduced fertility. Any child born of any of us, regardless of circumstances or parentage otherwise, is infinitely precious."
  
  "Unless the immortality trait almost never bred true then it would almost have to be that way." I agreed. "Robert A. Heinlein once calculated in his novel Time Enough For Love that his main character, Lazarus Long, would have been the ancestor of approximately 87% of the human race over the course of a 2500 year lifespan... and that was counting all humans that lived at any point during his life. Restricting it to the current generation alone made the probability he was in their family tree somewhere approach unity."
  
  "Entirely." Ehran nodded to me. "That's statistically inevitable for an immortal, unless they virtually never have children or virtually none survive to breed. Even when restricted to purely mundane history, Genghis Khan needed only one mortal lifetime and one millennium of intervening time to become the ancestor of approximately five percent of the entire human race. And I am much older than the fictional Mr. Long."
  
  "So if I was that precious - even if only in purely pragmatic terms-" Jane began.
  
  "Which you were not." Ehran reassured her. "Received on purely pragmatic terms, that is."
  
  "Then why?" Jane pleaded. "Why did you leave me alone after Mother died? I understand that the spell link you implanted in me would have let you intervene if I was in mortal danger, but it would still have taken you so much time to reach me if I were! What if your enemies found me first? Hell, what if I got mugged, or caught VITAS like Mother did, or just got hit by a bus? The reasons you gave certainly explain why couldn't visit when I was a child, or send me money, or-" she trailed off. "But if you'd come and taken me with you? You just explained how precious immortal children are to all immortal elves. Your domestic rivals wouldn't have touched me, would they?" she pleaded.
  
  "No." Ehran agreed. "Attacking each others' children is direly frowned upon among us, even among deadly rivals." He glowered. "Of course, some people find creative ways to manage anyway, all the while being able to plausibly deny that their actions are anything save generosity and a desire to educate."
  
  I grabbed Jane's other hand to join Cat in the comforting parade and let Ehran continue at his own pace.
  
  "You will forfeit much of that protection when you are old enough to no longer be considered a child - which you are - and when you also actively involve yourself in our intrigues. And to give him credit, he has at least been as diligent as I would have in not letting you unknowingly slip into the latter state." Ehran continued. "At least that much honor he still retains, however minimal that might be. But those dangers are not the only ones that exist for our children. They are not even the greatest ones that you and your generation face."
  
  "The dragons?" Jane guessed. "The Scourge?"
  
  "Yourselves." Ehran said surprisingly. "Even though we never speak of it amongst each other, the fact remains that our immortality derives from our status as descendants of dragons. And our agelessness, our capacity for mystic and intellectual might well above the average, were not the only traits we inherited."
  
  "Wait, are you saying-?" Jane's eyes opened in realization.
  
  "Yes." Ehran nodded. "We are of course still far more elven than draconic, even those of the first generation like myself. What is a nigh-inexorable inherent nature to them is merely a set of tendencies for us. A spectrum of behavior as opposed to a full-on syndrome. But the fact remains that arrogance... covetousness... ambition, vengefulness, willfulness, a reduced capacity for empathy... all these things come more easily to us than to some others." He smiled sadly. "We still do not have the excuse of inborn madness, not even the worst of us. We are born sane and responsible for our choices. Those few of us who are half-mad or more lost their reason via trauma and tragedy in life, as any other person does, and not because of our blood. But even with that caveat we still remain a ruthless and arrogant breed, us immortal elves." And then he shocked us all by smiling lovingly at Jane. "Except, my darling daughter, for you."
  
  "I don't understand." Jane said plaintively.
  
  "If you believe me a cold and harsh man now, then consider that my current state is the result of millennia of experience, maturation, and loss... and in recent decades, several very harsh and humbling lessons. Then try to imagine how vast and ruthless a tyrant I was of old, and you will still likely fall short in your imagining." Ehran admitted frankly. "Now consider that in light of what you also know of Tir Tairngire from when I and High Prince Surehand and our peers still ruled it, particularly at its highest levels. And then consider what personalities tend to run strongly in our bloodlines, and try to imagine what that particular combination of nature and nurture would likely result in."
  
  "Eugh." Cat shuddered eloquently.
  
  "Indeed." Ehran said with grim amusement. "And had you shown early on as a girl that you were as arrogant, as willful, as quick to covet and to dominate as so many of us were and are, then I would have had no hesitation in bringing you to be raised as Tir royalty. You would not have been any more corrupted by the atmosphere than you were already, and it would have been your best opportuity to gain the skills and discipline you would need to survive. And I would still have cherished you and protected you as best I could, for you would still have been my daughter." He sighed. "But then the reports I had on you, even as a small child, told me a different story. That in heart and temperament you took almost entirely after your mother and very little after me."
  
  "I ran with a go-gang just for fun and barroom brawled at the drop of a hat." Jane said flatly. "Innocent? Me?"
  
  "And yet you were still a Disney Princess compared to what the average scion of our blood was like at a comparable age, particularly when given all the privileges of wealth and effective immunity from prosecution." Ehran disagreed. "Prince Oakforest's son Glasgian was such a willfully cruel and arrogant personality that he actually dared to destroy dragon eggs in Lofwyr's keeping, and honestly believed he could get away with it!" Ehran shook his head sadly. "Needless to say, he did not survive the process of discovering just how greatly he was in error."
  
  "Wait, Prince Oakforest had three children in just eight years!" Jane realized. "I thought you said we were almost totally infertile?" she challenged him.
  
  "Not for public consumption, but Glasgian's two younger sisters are actually his half-sisters." Ehran replied matter-of-factly.
  
  "Oh." Jane acknowledged. "Ouch."
  
  "Quite." Ehran acknowledged dryly. "To leave you as an unregarded orphan exposed you to the vicissitudes of life, but also spared you the vast potential for corruption - for the loss of innocence - that becoming fully a part of my life, and of the society I then lived in, would have inevitably exposed you to." He sighed again, sadly, and drained his glass. "And before you ask, no, I could not have shielded you from that. I could not have 'raised you right' even if I had tried." He paused, and continued briefly. "How could I ever have taught a child what I had so consistently failed to teach myself? It wasn't until after Dunkelzahn's death that I realized even partially what a false path I had been traveling down in Tir Tairngire. But even before I consciously acknowledged it to myself, I instinctively shrank away from exposing you to it." He looked at her entreatingly. "That is why I said that if I had answered your question back then, I would have been lying to myself. Because it was not until afterwards that I was able to fully admit to myself that I had been wrong."
  
  "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man." I quoted. "Saint Ignatius of Loyola. You thought that you faced a choice between Jane being raised as your daughter and heir, and Jane being raised to be a good woman... and you chose the latter."
  
  "Yes." Ehran nodded to me, grateful at my understanding. "Power - mastery - wealth - intrigue... all of these could potentially be learned later in life. But corruption and cruelty? Those are lessons that once learned take far too long to unlearn. And never more so than when those lessons are learned as a child." He turned to Jane again. "Dunkelzahn approached you as he did because he too saw the rare potential that you displayed - to be born as one of our kind and yet with a heart still unstained."
  
  "I should never have turned him down." Jane mourned.
  
  "He never held it against you, daughter." Ehran reassured her. "He only blamed himself for having been so enamored of his own secrets and schemes that he failed to give you the truth that you deserved. He told me that, afterwards." Another mournful sigh. "And if that man had not come and swept you up into his own schemes, Dunkelzahn had just about been ready to approach you again. With my blessing."
  
  "So ultimately you left me in the orphanage because you thought you weren't fit to be a parent?" Jane said heatedly, still visibly struggling to process all this. "Because you wouldn't even try?"
  
  "Jane." Cat said. "If you want to see what a shitty parent really looks like then I'll introduce you to my mother sometime. At least your father had the self-awareness to even partially admit to himself what he wasn't good at doing."
  
  "Yes." Ehran agreed. "If I had had a suitable co-parent that I could trust to supply proper guidance and empathy where I was so poor at doing so... but I did not. If I had been at leisure to retire into quiet isolation and raise you peacefully away from Tir high society, so your nature could at least hope to shine through without being blighted by a poisonous nurture... but I did not." He sighed. "Even if I had placed my ambitions by the wayside for all those decades I still could not abandon all of my responsibilities, and I could not do right by you and them both simultaneously. And-" Ehran shook his head sadly. "If only your mother hadn't passed away when you were so young."
  
  "If only." Jane echoed. "The two saddest words in the language."
  
  "In any language." Ehran agreed. "So... there is your answer. I do not ask for your forgiveness. Merely..." he pursed his lips. "That this knowledge please not embitter you any further than I already have."
  
  "Honestly? I have no idea how I'm supposed to feel about all this right now." Jane admitted frankly. "But..." she smiled at him, genuinely if still sadly. "Thank you for telling me all this. It still means a lot that you could finally... share." she trailed off awkwardly.
  
  "Thank you." Ehran said, before visibly putting the awkwardness aside himself. "And with the immediate gap in communication hopefully resolved, I propose that we leave Jane to become more certain of her feelings at her own desired pace while we return to an examination of practical matters."
  
  "Who set us up and why." Cat agreed. "Do you have any ideas there?"
  
  "Before I speculate, let us first review the facts. If you would?" he said with a nod to me.
  
  I recapped him on the entire shadowrun, front to back, and by the time I was finished the servants had brought in a light supper for us to share. We ate, still in the sitting room, as I finished the briefing.
  
  "Disturbing." he frowned thunderously as he assimilated everything he'd been told and swiftly pondered the ramifications. "One moment."
  
  He reached out and pressed a discreetly hidden button twice, and the same man who'd led our escort to the mansion entered the room after a minute. "Yes, my Prince?"
  
  "Liam, I need a swift yet discreet background investigation into Carol Whelan, employed at the New Century Party's headquarters in the city as a senior investigator and vetter of recruits. She is an experienced mage and police investigator, and almost certainly a skilled intelligence operative, so caution is a priority. Look particularly for anything that suggests that she is an embedded double agent within the NCP. Report to me as soon as you have everything."
  
  "As you will." he bowed and departed.
  
  "Her primary duty is doing background investigations for recruits." I thought out loud, before continuing to Ehran. "You think she's deliberately fluffing those investigations in favor of a third party?"
  
  "If you are attempting to extensively infiltrate a rival, the first place you would want to suborn an agent is among their internal security apparatus." Ehran agreed. "That allows you to far more easily insert more agents wherever you will. And by concentrating on younger recruits, they are going for a slow strategy of infiltration and possibly eventual co-option."
  
  "You wouldn't be this certain of a wild guess." Jane thought. "What did we miss?"
  
  "You already noted that the hidden safe was concealed from her own superiors. But the bound elemental did not attack as soon as you attempted illicit entry into the safe, which would be the more logical course of action for a guardian. It's orders were to lay low and withhold its strike until someone other than Whelan succeeded in opening the safe." Ehran said.
  
  "It wasn't trying to attack us. It was trying to destroy the evidence!" Cat realized.
  
  "Precisely." Ehran smiled approvingly at her. "Whatever was in there, Whelan absolutely did not want anyone - not even her own superiors - to read it. That plus the stash of data chips being much smaller than the amount of data chips that comprised her secure files suggests that it was not a backup copy of those files but were instead selected extractions from them."
  
  "Extractions - or redactions." I followed his line of reasoning. "You're thinking that she was withholding incriminating evidence on selected candidates from her own chain of command. 'Double agent' follows logically from that."
  
  "And then some mysterious third party intervenes, and sets you on her trail - but without telling you what you are really going to find, and falsely signing my name to the deed." Ehran said. "That part I do not yet understand. But presuming our theory is correct, the identity of the car bomber is of course obvious."
  
  "Whoever the hell was running Whelan as their agent." Jane agreed. "If they don't want her burned, they need to torch those files and anyone who might have read them. Which latter category includes the three shadowrunners who actually did the job."
  
  "Our third party already knew that Whelan was a double agent, and wishes to have the evidence necessary to suborn her as a triple agent." Ehran thought out loud. "If they merely wanted her dead then all they would have had to do is inform the IOND of what she had been doing. They wouldn't even need proof in hand, merely a credible enough accusation to make her a suspect, and the NCP could readily find the same clues that you found - once they actually bothered to look. And the traditional reward for a double agent caught in the act is what it is."
  
  "But they didn't know I was linked to you." Jane agreed. "So right now they're wondering where the hell we are and what's going wrong with their scheme, while at the same time Whelan's paymasters are busy flailing around in the dark."
  
  "And we shall let them continue to flail while we-" Ehran's eyes suddenly opened wide in fright. In an eye-blurring motion he lunged across the table to seize Jane by her wrist with one hand while frantically tearing her dragon ring free of her finger with the other and clasping his fist tightly around it-
  
  -one second before the wards on the house shattered like a pane of glass struck by a sledgehammer and Jane's father howled in agony.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: I'm still not entirely satisfied with this chapter. But I can only fiddle with it so much before its time to release it, and I dragged out the delay between start of personal drama and resolution of personal drama as much as I could stomach. Jane and her father really have been talking past each other for a while, but as hopefully came across clearly Ehran knows he's about as good at communicating parental feelings - however sincere - as Baron Wulfenbach is.
  
  As for immortal elven infertility - well, the only three explanations for why immortal elven genes aren't all over the world are 'they can barely have children', 'virtually none of the children they have carry the immortality gene', and 'they never fuck'. The latter is absurd, and while the second one is entirely possible the fact remains that the dragons know how to create shit that breeds true, just ask the drakes. So I went with door number one, and since its canon that at least one immortal elf (Prince Oakforest) has three kids... well, the simplest way to make that jibe with this to say that two of them ain't his. Since Oakforest's marriage is canonically strained as hell (him and his wife live separated-not-divorced, for one thing), that was easy enough to patch in.
  
  As Ehran barely has a canon personality, even in the tie-in novels, I had to wing it from scratch. So you get a millennia-old Lawful Evil bastard who is yet at least partly self-aware of his flaws, and still treasures the fact that his daughter doesn't share them and he'd rather she not ever start getting into that habit.
  
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  I was on my feet and had my hand solidly clasped around Ehran's almost simultaneously with the attack. Cat, not being Awakened, had had no chance to perceive what was occurring and Jane was still in shock.
  
  My best astral barrier spell flickered into existence in a tight focus around myself, Ehran, and the girls, and Ehran's own spell was aborted in mid-cast as he switched his own efforts to reinforcing mine. While I'd certainly expected powerful magic from an immortal elf of his generation I was still shocked to see just how vast his magic was. With skill and force rivaling a Great Dragon's Ehran's counterspelling backed my own far simpler yet no less powerful efforts. The vastly overpowered pulse of mana that the ritual sorcery attack had channeled into Ehran had blunted itself punching through the magical defenses on the house and the additional set anchored on his person, so he was only moderately wounded. Only. If Jane had still been wearing that ring when the blow had landed, she'd almost certainly have died. Outside of the mansion she'd definitely have died, and with enough overkill left over to toast a medium-sized dragon. What the hell was on the other end of that link?
  
  "Her ring is still connected to whatever they're targeting it through." Ehran's thought touched the outermost edges of my mind. "Anchor your astral barrier to a spell lock, then synchronize with me. We must follow the astral link back to its source."
  
  "Jane, tell your father's guards what's going on and watch over our bodies. Cat, watch her back." I quickly ordered, and then we left the temporary set of defenses we'd conjured to guard our loved ones while I went fully astral alongside Ehran.
  
  The two of us blurred through the irrational geometry of astral space in record time, Ehran tracing the connection with a nigh-impossible ease. Thousands of years of practice really was good for something. We returned from the metaplanes to near astral space floating over a coastal city by an estuary. It looked vaguely familiar-
  
  "Washington DC." Ehran's thought came again. "There, you can see the rift torn into astral space at the site of Dunkelzahn's death."
  
  "Then the trail leads to Georgetown." I agreed, his identification of the city and the known landmark of the DC Rift allowing me to plot the location we'd traced via the ring on a real-world map. "But I don't see anything special there."
  
  "Nor would we, at this distance." Ehran said. "We must approach closer."
  
  Our two astral forms, each one hidden behind our best Masking, descended lower and lower towards the obscure yet wealthy residential neighborhood that the faint astral bond between Jane's ring and whatever was at the other end of the link was leading us to. "How are they using her ring as a link?" I thought to him. "It's not like anybody could chip a piece off of it without her knowing, and the creator is dead."
  
  "It is almost certainly a symbolic bond rather than a material one." Ehran analyzed. "Her ring is both visually and thaumaturgically unique, and is not only her linked power focus but has been continuously carried and treasured by her for over a decade. If you crafted a duplicate of it and knew the correct metamagical technique - which is highly obscure even among skilled practitioners - then even a non-enchanted ring would allow you to target the true focus with ritual sorcery. Which would of course have channelled the attack directly into her, had I not- had we not interposed ourselves."
  
  "So we need to use this window of opportunity to destroy their duplicate and make sure whoever was in that house doesn't get away. Because there's some motherfuckers down there that just got to get got." I said firmly.
  
  "Indeed." I felt Ehran's cold, cruel, smile. "And with your power added to my own, I believe the simplest approach would be best."
  
  I felt Ehran starting to cast, and used the technique for a group casting to join him. All I had to do was feed mana into the effort and help reinforce him against the Drain. As it was barely a minute past the initial attack, if that long, whoever was down there hadn't had much chance to even react to the unexpected failure of their attack, let alone prepare a response. And while I could sense that the wards and barriers layered over that house almost rivaled the ones on Ehran's mansion, that wouldn't have been sufficient to do more than slow him down were he in an all-out fury as he was now. So when Ehran struck in conjunction with a partner who could supply at least as much mystic force as he could, those wards might as well have been a soap bubble.
  
  Our counterattack was a simple powerball, channeling raw magical energy directly into a physical concussive wave. While normally it would be unable to affect material targets when cast from the astral, a symbolic/material link worked both ways. As we had one end of the link held firmly in our hands, and the ritualists down there had yet to break the other end, any spell we channeled into to the link would strike what was effectively a dual-natured object - an object that simultaneously operated on both the physical and astral planes - and thus channel our destructive spell back into realspace with the ring as the center of effect.
  
  Which is why the house shuddered, groaned, and then began to collapse in on itself as if someone had just detonated a cratering charge in the basement. Our combined power had punched through and broken all the mystic defenses on it just as readily as their attack had stripped Ehran's mansion of its defenses, and he'd precisely metered the force of his counterattack to be sufficient to shatter their ritual focus and blow anyone in the house - as well as most of the interior walls of the house - into pulp, without actually taking out a chunk of the entire neighborhood.
  
  "There." Ehran said, satisfied. "That will suitably punish and occupy them until we can have the remains of that house sifted for any traces-"
  
  "Someone's already moving!" I called out in surprise, as I noted the bright bubbles signifying people with protective spells active upon them suddenly appearing from inside several vehicles discreetly parked nearby. Our astral overwatch had an excellent viewpoint to see the several squads of operatives advance on the house. While material details were sometimes hard to note from the astral we could still sense the auras of the men, spot their movements, and note the signs on their astral bodies that they had extensive cyber-enhancement. These were clearly veteran commandos of some kind.
  
  "What the hell is that?" I said, pointing at the mage casually strolling behind one squad of men. Physically he appeared to be an elf, but his aura - expertly Masked, of course, but that didn't stop me - was that of a miniature dragon. I placed my 'hand' on Ehran's 'shoulder', willing whatever gift I had of penetrating illusion to include him as well.
  
  "That is someone I know all too well." Ehran thought grimly. "And someone who apparently did not expect me to be here so soon, or in the company of someone else who could penetrate his disguise so readily."
  
  Ehran floated down to confront the elf/dragon/whoever, and I followed immediately behind him. I had no idea what I was about to get into, and the Scribe apparently didn't feel like making explanations.
  
  "Scale!" Ehran shouted astrally as he floated down to land directly in front of the person he'd addressed, and Scale stopped and nodded at him.
  
  Scale. I remembered that name from the "Dragons of the Sixth World" shadowfile on JackPoint. A drake, and Lofwyr's principal assistant.
  
  Oh, crap.
  
  "Hold! Secure the perimeter, but do not enter the house." Scale ordered his men, and the Saeder-Krupp troopers obediently did so. "Prince Ehran." Scale continued, turning to greet him urbanely. As a dual-natured entity, simultaneously present on both the physical and astral planes, he could interact with us as readily as he could the material world. "Fancy meeting you here."
  
  "Do not play with me, drake." Ehran said coldly. "You know as well as I do that this location is a significant Black Lodge outpost. Some third party manipulated myself and the Lodge into being at odds with each other by sending that Deveraux impostor to hire my daughter and her team. You used Jane's life as your bait! Do not even attempt to deny it, not with her attempted murderers' corpses still smoldering as you leap in to scavenge!"
  
  "You said attempted murderers. Dare I hope that your daughter escaped without serious injury?" Scale asked politely.
  
  "Would we be speaking with this relative degree of civility if she hadn't?" Ehran replied menacingly.
  
  "By your account some third party is clearly active here, yes." Scale continued as if Ehran hadn't spoken. "But you unthinkingly presume this third party is me because...?"
  
  "Method, motive, and opportunity." Ehran replied grimly. "What more do I need?"
  
  "Evidence." Scale replied firmly. "There are any number of possible reasons for myself to have been sent to chastise the Black Lodge without requiring you or your family's involvement in the process at any point. The timing of your arrival is what is suspiciously coincidental, not mine."
  
  "You're going to need more than smug to keep me from being equally as upset at risking Jane's life for your scheme as he is." I broke in.
  
  "I admit to nothing, but in my defense I will point out that even in your own worst-case scenario the sole thing my lord hypothetically ordered done was that you, Frosty, and Netcat be hired for a routine shadowrun." Scale observed mildly.
  
  "All the while knowing that the Black Lodge would attempt to kill the shadowrunners involved for risking the exposure of their oh-so-useful mole within New Century." Ehran retorted.
  
  "People attempt to kill your daughter on a regular basis, as a routine hazard of her profession that you have long since accepted." Scale answered reasonably. "And her and her friends are far too formidable to be at any risk from the average run of assassins. Just ask the Smokers' Club."
  
  "That level of ritual sorcery was anything but 'average'." I said. "You're telling me that you didn't expect that?"
  
  "Logic would suggest that the preparations for a ritual working on this scale - the preparation of the ritual link most specifically - would have needed to be put into action before you were even hired for that shadowrun." Scale smiled thinly. Ehran and I looked at each other as we had to silently admit that yes, the SOB actually had a point there.
  
  "So you're saying that this hypothetical third party only expected something like the attempted car bombing." I observed reluctantly. "And that the Black Lodge already having a symbolic focus prepared and waiting on a shelf somewhere labeled 'Break glass to ritually assassinate Jane Foster' was entirely unanticipated."
  
  "That is precisely what I am saying." Scale agreed.
  
  "A glib enough explanation, but it does not fit." Ehran glared at him. "If the Black Lodge knew of Jane's link to me then they would have acted on that knowledge long ago. And if they did not know of it, she would never have merited such extensive preparations. So while I commend your skill as a fabulist, drake, you yet fail to convince."
  
  "Jane's link to you is unknown." Scale pointed out. "Her link to Caimbuel, on the other hand...?"
  
  "Shit." I swore. "I'm assuming this Black Lodge would gladly take that kind of big flashy shot at her to send a message to him, if a situation arose where they'd already targeted her for death for another reason?" I asked Ehran.
  
  "They would." he admitted through clenched teeth. "Very well, drake. You-"
  
  "Third parties unknown who are certainly not myself or my lord or affiliated with them in any way." Scale corrected him.
  
  Ehran just ignored that one like it deserved. "You hired Wild Man's team for the shadowrun that threatened to expose Whelan as a Black Lodge double agent who was helping enable other Lodge recruits to eventually infiltrate the IOND via the New Century Party. The Black Lodge predictably moves to clean up their leak rather than abandon such a potentially lucrative long-term scheme. My daughter and her friends were entirely expected to survive whatever mundane little assassination attempt the Lodge made - as they did indeed survive the car bomb - and I would come to Jane's assistance. Because even if I were not already keeping tabs on her while she was visiting Boston then requesting my aid would still be the most rational move for a young woman in her position to make. So in any predictable course of events I would soon enough trace the attempt on her life to the Lodge and make my displeasure known in some substantial fashion, and you would come in and use the window of opportunity my attack would create to finish raiding their DC chapter for whatever your actual target was. Or so your original scheme was conceived."
  
  "A plausible enough reconstruction of events." Scale non-admitted.
  
  "Except that when the first missed assassination attempt reported their failure up the chain, up the chain noted from that report that Jane - already a person of interest to them over another matter - was present at the scene. And they already had a preprepared contingency of some kind ready for her because of her link to Harlequin, even if they were still holding it in reserve. So they hauled it off the shelf and did the major ritual, only since they're expecting to hit a lone apprentice well away from her master, they aren't prepared for her to be behind Ehran's defenses. Or anything else he and I just did." I followed the thought.
  
  "And surely if any third party had known that the Black Lodge would or could escalate in such fashion, they would have at least given you more forewarning." Scale reassured us. "But apparently they were as surprised at the most recent turn of events as you were."
  
  "Do not think that i missed that you had to have tipped the Black Lodge off as to where they could find the shadowrunners for the New Century job, seeing as how my daughter and her friends had taken such thorough precautions that only their own Johnson would have known that they were the particular individuals hired for that job. They left no evidence at the scene, after all." Ehran said grimly. "So I still claim that a substantial insult has been done to me and mine here. And you will inform your master of that claim, and let him anticipate what may follow in its wake."
  
  "Which is why, in the interests of peace, I will offer you substantial compensation even though this attack on your daughter was not our fault." Scale said diplomatically. "You will already have noted that I ordered my men to hold outside the house."
  
  "You're giving Ehran a chance to send his own men to loot this Black Lodge alongside of you, unreservedly sharing all the intel with him." I realized.
  
  "I will compliment you to the extent of acknowledging that you are truly a creature created in your master's image, Scale." Ehran spat disgustedly. "You know full well that our customs require me to abandon the claim of provocation if I accept the compensation offered, and that I cannot pass up an opportunity to so deeply strike against the Black Lodge when they are this vulnerable."
  
  Scale just smiled in satisfaction at his own cleverness as we sighed and accepted the offer we could not rationally refuse. As Ehran's fellow immortal elf Aina Dupree was already in DC as vice-chairman of the Draco Foundation, floating on over astrally and making arrangements with her to immediately send a detachment of trusted men over to back up the Saeder-Krupp operatives took very little time at all.
  
  "Is it always like that when dealing with the fallout of Lofwyr's schemes?" I asked him as we turned to head back to Boston.
  
  "No, this is what it's like when the bastard is being polite." Ehran sighed.
  
  
  
  "So what's the Black Lodge?" Cat asked us as we all met up in the DIMR offices. Until the wards could be permanently restored on Ehran's house, all of us were Ehran's guests in the Institute building and living behind hastily-erected temporary wards.
  
  "At some point in the early medieval period of the Fifth World, the knowledge of magic somehow became prevalent among a group of mortals. Remember that while magic was not at all common prior to the Awakening, it was not entirely gone. The dragons slumbered in hibernation, but were occasionally active. And myself and my peers were active throughout, albeit notably reduced in power. Still, in the country of the blind the one-eyed man may not necessarily be king but he can still often be a prince." Ehran explained. "And even the lesser magicks available in the pre-Awakening era would be of great use against mundane and unaware targets, even when factoring in the substantial costs necessary to use even that little."
  
  "The Black Lodge is that old?" Jane asked, astonished. "I knew the name, of course, most everyone in the shadows does, but I'd thought they were just another society of magical initiates turned manipulative group of power mongers. Like the Illuminates of the New Dawn, or the Dr. Faustus Society over in Europe, or the Voice of Ogoun in the Carib League."
  
  "The first front organization of the Black Lodge that I know of was recorded in common history as the Knights Templar." Ehran astonished us quietly. "Yes. They are that old. Possibly older."
  
  "Let me guess." I thought out loud. "For the longest while, every immortal out there thought they were the other guy's minions."
  
  "Indeed." Ehran chuckled ruefully. "We suspected them of being dragons' pawns. The dragons suspected them of being ours. And they simultaneously all suspected each other of individually playing a private game as well, and so did we. It wasn't until several decades after the Awakening, when we were all active and regularly interacting and the Lodge likewise expanded with the growth of magic to no longer be quite so invisible, that the process of elimination finally led us to start realizing that they were almost certainly their own concern."
  
  "And at this point it doesn't matter if they're actually secretly led by an immortal you missed, or just operating on generations' worth of secret knowledge." Cat said. "They want what you and the dragons have, and they're willing to play dirty to get it."
  
  "Which is why I had to accept Lofwyr's devils' bargain." Ehran sighed. "Both we and the dragons know far too little about their true extent and goals. With what is almost certainly their Washington DC - if not their North American - command outpost vulnerable and open for the looting, my two options were to let Lofwyr have sole possession of what prizes lay therein or share it with him. So yet again, I have made your protection a secondary priority as compared to my own interests." He turned to Jane, his face expressionless but his eyes full of more than an age's worth of pain. "You must be so very disappointed in me."
  
  Jane looked up from where she'd still been absently rubbing her now-ringless finger, her face lapsing from its tense and withdrawn mask for the first moment since the initial attack. "What?" she asked, astonished. "No. No, I'm not."
  
  "You are being very generous, but I cannot imagine why-" Ehran began.
  
  And then Jane surprised us all by not only smiling, but coming up out of her seat to walk over to her father and wrap her arms around him in a hug. And not a polite, decorous hug either, but the kind of full-on rib squeezer that only I or Cat had ever gotten from her before.
  
  "What?" Ehran gasped, fully as astonished as if Jane had suddenly turned purple and grown three heads.
  
  "Father." Jane said softly. "Do you even know what you just did?"
  
  "I- traded away any chance to punish Lofwyr for daring to put your life in pawn, in return for furthering a longstanding goal of mine?" he asked, still entirely missing whatever point she was trying to make.
  
  "You saved my life." she corrected him insistently. "And-" she chewed her lip and continued, as she released him from her hug and sat down on the arm of his chair while still grasping his hand. "For so many years, I could never entirely get past that moment where Harlequin first tricked me into his schemes."
  
  "You mean the moment where I-" Ehran began before Jane interrupted him again.
  
  "Yes." she agreed. "I almost died. I did lose a limb. It took incredible effort and expense to restore it, and there were months where I was afraid I'd never even walk again. It's not as if I could get a cybernetic replacement, not without losing my magic..." Jane continued. "So yeah, that one got stuck in my nightmares forever. And earlier today that same old nightmare was coming true again. Impossibly powerful ritual magic, targeted at me through something I'd never suspected and always kept close and in a way I couldn't possibly defend against." Jane turned to me. "That attack could have killed him, couldn't it?" she asked me.
  
  "It could have." I agreed. Ehran's odds of survival had actually been quite high, even without my assistance, but they still hadn't been a hundred percent. And even in the best-case scenario he'd still have been significantly more wounded without my help.
  
  "I was within my own house, behind my strongest defenses, and I am one of the very strongest magicians in the history of the world." Ehran insisted. "I was in far less danger than you would have been."
  
  "But you had no idea exactly how strong the attack would be, not before it actually hit." Jane said. "All you could know was that it was pressing in on the houses' wards with enough strength that they were about to shatter. To the best of your knowledge at that time, grabbing my ring so the attack would hit you instead of me might well have been the last thing on Earth you'd have ever done."
  
  "I-" Ehran began, visibly at a loss for words.
  
  Jane leaned down and kissed him delicately on one cheek, dumbfounding him even further. "My introduction into magic left me with a deep suspicion of the agendas of other people, particularly those more powerful than me. I was only able to trust Alex because - well let's face it." she said, turning to me with a humorous quirk of her lip. "As a master of immortal intrigue, you're a great Urban Brawl player."
  
  "Hey, I also cook a mean omelet." I leaned into the joke.
  
  "And I certainly never trusted the clown again after the first time he played me." Jane continued icily. "But for a long while, I-" Jane continued less angrily before halting and blushing embarassedly.
  
  "You will not insult me with the truth." Ehran said to her affectionately. "I have never given you much reason to trust me either."
  
  "You're wrong." she disagreed. "Earlier today you said that a child has every right to expect a parent to provide for them. But by the same token, doesn't a parent have every right to expect their child to trust them?" Jane said.
  
  Ehran blinked in astonishment, and visibly tried to find something to say but failed. Jane nodded to him and continued. "But I never did. I gave you so little benefit of the doubt that random strangers off the street found it easier to be risked with a piece of my heart than you were. I was-" she pulled one hand loose to clasp her own forehead briefly. "I sometimes get wrapped up in my own drama a lot." she finished ruefully.
  
  "Truly? I have absolutely no first-hand experience with that sort of behavior." Ehran replied with such dry irony that there were maybe two illiterate yak farmers in Nepal who didn't pick up that he was sarcasming on himself.
  
  "And then today my worst nightmare ever was all coming true again - and you jump in and take the bullet without a moment's hesitation." Jane said. "And certainly without a moment's calculation. You never had an 'agenda' for me, did you? You just wanted me to be safe and... well, if not immediately happy, then at least capable of being happy. As opposed to growing up miserable and twisted and bitter. Or like you said, someone who existed only to further plots and ambitions and had no capacity to actually live."
  
  "Yes." Ehran agreed huskily. "That is all I ultimately wished of you, or for you. That and naught more."
  
  "Okay." Jane smiled down at him, before giving him another hug. "So... maybe I made mistakes at being a daughter, just like you did at being a father. And before you say that you made more, this isn't about keeping score. We're both immortal. We've got all the time we need to learn how to do better at being a family... if we're willing to try." she trailed off.
  
  "Thank you." Ehran said, and we all pretended that it was merely the dust in the air that required him to wipe at the corner of his eye. "And yes, I am willing." And then his softening expression firmed up again, and a more cold, calculating smile began to light up his eyes. "And it suddenly occurs to me that there is a gift I could possibly give you, one entirely fit to commemorate such an occasion. If you were willing, of course." he softened.
  
  Jane had started to draw back at his sudden change in demeanor, only to relax at his final question. "Willing to...?"
  
  "One of a master mage's responsibilities towards their apprentice is to shield them versus attacks made on them of a caliber the apprentice could not be reasonably expected to cope with. Particularly those attacks made by individuals pursuing a vendetta against the master via the apprentice. And here you are, having only narrowly missed death at the hands of the Black Lodge via ritual sorcery that even those such as myself or Caimbuel would find it a serious exertion to withstand... and your master nowhere to be found, while I am required to intervene at a significant risk to my own life." Ehran smiled up at her as Jane's expression began to collapse into an awestruck daze. "I do believe I have sufficient cause to put forward that he has failed in his duties toward you, and that he is therefore no longer fit to be in charge of your education."
  
  "You could do that?" Jane asked him wonderingly.
  
  "If you wished me to." Ehran said, before his expression lapsed into a more somber regard. "Because there is a rather substantial caveat. Caimbuel could legitimately counter-argue that you are not yet ready to essay the greater mysteries entirely on your own and would still need a mentor to finish tutoring you. Which would mean that I would have to arrange for one. And as Caimbuel is legitimately one of the very greatest sorcerers in existence, there is only one candidate I could put forward that I would possibly trust and who also possessed professional qualifications legitimately rivaling his."
  
  "You." Jane agreed, equally as somberly.
  
  "Precisely." Ehran agreed. "And even with our new rapport..." he fell silent. "When I had my moment of inspiration just now, I had not originally intended to offer you merely a choice between Scylla and Charybdis." he finally said.
  
  "But you're not." Jane replied immediately. "Even if we've still got work left to do on rebuilding our relationship, we can at least be sure that we both want to. That's far more certainty than I have with him."
  
  "Then... I have your blessing in this?" Ehran asked her diffidently.
  
  "Yes." Jane agreed. "And not just because I'd love to get shut of him. Just- yes." she finished inarticulately.
  
  Cat and I silently exchanged glances, and then catfooted right out of the room as quietly we could. If they were going to have any more intimate of a moment then we weren't going to intrude. But God damn, were we glad to see Jane finally have something go right in her life for once.
  
  Well, asides from meeting us, of course.
  
  
  
  In order to avoid Jane becoming publicly linked to Ehran, we had to minimize our time in Boston. So after her reconciliation with her father we picked up some new IDs, changed our faces, and hit the road. It was time to get out of town and be discreetly unavailable while both the immortal elves and Lofwyr were conducting follow-up operations against the Black Lodge, which would also keep Jane out of contact with Harlequin while Ehran did his immortal elven politics there to get her free of her apprenticeship.
  
  To be honest, as chilling as he could be sometimes I was solidly in Ehran's corner on that one. If Harlequin was really worth a shit as a master to an apprentice, he'd have shown up to have a look at us at least once in all the months we'd made Jane a part of our life.
  
  At any rate, in a few months Jane would be free to visit her father or even go live with him if she chose, while simultaneously not having to make any public announcement of their actual relationship. As Ehran's new apprentice it would be entirely unremarkable that he was providing for her, and even just going off of his public non-immortal reputation he'd certainly be expected to be a more formal and diligent type of teacher than Harlequin. Simultaneously, everybody who was aware of their actual relationship would know what was really going on - but wouldn't really care, as it was entirely Ehran's and Jane's business. And Ehran of course had no intention of interfering with Jane's relationship with us at all. Even leaving aside the pragmatic benefits of keeping his options open with me, the fact remained that he actually did want Jane to be happy and he could clearly see that Cat and I were doing that for her.
  
  Our counterattack had already destroyed the duplicate ring that the Black Lodge had used as a symbolic link to attack Jane. Before we'd left Boston Ehran had conducted a ritual that somehow altered or scrambled the magical signature of Jane's ring so that even if the Black Lodge tried that trick again, it wouldn't work. I still wasn't entirely sure how that one was going to work, but I wasn't one of the oldest and most powerful magicians in the history of the species. And it was his daughter's life that potentially hung in the balance, so we were all entirely willing to take his word for it. Jane had dropped and then renewed her link to her favorite power focus even more strongly than before as part of the ritual, and we all took it as hopefully a favorable omen for her renewed relationship with her father and her future.
  
  So, with Ehran's cooperation we'd picked up some shiny new cover IDs that made us out to be a high-end team of DIMR internal auditors and were flying down on a private jet to Peru to check out the goings-on at the Institute's major archaeological dig at Espiritu Pampa, the Lost City of the Incas. Ehran had already been scheduled to fly out there himself soon for a progress review but had had to change his schedule when the Black Lodge thing cropped up, so we were going down in his stead.
  
  "I still can't believe this Black Lodge has that kind of power." Cat said, leaning forward on her cushioned seat in the Lear-Cessna executive transport's passenger compartment.
  
  "Well, as near as Father could figure they were deliberately using enough overkill to potentially kill him or Harlequin as a message. 'Hey, clown, we just fried your apprentice with enough power that we could have fried you. Maybe you want to walk a little softer from now on, eh?'" Jane exposited. "It's really chilling to imagine that they had that duplicate ring sitting on a shelf for God knows how long, just waiting for a reason to actually use it." she shivered.
  
  "No kidding." I agreed. "But at least this 'Lodge of Morgana' that met in that Georgetown chantry is now all dead and your father and Lofwyr have access to everything that a rip-away-the-walls-search of the whole site can reveal. And with the job he and I did instantaneously clearing out the whole building and Lofwyr's troops establishing a perimeter literally minutes afterwards, no one had any chance to sanitize anything there. I can't imagine this Black Lodge is going to like what happens when the immortal elves and the Great Dragons both start rolling up their network with everything they can trace from what looked to be their North American command node."
  
  "Almost makes me sad that we're missing that party." Cat observed.
  
  "Hah, no way." Jane shook her head. "I got caught between feuding archmages on that level twice, I am not volunteering to rush back into that kind of mess a third time without a very compelling need. And Father couldn't think of an excuse to keep me away from that kind of action quickly enough anyway."
  
  "I'm not going to lie, I agreed with him." I said. "I swear to God at least one of the ritualists in that house had a double-digit degree of initiation. The only other people I've met who did that were your father or dragons."
  
  "Oh." Cat suddenly frowned. "A certain matchmaking dragon just emailed back." The email in question popped up in both our HUDs.
  
  "Well, at least it's a nice apology?" Jane tried to be diplomatic.
  
  "I'm just glad that your father explained to us what Hestaby was probably thinking, or else I'd still be wasting time composing paranoia scenarios." I sighed. "So annoying as it was, I'm not going to pick any fights with Great Dragons that I don't absolutely have to." I 'typed' up a polite acceptance of Hestaby's apology via my trodes and after the girls both approved the wording, I hit 'reply'. "There. Hopefully that learns her to not try and matchmake for the 'greater good' just because you're worried a rebirthing Passion might go crazy a couple centuries from now at the death of a mortal spouse."
  
  "If I strain very hard I can grudgingly admit that is a fair concern, what with your dad having explained how one of the Mad Passions back in the Fourth World actually was alleged to have gotten started out something like that way. Or so the legend ran." Cat said slowly. "But I'm still not happy. I don't mind sharing - especially if I'm also invited - but I damn well do mind some third-party meddler thinking that I need to be cut out entirely." Cat finished firmly. "I am just a wee bit tempted to give someone a piece of my mind over that."
  
  "Matrix-flame not the Great Dragon, lest ye risk being not-so-Matrix-flamed in return." I semi-joked with my wife. "And look! An obvious topic change!" I actually pointed over her shoulder and out the plane's window at that one, and Cat lifted an eyebrow in humorous acknowledgement. "Anything else in the message traffic?"
  
  "Pistons and Fatima want to know if we're swinging by Seattle any time soon. Bandit says the algae project is going entirely on track, and it looks like Horizon is going to be the first one to rush it to market. I guess they're that desperate for some kind of win after the big public pantsing we gave them last winter." Cat replied. "Puck actually dropped an email to let us know he's still alive and that he's pretty sure NeoNET's finally giving up on technomancer vivisection - apparently Villiers is putting the brakes on Celedyr because he's starting to figure out that NeoNET needs live technomancers helping them research anti-Resonance defenses more than they need brains in jars to try and mad science with."
  
  "Ugh, the world's lifetime achievement award in ruthless corporate raiding is butting heads with the mad scientist Great Dragon?" I shuddered theatrically. "Then we got out of Boston just in time, they both live there!"
  
  "No kidding!" Jane nodded emphatically. "Anything else?"
  
  "Nope."
  
  "We are on final approach to Lima Center and landing in fifteen minutes." the pilot's voice came over the cabin speaker. "All passengers please fasten their seat belts."
  
  "So, off to spend a month in the South American jungle." Cat said irrepressibly as we all buckled up. "Anybody here think we can hope for some peace and quiet for once?"
  
  "... there is literally no way I can not jinx that one." I eventually answered.
  
  "Well, we are troubleshooters now." Jane shrugged philosophically. "So here's hoping we only find the trouble that we can actually shoot."
  
  "I'll drink to that." Cat agreed, and we made one last raid on Ehran's excellent stash of elven honey mead while we still could.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: It literally took me longer to decide what the next adventure would be then it did to write the rest of this chapter. I got hung up all night on just the last ten percent. Sometimes already knowing where you want a given arc-section to end only makes it harder to write the middle.
  
  At any rate, yes, I have chosen to make the upcoming chastisement of the Black Lodge be largely a project that major setting NPCs handle offstage. This is because I needed to get Ehran offstage anyway instead of hanging around being Overprotective Dad, so why not make two problems have the same solution? *eg*
  
  And yes, Lofwyr's intrigues are starting to move. Remember, the convo with Scale you saw in the interlude was last winter, and it's now late April. So, what did Scale find out that prompted Lofwyr's next move, and who was it really aimed at? Note however that they really weren't expecting the Black Lodge to haul out the magical tacnuke, or even to have one on standby. Scale had to think pretty fast on his feet when talking to Ehran to keep Lofwyr's scenario mostly on track. Then again, you don't remain a Great Dragon's number one lieutenant for that many millennia without being damn good at your job.
  
  Lastly, for those who think I am harshing too much on Harlequin please note that every piece of commentary on him within the story has come from two types of sources - people who are epically not objective on the topic and/or people who have never actually met him. So even though the author also thinks Harlequin's behavior with Jane was pretty damn gross in canon at certain points, my characters are still being a little harsher than I would.
  
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  "My ears itch." Cat complained.
  
  "You'll get used to it." Jane said calmly while continuing to fuss with Cat's hair.
  
  "Why can't you be the one who has to cover the ears and pass for human?" Cat whined a little.
  
  "In addition to the part where the dig site is expecting my cover ID plus an unspecified assistant and bodyguard, and the description and ID they were forwarded includes my real metatype? Because I already know how to, and this is a useful skill for an elf to learn." Jane continued as she finished doing deft things with hairpins.
  
  "You know about data-searching, honey." I helped persuade Cat. "One man in my age group travelling with two elven women is not a common pattern. Way too simple a thing for any searchers to home in on, and after that first sort they've already worked through 99+% of the travelers out there. We need to break the pattern, and having one of you put their hair up and hide the ears is the easiest way to do it. That's why your current ID has you listed as human to begin with. And we're fortunate that neither of you have excessively 'elven' facial structure."
  
  "It's definitely been handy having my mother's cheekbones and jaw and not my father's." Jane agreed. "And seriously Cat, you've never 'passed' before? I admit that we hardly get the same treatment as orks and trolls, but there's still neighborhoods where pointy ears attract unfriendly notice."
  
  "I grew up in Tarislar as the daughter of elven supremacists, remember?" Cat pointed out. "I certainly never needed to do it while growing up. And U-Dub in Seattle was anything but a Humanis stronghold, and after that I was travelling with Alex. Seriously, this is silly. We're both average height for elves and that means we're half a foot taller than average for human women. Just hiding my ears shouldn't fool anyone."
  
  "So, an elven DIMR executive with two tall, pretty humans for personal staff. The only thing observers will be suspicious about is when they're trying to figure out which one of you is the permanent secretary." Jane winked.
  
  "Somehow I doubt that 'All of the above' is going to be the lead bet in the pool." I smirked, and Cat reluctantly started to smile herself.
  
  "And, we're here." Jane said as the plane finished rolling to a stop at the terminal. "Places, everyone."
  
  As it turned out, Customs was entirely fooled by Cat's human disguise and our cover IDs as a high-end DIMR internal auditor and her accounting specialist and bodyguard sailed through without a hitch. The dig site in question was several hundred kilometers to the northeast and over four thousand feet above sea level in a valley high up in the Andes, so we switched to a Skyswimmer dirigible for the hop. Although it was only about as fast as taking a bus, unlike the bus it could travel straight as the crow flies and ignore terrain and traffic.
  
  "I am still getting used to how common lighter-than-air vehicles are around here." I said as we rode in comfort in the Skyswimmer's passenger compartment. As a SHAPELY (Shaped Airfoil Positive Enhanced Lift) lighter-than-air craft, the gasbag and gondola were precision sculpted to aerodynamically be a 'lifting body' aircraft, allowing for greater ability to change altitude and minimizing drag. Between the electric-turbine driven propellers and the solar panels on top, a Skyswimmer could travel almost indefinitely and only need to stop for food, maintenance, crew rest, and the occasional recharge if it was driven at max load for an extended period of time. Many facilities used vehicles like this, and their larger cargo-carrier cousins, as an alternative to road transport for supplying remote sites or just for getting around in terrain that didn't allow for good driving conditions.
  
  "I'm surprised they weren't used more often during the pre-Awakening." Jane agreed. "They're economic and versatile, and it's not as if the basic principles behind its design weren't already known."
  
  "True, but good engineering needs more than 'basic principles." Cat demurred. "Getting materials light and yet resilient enough to build this thing with the proper lift-to-mass ratio, the computerized navigation necessary to make overland flight ubiquitous without getting lost, advanced self-sealing and gaseous mixing technology to prevent hydrogen explosions a la the Hindenburg - each one of those was its own entire project. A lot of R&D budget from multiple separate fields of industry all came together to build this."
  
  "That's an entirely valid point. These solar panels and lightweight battery technology are actually efficient and inexpensive enough to make a solar-powered vehicle cost effective, which certainly couldn't be said for my original time." I agreed. "I'm surprised they're not used more often outside of transportation concerns."
  
  "Not much market for it right now, so nobody sells that particular power set-up off-the-shelf. No off-the-shelf availability, not much market for it." Jane thought out loud.
  
  "I think we've got a next idea for Archimedes." I analyzed. "Or at least the beginnings of one. Although this time it wouldn't be as easy as letting us get ripped off. Still, I should be able to do something to improve battery or panel efficiency to the point it's a viable independent power solution for a full settlement and not just for helping extend the range of a passenger blimp."
  
  "Invent a ruggedized, stand-alone, turn-key set-up for providing power to remote sites like the one we're about to visit and then sell it to Jane's dad?" Cat thought out loud. "Once a major customer like the DIMR is using it, then provided it works cheap and well all of their competitors will start wanting them. And everybody from the Atlantean Foundation to the Apep Consortium also sponsors artifact hunts and remote dig sites like this. And once that many people are using it, it'll be visible on the market for everything from small isolated villages to corporate outposts to military field camps."
  
  "Something innocuous enough it doesn't draw a megacorporate attempt to quash it, not valuable enough they start a knife fight over it, and which in the long run allows for greater local autonomy for everybody from urban tribes to neo-Anarchist enclaves... but subtly enough that the corps don't notice it right away." I agreed.
  
  "And once it's an established product on the market then we just sell the start-up to another entrepreneur and move on. It wouldn't be even that remarkable to do - a lot of venture capitalists operate on the basis that the skills to start a new business are not always the same as to manage and grow an existing business." Jane thought out loud.
  
  "Something to do for the next year or two, then." Cat said. "Something that doesn't involve exploding cars. And I'm still wondering what we're going to do about that."
  
  "Not a damn thing." I admitted reluctantly. "Yes, we got Johnson Screwed, but this time the Johnson is somebody we just can't afford to go after at all. Ehran managed to get the point across that certain boundaries were to be respected more in the future, and now him and Lofwyr are busy giving what-for to the people who actually tried to kill Jane, and..." I shrugged.
  
  "And that's as far as we can practicably push it without getting into a pissing contest with Lofwyr. Which we couldn't win, and which would only leave us further behind the eight-ball than when we started even if by some miracle we did win. Scale's offer might have just been inviting my dad along to help him do something that Lofwyr obviously wanted to get started doing on his own anyway, but-" Jane shrugged. "What can you do?"
  
  "Make a resolution that we're never taking a Saeder-Krupp contract again unless it's the end of the world?" I thought out loud. "But yeah, outside of that..." I trailed off and Cat and I both shrugged.
  
  "Pretty much." Jane reluctantly agreed. "Well, we've got a couple hours before our 'auditing team' arrives at the site so we might as well start acting like auditors."
  
  "I already pulled the file dump." Cat nodded back. "Alex, you brute-force all the raw data, I'll info sortilege for possible trends, and Jane will review the executive summaries-"
  
  
  
  My superhuman learning speed allowed me to get through the equivalent of a degree in mechanical engineering from the Peoples' University online site in about two weeks. Admittedly, that was helped by my having already learned a lot of the degree requirements in other contexts, but there was theory and then there was practice. And I'd been able to get some practice at building simple, straightforward devices like generators and transformers - at least in VR Matrix simulations. So while I didn't have a finished design yet for the portable power project, I now had the mental toolkit to start working on one. In my role as bodyguard I largely just had to follow Jane and Cat around while they inspected and audited and checked the books, so I had plenty of time to multitask.
  
  During our first week at the dig site there we turned up a small drug ring trying to deal novacoke to the laborers, which was a tad bit awkward seeing as how the Ghost Cartel soldatos doing the selling were also the same local 'security firm' the DIMR had hired to help guard the site. There were a lot of 'production fields' up here in this part of the Andes and a very light government presence, so if you weren't coming in to fight a war with the local cartels then you paid them off and liked it. Jane was experienced enough with high-pressure negotiations to be able to point out to the local cartel boss that part of what he was being paid for was keeping the camp clean without actually offending him in the process, and he sat on his overenthusiastic subordinates a little more firmly.
  
  I was starting to wonder if maybe I wasn't going a little too native. Prior to coming to Shadowrun the very thought of living surrounded by honest-to-God South American drug cartel guys - let alone actually paying them off - while they were busy having subsistence farmers grow cocaine just a few miles away would have outraged my proper American soul. Now I was seeing it just as a thing you did, because what else could you do? The dig sites went where the history was buried, and they were a valuable and necessary part both of researching the ancient and Awakened worlds but also being potentially in position if anything went wrong. That's one of the reasons the DIMR existed. And you couldn't work in the Vilcabamba district without paying off the local cartel unless you were ready to fight an entire war to get rid of them, and you couldn't just declare war on everything that offended you even if you did potentially have the forces ot fight it. That was only chaos and carnage by a different route.
  
  Fatima had once accused me of quitting shadowrunning and going to play Urban Brawl because I hadn't thought it 'fair' to shoot people for a living when they couldn't hope to shoot me back. And while she was wrong on that specific point, she did touch upon a larger principle that I had later come to agree with. When you were that good at killing people, you had to be all the more careful about why you killed people.
  
  When I'd gone into full overdrive in the MCT black site at Barstow I'd effectively been invincible. For all that any one of my actions there - let alone all of them done in rapid succession - would have been impossible skill, luck, and split-second timing for anyone else, for me they'd been just exciting enough to not be boring. There could have been twice, three times as many gaurds and it would only have taken me longer to win. There hadn't been any real chance at all that I would lose. And despite the greater and greater lengths I'd gone to since then to try and test my limits, I still hadn't found them. The full power of a Great Dragon, the eldritch abomination that had been a Yama King fully manifested, the most powerful ritual sorcery group casting I'd even vaguely imagined, none of it had done so much as scratch me. I might still have some doubts as to whether I could take hits from nuclear weapons or beat down the mightiest of Great Dragons as easily I had Qian Ya - which is why I didn't propose to test those theories any time soon unless I absolutely had to - but 'are not entirely certain you could readily overpower the greatest threats you could find in the material world' was still ridiculously head and shoulders above even people like Ehran, let alone anyone else.
  
  As near as I could estimate my One Punch Man analogy was literally true. Which meant that several of the main reasons people got into fights in the first place no longer applied to me. Beating up defenseless targets wasn't my thing. The thrill of a challenging fight... well, there was no thrill if there was no real challenge. And 'self defense' essentially morphed into 'defense of other' at that point, and the best defense I could give those nearest and dearest to me was to do my best to start fewer fights than I finished.
  
  This was why Project Archimedes was becoming so important to me. I had more than enough power to take care of my own necessities and indulgences without real effort. On Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I had "physiological" and "safety" taken care of without even needing to lift a finger. "Love and belongingness" was safely in the hands of Cat and Jane, and to a lesser degree our circle of friends. I was free to concentrate on "esteem" and "self-actualization" to a degree that few other beings were, and a generally decent upbringing and growing up on comic books and genre material had primed me to find that esteem and self-actualization - especially now that I had superpowers - by acting in a generally heroic manner.
  
  Oh, not some unrealistic four-color Silver Age heroic standard that only works if you have total control of the script and a strong desire to stay within the old Comics Code, but a more general heroic sense of 'Don't be a bully, don't be a psycho, don't be an asshole, and use your unique powers and abilities for more than just selfish benefit'. I wanted to be an honorable man, but I was well aware that any number of religions, nations, and cultures would gladly sell you their own definition of 'honor' and that no two of them would entirely match. And a lot of what people called 'honor' was just technical nitpicking and/or excuses to pick fights.
  
  My father had once told me that the real definition of honor was "Honorable people cared about the harm that they could conceivably do, and dishonorable people didn't." And that definition worked for me. But what did you do when the situation was such that any immediate solution, any call to arms, all appeared to have too much potential for damage and not enough results? 'Look for a non-immediate solution.' is all that I'd come up with so far. But joining the megacorporate system to try and do good from within had already proved a bust. Still, I was seeing more and more that joining some kind of long-term and entrenched system and using it to start dragging the Overton Window gradually back towards sanity would likely be the only way to have Archimedes work without having to go all fire and blood about it.
  
  It was really a pity that the Horizon plan hadn't worked out.
  
  And while I was on the radar of several dragons and now the immortal elves... well, for the sake of family I wasn't going to oppose Ehran, but I certainly wanted to get to know him a lot better before I risked becoming entangled in his plans. Doing 'clean' work for the DIMR was one thing, but just the momentary brushing up against immortal intrigue we'd already done had already set this 'Black Lodge' on Jane with nigh-impossible force. Then again, it had also led to a big break in the case against an entrenched black magic conspiracy the likes of which I hadn't even suspected, so perhaps my greatest value to the 'big picture' was going to be as a catalyst.
  
  I took a deep breath and reached for the same type of crystalline-clear mental overdrive that I'd reached in the Barstow black site. There was something I was overlooking, something that underlay all of my piecemeal efforts to date that I was failing to put the pieces together with. Something I wasn't letting myself figure out.
  
  But I knew where to go to find some answers.
  
  
  
  "Hello, Alex." the Dweller on the Threshold said "Back so early?"
  
  "It's been almost a year." I replied.
  
  "For me, that's frequent flyer miles." Jane said wearily. "So, what are you questing for now?"
  
  "An oracle." I replied.
  
  "Too lazy to do your own research?" Cat snarked at me.
  
  I bit down on my reflexive answer and actually thought about that one. The Dweller cocked Cat's head curiously as it waited for my reply.
  
  "There may be something to that." I reluctantly conceded. "She can do it far better and more intuitively than I can, and-"
  
  "And you want to throw her a bone." Jane sneered at me. "Like she's a pet dog."
  
  "Cat's already said that she was sensitive about falling behind." I replied. "I want to reassure her that she's not, by letting her have more chances to do what she does better than Jane and I do."
  
  "Fair enough." Cat replied. "But that's not the only reason you do it, is it?"
  
  "Yes. It is." I said firmly. "I know I was a lazy-ass in my pre-isekai life, but that's not a problem I have anymore what with my new willpower boosts."
  
  "Ah yes, substituting raw power for actual thought." Ehran said loftily. "That's always worked out so well in the past."
  
  I yet again fought back my instinctive reaction, struggling to hold on to the superhuman mental clarity I'd deliberately brought here. "It's possible that I am actively mitigating pre-existing tendencies only when I'm actually aware of them, and still sometimes coasting in more subtle ways."
  
  "Ah yes." Ehran sneered. "You are quite good at saying what will immediately reassure your audience without committing yourself to anything, aren't you?"
  
  "I'm letting Jane take it at her own pace." I snapped, offended at his implication, before I forced myself back into that state of clarity.
  
  "Yes you are." Jane agreed icily. "Because you already know how slow my pace is, and you love having your side-piece along without having to give any more."
  
  "You really think Jane would appreciate being pushed?" I told the Dweller.
  
  "Maybe deep-down she's that type of girl." Cat said huskily. "I mean, there was that time we experimented with those handcuffs-"
  
  "No, that is too obvious a piece of bait." I looked at the Dweller. "Either I'm ramped a lot higher this time or you're slipping." I replied confidently... and then sighed inwardly as my memory suddenly prompted me with a conversation I'd recently witnessed. "Shit, it's the same thing Ehran did, isn't it? Being so careful not to push anything on Jane that I thought would make her uncomfortable that I'm not even giving her an invitation." I chewed my lip. "The border between not coercing people and not offering them a choice is sometimes too damn blurry."
  
  The Dweller nodded back at me. "At least you're starting to actually use those gifts of yours now. But you've still got a long way to go." And then it stepped aside.
  
  "Not here to be my full-time therapist, huh?" I lifted an eyebrow.
  
  "You're not the first magician who thought that just bouncing his face off of me frequently enough could be a shortcut to self-mastery." the Dweller said. "My job is to alert people to the necessity of pulling their head out of their ass. They've still got to do the actual pulling on their own."
  
  "Fair enough." I agreed, and stepped forward into the deep metaplanes.
  
  I suddenly arrived standing on a dais in the center of an impossibly white and gleaming Greek temple, set on top of an impossibly high mountain underneath a crystal blue sky. Staring down at the hapless mortal caught between them in the place of judgment were the towering forms of the Olympian pantheon, or at least ten of the seniormost divinities within it from Zeus himself on down.
  
  I immediately recognized the sculpted Matrix host the Corporate Court liked to use for their own private deliberations. Not that I'd ever been anywhere near the Corporate Court, but there was the occasional public broadcast or dramatization. There were several standardized 'Places' that astral quests took one to. This must be the Place of Charisma, where one had to overcome a difficult social challenge without resorting to combat. The possible range of scenarios was as limitless as the depths of astral space themselves, ranging from the utterly fantastical to the tediously commonplace. None of it was real, of course - or, rather, it was precisely as real and unreal as a dream. But you still had to succeed at the challenge by its own internal logic...
  
  "Mr. Kincaid, your application for upgrading your corporation to AAA status shows much promise. But the Court still has concerns that must be satisfactorily addressed before we may render a verdict." the NeoNET justice said. "First among them being your corporation's extremely lackluster compliance with accepted DRM protocols."
  
  "We have implemented all of the industry standards precisely as directed." I replied as reassuringly as I could. "The documentation of our compliance has already been provided-"
  
  "Yes, you implemented all the necessary procedures." the Aztechnology justice sneered. "And yet your nanoforges are routinely jailbroken by every anarchist and data pirate from pole to pole. Why should a megacorporation with such demonstrably inept security procedures be allowed to operate on a larger scale? Even your AA status should be placed under review."
  
  "The business losses - to us - are a negligible fraction of the total revenues involved. Preliminary estimates are that clamping down further would result in far more additional losses from the inefficiencies and redundancies such extreme measures would require in return for much less gains expressed in reduced shrinkage. The 37% increase in manufacturing cost per unit of specialized feedstock alone-" I opened up several virtual display panels scrolling the relevant data. "Our current security model is a stabilized optimax as balanced between conflicting imperatives, and operates on a principle of enlightened self-interest."
  
  "Don't pretend to a naivete you don't possess. Mr. Kincaid." the Saeder-Krupp justice said coldly. "You know full well that we insist on these security measures for far more significant reasons than just preventing losses due to piracy. The potentially destabilizing effect on society as a whole from allowing too much manufacturing capacity to be independent of established logistics chains-"
  
  "Do not think that we are unaware of your role in the significant growth of Neo-Anarchist and other separatist communities." the Ares justice said. "Your water purification technology, your energy independence solutions, and now your next-generation nanoforges-"
  
  "They are all poisoned gifts." the Evo justice said. "Your presentations are carefully calculated and stage-managed to keep us focused on the short-term gain and ignore the long-term and more indirect social implications. To make us capitalists sell you the rope with which you eventually intend to hang us."
  
  "But now you have been caught out at it." the MCT justice said. "This was a final test for you, and you failed."
  
  "We will favorably grant your corporation's upgrade to AAA status." the NeoNET justice surprised me. "But in return, it will no longer be your corporation. You will open your corporation to public trading instead of being privately held, and allow a minimum of seventy-five percent of the voting stock to be included in the initial offering. You will likewise step down as Chief Executive Officer and be ineligible to hold the office of Chairman of the Board for a ten-year period."
  
  "In other words, you gain control over my life's work for a minimum of ten years." I said. "I can still get massively rich off of it, but nothing else."
  
  "We can no longer tolerate your maverick disruptions, nor will we." the Saeder-Krupp justice said. "If you have a compromise of your own that would suit our purposes at least as well, you may suggest it now. Otherwise you must comply, or you will face sanctions."
  
  I speed-read yet again through the details of my own fictional application for upgrade to AAA status in this fictional courtroom, hoping that some solution to the dilemma here would be apparent in the details. My racing mind suggested a solution - if I yielded to their sanctions but ensured that the right person succeeded me at CEO, I could leverage them to at least partially adopt some of my hidden poison pills - the better-hidden ones - anyway. It would take some serious blackmail, and perhaps some outright mental compromise, but it was still well within my possibility. As ruthless as such an action would be, it would ultimately serve the greater good.
  
  "I would prefer not to." I said calmly.
  
  "The penalty for such noncompliance is an Omega Order." the Ares justice sneered. "We acknowledge that you would be a costly foe to destroy, but that's precisely why we're willing to buy you off! Don't be a fool!"
  
  "The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart." I quoted Lois Bujold, and the Place shattered around me.
  
  "You have surmounted the challenge of the Place of Destiny." the Dweller's distant voice reached me. "Advance."
  
  So, not the Place of Charisma after all. Good thing I decided to role-play rather than metagame!
  
  I arrived in the middle of an army of orcs - not metahuman orks, actual honest-to-God Tolkien uruk-hai straight from the movie - on a rocky, lava-swept plain. Okay, I suppose taking the image from my memories of the Lord of the Rings movie is valid but seriously, why the hell am I on the plains of Gorgoroth facing an small army of uruks?
  
  I frantically looked down at my hands while ducking a sword slash from the nearest uruk, terrified at the thought I might see a golden ring on one of my fingers. Whew! Not there, not around my neck. Yeah, I don't care how powerful you are, some things are just not worth the grief.
  
  I grabbed the wrist of the next ork to swing at me, crushed it like a dry breadstick, and caught his falling blade in my other hand and got to work. The same overdrive that let me succeed at Barstow kicked in and I started tearing through the nigh-infinite amount of uruks like they were so much dandelion fluff. I still had to kill them at the same rate of one ork per sword slash, and I was only moving at 'elven swordmaster' type speed instead of Speed Force velocity, so this was going to take a while. But there was no real chance I'd lose.
  
  At any rate, the several hundred orks took me maybe five minutes to kill my way through, and when the last one hit the ground I waited Hmm. I'd won the fight, but I hadn't advanced. So, not the Place of Battle then?
  
  I began a spiraling search pattern out from where I stood, and came across a blood trail. Uruks bled so red that it was practically black, but this was a brighter color. Human or hobbit-? I wondered, following the trail... for my heart to turn to ice when I came upon a dead Cat, her pale and bleeding corpse still being cradled in the arms of a seriously wounded Jane.
  
  The thing about the metaplanes was that even when you knew it wasn't real, you still reacted as if it was. If passing through the Places of Challenge were as simple as just treating it like a VR game where you picked the right answers from a strategy guide, nobody would ever fail these quests. No, the process of projecting this deep into the metaplanes at all metaphysically required a certain level of spiritual engagement. So even though you intellectually knew it wasn't real, everything that made a living soul more than mere intellect would respond as if it were.
  
  So when I saw my wife lying dead in the arms of my lover, my heart collapsed into blackened ash. The numbness of despair and shock was the only thing keeping me moving.
  
  "I'm sorry." Jane whispered, her cheeks gleaming wet with tears even in the dryest desolation of Gorgoroth. "I couldn't-" she slumped, equally as despairing as I was. I realized with horror that Jane's own dagger, still wet with Cat's hearts' blood, exactly matched the wound in my wife's back.
  
  "The Ring?" I asked, my voice empty.
  
  "Yes." Jane said, the One Ring now clearly visible on its chain around her neck "I thought I could-" she shook her head. "But I couldn't." She lowered her head. "Well... at least we don't have to worry about if I have the willpower to destroy it now." she laughed through her sobs.
  
  No, we didn't. All I had to do was carry the wounded Jane the last lap to the Crack of Doom, then toss her in. Or let her jump in, overcome by her own guilt at losing herself to the Ring's corruption momentarily and striking Cat down as she was. I wouldn't remotely have to risk its corruption myself. I wouldn't ever have to fear becoming an immortal, unstoppable doom upon Arda even worse than Sauron. All I had to do was let Jane pay the penalty for Cat's murder, the penalty she visibly wanted to pay. It would be that easy.
  
  And it would be playing directly into Sauron's hands. The one thing you could never do in trying to deal with the One was accept a moral compromise. Frodo had, at the end, when he'd abused the One's power to command Gollum. Sam Gamgee hadn't, when he'd carried it all the while with no thought except to give it back to Frodo and hadn't let the thought of 'Samwise the Strong' even be taken seriously.
  
  I knelt alongside Jane and picked her up, carrying to the nearest place of safety I could find. I brushed aside all her tearful, incoherent apologies as I gently bound her wounds.
  
  And then I reached out and pulled the One Ring right off her neck, snapping its chain, and stuffed it in my pocket.
  
  "You have conquered the Place of Fear." the Dweller acknowledged. "Advance."
  
  Mordor faded into nonexistence all around me, leaving me standing on a small island floating in a sea of stars. Above me was a lighthouse - oh, not the lighthouse of Bioshock, but a tall gleaming tower of white marble, faintly invoking both elven myth and classical iconography and suggestions of worlds I had never yet seen.
  
  A blind woman sat cross-legged on a humble straw mat in front of a campfire, adjacent to the lighthouse doors.
  
  "Welcome to the Citadel." she said. "You have quested for guidance. You have found prophecy."
  
  "And what is prophesized?" I asked her.
  
  "The one who would conquer the world will offer a choice to the conqueror." she said. "The conqueror may accept and know the greatest of betrayals, or he may refuse and know the greatest of losses." She held up three fingers, and then slowly curled one in.
  
  "Am I either of these people?" I asked her.
  
  "A wiser question than many have asked in a similar position." she grinned wickedly while curling in a second finger. "The master of gold is the one who would. You are the one who could."
  
  "Last question. I originally sought guidance for my Project Archimedes. Have you any to give?" I said after a long pause for thought.
  
  "The man who took all of the United States but one knew the secret of limitless success." she answered. Wait, what the hell did that mean-?
  
  "There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit." my expanded brain suddenly supplied the quotation. Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States... who in the 1984 election had won 49 states out of 50, the only President to ever do so.
  
  Well, at least the guidance was useful. As for the prophecy?
  
  "Thank you, oracle of the Citadel, for what you have been able to share." I said politely, and bowed. She bowed back from her seated position, and I opened my eyes.
  
  "Can't sleep?" Cat projected wirelessly after slipping my trodes onto my head so we could 'talk' silently without waking up Jane from where she was snoring snored quietly on the other side of the air mattress in our tent.
  
  "Vision quest." I answered her. "I had some things I was stuck on."
  
  "See anything useful?" Cat asked me.
  
  "Several things. But at this moment, the most important one is about someone we both love." I replied, and then we discussed the matter for quite a long while.
  
  
  
  "You want me to what?" Jane said incredulously. "That's not even legal, is it?"
  
  "Jane, our marriage license legally expired the instant Alex and I burned our SINs." Cat said tolerantly. "The only thing keeping me and him husband and wife are all the parts of marriage that don't exist on legal forms and in bureaucratic categories. And none of those parts require conventional monogamy."
  
  "We're not proposing." I rushed to reassure Jane, "because that would put you on the spot to answer yes or no. And you don't just drop that on someone with no warning. We're just... letting you know it's possible. Because I finally clued in that it's not a thing that would come spontaneously to mind, or could ever be expected to."
  
  "We'd very much welcome you as more than just a lover, or even a live-in mistress, in case you had any doubts about that." Cat picked up on the beat. "By now neither of us ever want to see you not be a part of our lives."
  
  "If you don't feel the same way, that's fi-" I began, only to have Jane's hands come up to cover both my and Cat's mouths.
  
  "Stop. Talking." she insisted firmly. "Good God, let a woman have a chance to catch up!"
  
  "This is revenge for Barstow, isn't it." I said with a quirky grin as I gently pulled her fingers off my lips.
  
  "Well, yes." Jane admitted matter-of-factly, unable to restrain a brief grin of her own. "But also-" she shook her head. "It's not exactly the conventional thing!"
  
  Cat visibly mimed putting both her hands over her own mouth as if trying to prevent the obvious comment of 'None of us are very conventional people!' from exploding outwards, and Jane nodded in acknowledgement of the byplay.
  
  "You want time to think about it." I said to Jane.
  
  "No." she shocked us. "If it were up to me-" she smiled lovingly at both of us. "I could answer you right now. But it's not entirely up to me. I'm still changing apprenticeships, and I can't commit to anything until I find out if my dad can actually guilt Harlequin into giving it up and then if he'll accept..."
  
  "Okay." Cat agreed. "That's perfectly reasonable, and God knows neither of us wants to pressure you. We just..."
  
  "Wanted you to know where you're welcome." I finished.
  
  "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Jane agreed. "And... wow, I hadn't even hoped to have one of those places for a long long while. You helped me find one, and now you offer me another?" She leaned and kissed me, and then Cat. "I love you both."
  
  "Well I should certainly hope so, or else this would never work." Cat snarked, and we all shared a laugh.
  
  And while I laughed along with them I already knew that when the choice the oracle had prophesied came, I would have to accept the betrayal.
  
  After all, even the greatest of betrayals might still be survivable. The greatest of losses certainly wouldn't.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: I had to rewrite this chapter three fucking times. I'd originally had an adventure idea in mind... and then it fell apart as I tried to write it. And then I tried another scenario, and that likewise failed to come together. It just wasn't flowing at all, until I finally realized that the problem was that I didn't want to have either yet another villain be coincidentally tripped over (coincidence has been abused enough as is) or yet another blast from the past coming back for revenge. I mean, given our MCs some credit at being able to not leave a backtrail.
  
  And so when you don't have man vs. man and man vs. world on the table, then you go for man vs. self. Plus foreshadowing. And so you got an astral quest, as Alex got to go spelunking in his own soul again as well as take advantage of an often overlooked resource (the 'seek enlightenment and omens' option of astral quests instead of a more tangible gain like a spirit's true name or some shit) for him to try and figure out how to make Archimedes work better.
  
  Oh, and the amusing thing is that I actually rolled the astral quest, right out of the 3e Magic in the Shadows rules. Outside of one fudge to make the thematics fit better (Place of Destiny instead of Place of Charisma) I actually did roll all this, and I got to the Citadel in just three die rolls.
  
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  With both of us comfortably resting a hand on each shoulder, the taut and white-faced Jane took a deep breath and opened the door of the luxury hotel suite in Caracas. She'd received a summons that she couldn't deny, and so we'd rushed things to completion at the dig site and flown out here where he'd given a rendezvous.
  
  "Eorin." Jane formally greeted the face-painted elf who waited for us in the suite's living room.
  
  "Telenyn." he replied with equal formality. "Although not my student for much longer, if certain others would have their way."
  
  "And you know why that's true." Jane replied tightly.
  
  "And you know that these are matters to be discussed in private." Harlequin said to her firmly, as if we weren't there.
  
  "They have invited me into their hearts and into their lives. There is nothing you can say to me that I will not share with them." Jane said defiantly.
  
  "All the same, this matter will not progress until they leave." he replied, staring at Jane intimidatingly.
  
  "Make me." I interrupted him, shrugging insolently. As we'd discussed previously, Cat and Jane sidestepped to clear the line of fire between me and him.
  
  Harlequin's eyes narrowed at the byplay, not being arrogant enough to miss the fact that Jane was apparently confident I could withstand whatever he could throw. "Have we met?" he probed.
  
  "Not in this world or any previous." I replied, and he raised one eyebrow at my clear reference to the prior ages of the cycle.
  
  "Curious. I wonder what the Scribe would make of you." he mused theatrically, while stroking his chin. "We're very old frenemies, you know. Even while at odds, he would still take me seriously if I warned him that some stranger was attempting to set him and I at odds aga-"
  
  It was a crouching uppercut, delivered right into the junction between his upper thighs, and it left him collapsed forward onto his knees in such shocking agony that he didn't even have the breath to scream. I listened to the faint whistling noises of him trying to replenish oxygen with a diaphragm temporary paralyzed in shock, and waited until he'd started gasping preparatory to shouting to put my heel on the back of his neck and press him into the floor so hard that he could feel the floorboards starting to creak beneath the force I was exerting.
  
  "Your defensive spells are holding up better than the structural strength of what you're laying on, so I probably can't kill you by heel stomping." I observed calmly. "So do I test how far down towards the basement I can get you with a single kick, or...?"
  
  "Jane, would you and the young lady step outside for a moment please?" Harlequin asked with commendable savoir-faire given the position he was in. "
  
  Once they were further outside the blast radius I hauled him up off the floor by the scruff of his neck before he could react and sighed inwardly at the barely restrained malice in his glare. I shrugged and dragged his right hand up by the wrist to lay his palm squarely on my Adam's apple. "Okay, hit me with your best shot."
  
  Harlequin smiled disarmingly at me, and then without a visible change of expression clenched his fist hard enough to bend sheet metal. I stared levelly back as if I felt absolutely nothing - which I hadn't - and then didn't change my expression when he switched to channelling a Death Touch spell so powerful that it would probably have given a Great Dragon a heart attack. A spell of madness battered against my mental defenses to a similar lack of effect, and then I calmly clenched my own fingers around his neck and irresistibly pulled him off of me and left him dangling with his feet slightly off the floor. I then put just enough force into my grip for him to understand that if I wanted to at this moment I could snap his head off like a bottlecap, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, before lowering him back to the floor and insultingly brushing imaginary dust off his jacket and straightening his collar for him. I then ruthlessly interrupted him with his mouth still barely half-open. "Do you like movies?"
  
  "Witty non-sequiturs are my particular motif." Harlequin replied after a brief pause. "It's bad enough that you're such a ruffian, but what's far worse is that you're a copycat."
  
  "Right now, I'm a drama critic." I riposted. "Which leaves me with a rich field to operate in here, because I have never met anyone as wrapped up in their own drama as you are. You can come in now, dear!" I raised my voice, and Jane and Cat both re-entered the room.
  
  "If I'm the one indulging in gratuitous drama, why are you the one arranging for the audience?" Harlequin said insolently.
  
  "She's put up with your shit for over a decade, so more than anyone else she's entitled to be here when you get called on it." I said. "But I was asking you about movies. And the reason was because you seem to think that you're in one."
  
  "And you don't? Let me guess your particular genre - bulging biceps and breathless, brainless maidens?" he sneered at me.
  
  "You're literally older than Egyptian hieroglyphs but you are still that fucking clueless about the social graces." I eye-rolled incredulously. "How do you even manage that? I mean, you do realize you just called Jane - the young woman you're actually trying to impress here - a bimbo by implication, right?" I smiled inwardly as I saw his body language suddenly go taut at the inward wince he just gave, and pressed the attack. "But that's just what you do, isn't it? It might not be deliberate cruelty, but it's such self-absorbed thoughtlessness that it cuts all those around you just the same."
  
  "I have pocket lint older than you." Harlequin sneered. "And I have long since been thoroughly educated in how 'Wisdom from the mouths of babes' is a delightful fable and nothing more."
  
  "That reminds me, we were discussing film studies." I segued. "Let's play a game, shall we? I'm going to describe a character and a plot, and you're going to tell me what genre of film he comes from." I waited for him to try and say anything to cut me off, and then deliberately drove right over him. "So here we have the tortured brooding loner with a past full of tragic loss, who is also one of his world's master magicians. One day he happens across a bright and kind young orphan with a vast hidden potential she has yet to even begin to tap, who is also entirely unknown to her the heir to an ancient magical legacy. So he approaches her and offers to mentor her introduction to a whole hidden world of magic and wonder that she is unaware of her ancestral connection to-"
  
  "Urban fantasy." Harlequin said flatly. "And if your clumsily disguised allegory is a reference to me, also a romance."
  
  "Wait until the end." I said. "But then tragedy strikes. Another archmage, a forbidding and stern patriarch and master intriguer, strikes out at our protagonist via ritual magic and a spell link secretly implanted in the young woman. However, the spell goes wrong when the defenses of our protagonist attempt to reflect the attack back at the archmage and hit only the conduit instead."
  
  "And the protagonist goes to incredible expense and effort to ensure that the young woman is healed good as new, and then spends years showing her all the wonders of magic and the world. They grow closer, and eventually she gives her heart to him. He still grieves at night, but at least part of him knows happiness again, and she is happy-" Harlequin insists.
  
  "-until the day she finds out that her mentor only approached her originally as a means towards an end, and that it was his carelessness that almost crippled her and not the deliberate malice of the other mage as he had deliberately let her believe."
  
  "He never told her that!" Harlequin insisted.
  
  "He never did anything to stop her from leaping to the wrong conclusion either." Jane said with a voice as empty as the chill of space. "And he deliberately fed that impression with clever words that were never quite lies, but were never more than half the truth."
  
  "And neither had he ever told her that his rival archmage was not a threat to the young woman's life, but was instead her father. And yes, he had his definite failings as a parent - which he's never pretended not to have - but the fact remains, he would never have offered his daughter any deliberate harm and our protagonist had been certain of that all along." I again waited a ruthless moment before continuing. "And before you object, note that this is the generous assumption. Because if he hadn't known that all along, then he deliberately dragged an innocent young woman into a war between archmages when he couldn't have any assurance of her not being targeted deliberately by the other side. Which would be worse? Such reckless disregard before, or such base deception after?" I said, enjoying Harlequin's stricken impression.
  
  "I- but the story was not that simple!" he insisted. "They never are!"
  
  "You're referring to the romance subplot?" I redirected. "Well, no, 'complicated drama' was our main character's forte, and nothing was as emotionally complicated to him as his own heart. But our leading lady's heart? Oh, that was quite simple. She was in love, the sort of innocent, heady love only possible to a young woman who had never been in a serious relationship before. And with a man who she knew was handsome and charming, and had thought had come to her simply out of a desire to protect and guide and with no hidden agenda of his own. And who she thought had saved her life at risk of his own from a murderous attack. And who she thought loved her back as deeply as she loved him." I kept driving ruthlessly.
  
  Harlequin clenched his fists, but remained helplessly silent in the face of Jane's tight-lipped glare and pained eyes - and the certain knowledge that he couldn't stop me from beating his ass into paste if he actually tried to swing. "And?"
  
  "And then, after years of trying and failing to reach her, the long-lost father is finally able to show her the truth. The mentor she'd trusted had schemed to draw her into the ages-old vendetta in the first place for his own purposes, while the father would have gladly seen her never be involved. And her near-crippling had been at the reckless hands of the same lover she'd originally taken to her bed at least partly as thanks for saving her life, when the truth was that he'd almost taken it. And that she had never truly known what degree of love and for whom had been in her teacher's heart, because he was so tormented by his past that he couldn't know either. And so the young woman's heart broke, and for far too long she had only her studies and her shadow war against the creatures of darkness to devote herself to. Because she had no person she could trust anymore. Not the father who had left her, and who she barely knew anything of. And certainly not the mentor who'd failed the first and most important duties of a teacher of magic - to teach their student the difference between truth and illusion."
  
  "But the illusion didn't hurt." Harlequin insisted. "It was happiness, and peace. And it would have lasted if it hadn't been for-"
  
  "The world." I cut him off. "If her father had never told the young woman the truth, eventually it would have come out anyway. It always does." I shook my head. "So, what sort of story is it where a young woman is sucked into battles not her own, maimed by a man who never has the courage to admit his fault, taken and ravished under false pretenses and raised on a diet of pretty lies, and then left to walk her own path when the harsh truth cuts her to the bone? To the point her teacher has no idea who she has come to love or what their provenance is? But who, when he finds out, immediately leaps to browbeating and attempts at manipulation? To try and deliberately provoke a father's wrath to aim as your own weapon again, and with a similar lack of concern over what else could have been hit in the crossfire?" I stared at him. "You tell me, drama expert. What kind of movie am I describing, in what genre? Is it a love story?"
  
  "I-" Harlequin gritted his teeth on things he couldn't say.
  
  "No." I agreed with his unspoken words. "It's a psychological horror movie. Or one of those dark paranormal romances, where the handsome and charming mentor at the start of the chronicle isn't the hero but is revealed to actually be a vampire or demon, and it's the rough-hewn monster hunter who comes along later that's the real love interest." I finished crushingly.
  
  "And where the estranged father and daughter end the story at least talking to each other again." Jane broke in. "Because even if they've still got a lot of mistakes to work past there, they both know that neither one actually intends to harm the other, and that they both want a healthier relationship." She sighed. "I thought I knew what you wanted, once. But then I found out that I'd never really known you at all. And worse yet, when you faced the prospect of losing me as a student I saw your first reaction - and it wasn't to try and find out how I'd changed and why. To learn why I wanted a different teacher now. All you saw was that you were losing the next round of your stupid rivalry, and you lapsed right back into the same old manipulating and intriguing you always did."
  
  "And your father hasn't?" Harlequin said. "You said it yourself, you're only barely starting to know him! And even if you believe me a biased source on the topic, the fact reminds I am still a vastly more informed source than you!"
  
  "I know that when the Black Lodge attempted to kill me, my father's immediate reflex was to throw himself in front of the attack at the genuine risk of his own life." Jane replied. "Just as I know that you were nowhere near there. You hadn't so much as checked in with me for almost a year." She shook her head. "What, did you think he was lying about what happened?"
  
  "No, as that would defeat the point." Harlequin replied. "But he is entirely capable of deliberately setting up a genuine attack on you precisely so that he could be Johnny-on-the-spot to 'defeat' it. Did you even consider that?"
  
  "We already know who set the Black Lodge up to attack Jane, you arrogant twit." Cat broke in fearlessly. "Did you even ask for the whole story before making up your mind? Or did you just assume that you knew everything, because of course it had to be people living up to - or down to - your expectations of them in all things, instead of actually having their own lives?"
  
  "It was Lofwyr." I cut in. "Not that we can prove it, because the SOB is legitimately that good at what he does. But Scale as much as admitted without actually admitting that he'd dragged us across the Black Lodge's line of fire."
  
  "And he chose to do this in Boston, when Jane was visiting her father." Harlequin seized on this. "So. We were both played by a third party."
  
  "Look, if you want to go butt heads with Gold-Master over this then feel free." Jane said. "It's not like we owe him anything but a bad turn. We just can't try to retaliate, and neither can my father, because we've actually got too much to risk losing in return for too little gain. Whether or not that same condition applies to you is a decision only you can make for yourself." She paused and continued. "That's not me wanting you to go off and get yourself immolated over nothing, mind you. God knows you hurt me terribly, but even if I hated you enough over it to wish you dead - which I don't - then I'd still treasure not coming to emulate your methods even more than I would vengeance."
  
  "That's called emotional transparency." I whipsawed him. "It's something you might want to look into."
  
  "And what is your interest in this?" Harlequin asked me.
  
  "I love her, and she's my beloved friend." I said simply. "So yes, I'm more than willing to flex on the bastard ex-boyfriend to make sure he understands when to back off." I smiled. "And don't forget, you and Ehran have all those immortal elven rules that keeps your vendetta channelled and all. But I'm not an immortal elf, and I don't have to be all 'the forms must be obeyed' when I declare kanly." I said. "I don't want any more fights than I'm already in, and even me punching you in the dick was largely me keeping a promise. So if you want to never see me again, I'm up for that." I shrugged. "Or if you want to keep trying to find ways to make yourself any part of Jane's life in the future without her express invitation... I'm up for that too."
  
  Harlequin stared me in the eyes, before he finally lowered his gaze and turned to Jane. "I never intended to hurt you, you know." he said softly.
  
  "I know." she agreed. "But that only makes it worse."
  
  "... I suppose it does." he conceded, and for a moment he looked as old as all the millennia he'd actually lived. "Jane Foster, I acknowledge that I have done you great wrong, by acts of stealth, of deception, and of neglect. And I offer as compensation..." he paused, and then forced himself to continue in a voice he could barely keep from breaking. "... an unconditional release from all duties and obligations as my apprentice, and my blessings in your future endeavors under any mentor you choose or none." He sighed and held up his palm to cut off Jane's reaction as he continued. "And I also offer... my concession in the chal'han your father and I recently fought."
  
  "Why?" Jane asked him. "As disgusting as your methods were - as the whole business of chal'han is, in many respects - you'd gamed the rules perfectly. You'd earned your victory."
  
  "I did it earn it, yes." Harlequin said. "But..." he shook his head. "I can no longer pretend to myself that I deserved it."
  
  "I accept your compensation, Caimbuel." Jane eventually said somberly. "And..." she bit her lip. "I don't know if I can ever really forgive you. I'm even more afraid that you'll never forgive yourself. But the entire point of our traditions in this regard is to allow the forswearing of vengeance and the end of vendetta even when people can't forgive, and that much I can do. And will."
  
  Harlequin turned to me and Cat. "Take good care of her, will you?" Even against her own father, if need be. hung clearly unspoken in the air.
  
  "We will." I agreed.
  
  Harlequin stepped forward with his hand outstretched, and Jane forced herself to step forward and take it without hesitating. "Good fortune to you, former student."
  
  "Good fortune to you, former teacher." she responded, and then we withdrew and left him alone with his ghosts.
  
  
  
  "Did you mean what you said?" Cat asked her as we barely tasted a luxurious lunch in a rooftop restaurant well away from Harlequin's own hotel. "About hoping he could forgive himself?"
  
  "Anybody who actually deserves to exist in that kind of self-torture forever is somebody that I'd already hate enough to want dead." Jane said. "And I don't have that kind of hate. Not for him, at least." She shook her head angrily. "And really, that's enough about him. He's my past. You guys are my future."
  
  "Speaking of futures, we need to get in touch with your father and tell him Harlequin conceded." I said.
  
  "I already sent his office a message, but he's out of contact." Jane said. "The Black Lodge thing really has him jumping." She snapped her fingers. "Ugh, if I'd been thinking I could have asked somebody to go help out my dad. For all his personality flaws he is legitimately devastating in a fight. And lord knows most of the other elves like him are already onboard with this effort. I hear even Tir na Nog is buying in."
  
  "I wonder if the big L has gotten any other dragons to tag in?" I thought out loud.
  
  Jane and Cat both shrugged. "It's not like they'd post that kind of thing on the Matrix." she said.
  
  "Do you think we - or at least I - should try to tag in there ourselves?" I wondered. "It is a very important job."
  
  "As much as overprotective dad might be trying to sideline me from the action deliberately, the fact remains that he knows vastly more about the Black Lodge and about this kind of shadow warfare in general than we do, and he already knows at least some of your power." Jane said reasonably. "So if he's already considered and rejected the idea of having you tag in - which he has, or else he'd already have asked you - then I lean to 'Let's not second-guess that without a lot more cause than we have'."
  
  "So, we're at loose ends again." Cat said. "And it's too soon to do another Vegas, and while Caracas is one hell of a jumping shadow-town it's not really my kind of scene. It's like all the desperation of Lagos without all the decay, but that only makes the energy of the place worse somehow."
  
  "Twenty-three million people all jammed into an urban sprawl barely twice the size of Hong Kong." I agreed. "The one large free city left in Amazonia, a modern-day Port Royal crammed with the refugees of eveywhere between Colombia and the Yucatan. Great place to come to get lost, but also an easy place to be lost."
  
  "Permanently." Jane agreed. "And sure, we're all very formidable people - even our cute little Matrix nerd here-" she teased.
  
  "Somebody is on a fast-track to having to clean out her own commlink viruses." Cat stuck out her tongue at Jane.
  
  "-but who wants any fights they don't have to get into." I agreed. "So... hrm. We've done a big project for me recently, we just finished up a major milestone or two for Jane, but Cat hasn't had a turn since Horizon." I rubbed my chin. "Where do you want to go, honey?"
  
  "Follow me." Cat surprised us.
  
  Back in the privacy of our own hotel room, and with the maximum anti-eavesdropping precautions we used whenever discussing immortal or other secret matters, she continued.
  
  "That prophecy you received in the metaplanes has been a lot on my mind." Cat continued.
  
  "Prophecies are a disputed topic among magicians." Jane replied. "There have been some consistent successes with divination - various forms of scrying are valid metamagic techniques, just ask the Diviners' Guild in France - but even though a successful quest to the Citadel will never tell you something that's false, it's still not necessarily a useful truth."
  
  "I already know Alex has decided that if the situation comes to pass he'll choose being betrayed over suffering loss - not least because I know exactly who he thinks will be lost." Cat agreed. "But if your plan is 'survive a sudden yet inevitable betrayal', then shouldn't you forewarn yourself as much as possible as to what kind of betrayal is coming? And before you ask 'How do we do that?', remember that while we have no clue on how or why yet we almost certainly know who."
  
  "Lofwyr." I agreed. "The 'master of gold' is, 99 out of 100, referring to his use-name of 'Gold-Master'. And the other 1 out of 100 is covered by the fact that we already know that big scaly sent Scale to set us up for the whole Black Lodge thing."
  
  "So the reasonable inference is that there's a part two to his scheme coming up." Jane agreed. "Now, how exactly do you think we can risk getting inside that decision loop without risking a transgression on anything that Lofwyr considers 'his territory'? Remember, the main thing protecting us so far is that Lofwyr has no legitimate claim that we've done anything against him or his. We grief any of his stuff and get even credibly suspected of doing it, we make ourselves a lot more vulnerable to his machinations. And cultivating that kind of further vulnerability is kinda the opposite of protecting ourselves."
  
  "I've already been doing some public domain searches." Cat replied. "And the first thing I noticed was that there was a period of almost two months recently where Lofwyr went into total seclusion. Oh, there was no public announcement but with enough info sortilege the pattern was obvious to me. He spent over seven full weeks having nothing to do with managing Saeder-Krupp at all. The op tempo completely changed to something suggesting that it was just the senior human executives and assistants maintaining a holding pattern. You know probably even better than I do that his normal decision-making pattern is completely non-metahuman."
  
  "One of the world's greatest multitaskers and worst delegators, and superhumanly intelligent with all of it." I agreed. "So, the obvious question is 'What was he working on'? When exactly was this period of seclusion, and what else was going on at or shortly before that time?"
  
  "That's the thing." Cat said. "It started less than 48 hours after we left Hong Kong."
  
  "... your battle with Qian Ya." Jane realized. "Lung must have told Lofwyr. In addition to the part where Lung is one of Lofwyr's closer allies, something mystically unprecedented and unique is traditionally something that any dragon should bring to the Loremaster's attention. And Lung is nothing if not a traditionalist."
  
  "So I'm the target." I realized. "But then why was the opening gambit against you?"
  
  "Well, your response to someone trying to hurt either me or Jane is really predictable." Cat agreed. "But no, that presupposes Lofwyr's first response on discovering the existence of someone uniquely powerful was to aggro that guy on himself. And that makes no sense."
  
  "No, it was to try and aggro Alex on the Black Lodge." Jane said. "Remember, the original scheme was not supposed to explode in everyone's face remotely as quickly or on such a large scale. So, he wanted to make you a weapon without you knowing that you were one. That fits his style, but why the Black Lodge? Why then? If he wanted them dead he wouldn't necessarily need you. Scale and my father working together could have shattered the defenses on the Georgetown chantry equally as well as my father and you working together did."
  
  "It was a test." Cat hypothesized. "Scale was there to see exactly what Alex could do with his own eyes, and not just rely on second-hand observations from Lung."
  
  "But the strategy tree could also fork." I realized. "If there hadn't been that big ritual sorcery thing to draw me in immediately, if Ehran had attacked by himself later, then Scale could have leapt in and shattered the Georgetown chantry... and been in position to loot it immediately, without being caught out and having to bargan with us. So, something the Black Lodge had was necessary to Lofwyr's overall goal. But I'm also an eventual part of it."
  
  "And here we run into the first problem of trying to figure out a dragon's schemes, the part where they're always playing multiple angles at once. Our brains are serial, theirs run in parallel." Jane cursed.
  
  "Wait. Jane, you know the most about Lofwyr of all of us. What's the first thing he'd do when working with unknown phenomena and not facing an imminent time pressure?" I asked.
  
  "Gather more data on it, of course. Whenever possible, Lofwyr always makes damn sure he knows what he's sticking his snout into before he leaps." Jane answered.
  
  "Well, that certainly answers the question of where we're going." Cat asked. "Because if we assume that part of Lofwyr's scheming was gathering as much information about Alex as possible, there's only one place he'd start."
  
  
  
  "Welcome to Seattle!" Pistons greeted us cheerfully as we entered her house.
  
  "So, a triad, huh? Where does he get all the energy?" Fatima joked.
  
  "Physical adept." Cat joked back.
  
  "So, what brings you back to the Emerald City? Business or pleasure?" Pistons asked as we dropped the take-out we'd brought onto the table and she went to go fetch the beers.
  
  "Business." Jane sighed. "We're afraid that S-K is doing a major probe into Wild Man's background, and since his traceable background starts here..."
  
  "Oh." Fatima said seriously. "Damn, and here I had all these sex jokes I wanted to make at your expense but didn't that just throw a bucket of ice water on the mood. What the hell did you guys step in, and am I going to go need to check the perimeter right now?"
  
  "We haven't hit anything S-K at all, and it's not shooting trouble." I reassured them. "It's more that they've got some vague intrigue going that's apparently about me and my... unique abilities... and we want to try and figure out something about what the hell the big L wants before he makes whatever his next move is. So, has anyone been shaking any trees here?"
  
  "Well if they have then they haven't approached us." Pistons answered soberly. "Then again, assuming Lofwyr sent anyone with enough brains to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions printed on the heel they'd already know that asking us would be a waste of time."
  
  "We wouldn't tell them shit, and we would call you to let you know they'd been looking." Fatima agreed. "So, no. I can ask around...?"
  
  "Please do." Cat said. "And this isn't conjecture. I've already been doing some Matrix work, and both the U-Dub and Lone Star hosts have had subtle traces of S-K Prime hacks on them recently. Three guesses what records were the targets of the hack."
  
  "Anything related to Wild Man or you." Pistons agreed. "Shit, yeah. I'll start going over ShadowSEA logs to see if they pulled any dumps from there. Facet owes me a couple of favors."
  
  "I already know that Caveman and Sergeant Ivan are gone, and everybody else who did the Northwest Pyramid run is in this room." I said. "But leaving aside the beer money and routine jobs, there's also the Auburn run to check back on me through. Anybody using Green Dreams for a source of information would be worse off than when they started, but have you heard any from Pipes or Livewire lately?"
  
  "Pipes left Seattle to go do the T-bird circuit in Denver a couple of years ago, no clue if he's even still alive." Pistons shrugged. "Livewire's still working here, though."
  
  "All right, I'll set up a meet with him." I said.
  
  "I can do that." Cat said. "He's from Tarislar too, we've met. If you'd brought him up to my place during the Auburn run instead of making him wait in the van, I'd have vouched."
  
  "Let me guess. Another ex-boyfriend?" Jane teased.
  
  "Ew, I was like thirteen when he finally left the neighborhood." Cat shot back. "No, we just lived on the same block. He ran off a couple of Spikes that tried to mug me once, though, that's how I know him."
  
  "I knew I liked him for a reason." I said. "Okay, let's get to work."
  
  It took us barely two days to confirm that Saeder-Krupp had made a major probe into Seattle looking for any information on my background recently, but that they had been very subtle in the doing. No door-kickings, no overt use of megacorporate resources. Hired shadowrunners had done most of the legwork - many of them out-of-towners brought in specially for the occasion. It was notably more expensive for Lofwyr doing it that way, but also far harder to trace.
  
  But the break in the case came, from all people, from a man I hadn't spent any time thinking about since the week after I'd stopped working for him.
  
  "Hey kid." Max said. He was still working the angles in Touristville the same way he always had... a little greyer, a little slower, but no less prosperous and certainly no less healthy. The boring approach was at least having the hoped-for effects on his longevity.
  
  "Hey Max." I replied, sitting down in his little dingy office the same way I had so many times. "Long time no see."
  
  "I heard you got your past back, then lost it again." he said. "Urban Brawl, huh?"
  
  "That was just a phase." I said. "But yeah. I'm still trying stuff out."
  
  "Well, you're not dead yet." he conceded. "And judging by the threads, you're earning well."
  
  "Got married too." I said.
  
  "Yeah." he agreed. "I'm a little hurt I didn't get a wedding invitation."
  
  "You'd have flown to Lisbon?" I said disbelievingly. "Max, you hate driving as far as Tacoma."
  
  "It's the principle of the thing!" he joked. "So, since it obviously ain't nostalgia brings you back, what does?"
  
  "Backstory." I said. "Someone's been making a major legwork probe into my life. And you were the first fixer I ever had after I started using this face."
  
  "So all that crap about losing your ID in the Crash was bullshit." Max said disapprovingly.
  
  "Oh, I lost my whole life, if not necessarily from the Crash." I admitted. "Shit, for a while there I barely knew who I was."
  
  "So it was like that?" he rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Yeah, that fits. Samson mentioned to me once that when he was teaching you, it was like you started out not knowing shit but then you picked it up so fast it was like all he had to do was remind you and you were remembering it like you already knew it. So, brainwipe?"
  
  "It was some weird shit, and that's all I'll say about it." I said. "The important thing is, somebody else is trying to backtrace me. So, since you're where I started out in Seattle, you'd be the end of their trail here. Did anyone come?"
  
  "Yeah." Max admitted. "Someone did. Never said who he was working for, but he was...not the kind of guy you said no to."
  
  "What'd they look like?" I asked.
  
  "Elf in a ten-thousand-nuyen suit." Max replied. "All smiles and soft words, no threats or gestures, but still scary as shit."
  
  I played a hunch and pulled up a picture on my commlink. "This guy?"
  
  "Yeah, that's him!" Max agreed. "Who the hell is he?"
  
  "He works for Saeder-Krupp." I said, putting away the picture of Scale. "And that's probably all you want to know about him."
  
  "Fuck yeah." Max agreed emphatically. "Dealing with dragons is way above my pay grade. Should've been above yours, too." he reproved me.
  
  "It's not that I ever dealt with him." I demurred. "It's just that he seems to want to deal with me for some reason. Did our company man say anything about where he was going next?"
  
  "Nope." Max said. "Why do I have this big hunch I'm never gonna see you again?"
  
  "Because you just might not." I agreed. "Well... thanks for all your help, Max. And thanks again for getting me started."
  
  "You're welcome." the old fixer agreed, shaking my hand. "Good luck out there, kid. You're gonna need it."
  
  
  
  The three of us walked down the trash-strewn street in Redmond, retracing the steps I'd originally walked so long, long ago.
  
  "You're sure he came here?" Jane asked.
  
  "The local gangers confirmed that 'the scary elf' was walking up and down this section of town for almost a week after the date Max said that Scale visited him." I said. "I can think of only one thing Scale would be searching for here at all, much less doing so personally."
  
  "Your arrival point in this world." Cat said soberly. "How the hell did Lofwyr get that far?"
  
  "I have no clue what would make him guess I had an extra-universal origin." I said. "But if you were doing a major legwork trace on me then you'd get as far as Max. Even Horizon eventually cracked that code, as we found out later. And the first time I met Max was the afternoon of the day I arrived here."
  
  "You dropped in, you had that fight, then you legged it to Touristville with the drabs of cash you'd looted off the corpses and used it to buy an introduction to someone who could give you work." Jane agreed. "So assuming that enough investigative work could turn up anyone who remembered seeing you on that day-"
  
  "I also ate in a McHugh's." I remembered. "So there'd be security camera footage."
  
  "Bingo." Cat said. "Anybody seeing that archived imagery would have noticed that you were wearing looted clothes."
  
  "Even so, the trail would be several years old." Jane said. "Running it back to here would have taken an incredible amount of legwork."
  
  "Scale, the right-hand man of one of the wealthiest and most powerful entities in the world, spent a week personally searching dingy Barrens alleyways looking for something." I said. "That's an 'incredible amount of effort' by any standard."
  
  "Well... here we are." I said, barely controlling a shiver. While there were of course no visible traces of what had happened here back on that fateful New Years' Day in 2065, I had never forgotten this particular alleyway. I could still close my eyes and see exactly where those four orks had fallen, and in what order they'd died-
  
  "That's where I arrived." I said, pointing at a particular patch of pavement.
  
  Jane opened her astral eyes, assensing the scene. "Well, I don't pick up any traces of anything- wait." she blinked. "There's a very faint signature of earth magic on the pavement there."
  
  "From my arrival?" I asked.
  
  "No, it's much more recent." she said. "It would have to have been left here while we were in South America."
  
  Cat's eyes opened. "Wait, there's a fresh RFID tag here!" She knelt down and started waving her open palm over the pavement. "And it's a very high-end stealth tag, I'm barely picking it up even at this distance. Your average hacker-with-a-commlink wouldn't have a chance." She furrowed her brow in concentration. "It's... under the pavement surface. He buried it here magically."
  
  "It's a message for me." I swore. "What does it say?"
  
  "The daughter of the scribe, and then something unpronounceable. I don't even know how to spell it." Cat said. "Here, I'll project it into your HUDs."
  
  "It's a spirit's true name." Jane said. "So, Scale wants me to summon it."
  
  I cracked my knuckles. "Well, if it tries anything it won't try it for long. All right, pull the string."
  
  Jane nodded and closed her eyes, and began her conjuring chant. Soon enough the specific air elemental she'd called answered.
  
  "You are the one I was told to wait for." it greeted Jane. "I bear this message - 'Have your lover seek my cache where he left the fourth.'"
  
  "Anything else?" she asked it.
  
  "Those are the only words Scale gave me, and the only service he asked of me." it replied, Jane dismissed it.
  
  "So, a three-part message. One part that would need a technomancer like Cat to pick up, one part that his tasked spirit would only give to me, and the last part something only you would understand." Jane thought out loud. "But the fourth what?"
  
  "I left the corpses of three of the orks that attacked me here, and vanished the fourth one so that he'd catch the blame for the deaths." I said. "Scale must have been incredibly thorough to get that far."
  
  "The medium is the message." Jane agreed. "Lofwyr is making it plain that he is really invested in whatever this is."
  
  "Doesn't that just make us feel warm and fuzzy inside." Cat sighed. "Okay, lead us to it."
  
  The dumpster a block away that I'd stuffed the fourth ork into wasn't there anymore, and the building itself was a burnt-out ruin from a fire that looked to be over a year old. Still, Scale wouldn't have steered us here without a reason, so I searched the area and soon enough found a hidden cache nearby - along with a spell lock containing enough invisibility and obfuscating magic that anyone less adept than I was at seeing through Masking would never have noticed anything here. Somebody had been researching me very thoroughly indeed.
  
  The cache contained a scroll with a message written in a simple substitution cipher. The key to the cipher was at the top of the page, and required a verbatim knowledge of the conversation that Scale, Ehran, and I had had outside of the Black Lodge's chantry in Georgetown to solve. Scale and Lofwyr had taken every precaution possible to make sure that nobody except me, Cat, and Jane could read this message.
  
  To the man from beyond the world, whose steps began in that alley;
  
  You hold within you a key component to a lasting defeat of the Scourge.
  I hold the other key component of this potential victory.
  And so I offer you a choice;
  You may come to me and join your strength with mine against the common foe
  And by so doing strike a greater blow for the common weal than any other that you possibly could.
  Or you may refuse, out of whatever mistrust or resentments you might harbour
  And know that by your choice the world will continue onward as threatened and blighted as it always has been.
  I threaten no retribution if you refuse me in this matter.
  But the consequences of allowing the Scourge to go unchecked will be unavoidable.
  Should you come, you must bring the daughter of the scribe and your first beloved with you.
  Success would not be complete without them.
  I swear on my Name that nothing within this message is a lie.
  
  Lofwyr, aka "Gold-Master"
  Loremaster of the Great Dragon Conclave
  
  
  So, here we were. We'd thought we were getting one step ahead of Lofwyr's scheme for us, and he'd been one step ahead of us the entire time. The sheer amount of effort put into running down my origins and delivering this one message was intimidating, but the incredible insight it had taken to so perfectly gauge our probable reactions was downright terrifying.
  
  "So." Jane said tightly. "This is the choice that was prophesied. And if a dragon swears on his Name..." she looked up at us soberly. "He means it. And while normally you'd have to watch out for games with exact wording, 'nothing within this message is a lie' is not exactly an ambiguous statement.'
  
  "And so the 'greatest of losses' isn't me or Jane." Cat said horrified. "It's the world."
  
  "Yeah." Jane said, drawing close to me and offering what comfort she could.
  
  "Cat?" I sighed. "Make the call."
  
  I closed my eyes and did not weep.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: And here... we... go!
  
  Eorin is Sperethiel for 'Wise one' or 'Teacher'. Telenyn is Sperethiel for 'Student'. Or at least that's what one particular mailing list post I googled said. Hey, I'll roll with it.
  
  And yes, Harlequin got to say goodbye at least. And Alex got to punch him in the dick, just like he'd promised. And while he did deserve the dressing down he got, I at least let him have the grace of being able to honestly apologize at the end and start to be forgiven. Hopefully it'll give the tormented old bastard some peace.
  
  The 'I'm going to tell you a movie plot, and you tell me what genre it's from' device was yoinked by me from GilShalos1's "The Lion, the Wench, and the Wardrobe Trailer" on AO3, which while having absolutely nothing to do with Shadowrun is a very nice Game of Thrones fanfic - at least if you ever wanted a modern-day AU where Westeros is reimagined as a Hollywood experience, with the Great Houses as rival movie studios, the Iron Throne Awards, our favorite MCs as movie stars and paparazzi and all. But hey, even when it's off-topic I still properly attribute sources. *g*
  
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  "The Bermuda Triangle?" I asked Scale. "Really?"
  
  Scale leaned back in his seat onboard the tilt-rotor aircraft that was ferrying to us the anonymous random island in the middle of Carib League territory that Lofwyr had apparently set up his 'lasting defeat of the Scourge' upon. "It was the nearest convenient major ley line nexus that wasn't already claimed by someone else. So we put in a temporary base here."
  
  "Lung couldn't have contributed something?" Jane asked, nervously twining her bare fingers against each other.
  
  "Too much risk of Ryumyo taking an interest." Scale explained calmly. "Otherwise his assistance would have been ideal. As is, Lung will be occupied making sure nothing destabilizes the working from the dragon lines over the polar great circle connection. Hestaby is likewise monitoring the North American connection, and Hualpa the South American. Schwarzkopf is anchoring Europe. That's four major secondary poles to the working, with the primary nexus being right here."
  
  "Five great dragons are busy doing a group ritual that involves over half the ley lines of Earth?" I asked, astonished. "What the hell kind of mana levels are we talking about here, the second Great Ghost Dance?"
  
  "Oh, much more than that." Scale chilled everyone's blood with the matter-of-fact observation. "Gold-Master will explain everything to you when we arrive."
  
  "I'm noticing that Doll-Maker isn't part of this." Jane observed. "And you'd think he would be."
  
  "He may be needed elsewhere." Scale non-explained, and then said nothing more.
  
  "What the hell am I even doing in this kind of mess?" Cat muttered. "I'm not even Awakened!"
  
  "My lord did not deign to explain himself to me there." Scale shrugged. "But you may rest assured, he does nothing without a valid purpose."
  
  "That's exactly what worries me." I admitted frankly.
  
  "Wise of you." Scale conceded. "But against the Scourge, all other considerations are moot."
  
  "We wouldn't be here otherwise." Jane conceded. "But I still say my father should be here. Or the High Prince, or some other suitable representative. This is a matter that concerns far more than just the dragons."
  
  "It is." Scale agreed. "But at the heart of this ritual is a secret that only the dragons keep to themselves. A secret that until now the Loremaster has not even shared with other Great Dragons, let alone any of the Younger Races. And you will be expected to swear an oath of secrecy in that regard before you leave."
  
  "Oh, are we leaving?" Cat said archly. "I'd been wondering."
  
  "My lord has every intention that you will depart from here as unscathed as when you arrived." Scale said coolly. "Although if you are as impertinent in his presence as you have been in mine, that could conceivably change."
  
  "This is going to be one fascinating conversation." I muttered. My eyebrows raised as an entire flotilla of warships came into view floating serenely in the ocean next to this small grouping of coral atolls, all in Saeder-Krupp colors. There was a guided missile cruiser as the apparent flagship and an amphibious assault ship/VTOL carrier large enough to hold a battalion of troops as well a full complement of drones or helicopters, with a pair of escort frigates patrolling the perimeter around them. There was even a fleet supply ship of some type accompanying them.
  
  "There's a full combat air patrol of drones surrounding these islands." Cat muttered. "I'm split-screening the take from the aircraft's sensors. Lofwyr's sent an entire damn army here."
  
  "And there's a small horde of spirits up in the air, backing up the drones." I agreed, clearly seeing them with my astral perception. "And... holy shit, that's another Great Dragon besides Lofwyr down there."
  
  "Is that Arleesh?" Jane asked Scale, nodding towards the great feathered serpent visibly standing a sentry watch on the low peak of an atoll, overlooking a Saeder-Krupp base camp.
  
  "Yes." Scale said. "She won't actively be part of the ritual, but she graciously consented to lend her efforts to helping secure this site."
  
  "Secure?" I muttered. "I'll say secure. It looks like a goddamn nuclear test site."
  
  "It could very well be one without you." Scale answered tensely.
  
  As we overflew the camp and drew closer to the ritual site I could clearly see two very large objects in the distance. The expected sight of the large golden dragon standing majestically at the heart of seven concentric circles of elaborately carved glyphs nodded soberly as our tilt-rotor came to a halt and began to lower itself to the ground about a hundred meters away from the ritual site. The unexpected object was a tall monolith of gleaming black stone, ten meters on each side and inlaid with glowing veins of bright orichalcum, that had been erected in the direct heart of the ritual circle.
  
  "By the spirits, a mel'thelem!" Jane said awestruck. "How long have you had an intact Locus?!?" she challenged Scale.
  
  "Less than a month." he surprised her. "We only recently recovered it from a deep storage site where the Black Lodge had sequestered it for over a century. They had had no idea of the true worth of the treasure they held in their grasp, the ignorant fools."
  
  "That's why you set us up to crack the Georgetown chantry open for you." Cat realized. "You knew that the Black Lodge had it, but you didn't know where. You needed to seize one of their secure records repositories to help track it down."
  
  "Precisely." Scale agreed. "And, here we are." The aircraft finished landing and Scale got up to slide open the side door and leapt lightly to the ground. Lofwyr towered imposingly in the foreground, the Locus standing tall behind him.
  
  Scale. You have done well. Lofwyr's dragonspeech filled our ears without sound.
  
  "Thank you, my lord." Scale said, bowing.
  
  Withdraw to minimum safe distance. I will finish explaining matters to them.
  
  "As you will, great one." Scale said humbly, and stepped back into the aircraft. The tiltrotor lifted off from behind us, leaving us three alone on the atoll with Lofwyr.
  
  "You wanted us here, and here we are." I said matter-of-factly. "Please explain what you want of us, and then we may discuss matters further."
  
  Before I give you your answers, I will require a binding oath of secrecy from all three of you. The explanation will require sharing secrets that heretofore have been the charge of the Loremaster alone.
  
  "No." I said. "Our word of honor you may have, but there will be no geasa."
  
  You are quick to take presumed advantage, Alexander Kincaid.
  
  "Gold-Master, you have already sworn on your Name that whatever blow you intend to strike against the Scourge cannot be executed without his cooperation." Jane said diplomatically. "We are taking nothing that has not already been freely offered."
  
  ... a valid reasoning. Lofwyr conceded. Very well, do I have your words of honor that you will hold any and all secrets of the era before the Age of Dragons that I share with you today in confidence?
  
  "You have my word." I agreed, and Cat and Jane echoed me in turn.
  
  Then I will explain, and I swear upon my Name that this is a true speaking to the best of my knowledge. Because while Jane Foster may or may not already have shared with you what she has been taught about the dawn of the world, my knowledge is far greater - and more importantly, is from a first-hand source. The Jewel of Memory, the greatest treasure of dragonkind, has been in my rightful charge ever since the death of Far-Scholar. He was the Loremaster before me, and his progenitor All-Wings before him, the first Loremaster our race ever had. All-Wings was the last living dragon to have beheld the events of which I am about to speak with her own eyes, and the Jewel was her only record of them.
  
  "Nightslayer, and the birth of the world." Jane said in awe.
  
  Nightslayer was a story created for children, Jane Foster. Lofwyr replied. A myth that we invented, to conceal the greatest shame of the dragons from even our created dragon-kin, let alone any of the Younger Races. The tale of the Great Hunter's original dominion over this earth, that was ended by a child of it that abandoned its Horror nature to become the first Name-Maker and birthed the dragons and the younger races out of an act of selfless love? Lofwyr chuffed scornfully. Did it never occur to you that it was far too poetic and neat a tale to be grounded in reality?
  
  "So it wasn't even hagiography." I acknowledged. "But an outright fable."
  
  Yes. Lofwyr admitted. And likewise the mentions of Daystar, the First Dragon, and all other tales that were shared with Name-Givers in the Fourth World and prior. Here now is the truth that even most of us no longer know. For the first race that we told our face-saving myth to was ourselves. Even I am not old enough to have been raised on the truth, and was brought up believing the myth. Only one dragon yet lives who was actually extant in the First World, and Doll-Maker is still too consumed with shame over those events to speak of them to anyone.
  
  But the truth yet remained within the Jewel of Memory, even if I at first did not know it. It was only recently, when seeking knowledge related to the anomaly that was Alexander Kincaid, that I actually delved into the oldest lore that I had long since thought not relevant. And what I found there shocked me as much as it will shock you. For this is the truth.
  
  All-Wings, our First Loremaster and the bearer of the First Clutch, is also the one who first brought the Great Hunter to this world.
  
  We all gasped in shock. It felt like the sun had momentarily darkened, and that there was no oxygen in the air.
  
  Oh, she did not do it knowingly. But according to what the Memories sing of it was a truly heady thing to be a dragon in those days. The world had no rivals for us, no challengers, no limits. What a dragon willed to do, it could do, and only another and mightier dragon could ever gainsay it.
  
  "You're describing Thomas Hobbes' 'state of nature'." Cat said, aghast. "All against all, with no standards of right and wrong. That's not a paradise, that's Hell."
  
  Lofwyr actually tilted his head at that. Interesting. I had not thought to examine it in such a light, but... considering what that era eventually wrought, there is some truth in what you say. But the relevant portion is that dragons were proud and willful creatures then, even moreso than we are now. There is nothing we did not dare to do, and in the case of All-Wings such was her power and majesty that there was nothing she had found herself unable to do. And so eventually the day came when she grew bored with being the mightiest of the mighty, the swiftest of the swift, the most brilliant of the brilliant, and all the rest, and tested herself against the very Pattern of the world - for she had already sought her limits against all other contenders, dragon, metahuman, and spirit alike, and never found them.
  
  And so the world cracked, and things from beyond the reaches of even the furthest known metaplanes could come creeping in. And they laid their foul marks upon All-Wings and as many of her children as they could corrupt, for at first she and her children did not even know the danger. For the Great Hunter was a great hunter indeed, and it knew stealth and camouflage as well as it knew any other form of battle.
  
  And when the depth of her mistake became apparent, All-Wings became the first of us to know shame, and guilt, and regret, just as she had been first among us in anything else. The battles against the Horrors underneath her aegis were of a scale beyond all imagining, and I could tell you tales of them until you all collapsed from weariness and not even be remotely close to exhausting the lore of the Jewel. But even through it required the extreme measure of lowering the global mana level of the planet to the point it could barely support draconic life, and that much only in hibernation, eventually the Horrors were driven off.
  
  But then the mana began to rise again, despite all that the dragons could do to stop it, and All-Wings realized the truth. For as long as a single person or place on this Earth bore a Horror-Mark, an astral touchstone would exist by which the Great Hunter and its children could eventually find their way back to this world regardless of how deeply into the trackless void between the planes they were driven. And while All-Wings had been able to shatter the Horror-Mark upon herself, she could not do likewise for her children or all the other surviving victims of the Horrors. And so the most horrible of wars began, one even worse than the original battles against the Dark One. For that war had at least not been waged against the innocent.
  
  "The dragons killed them all?" Cat asked, aghast.
  
  Yes. Over nine in ten dragons and a similar proportion of the Younger Races were all purged by fire and blood, in an attempt to cauterize the corruption that the Horrors had left upon this world. And when the bloody slaughter was done All-Wings took her own life out of shame and guilt, for she had had to kill most of her own children in order to try and undo a tragedy that her own hubris had originally caused. Only her two youngest scions - Far-Scholar and Doll-Maker - had escaped the taint, for they had been but hatchlings at the time of the original cracking of the world and had been kept sequestered in safety from the entire war. And so the second Loremaster succeeded the first, and with his brother at his side began the task of guiding the world back from the brink of extinction.
  
  "He created the myth of Nightslayer's tears and the first dragon." Jane realized. "Because he couldn't bear the world remembering his mother as a figure of such shame."
  
  Yes. Lofwyr nodded. And so the First World gave way to the Second, and the history that your father and mentor taught you began from there. Until the day the Horrors began showing their presence again, and all concerned realized to their horror that the final bloody work of All-Wings had not been complete. And so the cycle began, and has continued to this day, for the task of simultaneously destroying every single Horror-Mark in the world and permanently severing their connection to this plane has been impossible to achieve.
  
  Until now. Lofwyr finished resolutely.
  
  "How do I make the impossible possible?" I asked.
  
  Because a ritual sufficient to undo All-Wings' greatest sin would require another like her, a being who sought its limits in the impossible yet never found them. Lofwyr said. I have finished designing the necessary ritual from her original notes. My fellow Great Dragons will help channel the power of a world all into this Locus. I will be the sorcerer who does the final casting. But you will be the anchor, Alexander Kincaid, for even I could not hold such a magnitude of power absolutely steady without the slightest slip. And when we are finished here today, the cycle that has held for six ages of the world will finally be broken, for the mana may return in perfect safety. The Horrors will be exiled from this reality beyond their ability to return, unless someone in the future repeats the first folly of All-Wings. Lofwyr said firmly. And that will never be allowed to happen again.
  
  "How can you be so certain that I can do it?" I asked Lofwyr. "Sure, I'm unprecedented. And yes, I punked a Yama King and casually faceslap people like Harlequin. But that's still a far cry from what you're describing here, and it's not a theory you can test before we actually do it. What happens if we fail?"
  
  Given the magnitude of the energies involved, the worst-case scenario if the ritual fails to be adequately controlled is that everyone within approximately a mile of this spot will die. Lofwyr replied calmly. That is why all my servants and other allies have withdrawn to the other island several miles away and approach no closer. Should I be turn out to be wrong, only us four shall pay the price. He nodded to Jane. And that is why Doll-Maker is not involved in the ritual today. Should we fail here today, then he will be needed to succeed me as Loremaster.
  
  "Well, that's why you and I are here." I said. "But why Cat and Jane?"
  
  Because even for one such as you, this will be a challenge beyond any other that you have faced. And your heart is such that where you might hesitate to put yourself forward on your own behalf, you would unhesitatingly tear the very universe in twain with your bare hands to protect or avenge those you love. Lofwyr said. And so they will remain here alongside you, at the very heart of the danger, to ensure that you do your absolute best to succeed.
  
  Cat immediately grabbed my hand to forestall my reaction and asked Lofwyr. "And what if he doesn't want us to be used against him like that?" she asked more diplomatically.
  
  Then the ritual will not commence. Lofwyr said simply. Particularly not since I have designed it to require two lesser anchors to the primary anchor, one an immortal dragon-kin and one an Unawakened mortal, and both linked to the primary anchor by ties of the heart. Lofwyr smiled cruelly. I could have designed another ritual from All-Wings' basic formula, of course, but I have not. And you have not the requisite knowledge to design your own... and even if you had the assistance of another master ritualist of my kind to make good that shortfall, they would still not have access to the Jewel. He stared loftily down at us. I am the Loremaster. I am the chosen steward of All-Wings' legacy. This is my charge to perform, and our race's ancient shame to put to rights. So this task will be done on my terms, or it will not be done at all.
  
  He paused and then, incongrously, shrugged.
  
  And so, as I originally promised in my missive, the choice is yours.
  
  
  
  We spent hours going over the formula of the ritual as best we could. I could expand my mind to independently redo all the thaumaturgical calculations in a short period of time, but neither Jane nor I completely understood the underlying theory. Then again, that was only to be expected given that this was based in dragon secrets even more of the dragons didn't know. Still, everything we could pull down from MagickNet combined with everything we could combine to do to verify that there were no obvious booby traps in this ritual. The mana would flow exactly where Lofwyr had said it would, with nothing being diverted for his own use or empowerment. The main thrust of the ritual was indeed a giant global purification, that would banish all Horror-marked spirits, cleanse all Horror-tainted lands and background count, and shatter every existing Horror-Mark on any living being. Those who had not yet been so corrupted by the Horrors that they required the tainted essence to survive would survive, and those who had been... well, a merciful death was the best they could have hoped for anyway.
  
  So after having verified all that we could, and discussing it among ourselves, we all volunteered to risk it. There really wasn't anything else we could do and still be able to look ourselves in the mirror afterwards. Dunkelzahn had ultimately given his life just to delay the Scourge's incursion, so how could we remotely call ourselves decent human beings again if we weren't willing to even risk ours for a chance at the Scourge's final defeat?
  
  And yes, we hadn't forgotten about the "greatest betrayal". But ultimately the same logic that had reassured us with Hestaby would also apply here, and Lofwyr would already be familiar with it as he'd already consulted with her about us. Lofwyr's entire theory here revolved around me being supposedly as powerful as All-Wings in her prime, which meant I'd certainly be beyond his ability to kill, control, or even confine. And indirect coercion by threatening the girls would only be an elaborate form of suicide, as Lofwyr had already conceded today. So it was either enlist me voluntarily or let me go free... as Lofwyr had also just conceded today.
  
  In fact, the 'greatest betrayal' might already have happened. Lofwyr had just revealed to us the greatest shame of the entire dragon race, after all, a secret that they'd literally lied to five entire ages of the world to try and bury. A lie they'd told so often and so passionately that the dragons had largely come to believe it themselves. And now that comforting illusion would be forever shattered. It could be argued that the Loremaster had betrayed his greatest duty - to keep dragon secrets a secret. Or that All-Wings had betrayed all of existence when she'd originally gone all First Age Solar Exalted and let the Horrors into our universe in the first place. The prophesy had only been that I would know the greatest betrayal, after all, not necessarily that I would be the one betrayed.
  
  Well, I certainly hoped so at least. Because it was too late to back out now.
  
  Begin. Lofwyr thought, and the astral forms of four other Great Dragons blurred into nonexistence as they withdrew themselves into their bodies and Jane and I felt the mana surge through the ley lines. Hestaby, Lung, Hualpa, and Schwarzkopf had started their parts of the ritual. All around the world, the ley lines began to activate and shift-
  
  The first stage is complete. Lofwyr nodded, his 'voice' exceptionally well-controlled given the circumstances. The main ceremony begins... now!
  
  A tidal wave of mana beyond that which any I'd ever even imagined slammed into me. I sat in lotus in one circle of the elaborate mandala engraved into the flattened stone of this island, each hand firmly gripping that of one of the two women sitting alongside of me in their own circles. We were at one point of a long narrow diamond triangle that Lofwyr, on the other side of the mel'thelem, was at the opposite point of. The Locus-pillar itself sat in the center between us, no longer a spire of gleaming black marble but a brilliantly incandescent bar of solid lightning.
  
  Lofwyr's dragonspeech chanted in impossible syllables not actually possible to carry through ordinary air, each new stanza growing more and more elaborate and building upon the last. His responsibility would be to conduct the actual castings and ceremonies that were part of this impossibly complex unbinding we were laying upon an entire world. My responsibility was simply to grit my teeth and willpower through this. To be a living, self-adjusting damping rod on this barely controllable thermonuclear furnace of magic we were playing with here and keep the whole thing from spinning out of control and going prompt critical.
  
  And then I felt the first cold leech of something graft itself onto my soul, and tasted foulness so thick that I choked.
  
  Lofwyr, what are you doing? I thought.
  
  Fool, did you imagine that Horror Marks would be so easy to destroy? he thought back at me. If they were, would All-WIngs not merely have cleansed her children rather than slay them? I told you that she could only break the one upon her own soul. You must do the same!
  
  You're going to transfer every Horror-Mark on Earth to Alex so that he can shatter them?Jane thought. Are you insane?
  
  You did not know either, scribe's daughter? Lofwyr thought scornfully. I had thought you at least capable of comprehending basic sorcerous formulae!
  
  I ignored Jane and Cat raging telepathically at Lofwyr through the link to try reaching within with one 'hand' while keeping the mana flow steady with the other, imagining the Horror-Mark on my soul as a filthy little leech I could reach down and squish-
  
  Yes! Lofwyr said. You can destroy them! We may yet survive this after all! Now prepare yourself, little one! There will be more, much more!
  
  Oh great. I moaned, as suddenly all the evils of the world crashed upon me.
  
  Incongruously, I thought of Mordor. "No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star are left to me. I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades." Frodo had despaired on the final approach to Mount Doom. And so it was for me, as every imaginabie corruption and temptation that the Horrors had ever laid upon anyone in the world all simultaneously impinged upon me. Lofwyr could not have remotely imagined within several orders of magnitude the sheer vastness of the undertaking or if he had then he'd had a far greater confidence in my abilities than I ever had. It was absolutely inconceivable that any finite being, mortal or immortal, could withstand so many years, decades, centuries of concentrated effort by all the Horrors all concentrated into one single timeless moment.
  
  And yet I did it. As the scale of the challenge facing me loomed larger than the universe it somehow simultaneously shrank, or I grew, to where it was an even struggle. I met the full might of the Horrors on fair terms-
  
  AND SO THE WHEEL TURNS YET AGAIN. NOW THE LITTLE DRAGON SEEKS TO SURPASS THE LEGACY OF ALL-WINGS. IT IS AMUSING TO SEE HOW CLOSE HE COMES, AND YET HOW FAR HE STILL REMAINS FROM HIS GOAL.
  
  The Dark One. The Great Hunter. Verjigorm.
  
  YOU KNOW MY NAME, ALEXANDER KINCAID. AND I KNOW YOURS.
  
  This is not your planet! I raged at it, as I felt a planets' worth of monstrosities shrieking in the background.
  
  ALL WORLDS ARE MINE IN THE END. I AM THE MASTER OF ALL SORROWS, THE MUSE OF REGRETS, THE LORD OF LOST HOPE. I AM THE RULER OVER LUST AND GLUTTONY, THE LIEGE OF GREED AND SLOTH, THE SOVEREIGN OF WRATH AND ENVY, AND THE KING OF PRIDE. BUT ABOVE ALL ELSE, I AM ENTROPY. NOTHING IS BORN THAT DOES NOT BEGIN TO DIE THE INSTANT IT FIRST DRAWS BREATH. NOTHING IS RAISED SO HIGH THAT IT CANNOT FALL. AND I TAKE ALL OF THEM IN THE END. SO DO YOU TRULY BELIEVE YOURSELF TO BE BEYOND MY POWER, LITTLE ONE? ALL-WINGS ONCE DID, AND WE BOTH KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO HER. The full scale of human evil and more crashed upon me like the waves upon the shore.
  
  But I was not the shore, and I was not the waves.
  
  You didn't defeat her. I thought back angrily. She defeated herself.
  
  THE FLAWS OF THE SELF ARE THE MOTHER OF ALL DEFEATS. DO NOT IMAGINE YOURSELF TO BE WITHOUT FLAW. It paused and chuckled horribly. ON SECOND THOUGHT, PLEASE DO.
  
  Fuck off and die! I imagined striking out at it with intent to kill, and felt it shudder.
  
  WAS DRAWING BLOOD SUPPOSED TO ENRAGE ME? Verjigorm scoffed. TO MAKE ME FOOLISHLY BLURT MY SECRETS, OR RUSH INTO SOME OBVIOUS TRAP? DO YOU IMAGINE ME A SPOILED CHILD, THAT HAS NEVER BEFORE KNOWN CHALLENGE OR DEFEAT? NO, ALEXANDER KINCAID. THAT WOULD BE YOU.
  
  You can't win. I thought at it. You can only try to trick me into losing. All I have to do is hold the line, and us stubborn little apes are really good at that. The same impossible ability that made me meet and beat every prior challenge surged into me with redoubled confidence, and before it all the evils of the world seemed barely a fair match.
  
  YES, BE A LOYAL LITTLE SOLDIER. PLAY YOUR PART. SEE WHAT GRATITUDE YOUR EFFORTS EARN YOU. THE LITTLE LOREMASTER WILL BETRAY YOU, YOU KNOW.
  
  No shit, really? I scoffed at it.
  
  AND HE WILL BETRAY YOUR MATES.
  
  We know. I thought back coldly.
  
  YOU WILL ABANDON THEM TO HIS TENDER MERCIES? Even though we were communicating on a level well beyond the audio-visual, I somehow imagined the Horror having a face that it was now raising an eyebrow in scorn upon.
  
  I will abandon them to nothing. I thought resolutely. We all agreed.
  
  YOUR DREAM OF BEING THE ONE WHO MOVES THIS WORLD UPON HIS LEVER, OF REMAKING THIS PLANET TO YOUR OWN DESIGN - IT WILL NEVER COME TRUE IF YOU DO NOT ACT NOW. I MAY BE NAME-EATER RATHER THAN NAME-MAKER OR NAME-GIVER, BUT I STILL HAVE A NAME TO SWEAR UPON. YOU NAME-GIVERS GRANTED IT TO ME.
  
  It wouldn't matter if you were telling the truth. I sighed inwardly as it confirmed some of my worst fears. Abandoning this ritual, abandoning this world to your later depredations would be a worse evil than any 'good' I could hope to balance it out with.
  
  THERE IS NO GOOD AND EVIL. ONLY POWER AND THOSE TOO WEAK TO SEEK IT.
  
  ... did you seriously just quote Voldemort of all people?
  
  WHO?
  
  Okay, wow. I could almost die happy, because I just heard the greatest evil in creation make a total ass of itself and not even know how.
  
  NOW YOU ARE BEGINNING TO ANGER ME, INSOLENT ONE.
  
  Well, I'd hate to leave a job half undone, and while we've been busy metaphysically headbutting each other I've also been busy snapping all your Horror-Marks, so... kiss this world goodbye!
  
  WE WILL MEET AGAIN, ALEXANDER KINCAID! Verjigorm thought at me furiously, and with one final impossible yank I snapped the last feeble cord tying it to Earth and 'felt' it fall away into an impossible void beyond all reality-
  
  -and then it stopped, as something reached out and seized me in its icy grip. I struggled to break this last Horror-Mark, and felt it loosen...
  
  ... and then something shifted underneath me.
  
  AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! A MASTERFUL STROKE, LITTLE DRAGON! Verjigorm exulted. YOU ARE ALMOST WORTHY!
  
  There is no almost, Dark One. Lofwyr's voice crashed into the link. Only one Horror-Mark remains, Alexander Kincaid! Snap it, and the world is safe forever!
  
  Something's changed in the ritual! I thought back. I can't snap this mark without unanchoring myself from this dimension!
  
  Of course you cannot. Lofwyr replied matter-of-factly. Your and the Orange Queen's logic was incomplete. There are five options when faced with a foe - kill them, conquer them, confine them indefinitely, come to terms with them...
  
  ... or exile them. I cursed. I never thought of that, because how could you exile someone of my power beyond their ability to return?
  
  How indeed. Lofwyr thought with icy amusement. As you said, the only force that could defeat All-Wings was herself. And so it is with you. The same choice that originally brought you to me is the same one that will make you inevitably consent to forever exiling yourself from this reality. You cooperated in helping casting this ritual upon yourself in its current form, and so you bind yourself to its terms and bargains. You cannot remain here without giving the Dark One a way back into the world. You must allow yourself to balance the equation and exile yourself as thoroughly as you exile it, or you accept the failure of the ritual and make all our efforts to date for naught. Lofwyr paused. I do not, of course, insist that you and the Horrors be banished to the same place. I am not needlessly cruel. You are free to pursue whatever goals you see fit in whatever realms you choose. So long as you never again intrude upon mine.
  
  THIS BETRAYAL IS SO COMPREHENSIVELY AMUSING I WOULD ALMOST NOT MIND YOUR SUBMITTING TO IT. the Great Hunter broke in scornfully. IT WOULD ALMOST BE WORTH LOSING MY PURCHASE ON THIS WORLD TO KNOW THAT I HELPED CONTRIBUTE TO SUCH AN UNCONQUERABLE FOE CHOOSING TO DAMN THEMSELVES SO THOROUGHLY. EVEN ALL-WINGS WAS MERELY A SIMPLE SUICIDE.
  
  And why Cat and Jane? I raged at Lofwyr, ignoring the Horror as beneath my notice now. Why draw them into your scheme?!?
  
  Because you would never allow yourself to be willingly parted from them, of course. Lofwyr replied matter-of-factly. And the entire purpose of this exercise is to ensure that you never risk impinging on my affairs again, not to give you a compelling motivation to claw your way back here by any means possible! So I yet again give you the freedom to choose - you may either take them with you, or leave them here. But whether they stay or go it will be by your will, and so you will not strain so mightily to see it undone.
  
  Hey, don't we get a vote? Jane's voice entered the link faintly.
  
  I sure hope somebody wasn't about to do something stupidly noble again! Cat agreed.
  
  Cat, Jane, we're talking about your being permanently exiled from known reality here! I thought desperately back at them.
  
  No, we're talking about our marriage. Cat thought back. "To have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death." I don't remember hearing 'or dimensional exile too' at the end of that one, so don't you even think of skipping out now!
  
  And speaking on my own behalf, the answer to your question is "yes"! Jane said forthrightly.
  
  Did you seriously just accept a marriage proposal in the middle of all this? I thought incredulously, while I swear I 'felt' Lofwyr's and even Verjigorm's jaws 'dropping' in the background.
  
  Anything worth doing is worth doing in style! Jane thought back cheerfully.
  
  And the ayes have it! Cat thought resolutely. Do it!
  
  Lofwyr, you magnificent bastard. I nodded to him in grudging respect. I am not happy with you, but I've got to admit - you earned this win.
  
  There is no other kind of victory worth having. Lofwyr agreed. Fare thee well, Alexander Kincaid, Jane Foster, Catherine Connors. I will make certain that your Names are remembered.
  
  I breathed the last breath of free air I was going to take in this world, and with Cat and Jane's 'hands' clasped solidly in mine we all reached out and broke the chain. And as the fabric of reality tore upon around us and we fell through the astral rift into the trackless void, we felt the very world shift underneath our feet.
  
  The reign of the Horrors over Earth-Shadowrun was over. The final victory over the Scourge had been won. And all it had cost us was everything we'd had.
  
  ... except each other.
  
  
  
  "Where are we?" Cat asked, as she marveled at the Silver Void which she had never seen before.
  
  "The deep metaplanes." Jane said. "You navigate by 'feel' here, not sight, but I don't sense anything even remotely familiar. We're well beyond even the Citadel."
  
  "You've been to the edge of reality once before." I said. "The Bridge would have been utterly unmade by what we've done, but is this anywhere in the neighborhood of where it would have been?"
  
  "It might be." Jane acknowledged thoughtfully. "I can try heading in that 'direction', at least. It's the only point of reference I already have that could even be theoretically close to how far out we must have been thrown."
  
  "So there's a chance we can get back?" Cat asked.
  
  "Well, my first contingency plan for that isn't working." Jane admitted.
  
  "I noticed you haven't been wearing your ring since Seattle." I said to her. "Although I wasn't going to call attention to that fact anywhere Lofwyr could hear me think about it."
  
  "Yes." Jane said. "It wouldn't be unexpected for me not to be wearing it after the Black Lodge attacked me through it, so I figured I could risk him noticing its absence. I left it behind with Pistons and Fatima with instructions to get it and a message-in-a-bottle to my dad. Of course, that was just me thinking Lofwyr might go for imprisoning us somewhere or some other scheme and dad would need the material link to come find us. I wasn't anticipating us being stuck out here."
  
  "You can't follow the link back from this far out?" Cat asked.
  
  "No." Jane said. "The tie is so faint at this distance that being able to use it without inadvertently breaking it in the process would take a lot more skill than I have. That's also why I'm not asking Alex to try it - his abilities generally lend more towards power than finesse, and we'd only get one try at it. So first we try seeing if I can find the former site of the Bridge, and if we can start metaplane hopping home from there..."
  
  "I sense something." I said. "No idea what, though."
  
  "I can't even begin to touch the Resonance Realms from here." Cat sighed. "So much for experimenting with technomancy from the astral plane."
  
  "I'm sensing it too." Jane said. "It's... that's not a 'what', it's a 'who'. There's an astral traveller nearby, a powerful one."
  
  "There." I said, pointing at the glowing dot at the edge of vision. "Head for them or head away?"
  
  "We need to do something besides float around out here forever." Cat said. "Don't we only have a few hours before we die from too much astral projecting?"
  
  "That's normal astral projection." Jane reassured her. "We got dumped bodies and all through a direct rift into the deep metaplanes. So we're good indefinitely, just like Ghostwalker was... provided something doesn't happen along and eat us."
  
  "Well, whoever it is just saw us, because they shifted course and are heading this way. Might as well go hail them." I sighed, and got out in front where I could protect the girls. Jane moved to cover Cat in addition, her being the only one of us who couldn't really do anything in astral combat.
  
  "It's a dragon." I said, looking at the astral form. "A Great Dragon. Wait, did Lofwyr follow us out here to finish the job?" I tensed and got ready for combat.
  
  "That's not Lofwyr." Cat said. "But he still looks familiar somehow..."
  
  I should certainly hope that I look familiar. the amused and friendly dragonspeech touched lightly upon our minds. I'd hate to think that all that nuyen I spent buying broadcast airtime was wasted, now wouldn't I?
  
  The Great Dragon drew up close alongside us and we got a look at him. He was huge, larger even than Lofwyr or Ghostwalker, and his silvery-blue scales positively shimmered in the astral light. Cat and I suddenly felt recognition crash in upon us-
  
  "Dunkelzahn!" Jane gasped.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Curse Lofwyr's sudden yet inevitable betrayal! And sure enough, he made it work the only way he could - as several readers guessed, it would only happen if Alex willingly agreed to go along with it. So Lofwyr held an entire world hostage to move Alex's conscience, and it worked.
  
  Of course, even Lofwyr didn't expect this plot twist. *g*
  
  As for the retcon re: the First Age of the world, yes, it's me retconning stuff. However, note that even Earthdawn Book of Dragons and the Horrors sourcebook, the two sources for the tale of Nightslayer and the creation myth of Earthdawn, both acknowledge that 'the only sources we have for this are what the dragons chose to tell mortal scholars'. That was done deliberately to let Earthdawn DMs roll their own versions if need be, without directly contradicting the sourcebooks. So that's what I did, re: riding the USS Make Shit Up to better fit my narrative.
  
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  Threadmarks: Interlude - Voices of Past and Present (Shadowrun)
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  Jane Foster
  
  "Hello, Jane." Dunkelzahn nodded politely to me. "Who are your friends?"
  
  "Far-Scholar, I am pleased to introduce to you my betrothed, Alexander Kincaid, and his wife, Catherine Connors Kincaid." I said to him.
  
  Dunkelzahn was far too urbane to actually jawdrop, but I still got the distinct impression he hadn't been expecting that one. Goodness, I have been out of touch.
  
  "Sir, I believe this matter would be simplest and best explained if you shared my thoughts." Alex said majestically, and Dunkelzahn turned and locked eyes with him. I saw the great dragon's pupils dilate briefly, and then his eyelids lowered and his head dipped.
  
  So Gold-Master at long last essayed the oldest lore, and revealed unto you the greatest shame of the dragons. he sighed softly. I owe you all an impossible debt, for having at long last undone my mother's greatest mistake.
  
  "We did undo it then, sir?" Cat asked. "The Horrors are really gone?"
  
  Yes. Dunkelzahn reassured us. Oh, not gone from the multiverse. The Great Hunter and its spawn still exist, and still lust to devour and despoil any world they can reach. But their grasp upon our birthworld is removed for all time. This is the former site of the Bridge, the edge of our Earth's manasphere beyond which the Horrors held sway. But as you can see, they are now so far removed from our sphere that they are not even a distant menace any longer.
  
  "Then we got at least that much right." Alex sighed. "It's nice to have achieved something."
  
  "We achieved a lot more than 'something'." I insisted. "All the tainted areas of the world cleansed? Well, not the ones that were environmentally tainted, but the problem will be far more manageable without the Horrors subtly making it worse. And that's before we even remotely get into how many conspiracies and cults, from Aztechnology on down, we just helped shatter with a single blow." I sighed. "We knew going in that Lofwyr would almost certainly screw us over somehow, even if we had no idea he'd take it this far. But even with all that-"
  
  "But even with all that, we still saved the world." Cat reassured Alex. "So quit blaming yourself for what happened."
  
  And that is more true than even you know. Remember that all you have been taught regarding the laws of magic was formulated from first principles in a world already marked by the Horrors and the Cycle. With that burden permanently removed from the manasphere, there will be changes that even I can hardly foresee. The root of all Essence will flow cleanly again, and the Younger Races will be as free to eventually reach their full potential as my people already had the privilege of doing in the First World.
  
  "I got stubborn, and then I got lucky." Alexander still doubted. Spirits knew that I loved the man, and a lack of hubris was all well and good when you carried the kind of cosmic power he did, but still-
  
  You underrate yourself, Alexander. I see in your thoughts that you have already begun to suspect that All-Wings and you shared a burden. You are correct. I have seen the power that you bear once before, and my mother was indeed its previous wielder. But you have already gone further down the path of bearing it correctly than she ever did.
  
  "Then you know what my power is!" Alex gasped.
  
  No I do not, because she did not. Dunkelzahn corrected us mildly. But while I do not know everything, I do still know more of its workings and limitations than anyone else yet extant in our universe.
  
  "We're all ears." Cat said eagerly.
  
  And so Dunkelzahn began to explain the workings of what he called 'the Unconquerable' to us. Apparently Alex's suspicion that he could arbitrarily ramp up to defeat any foe was entirely true, for All-Wings had never met a challenge she could not readily surmount. Even the Great Hunter was unable to overcome her - just as it had proven entirely unable to overcome him earlier today - and it had to expend truly legendary amounts of cunning and guile, as well as a truly legendary amount of disposable minions, to keep All-Wings from cornering it long enough to finish killing it. Her only limitations had been that while she was genuinely undefeatable, she was not either omnipotent or omniscient. She could not simultaneously perform two mutually exclusive courses of action, nor could she act upon or perceive truths that were completely outside her sphere of knowledge. Amplifying deductive and intuitive faculties to an almost arbitrarily high point would often allow her to simulate being able to know the unknowable, but even superhumanly accurate inference was not the same thing as certain knowledge.
  
  And, most importantly, she could not act recklessly and then be immune to consequences. Her breaking the world and allowing in the Horrors had been the result of her attempting to brute-force a change to the global Pattern that she did not have the skill or lore to perform more subtly. She could perhaps have succeeded had she been more cautious and patient, and had attempted a more cautious series of experiments and trials instead of simply trying to will things into being all at once, but the truism that having a hammer did not necessarily make all of your problems into nails was still valid even if you had an infinitely large hammer.
  
  "So my initial instincts were correct." Alex said. "I do have to ramp up slowly with this, whenever I can."
  
  Say more that you would always need to retain as much clarity as possible about your goals. Dunkelzahn answered him. Striking with insufficient force against a clear foe is foolish. But by the same token, escalating merely for the sake of escalation is worse than foolish for you; it is dangerous. It was the eternal paradox of All-Wings that the more ability she had to conquer all that she surveyed, the less joy she could take in doing so. And the more ennui she suffered, the greater and more reckless her attempts to seek renewed stimulus in more, in higher and faster- He sighed. But then again, she was a dragon, as am I. We are creatures of passion and primal instincts, who require a complex web of traditions, customs, and rituals - and centuries of maturation and experience - to temper ourselves and truly learn things like empathy, cooperation, and mercy. You are far more fortunate; as much as metahumanity struggles with its id versus its superego, you are still far more easily inclined to the gentler emotions than we. Never consider your humanity a weakness, Alexander, and guard it as if it were your most precious treasure. It is all that will allow you to carry this burden far more lightly than my mother did.
  
  "But what should he do with it?" Cat asked him.
  
  Do? Dunkelzahn raised an eyebrow. An it harm none - unnecessarily - he should do as he wills, of course, just as we all do. For all my age and alleged wisdom I do not possess the meaning of life any more than you do. If you take joy in building, then build. Should it gladden your heart to defend the helpless, then defend them. Should you wish only a peaceful and prosperous life for you and your loved ones, then seek it out. he advised us compassionately. There are of course such considerations as the common law, the general brotherhood of metahumanity, and your own internal ethics, but I do not need to explain to you how to be decent people. I do not have sole possession of the knowledge of right and wrong, and you are all quite admirable in moral character already.
  
  "I think she was asking more 'Where can we go from here?'" I interjected. "Because we're kind of stuck outside the universe."
  
  Alexander is, and will be for years to come. Dunkelzahn added. You and Catherine strictly speaking are not, as the binding lays only upon him.
  
  "I had thought it was permanent." Alexander said.
  
  Remember that power is not measured merely by what you have, but also by what your opponent believes you have. Dunkelzahn said. It is elementary thaumaturgy that without a permanent quickening of the aura, an enchantment, or a spell lock, all sorcery must be ultimately finite in duration. The terms of the ritual cannot bind you for longer than the astral signature of the ritual itself persists upon you. For you to return to my birthworld before the echoes of the ritual finally fade will indeed lead the Dark One back there as well, but that condition will not be binding on you for so much as an ork's lifetime, let alone an elf's. Perhaps even sooner, particularly if you find a way to accelerate the process.
  
  "That's good to hear!" Alex gasped. "So it's not permanent exile then. Lofwyr just wanted us to believe that it was."
  
  The best prisons are often forged solely in the mind. Dunkelzahn nodded. And Gold-Master is a truly brilliant plotter indeed. He expertly took advantage of every opportunity your presence offered him but one, and used it to engineer a lasting defeat of the Scourge in only a few short months. It is such a masterful scheme that I am almost not disappointed in him.
  
  "I'm guessing it's the final goodbye shank in the back that's the disappointing part?" Cat said ironically.
  
  What else? Dunkelzahn agreed. Were he able to have the slightest trust in anyone he did not own, he would have seen what every other dragon from the Orange Queen to Wind Master could so readily perceive - that if left to his own devices your husband would only wish to deal in good faith with all those who did likewise. Your Project Archimedes would have done immense good for the world and made Gold-Master immense profits, had he only had the slightest interest in joining it. An amused dragon chuckle reached our ears, despite there not actually being sound here. He will soon enough figure out that without the Scourge and the cycle, he can no longer simply hope to postpone problems until it is time to enter the kaerns again and then start anew in an untouched world.
  
  "Sorry to interrupt, but I just have to ask." I broke in. "How are you out here in the first place?"
  
  My assassination was in fact an act of self-sacrifice to power an epic working intended to delay the coming of the Scourge for as long as I could. Dunkelzahn added matter-of-factly. The work you and Caimbuel did at the Bridge was proving more temporary than we had hoped. he said to me. And so I had to abandon certain long-range plans to concentrate upon the greater necessity.
  
  "You were what defeated the Blood Mage Gestalt in the late 50s and headed off the second Spike Point planned for 2061!" I realized. "And you channeled Great Ghost Dance level magic by using a blood sacrifice of yourself!"
  
  Correct. Dunkelzahn agreed. And as part of that working I dimensionally exiled my spirit out here after I shattered my body, to stand an eternal vigil upon the Bridge until the cycle either completed yet another turn of the wheel or those I left behind found a way to halt it over the long-term. As Gold-Master now has, even if I did not remotely expect the feat to be achieved this completely or this soon.
  
  "And now he gets to inherit the world." Cat groused. "I mean, even your brother hasn't been able to do much to stop him so far."
  
  I am surprised at the news of my brother's return to Earth at all. But yes, with less than a decade to start from effectively nothing, it would take some time for even Doll-Maker - who is actually a more skilled politician than I, even if he is not often given credit for such - to overcome Gold-Master's advantage of position.
  
  "Wait, you said would, not will." Alex immediately realized. "What do you think will change that-" and then he suddenly broke out laughing, of all things! "Of course! How did I not see it immediately?"
  
  "Um, see what immediately?" Cat asked, confused, and then turned to look at me in shock as the sound of my palm hitting my forehead rang out like a pistol shot.
  
  "Idiot!" I cursed at myself. "It was literally staring us in the face! There's only one way your astral form could remain this intact out here for this long, and that's if you weren't actually dead!"
  
  Exactly! Dunkelzahn congratulated me. Oh, I was not entirely alive either. The amount of blood sacrifice needed to re-empower the barriers against the Scourge would have killed any other Great Dragon, and came within a hairs' breadth of killing me. I was comatose for quite a while, and amnesiac in the astral for a while longer. For a substantial period of time I needed to astrally bond with a human practitioner likewise suspended on the border between life and death by cybermancy, a former victim of Aztechnology, to help sustain myself. He sighed. But Billy's tormented soul has at last been freed to go on to its proper reward with the banishment of the Scourge, and I am now my proper self again. And while it will take me a great deal of time to solve the problem of metaplanar navigation back to Earth given how the re-alignment you just helped perform has reset all the benchmarks, I will return eventually.
  
  "Um, actually sir, I can think I can help you do it right now." I spoke up. "The ring you gave me? I deliberately left it behind on Earth. I don't have the skill to follow that tenuous a connection back that far without breaking it... but you do."
  
  ... bread cast upon the waters indeed. Dunkelzahn said to me wonderingly. You would truly have been one of the greatest students I would ever have had.
  
  "I'm still sorry about that, by the way." I blushed. "Gods, I was such an idiot."
  
  It was not your fault, but mine. For all that I have tried to be the Younger Races' guardian and guide, I still fall too much in love with my own schemes sometimes. Doll-Maker had always been the one whose caution kept me from lapsing too far into those habits... he smiled. And now he can perform that service for me again.
  
  "Um, I'm all for helping the Big D get back home as quickly as he can - not least because I just want to imagine the expression on Lofwyr's face - but how do we get back?" Alex asked.
  
  You forge an astral connection with me, of course. Dunkelzahn said matter-of-factly. The stages of initiation are largely an arbitrary concept for you, so simply advancing yourself another grade along with myself as part of an initiatory group will leave a karmic tie between us that you can readily use to bring you and your loved ones back when the effects of Lofwyr's binding finally fade sufficiently.
  
  Alex sighed in ecstatic relief as the weight of a world seemed to vanish off his back. "The Dark One taunted me with a foretelling that if I allowed Lofwyr to betray me, I would forfeit ever being able to complete Project Archimedes." he said. "A project that I'd already been despairing of how to complete in anything less than centuries because I simply didn't have the experience or the resource base to manipulate that many megacorporations without brute-forcing it, and we already discussed why even my powers can't risk doing that without the risk of excessive collateral damage. But my original inspiration for Project Archimedes was you, sir. And the work that you could have done, would have done, had you not been forced by the press of events to abandon what you'd planned to do with the Presidency because of the immediate press of the Scourge." He fearlessly looked up into Dunkelzahn's eyes. "Would you please share all of my thoughts about what I'd hoped to accomplish, sir, and make sure these inventions are completed and brought to market? And the other goals?"
  
  I will indeed, and not least because I have already acknowledged I owe you an immense debt for what you have already done. For your goals are indeed the same as mine here, and I would be pleased to add your efforts to my own when I return.
  
  "And try to keep Father from freaking out too much, please? And help pick what's left of Caimbuel up off of whatever floor he's probably collapsed upon?" I asked him.
  
  Of course. Although I will comfort you with the observation that with Ysgraithe's spectre removed from Aina Dupree's life just as readily as you removed all the other Horrors from our birthworld, he will have chances for happiness there again that he had thought forever lost.
  
  "And look after our friends? Or at least help them find useful work instead of just getting lost in the old shadow grind? You'd have to rebuild your network of Watchers anyway, and I can make some handy recommendations there." Cat asked him.
  
  Again, I would be glad to.
  
  "Oh, and just one more thing." I suddenly realized. "Today I got engaged, but I don't want to wait until whatever the hell reality we land in next to get married by a stranger and in front of strangers." I continued firmly. "Would you do me the honor of officiating the ceremony?"
  
  I would be more than honored, Jane. Dunkelzahn agreed.
  
  I stepped forward and took Alex's hand in my right and Cat's in my left.
  
  "I pledge my loyalty to you both. I will hold true to you until we part in death or my loyalty is no longer of value to you. I will love you. And your children will be my children." I said solemnly.
  
  Alex looked and Cat, and she nodded to him.
  
  "I pledge my loyalty to you both. I will hold true to you until we part in death or my loyalty is no longer of value to you. I will love you. And your children will be my children." Alex responded, and Cat likewise in her turn.
  
  Then as Loremaster Emeritus of the Great Dragon Conclave, I sanctify your marriage here before the very face of Creation and pronounce you man and wives. Dunkelzahn said solemnly, before he continued impishly. You may kiss the brides.
  
  Cat and I practically bonked our heads both trying to reach him first, and I swore that I could hear a certain insufferable dragon chuckling in the background.
  
  Nadja Daviar
  
  "Ma'am, there is a man here to see you-" the voice of my secretary broke into my thoughts via my intercom. "Sir, you can't-!" she continued hurriedly.
  
  I stood up and gathered my magic, prepared to strike down this impertinent intruder as soon as he finished pushing past my secretary and entered my office without permission. Who did he think he-?
  
  The door flew open and my heart sank as I saw ice-pale eyes staring out at me from under shock-white hair. I immediately released my mental grip upon my magic as I recognized precisely who this man was - although "man" was not entirely the correct word.
  
  "Nadja Daviar, I would have words with thee." the Great Dragon Ghostwalker said menacingly.
  
  "Doll-Maker." I replied respectfully - but not subserviently. "If one of ours has inadvertently given offense, then I am entirely willing to be reasonable, but-"
  
  "I do not accuse you of offense." he interrupted me contemptuously. "I accuse you of theft. I accuse you of malfeasance. I accuse you of treason. You have been looting my brother's legacy for your own power and profit and very little else."
  
  "I realize that you and I have long disagreed on the proper course of your brother's legacy, but I will remind you that his own expressed wishes - which you pledged to accept - made me the executor of his estate." I insisted firmly.
  
  "Yes, and you have also reminded me - repeatedly - that you have been operating on my brother's secret instructions throughout for many of your more.. questionable decisions." he said, and I reinforced my mental shields yet again against dragonspeech as he glared at me. "But I have recently found out what a tissue of lies that tale of yours has been!" he raged.
  
  "You have no proof of these assertions!" I said. "And neither my kin nor yours will support taking what is rightfully mine by force majeure!"
  
  "What is rightfully-?!?" he snapped, before visibly biting off his words. "I am not here to bandy words with a faithless grave-robber." he said. "I will leave your rightful fate to another, in the fullness of time. But I will have the Dragon's Heart in my hands before I leave here today."
  
  "And what if I don't?" I challenged him.
  
  "Then I'll kill you and take it anyway." he said with a frightening calm. "But as difficult as it may be for you to believe, I would actually prefer for you to live."
  
  "That is difficult for me to believe." I challenged him.
  
  "You're still alive now, aren't you?" he replied matter-of-factly. "Give me the Dragon's Heart, or duel me to the death. Choose. Quickly."
  
  "If I yield the Dragon's Heart to you, you accept that as compensation for my imagined slights against your brother." I insisted. "It ends there."
  
  "Oh, it won't end there." he smiled cruelly. "But I will agree to press no further claims against you in this regard."
  
  "... I accept your terms." I exhaled in relief. "I will instruct the guardians of the vaults to-"
  
  "You will accompany me there in person and then escort me to the door." Ghostwalker interrupted. "I trust you not a single inch further than you could throw me in my true form, grave-robber. Your throat will lie bare beneath my claws until I have what I need firmly in my grasp and I am on a clear path back to the safety of my own domain, and you will like it."
  
  "Very well." I conceded reluctantly, and reminded myself very firmly that an immortal scion of Thera did not allow herself to wet her panties, even when she really really wanted to.
  
  Lofwyr
  
  I flew through the air towards the summit our kind traditionally used for gatherings of the Conclave. Doll-Maker had disappointed me by not even waiting three months after the banishing of the Scourge before making his first challenge to my authority.
  
  It was all quite pathetically predictable, of course. The prestige of my having been the architect of the final victory over the Great Enemy had catapulted me to heights of regard among our kind that even Far-Scholar had never enjoyed. No one save a few meaningless shadowrunners even cared about the loss of Alexander Kincaid or his wife, and while both Ehran and Caimbuel were wroth with me over the loss of Jane Foster I had been able to deflect all of their charges by explaining that she had fallen honorably in battle against the Horrors, a death that she and all the rest of us were sworn to in necessity and that by the traditions of both her kind and ours was not sufficient cause for vendetta by anyone. Which wouldn't stop that bitter old librarian or that outright madman from nursing a blood vendetta anyway, but they would have to do so without the support of any of their kin if they got caught. And I had come too far and defeated too many challengers to quail in fear of them, or anyone.
  
  Still, though, it was quite inconvenient to me for Doll-Maker to so insist that an emergency meeting of the Conclave be held at once, and worse yet, that we all attend in the flesh instead of the convenience of astral projection. I could not imagine any other of our kind besides myself who would have had sufficient prestige to compel such a gathering, and I pleasantly anticipated how much face he would lose for having forced such inconvenience upon us all unless he could show an excellent cause for having done so.
  
  But it would not do well to be overly complacent. Doll-Maker was the finest conjurer and sage of spirit-lore to ever live since the era of All-Wings, and if the ritual had been less complete than I had hoped for then he would be the logical first candidate to discover the signs. And if that were true, then I would have to exercise great cunning. But I doubted it - I had not only done all the calculations myself, I had been present when Alexander Kincaid sent the Great Hunter itself into a rout. And for all its stealth and cunning, the Dark One was far too proud to feign a defeat of that order - especially not in front of the Loremaster of its most hated enemies - simply to set up a relatively brief tactical withdrawal.
  
  I landed, took my rightful place at the head of the gathering, and underwent the Ritual of Honored Greeting to my peers. Only a couple of them had been unable to come, and we had more than enough for a quorum. Doll-Maker met my gaze, and I began to grow slightly concerned at his demeanor. Oh, his pride and distaste for me were as present as ever, but... he was neither worried enough for this to be the resurgence of the Scourge that I feared, nor enraged enough to be indulging in a foolishly hasty challenge to my authority while my star was waxing so ascendant. No, he positively exuded satisfaction, as if he was not only utterly confident of how events would fall in his favor today but also as if he had recently received a tremendous gift.
  
  And why had he insisted on such a large gap being left between him and the Orange Queen? Were we expecting latecomers?
  
  Very well, let us dispense with fencing.
  
  Doll-Maker, you called this gathering. I projected my thoughts to all. What great necessity do you claim?
  
  You hold your office without legitimacy. he shocked me with his reply. And you must either yield it voluntarily, or you must face the Challenge.
  
  This is not a place for jests. I replied contemptuously. You have already challenged me once, and failed! The Orange Queen won that Rite of Challenge, and acknowledged my rightful place as Far-Scholar's heir. You wasted all our time for this?
  
  I did indeed make such a ruling, Gold-Master. the Orange Queen said with far more chilling insolence than I had ever heard her use to me before. However, I was in error. Had I known the truth at the time of my decision, I would never have allowed Far-Scholar's last will and testament to stand. She made a gesture of reconciliation. The claw, once having struck, cannot unstrike. My error is my own to bear, and acknowledging it does not by itself strip you of your authority as Loremaster. However, it does allow for the Challenge to be renewed.
  
  No it does not. I insisted. The traditions were obeyed in full, and Doll-Maker has no right to press a claim again so soon. Not without fresh cause, which even the Orange Queen's... concession... does not grant.
  
  Oh, but I am not the challenger. Doll-Maker gloated. And neither is the Orange Queen, nor any other gathered here. He's being fashionably late again... ah, but here he comes now! he finished smugly, looking up in the sky. We all followed his gaze, and-
  
  No.
  
  It was absurd. It was ludicrous. This had to be a trick! Doll-Maker had entirely lost his reason, and thought he could fool us all by such base artifice-
  
  The resplendent form of the Mountain's Shadow silhouetted itself magnificently against the rising sun, and swooped in low to circle and land as we had all seen him do so many times before. Every gesture, every line of feature and cast of scale was entirely correct. Even his unmasked aura was clearly and unmistakably that of-
  
  How? HOW?!? This could not be! This was impossible!
  
  Gold-Master. Far-Scholar's dragonspeech clashed triumphantly against all our minds, the rich and imposing texture of his thoughts and the sheer knowledge bolstering the context of every telepathic syllable removing the last traces of doubt that he who our eyes beheld was truly before us. You're in my chair.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Think back on every time our MC itemized the obstacles preventing him from successfully executing Project Archimedes any time soon... and then realize that they all applied only to him. The Big D has an immensely greater advantage of position, and the leverage and connections and wealth and friends to get done what even a lone wielder of Conquest could not. Hell, I've been setting this one up since chapter 12 and our hero musing 'Damn, it's a real shame the Big D died when he did. He could have done so much good.' Well, yes he could have. And now he's back, baby! (Thanks to Renrag for posting that clip of Bender.)
  
  And thus the oracle's final advice comes true. There is no limit to the amount of good you can get done... if you don't insist that you have to get the credit for it. *g*
  
  As for Nadja Daviar - okay, the Draco Foundation was built up in 2e as a force that would really make a difference. And then... it didn't. And then when the late 4e suckening came along, they finally mentioned Nadja Daviar again but in the stupidest possible context, and... look, it just sucked, okay? So I acknowledge that to the extent of 'When her boss died and left her alone to execute his legacy, she basically acted like every executor of a will in a novel who just half-asses the job and lives large on the dead man's loot themselves'. And now all her chickens are coming home to roost. After all, Ghostwalker only promised he wouldn't press further charges against her. The Big D, on the other hand... heheheheh.
  
  I am 95% decided on where we're going next. When I'm 100% decided and finish getting an outline together for it, we'll go there. Until then, enjoy the interlude.
  
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  cliffc999, Nov 26, 2021Report#4345Like+ QuoteReply
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  "I can't help remembering something Andrew told me once." I mused as we walked/floated along.
  
  "Dear, we're stuck further out in what you're calling 'the Blind Eternities' than even Dunkelzahn has ever gone." Jane said with a touch of exasperation. "And you're thinking about Urban Brawl of all things?"
  
  "Hey, it's a more cheerful name for where we're stuck than 'The Bleed'." I snarked back. "Or would you prefer 'the Warp'?"
  
  "A world of no." Jane couldn't help but chuckle. "No, definitely not the Warp."
  
  "And regarding Andrew I was actually thinking about how he told me once that goals weren't just for winning Brawl games. Or how a lot of people that we'd met had just basically fallen apart after they'd spent too long not having to struggle for anything." I sighed regretfully. "A cautionary tale that's having a lot of resonance with me after hearing about the life story of All-Wings."
  
  "He was talking about all those goldenkids and celebrities in LA, wasn't he?" Cat agreed. "I'm pretty sure those people were more nature than nurture. Or did you forget what you told us once about how power didn't corrupt so much as it let the existing capacity for corruption have free rein to grow?"
  
  "... I was going to raise the point that my nature prior to receiving this power and ending up in Shadowrun wasn't anything to write home about, but then you'd just point out that if that's true then my power is, if anything, helping me grow better as a person." I sighed again, but this time in relief. "Thank you for the reassurance, I legitimately needed that."
  
  "And I legitimately need a nice place we can get started on our honeymoon." Jane deliberately tried to lighten the mood. "I know we discussed how trying to brute force a way to somewhere was a bad idea and why, but are you at least sensing anything?"
  
  "This would be going a lot easier if we could use any one of the existing metaplanes we're familiar with, but we can't." I agreed.
  
  "Lofwyr's dick move applies if I go anywhere inside Shadowrun's manasphere, not just our Earth itself. The former site of the Bridge is as close as we could dare to approach. So..." I nodded and got to work.
  
  I was ramping my senses up as high as I could imagine them going - at least the ones useful for sensing disturbances in the astral plane - and concentrated as best I could on picking up any astral ripples that might suggest anywhere we could actually land. Preferably somewhere that had an already existing astral rift, because we'd gotten bodily thrown into the astral plane and neither Jane nor I actually knew a technique for opening a way that allowed physical travel in-between the astral and physical planes. Even Dunkelzahn hadn't, it not being a field of lore that the dragons had felt any great need to delve into. The astral rift created at the scene of his 'death' had not been intentional, even if it had ultimately proved useful to his brother Ghostwalker in allowing him to find a way home when he'd gotten astrally stuck in the Blind Eternities.
  
  A feat that I was now trying to emulate. But even if we'd come far enough that the familiar echoes and reverberations of the Shadowrun manasphere were no longer impinging upon my awareness, the problem was that we were likewise so far out that all other signals were being wholly damped out as well. it didn't matter how sensitive your receiver was if nothing was transmitting, and whatever the astral equivalent of the deep space cosmic background ray count might be, we weren't getting any signals strong enough to stand out against that-
  
  ... wait, what the hell was that?
  
  "Something?" Jane said, noting my change of expression.
  
  "Dimensional rift. And it's got to be immense to be sensed this far out. It doesn't feel quite like any astral rift I've ever assensed, but..." I muttered, still trying to focus in.
  
  "But it's still something to aim for besides yet more nothing." Cat said hurriedly. "Seriously, I've been stuck in the astral and away from the Resonance for long enough I can't tell if it's just my imagination that my brain is starting to feel a little different. And I don't want to be here long enough to find out for certain!"
  
  "Well, we've been zipping through the trackless depths at such ludicrous speed that we could potentially be anywhere in the multiverse by now." I agreed. "So yes, we can't pass up this chance. Grab on, I'll head us over there as fast as I can."
  
  As we drew nearer and nearer to the strange universe and its associated metaplanes, we felt things start to become different. Dunkelzahn had already mentioned the concept of immutable laws of magic not necessarily being so immutable as the underlying cosmology of a realm was affected by immense changes such as the banishing of the Horrors, so it made sense that a different universe might have magic that worked somewhat differently. Still, just so long as there was magic then me and Jane should be able to adjust- well, I was sure that I could adjust to essentially anything, but I also wanted her to be safe-
  
  "Pathetic Earthlings. Hurling your bodies into the void, without an inkling of who or what is out here." Jane muttered as the 'sense' of actual dimensions and planes began to slowly build up around us, and the astral plane ceased being a smooth void and slowly developed currents and tides-
  
  "Wow, how good was his movie collection?" I said, legitimately impressed.
  
  "Um, is it supposed to look like that?" Cat asked querulously as we drew nearer, and the astral 'sky' began to fill with glittering points of light.
  
  "... not that I've ever seen before." Jane said, looking around wondrously. "Are those all planes?"
  
  "I think those are universes." I said. "Actual, physical universes. We'd already hypothesized a multiverse, but..." I tried to wrap my head around it.
  
  "Multiple physical universes, as opposed to just one base physical realm and associated metaplanes." Jane said raptorously. "Wow, at this point I'm ready to thank Lofwyr for exiling us here. Nobody's ever seen anything like this before!"
  
  "The people who live here have." Cat pointed out practically. "But... what sort of people?"
  
  As we flew deeper and deeper towards the heart of this... local multiversal cluster, I suppose would be the best way to describe it... the astral currents grew more and more tangled, and the speed we felt it safe to use grew slower and slower. "Navigation's getting tricky..."
  
  "It would have to." Jane agreed. "So many different material realms instead of just one... astral space must be not just multi- but poly-dimensional. I can't even begin to calculate the implications of that in my head..."
  
  I ramped up my intellect and tried to do precisely that, extending the logic of my own basic knowledge of astral geometry and trying to come up with a hypothesis that explained the data I was perceiving-
  
  "Okay, I'm getting a feeling for what I'm sensing. It's some kind of massive warping of space in the material realm." I realized. "One that's so powerful that it creates a shadow in the astral."
  
  "We can't come out there!" Cat said, aghast. "You must be describing some kind of gravitic hypermass! No, an outright gravitational singularity!" She shook her head. "Be safer to pop out in the middle of the core of a white supergiant!"
  
  "Wait, the signal just split as we got closer. I was picking up multiples of them, that's why they were perceptible so impossibly far out." I said, my eyes going as wide as a squirrel's. "Two... four... dozens-" I pulled my mind away and ramped down. "Okay, I just got a major hunch that I do not want to risk poking that bear any further."
  
  "Why?" Cat asked.
  
  "What would you say if I told you that all those major 'warp points' felt virtually identical?" I asked her.
  
  "That they're very likely not natural phenomena." Jane agreed, going pale.
  
  "Wait, some kind of hypothetical cosmic megascale engineering? And in multiple dimensions too?" Cat whispered. "Okay, I'm about ready to say we should turn around and go right back into the Blind Eternities."
  
  "Unfortunately, the nearest one is one that we're almost on top of - well, relatively speaking." I said. "And it's like a gravity well. Much easier to go down and towards than up and away."
  
  "And if we're positing a multidimensional civilization, then they might have detectors for dimensional travel, so we want to stay as low signature as possible." Jane agreed.
  
  "Yeah. Masking on, full strength. We both cover Cat too. And then we creep away quietly from where we are now, and on an oblique vector." I ordered.
  
  "Undertow!" Jane called after we'd been sneaking along for a short while. "Or at least that's what it feels like!"
  
  We both grabbed onto Cat and each other as a swift astral current suddenly yanked us off-course. The best analogy I could think of was that we were three small fish in the depths of an ocean, and suddenly a whale or a submarine had swum past a mile or so away and we'd just gotten pulled along by the corona of its wake.
  
  "Tell me we're not getting sucked into some kind of cosmic garbage disposal!" Cat begged.
  
  "No, it's more like there's some kind of rapidly rushing... channel?" I tried to find words. "And we're paralleling its course. Weird thing, though, it's heading away from that giant warp point."
  
  "Well if that's behind us, then what's ahead of us?" Jane asked practically.
  
  I concentrated on long-range assensing, even if I couldn't hope to pick up on any really fine details this far out. "A dimension. Material plane, not metaplane. Wait..."
  
  "Yes, that's familiar!" Jane agreed as we swept closer and closer, going from the equivalent of cosmic distances to merely interstellar. "Well, not entirely familiar but it's definitely the same type of thing even if it's not the one I'm familiar with! That's the astral echo of a biosphere! No, a Gaia-sphere!"
  
  "Alternate Earth." I agreed. "It just... resonates with us, somehow. But you two are resonating identically and I'm slightly different, so-"
  
  "Jane and I were born on the same Earth, you were born on a different one." Cat reasoned. "And this is a third one entirely. So it's like that symbolic link thing you explained to me once, not an actual material link."
  
  "And apparently that big warp point just opened up some kind of dimensional travel vortex heading to that Earth." I agreed as we drew nearer and nearer to the astral boundary. "That's what we've been paralleling the 'current' of."
  
  "Huh, it looks like the endpoint of the vortex is actually outside the atmosphere." Jane said. "Well outside the atmosphere. We certainly don't want to follow it all the way there."
  
  "No, we don't." I said. "But now that we're close enough to actually 'feel' the planet... is it just me or does it 'feel' like there's little weak points down there that we could use to come out of? Like the Washington Rift, only not as dramatic?"
  
  "Yes it does!" Jane agreed enthusiastically. "We're close enough now, so let's drop into near astral space and actually get a look at the place directly!"
  
  We came out of what back home we'd have called the metaplanes and entered the near astral, the section of the astral that had a one-to-one correspondence with the material realm and could let you actually see into it and vice versa.
  
  "Wait, this is low earth orbit!" Jane cried. "We should be dead at this altitude!"
  
  "There's no mana void in space in this universe." I said, awestruck. "Different laws of magic, indeed."
  
  "And there she is!" Cat pointed and called out joyously, as we all three floated like ghosts in orbit looking down at the blue cloudy ball that was Mother Earth.
  
  We all wiped tears from our eyes and just basked in the glorious view for a few minutes, and then we swooped down. We'd come out somewhere over western Europe, and it was a very familiar-looking Europe indeed. The fine details of physical objects were often difficult to observe from the astral plane - only living things, magical auras. and things of great emotional resonance actually had color and fine resolution in the near astral, with the physical details of real-world objects being largely colorless shadows and drab reflections - but the Gaiasphere itself mystically qualified as a living thing, an aura, and a thing of great emotional resonance, and so the planet as a whole still glittered a brilliant blue-green with white clouds. And while a disturbance or a taint would have had to have been widespread indeed to be visible at this distance, it was still a relief not to see any signs of such.
  
  "I can't see any ley lines." Jane muttered. "Which means this place has either vastly different laws of magic, or more likely they're not glowing brilliantly enough to stand out against the Gaiasphere's own radiance at this distance. So even though there's still magic this high up, it's not because the world itself is overcharged with magic by our standards."
  
  I couldn't help but inwardly sigh with relief at confirmation that we were not going to end up on Rifts-Earth or something. There had been that giant network of dimensional nexi of some type that was detectable at such a long range, after all.
  
  "So where are we landing?" Cat asked insistently.
  
  "We'll try Stonehenge first." I decided, because we wanted a place where the Veil between the material and the astral was as thin as possible and an ancient site of mythic - and hopefully mystic - significance was as good a place as any to start looking. Not that I had the slightest ability to find Stonehenge on a map without a Matrix lookup, but fortunately Jane did. The town of Amesbury in County Wiltshire was approximately ninety miles west of London, so we simply looked for a point halfway between London and the Bristol Channel and began a low altitude sweep. Soon enough the familiar stone circle showed up on the plain a couple miles away from the nearest town, and we all breathed a sigh of relief as we saw the glowing aura and brilliant detail that indicated that it was a genuinely magical site even in this other-Earth. The rest of the Salisbury Plain around us was peaceful and quiet underneath a clear moonlit sky.
  
  "Right." Jane breathed relievedly as we eagerly flew straight in and settled to a stop just outside the inner circle of stones. "We can work with this."
  
  I nodded. "It's the middle of the night, all nice and quiet. I'll see if there's a spirit here I can summon. Probably be a better idea than just trying to force open a gap."
  
  "We'll do it together." Jane asked. "Nice and easy now..."
  
  While normally the summoning of a simple spirit would take an experienced conjurer less than a minute, in a world with a different manasphere and quite possibly different laws of magic we chose to approach the job as slowly and carefully as if we were trying to cast in a wild magic zone. Fortunately the local mana seemed to be quite steady, and while it wasn't quite as high as it was back on Earth-Shadowrun it wasn't any kind of low-mana zone either. Jane estimated that it was probably roughly equivalent to where Earth-Shadowrun had been only a couple of decades post-Awakening, so neither of us would have any real problems with added Drain.
  
  "You come from far away indeed, travelers." the ancient-sounding voices reached us distantly. Back in Shadowrun a spirit of man or nature would have manifested clearly by now, but clearly the rules of conjuring were notably different here. Still, we'd reached someone. Or someones.
  
  "Very far indeed." I agreed politely. "Spirits of this place, we are men and women born of the material realm yet through no will of our own trapped on this side of the veil. Although this world is not the world of our birth, we yet humbly request safe haven here. If you could, please open the way."
  
  "Shape your power and press upon the keystone." the voices whispered. We did a careful assensing to hopefully make sure we weren't about to unleash sealed evil in a can or something, and cautiously did as we were bid.
  
  The clean, raw mana we funnelled into the stone circle was grabbed and shaped by - something - and elegantly formed into an arch, then a circle, and then a gateway. The astral rift began to open, and I hurriedly took what mental notes I could-
  
  "The way now lies open for men and elves." the spirits replied. "Cross quickly. And be wary, for the trail you followed to reach this world carries a wave of conquest that threatens to overwhelm us all."
  
  "I have no intention of overwhelming anything!" I demurred earnestly as we rushed forward to step sideways back into the material realm. Gravity suddenly resumed its operation. Oxygen filled our lungs. The beat of our hearts, the smell of crisp clean grass, the peaceful murmuring of nighttime wildlife-
  
  -the frantic murmuring of a nervous-sounding young woman nearby.
  
  "-ode 99! I say again, code 99! A man and two women just materialized out of thin air in the center of the stone circle, and Lord ha' mercy, I swear that the ladies are of the Fair Folk! ... oh hell, they're all looking right at me." I overheard her clearly.
  
  Looking in the direction of the sound revealed why we hadn't seen her on approach - she'd been behind one of the stones, which being mystically charged were all opaque to astral sight. And we'd been so eager to get out of the astral that we hadn't looked all around before going straight in. So right now only the uniform cap and head of a young policewoman stuck out from around the corner of the menhir, along with one visible hand holding up a slim walkie-talkie to her mouth. At least we'd landed somewhere modern-
  
  "Are they hostile, Constable?" the voice on the other end of the connection replied urgently.
  
  "No sir, the man is... facepalming?" she replied. "Looks as guilty as a shoplifter that just got nicked, in fact." she muttered with nervous humor. "They're all just... waiting me for to say something?"
  
  "... right then." her shift sergeant replied resignedly. "Backup will be there in a few minutes. If you think it's safe then make the approach. If not then you are authorized to run like the clappers."
  
  "Hello? Sir? M'ladies?" she called out querulously as she stepped out from behind the menhir. "My apologies, but I am afraid that I shall have to ask you to accompany me to the station!"
  
  Despite the young policewoman's statement, we were not actually taken to the station house. The first several panda cars that arrived carried the normal progression of everyone available on the night shift to respond to a radio call and then a supervisor, but all they did was stand around about fifty feet away and wait. The sergeant had briefly chatted with us and taken down our names and asked us some basic questions, and having been caught red-handed and not wanting to start out our journey in a strange new world as hunted fugitives after punching out the cops we'd resigned ourselves to the inevitable and just straight-up admitted the basics. Magic, parallel Earth, accidental dimensional journey due to a ritual gone wrong, we come in peace, et cetera.
  
  Really, given the whole 'we'd teleported in out of thin air and two of us were visibly non-human' thing the bobbies were being remarkably calm about the whole thing. Oh, they were a little taut in their demeanor and I noticed that several of the late-arrivers actually had firearms slung - the shift supervisor on duty must have authorized an armed response - but I could see in their auras that they were legitimately as mostly non-freaked-out as they appeared to be. The amount of caution they were bringing to the task was more appropriate to police officers encountering armed but apparently non-hostile strangers in a diplomatic situation as opposed to people who had just seen three alien life forms appear out of thin air. It was actually a little disconcerting in its lack of panic. I mean, God knows that the Metropolitan Police were justly famed for their sang-froid but this was still getting strange-
  
  And then suddenly everything was explained when the 'specialist unit' that the sergeant had said they were waiting for arrived.
  
  The first sign of their arrival is when the sergeant nodded at something said to him over the radio and then turned and faced to the east and south. He drew his big four-cell Mag-Lite from its belt loop and switched it on, aiming it up into the sky and flashing it three times. In response a set of aircraft running lights lit up at somewhat less than a thousand feet of altitude, and the helicopter he was guiding in began to swoop down on final approach-
  
  "... that's not a helicopter!" Cat said, shocked. As elves both Jane and Cat had natural low-light vision at least as good as anything cybernetics could supply, and of course I could amplify my senses at will, so even before it had drawn into immediate view for the others we three got a good look at it.
  
  Until now we hadn't seen anything that wouldn't have been perfectly at home on a late 20th-century or early 21st-century Earth. The police radios were still hand-held units but were compact and robust-looking instead of being clunky 80s-era walkie-talkies, the firearms the Armed Response officers had slung were perfectly ordinary 9mm submachine guns and pistols, and their armor vests looked to be standard Kevlar. Likewise the police cars and Armed Response van were perfectly ordinary vehicles - even the brand names were the same. I hadn't been surprised that everyone here spoke familiar English - after all, the same thing had occurred when I'd gone from my original world to Earth-Shadowrun - but all the rest of the correspondences had been a little eerie. Up until I'd seen the aircraft, part of me had actually been dimly wondering if I'd somehow ended up back on my original world.
  
  But clearly that was not the case, because the aircraft that drew into view was nothing I'd seen in either my original Earth or Earth-Shadowrun. It was a glossy dark-navy blue military-style aircraft but one without either rotor blades or wings. In outline it looked to actually be akin to the SHAPELY dirigibles of Shadowrun, an aerodynamic 'lifting body', but it was moving at a speed more appropriate to a Blackhawk. If anything it looked like an MCU Quinjet, only with wings so stubby as to basically be just an outward flaring of the body. Like a dirigible it clearly had to have something else holding it up besides either aerodynamics or VTOL jets, but it clearly couldn't be a lighter-than-air vehicle given its size and visibly armored construction. Whatever was levitating it was holding up at least as much weight as an A-10 "Warthog" ground-attack fighter, because the hull was clearly made out of advanced laminate composite at least as sophisticated as anything I'd ever seen on an Ares APC. Likewise, the wing stubs were carrying some type of pintle-mounted heavy autocannons - no, those thick armored power cables meant that those were energy weapons!
  
  And as the aircraft drew close enough to land that we could see the blue-and-white logo on the side, everything became clear. The hover-transport settling to a smooth landing nearby and the rear ramp lowering to reveal a squad of agents in advanced tactical gear and carrying blaster rifles straight out of a science fiction movie was highlighted exactly what type of new world we'd landed in. The blue-and-white logo emblazoned on the aircraft's side was just the punctuation on an already emphatic sentence. The emblem was clearly based on the United Nations flag we were already familiar with, a stylized polar-projection map of the globe surmounting a pair of olive branches symbolizing peace, but the text banner underneath it was new. UNTIL the heraldry proudly proclaimed, with smaller letters explaining the acronym underneath; United Nations Tribunal on International Law.
  
  No wonder the police hadn't been mindblown at seeing strangers magically teleport into the center of Stonehenge. This was a superhero universe.
  
  
  
  The SHIELD-alikes who'd politely greeted us, ran an energy scanner of some kind over us, and then politely 'invited' us to accompany them back to their nearby compound were all very gentlemanly and polite. The supervisory agent in a neat gray suit accompanying them was basically an Agent Coulson type straight from Central Casting... well, if you'd held your casting call in Uganda. And despite the 2020s-ish technology - or in UNTIL's case at least, outright superhero technology - visible all around us, the local date was only 1998. Apparently the general tech level of this world had advanced at least one generation faster than our own as an indirect effect from all the superheroing and tech geniuses and etc. So, not an artificial comic-book stasis again. And most importantly, so far nobody had remotely presented themselves like there was a HYDRA lurking inside this particular expy of SHIELD anywhere, even if we were technically under arrest.
  
  Then again, that was a fair cop. We had dropped into a foreign country without a valid visa, after all.
  
  The nearest UNTIL compound was co-located at RAF Boscombe Down, the Royal Air Force's large regional airbase and test flight center located several miles southeast of Amesbury and only a few minutes' flight hop from Stonehenge. The familiar sight of the Union Jack flying over the base to go along with the UN flag on a pole inside their separate compound reassured us that whatever this new timeline was, it wasn't some New World Order one-world-government thing. At least, not openly.
  
  After we arrived a medical technician had drawn blood samples from us - protocol for extraterrestrial visitors, which we also technically were - and then we'd all been put in a debriefing room, where we'd been for the hour and a half. We hadn't had any chance to speak to each other in private since we'd arrived, which was only elementary law enforcement procedure to keep a group of suspects from having a chance to rehearse a story amongst themselves. We couldn't even use Cat's technomancy because none of us had been wearing our commlinks - we'd taken off all our breakable gear before doing the ritual, given the magnitude of the energies expected to be involved, so we'd arrived wearing only our clothes - and while Jane and I both spoke Sperethiel, we couldn't use it without making it obvious we were trying to communicate secretly.
  
  Which meant there was nothing for it to but to actually tell the truth. In addition to the concern that we had no idea what kind of lie-detector powers or technology this place might have, if we tried making shit up then the lack of opportunity to coordinate beforehand would rapidly trip us up. But since this technically wasn't a hostile interrogation then we hadn't been split up or restrained or anything, so we could at least hear what everyone else was saying.
  
  So we'd given a reasonable outline of the situation. Tthat we'd been working on a great ritual to banish a major extradimensional evil from our home dimension in conjunction with other mystic defenders, that the powerful supervillain - look, Lofwyr had earned that designator - who'd been invited into the alliance had betrayed us at the last second, that we'd been cast deep into the astral plane, and that we didn't know how to return home and didn't even anticipate being able to until the mystical 'echoes' of his banishment finally faded.
  
  "So you were superheroes back home?" Captain Akiki Masane, the second-ranking agent assigned to this UNTIL post, asked us amiably in his quite frankly beautiful English. The man could have been a BBC announcer.
  
  "I like to think of myself as generally heroic." I agreed, and his smile widened knowingly at my evasion. "But before I became independently wealthy enough to pick my own battles, I'd been a mercenary. Catherine as well. Still, that had been with a licensed and bonded private military contractor... well, most of it." I admitted.
  
  "I was more of a freelance mystic defender type, but I also did contract work to make enough to live on. But our homeworld didn't quite have the same 'rule of law' as your Earth apparently does - assuming that your 1998 is roughly analogous to what our own was." Jane chimed in. "The best jurisdictions were still significantly corrupt, a lot of nations were what you would probably call outright kleptocracies, and many verged on being outright warlord states. So none of us can really say that we didn't break laws, because it was basically impossible to live decently without breaking some."
  
  "That I can entirely understand." Masane nodded sympathetically. Yeah, the man was old enough to have been just hitting his teens back when Idi Amin still ran his home country. "But you still did not seek to hurt people unnecessarily?"
  
  "No noncombatants, no innocents." I agreed wholeheartedly. "And we'll be entirely happy to comply with the local laws here as soon as we can find out what they are." Unless they turn out to be total bullshit, I mentally crossed my fingers behind my back.
  
  "Well, we certainly have every intention of providing transition assistance." he agreed. "Not that dimensional travellers are a familiar event even for us, but the First Contact protocols can be readily enough adapted to your situation. Oh, and I can reassure you that Her Majesty's Government will be dropping the immigration charges now that we're aware of the situation."
  
  "So we're free to go?" Cat probed.
  
  "Legally, yes." he surprised us. "We would of course prefer that you stay, and given that you still entirely lack documents, a means of support, or even any possessions beyond the clothes on your backs it would be entirely sensible of you to continue to accept our hospitality for at least the near future. But unlike the situation that you just described we pride ourselves on observing a genuine rule of law here, and it would not be an act of good faith to continue to press charges against you. The castaway rule entirely applies to your particular situation; the Crown Prosecution Service would be derelict if it attempted to bring you to court on charges they already knew would fail due to your having a valid defense. So yes, if you wanted to you could walk right out this door right now... although I'd earnestly advise you not to, because it would be sadly counterproductive if you ended up brought right back here tomorrow for, oh, having to steal food to eat or suchlike."
  
  "So what do we do for paperwork?" Jane asked practically.
  
  "UNTIL has the authority to issue you UN Certificates of Identity as per the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which will be done immediately after this meeting. Her Majesty's government will likewise issue you each a Standard Visitor's Visa at our request, as soon as I validate your stateless passports. Those will allow you legal residence in the United Kingdom for the next six months, by which point we should long have since worked out the best permanent solution for your situation between us." Masane said reassuringly. "And while all that's occurring, we'll ask the RAF to set you up in visitors' quarters on the base and give you an access pass so you can come and go freely. For tonight we can find you some bunks right here, and in the morning I'll escort you to the post exchange so we can at least get you some clothes and effects on our expense account."
  
  "Would it be possible to get joint quarters?" Cat asked. "Because we're married."
  
  "Of course it would be." he agreed amiably. "Might I ask which two of you are married?"
  
  "We're married." Jane said. "All three of us. Is polygamy not known here?"
  
  "I am culturally familiar with it but no, it's not exactly in the Western common law." he replied without missing a beat. "Still, I am presuming your marriage was legal and properly sanctified in the jurisdiction where it took place?"
  
  "Absolutely." I agreed. Hey, the depths of astral space was a 'jurisdiction', wasn't it?
  
  "Then the full faith and credit rule would apply." he agreed.
  
  "Good, because if I had to give up on my honeymoon night on top of everything else I just lost touch with I'd go absolutely spare." Jane burst out.
  
  "You were only married just today?" he startled.
  
  "Given how time flowed weird while stuck in the astral we couldn't even begin to tell if you it was today, last week, or last year." Cat said. "But yeah, this is the first time we've touched terra firma since the ceremony."
  
  "Then my earnest congratulations to you all!" he replied with genuine warmth. "And I'll certainly have to find something better than merely a few cots off the ready room! Well, I'll-"
  
  The door to the room suddenly opened. "Sir?" a junior uniformed agent stuck his head in. " Commander Aleksikov needs you in the watch center immediately." He nodded towards us. "Them as well."
  
  Captain Masane shot right out of his chair, his demeanor going entirely somber in an instant. We all hurried to our feet as well. "Immediately?" he repeated significantly.
  
  "His words, sir." the junior agent affirmed, and we all hurried off down the corridors of the UNTIL post's headquarters building. Masane waved us right past a high security checkpoint and we crossed over from the outer offices of the HQ into the secure center where they kept things like the communications room, the commander's office, and the big room with all the big screens that we were entering.
  
  "We have an immediate situation." the gray-haired man in uniform that everyone else was deferring to greeted us. "According to our visitors' debriefings, they followed some kind of 'major dimensional vortex' to find our world, correct?"
  
  "Yes sir." I agreed.
  
  "Well, about half an hour ago the boffins finished narrowing down the vague sense of distance and direction that you gave us and it turns out that that vortex's entry point was at least three hundred thousand miles away from Earth and directly behind the Moon." Commander Aleksikov continued.
  
  "At the moon's orbital velocity a fixed point in space would have been unmasked by the moon in under a minute." I realized. "Whatever's maintaining that vortex entry is moving it in sync with the moon's orbit. It's deliberately masking its approach from Earth."
  
  "Precisely." Commander Aleksikov nodded. "It's big, it's entirely unprecedented, and it's hiding. That's not a comfortable combination. So I need you all to please tell us anything else about that phenomenon that you can possibly remember."
  
  I hurriedly began a recital of every subjective impression about the network of dimensional nexuses-or-whatever-the-hell-else-they-were that I could recall, and the technicians in the watch center recorded every word and transmitted them to UNTIL HQ in New York. And as I reached the end of the recital, I suddenly pounded my fist on my thigh. Idiot!
  
  "Shit, I just remembered. Everything else that had happened had driven it out of my head, because the second right after it happened we'd dropped on top of that poor bobby-" I broke off. "Right before we materialized at Stonehenge, we'd spoken to the local... spirits of some kind... to help open a gate for us to cross over. And the last thing they said to us was 'And be wary, for the trail you followed to reach this world carries a wave of conquest that threatens to overwhelm us all.'"
  
  "Director-General, did you copy that?" Aleksikov said hurriedly into the speakerphone.
  
  "I did." the UNTIL Director's voice came back from the other end of the line while the icon on the map for the UN Building in NYC glowed to denote who was talking. "HUGIN, inform all stations to set global threat watch. We are at DEFCON Four, I repeat, DEFCON Four."
  
  "Global threat watch declared. All stations acknowledge DEFCON Four." a smooth mechanical voice replied, sounding vaguely like a feminine JARVIS from the MCU movies. Okay, so we apparently had AIs in this superhero world too-
  
  "This is Vanguard." a new man's voice broke in, with a confidence and maturity I could only describe as 'Superhero-ish', while a new icon on the global display flicked into existence at New York City. "The Sentinels acknowledge DEFCON Four."
  
  "Director, this is Gateway Station." a new icon blinked on the map - one apparently set in geosynchronous orbit. "We just finished that deep analysis you asked for half an hour ago, and the long-range sensor arrays at L-4 and L-5 are picking up too much nothing. Now that we're on manual and not just relying on the software, the scientists can see that there isn't enough background noise. The pattern is random-appearing but it's actually a subtle repetition variant. Somebody is running one hell of a cloaking field out there in the lunar shadow."
  
  "HUGIN confirms." the AI replied. "An interesting cloaking algorithm. It utilizes a semi-random fluctuating pattern intended to adequately simulate cosmic ray fluctuations in a manner that most non-heuristic intelligences would mathematically overlook. It would have required near-human or human intuition along with a dedicated attention focus to spot the pattern."
  
  "DEFCON Three." the Director-General immediately ordered. "HUGIN, flash traffic to all participating superhero teams to stand to. We have a possible global situation."
  
  "Christ, this could be as bad as the Hzeel." I heard Aleksikov mutter.
  
  "Boscombe Down, this is London." a new voice broke in on the secondary frequency. "Whitehall wants to know what the hell is going on and so do we, over."
  
  "We've got a probable major dimensional breach in cislunar space behind the Moon's shadow, London." Masane explained to them. "Tap HUGIN's status feed for the rest, please, it's getting rather busy down here."
  
  "We're already doing that, but the first threat indicator came from you. What the hell did you trip over there-?" London insisted.
  
  "Vanguard, this is Dr. Amazing." a new voice broke in, with an icon flashing somewhere in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina on the big map. "I've got the customized probe ready for launch."
  
  "I'm on my way." Vanguard replied. "Diadem, you've got tactical command until I get back from the space mission."
  
  On the map, Vanguard's icon departed New York and started zipping down towards Dr. Amazing's icon at... holy crap, he was going to make North Carolina from NYC in less than two minutes at that pace! His icon touched down briefly, then started moving again - upwards. Straight upwards. He hit escape velocity in less than thirty seconds and streaked out into cislunar space like gravity wasn't even a suggestion. Okay, for all the Marvel-esque themes I'd seen so far apparently this world had its equivalent of Superman too...
  
  "All right, I'm going to drop down low on the near side and skim the lunar horizon until I can get the probe a good viewing angle to dark space." Vanguard said, as his map icon faded out once he left the range of Earth's near-orbit tracking network. "We'll stick to communicating on the tight-beam."
  
  We all held our breath as the lightspeed lag began to kick in. Wherever and whatever Vanguard was seeing, he was over two seconds' ahead of us by now.
  
  "Skimming the surface. I'll be within the lightcone of the emergence point-"
  
  "Vanguard!" Diadem suddenly cried out on the circuit in a panic. "I just lost my link!"
  
  "-in just a few seconds, and-" Vanguard's voice transmission cut out almost exactly two and a quarter seconds later. Diadem must have been the team telepath, so she'd have known in real-time-
  
  "Vanguard offline." HUGIN said dispassionately.
  
  "All signals from the probe have been lost." Dr. Amazing contributed. "Trying to salvage the last telemetry burst now-"
  
  "When Doctor Destroyer tried to gravity-beam that asteroid into the planet, Vanguard tanked it on his fucking face!" one of the technicians broke out in incredulous swearing. "What the hell-?"
  
  "Silence in the ranks!" Commander Aleksikov snapped.
  
  "All stations, DEFCON Two. I say again, we are at DEFCON Two!" the Director's voice snapped. "HUGIN, if there's a national military on this rock not on high alert yet then wake them the hell up! We just lost the most powerful superhero on Earth like he was a beat cop walking into a bank robbery!"
  
  "Vanguard's still alive." Diadem's voice broke in. "I didn't feel any death shock. But he got hit so hard he barely knew he was under attack before he was out. It felt like... burning." she trailed off faintly.
  
  "The last instants of telemetry from my probe before it was destroyed recorded beyond thermonuclear-ignition temperatures." Dr. Amazing confirmed. "I'm trying to reconstruct any other useable data from the burst right now-" he trailed off, and then continued tonelessly, like a doctor who'd just received a terminal diagnosis. "HUGIN, put the datapacket I just sent you on everyone's screen."
  
  "Oh my God." Masane muttered breathlessly, as all of our jaws dropped at the last snapshot the probe's sensors had taken of what lay behind Earth's moon. Vanguard had apparently managed to just finish getting inside the cloaking field covering that thousand-plus kilometer-wide bubble of space before they'd shot him down.
  
  "DEFCON Zero!" the Director thundered, and we could dimly hear the alert sirens of the British civil defense system blare into action outside the building. "I say again, Zero Zero Zero! All Tribunal nations implement maximum defense drill! This is it, people!"
  
  "On the scale I'm familiar with, DEFCON One is World War Three!" Cat whispered fearfully. "What the hell is Zero?"
  
  Captain Masane looked away from the fateful image frozen on the display of the literally hundreds of massive starships arrayed in full fleet formation on the far side of Earth's moon and whispered back to her with equal gravity.
  
  "Invasion."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Welcome to the Champions Universe superhero tabletop RPG! Although it's not the canon published Champions Universe, but instead the homebrew timeline and setting that our tabletop group did as a campaign oh, God, it must have been at least fifteen years ago by now. So you'll be seeing a lot of things you recognize, and some things you might recognize from somewhere else, and some shit we just made up ourselves.
  
  And here I thought I'd never have a use for all those old setting notes ever again. *g*
  
  Yes, our heroes dropped right into a full-on Summer Crossover Event. But as you can see, there's a logical connection - they followed a major dimensional pathway someone else was opening to get here, and the thing about going to all that effort to open a route? You're going to use it.
  
  So tune in next chapter, true believers, for... The Dimensional Invasion!
  
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  My blood chilled when the voices on the command circuit suddenly dropped out of circuit and we were left watching the status displays in silence. The body language of the comm techs didn't show any panic so we weren't being jammed. But in some ways that was worse, because it meant UNTIL HQ and the various superhero teams and high-level politicians - I could see an icon for Washington DC blinking away on the big map now, meaning that somebody had just woken up POTUS - had deliberately cut the sound out for all the station chiefs and outposts while they argued over what the next move was. That kind of uncertainty in the high command actually being shown in front of the troops? Never a good sign.
  
  "Sir?" one of the junior officers asked.
  
  "This fleet is almost a dozen times as large as the Hzeel flotilla. And we barely held off the Hzeel, and it took everything we had and some of the major villains in alliance. Even Doctor Destroyer and VIPER bought in on that one." I gave Commander Aleksikov a whole bunch of credit right then and there for being able to admit the plain truth in front of his troops without letting things devolve into a panic. "We can't match that kind of force."
  
  "It's worse than that, sir." one of the technicians said. "Dr. Amazing was able to use stereo-parallax calculations to get a rough size estimate. Those capital ships are almost two kilometers long. The Hzeel flagship was barely three hundred meters!"
  
  Captain Masane said soberly. "And the Hzeel certainly didn't have starship cannons that could take down Vanguard. If this fleet is so much larger and more powerful than theirs, then I don't think-" he trailed off.
  
  Commander Aleksikov nodded back to his deputy, then closed his eyes as if in pain and stood at parade rest for a long moment. "London, this is Boscombe Downs." he said into the microphone. "Have you heard anything from Command?"
  
  "Nothing." the London UNTIL station replied. "I've already been requesting permission to order Dispersal for the past several minutes, but the only reply is to hold in place and await instructions. That's all."
  
  "London, we don't have time to wait for the politicians to catch up to the obvious. I intend to immediately order Dispersal in my area of responsibility on my own initiative and to hell with Command's dithering, and I earnestly recommend you do the same." Commander Aleksikov said softly, and then he turned to us. "You have no background, you have no clearance, and I have no authority over you whatsoever. But you're also the only reason Earth got any warning at all before those things dropped their cloaking field already in Earth orbit. If I ask you to help us again, will you?"
  
  I polled my wives with a glance already knowing their answer, and at their resolute nods I turned back to him. "We will."
  
  "Captain Masane, as of this moment you are on detached duty to- we need call signs for them, dammit." Aleksikov broke off.
  
  "Wild Man." "Frosty." "Netcat." we each chimed in turn.
  
  "Our three new allies." he continued without a beat. "Wipe every record of them, then get them off the base. Wild Man's the only person we know of who can sense anything about their dimensional transport network-"
  
  "Commander, I could only do that when I was trapped in astral space, a condition I cannot repeat." I cautioned him.
  
  "Then you'll just have to find someone out there who can help you plug back in." he replied matter-of-factly. "Captain, the balance of forces against us is such that I anticipate that barring a miracle all organized military resistance on Earth will collapse within a day if we're lucky. So if anybody's going to be doing anything about this after the first wave gets through with us then it'll be the irregulars and the holdouts. Get our new friends the hell off the base, and get them to- no, don't even tell me where. Don't even decide where until after you've left. What nobody on post knows, nobody can reveal later. You can draw whatever supplies or funds you need before you leave, for all the good that'll do. But get off the post as fast as you can, and be prepared to stay out in the cold for as long as necessary. Whatever organization remains post-blitzkrieg might be able to use them. And yes, it's a long shot, but long shots are all we have right now. Do you understand your mission, and what I'm asking you to risk?"
  
  "Yes sir." Captain Masane nodded soberly.
  
  "Then get moving. And good luck. I want you out beyond minimum safe distance in twenty minutes max." Commander Aleksikov finished.
  
  "It was an honor and a privilege to serve with you, sir." Captain Masane replied evenly, and the two men traded solemn salutes before we departed hurriedly.
  
  "If they were going to bombard the planet they wouldn't waste time drawing up in fleet formation and holding behind the Moon for so long." Cat tried to reassure him as we rushed through the corridors full of bustling men towards the supply section. "If they've got fleet firepower that could hurt your Vanguard like that-"
  
  "No, they're almost certainly not going to glass the planet." Masane agreed. "But with that much firepower in the high orbitals, even if they avoid firing on noncombatants there won't be any large concentration of military force they can't destroy at will."
  
  We hurriedly drew some emergency supplies - dried food, bottled water, medical supplies, and other things that a trunkful of would be more valuable when laying low during an invasion scenario than a bag of assault rifles - and a portable satellite transmitter as well. There weren't any clothes available for us, and given that it was barely 4am we'd have to hope something would be open later.
  
  After we drove hurriedly off the base - in a perfectly ordinary Vauxhall sedan instead of any of the ultra-tech UNTIL vehicles that would be noticed - Captain Masane headed north on the A338 instead of east towards London.
  
  "Where are we going?" Cat asked him.
  
  "Swindon." he replied. "There's a-"
  
  The early-morning AM music and traffic reports on the car radio suddenly cut out.
  
  "This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. There is a national emergency now in effect. An alien invasion fleet has been detected in lunar space, and can potentially be in Earth orbit within minutes. All military, territorial, and law enforcement personnel are ordered to muster to their duty stations. All non-essential shops and services are now ordered closed.
  
  "Please stay tuned to this wavelength, remain calm, and-"
  
  Cat winced and clutched her head as the broadcast was suddenly drowned out by a strange pulsating tone.
  
  "Jamming field! Big one, and it's from space." she said, looking up. "They know we're alerted now-"
  
  "People of Earth, this is System Admiral Helmuth of the Dimensional Empire. I am the commanding officer of the fleet currently investing your star system." The alien admiral - or more likely his translator program - had apparently decided that BBC Standard Received with just a slight overtone of German pronunciation was the proper accent to broadcast a message of conquest to England with. Either somebody really hadn't done any cultural studies of Earth at all before coming here, or else they'd done some really in-depth ones.
  
  "We are here because your local space has been chosen as the next region to receive the privilege of annexation into our glorious empire. Whether or not we come in peace will be determined by the reactions of your own leaders, and whether or not they are enlightened enough to avoid violent, futile gestures intended only to prop up their fading regimes at the expense of their subjects' lives - your lives. You are now directed to pay respectful attention to this address from Her Radiant Majesty Imperiatrix Ascendant Istvatha V'Han, Empress of a Million Dimensions."
  
  "I really hope that's a poetic exaggeration or else we are so very, very screwed." I muttered, to the emphatic nods of everyone else in the car.
  
  "My subjects both old and new." a woman's melodic voice came over the airwaves. She spoke with an impossibly regal self-assurance that hinted at someone who hadn't heard the word "No." in way, way too long, but also seemed both relaxed and compassionate as opposed to being gloating or cruel. Which didn't mean that she couldn't still be those things and just be a good actress, but not coming across like Cersei Lannister from the jump was better than nothing.
  
  "Know that there is nothing I desire more than that the transition of your world to Imperial status be accomplished peacefully and without needless destruction. I know that at this moment you see only the might of my legions and the power of my fleets, and that you perceive me only as a brutal conqueror. And so I request and require but a few moments of your attention as I tell of things that you cannot currently see, but that I hope to show you soon.
  
  "Your world is typical of those who have yet to achieve interstellar flight. The food you grow fails to feed the people because due to reasons of both logistics and politics it cannot be distributed to all those in need. The fuel that powers your industries and vehicles is rare and precious, obtainable only by great expense and effort and staining your biosphere with pollution as it is consumed. Your industries pollute your rivers and fields. Your leaders squabble over scraps and spill the blood of your children like water for their own profit and blind you to this harsh reality with words of unreason, and appeals to your pride, your fear, your hatreds-" She actually sighed dramatically before continuing. "In all my millenia of life, I have seen this pattern recur again and again. Whether they breathe oxygen or fluorine, whether their cells be based on carbon or silicon or even more exotic things, all life is ultimately one, and all young civilizations go through similar growing pains. In uncounted trillions across the multiverse, the loss of life is incalculable. The sheer waste of such potential is staggering.
  
  "And that is why I am here. That is why I have built and continue to expand and rule my Empire. That is why I am not content to merely sit on a golden throne and be fawned over by courtiers, why I and all my loyal servants work ceaselessly to explore, to build, to guide, and grow, and protect, and lead. The list of civilizations that we have saved from languishing alone and helped to bring prosperity beyond their imaginings is almost beyond counting. And nothing would make me happier than for your civilization to become the latest to join that list.
  
  "In my Empire, when people are vulnerable we lend them our strength. In my Empire, when people fall ill we bring them succor. Against poverty we are the fountain of prosperity. Against the threat of chaos we are order's shield. In the immediate future your leaders will speak to you of things like history, and pride, and freedom. I assure you now that I do not want to be the end of your history but the beginning. I do not wish to break your pride, I wish to lead you to achievements that you can be proud of on a scale you can currently not even imagine. And as for freedom? You are already a people who are subject to rulers and bound to law, as are all people who are not barbarians. So when your leaders cry to you 'Fight for your freedom!', what they actually mean is 'Fight for me! Submit to my law!"
  
  "So before you muster for a futile battle of guns and planes versus orbital plasma lances and starships, ask yourself this. Have your leaders served you well? Are things so safe and pleasant under their rule that not even the technology of a civilization from beyond the stars could improve your lot? Are you so prosperous already that not even the resources of a million universes and more could not help you build a better future? If you truly believe that you already live in the best of all possible worlds, then by all means, muster under your flags and meet my Imperial Legions on the field of battle with all the valor and skill you can bring. We will respect you and mourn you, even as you fall honorably. But if you aspire to more than merely an honorable death, if you instead wish to dream of a better life, then know that the Dimensional Empire will eagerly welcome your service."
  
  "I leave you now to the care of my loyal officers and men, who I assure you will remain scrupulously honorable and act in accord with the Imperial Laws of War - so long as you respect the customs of honorable warfare in return. But to those who dream of striking from behind false loyalties and false faces I give you solemn warning - our experience at war and rule far outweighs any younger civilization's experience at treachery and subversion. And there will be neither any negotiation with or mercy for terrorists."
  
  "Accept the Empire, and know peace and prosperity for all the centuries to come. Or fight us to the end - your end, never ours. The choice is yours. Please, choose wisely."
  
  The jamming resumed, and after a minute or two made it plain that the Dimensional Empire wasn't going to allow normal broadcast service to resume we shut off the radio.
  
  "I have to keep law and order, and it means that I have to kill my enemies before they kill me." Captain Masane muttered contemptuously. "They are all the same."
  
  "Ow!" Cat winced, before blanching in horror.
  
  "What's wrong?" I asked her anxiously.
  
  "EMP." she replied, and our blood chilled. "One huge transient from over the horizon to the southeast. Just the echo off the ionosphere was still such a big spike-"
  
  Captain Masane pulled over onto the shoulder and we all looked back the way she indicated to see the faint glow from over the horizon reflecting off the bottom of the clouds, as if it were already dawn. Only dawn wasn't for another couple of hours-
  
  "What's in that direction?" I asked faintly, as the upper edges of the distant mushroom cloud began rising over the curve of the Earth.
  
  "Portsmouth." Captain Masane replied tonelessly. "The orbital bombardment has begun."
  
  
  
  Before we even reached our destination, the governments of Earth had broadcast their surrender.
  
  We'd picked up the general broadcast on all media channels and public information and news websites. Right now we were sitting a car outside of a neat little country inn in Swindon that had a sign advertising 'Free Wi-Fi'. With the software in Masane's smartphone available to study and experiment with it had taken Cat only a short while to learn how to adjust to this world's Internet. 99% of the work of learning how to interpret the signals her powers were sending her brain had already been done the first time she'd Emerged, after all, so this was essentially just a case of learning a new encryption format.
  
  There had been some difficulties in adjusting. For one, transmission bandwidth was significantly more limited here than on the Matrix back in Earth-Shadowrun. This was only to be expected given that the Internet hadn't been designed for high-resolution VR simsense as the commonest method of browsing but was still using simple audio-visual files and text. So Cat's VRspace was largely empty now, and occupied solely with datastreams and displays that were the equivalent of a low-end cyberterminal in tortoise mode. But as anyone who'd ever lived on a 21st-century Earth knew, that was still an incredible amount of information.
  
  "Okay, the good news is that the bombardment wasn't indiscriminate." Cat said after a tense few minutes of frantic surfing. "Most of Portsmouth is still there-"
  
  Everyone exhaled hugely in relief.
  
  "-but everything the Royal Navy had in homeport is gone." She continued. "They put what appears to have been a multi-kiloton shot into the center of the harbor basin and let the shockwave break the keels and beach everything in dock." She sighed. "And, of course, that large an explosion even a half mile offshore broke a lot of buildings and set pieces of the shore on fire. Casualties are in the thousands, civilians and military alike."
  
  "So the 'Imperial Laws of War' tolerate 'regrettable collateral damage'." I sighed. "To be fair, so do ours, but-"
  
  "We are not an alien empire touting their allegedly vast technological and ethical superiority." Masane agreed meaningfully. "Their first impulse was to choose what was easiest for them despite the casualties. Did they bombard anywhere else?"
  
  "Pearl Harbor, Severomorsk, and Zhangjiang." Cat said. "US Pacific Fleet HQ, Russia's Northern Fleet HQ, and China's South Sea Fleet HQ. Obviously there's no official sources but people are social media'ing from all over the cities. They were the same kind of offshore shots that Portsmouth got."
  
  "It's the same strategy as the Vera Cruz Incident back home." Jane realized. "Hey, we just messed with some of your biggest military bases and the best you could do didn't even slow us down. So if it should enter our heads to mess with anything else, then how the frag do you think you're going to stop us? A clear and simple 'Surrender, or be destroyed.'"
  
  "Without an indiscriminate massacre that puts too many people into 'nothing left to lose mode'." Cat analyzed. "They're trying to terrify their future counter-insurgency problems into nonexistence before they start, not breed them."
  
  "I don't blame the world governments for broadcasting the general surrender order under those circumstances." I agreed. "But is that it? Everyone just... lets the world be conquered?
  
  "No." Masane insisted. "The political leaders will buy as much time as they possibly can by negotiating the terms of surrender as slowly as they can. Meanwhile the superheroes and agents like myself will try to stay viable 'in the wild' as it were, and to find a weakness, a way to defeat this Dimensional Empire by other than main force. The Commander is not, cannot possibly be, the only military tactician to see the necessities of the situation as he did. Everywhere on Earth people like us will have been detached, ordered to go to ground and try to link up later. That is the Dispersal plan you may have heard referred to earlier."
  
  "I did notice that the Empress' speech made no mention of superhumans. But they can't possibly be ignorant of our existence. Even if we go with the absurd impression they did zero SIGINT on Earth before attacking - which we already know is false, because their translator programs are calibrated for perfect idiomatic English-" Jane started.
  
  "As well as Spanish, Russian, German, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, and pretty much all the other major languages around the world according to reports." Cat broke in.
  
  "So they'll know." I agreed. "And they'll already have a plan for that. Almost certainly one of the first things they'll go for once they start landing troops is your government records, especially of superhumans. That has to be why Commander Aleksikov ordered you to flush our arrest record from the system."
  
  "Yes." he agreed. "And you will not be the only ones. "
  
  Cat blinked. "There's social media reports of troop landings, but nothing in the news. And I just felt several major Internet trunks go offline."
  
  "Taking control of local communications." Jane realized. "Cat, any chance that your activities might have drawn notice?"
  
  "I thought of that, and stayed as stealthy as possible." Cat nodded. "And cybersecurity on this Earth isn't even a fraction of the ice hackers were routinely expected to shave back home, so there's zero chance anything on Earth tagged me. I haven't had a chance to test myself against any Imperial systems yet, but if they're so far ahead of what I'm used to that they're not only already through the entire Internet but I couldn't even perceive them monitoring me right now then they're far enough towards the singularity they could grow Deus-class AIs as pocket pets." She shrugged. "And if that was true then we'd better roll over as fast as possible. But I really doubt it is, because if they had that kind of muscle to flex they wouldn't have needed orbital bombardment to terrify every government on Earth into submission."
  
  "They also wouldn't need to physically land troops and take physical control of major backbone nodes to start gaining control of the Internet." Masane pointed out practically. "Still, I think it would be best to go offline for now except for public broadcast reception. We're almost at our destination now, and I do not want to take the slightest chance of leading any Imperial forces there."
  
  "Some retired badass agent you're about to give his reactivation papers?" Cat asked him as he started the car and pulled back out onto the road.
  
  "Not... quite." Masane admitted with mild embarrassment.
  
  When he pulled the car into a cheerful and rather upscale little compound with a sign out front saying Ashbury Lodge Assisted Living Facility the 'retired agent' theory bumped up quite a few notches in probability, but the 'badass' quotient similarily bumped down. When the door of the cheerful little cottage at the end of the row opened to reveal a slender white-haired woman who had to be at least well into her 80s leaning slightly unsteadily on a cane and peering at us over her bifocals, it zeroed out.
  
  "Captain Masane!" she greeted him with polite surprise, and then looked over his shoulder to take us in. My first impression of her underwent a substantlal revision when her intelligent-looking eyes - she still had full possession of her faculties, thank goodness, even if she looked frail enough for a stiff breeze to knock her over - subtly glittered with a touch of the astral. As Jane and I shifted our own perceptions over we nodded inwardly as we saw her looking at our auras as plainly as we looked at hers, and we realized Captain Masane's elderly friend was a practitioner of magic.
  
  "How very odd." she muttered bemusingly, focusing in on our two elves. "You're clearly not Lyonessean... those stuffy boors from Tir na Nog all have ears as round as mine... goodness me, are you young ladies Alfar? If so, then you're certainly a long way from home."
  
  "Longer than you know, Wise One." Jane replied respectfully. "May we come in?"
  
  "Of course, of course." she said, stepping aside as we all entered. "Akili, if might we be introduced?" she asked him with quiet dignity after we'd all been ushered inside, settled into chairs in the sitting room, and offered tea.
  
  Captain Masane introduced us all around and concluded with "And this is my dear friend, Mrs. Janet Tompion."
  
  "Janet." Mrs. Tompion insisted. "And I'm flattered that you found time in this crisis to come and see if I were all right, but if you brought all these young people along with you then I can't imagine that was your only purpose."
  
  "Is it all right if I poke around in your kitchen a bit?" Cat asked the elderly matriarch politely. "We've been up all night without a thing to eat, and it's just about time for breakfast."
  
  "Of course it is." she insisted. "I'm sorry I'm not getting up to fix you something myself, but it takes me a little longer to cook nowadays than it used to and I'm sure you're all starving. There's some cereal in the upper left cabinet if you don't find anything more suitable for you."
  
  "We brought our own supplies." Jane said, handing Cat the bag of dried food we'd brought along. "We don't want to be a burden."
  
  "You'd best save your field rations for the field, my dear." Mrs. Tompion replied with quiet dignity. "If the deliveries stop here then I'd be in more than a bit of a sticky wicket anyway, and if they don't then I'll have plenty of good fresh food to spare. Eat well when you can, sleep well when you can, for you won't always know when you can do either."
  
  "You were in service then, ma'am?" I recognized the old soldiers' maxim.
  
  "Unofficially." she replied reminescently. "And I can tell that you're positively bursting with curiosity as to how Captain Masane and I are acquainted, so if you don't mind an old woman telling some old stories...?" she politely trailed off.
  
  "I'd be fascinated." I said honestly.
  
  "Do you like scrambled eggs?" Cat asked from the kitchen.
  
  "I love them, dear." Mrs. Tompion called back. "Just two, please, and a bit of toast."
  
  "All right!" Cat replied, as I heard the frying pan start to sizzle.
  
  "Where was I? Ah yes. Back when I was young, I was part of a group. We called ourselves the Fire-Watchers... after the air raid wardens from the Blitz, of course. This was all more than fifty years ago, during the War."
  
  "We're familiar with World War II, ma'am." Jane said.
  
  "Oh good, that saves me ever so much tedious explaining." Mrs. Tompion said relievedly. "At any rate, the Jerries had this dreadful little chap who called himself Türmacher. Which is German for 'Doormaker', of course." she sniffed amusedly. "They were not a very imaginative bunch, to say the least. Well, Türmacher wasn't much use in a fight on his own but he could open portals over a distance of a hundred miles or more. And what's worse, he could do it safely from the other side of the Channel. So you could just imagine the potential there was for commando raids and suchlike."
  
  "Ouch." I winced. "He couldn't hit everywhere in Britain with that range, but far too many targets could be still within his reach-"
  
  "Not least among them being all of the south coast, including London." she nodded sagely. "He couldn't send through too many people at once, so after the Home Guard sorted out the first few commando teams they'd portaled in he largely switched to inserting and extracting Hitler's Ubermensch." she sniffed disdainfully. "We're fortunate that the chap didn't seem to have a very precise aim, or else the war might have ended before '42. As is, I remember several entire weeks that the Prime Minister couldn't dare to go near Number Ten out of fear of being caught in a raid-" She exhaled. "To get back to the topic at hand, even if they couldn't always go at strategic targets they could still do terror raids. And the entire point was of course to make the High Command pull the Victory Legion from the offensive and keep them on the home front. But there were a few 'special talents' who weren't in the Legion because we weren't eligible for service. They didn't allow women to be anything but clerks and drivers then, so that left me out. And Ian had lost his eye in that accident, so he was physically ineligible... James was able-bodied enough, but he'd helped design aircraft and all sorts of clever things even before the war so they'd declared him 'essential to industry' and wouldn't dream of letting him go anywhere near the fighting front where he could possibly get captured..." She looked up from her memories and smiled. "All the rest of us had something similar, and we all sort of came together by accident. But soon enough there we were, a team of unofficial Home Guard superhuman volunteers. Everyone else was volunteering for something in those days, so why not us?"
  
  "And so every time the Nazis portaled one of their terror teams to London, you'd be on top of them." I nodded.
  
  "Like a shot." she agreed cheerfully. "The Victory Legion didn't have to be pulled back at all. And after a little while the special operations chaps finally managed to catch up to Türmacher so that wasn't a problem any more, but by then we'd all gotten used to it. And there were still other things to take care of on the home front, after all, so the Fire-Watchers kept on keeping on right up until V-E Day." She sighed softly. "It was hardly the best of times, but we were very much the best of friends."
  
  "And after the war you kept on with your duties." Captain Masane said.
  
  "Well, yes." she agreed matter-of-factly. "I had a responsibility to the coven, after all. And a more general set of them as well." She looked at Jane. "You're a practitioner yourself, dear, aren't you?"
  
  "I am." Jane agreed.
  
  "Then I'm certain you already know that there's nasty things out there the conventional authorities can't always deal with." Mrs. Tompion nodded sagely. "And that it's the responsibility of people like us to handle them when no one else can."
  
  "That's how we ended up here." I agreed. "We were banishing a great evil from our homeworld, and... well, making alliances with villains against a greater evil sometimes ends up with him betraying you and casting you dimensionally adrift. Still, it's not as if we could not do the banishing, and he was holding an essential piece of it to ransom."
  
  "Oh isn't that always the way with such people." she eye-rolled. "Trust me, young man, I know entirely what you mean." She nodded. "But to skip to the end, James and I got married, settled down, and all the usual things followed afterwards. Oh, I still had my magical work to do, and he was busy helping people with all his inventions, but life went on." She sighed fondly. "And eventually I lived long enough to retire." she continued before looking downcast. "Even if not everyone else did."
  
  Cat called us into the kitchen and we all took places around the table while she served. Mrs. Tompion continued.
  
  "Oh it wasn't anything tragic." she reassured us. "His heart just gave out one day in his late seventies, peacefully and in his sleep. My children, on the other hand... the Night of Villainy took them both." She looked up at us soberly. "Doctor Destroyer's largest attack on the world, in '91. The Captain can tell you more about it later if need be." She sighed and relaxed again. "But still, life goes on. And that observation, I believe, segues rather neatly into what Captain Masane thinks that I can do for you three."
  
  "They're involuntary dimensional travelers, as you just heard." he said, and then went on to briefly explain our circumstances.
  
  "So you want me to teach the young lady here some of my spells, so that they can better adjust to how magic works in our universe?" Mrs. Tompion said. "Well, I haven't had the strength to do more than cantrips in some time but I certainly haven't forgotten any of the theory. So that task should be handled readily enough, but what do you propose to do after that?"
  
  "Are you aware of the dispersal plan?" Captain Masane asked her.
  
  "That thing the defense boffins came up with after the Hzeel flotilla tried invading us in '77?" she asked. "Of course I am. James was one of the consultants on the original scheme, after all. But I haven't been on the distribution list for it in at least fifteen years- oh, of course. Yes, after I finish getting them up to speed I can put you in touch - provided that these rotters haven't cut or tapped the phone lines by then."
  
  "We have a satellite radio, and my own gift is... cyberkinesis, I believe it's called here?" Cat said.
  
  "Really? That would be ideal!" Mrs. Tompion agreed gracefully. "And what do you do, young man?"
  
  "I don't lose fights." I simplified. "Ever. And I'm also basically impossible to kill."
  
  "Those two concepts are not identical, but they certainly are related." she agreed. "Akili, how on Earth did you get such a useful squad together in the middle of all this chaos, and so soon?"
  
  "How else? They fell right into my lap." Captain Masane said with tired humor.
  
  Mrs. Tompion was helpless to restrain her chuckle. "Deja vu all over again, for certain!"
  
  "May I ask how you two know each other?" Jane inquired politely.
  
  "Oh, even after my magic wasn't quite up to snuff anymore and I had to retire I still kept my hand in a bit advising the younger people among the mystic set." Mrs. Tompion replied. "I've always been a bit of a loremistress as well as a practitioner-"
  
  "At your prime you were head of the foremost defenders' coven in England." Captain Masane said firmly.
  
  "It was more of a cooperative effort." she demurred. "At any rate, I was busy consulting with a pair of nice young people in the West Country about unraveling the latest plot of that Dr. Samaine boor when he decided to take that personally. And while I'd have been able to deal with him myself in my day, my day had been rather a while ago. Akili here was the young man in charge of my protective detail on that occasion, and we've consulted off and on with each other since."
  
  "Being able to use my magic more freely would be a definite help." Jane agreed. "It's not that the mana here feels out of control or anything - I've worked in far more hostile environments back home, in fact. It's just that what I've been taught seems to connect differently here, and while I could work it out by trial and error-" she shrugged. "If a little patience can get me past that trial without the error, then I'm all for it."
  
  "Very sensible of you." Mrs. Tompion agreed. "Right. I don't know how long we'll have together before you need to move on, so let's not waste any time."
  
  "Actually, we're going to need to 'Sleep well while we can' first." Jane apologized. "We've been up for at least sixteen hours by this point."
  
  "Of course. They don't exactly give me ample space for guest bedrooms here, but the cottage next door isn't occupied. And given the current ongoing emergency, I think that squatting would be permissible." Mrs. Tompion agreed.
  
  "I'll just sleep on your couch here." Captain Masane said. "You three deserve a little privacy."
  
  "Oh?" Mrs. Tompion said curiously, picking up at least something of his overtones.
  
  "I'll tell you later." he said amusedly.
  
  
  
  "This is not the wedding night I would have imagined." Jane said, as we all three fell into bed. We were so tired - well, they were, at least - that we weren't even going to do anything except cuddle and sleep.
  
  "Call this a rain check, then." Cat agreed. "Acts of war and Acts of God don't count, after all."
  
  I leaned back with a wife on each arm and relaxed for the first time since we'd met up with Scale to head down to Lofwyr's island, and tried to relax and let everything finally process. The banishing of the Horrors, meeting Dunkelzahn, learning at least some of the truth about what I really was and what empowered me, and now all this-
  
  "Hey, are you crying?" Cat said compassionately, running one finger down my cheek. "Alex, what's wrong?"
  
  "Sorry." I sniffled. "I just- got a little emotionally overcome." I shook my head. "No, not by the invasion or the danger or everything. That's all too familiar, in concept if not quite in scale. No, I just-" I sighed. "Have any of you actually thought about the significance of what we saw today?"
  
  "I don't quite follow." Jane said.
  
  "Try to imagine this Dimensional Invasion happening in our world." I said. "And imagine you're there in some command room in Zurich Orbital watching the Big Ten try to process and deal with this."
  
  "Oh God, it would be an absolute-" Cat began, and then suddenly her eyes opened wide.
  
  "Exactly." I said. "Nobody would have had a plan ahead of time, because nobody would have wasted this kind of money and effort on anything not of immediate interest. There would have been no one like Director-General Eckhardt calling the shots with all the different members of the alliance not even arguing over precedence and place. Nobody would have been leaping in to volunteer like Vanguard or Dr. Amazing without a pre-existing contract obligating them to or negotiating terms of being paid first. But in that room we saw all the nations of Earth instinctively reacting together in a crisis, but this world is not some unrealistic Utopia. I'm sure they've got most if not all of the same politics and divisions we do here, and yet as soon as an existential threat showed up none of that mattered. Hell, Mrs. Tompion let us all into her home without blinking an eye despite the fact an alien death squad could conceivably have been ten minutes behind us, and then sat us down and told us a story over breakfast about how perfectly normal it was that she'd volunteer to fight in a war that she couldn't even officially enlist for, without being paid, and then spend the rest of her life being a freelance mystic defender without anyone asking-"
  
  "I spent over a decade of my life in a secret war against an existential threat to my entire home universe." Jane agreed regretfully. "And yes, now that you've made look at it I realize that I never even imagined seeing a millionth of global cooperation for the common welfare as I saw in that room."
  
  "All my power, all my potential, and I haven't the faintest notion of how on Earth I could produce something like that." I said. "To inspire a world like that, to create a world like that."
  
  "Maybe the point is that you can't." Cat said. "Remember Gary Cline? About how the reason Horizon was so fucked up is because they thought they could make people be good?"
  
  "Looked at in that light, it kinda feels like Horizon has a starfleet in orbit over us right now." Jane said.
  
  "Oh God, I'm almost hoping that they're just hypocritical fucks with really good PR than if they actually believe their own propaganda." I said, horrified. "Once was enough!"
  
  "Are you sure?" Jane asked. "I mean yeah, one way we're fighting Space Horizon, but the other way we're fighting Space Aztechnology."
  
  "Ugh, talk about heads they win and tails we lose." I groaned. "And how did we even get on this topic anyway?"
  
  "We dragged you there to head off the existential angst of realizing that you had gone native on a world that was really kinda fucked up." Cat said, before trailing off. "Of course, now I'm bluescreening on the realization of how really different this place is."
  
  "Too much philosophy and we're too tired." Jane moaned.
  
  "I love you both dearly, and no matter what world we end up in, I never want that to change." I said. "That's all the philosophy I can actually get my brain around right now."
  
  "We love you too." Cat answered for both of them. "And yeah, this is looking to be a really nice place. I'm voting we stick around to try and help it."
  
  "Well, I could almost certainly be the most powerful superhero on Earth if I want to be." I agreed. "Even if I can't fly like Vanguard."
  
  "Not yet." Jane said practically.
  
  "But the question is, do I want to be?" I said. "Remember what Dunkelzahn said - that striking with insufficient force against an enemy was foolish, but escalating for the sake of escalating was dangerous. And right now I'm not sure which one I'd be doing."
  
  "If you're not sure you want to do it, then you're sure that you don't want to do it." Cat analyzed.
  
  "... I think I'll go with Jane's answer instead. Not yet." I nodded to myself. "If the situation needs..."
  
  "Right now the situation is a big pile of gray fog on an even bigger blank map." Jane agreed. "Get some sleep, everyone. The invaders will still be there in the afternoon."
  
  
  
  It took barely half a day for Mrs. Tompion to finish working together with Jane as far as reconciling the basic magical theory she knew with what the local conditions here were. It admittedly helped that both women were legitimately master-class arcane scholars in their respective fields. Oh, even at her height Mrs. Tompion apparently hadn't had more than a respectable fraction of the power of the 'super-mages' around here, but she was so learned that she could have auditioned for the Watcher's Council without even needing the test to be open book. And Jane, for all that she looked to be a young woman in her early 20s, had in fact been learning advanced magic from some of the very best of the best for almost fifteen years. So they started in the early afternoon and were done before midnight.
  
  But yes, magic here was definitely different. There were things that Shadowrun magic did, such as quickening and conjuring, that were considered routine back home but were considered grandmaster level techniques here. Likewise, there were spells here that were considered routine that would have been Nobel Prize territory on the spot back in Shadowrun-
  
  "You want us to teleport to London?!?" Jane asked, utterly flabbergasted.
  
  "I admit that I haven't had the strength to do it myself for quite a while, but you've already shown more than capable of handling more complex techniques than a simple linear spatial dislocation." Mrs. Tompion said, puzzled at the depth of our reaction. "And you've certainly got power to do it and spare. I haven't seen anyone with a Talent that strong since the last meeting I attended of the Trismegistus Council." She sniffed disdainfully. "Which was also my first meeting. If you ever meet one of them, dear, do kindly tell them to insert their 'A true student of the Art must abandon mundane dross' pretensions in a very uncomfortable place. They're not dark sorts, but it's more than a bit misguided to believe that it's possible to save the world without actually living in it."
  
  "I just-" Jane shook her head. "Literally no one back home can teleport at all. As in, I know twelve thousand year old immortal archmages and dragons that haven't even conceived of doing it. I don't know if local conditions don't support it or if somehow everyone just missed the mathematics and it's so non-intuitive it gets missed again every time-" she looked up. "You're seriously telling me that after I learn this spell, I can just go from place to place over dozens and hundreds of miles?"
  
  "And how else were you going to get to London?" Mrs .Tompion said with quiet amusement. "The invaders have already been announcing their 'Provisional Government' and ordering local governments to enforce strict martial law or they'll land their drop-ships and enforce it for them. There'll be a traffic checkpoint on every major crossroads from here to the English Channel by now, and for all that the bobbies will be as regretful as anything they'll still have to obey orders or else risk getting caught out on a spot check."
  
  "Even with over half of the Dimensional Empire's fleet turning out to be troop transports and support ships, they still don't have enough infantry to invest everywhere in force. Oh, they brought at least a million troops, and between orbital drop ships and grav tanks and all the rest they can run over the average tank company with a squad, but-" Captain Masane broke off. "They're clearly counting on a 'nodal control' strategy of maintaining firm control over essential points and counting on local cooperation - 'willing' or otherwise - as well as a firm grip on the key points of the supply chain to maintain control."
  
  "So most people will go quite a while without even seeing an invader except maybe as a distant flyover. But if you act up enough to be noticed at a distance, a few minutes later the space marines will literally be landing on your head from orbit." I agreed.
  
  "And the usual counter-strategy to that - massed attacks everywhere - is dealt with by the fact that any large military force trying to muster anywhere is going to get orbitally bombarded into ash." Jane said. "They made that point clear in the first hour of the invasion, and so far nobody wants even to risk them making it again."
  
  "Even so, if there's really such a massive interdimensional empire on the other end of that wormhole then you'd think they'd have sent ten or a hundred times as many troops." Cat said. "Sure, it would cost, but unless their troops literally eat diamonds then so much as a couple years' worth of the Earth's GDP should pay it back. And it would make the conquest a fait accompli over in a few days, as opposed to giving us a chance to struggle. Why are they doing it on a shoestring?"
  
  "Two main possibilities. Either they're not actually as big as they say they are, or else there's a transfer limit on their wormhole to the point that this large a fleet is all they could bring through." I analyzed. "Either one gives us hope."
  
  "Yes, well, 'hope' is going to need to link up with as many other holdouts as it can or else we'll be stuck discussing theory around a kitchen table until it's far too late." Mrs. Tompion said archly. "And that's before we even get into their latest announcement."
  
  "72 hours for all superhumans and other enhanced people to turn themselves in before they are in violation of the Imperial registration laws on superhumans." Captain Masane said soberly. "The penalty for violating which is being shot on sight."
  
  "No, the penalty is 'being presumed an armed and hostile combatant in an active conflict zone'." Jane said sarcastically. "Which means being shot on sight, but sounds much better in front of a hypothetical intergalactic war crimes tribunal."
  
  "Hence your needing to find one of the deep dispersal groups and link up with them as soon as you can." Mrs. Tompion agreed. "Less Home Guard, more French Resistance. And in light of that dear, it's best you try your radio now."
  
  Cat's nimble fingers set up the satellite radio on the kitchen table, and hooked up the antenna. The aliens had of course shut down all 'nonessential' telecommunications, but the hardware was still there. A suitable tight-beam setup off one of the UNTIL satellites still extant, along with Cat riding technomantic shotgun should be able to give us a secure phone connection to London-
  
  "Who is this?" a young woman's voice sounded challengingly from the speakerphone. "If you're one of the invaders, and I can't imagine who else has a working phone right now, then you can just bugger off!"
  
  "Charlotte, what have I told you before about using barracks-language while on the telephone?" Mrs. Tompion said firmly.
  
  "Grandmother?!?" her astonished voice came back. "I'm so sorry, I thought you were one of them!" She paused. "... and if one of them is there and you've got a gun to her head, then I strongly suggest you just clean your own sinuses with it before I come find you. And I will come find you." she ended viciously.
  
  "Duress Code Blue Strike 17." Captain Masane said firmly. "Look, we taught you those for a reason."
  
  "Duress Code Alpha Green 144 and excuse me for not having gotten any sleep in the past I don't even know how long." Charlotte replied embarassedly. "And we need to cut this transmission as short as possible, so what do you need?"
  
  "We've got a cyberkinetic supporting this, so we should be safe for at least a little while." Mrs. Tompion explained. "Look, Captain Masane plus three need a safe arrival spot in London. We'll use teleport magic so the transport is all taken care of, but I'll need you to meet them and then get them to... the place that's not white." she ended discreetly.
  
  "Are they cleared for that?" Charlotte asked professionally.
  
  "They're the reason Boscombe Downs got the warning of the Invaders' approach ahead of everyone else." Captain Masane said. "They're new and they don't have background checks, but we're all taking our chances now and this one is mine."
  
  "Grandmother, you've always been able to read people like I never could. Do you agree with the Captain that they're safe?" she asked.
  
  "Yes." she replied confidently.
  
  "All right then. Then I'll meet you all at the old factory in an hour. I told you that hanging onto it was a good idea." she finished proudly.
  
  "Yes dear, you were right and I was wrong." Mrs. Tompion said agreeably. "But I'm afraid that I won't be coming."
  
  "Is something wrong? You haven't fallen and broken your hip again, have you?" Charlotte asked worriedly.
  
  "No, it's more that you young people have failed to think a step ahead. Again." Mrs. Tompion said firmly. "Of course everyone who's still in the wind needs to link up and start some deep action cells, but the fact remains that between their captured records and their orbital surveillance and rapid response, the vast majority of superheroes - and even the other nasty odds and sods - are going to end up confined in their prison camps in short order. What does this suggest?"
  
  "That our second order of business after finding some proper strategic targets to strike at is to then hold some jailbreaks to get the firepower to strike with, of course." Charlotte replied intelligently.
  
  "And how do you propose to hold this jailbreak if you haven't found the jail?" Mrs. Tompion asked intelligently.
  
  "Well, we could-" Charlotte stopped and broke off. "No. No, no, no, no! That is an absolutely horrible idea and I won't have it! Absolutely not!"
  
  "How precisely do you intend to stop me, young lady?" Mrs. Tompion asked archly.
  
  "Wait, you're not talking about-" I broke in incredulously.
  
  "Turning myself over to the Invaders after you've left, and after making sure I'm a discreet mystical tracking beacon that Jane here can follow anywhere?" Mrs. Tompion said evenly. "Of course I am. It's the most obvious contribution I can make."
  
  "But what if they're not imprisoning the superhumans they capture? What if they're just killing them and dumping them out in space somewhere?" Charlotte pleaded frantically. "Look, we can-"
  
  "Charlotte, dear, I'm eighty-six years old and I can't even drive myself to the shops anymore to buy groceries. I have to let the hospice sisters pick things up for me." Mrs. Tompion explained reasonably. "Even if I came down to London with everyone else, all that I could do would be to take up space and food in the shelter that's already at a premium. You certainly can't spare the time to look after me, the New Knights will need you on the front lines."
  
  "Grandmother, please..." she begged.
  
  "I'm sorry to be so arbitrary with you, dear, but the only scenario worse than attempting this and not having it end well is attempting this with your cooperation and not having it end well. As is, even if worst comes to worst you'll still be able to tell yourself that it wasn't in the slightest your fault." Mrs. Tompion said compassionately, before sighing and continuing more firmly. "Please don't argue, dear. The situation doesn't really allow for it, and duty is duty."
  
  "Janet, there's something you've overlooking." Captain Masane broke in. "You know about the existence of the dispersal sites, you know at least one person who has the current locations, and you know about our three friends here. You can't put yourself in a position where you could potentially be interrogated."
  
  "Yes, that's right! LIsten to him!" Charlotte said insistently.
  
  "Akili, I'm also frail enough to shatter in a stiff breeze." she said reasonably. "If these rotters try to use anything more strenuous than harsh language, I'll kick off well before they get any useful information. In addition to the simple fact that clearly I've gone feeble in the head if I thought their 'anti-superhuman' turn in order applied to an elderly woman with parlor tricks, so they won't imagine I've got any useful knowledge to interrogate for in the first place!" She chuckled. "All I need to do is pretend I'm talking to an invisible cat or something, and they'll write me off as entirely harmless." She paused and continued matter-of-factly. "And even if the absolute worst comes to worst, then all I'd need to do is try and cast a spell that's too strong for me in my current condition and it would be as good as taking one of those pills the OSS used to give out to behind-the-lines men."
  
  "Why does it always have to be you, grandmother?" Charlotte asked sadly. "Haven't you given more than enough? More than any ten other people?"
  
  "It's not about 'enough', dear." Mrs. Tompion said kindly. "It's about what's right, and about what's necessary. And this is both. Now hurry up and make your preparations please. Even with everything my friend Netcat can do to secure this call I can't imagine it's safe for you to transmit much longer."
  
  "I-" We could all hear her sigh of resignation. "Damn it, there's just no reasoning with you when you get like this. All right, you do what you're doing to do, but nothing heroic - I mean, nothing more heroic than just getting yourself taken in, all right? Don't try and overachieve by starting any prison riots in there or anything! You just stay as safe as possible until I come and fetch you out, you promise me!"
  
  "I promise to do my very best to see you again, darling." Mrs. Tompion agreed. "And never doubt that I love you, and that I have always been so very proud of you."
  
  "... I love you too, grandmother." Charlotte sniffled and then continued more professionally. "I'll be at the RV in forty-five minutes. This is Firewatch, signing off."
  
  "Forty-five minutes, acknowledged." Mrs. Tompion replied. "Cunnan, signing off."
  
  "Godspeed." Firewatch replied, and the link went dead. And I mentally raised the 'badass' quotient I'd originally zero'ed out when arriving her back to maximum and left it there.
  
  "All right, people." Mrs. Tompion said quietly into the awed silence that had descended all around her kitchen table. "Let's be about it then, shall we?"
  
  
  
  Author's Note: And this is where I take existing NPCs from Champions 4e 'Kingdom of Champions' and fold, spindle, and mutilate them until they are much more badass and impressive versions of their original selves. (Seriously, James Tompion and Janet Misperson were basically joke characters in the original version. And their granddaughter basically didn't exist! I was quite offended, so fuck it, reboot!)
  
  The shape of the Dimensional Empire's invasion begins to grow more and more apparent. Of course, as you're getting a grounds-eye view of the invasion from the POV of several people caught up in it there's a whole lot of stuff going on that you're not seeing. But that's why this is a story, not a tabletop RPG supplement.
  
  And yes, try to imagine going from a cyberpunk universe to a superheroic one. The tone shift would be like a deep-sea creature brought up to surface pressure.
  
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  The four of us materialized exactly where we'd intended to. Jane hadn't known our destination but Mrs. Tompion was more than familiar with it, and the two of them had technically been joint casters of the spell even if Jane had supplied 99% of the mana. So, Jane's first long-distance teleport with me, Cat, and Captain Masane worked just as smoothly as her first few short practice hops had.
  
  We arrived not in the middle of a factory like we'd expected, but in an underground bunker full of workbenches, machine tools, and a highly advanced computer setup. There was too much dust and and not enough "lived-in" for this to have been someone's regular lab, but we were clearly in a backup lab that someone had been hastily setting up for the past day.
  
  The tall, ginger-haired young woman in the slim-framed dark green and black power armor stood facing us with her helmet underneath one arm. She looked to be barely out of college, although the worry lines in her face and the bags under her eyes from lack of sleep made her look slightly older. Her armor's paint job was incongruously intact despite the several scorch marks on her limbs and a minor dent on one of her pauldrons.
  
  "We have a problem." she greeted us urgently. "You see that harness over there?" She pointed at a workbench where the smoking and half-melted remains of a slim pair of crossed bandoliers lay with the sophisticated circuitry just barely visible inside the bands. The impact marks on the workbench were still smoldering, indicating that whatever had just fragged it had been fired in this room only several minutes before our arrival.
  
  "You captured a piece of Invader equipment and started taking it apart to see how it worked, and then it backfired?" I guessed.
  
  "Some of Brown Fox's people had picked it up this afternoon, God only knows how, and they brought it to him. And he had them bring it over here for me to look at - and I don't even know how the hell he knew this place was here, and I'm not at all happy that he did - because for once he figured that he'd do a patriotic turn for once and hand over the thing to a science hero for the benefit of the realm." Firewatch sighed with eloquent frustration. "And I wouldn't even have been here if I hadn't come over for the rendezvous with you, so it was just all the worst timing imaginable. I got rid of them as fast as I could, of course, but that meant letting them hand the thing off to me instead of explaining why I didn't want it. Because it actually was a high priority for us to get our hands on an intact one, and somehow he'd known that."
  
  "Brown Fox?" Jane asked curiously.
  
  "Owns almost half of the London underworld and frightens the hell out of the other half." Captain Masane explained. "No powers that we know of, but a first-class organizer and ruthless as hell."
  
  "Strange bedfellows." Firewatch agreed. "But no, I don't think it was a setup. If Brown Fox knew that I was here and I didn't know that he knew, he could have just tipped the Invaders straight off and I wouldn't have had an inkling of trouble until there was a squad coming in each door. But yes, I obviously didn't start messing about with the thing when I already knew you were coming, except to run a scanner over it to make damn sure it wasn't transmitting. Which it wasn't." She sighed. "Until about maybe ten minutes before you arrived, when it started squalling its head off out of the blue and I had to blast it with my gauntlets right off to shut it up. There must have been a timed beacon in there so that sticky-fingered rebels would grab one, figure it was safe, and then have the tracker go active only after it was already back at the rebel base."
  
  "These people just don't miss a trick, do they?" Netcat said disgustedly.
  
  "And sure enough, a squad of jumptroopers warped in topside barely two minutes after it went off, and while they obviously don't know where it was give or take a couple of blocks, they're busy doing a nice slow search of all those blocks." Firewatch continued. "So at the rate those bastard are going, it'll be maybe fifteen minutes more before they work down as far as here and that's if they don't go for the big abandoned building on the corner first. And we can't leave for as long as they're out there, because one call and we'll have jumptroopers warping in on us from all over London."
  
  "You said warped in." Jane asked. "Are you saying that the Invaders teleport?"
  
  "That's exactly what I'm saying." Firewatch nodded. "Those harnesses let them bamf about up to twenty meters at a go, hence 'jumptroopers'. And as far as we can tell every squaddie in the Empire right on down to Private Tommy wears one. It makes them an absolute bastard to fight, let me tell you. You think you've got a couple of them pinned down, and the next thing you know they've all repositioned to new cover without having had to expose themselves to your fire at any point in the process and it's you that's suddenly caught in the crossfire. And at least one man in each squad has got some kind of long-range unit that lets him and his whole squad go right over the horizon if they all huddle together and sync up for a bit. No good for jumping in or out under fire, but give them half a mo' to breathe and who needs helicopters?"
  
  "So you could have squads of them split up in penny-packets sweeping all over hell's half acre and still get the whole damn battalion mustered together to anywhere inside of a minute as soon as one of them hits an enemy strongpoint." I realized. "Christ. Talk about the force multiplier from hell. Between that and uncontested space and air superiority, no wonder they thought they only needed a million or so troops total to conquer a planet."
  
  "And even that's still stretching themselves a bit thin, but nowhere near as thin as first estimated." Firewatch agreed. "The only good news so far is that we haven't yet seen any of them do a short-range tactical jump to any point he didn't have line-of-sight to, so at least they won't be coming out of the walls like a horror movie." She hurriedly took a big swig of bottled water to quench a dry throat. "We hope, at least. But you can see why we made a priority of trying to get one of those harnesses in our hands and taken apart so we could hopefully figure out some kind of jammer for them." She sighed. "And I just told you how that effort's been going so far."
  
  "Did you get a recording of the signal?" Cat asked her urgently.
  
  "Hang on a bit." Firewatch replied, and put her armor helmet on. "I- yes, the comm logs in the suit caught it and recorded at least some of it. Why?"
  
  "Permission to cyberkinetically interface with your suit?" Cat asked her.
  
  "What's on your mind?" Firewatch said, pulling her helmet off again.
  
  "If I can get even a partial of that signal, I can hopefully synthesize enough of it to start a loop tape of it running. So if you've got any useful parts in here-" Netcat began.
  
  "A decoy drone!" Firewatch's face lit up. "And then we let them go chase the rabbit all the way down to Waltham Abbey while I sneak out you out the back way and we can get to where we're going! Right, you start your end and I'll see what I can scrounge up. The rest of you get topside and on lookout, and if they start coming too close before we're done then we'll have to start improvising."
  
  "We don't have any weapons beyond my sidearm." Captain Masane said inquiringly.
  
  "That I can fix." Firewatch agreed. "Stockpile's two doors down the hall on the left, help yourself to anything in there. Door code is Mother's birthday with second and third pairs of digits reversed."
  
  "Where are we, by the way?" Jane politely asked.
  
  "In the basement underneath an old watch factory in the East End." Firewatch explained over her shoulder as she began to hurriedly rummage through some storage cabinets. "It was Grandfather's original inheritance. The factory closed down for World War II - nonessential industry - but rather than retool it for war materiel he made it into a laboratory for his defence research instead. The Fire-Watchers also used it for their headquarters. And the War Department paid to put in a proper bomb bunker under here during the Blitz due to the government work Grandfather was doing, that's what we're standing in right now. Grandfather never re-opened the factory after the war, not even after he became a wealthy man and got into all sorts of industry, but he never sold the property either. My regular lab is normally over in the New Knights compound at Woolwich Garrison but I also kept some old stuff here."
  
  We headed out as she'd directed and found there was indeed a small armory there behind an armored door with an electronic keypad lock, in a sealed chamber that had apparently started out as some kind of secure file storage. After Captain Masane helped himself to an old-fashioned NATO battle rifle and underbarrel grenade launcher plus web gear and ammo, we relocked the armory and headed topside. Jane chosen to stick with our powers for now, but I saw a very nice silenced M-14 designated marksman conversion and helped myself to that.
  
  "Not the sort of thing you expect to see in England." I observed mildly.
  
  "Her everyday wear is what's effectively an blaster-cannon armed attack helicopter disguised as an exoskeleton." the Captain observed ironically. "So it's a bit late for her to pretend she's not much more heavily armed than the government prefers civilians around here to be, and Charlotte's not much for pretense of any kind. Of course she's got a Ministry of Defence dispensation, so it's all entirely legal. Enough."
  
  "Who are the New Knights?" I asked him. "Her superteam?"
  
  "The New Knights of the Round Table, Her Majesty's official government superteam." he replied. "First commissioned in 1971, been in continuous operation ever since. Charlotte's father, the first Firewatch, was one of the earliest members."
  
  We climbed up the old catwalk to overlook the factory floor - and also to get a good vantage point out of the yellowed windows under the eaves.
  
  "Damn." I swore mildly as we watched them walk slowly down the street over a block away. "They're headed right for here."
  
  "On the entirely logical supposition that the big abandoned building is a likelier hiding place for a band of rebels than any of the shops or apartments around here." Captain Masane sighed.
  
  Jane closed her eyes briefly, then opened them. "Okay, I sent Cat a message what's coming."
  
  "Stay in cover, weapons tight." I said as we hunkered down and kept a discreet watch out the upper windows. "Let's see if we can run out the shot clock-"
  
  "You'd think they'd have integrated sensors in their helmets." Captain Masane wondered out loud. "It's late at night, but simply spotting heat signatures alone would reveal us and yet it's mill-around mill down there."
  
  "Any milspec corp troopers back home would already have spotted our signatures in this window." Jane agreed. "And we'd be taking counter-sniper fire before we could even shoot first. They look very well-drilled and their jump harnesses give them a real edge, but there's a lot of other gear they could be equipped with and aren't."
  
  My eyes opened as I suddenly realized something. "Incoming!" I called quietly but urgently, and we all immediately moved off our marks-
  
  -right as the eight-man squad of jumptroopers we'd just been looking at blinked into the center of the factory floor, and energy weapon fire raked right through where we'd been standing and shattered the windows we'd been silhouhetted against. They had had nightvision or thermalvision in their helmets, and they had spotted us, and they'd had cool enough nerves to pretend they hadn't and stroll towards us in the open the entire time, risking possible sniper fire, until their long-range jumper got enough of a position fix to sidestep right into the big empty factory floor-
  
  I hipshot the man wearing the slightly more elaborate harness and with his hand still on his wrist-computer controls in the neck joint of his armor, hoping that it was weak enough the 7.62mm hardpoint would penetrate. I killed the man with the different shoulder insignia standing in the formation's center next, firing like a metronome as quickly as the semi-automatic action could cycle. Jane had to switch from her powerball to a fast manabolt of their heavy weapons trooper before he could finish dialing in on us, and-
  
  -and then Captain Masane's underbarrel grenade launcher put a 40mm directly into the center of the remaining formation and knocked them all galley-west, and Jane dropped a quick manaball on any survivors to make sure they weren't any.
  
  "Very nice shooting." I congratulated him as we got to our feet and hurried down to the factory floor.
  
  "Damn it!" Firewatch swore as she and Netcat made it back topside. "If they'd just given us two more minutes!"
  
  I reached down and pulled the harness and wrist computer off of the apparent long-range jumptrooper. "That one looked to be the squad leader." I pointed at the corpse with the fanciest shoulder stripes. "Cat, find his datapad if any, break the tracker, and take it along. Then make sure these don't have active locators either." I handed the jump harness and controller to her. "I doubt these ones had a chance to call out before they died, but they had to have reported contact before they jumped in so their reinforcements should be here within minutes at best. Start the rabbit heading out, we need their reaction teams to head away from here when they arrive."
  
  "I'm on it." Firewatch said crisply, and with a brief flare of her armor's jets flew up to the smashed-open windows on the upper balcony to release her little quad-rotor drone with the decoy transmitter out into the wild.
  
  "Jane, go astral and look for living bodies out on the street. All residents are staying in their homes, so people outdoors are jumptroopers." She nodded and I slung her suddenly limp body over my shoulder as she became our own aerial reconaissance. Out of the corner of my eye I noted that Firewatch's armor apparently had color-changing capacities, as her armor was now configured for digital-pattern nighttime urban camouflage.
  
  Jane's astral form swooped back down and she concentrated in the way that made you audible and ghostlike even to non-astrally perceiving people. "Three squads just arrived, at north, east, and west and two blocks out each."
  
  "Right." Firewatch muttered. "West is the way we want to go, so I'll remote the rabbit to swoop this way, and-"
  
  "Just pulled the west squad off position!" Astral Jane confirmed. "Okay, looks like it'll be alleys and soft shoes for us from now on. I'll be eyes in the sky."
  
  With the nearest squad of jumptroopers decoyed out of position and Jane's astral form floating along above the rooftops to keep lookout against the remainder, who'd split up into pairs and were blinking up and down the side streets in a methodical search pattern, it was only the work of a few tense minutes and some lefts and rights through back alleys and narrowly in-between buildings to escape their immediate circle. But the sight of a pair of Imperial anti-gravity tactical aircraft swooping in towards and the arrival of two more squads of jumptroopers where we'd left the factory behind let us know that they weren't giving up that easily.
  
  "Damn." Firewatch swore passionately. "I was hoping I wouldn't have to... Damocles Four-Two!" she intoned hieratically into her helmet mike-
  
  -and the entire factory several blocks behind us went up in a giant vertical fireball that incinerated the jumptroopers who'd just entered the factory, as well as flipped over both the low-hovering gunship and just-landing transport and left them to fall back helplessly down into the fiery ruin that the factory had instantaneously become.
  
  "What the hell was that?" Captain Masane asked for us all.
  
  "An old HC bomb from the War." Firewatch answered flatly. "Grandfather had it buried in the original bunker foundations to self-destruct the entire lab if need be - this was back when Türmacher's portal raids made it a legitimate concern that the Ubermensch might capture the place, and he had part of the Enigma project going on in there. Very hush-hush." She sighed. "Of course the detonators hadn't actually been in for decades, but he never took out the charge. I'd re-armed the system earlier today and remoted a command detonator to my armor's systems just in case." she sighed mournfully at the sight of her original family legacy up in flames. "Just in case." she sighed quietly.
  
  "Casualties?" Cat asked her equally as quietly.
  
  "It was laid deep in the foundation so the blast would funnel upward, not outward like the old surface-burst UXBs the Nazis would drop." she said. "And there were blow-out panels in the roof. Notice how most of the outer walls are still standing even though the whole building's gone up? Grandfather didn't want the neighboring buildings excessively damaged, and he was a very good engineer."
  
  "Your grandmother actually wanted you to sell a property that had an unexploded four-thousand-pound bomb in the foundation?" Captain Masane asked, still in shock.
  
  "According to Father, he'd never actually told Grandmother about that bit." Firewatch admitted embarassedly. "It's really not the sort of thing she'd have approved of-" she trailed off even more sadly as she remembered where her grandmother would soon be, if she hadn't already started going there. She shook her head and continued more firmly. "Come on, we'd better go. We're already running late."
  
  Jane's astral form returned to her body as we broke contact, and I gently lowered her back to her feet. We arrived at and headed into a nearby Tube station, now abandoned what with the Invaders' martial law and travel shutdown. They hadn't bothered to waste manpower guarding every entrance, however, and while the main doors were sealed Firewatch had a key for a maintenance access.
  
  "And turning to more practical things, where exactly are we headed?" Jane tried to distract her as we all headed down into the now-darkened depths of the London Underground.
  
  "Blackhall." was Firewatch's only answer.
  
  We'd gotten well down into the Underground and d taken enough twists and turns that only my total recall would have let me retrace our steps out of here and I couldn't even tell you what part of London we were under before she spoke again.
  
  "The basic concept of Blackhall was originally thought up during the Cold War, I'm not sure of the exact year." Firewatch began as we kept trudging along the darkened steam tunnels. "You don't really get people actually trying to take over the world now - alien invaders excepted - but back in Father's era you had everyone from Doctor Destroyer to the original Supreme Serpent to et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." she waved her hands. "And then there were all the would-be Illuminatis and shadow cabals that wanted to take over the British government, or Western Europe, or all of Europe-" she rolled her eyes. "At any rate, the question was soon enough asked, 'if the government is actually deposed or mind-controlled or replaced by shapeshifters or whatnot, where do the survivors meet up to try and coordinate a takeback?"
  
  "And now it's being repurposed for use against alien invaders." Cat analyzed.
  
  "Yes, and unlike UNTIL's Dispersal contingency we never actually put it in any computers." Firewatch said proudly. "The original Department S barely even wrote it down, and they certainly didn't make copies in triplicate. If you were someone the old hands who'd originally dreamed it up thought could be trusted, then you got things passed on down to you. If not, then you didn't. And even if you knew it existed there were entire parts of the system that wouldn't be decided upon until after the crisis kicked off, so even an infiltrator's damage would hopefully be limited. A limited number of UNTIL people like Captain Masane were clued in to the fact that it existed, but that's all we ever told them."
  
  "Speaking of that, what's the status on London station?" Captain Masane asked her worriedly.
  
  "We don't know." Firewatch said soberly. "The decision was made in the earliest hours of the attack to firewall UNTIL out completely. I had to get permission just to bring you in, and only your having been detached separately before the ax fell and Grandmother's recommendation convinced them."
  
  "They think there's a mole in UNTIL?" Captain Masane said, shocked.
  
  "There was a mysterious disruption in comms right after DEFCON Zero was announced-" she began.
  
  "We were in the ops room at Boscombe Down when that happened." Cat broke in. "But we thought it was just the higher-ups cutting the mike because they didn't want to broadcast their command paralysis."
  
  "So did everyone else." Firewatch said. "It wasn't until superhero teams started comparing notes across the pond in the immediate aftermath that it became suspicious. Because every station thought that the comms cutout had been authorized by some other station." She looked up. "Right now the leading theory is that HUGIN was compromised before the attack, and that's at least part of why Gateway Station and the Deep Space Tracking Network didn't see anything."
  
  "But HUGIN was the one that said-" Cat began, before realizing. "Of course, it was maintaining cover once it knew that we knew. That's how Admiral Helmuth knew to move up his attack, he'd had almost real-time warning that he'd been blown."
  
  "And if that theory is true then it also means that we have to assume everything in UNTIL's databanks - everything - was an open book to the Invaders." Firewatch said. "Which conclusion is being at least partly borne out by how very successful the initial round-ups are being in places where the heroes were registered. What little we're having back-channeled from across the pond is that the Americas are getting positively pasted - the only ones we know of who are still successfully in the wind there are folks like Dr. Amazing, who had double secret paranoia contingencies of their own rivaling Grandfather's." She sighed. "Thank God for the early warning that you turned up for everyone. According to Sir Gareth, it's the only thing that let us activate Blackhall just in time."
  
  "The Prime Minister's still free?" Captain Masane almost gasped with relief.
  
  "He resigned right before the surrender, left that to his successor so that he technically wasn't breaking his sworn word." Firewatch corrected him. "And then Sir Gareth went straight underground and started coordinating things as Blackhall Prime." she finished proudly.
  
  "Wouldn't the bunker you're taking us to down here be in government records for the Invaders to find?" Jane asked.
  
  "Which bunker?" Firewatch chuckled. "Do you know how many of them were built during the Blitz, both by government and private industry? And then there's the various facilities they put in for the Cold War. And the ones that were officially built, but then they shredded all the files right after except for the ones kept in people's heads. There's at least a baker's dozen of redundant command-and-control facilities you could run an entire secret war from just under London alone, not even counting the several others around the country, and only four of them are officially listed. Once Blackhall is set then Blackhall Prime's job is to pick the one that looks best suited to the ongoing crisis and then start working the word-of-mouth network outwards from himself until there's a sufficient muster to start doing something about the mess."
  
  "There can't have been equipment for all these places, let alone all of them kept maintained for all this time." I thought out loud.
  
  "There isn't." she agreed. "But there's up-to-date sets of all the essentials kept in long-term storage in various warehouses topside, And the storekeepers aren't told why they're there, just that it's orders to keep them polished up and in reserve. The first few Blackhall responders are responsible for nicking the nearest set that it's safe to steal, making sure it's clean, and nipping it on down to be plugged in. All the possible sites have suitable wiring already prepared." She nodded. "And similar setups exist for things like food, medical supplies, other stores- it's not like a Blackhall crisis would have us actually filling out requisition forms after all. Except for midnight requisitions, of course." She paused and continued. "All right, we should be coming up on the sentries soon. Don't make them nervous until after I can make introductions."
  
  "We're already there." I nodded towards the darkness ahead of us where I could clearly see two men and a woman waiting for us. The leader was a man in his late 40s, in British Army battledress and full kit and a hard level stare. With him was a man dressed in high medieval plate armour, of all things, and a shimmering silhouette in the form of a woman.
  
  "Dangerously unalert there, Firewatch." the soldier said scornfully. "I could hear you a mile off."
  
  "You were intended to." she replied archly. "We wouldn't want to risk catching a bullet from our own sentries because they were startled, after all."
  
  "Firewatch." the shimmering woman said with mild warning, and then the mirrored force-field around her faded away to reveal a wholesome-looking young brunette woman. "Blackhall protocols, remember?"
  
  "I remember." she agreed tightly. before turning back to the soldier. "Partisan. If you would kindly tell Sir Gareth that we're here?" she continued formally.
  
  "Go on through and tell him yourself." he replied stolidly. "We've got to stay out on post and wait for the rest. Oh, and fair warning, I'm not the only 'villain' you'll be seeing in there tonight so keep a grip on it."
  
  "Duly noted." Firewatch replied stolidly and we moved on past.
  
  "Villain?" I asked quietly once we were out of earshot.
  
  "... fairness compels me to grant that he hasn't actually done anything monstrous." Firewatch admitted reluctantly. "But if I'd met him even two days ago then I'd have had to arrest him. Right now he's under amnesty because of Blackhall, but-" she trailed off.
  
  "Major Grayson was psychologically discharged from the Special Air Service after his wife and young son died in a terrorist bombing." Captain Masane interrupted gently. "Shortly after that, the parties alleged to be responsible started dying as well."
  
  "And their friends, and their friends' friends, and so on down the line." Firewatch sighed. "Towards the end you'd swear that he was killing more Provos than all the rest of the SAS put together. And yes he never scored a collateral, and yes it was mostly the same thing the government had been paying him for but just without sanction, but sanction is important, damn it." She shuddered briefly.
  
  "War is not always simple." Captain Masane said soberly.
  
  "That's what worries me." she quietly agreed.
  
  
  
  As Firewatch had eagerly informed us upon our evincing the slightest curiosity in the topic, Major General Sir Gareth Somerset, Victoria Cross, Knight Companion of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, who up until his resignation earlier today had also been the Right Honorable Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, had been the first British superhero of the modern age. A young man who'd enlisted underage just in time to get caught up in the Battle of Dunkirk, his sudden manifestation of incredible strength, speed, resillience, and agility had made him a nigh-unstoppable super-soldier on the battlefield. Proving as intelligent and tactically adept as he was physically adept, the slight irregularity of his youth had been glossed over and he'd been the first British contribution to the newly-forming Victory Legion. Taking the superhero call sign of "Beaumayn" - after the mythical Sir Gareth Beaumayn, the youngest Knight of the Round Table - he'd gone to a decades-long career of practically everything a man could do in service, including being the first leader of the New Knights of the Round Table, until he'd retired from active duty in '89 to become Minister of Superhuman Affairs in the Cabinet. In 1993 he'd run for Parliament in the new general election and immediately became Prime Minister, a post he'd held until the Dimensional Invasion and which he'd just resigned from earlier today. The new Prime Minister's first act in office had been to recall him to active service, and now he was here.
  
  And although well into his seventies Sir Gareth's powers gave him the physique of a man at least twenty years younger, so while was slower and stiffer than he'd been in his prime and had moved behind a desk thereby he still was still more than up to the tasks ahead. Especially since both Jane and I could see that the source of his powers was magical, which meant it didn't have to obey all the normal rules. Back in Shadowrun I'd have called him an advanced physical adept without hesitation, although there were also unfamiliar overtones in it- then again, we'd barely been in this world twenty-four hours at this point, so there was still a lot of unfamiliar everything.
  
  The site they'd picked for Blackhall headquarters was an old deep bunker somewhere well under the officially acknowledged sub-complex near the British Museum. After Firewatch had eagerly turned us over to her superior officer - her hero-worship was just a tad bit obvious, but in classic British good form everyone politely pretended not to notice - he'd invited us all into his office for a private chat. After a hurried catch-up, we finally reached the meat of the conversation.
  
  "So that's it. They're not bluffing about their size, they really are a major multi-dimensional civilization." Sir Gareth acknowledged stolidly.
  
  "Yes." I acknowledged. "And I have no idea how large their network actually is. I stopped trying to sense it after I'd picked up the first several dozen, and then we went dark and ran. But we were already too close to one of the nexuses, and got caught up in the 'dimensional current' of the wormhole that was bringing the invasion fleet to here."
  
  "But they're still doing this on the cheap." Captain Masane said. "We have to hope that their transport network has a throughput limit, or else they'd simply swamp us."
  
  "Our first priority must be gathering intelligence." Sir Gareth agreed, his eyes flicking down to his laptop computer to check his messages. "And in light of that, I have bad news. It's now virtually certain that HUGIN was compromised. The difference in response time and success rate for the Invaders' round-ups regarding things that were in UNTIL files versus things that were compartmentalized from them is getting too obvious. Particularly the near-immediate collapse of UNTIL's own bodies of troops."
  
  "Damn." Captain Masane swore agonizingly. "It's the Borovik Incident all over again, only on a global scale. We got infiltrated and the secrets shared with us are being used against our member nations. Everybody trusted us, and now we've let everyone down with this." he moaned. "I don't know if UNTIL will survive this."
  
  "Right now we're not sure Earth will survive this." Firewatch prompted him sharply. "Get your head on straight!"
  
  "Phrasing, Miss Tompion." Sir Gareth shushed her mildly, and she blushed in embarassment. "Still, the greater point is entirely valid. Until such time as the world ends, we must all act as though it intends to spin on." he affirmed quietly, and we all straightened up a little.
  
  Oh, God damn it.
  
  "Sir, there's something you should know." I sighed resignedly. "My powers are significantly in excess of what I've shared so far." And then, to the growing incredulous stares of my wives, I hurriedly summarized everything relevant to my abilities.
  
  "Bloody hell, that's Titan-class." Firewatch murmured. "No, Omega-class..." She turned to Sir Gareth confusedly. "Do we even have a class for that, sir?"
  
  "Omega should suffice for now." he replied calmly. "And what an incredible stroke of good fortune this is for us. Particularly the part where UNTIL, and thus the Invaders, weren't given the slightest inkling of it."
  
  "I don't think I can single-handedly smash this problem for you. I've never ramped up that far, and I don't want my first time for it to be near anything breakable. Such as an inhabited planet." I hastened to deter them.
  
  "Absolutely not." Sir Gareth agreed readily. "I've seen bids for 'ultimate cosmic power' before, and traditionally they've never ended well for anyone who made the attempt. And given that we're currently in a covert phase I support your moderating yourself for the duration even more than I normally would. When we reach a phase where open battle is possible then it will be time for you to emulate Vanguard. Until then, we shall avoid needless escalation."
  
  "I've been sandbagging as well." Cat suddenly spoke up. "Oh, I'm a world-class cyberkinetic, but in addition? If I overdrive my abilities and do a deep meditation I can apparently reach some sort of digital version of the Akashic Record. I haven't done it in this universe yet, but if it does turn out to work here - if it wasn't just a property of our home world's datanet - then I should be able to reach at least small, selected portions of Invader databases without needing to hack a signal path to their servers." She gulped slightly. "And this ability of mine also makes my very existence an existential threat to cybersecurity, which is what got me abducted into a black site and almost vivisected back home. So please don't do that?" she trailed off faintly.
  
  "Really please don't do that." I added quietly but meaningfully.
  
  Sir Gareth nodded in respectful acknowledgement of my warning, and then looked over at Jane.
  
  "Oh, I've got a big dramatic revelation I could make but it's not about my powers or remotely relevant to the situation." she replied with deliberate cheek, and everyone couldn't help but chuckle as the tension was punctured. "But yes, I understand." Jane looked over at me. "Everyone else here has been committing to an impossible battle straight away, with no assurances and nothing held back. And there eventually comes a point where you just have to do the same, or not be able to look yourself in the mirror."
  
  "And gentlemen in England now a-bed / Shall think themselves accursed they were not here." Sir Gareth recited solemnly. "Welcome to Great Britain, all of you."
  
  A pair of sharp knocks sounded on the office door. "We've got a problem." Partisan's voice rang out.
  
  "Brown Fox?" Firewatch said, shocked, as the door opened at Sir Gareth's acknowledgement to reveal Partisan and a handsome mixed-race man in a duster with a sleek, dangerous arrogance and a disarming grin. "They brought you in?"
  
  "Brought myself in." he replied fearlessly in an accent that was a curious mix of 'drama coach' and 'pure East End'.
  
  "Part of the way in." Sir Gareth corrected. "But you got far enough on your own that it was either bring you inside the rest of the way or bury you in the basement. Fortunately for all parties concerned, we were convinced of your sincerity."
  
  "Fortunate that your voice-stress analyzer wasn't ever legal for the peelers to use." Brown Fox acknowledged. "Right, here's the emergency. Ironmaster's gone over."
  
  "Project Armour's sold out to the Invaders?" Captain Masane asked him.
  
  "Lock, stock, and super-villainous barrel." Brown Fox agreed. "The only silver lining's that MACE hasn't gone along with it. Battleaxe and her team cut and ran, looks like they're going to go to ground and try and wait for everything to blow over. Except for Sidestep, who came to me."
  
  "Sidestep's got a teleport suit of her own!" Firewatch said eagerly. "We might get that jammer up after all, especially with what we brought in just now!"
  
  "You're welcome, by the way." Brown Fox replied cheekily.
  
  "Oh yours wasn't any help." Firewatch cut him down. "Damn near got us all killed, in fact. But I am glad at least to find out that you knew where my lab was via Blackhall. I was starting to have a bit of a panic."
  
  "So I'd heard." he smirked even more widely, until a discreet throat-clearing from Sir Gareth brought him back on point. "But yes, you can see right off what this means."
  
  "They're offering amnesty for at least some selected supervillains." Sir Gareth agreed. "And non-publicly. Well, that's certainly going to help fill in their intelligence gaps. We'll definitely have to take that into account from now on."
  
  "Why didn't you take their deal?" Firewatch probed. "Because obviously you haven't or else they'd already be here."
  
  "Because I'm not a damn fool." Brown Fox agreed readily. "Look, it breaks down quite simply. Either the Invaders really are the sort who'd let nasty sods like Ironmaster or me all the way into their power structure for real, or it's just another con. The first way means you're at best a new minnow in a much larger pond where the old fish have all had centuries to get ahead of you. And the second way means you're dead in a ditch as soon as you're no longer useful. You'd have to be solid ivory from the navel up to be stupid enough to believe their pitch, so it's no wonder that Marston fell right for it." He shook his head. "But it's the Queen's shilling for me, at least for the duration. You lot at least have been honest enemies." He smirked again. "And ones that I've had no problem keeping a step ahead of."
  
  "So what's the next stage?" I asked Sir Gareth, and he nodded gratefully to me at the redirection.
  
  "An assembly." he said, stepping out from behind his desk. "Please come with me, Mr. Fox. You arrived just in time for the first meeting."
  
  "Lucky me." he snarked as we all fell in behind Sir Gareth.
  
  
  
  We all gathered in the bunker's mess hall, the largest open room available. I could see at least a dozen and a half people, costumed and otherwise. The clock read just about 2:30am.
  
  "Good morning, everyone. It is now D Plus One of the Invasion and by order of Her Majesty Case BLACKHALL has been set." Sir Gareth opened, his voice easily carrying to every corner of the room. "Some of you already know what that means, but I will now briefly explain for our newcomers."
  
  "The mission of Blackhall is to be a behind-the-lines force of partisans working towards the restoration of the legitimate authority of Crown and Government in a scenario where the nation has already been conquered and all the overt apparatus of administration has been seized or compromised. As of this moment all existing chains of command are severed and void for the duration, save for those internal to Blackhall itself. This expressly includes orders from the Crown or the Prime Minister, as per the joint directive of both in the original Blackhall order. I have the written documents available for anyone who wishes to examine them after the meeting. From now on we will operate under martial law conditions, with final authority residing in my own person as Blackhall Prime. The chain of command will devolve from there to Colonel Colin MacKenzie, call sign 'Clansman', as Blackhall Two. He will remain at the alternate Blackhall command center along with those elements he can gather or recruit himself so that the secondary cell may continue operations if the primary cell is compromised, in addition to having the responsibility for selecting whomever is to be Blackhall Three. Instructions on how you are to proceed further should myself or this base be lost will be separately disseminated after this meeting. Until further notice Major John Grayson, call sign 'Partisan'-"
  
  Everyone in the room startled slightly at that save the man himself.
  
  "-will serve as my deputy at this base." Sir Gareth continued as if nothing had happened. "Furthermore, as part of the general amnesty order for Blackhall all charges against you are now dropped and on my authority you are being recalled to active service. You'd better start remembering how to salute properly, John." he finished lightly.
  
  "Hrmph." was the gruff man's only comment.
  
  "You'll also double up as Operations Officer. Dr. Goldwing, you'll have to double up as well on Science section and Medical for the duration. You can tap anyone else who's technically inclined to assist as their other duties allow, I don't anticipate that we're going to have strict regimental discipline here. Captain Akili Masane, late of UNTIL, will have Intelligence section. Microman-" I noticed with amazement that one of the people sitting in the first row was apparently an android. "Will have Logistics in addition to his other duties. And one of our newcomers, call sign 'Frosty', will be in charge of Mystic section. And that's about as much of a General Staff as we'll have room down here for."
  
  Sir Gareth clasped his hands behind his back and stood stiffly at parade rest. "But before I begin, there is something that I must make absolutely clear. It was already emphasized before anyone agreed to come here that if you did come here, you would be under orders and that you would not be allowed to resign for the duration. But some of you may not have fully appreciated what that means, so I will now be entirely and chillingly explicit. We are currently operating under much the same operational conditions as the French Resistance. We are trapped behind enemy lines with no government save ourselves and no safety to be found anywhere, only what we're up against actually makes me wish I were back dealing with the Nazis. So does anyone recall from their study of history exactly what type of discipline the maquis operated under?"
  
  "Field courts." Partisan predictably replied. "The frogs didn't have the ability to hold fancy courts-martial with lawyers and appeals, and a single turncoat or deserter meant the death of at least an entire cell. So if you held back or tried to flip over, then you got dragged out behind a tree and they'd put a bullet in your ear."
  
  "Yes." Sir Gareth agreed chillingly. "That is what 'martial law' truly means. Those are the conditions we operate under now, and must operate under if we are to survive. War is the final breakdown of the public order, and through no choice of our own we are in a war graver than any this planet's history has ever before seen. I will take no pleasure at all in ordering ruthless measures. I will likely never forgive myself if a field execution becomes necessary to protect the rest of us all." The air in the room seemed to thicken and solidify as he continued. "But my tears will be a cold comfort to the poor sod who makes it necessary, because they'll already be dead." He sighed. "If you feel that you have been ordered to do something your conscience absolutely cannot tolerate, we will make allowances. Dr. Goldwing has already put himself forward as a conscientious objector and in return he is being assigned to duties that will never require him to use lethal force against the enemy. But if you just don't like what we're about to get stuck into and want an easy out-" he shook his head with finality. "There is only one of those you will ever find, and I assure you that you will not want to find it."
  
  "Bloody hell, that's worse than the Invaders!" a young man with a bow and arrow angrily burst out from somewhere in the back.
  
  "Is it?" Sir Gareth asked him calmly.
  
  "They damn sure haven't said 'Obey or die!' yet!" the objector retorted.
  
  "So you didn't know anyone who lived in Portsmouth then, did you Yeoman?" Partisan replied icily to the archer and the room fell silent.
  
  "Yes." Sir Gareth nodded to him. "That ties directly into the point I was about to make. As we all heard, Empress V'Han gave an exceptionally well-crafted address. I was Prime Minister after all, I'm entirely qualified to rate someone else's campaign speech." he said dryly, and even Yeoman couldn't help but chuckle. "And in my professional opinion, I haven't heard a better one given. But - with the obvious exception of myself, of course-"
  
  Again the brief chuckles.
  
  "-just because a political speech is well-written and well-delivered, that does not guarantee it is sincere. And regardless of the wide variety of differing philosophical viewpoints in this room-"
  
  Brown Fox preened smugly underneath the obvious looks of everyone else.
  
  "-I believe we can all at least agree on the principle that 'Actions speak louder than words.' So, let us examine the Invaders' actions. And I shall first start off with a dog that did not bark in the night-time." Sir Gareth said equably. "Has anyone here heard anything, even a rumor, about an attempt by the Imperial government to open diplomatic contact with Earth prior to the start of hostilities?"
  
  The room fell breathlessly silent at this question.
  
  "No you haven't." Sir Gareth nodded at us all. "And that's because they never made even the slightest attempt at one. And while some of you may be imagining covert scenarios out of novels right now, do recall what official position I immediately held before today. I was the head of government for a UN Security Council permanent member nation. There is no remotely credible scenario where a First Contact would have been made, however discreetly, that I would not have been informed of with dispatch, whether via the United Nations or our special relationship with our traditional ally. Oh, and for the record the last conversation I had with President Westfield immediately after the Invasion also had him entirely demur any such knowledge or First Contact."
  
  "Could it still have been the Russians or the Chinese dealing behind the world's back, sir?" the young woman with the force fields we'd met earlier spoke up.
  
  "Severomorsk and Zhanjiang argue rather strenuously against." Sir Gareth replied reasonably. "So we have a definite strike against the Invaders. And the various ports we have already mentioned, in addition to Pearl Harbor, are yet another devastating strike on their own merit. Major Grayson, would you kindly give a tactical evaluation of the initial bombardments?"
  
  "It was like breaking all four of the legs on a sick kitten and tossing the poor creature into a duck pond." Partisan spat viciously. "That wasn't war, that was outright murder. And I'm a man who can professionally speak as to the difference!" He took a deep breath and continued more calmly. "Those vessels weren't even remotely threatening to an interstellar force, and just the technology the Invaders have already revealed would have let them easily sink each ship individually without so much as scuffing the paint on a single automobile in the base parking lot. Instead they nuked crowded harbours knowing that the shock waves and heat pulse would sink civilian vessels, destroy buildings on shore, break windows and blind and burn people in the open-" He shook his head viciously. "Anybody who thinks that people who can cross dimensions and have faster-than-light drive still can't do high school physics needs to share whatever they're drinking, because they've obviously found a stash of the good whiskey."
  
  "For all their pious appeals to 'civilized warfare', it is inescapable fact that every single casualty of the orbital bombardments - particularly every noncombatant casualty, of which there were over ten thousand aggregate around the globe, a total almost three times the military casualties of the infamous 1941 Pearl Harbor attack alone - occurred solely because the Invaders wanted them wounded or dead, not because military necessity required them to be." Sir Gareth said flatly. "So the obvious question begs, why? I now leave the floor open to those of us with less military experience to speculate."
  
  "Cultural differences?" Microman asked.
  
  "That's just another way of saying 'We have no idea' and ignoring the question, Microman." Firewatch replied.
  
  "Oh I know." Brown Fox broke in. "It's public relations, pure and simple." Off of everyone's expressions, he continued. "Look, those of you who do the London street scene might think you know how my loansharks work. Pay up, you keep your knees. Don't pay, the hard men with the iron bars come around. Strict cause and effect, right?" He shook his head. "Well, mostly right, but as with doing anything worthwhile the devil's in the details. You're a collector and you go around smashing Granny Smith's kneecap because she spent her last pound on buying medicine for her sick grandson instead of paying off, you'd better not visit that neighborhood again without bringing a vanload of friends because all her friends and neighbors'll be starting to fondly wonder about how nice your face would look if a garbage can half full of bricks anonymously fell off a rooftop onto your head." He shrugged. "On the other hand, that mean old bastard who slaps around his kid and spends all his money on booze? Nobody cares if he's found in the gutter with his joints bent backwards. Hell, the 'good people' of the neighborhood will applaud and buy you drinks." He smiled disarmingly. "If the people around you think the mark has got it coming then you can get away with bloody murder, and if they don't think he did then you're the second coming of Doctor Destroyer as soon as you raise a bruise. So if any of you ever want to go into my line of work later on then keep this in mind. Your most valuable professional skill won't be about being strong or hard or even clever, it'll be knowing how to read the bloody room. And then how to work it." He nodded at Sir Gareth. "If you can manage the perception good enough, ninety-nine percent of everyone won't even care about the reality."
  
  "Damn, you are sharp." Partisan nodded to him respectfully. "And I'm sure you can back me up that if you've got a reputation for keeping your own standards but then hinting that you'll break them if pushed far enough, that's ten times scarier than just being known as a vicious bastard who stops at nothing."
  
  "Looks like you and I have more in common than I'd thought." Brown Fox smirked back at him.
  
  "Not with me, but with the bloody Irish." Partisan smiled back cruelly at Brown Fox's expression. "The Provos - the smarter ones, at least - used that same tactic for years. If everybody knows that you're a total savage right from the jump, then all the ones with balls will fight you back because what the hell have they got left to lose? But if you go around talking about how honorable you are, but then your actions make it plain that your 'honor' is situational and that if your patience is pushed enough you'll take the gloves off and start crushing, then that backs off the people who can't be ruled by fear because their own consciences are telling them to try and not push things too far." Partisan looked us at all. "Yet all that really means is that you're letting the enemy set the rules, because he's trying to play off the part that you've got a conscience at all and he's just got a pretense of one." He looked up meaningfully at the bunker ceiling, as if to glare directly at the orbiting starships. "Terrorists, pure and simple. That's all they really are."
  
  "Most of you likely do not know that I am Ugandan." Captain Masane said suddenly. "But I am, and although I was only a boy I am old enough to still remember the days when Idi Amin terrorized us all." He nodded to Partisan and Brown Fox. "Pious talk about his warrior's honor, but nothing except savagery underneath. I knew this Empress was a tyrant in a smiling mask from the instant I saw the mushroom cloud over Portsmouth."
  
  "And it's not just the bombardment." Sir Gareth reclaimed the floor. "We've just found out that the Dimensional Empire is making outreaches to selected supervillains, promising them amnesty and positions in the new regime in return for their aid in running down their enemies. Ironmaster and most of his Project Armour organization have already gone over. I have admittedly offered amnesty to criminals myself, most recently today-"
  
  "But your back's to the wall, and theirs is in the catbird seat." Brown Fox granted him. "Bit of a difference there."
  
  "And our amnesty is contingent on us giving up crime." a young woman in a slim high-tech bodysuit broke in. "If I go back to robbing and suchlike after the war's over, I just get a fresh set of warrants. But Ironmaster's deal was that in return for his cooperation he'd get a chance to buy in. The Dimensional Empire knows that they can't really stamp out organized crime in a society, so they just settle for keeping it tame and on the hook."
  
  "Thank you, Sidestep." Sir Gareth said to her. "But yes. All these indicators and many more, direct and indirect, do not paint a flattering picture of the Dimensional Empire for our analysts. I have no doubt that the trains all run on time there - X centuries of practice and polish have got to be good for something, after all, and simple expediency would dictate that an efficiently managed Empire is a more long-lasting Empire." He sighed. "So yes, if we're willing to accept the broken eggs the omelet might indeed be competently cooked. But is that what we really want? And much more importantly, is the Empire's already demonstrated degree of moral expediency with our cities and our lives really the price we want to pay?" he entreated us earnesly.
  
  The room fell silent for a full minute.
  
  "No, we do not." he continued into the sober reverie. "And no, we will not. We all believe in different things. Some of us in God, some of us in Country, some of us in justice, or revenge- or even just ourselves-"
  
  Brown Fox inevitably chuckled.
  
  "-but before this began, we were still all people living our own lives, by our own endeavors. We were not sitting, powerless and in penury, and praying for a patron to descend from their castle and take us as their new vassal. We were not waiting for a colonizer- and yes, I am entirely aware of the historical irony involved in an Englshman making that statement, thank you-"
  
  This time whole room couldn't help but laugh.
  
  "-to pull up alongside and use their steamships and rifles to conquer our primitive tribes. And I will remind you that back when we were the ones in the steamships, God's eventual verdict to our ancestors for their sins was not kind at all. And it was even less kind to those we left behind." He nodded sadly to Captain Masane. "And so I can't imagine that the verdict would be any kinder to the Dimensional Empire now that we're the tribesmen and not the colonials - or to us, once they were finally done with us." Sir Gareth chilled our blood. "And even if we did harbor secret dreams of benevolent space gods descending from the sky like an Arthur C. Clarke novel to set our poor world to rights... did those dreams ever have the first chapter involve fire from the sky and smiling words that served only to hide secret terror?"
  
  All of us hung breathlessly on his pause.
  
  "No." he said with absolute finality, chin proudly held high. "The Empress claimed that I and my fellow leaders around the world would call upon you to fight for us with honeyed words of freedom, but really for our own power and dominion. I put to you that if I wanted power and dominion I could easily have cut a far better deal with the Empire than Ironmaster has. Did I but put my hand forward and grasp it, I could quite easily be the ruler of a new British Empire. I could, perhaps, even be your King." his voice rang majestically as he seemed to loom ever larger among us.
  
  He shook his head, breathed deeply, and then diminished into a mere general again. "But I do not and will not put myself forward so, for it is not my rightful place. I am no longer even your Prime Minister, merely your commanding officer in time of war. And when the war is over, I will not even be that. I do not fight for myself, and I do not ask you to fight for me. I ask you to fight for England. I ask you to fight for Earth. And I ask you to fight for yourselves, and your own lives, and your own hopes and dreams, and those of your children and your children's children for all the ages to come."
  
  I began to rub at my eyes. Dusty in here-
  
  "I didn't actually pre-prepare any remarks for tonight." Sir Gareth said disarmingly. "It's all off the cuff. So I find myself at a loss for closing words - or rather, for any closing words of my own composition. For the only truly fitting remarks for this occasion have already been said by one of my most illustrious predecessors, and the first Prime Minister I ever served under. We all know them, and we will pledge ourselves to them yet again with our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. And so-"
  
  "We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans-" he began operatically.
  
  "We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be." First Dr. Goldwing, then Partisan and Brown Fox, and then all the rest of us one by one began to chime in.
  
  "We we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills-" Everyone else in the room started up, even those of us not familiar with the speech in question contributing as best they could to the chorus.
  
  "We shall never surrender!" every voice in Blackhall roared as one.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Look, when you're redoing the plot of Independence Day only with the British instead of the Americans, you will get stuff like this. Just be thankful I didn't actually do the whole St. Crispin's Day speech as well. And yes, the MCU Nick Fury quote was deliberately stolen.
  
  And yes, in the original Dimensional Invasion campaign script it was the Avengers Sentinels who had the heavy lifting in campaign backstory. But I'm trying something else. The Golden Age version of Gareth Somerset was actually my best friend's PC in a World War II campaign, but I got permission to age him up and insert him here.
  
  And yes, I actually got British Captain America, British Punisher, and British Kingpin (one of whom is entirely an OC, and all of whom were heavily customized, so don't go looking in "Kingdom of Champions" for them) all in the same room and all agreeing on something. This isn't even a Champions game I ever ran, it's the super dream game I wish I could have run if I were superhuman. But in many ways it's easier for an author, as you have total control over all events and dialogue.
  
  The Dimensional Empire arc is going to be a whole novella of its own before we're done, but you can at least feel the events moving and building. So hang on to your hats, true believers, because I hope to make it one hell of a ride.
  
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  "This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service, transmitting to you from London at the top of the hour. It is 12pm British Summer Time on Day Three of the Dimensional Invasion, and in the top of the news Imperial civil relief efforts still have yet to be allocated to the devastated city of Portsmouth. The mayor's office has informed us that local hospitals are being overwhelmed with casualties, and that it took over twenty-four hours simply to obtain permission for a relief convoy of British Army medical personnel and supplies to be authorized travel to the site. Due to the restrictions of the surrender terms the unarmed relief mission has proven unable to entirely protect themselves from looters, and liason difficulties are still ongoing so arranging for Invader security for the relief efforts has yet to be entirely successful. If your broadcaster might be permitted an editorial comment, for an interstellar polity that claims to have uplifted so many 'millions of worlds' they don't seem to be entirely as well-organized for the task as one would expect.
  
  "In foreign news, reports are that the Invaders have allocated at least two additional divisions of jumptroopers from their strategic reserve to the United States due to the bit of difficulty involved in trying to occupy a nation that has over nine and a half million square kilometers of wilderness and approximately one-and-a-half firearms for every man, woman, and child - and those merely the ones they'll admit to owning. Your broadcaster is not going to dissemble, I had always thought our cousins' obsession with hoarding firepower was a tad disquieting in the past. But it does certainly seem to be coming in handy now so point to you, Yanks! Let's all earnestly hope that the Invaders won't backslide to just tossing multi-kiloton plasma discharges at everything that annoys them again, shall we?"
  
  "In economic news, shipping has still been disrupted by-"
  
  The radio broke off into a swirl of screeching and static, and Cat turned and gave us a wide grin and a thumbs-up.
  
  "I still can't believe we're jamming ourselves." Partisan chuckled. "Damn, you lot have got wicked imaginations."
  
  Cat stood up from the microphone and stretched. "It's about managing expectations. Everyone already knows that the Invaders can cut off radio broadcasts, they did it on day one. So we can just stop transmitting in mid-sentence and let everyone's imaginations go to work on coming up with more reasons to be dissatisfied than we can actually give them, and blame the Invaders for any inconvenient radio silence."
  
  "The worst question any government can have the people start asking." Partisan agreed. "What are those bastards trying to hide from us now?"
  
  "And that lets us do propaganda without actually lying, because God help our credibility if we put out one single allegation of fact that the Invaders can then demonstrate was clearly untrue. But the timing of events in Portsmouth is true, we actually did get a statement from the Mayor's office relayed to us, and Dr. Amazing can confirm they actually landed two more divisions' worth of troop transports in the US." Cat stopped to take a drink of water.
  
  "And all the while we're stabbing them with Morton's Fork." I picked up. "If we hadn't mentioned Portsmouth then the people living there would have accepted the delay as 'What else could you expect? It's still the first days of the war!', but now we've gotten to publicly frame the problem first and first impressions count. If they don't rush to send aid there now then they're callous bastards, and if they do rush to send it there then it looks like they're conceding to us and we get Portsmouth the help they need. Likewise with our indirect comment on the bombardments - even if they take out a perfectly valid tactical target out in the middle of the wilderness now, after our propaganda the impression it will leave on far too many people is still that of a brutal totalitarian Empire just solving all their easy problems with nukes. Brown Fox was right when he said it was a war of perceptions, so that's exactly what we'll keep playing on."
  
  "And at the same time we're also playing with the Invaders' heads." Cat broke in. "We know they're very good at propaganda and perceptions themselves - the Empress' speech alone was a masterclass in that - so they'll know what corner we're trying to box them into with the bombardment issue, but that just means they'll be more likely to delay going back to bombardments if they can. And that's exactly what we want them to do, of course. Plus, given the way they took out HUGIN pre-emptively and the lack of automated force multipliers we've seen so far - no war robots and barely even any drones - suggests they might not like AIs as a technology. So the voice filtering program I use to give me a Standard Received accent also removes all my subliminal vocal overtones to make it human-sounding to the naked ear but obviously synthesized if put under computer analysis, and between that and my cyberkinesis hacking into the trunk lines to get the broadcasts out-"
  
  "-they'll wonder if we've got our own big digital brain down here running command-and-control, and they'll sweat all the more for it." Partisan nodded. "It's all solid psy-ops, I love it. But for right now it's time to log off and grab your kit, the briefing's going to kick off in half an hour and after that we've got the raid. Make sure you grab some ration bars in the canteen first, no fighting on an empty stomach."
  
  "We'll be there, Major." I acknowledged, and he nodded to us and left the little corner of the bunker that we'd set up as a broadcast center.
  
  "Who'd have ever thought the Horizon media training would work for us." I said bemusingly as Cat finished powering down the "Wartime Broadcasting Service" studio. It was a haywired mess kludged together out of parts ranging from old 1960s era radios fresh from Cold War storage caches that still had the original plastic wrapping on them to superhero-tech computer gear scavenged straight from the HQ of the London Watch private super-team that Dr. Goldwing had led, but between the combined brilliance of him, Firewatch, and my wife it all ran like a Swiss watch.
  
  "Just because someone are a bunch of megalomaniacal bastards doesn't mean they can't be good at their jobs." Cat said as we headed out.
  
  "Given who we're up against right now, that's what worries me." I replied.
  
  After a hasty lunch of ration bars and bottled water we arrived at the briefing room. Cat nodded to Sir Gareth and took her place alongside him at the podium.
  
  "Good afternoon." Sir Gareth opened. "Within the hour you will all be departing on our first real offensive operation of the campaign. But before we begin, Netcat will explain both the purpose of the upcoming raid and its necessity." He stepped aside and let her take the floor.
  
  An image of an Intel microchip popped up on the screen, split-screened alongside the CPU of an Invader portacomp. "When we began working on the portacomp we'd captured from an Invader jumptrooper squad leader, we ran into a surprising amount of difficulty. Merely getting access to the thing at all was more than a bit of a chore, and the programming seemed essentially unhackable. On further examination we determined why."
  
  The next picture on the screen was, of all things, some type of huge primitive vacuum tube computer, a giant mainframe installation that filled an entire room. "Our analysis is that at some point in the past the Invader culture ran into their own equivalent of Mechanon, or came across what was left of a world that had suffered through a similar incident, and decided that they absolutely didn't want to risk any ever again. And so they apparently went back and reengineered the very fundamental basis of their computer technology all over again from the earliest fundamentals on up. What they use as the foundation of all their cybernetics diverged from the tech track that Earth used literally at the dawn of our digital age." She nodded towards the screen. "This is ENIAC, which went online in 1945 as the first programmable digital computer of the modern era. However, the programming method used for it was not what remotely what we would commonly consider programming today. Although ENIAC was capable of all the functions we consider necessary for a Turing-complete system - data storage, memory alterable by programs, complex sequences of operations including loops, conditional branches, and subroutines, and all the other things only Science section here would really be interested in - it did so via entirely electro-mechanical principles." Another image, of several women engineers with their hands in the guts of the machine. "Both the 'operating system' and the 'software' of ENIAC were composed of a large series of arithmetical machines with hardwired logic functions and data arrays, that were then combined or recombined via a combination of manually hooking up wires on a plugboard and setting up function tables using three large and extremely complicated switching panels." She nodded to the audience. "In short, you reprogrammed the machine by physically rearranging the wiring. Likewise, the operating system was derived from the basic physical structure of the machine itself."
  
  The view switched back to the guts of an Invader portacomp. "And so it is with the Invader computer systems. Virtually the entire setup is ROM - Read-Only Memory. The basic operating system is, all of the software is, even the compatibility plugins are. The computer memory that we are used to - RAM, the sort of thing that's on a basic USB key, for example - is used solely for storing variables required for current calculations, and/or text and audio-visual data. With suitable effort put into encoding sophisticated enough ROM stacks an Invader computer is capable of emulating almost any routine function ours is. They have databases, they have spreadsheets, they have word processors and email and text, and a whole range of other useful utilities. But there is absolutely no flexibility in the system, and likewise, the fact that the program guts themselves are all hardwired onto a physical substrate - however miniaturized - means that it's immune to virtually everything we'd consider as malware. As the old saying goes, you can't hack into hardcopy... and hardwired ROM computer instruction sets with no provision made for self-programming at all are essentially the digital equivalent of hardcopy." She looked at everyone soberly. "The practical upshot is, it is essentially impossible to do anything to an Invader computer that their own user interface is not designed to permit you to allow."
  
  "Then how did you hack that portacomp at all?" Silver Shadow, the young woman with the force-fields we'd met on the first night and a fellow member of the New Knights alongside Firewatch, asked us.
  
  "Because I was physically in contact with the hardware, meaning that I could read the data directly off the drive. Although in practice it was easier just for me to read the password file, then decrypt it, and then type in the user's login and passcode and work from there. The operating system is of course designed to let the authorized user have access to his own files." She sighed. "But that's where it stopped. Normally, once I'm inside any machine I can follow the network connections from it to wherever I want to go and then just go to town. But with Invader systems, I'm locked right out at the modem. The hardwired nature of everything means that it's impossible to privilege-upgrade an account." She nodded. "I hacked a good chunk of the British Internet just this morning in order to get our latest propaganda broadcast out, for example. It wasn't even difficult for me, because British Telecom runs most of their trunk lines for the region through various bits of the London Underground. But I could do that because Earth computers have flexibility. A user account can be upgraded to an admin account in real time, simply by putting the correct authorized command into the operating system from another admin account... or making the system think that you have. But on an Invader system? Admin functions are entered solely from admin terminals, period. User terminals literally don't have the CPU pathways to let admins be admins, they can merely listen to commands coming from higher-ranked nodes on the network and obey them. It's a system engineered for ultimate stability and security at the expense of flexibility, and even if it means they forfeit a good percentage of what computers are good for in the first place it's still brutally effective."
  
  "Which is incidentally a valuable cultural indicator." Dr. Goldwing spoke up. "It means that Invader society greatly prizes stability above innovation. So while their technology is highly advanced, and is certainly extremely robust and reliable, it's advanced because they've put centuries' or millenia worth of effort into incremental advancement, one methodical step at a time. This may be one of the only significant advantages we have over them, so we intend to take advantage of it as best we may."
  
  "I must caution, however, that we should not fall into complacency." Sir Gareth emphasized. "Simply because we believe the Invaders to prize uniformity of method wherever possible does not - not in the slightest - imply that we can safely rely on them to be stupid. They have already shown a disturbingly high degree of calculation and subtlety in their actions to date, and so if we expect things to go as easily as a Star Trek episode we may very well set ourselves up for disappointment."
  
  "These bastards aren't going to just fall helpless at our feet as soon as we start using the James T. Kirk School of Computer Repair." Partisan agreed. "And as anybody who watches footy already knows, you can still get a lot done even with never going outside your playbook if your playbook was written by people who knew what they were doing."
  
  "Particularly if you've had centuries to methodically work out plays for almost every imaginable contingency." Sir Gareth agreed. "Innovation and flexibility must remain our weapons, but our work will still be challenging."
  
  Netcat reclaimed the floor. "To sum up the part of immediate tactical relevance - I cannot actually reach or manipulate sensitive Invader data or command-and-control functions unless I am within direct cyberkinesis range of a hardwired Invader command-and-control terminal. Worse yet, all Invader electronics right on down to their equivalent of a flip-phone all incorporate vigorous EMP shielding into their outer cases, which means my normal range of several kilometers is cut down to at least a tenth of that whenever trying to take a crack at one. So I need to get within several hundred meters - and preferably closer - to do any useful work. And that, of course, is what today's raid is intended to accomplish. Partisan?"
  
  He stood up and took control of the briefing. "Right, I'll start with bringing you up to date on what we've found out about the jumptroopers. First off, we confirmed from the portacomp that the Invaders have two kinds of jump harnesses."
  
  Two pictures showed up on the screen, close-up shots of single Invader troops. The differences between one man's harness and the next were highlighted. "The chap on the left is wearing the common version every squaddie gets, and it's short-range tactical only. They can go about twenty meters at a jump, and the controls work off of their helmet. The jumptrooper just looks at where he wants to land, says the command word, and the compass-and-rangefinder setup in his helmet does all the work for him. They're well-drilled enough they can do this under fire and practically by reflex, which is why it's so hard to pin them down if you don't get the drop on them and put them down with the first shot. They can also manually set direction and distance by voice command, and that does work without line-of-sight, but they really hate doing it because they haven't got any safety systems that keep them from risking ending up stuck inside a piece of furniture or a wall. So unless you get one really desperate he's not going to start zipping around between rooms in a house-to-house fight like Sidestep would." Partisan explained.
  
  "The chap on the right is wearing a long-jump harness. He can move himself and up to ten other jump-harnesses synced to his up to about eleven kilometers at a single hop. A long-jump works by manually setting direction and distance, or by jumping to pre-calculated waypoints in his nav. Now the long-jumper does have a safety system that bounces him back to his starting point if he's aimed into something solid, but the price of that is that it takes him at least five seconds to charge up for a hop. The short-range harnesses deliberately don't have that safety interlock to allow for immediate tactical movement under fire, and neither does the long-jumper's if he's working in short-range mode, but their inability to have long-range mobility unless a squad can all do a stationary huddle all around their long-jumper for a few seconds is a weakness. And now, on to today's target."
  
  The picture shifted to an overhead long shot of an Invader walled compound set up in what we could see was a large flat section of a park inside a city.
  
  "This is what we're calling Invader Base Edinburgh." Partisan said. "They weren't remotely stupid enough to move into the buildings, they just had their own combat engineers clear out some open ground even a little more open and set up some prefabs." The picture shifted to a Google Maps snapshot. "Holyrood Park is in the center of the city, just about a mile square. You've got the fields here, St. Margaret's Loch here, the peak of Arthur's Seat here - a small mountain in the middle of a city, go figure - and they set their garrison up here-" He circled his finger around the large open northeast section of the park.
  
  The picture flashed back to a closer zoomed-in photo of the garrison, apparently taken from what I now realized had been the top of Arthur's Seat. "Rough head count on the troop complement in there is at least five hundred men. About two-thirds of them look to be jumptroopers, the rest are service-and-supply types. They've still got uniforms and rifles so they're still valid targets, but apparently they're not front-liners. But every army everywhere in history has needed tail as well as teeth, and they're it."
  
  "Note particularly that they're not using robots even for something as routine as cargo handling." Dr. Goldwing said after holding up a hand and having Partisan nod at him. "Their hardwired computer systems work against them here - I could easily program a robot to do something as simple as sort boxes simply by spending a few minutes coding an app on my phone, but these people would have to go all the way back to the factory to hardwire a ROM module for it. And that module would be useless if you were sorting non-standardized boxes on non-standardized shelving, because it wouldn't have any degree of heuristics at all. I am of course speculating, but barring late-arriving evidence I gravely doubt that the Dimensional Empire is willing to automate anything more complex than a simple rote assembly-line type operation."
  
  I definitely had to concede the point. Back in Shadowrun you had drone autopilot programs that could do things as complex as telling weeds from flowers, or sorting breakbulk in a package warehouse, or replacing a dedicated housekeeper. The super-technology of this Earth could likely do the same, even if things hadn't quite advanced to doing so where it would be cheaper than using people. But the Dimensional Empire should long since have reached that point, and yet their military supply depots still used people for the grunt work.
  
  "You can't do law enforcement for half a million people with that few men, teleporting or not." Firewatch said. "And while 24-hour curfew solves that problem in the short-term the immediate post-invasion lockdown has got to end sometime, because most households only keep a couple days of food. Do the Invaders know that?"
  
  "Edinburgh's garrison commander lifted the lockdown yesterday afternoon." Partisan acknowledged. "The Edinburgh police are still doing their jobs, but the mayor now reports to the local Imperial provost. They've even kept their side-arms, because sweet bugger-all they can do to the whole garrison with them, but all long-arms and military weapons have to be turned in." His nasty grin flashed again. "Not that there's been any immediate rush to comply."
  
  "Still, this is only the first several days." Sir Gareth contributed quietly. "Relatively limited manpower or no, things will shake down more and more as the immediate future progresses. Time is not on our side, hence our current action."
  
  "At any rate, the Scots have been the Scots so the lockdown wasn't off two hours before they had their first riot." Partisan continued. "That's when we found out the Invaders have stun rays. The rioters and everybody else who acted up got tossed into Murrayfield Stadium, which the Invaders are using for a temporary prison camp until they can presumably build a better one for themselves, and there's another smaller garrison outpost there for the guards." Partisan continued. "I mention this because we're going to be making Murrayfield part of the diversion for today, and because it highlights that a lot of people besides us will be at risk here. So let's not waste either their chances or ours."
  
  "Who is our local connection?" Sidestep asked.
  
  "Laird McVarran." Partisan replied. "For those who haven't already met him, chap's a low-level superhuman as well as laird of his own small clan of helpers up from the north of Scotland. He happened to be visiting the city on business when the Invasion kicked off, and now he's laying low and looking for a chance to keep his hand in. Blackhall aren't the only people in England who don't want to go quietly, after all. At any rate, Blackhall Two knew of him and gave him a referral to us, and Netcat's kept enough comm lines open for our own use that we could check each other's mail drops. So, now we get to the meat of the plan."
  
  "This operation wlil be in three phases." Sir Gareth began. "Phase One is to draw out a goodly proportion of the jumptroopers with trouble elsewhere in the city. Laird McVarran will be handling that in conjunction with local elements. Phase Two will have Havoc Squad under Partisan's command hit the Murrayfield prison camp to help enable a mass breakout. The purpose of Phase Two is not only to pull out most or all the jumptroopers that Phase One hasn't already tied up, but to be obvious enough as what Phase One was the diversion for that they won't be looking for Phase Three. Because Phase Three will be Wild Man, Netcat, and Sidestep going straight at Invader Base Edinburgh as Ghost Squad, and they will need to be at least as stealthy as their namesakes."
  
  "How are we getting to Edinburgh and back?" Firewatch asked. "Frosty?"
  
  "Yes." Frosty replied. "My teleport spells are the only long-range transport we have at present, so I can't go in with either Havoc or Ghost squads. I'll get everyone to the arrival point Laird McVarran has waiting for us, and both squads will have pickup points and alternate pickups set. If you can't make either then you'll need to get to the locals and sit tight until we can arrange something." She sighed. "Please understand that if it comes down to triage choices, then Ghost Squad has mission priority. Netcat and the data we hope to retrieve is the mission, and while losing all of Havoc would cripple our operations the overall effort still succeeds we can bring back useful intel that Blackhall can pass on to other action cells elsewhere in the world."
  
  "Right." Partisan agreed. "Havoc Squad, I'm going to start working you lot up on photos of the target site and the plan we've roughed out. As we don't know sweet bugger-all about conditions inside the garrison buildings, Ghost Squad's going to have to freelance it the whole way. Go get set up with your specialist gear and meet us all at the jump-off, we'll get caught up here."
  
  Cat and I gave a goodbye nod to Frosty and we headed out to get set up. The goggles me and Sidestep were pulling on were basically modified Google Glasses, but they'd let Netcat remote all of her sensor inputs to HUDs we could actually interpret.
  
  "So, I get an amnesty and the first thing I'm up for is a bit of burglary again." Sidestep joked in her distinctive Yorkshire accent. "Either of you two ever do anything like this before?"
  
  "What, industrial espionage?" Netcat grinned. "We called it 'shadowrunning' back home, and we used to make a very good living at it."
  
  "Really?" Sidestep grinned. "And here I thought you two were new hero types! Interesting to meet someone I've got things in common with."
  
  "Well, we did that too." I admitted. "Eventually. And how'd a nice girl like you get into this line of work anyway?" I changed the subject humorously as we finished gearing up and headed for the departure point.
  
  "Got out of the slums on a scholarship, worked my arse off to get into college-" Sidestep began.
  
  "You and me both." Netcat nodded. "So, got recruited by the wrong crowd?"
  
  "What, you mean press-ganged?" Sidestep replied. "No, got a job in a nice start-up company all on my own, thought I'd made good. Ended up put on a project working on a new experimental teleport thingy." she said. "Then it turns out the man who owns the company who owns my company is one Herbert Marston - Ironmaster - and the front company is actually part of his whole Project: Armour 'I'm going to take over British industry with my own private supervillain agency!' master plan. So there I am, in too deep to get out before I even know what I'm really in." She shook her head. "The ruddy thing is, at first I thought I'd hit the jackpot. Teleporter was way too expensive to make a production of but the prototype worked fine, and I could make it work better than any of the other techs, so they gave me the suit and the sci-fi weapons and asked me if I wanted to join MACE - Armour's supervillain team. And not going to lie, I leapt at the chance. I mean, it's not like they were asking me to join Argent Anarky, right? We weren't going to be killers, just - you know, smash and grab, bust up the competition's factories, industrial espionage, that sort of thing. You understand me?"
  
  Given that Sidestep was almost exactly describing a shadowrunner's normal career, I entirely understood what she meant.
  
  "So there I was, never really part of anything before and suddenly I'm surrounded by people like Battleaxe and Grenadier and all the rest - talented and dangerous people, the sort of people I wanted to be - and even if I'm the new girl on the team I'm still on the team, yeah? Even if Charmer was an absolute creep and Battleaxe-" she shook her head. "Any rate, the Invaders come around and holy God, I was in secondary school during the Night of Villainy but this is that all over again and a million times worse. And then Ironmaster says it's all right, he's worked out a deal with the Invaders and all we've got to do is help them round up the same heroes we were fighting." She shook her head. "Round up. For camps." She shook her head. "I'm no hero but I've got a sodding limit, damn it. So I told Battleaxe that Marston had lost his goddamned mind and she agrees with me, and I'm pleased as punch somebody else is talking sense, right up to the point where she says her plan is to just scarper off and let him do it without risking getting tangled up in it herself. And I can see in her eyes that if I'm not on board right then, I'm dead to her. Like, just all her human feelings switched off like a table lamp." She sighed. "You ever think somebody's a role model, someone you'd trust to mentor your life and help bring you along, and then find out that they were a sociopath the whole time and you were just too thick to notice?"
  
  "My last boss." I surprised her. "It's a really long story, but it ends with him putting Cat in a lab to be cut apart to find out how her powers work and me and Frosty having to shoot a lot of people to get her out."
  
  "Damn." she whistled. "You do for the bastard too, or did he get away with it?"
  
  "We burned his whole operation to the public and his own bosses cut him loose as a liability." Cat explained.
  
  "Serves him right." Sidestep grinned. "But yeah, then you get it. All of it. Why I got into it, but why I couldn't stay there anymore either."
  
  "That gets you out, and looking for a place to hide." I nodded. "It even gets you to Brown Fox, because apparently you knew him as a useful sort of contact. But I still don't understand why you came down here? If anything looks like a job with no percentage at all, this one would."
  
  "You're here, aren't you?" Sidestep said perceptively. "Probably not for the same reason I am, but in my case it's dead simple. I've never been a coward, and I'll be damned if I just run off and hide like Battleaxe and the rest while people who don't even have powers are busy fighting and dying. And especially not when I'm a technician that helped build a teleport suit, even if I didn't actually invent the whole thing on my own, and the Invaders use teleport gear. I figured Brown Fox could help find me a place to sleep and eat in return for services rendered while I waited to see which of the London heroes would start a ruckus and trail along after them a bit, and now I'm down here with Sir Gareth himself giving me missions in the name of the Crown while I've got folks from the New Knights and London Watch both all in the room with me." She shrugged helplessly. "Honestly? That's weirder than aliens."
  
  "Here we are." I said as we arrived at the room where everyone was mustering for departure. "Let's get it done."
  
  
  
  "Anything?" Sidestep whispered as we lay low in the dirt just outside range of motion sensors on the garrison's outer wall. The Imperial combat engineers had erected a four-meter high sloped berm around the compound, composed of interlocking prefab sections, and there was some type of energy fence both on top of the berm and an outer fence several dozen feet away from it.
  
  "I can 'feel' some secondary terminals, but the command node is still shielded." Netcat said. "Hang on, I'm going to try and see if any of those other terminals have a layout of the base-" She closed her eyes and worked for a second. "Eugh, I just want to cry whenever I see one of those. The Invaders are more than capable of stable quantum-dot computing - their encryption modules are actually advanced enough to not be Heinrich-vulnerable - but their CPUs are so hardwired and coarse they barely qualfy as microprocessors!"
  
  "Strewth, what a lash-up." Sidestep swore. "That's like finding out someone put a long-range computerized ballistic sniper scope on a matchlock musket! Sure, it does the job just fine but what's the bloody point?"
  
  "Defense against people who own better computers." I said. "Without Cat we'd be a lot further behind on the hacking than we are now."
  
  "She's head and shoulders over that Cybermind geek from the States and no mistake." Sidestep complimented her. "I worked with the little git once, and if you took his powers away he'd barely be able to log on. He never even took a software course, he just lets his powers do it all!"
  
  "You're joking." Netcat muttered incredulously. "I did four years of comp-sci and two years as a military signal intelligence specialist to learn my trade even before I had powers!"
  
  "Respect!" Sidestep nodded vigorously. "Even if you've got an edge there's still no substitute for knowing what you're doing. But you just try telling that to most supervillains nowadays. Soon as they get the power to shoot laser beams out of their bum or something, they think they can take on the world with no plan at all."
  
  "Speaking of knowing what we're doing...?" I tried to refocus the two members of the tech-crime sorority.
  
  "Right." Netcat said embarassedly. "Anyway, I got the map. Putting it up on your HUDs now."
  
  "Floor plans and heist planning." Sidestep murmured satisfiedly. "Just like old times... errr, could you kick in a translate program so the labels are in the Queen's English?"
  
  "Sorry." Netcat said. "The portacomp had a full suite of translator software so let me put that in, and..." The map became comprehensible. "Right, that building is the command post, and it's also the only one with a subterranean level. Think they put the data core in the basement?"
  
  "Makes more sense than putting it in the attic." Sidestep agreed. "But the tricky bit about this was always never knowing which rooms had internal motion sensors and which ones didn't. So let's not jump straight into that big room with all the heavy power cables running into it, and instead..." She nodded and pointed at a spot. "Maintenance closet or lavatory. Either one works for not having burglar alarms, and then it's just wait until the hallway's clear and down to the door. You can spot cameras, right?"
  
  "Easily." Netcat said. "Think you can make the jump with just the floor plan to go off of?"
  
  "Well, that big roof antenna right there is a nice landmark, and that closet is so many degrees and meters off the antenna, so let me just get a fix and..." Sidestep said. "All right. grab my hands and we go in three... two... one..."
  
  The world blanked out, and we materialized inside what was indeed a restroom. Judging by the stand-up urinals, it was the men's.
  
  "Touchdown." Sidestep whispered, and like the three veteran B&E artists we were we hurriedly checked out the zone, timed the footsteps of the patrolling guard in the hallway outside, and made our way to the data core while Netcat temporarily kicked the cameras into test mode. Lack of ability to change the programming didn't stop her from using functions that were already hardwired in, and a similar logic let her finesse the door.
  
  "Right, we're in. Hope Havoc and the boys are making out all right." Sidestep muttered as the two of us took up positions and covered Cat while she leaned up against the central server spire and dropped into a trance. "How long's this usually take her?"
  
  "Given how hard Invader computers are to work with, more minutes than seconds." I agreed. "We'll only get one shot at this, so we hang on right up until they're beating down the door."
  
  "Right." Sidestep agreed, and we settled down to nervously wait. Five minutes ticked by... ten...
  
  Someone in the hall. Netcat texted on our HUDs, and a picture-in-picture popped up from the hallway cams. Two sentries on rover patrol...
  
  My heart sank as one of them muttered into his headset as he approached. "They wouldn't be checking in on the hour while doing interior sweeps."
  
  "No." Sidestep agreed. "That's guards who thought they heard something and are going to check it out."
  
  We stacked up on each side of the door and sure enough, the datacore opened and one Imperial trooper entered while his partner covered him from outside. Netcat was not visible from the door, leaning up against the central datacore pillar on the opposite side, and we were crouched down outside the peripheral vision of the inside man. So after he stepped far enough in to clear my path, Sidestep swung out and cracked him right across the base of the skull with her escrima shocksticks while I boosted speed and sprang out at the second guard like a trapdoor spider. Within five seconds the unconscious bodies of both men were inside the datacore room and the door was closed again.
  
  "We're not going to off them while they're out, are they?" Sidestep asked nervously. "I mean, it's war, but-" She trailed off. "Never done it before."
  
  "No, we're still trying for nobody knowing we were here." I said. "So instead I'm going to use this." I reached over and pulled off the first guard's helmet, revealing a gold-skinned alien who looked almost entirely human except for an odd-shaped face, no nose, and his skin and hair color. He clearly wasn't of the tall, thin blue-skinned 'Imperial Race' that we'd seen in the portacomp data we'd already captured.
  
  I idly wondered how long this poor bastard's home planet had lasted versus invasion however many years or centuries ago it had been as placed my hand underneath the first guard's nostrils, casting a spell of forgetting that would blank his short-term memory much like a dose of laes would. The Mesmerizing Mists of Modor were considered a basic spell here, that practitioners used often to keep knowledge of the Mystic World from mortals. Not that Mrs. Tompion had ever held with such a practice, unlike the Trismegistus she'd briefly mentioned, but she'd still known the basics. Jane was much more adapted to this world's magics than I was because I simply hadn't had the time in the past several days to actually make a lengthy project of it what with everything else I'd been spreading myself thin on, but while I wasn't quite up to long-range teleporting yet I could still do apprentice work like this. In addition to mostly adapting the Shadowrun magic I already had, of course.
  
  "Wonder what their sergeant will make of them when he finds them caulking off in here." Sidestep muttered as I neuralyzed the second one.
  
  "Remember that they checked in before they took the door." I said. "The guardroom's going to notice them gone soon enough. But if we get clear before they arrive, then they still won't know-"
  
  The alarm klaxons going off cut that off.
  
  "Shit!" Netcat said, snapping awake. "Whoever the duty officer is, he's not kidding! As soon as those guys missed check-in-"
  
  "Incoming!" i called as four jumptroopers blinked into the middle of the room and immediately opened fire even as they were warping. Sidestep shrieked and blinked out barely ahead of the bolt, and Netcat went down before she even had a chance to get her weapon clear. I ignored the bolts that hit me, of course, and only dimly registered the sounds of combat outside in the hall as I cold-bloodedly tore my way through the rest of the squad with my bare hands.
  
  The door opened to reveal Sidestep, battered and with a tear in her costume and the unconscious bodies of several more jumptroopers on the floor behind her. "Shit!" she was swearing. "My suit's fried, I can't get us out!" Then she saw Cat and moaned. "Oh no-"
  
  "She's just stunned!" I gasped, my body flooding with relief as I finally reached her body. "They must've wanted prisoners to interrogate." I picked Cat's limp body up and handed her to Sidestep. "Here, I need my hands free."
  
  "Right." Sidestep said, slinging Cat into a fireman's carry. "Oof, she's taller than I am!" she grunted.
  
  I turned and grabbed the central pillar of the datacore, then bodily tore the entire pillar free of its mountings with my bare hands and tossed it into the corner. The klaxon stopped shrieking and every system in the base went dead, right down to the lights and ventilators. So, they did have centralized engineering controls-
  
  "Let's go." I said, and we ran for our lives.
  
  "How the ruddy hell did they get on top of us so fast?" she cursed.
  
  "Preset waypoints." I realized. "The fast-reaction team must have had their long-jumper already dialed in for various sensitive points around the base. I'm surprised they didn't blink in first instead of just sending the roving patrol-"
  
  "The first blip's always a false alarm." Sidestep grunted as we rushed along. I ran into a team of them setting up at the intersection and plowed through them. These ones got to live. "Security guards are all the same-" she puffed. "In every universe!"
  
  I kicked open a door that I remembered as leading to a surface maintenance access, then grabbed Sidestep's shoulder and hurried her along away from it.
  
  "False trail?" she grunted as we reached the nearest room and hid in it.
  
  "Yes." I said. "Can you fix your suit?"
  
  "I've got an idea, but I need her awake for it." Sidestep muttered. "I hope they only used a little dose-"
  
  I pumped a basic healing spell into Netcat and was rewarded with a moan and her eyes flickering. "What hit me?"
  
  "Stun gun." I said. "The base is alerted and we're stuck in a basement, and Sidestep's suit got trashed in the fight. But she's got an idea?"
  
  "Diagnostics says I've still got power and controls, it's just my jump module that's trashed." Sidestep said. "And we're in the middle of a base full of people who use teleporters. So get me one of their harnesses and I'll patch it into mine. Problem is that I can't solve the compatibility program on my own, but even if Cat can't rewire Imperial computers she can still hack my suit to talk to Imperial gear-"
  
  "Go fetch." my wife said to me. "We'll get started here."
  
  The nearest jumptroopers were the corpses that I'd left behind in the datacore room, and getting there required me to go through yet another team of sweepers. My heart sank at the necessity of cold-bloodedly finishing off not only these ones but the ones we'd just knocked unconscious earlier. With our chance for a ghost run or even a mostly-ghost run ruined, all I could settle for was making absolutely sure that the Empire couldn't identify who our cyberkinetic was. Hopefully the damage I left behind in the datacore and the further damage I'd do with the jumptroopers' own grenade belts would convince them we were here to do a sabotage run, not a datasteal-
  
  I left the bloody work behind me and got back to the girls. Sidestep and Netcat working together got the Invader jump-module patched in in very short order, and a hasty semi-blind jump put us back outside the compound. Everything was on higher alert than a nest of kicked bees, of course, but with all their command-and-control systems completely fragged and no description of what intruders to look for, we had no problem making it into the city. Several of McVarran's people met us at the obscure service garage that was one of the secondary RV points, and then it was just a matter of waiting for Frosty's pickup.
  
  Mission accomplished. I sighed regretfully to myself as I washed the blood off my hands. Because apparently I hadn't left Shadowrun as far behind me as I might wish.
  
  
  
  The full Blackhall muster assembled in the mess hall the next morning. Science and Intel sections had been up half the night with everything Cat had managed to download from the datacore into the portable storage module she'd taken along. She hadn't gotten everything, and it had only been a second-line garrison battalion, but it was still far more than we'd had. Because even simple garrison still had access to field-grade officers' briefings, which was far more than the mere "Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer" level material which is all we'd captured up until now.
  
  "Good morning, everyone." Sir Gareth said. "I am pleased to announce that yesterday's mission was a success on all fronts, and we now have our first major intelligence break against the Invaders. The information I am about to relay to you has already been relayed to Blackhall Two and as many other resistance groups around the world as we have any contact with. Foremost among that information is that we now know why the Invaders are here."
  
  Sir Gareth paused and waited for everyone to settle down before continuing. "Their objective is not merely the Earth, but the entire Milky Way galaxy. We are intended to be the beachhead."
  
  "But that doesn't make sense, sir!" Firewatch burst out. "If I wanted to do that I certainly wouldn't land here! I'd find some obscure star system without anyone within parsecs of it, drop straight into the deep black, and build up my forward operating base on some lifeless rock!"
  
  "And if they could have, they would have." Sir Gareth agreed. "But they could not. Frosty?"
  
  "The basic theory of dimensional travel, at least as far as the mystic community on Earth knows, is a whole complicated mess." Frosty explained. "The simple and relevant bit is that the Dimensional Empire's method of travel is well and truly off the scale of any dimensional travel that's known of. But working from the theory I've been taught I've been able to figure that as a price for that greater scale, it has less precision unless you've got a big installation at both ends." Frosty nodded and continued. "Earth is what's called a 'dimensional axis'. It's why the mana level is higher here than on most extraterrestrial worlds, it's why so many mystic dimension travellers end up here, and it's why the Invaders are here. They came through at Earth because Earth was the only point they could reliably aim at over the distance they were shooting from."
  
  "Thank you." Sir Gareth said politely, and reached out and tapped a key on the laptop lying on a table near him. The overhead projector put a picture on the wall of a picture of a large golden installation on the surface of an alien world. It looked vaguely like a gigantic gyroscope with twelve gimbals each concentrically set one inside the other.
  
  "This is a Reality Gate." Sir Gareth continued. "To give you a sense of scale, the installation you are looking at right now is over eighty meters high. It is the smaller of the two Reality Gates that the Dimensional Empire normally uses." The picture shifted to another Reality Gate floating in deep space. "This is the larger model, and is ten times the size of the planetary model in every dimension. These images are from a standard Imperial military training video on dimensional travel, apparently part of the instructional materials for their version of the Basic Officer's Course. We obtained a copy from the Edinburgh datacore yesterday. You will now see film of the Reality Gate in operation."
  
  He clicked a control and the image unfroze. The six outer gimbals slowly shifted into an elaborate set of positions, and then the six inner ones did. Then all twelve rings began spinning, faster and faster, until they were moving in a blur too fast to see. And then as they approached peak speed the twelve rings faded, and the blurring golden rings suddenly morphed into a giant multicolored sphere of energy that projected a gleaming cone upward to open a giant ring-shaped portal-
  
  The image froze as Sir Gareth hit the control again. "That portal is over five kilometers wide, and can transmit over 500 million tons of mass in a single transit. The energy expenditure is prodigious to say the least, but Imperial power generation technology for such a large portable installation is more than up to the task. And with an operating Reality Gate on both ends of the wormhole the connection is stable - the mass transfer limit I mentioned is per single transition, not total. A double-ended Reality Gate link can be sustained for hours." Sir Gareth looked at us soberly. "Half a billion tons of mass is larger than the estimated total of Admiral Helmuth's entire fleet, and with an operating two-ended Reality Gate connection they could move any number of fleets as large as his through the portal as quickly as their traffic control allowed."
  
  Sir Gareth let that sink in, and then continued with grim determination. "There is, as of yet, no functional Reality Gate in our dimension. Helmuth's fleet arrived via a one-sided transition, and those are significantly more difficult. According to the Imperial training syllabus, one-sided transitions 'destabilize' the local area of space to the point that further transitions become far more insurmountable. The practical upshot is that until Admiral Helmuth's engineers can finish constructing a Reality Gate on his side of the connection he can still send courier ships back and forth and receive isolated replacements, but cannot receive any substantial reinforcements. But the instant they finish that construction, the full might of the Dimensional Empire will be upon us."
  
  "Then why the hell did he invade now?" Sidestep burst out irrepressibly. "He shouldn't even have let us know he was here until after he'd finished his gate!"
  
  "To answer the most immediately urgent question first, at the current rate of construction Admiral Helmuth anticipates completion of the Gate within nine weeks. That variable may increase or decrease depending on future conditions, but it is the estimate he has currently disseminated to all of his garrison commanders." Sir Gareth said. "As to your objection, remember that their objective is the galaxy and not just Earth, and according to what little data we have received from stranded 'visitors' such as Ironclad and Firewing, our galaxy has several substantial interstellar powers of its own. So Admiral Helmuth's original plan was to keep his fleet securely cloaked behind our Moon while he began the construction of his Reality Gate, and then to move on to the conquest phase after substantial progress had been made but before it had been completed. A calculated risk to try and mitigate the dangers of both moving too early and getting trapped into a situation he could not readily leave, and moving too late and risking premature discovery from one of our galaxy's interstellar nations. Only our Earth discovered his presence early, and forced his hand."
  
  "Which is why the Invasion has seemed so half-arsed so far." Partisan picked up. "He doesn't have to take the Earth with his fleet's resources. He's just got to keep the lid on long enough to finish building his wormhole generator and then they can pour through enough millions and millions of jumptroopers on us to hammer us flat. So everything up until now has just been a spoiling attack. It's all to keep us off balance, keep us delayed, keep us so busy fighting down here that we pay no attention to what's going on up there." He shook his head and swore wonderingly.
  
  "There is also the element that while our conventional military forces are only a threat to them if they enter our planet's atmosphere, they are already aware that our superhuman community has space-capable operatives." Sir Gareth said. "In hindsight it is no wonder that Vanguard's space mission moved them to such a relative degree of panic. The single most vital point of effort in Admiral Helmuth's entire mission is the Reality Gate, and we were about to literally trip over it on the very first day."
  
  "Do they know we know now?" Silver Shadow asked urgently. "Because if I were Admiral Helmuth and I knew my mission was blown that far, I'd seriously be considering writing off the entire Earth at this point!" she finished fearfully, and the rest of us drew a deep breath as well.
  
  "Traffic analysis worldwide indicates no significant shift in Invader op-tempo between yesterday and today." Captain Masane answered her. "Ghost Squad's efforts to make it look like a sabotage run instead of a datasteal succeeded entirely. To the best of their knowledge, they have no suspicion that we escaped with any data at all. Particularly not given that Imperial computers are effectively immune to conventional cyberwarfare... except for cyberkinetics, which they're still not entirely certain Earth even has any of."
  
  "So there, at least, we have escaped disaster." Sir Gareth agreed. "And this knowledge of course entirely clarifies our primary strategic objective. However, Silver Shadow raises the entirely valid point that we will only get one shot at the Reality Gate. If we try and fail, then the Empire's probable counter-action will be extreme to say the least. Because amongst the Imperial materials we captured was also quite a bit of data on standard Imperial counterinsurgency tactics."
  
  "Genocide." Captain Masane said. "If a subject population proves too intractable, there is indeed a point beyond which they will simply cut their losses and depopulate the region for resettlement by 'loyal Imperial citizens'. After all, they have the transport capacity for such large-scale resettlements." He shook his head in disgust. "It is not their first preference, or even their second, or their third. But they will do it if they feel that a given insurgency situation is too closely approaching the sunk cost fallacy. They have standardized procedures for it. There are manuals."
  
  "I never remotely anticipated saying these words in my life, but I believe that I have finally met a tyranny even more horrible than Hitler's." Sir Gareth said. "Even the Nazis committed their twisted atrocities out of ideology. A sick, savage, hateful ideology as brought forth from the very depths of Hell and practiced by madmen, but even so it was a thing in which Hitler actually believed. But the Dimensional Empire has made a practice of it solely on utilarian grounds. There were even procedures on how long to wait before a 'scourging' was authorized so that nearby subject populations would accept Imperial propaganda that their hand had been 'forced', that there was 'nothing else the Empire could regrettably do'." For a brief moment he looked and sounded terribly, terribly old. "Entire worlds reduced to spreadsheets. These billions die here so those trillions over there may be more profitably ruled."
  
  "And don't forget the PR value." Brown Fox said, sick with rage. "Can't ever forget the buggering PR, can we?" he choked. "I dunno what's worse, the idea that this bitch doesn't even believe her own propaganda or the idea that she still might!"
  
  "Portsmouth, Pearl Harbor, Severomorsk, Zhanjiang." Sir Gareth trailed off. "Our analyses were not only correct, but the foreshadowing was even more ominous than we knew." He gathered himself and continued grimly. "But as staggering as the thought is to contemplate, it actually does get worse."
  
  He let that settle in.
  
  "Simply destroying the Reality Gate will not save us." he said simply.
  
  "They sent Helmuth's fleet through even without it." Captain Masane said. "So even if we somehow removed their Gate and all of Helmuth's forces, they could still send another fleet. Whether later this year, or the next, or the next-" he trailed off.
  
  "So what do we do, sir?" Firewatch asked nervously. "What can we do?"
  
  "Earlier this week, we all stood in this hall and pledged to never surrender." Sir Gareth said steadily. "Now we come to realizations of horrors beyond our wildest nightmares, and we face the awful possibility that surrender may be the only thing that will save the human race from extinction."
  
  He let us all gasp at this and then interrupted. "May be. Or maybe not." he finished inspiringly.
  
  "So how do we find out, Sir Gareth?" I asked loudly, before the panic could resume.
  
  "At last, someone asks the proper question." he smiled at me. "And to the best of my knowledge, there is perhaps only one man in the solar system who can tell us." Sir Gareth calmly replied.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: I think this chapter speaks for itself, really.
  
  Oh, and note, nothing about the 'scourging' here is me making it up. That stuff's either canon from the 6e sourcebook Book of the Empress, or can be readily inferred from what is there. Not that we need to get into the exact details of which Earth populations might get 'scourged' or why, especially since our heroes don't need to.
  
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  All around the world, people fought on.
  
  Lone hunters sniped at Invader patrols, then faded back into the bushes and alleys after the first shot. Even if they didn't actually wound anyone it still tied up at least one squad of jumptroopers for ten or fifteen minutes, and it was happening in thousands of spots around the planet every day. Civilian vandals and rioters caused just enough trouble to cause the local police to call for jumptrooper backup, then got clear before the hammer fell. The local police sometimes cooperated in the false alarms, or were creatively slightly off-target in telling their new self-imposed overlords exactly where the trouble spots were.
  
  Many actve duty military personnel and veterans' groups in multiple nations had had their own dispersal plans and weapons caches - even if they all hadn't originally been intended versus alien invaders, perhaps - and were busy running wild with them. The first week of the conflict had seen over half of those action cells get wiped out, as they rapidly learned the hard way what did and didn't work versus the Invaders. Still, Blackhall and other self-organized command nodes around the world did the best we could to learn about their stories, how they'd fought and why they died, and distill the knowledge down to pass around to as many others who could use it.
  
  By the end of the first week an estimated 75% - give or take a generous margin of guessing - of the active superhumans on Earth had been detained. The revelation of the Reality Gate had explained why Admiral Helmuth hadn't taken the sensible precaution of having them shipped out into space where the vast majority of them couldn't possibly hope to escape - the absolute last thing he wanted to do was put large numbers of hostile metahumans into a position where they could hope to steal a spaceship, like already being on one. The magical tracker we'd put on Mrs. Tompion led to Antarctica, and the signal had been confirmed by several other resistance cells around the world who'd had similar ideas using various magical or technological means. Not all of them had succeeded and not all of the volunteers had survived, but we still had enough to go on. So among all the other possible war plans and intel-gathering efforts we were juggling we now had to work on figuring out methods by which we could extract tens of thousands of people from the most isolated continent on the planet and where the hell we could possibly hide them all once we'd busted them out. It was heartbreaking to think of deliberately leaving people in a gulag longer because we weren't able to shelter and feed them ourselves, but that's about how it was looking at the moment.
  
  Dr. Amazing, perhaps the single greatest scientist in the superhero community, was working in conjunction with the genetically engineered hyperintelligent gorilla Dr. Silverback on tracking down the force that had compromised HUGIN. For all that the Invaders disdained AI technology for themselves, they still seemed quite familiar with it if need be. They'd had yet to take HUGIN offline but were instead using him for one of his original intended purposes - wide-spread logistics and coordination during disaster relief. The Dimensional Empire's carrot-and-stick approach was not forgetting the carrot, and areas where there was less resistance were starting to see the early benefits - very early, it was still barely the first week - of the promised Imperial uplift while more contested areas did not. And Admiral Helmuth seemed to have no hesitation in salvaging and repurposing already-existing tools for the job available on Earth instead of trying to immediately hammer every round peg into a single Imperial square hole. Presumably the 'native' elements like HUGIN and Ironmaster and all the other collaborators large and small who'd started to sign on would be 'regularized' later once their victory was complete, but for right now they were being left mostly free to operate as force multipliers. And it was basically the same strategy as our own harassment attacks versus the Invaders, even if their efforts were strategically irrelevant to the bigger picture they were still immediate threats that had to be responded to. So we could either look entirely ineffectual, or we could stretch ourselves thin making shows of force that weren't serving the primary point of effort.
  
  Really, this war would have been going a lot more smoothly if the Invaders had been stupid.
  
  In hopefully better news, a superteam from North America called 'the Champions' had successfully stolen an Invader planetary landing shuttle. Even their long-jump harnesses didn't have the range for surface-to-orbit, after all, and for moving bulk cargo vehicles were still more cost-effective than teleporters even for the Invaders. One of their members had been a stranded (and lost) alien scout named 'Ironclad' who'd crashed here several years ago and who'd been unable to contact his people, and while Ironclad hadn't been an engineer of his own race he'd still been able to describe the basic workings of his race's interstellar comms technology to the Champions' own tech genius Defender. And while Defender hadn't yet been able to entirely reproduce a long-range gravity-wave communicator on Earth just from first principles, the Invaders already used grav-coms for secure FTL communications even on their insystem craft. So with a finished grav-com unit in hand the Champions had been able to break into a university's particle accelerator, have Defender jury-rig the shuttle's salvaged comm unit into it, and somehow use the whole works as a giant amplifier to get a brief signal burst out over several hundred light-years before the grav-com melted under the overload. We still didn't know yet if Ironclad's people had heard the signal, but if they did then the Perseids should right now be relaying the warning to every other interstellar power they were in contact with.
  
  And then there was the project we were currently working on.
  
  Bhutan, the 'Land of the Thunder Dragon', was a tiny kingdom nestled in the the Himalayas between China and northeast India, in close proximity to Nepal and Bangladesh. With a population of approximately three-quarters of a million and a land area about one-and-a-half times the state of Maryland, it was not what you'd consider a dominant force in international politics. Ruled by a constitutional monarchy, it's ethnically Tibetan and Nepalese populations were largely devout Buddhists. It's local industries were a large hydroelectric installation that sold power to India, forestry, handcrafts, and some tourism.
  
  And, unknown to virtually everyone, for over the past century it had been the home of the most powerful mage in Earth's dimension.
  
  As we stepped through the gateway that the master of this fastness had opened for us to come here, a sense of geomantic harmony fell over us that we hadn't felt since visiting Hestaby at Mount Shasta. The humble-appearing mountaintop enclave we'd just arrived in the foyer of was not only set upon a mystic confluence, but had for a long period of time been the fastness of a highly powerful yet subtle magus whose philosophical outlook had steeped into the very stones and earth. There were overtones of peace, of eternity, of the endless cycle of death and rebirth. The blue skies and sweet air seemed halfway removed from the very world, let alone from the immediate press of the war...
  
  Also, our ears weren't popping despite the fact that we'd just gone from the London Underground to over nine thousand feet above sea level and well up in the Himalayas. Truly a magical place indeed.
  
  "Sir Gareth, it's such a pleasure to see you again." the young woman dressed in a modest traditional robe said to us as she bowed respectfully. "Mr. and Mrs. Kincaid, please be welcome as well." Frosty and I noted that she'd not only addressed us by our proper name despite not having been introduced, she'd also known we were married.
  
  "Hello again, Karzi." Sir Gareth nodded back. "How have you been?"
  
  "Bhutan has remained free of the Invaders for now." she answered his implied question. "They have other, more obvious concerns elsewhere. But we know that our humility will not shield us forever." She gathered us all with a glance and continued. "Please follow me. The Elder is waiting."
  
  We trotted after her down a hallway and around two corners, to see a set of double doors up ahead. "Why do I feel like space has just twisted?" I politely asked the open air.
  
  "Because it has." Sir Gareth answered me. "The interior of the sanctum is a dimensional maze. Try to walk through here without being given the key, and you'll go around and through the same rooms over and over again without ever approaching closer to the center. It won't stop you from leaving, but it's certainly good at preventing unwanted entry."
  
  "Here we are." Karzi said as she stopped at the doors and pulled them open. "Revered Elder, your guests have arrived. I'll go fetch some refreshments from the kitchen."
  
  "Thank you, my dear." an old man's voice replied to her, and as Karzi turned and headed back we stepped through into the sanctum of Earth's archmage. At first glance it looked like a perfectly mundane office/study, albeit one with century-old antique furniture, not a single piece of electronics in sight except for an old rotary phone that looked to be World War II vintage at the latest, and a lot of bookshelves. But the robed man sitting cross-legged on the rug in front of the desk, although a frail-looking Tibetan great-grandfather at first glance, had an aura that positively glowed with power and wise, intelligent eyes. "Sir Gareth, I have a preliminary answer to your query. Your surmise was correct - the Dimensional Empire is indeed known of in the higher realms. But first, please sit down and have something to eat."
  
  We waited for Karzi to return, followed by several lap trays floating behind her in mid-air. Each one contained a full, luxurious breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and hash. "We know you've been living on emergency rations so please, refresh yourselves." she said as she served us and poured out fresh orange juice. We dug in eagerly - we had all been living on MREs for a while - and waited for the Revered Elder to resume speaking.
  
  "Sir Gareth already knows this, but I will briefly review for our newcomers." he lectured. "The mystic community of Earth commonly groups dimensions according to the 'Four Worlds' model of the qabbalah for convenience's sake, so I will use that. The material universe in which our Earth is located in the first of the four groupings, Assiah, the Material World. Assiatic worlds are the furthest removed from the highest realms that are the ultimate source of mystic energies, and in general span the gamut from having magic be essentially unknown to having it be as common and plentiful as it is on this planet. That latter phenomenon tends to occur closest to dimensional axes, of which our world is one." He held up a remonstrating finger. "This does not mean that our planet is the center of the multiverse or even the universe, either literally or metaphysically. It merely means that the dimensional fabric is slightly thinner here."
  
  "Intelligence recovered from the Invaders states that the dimensional axis is all that has allowed their own dimensional transport nexus to accurately lock on to Earth over the distance that they're traveling." Jane informed him. "Until after they sync up one of their Reality Gates from this end, they won't be able to transport anywhere else. However, once they do get a full relay set up here-"
  
  "Then the entirety of our galaxy, at minimum, will be easily navigable to them due to the fixed aiming point now provided." the Revered Elder agreed. "Yes. Their method of dimensional transport is technological, not mystical, and differs from my own on a fundamental level and is of course almost wholly unfamiliar to me. But the multiverse remains the multiverse regardless of the method by which you cross it, and the basic principles of interdimensional navigation would make such a condition entirely logical." He took a sip of milk and continued. "The number of differing universes at the level of Assiah are beyond counting, and potentially infinite. However large the Dimensional Empire may be - even if it truly rules all the million dimensions it claims to rule and more - it is still a tiny dot too small for even the finest eye to see, a single dimensionless point, when held up against the sheer scale of All That Is."
  
  He shook his head. "No mind brilliant enough to invent such a technology and no ruler capable enough to sustain a viable governmental structure over such an impossibly wide span of control can possibly lack the capacity to perceive the relative scope of the task at hand, and yet the Majestrix persists. For all the order and prosperity that her Empire may bring - for all the good that she proclaims to do and may or may not actually have done - Istvatha V'Han cannot possibly be sane. For the only other being I know of who has similarily looked out at the infinite multiverse with naught but an all-consuming lust to rule every corner of it has been Tyrannon the Conqueror." The Revered Elder shook his mead mournfully. "And he is not only mad beyond the nightmares of gods but had willfully burned the last infinitesimal specks of his humanity in the furnace of his ambition eons ago. Yet according to the legends of the dawntime, even he was mortal once..."
  
  "Two of them?" I couldn't help but sigh. "What are they, evil twins?"
  
  "Say more that they are each other's Jungian shadow." the Revered Elder corrected me. "Tyrannon is a creature of vast metaphysical power, she is the greatest of secular rulers. Tyrannon's fastness lies in the higher realms - of which I will shortly speak - and seeks to ultimately merge all other dimensions into his own, while V'Han is solidly rooted at the base of Assiah and seeks to connect her dimension into all other separate dimensions via gateways and roads. He is magic, she is science. And the pattern continues from there." He shrugged. "I had never heard of her before her fleet came to Earth, but in hindsight I marvel that I had missed her existence. Balance would indeed suggest that the Conqueror's shadow would cast itself across the cosmos and give rise to a counter-force."
  
  "Balance should suggest that neither one should be the threats that they are." Jane said flatly.
  
  "That could also be true, as I admit that I am entirely guessing there." the Revered Elder frankly agreed with her. "And it would be certainly far more comforting if neither one was remotely as threatening as they are. But to continue...?" He waited for us all to nod. "The second of the Four is Yetzirah, the Astral World. The planes of Yetzirah are all strongly magical. Symbols and beliefs matter there at least as much as matter and energy do. And the former ultimately trump the nature of the latter and not vice versa, unlike when in Assiah. The realms of most of those beings commonly held to be 'gods' are in Yetzirah."
  
  Jane and I both silently noted that this was an almost exact description of the astral and the metaplanes as known on Earth-Shadowrun, and how they differed from the material realm.
  
  "Tyrannon's home dimension is in Yetzirah, as are the vast bulk of his conquests. He has only infrequently attempted to extend his realm down into Assiah... although several of the attempts he has made have been directed right here at Earth." The Revered Elder nodded gravely. "Countering the forays of Tyrannon as he probes our dimension for weaknesses may not be one of the most frequent duties the Archmage is called upon to perform, but it is one of the most significant. But most relevant to our current plight - although I reiterate that I only learned of this when I actually was prompted to look for it in recent days - is that Isvatha V'Han and Tyrannon have fought at least two major interdimensional wars with each other. And when I say 'major', I mean that armies fit to shake entire galaxies were thrown at each other." He emphasized.
  
  "Oh great." I realized. "It's a multiversal Cold War and our galaxy gets to be the Third World spit-patch in a strategic location that the two superpowers are busy each trying to grab for themselves without the other one going nuclear over it." I facepalmed. "I'm sure Captain Masane would have a great saying right now about elephants and grass."
  
  "I am familiar with it." the Revered Elder agreed. "But V'Han's goals for our galaxy may or may not be related to her ongoing rivalry with Tyrannon, and as far as we are concerned the point is rather moot even if they were. And before you propose the obvious solution, no, we cannot attempt to seek his aid versus her. In the event we were not defeated by the Majestrix first, opening the way for him would result in the Conqueror devouring our dimension before V'Han could conquer it. And as evil as she is, as vast as her legions are, she is still ultimately an individual resident of Assiah as are each of her soldiers. But he is an almost conceptual horror." Jane and I both winced at that last word.
  
  "We're hoping to find a way to sever our dimension from the Empire's transport network entirely." Sir Gareth said. "Not just to break this gate, but to make it so they can't ever open another one to here. Something similar to the way Thanoro Azoic, the first Archmage, blocked out Tyrannon from being able to enter this dimension in any way unless he could loophole the terms of the ancient pact."
  
  "Only without any loopholes." Jane agreed.
  
  "Given that the Empire's transport network is an epic feat of physics and engineering and Karzi is still despairing at teaching me how to check my email, I am presuming that you do not want my help in hacking their Reality Gates." the Revered Elder said humorously. "But before I ask you what your idea is, please allow me to finish my discourse on the Four Worlds." He cleared his throat and continued. "The third is Briah, the Creative World. Realms of Briah are entirely spiritual. They embody concepts, states of mind, and abstract aspects of Reality. These are the realms of the conceptual entities, the truly cosmic beings. And the fourth is essentially theoretical, as no entity I know of has actually visited it and to even dimly perceive the slightest fraction of a reflection of it in a vision is a nigh-impossible feat. That is Atziluth, the Conceptual World, the ultimate peak of Reality and the root of whatever First Cause or Godhead the multiverse may ever know. And while Briah and Atziluth are very unlikely to be germane to the current problem at hand, it is still not good for a mystic to be entirely unaware of them. And now, your idea?"
  
  "I'm going to describe the dimensional journey that brought me here, and what I sensed on the way." I said. "And hopefully between what I know and what you know, we can figure out a way to reach the other end of the wormhole whose current 'dragged' me here. Because in hindsight, those big singularity things I was sensing a network of had to be Imperial Reality Gates."
  
  And so we stared to tell the Revered Elder our tale, of how we'd gotten cast into the depths of the interdimensional realms and why... to be almost immediately derailed.
  
  "Verjigorm?" he expostulated. "I know that name! It is an ancient Throalic term-"
  
  "Throalic?!?" Jane was equally startled. "As in the Kingdom of Throal, from the Fourth World? You've been to our world?" she practically spit-taked.
  
  "Ah, no." the Revered Elder demurred. "The Throalic people are but an ancient fable among the practitioners of many dimensions, a fragment of a whisper of lost lore passed down incompletely in the most ancient libraries of other worlds. They are primarily known only for having been the only Assiatic world known to suffer a full incursion of the nigh-conceptual taint from outside the Four Worlds themselves that mystics call the Qlippoth, and yet still retain their freedom and their souls. Legend has it that they destroyed the very root of magic on their own world to deny the Qlippoth on anything with which to sustain itself, and yet impossibly survived."
  
  "That's the Horrors." Jane said, awestruck. "You're describing the Horrors."
  
  "Revered Elder, I believe that it's also time to tell you the tale of All-Wings and the Great Dragons..." I began.
  
  
  
  As it turned out, the ritual that Lofwyr had designed - although as we'd found out later from the Big D he'd been substantially cribbing from Dunkelzahn's notes - was a pearl beyond price not only to the Revered Elder but to every other mystic defender in virtually every dimension that he knew of. Because it was the single greatest anti-Qliphothic banishing that anyone had ever conceived of. And while the ritual in its current form was impossible to use without an Unconquerable like me or All-Wings as the caster, the basic principles could be adapted for 'lesser' purposes that were still much more effective anti-Qlippoth - anti-Horror - enchantments than anything the Revered Elder had ever heard of. Then again, entire millenia of being inescapably stuck in against the worst Qlippoth incursion known in Assiatic history over the past eon had made Earth-Shadowrun put far more man-hours and dragon-hours into specifically researching the problem than most other places, let alone the collected contributions of intellects such as All-WIngs, Far-Scholar... and yes, even Gold-Master, the prick. But yes, it had been wondrous to find out that even if things had gotten so distorted and incomplete in lost lore that they couldn't even get the eras right, let alone the identity of the people who'd actually started the mana cycle to hold off the Horrors in the first place, that the tale of Earth-Shadowrun's struggle against the Great Enemy had indeed spread even as far as here.
  
  And this had all caused a distinct fork in our original plan, because we now had far more valuable trading material than we'd anticipated. There were other dimension lords, relatively minor ones as compared to mad gods like Tyrannon, that would pay well for things like this. Honestly, from the Revered Elder's description that guy had sounded like the mystical version of a failed Singularity that had instead become something like the Blight from Vernor Vinge's 'A Fire Upon The Deep'. As Jane had once trenchantly remarked sometimes people didn't need the Horrors/Qlippoth to go that extremely toxic and crazy, they could manage the job just fine all by themselves.
  
  We'd intended just to ask the Revered Elder for help in finding a way to magically dimension travel to the other end of the connection the Dimensional Empire had forged to Earth, a job that would have required us to first overcome the completely separate and incompatible navigation systems that both parties were using. My having proven able to sense at least part of the Imperial Reality Gate network while floating involuntarily through Yetzirah was how we'd hoped to bridge that gap. But now we had the Qliphoth-Banishing ritual, and while the sacred duty of the Archmage would require him to make it as widely known across all the other non-wholly-evil dimensions as he could reach, his principles in that regard did not prevent him for asking for a small favor or two in return for a copy. So he was now working on traveling through the mystic realms seeking what extra-dimensional aid for Earth that he could possibly trade for, as well as gathering what intelligence on the Dimensional Empire he could hope to indirectly obtain via espionage against the forces of her primary enemy Tyrannon. All of which precluded my or Jane immediately taking any more magical travel lessons.
  
  And then then the Americans came up with an entirely lunatic idea.
  
  "You want to what?" Partisan sputtered incredulously at the viewscreen. We were currently on a secure conference videocall with several other key cell leaders in North America that were hacking through the trans-Atlantic telephone cables. How convenient that the English terminus for those cables was directly underneath London, and that British Telecom had put their main switching nodes for it right down here amongst the incredible rats' nest of tunnels and sublevels that lay underneath Britain's capital. Sir Gareth was here, of course, and Partisan as our number two and ops officer, and myself because my treating sleep as optional and perfect memory and enhanced intellect had basically made me the Lord High Everything Else of helping analyze raw intel, coordinate multiple schedules, and generally keep things organized and on track around here.
  
  "We want to destroy the Reality Gate." Dr. Amazing said.
  
  Sir Gareth held up a hand to pre-empt the next outburst. "You obviously have a reason for believing that this will not prompt an immediate scourging of our planet, which has been our greatest concern against attempting any such plan at this time. I would very much like to hear that reason, if you please." he finished with that particular British understatement that meant 'Have you lost your cotton-pickin' mind?!?'
  
  "Your intel raid turned up that the Invaders have two main classes of Reality Gate - the giant spaceborne one that opens up five-kilometer portals that move entire fleets, and the smaller ground-bound one that opens up 500-meter portals that move entire ships at a time." the acting President of the United States replied. Formerly US Secretary of Defense Lawrence McDonnell had happened to have been visiting Hawaii on the day of the Invasion, and they'd immediately taken advantage of the Pearl Harbor strike to declare him 'dead' and move him to a Secure Undisclosed Location. Due to everyone above him in the line of succession having been taken out of action in the surrender, he'd assumed national command authority for the duration and was now serving as a center of legitimacy for the US-based resistance to coalesce around after the government in Washington DC was forced to surrender. "Our analysts have followed that conclusion to the obvious endpoint - that several million Imperial military personnel would be trapped here if they lost their gate to some type of catastrophe or enemy attack... and if it was their only gate."
  
  "Damn, we were so in shock down here that we missed that." Partisan admitted embarrassedly. "They're not idiots, so they wouldn't sail out into the deepest reaches of the ocean with only one lifeboat. And the smaller Reality Gates are only 80 meters or so on a side - you could fit one into the cargo hold of one of the biggest ships up there."
  
  "They almost certainly brought along at least a couple of the smaller planetary gates already pre-assembled." Diadem, the acting leader of the US' primary superteam the Sentinels, agreed. "And if they're not helplessly trapped here, if they do have a backup way to either get home or call for reinforcements, then they wlll almost certainly concentrate on expediting that rather than any last-ditch spite attacks on Earth."
  
  "It's odd they don't have any of them set up on the lunar surface already, then." I pointed out. "Even getting a small gate set up on the Moon's surface would significantly increase the rate at which Helmuth could bring through reinforcements. One ship a minute is a lot slower than one task force a minute, but it's still over fourteen hundred ships a day."
  
  "They can't do it." Dr. Amazing said. "Until after they get a stable double-ended wormhole up as an aiming point - until after a Reality Gate is successfully on-line on the same point that a Reality Gate on the other end of the connection can already reach accurately - the dimensional axis phenomenon means that they can't aim anywhere but Earth. And according to my calculations, there's a proximity effect."
  
  "The larger Reality Gate - the space-borne model - is powerful enough that the 'signal' can be several hundred thousand miles off-axis and still be succesfully synchronized with to stabilize the connection." Sir Gareth realized. "Just as they did an off-axis shot with the initial one-way incursion to drop Admiral Helmuth's fleet into position in the first place. But the smaller gate lacks the capacity."
  
  "In order for one of the secondary gates to be any good under the current circumstances it has to be almost directly on top of the axis." Dr. Amazing agreed. "Not behind the far side of the moon where Helmuth is constructing his primary gate, but down on Earth's surface. Helmuth clearly doesn't want to risk us capturing one at present or else he'd have already air-dropped one of his backups... but if we blow his primary gate then he won't have any choice. He'll have to deploy one of his secondaries down here where we can reach it."
  
  "Doctor, if he successfully deploys a secondary gate than that is still an almost immediate loss for Earth." Sir Gareth replied.
  
  "Oh we don't want to do it now." Diadem agreed. "That's for when we're actually in position to take advantage of having access to one, which is still going to be some ways off. But we need to start doing the prep work for it now because destroying the one under construction up there in lunar orbit is not going to be easy."
  
  "We're working on the warhead." President McDonnell said. "What we need you to do is to get us the delivery system."
  
  "Given the relative disparity between our national space programs, I presume that you what you are hoping for us to do is to capture an Invader ship for you?" Sir Gareth said.
  
  "Yes." Diadem agreed. "It doesn't have to be a starship, and Helmuth hasn't been crazy enough to put one where we could get a crack at it anyway. But we need something capable of making it behind the Moon and to wherever their primary Reality Gate is under construction. And we need it stolen under conditions where the Invaders think it was lost, not captured, so they don't get double-suspicious on checking IFF later."
  
  "If Vanguard couldn't force his way in there then the Trojan Horse is the only play we've got left." Partisan agreed. "But why us?"
  
  "Your raid on the Invader outpost in Edinburgh was a thing of beauty." President McDonnell conceded. "You got in, got the data, and got out ,and they still don't even know it was gone. So we're hoping that you can pull that one off again. Especially given that we don't have access to any teleporters."
  
  "We're making progress on reverse-engineering Invader teleport systems." I replied. "We'll make a priority of forwarding you all the data that Dr. Goldwing, Firewatch, and Sidestep have currently accumulated."
  
  "Every little bit helps." Dr. Amazing agreed. "We're at the 'throwing science at the walls to see what sticks' stage right now."
  
  "All right, I'll have my staff start working on options and try and reply back to you soonest with if it's feasible and, assuming it is, when you can hopefully expect a delivery date." Sir Gareth said. "Is there anything else that requires urgent settling while we still have a transmission window?"
  
  "No." President McDonnell agreed. "Best of luck to you all. Green Mountain out."
  
  "Best of luck to yourselves as well." Sir Gareth agreed. "Blackhall out." and the circuit went dead.
  
  "You know sir, I can't help but notice that we got so occupied discussing their lunatic idea that you forgot to tell them about our lunatic idea." Partisan said into the sudden silence.
  
  "All things in their proper time, Major." Sir Gareth replied urbanely.
  
  
  
  "I can't believe I missed it this long." Netcat swore furiously. "How did we not put it together?"
  
  "Put what together?" Firewatch asked. We'd come to the signals intelligence center because Cat had announced she'd just had a breakthrough.
  
  "How the Empire hacked an advanced AI supercluster when their own military computers are basically bricks with power cords attached." She shook her head. "The pieces were literally staring us all right in the face! What was the one and only non-brick part of that Imperial portacomp?"
  
  "The quantum encryption module." I remembered. "And back home, the primary reason those were invented was-"
  
  "-the Heinrich Maneuver." Cat swore. "No matter where you go in the multiverse, math is math! How did we not ever suspect that the Dimensional Empire would have eventually discovered it too?"
  
  "Okay, to ask the obvious question - what's the Heinrich Maneuver?" Firewatch played along.
  
  "It's a mathematical technique back home that basically obsoleted every form of key cryptography in the world. Symmetric, asymmetric, public-key, private-key, elliptic curve, gone. It's one of those higher mathematics things that takes forever for anyone to stumble over except by pure luck or divine inspiration, but is incredibly obvious in hindsight once someone points it out." Cat explained.
  
  "Wait, you mean like the black box? From Sneakers?" Firewatch said, astonished, and then went off our blank expressions. "Oh, right, from another dimension. It was a movie that came out a few years ago about a bunch of hackers and a secret government project that basically used Hollywood math wizardry to instantly brute-force even the largest cipher keys." She continued bemusingly. "You're telling me that back where you came from, someone actually made that work in real life?"
  
  "Yeah." I agreed. "He'd have ruled the digital world if he'd done it before the invention of quantum optical chips, but he didn't. As is, he still forced the industry to roll out an entire new generation of CPUs in a rush. So the Empire has it?"
  
  "Yes." she said. "And that means that they didn't hack HUGIN, they hacked everything. The entire Internet was wide open to them. The only reason Blackhall's been as far ahead of their decision loop as we have been is because all of your organizational setup was hardcopy and institutional memory."
  
  "Shit, what about our comms?" Firewatch swore. "We talked about 'burn the world' level stuff on those!"
  
  "Only with me monitoring the transmissions." Cat said. "But yes, a whole lot of resistance groups out there were vulnerable and never knew it."
  
  "Right, we've got to tell command about this and then tell everyone else about this." Firewatch swore viciously. "But how the hell do we guard our transmissions? I mean, yes, we've got Intruder encryption modules to reverse engineer but if's their own stuff! They might have a hack for it too! And sure, cyberkinetics still work, but we haven't got any but you and a couple others worldwide and it's not like we can just build new ones from a kit!"
  
  "... wait, why can't we?" I said, my eyes open wide with realization. "Firewatch, your armor helmet uses a neural interface, right?"
  
  "Yeah, but all it does is sync up to my movements and let me work my HUD hands-free. It's basically a fancy mouse and nothing else. Actually coupling a human brain directly to computer code is a research problem nobody short of maybe Doctor Destroyer ever solved, and he took a lot to his grave with him."
  
  "We had them back home." Cat said, to Firewatch's astonishment. "They were called 'cyberdecks'. By the time I went to college they'd been an established technology for around forty years. I literally have a degree in building them."
  
  "Right." I said. "This technology s going to change your world in ways you won't even imagine after we win - if we win-"
  
  "No, no, you had it right the first time." Firewatch said bravely. "But go on, please!"
  
  "-but we're going to do it anyway. Cat, assuming Sir Gareth concurs then you and Firewatch will have a new job. She'll contribute how to build neural interfaces using existing Earth hardware, and you'll contribute how to couple them to metahuman brains for maximum efficiency so we can undo what the Invaders are doing to Earth's datanet. And as soon as we can build up enough decks and train enough deckers-" I said. "Maybe we'll find something else we can do with them."
  
  "So, what are we going to code name this new project?" Cat asked me knowingly.
  
  "What else?" I smiled back at her. "Echo Mirage."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: You get a short chapter today - well, okay, an average chapter, it's just that the last few were super long chapters - because I'm going in to have a cyst removed (maybe removed) tomorrow, so I'm a bit off. Should be fine, just a bit of delay.
  
  We have started to get into the fun part of a multicross, notably, the part where the author gets to bullshit how this stuff actually all hooks together at some level. Welcome to the fanon zone! And as to how Sir Gareth knows the Sorcerer Supreme, look, the man had an active superhero career for almost 50 years and the source of his powers is magical. The only oddity would be if he didn't.
  
  And yes, other people get to be clever besides the British. And we finally get the mystery answered of how the Invaders are so good at hacking Earth computers despite their own limitations. The clues were out there all along, mwahahahaha! *g*
  
  Lastly, I never imagined that I'd end up having our heroes import tech into a superhero universe, but there are some things cyberpunk actually does better.
  
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  Threadmarks: Interlude - System Admiral Helmuth (Champions)
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  System Admiral Kalon Helmuth of the Imperial Legions stood in front of the panoramic viewscreen - only idiots and primitives actually put the command center of a warship adjacent to the exterior hull - on the flag bridge of the INV dreadnaught Kallen's Fist. The tall, handsome blue-green humanoid features that proudly marked him as a member of the Imperial Race were set in a mild expression of calm regard. His uniform was impeccably turned and unwrinkled despite the long shift he'd just worked, and his parade-ground posture was erect yet not tense. A proper commanding officer never displayed uncertainty or anxiety before his subordinates, after all. Even when they were feeling it.
  
  Especially when they were feeling it.
  
  Two weeks. he sighed inwardly. It has only been two weeks, and I already feel as if I have been fighting for months. I told the High Command that we needed either more extensive pre-incursion sabotage or more extensive fleet preparations. But no, better for them to risk a failed First Incursion than they risk having to explain the Imperiatrix Ascendant, grace unto her reign, why the assault was delayed. The latter would be a displeasure they could not evade, but the former lets them blame any subsequent failure on me.
  
  And so Breaker take their souls, they risk feeding almost two million men to the Furnace rather than risk suffering a single reproachful glare from Her Radiant Majesty, honor upon her name.
  
  When a younger Kalon Helmuth had qualified for officers' training he had first gained access to the Privileged Knowledge that was reserved only for vetted and security-cleared civilians and supervisory ranks of the Imperial hierarchy. Until then he'd merely had exposure to the Basic Knowledge which was all that lower-ranking Imperial hierarchy members and all but the most trusted and valuable of civilians were entitled to. Although 'Basic' was a slight misnomer in that the Basic Knowledge encompassed the full range of primary, secondary, and tertiary education, all the way up to the most advanced postgraduate degrees in the arts and sciences. It just limited the choices of exactly which arts or sciences.
  
  The Privileged Knowledge taught things that the Dimensional Empire did not want in common circulation. For example, it was the first tier at which the sorts of economic science or deep historical background data were taught that would allow anyone to begin a professional analysis of the structure of the Empire to look for weaknesses. Indeed, one of the more shocking mental adjustments that every new class at the Academy had to go through in turn was their horror at hearing any official admission that the Empire actually possessed weaknesses, even if the most thorough efforts had been made over millenia to disaster-proof the Empire as much as possible.
  
  For example, it wasn't until you reached the Restricted Knowledge available only to System Admirals and up - even planetary governors and garrison commanders didn't have access to it - that you found out that one of the things that education centers which were authorized to teach Privileged Knowledge did was closely monitor their students for the proper degree of shock and revulsion when first hearing that the Empire wasn't perfect. People who failed to display it were routed away from sensitive assignments and rapid promotion. And another one of the things you only found out when cleared for Restricted Knowledge was that the recruiting standards of the Imperial Legions were deliberately set lower than they could be.
  
  The young Helmuth had often wondered as he'd risen up the ranks why so many of his peers had felt like the children he'd grown up with. Certainly he'd always been one of the most brilliant achievers in his primary educational unit but shouldn't the competition have gotten stiffer when he'd joined the Legions and gone to his Sector Military Academy? Even so much as a single galaxy within a single dimension still had a population measured in trillions at the absolute least, and there were over a hundred thousand dimensions full of multiple galaxies all underneath V'Hanian rule. You could in theory have staffed the entire Imperial Legion, from the Supreme Admiral himself on down to the lowliest private, with only the top 0.1% of the sophont intelligence curve and still had enough geniuses left over to fill a galaxy full of universities. And yet the distribution of intelligence in the Legions was only a minor statistical variation from the common population. The primary sorting factor on recruitment had not been either intelligence nor initiative, but temperament.
  
  Of course, what had puzzled a young Ensign Helmuth had made perfect sense to System Admiral Helmuth once he'd finally gained the full background informing the decision. Outside of the cheerful thumbnail sketches fit for public consumption, the early history of the Empire was a topic sealed at Restricted Knowledge for a reason. Any historical account of a successful or near-successful rebellion was for obvious reasons kept as Restricted Knowledge, and in the dawn times of the Empire the Imperiatrix had had more than once had to put down attempted coups by her own senior officers.
  
  Once all the relevant data were available to me it was more than an obvious conclusion, but an inevitable one. Helmuth's thoughts drifted. Her Radiant Majesty, may her wisdom forever guide us, is biologically immortal. My own lifespan as a member of the Imperial Race is almost two centuries solely by virtue of my genetics and almost double that with modern medical care, but the Imperiatrix, blessings upon her, dates all the way back to before the Imperial Race had spaceflight. No wonder her wisdom stretches so far above us mortals. And no wonder that an Imperial military that made its first recruiting priorities be intelligence and initiatives repeatedly suffered the effects of thwarted ambition as the most talented among us rose as high as they could... and then were confronted by the realization that there would always be one above them. No, she was right. Loyalty must always be the first and foremost quality an Imperial Legionnaire must possess, above all other considerations. Ours is a sacred trust, and while it requires ability and courage to execute those qualities are worse than useless if they are wielded by unfaithful hands - they are dangerous.
  
  But even though I cannot fault the courage of a single one of my soldiers, I could still wish for greater ability. Maker preserve us, I honestly believe that this campaign is going to end up being taught at the Imperial War College. Move over, Karkor V! This is going to be the new worst-case scenario that every generation of cadets has to sweat blood over in the strategic simulators. Because if I'd sat down a Breaker-damned committee and ordered them to design a worse collection of red flags for a planetary culture, I doubt they could have topped Sol III.
  
  It's not just enough for this planet has one of the highest para-normal population densities in the entire dimensional cluster. Oh no, on top of that it has significant use of magic - not that that's unusual for a dimensional axis world - but in addition also has multiple of the Restricted Technologies. Not just nuclear weapons - virtually any world that gets past the steam engine ends up there eventually - but also artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, even the beginning of advanced memetics. Those right there should have made my troop allotment be at least half comprised of specialist planetary assault divisions and not just line troops, but no, it would have been 'unacceptable delay' to concentrate that many...
  
  But no, it's actually worse than that. On top of their technology and magic this also has to be one of the most ridiculously warlike cultures I've ever heard of, and what's worse, they didn't evolve the usual rigid honor codes that allows most worlds with such a high cultural aggression quotient to not kill themselves out of existence. The sheer mass of data we're still sorting through means most conclusions are preliminary, but even so my analysts swear that out of the last three thousand years of this planet's history there were less than one hundred of them without at least a regional-sized war occurring somewhere. Their technology of course doesn't remotely compare to ours in most respects, except for what few anomalous higher-tech outliers exist thanks to their para-normals, but you don't spend that many millenia constantly practicing your combat arts without getting very very good at them. When I'd first been told that computerized strategy-and-resource-allocation simulators that would have been considered restricted military software in the Empire were being sold here as children's entertainment.... Maker spare my heart, and here I thought the Thorgons had gotten far too much practice at killing each other.
  
  And then there's the fact that psi-sensitives are also known here! And I haven't got any of my own to counter them with, because the last major attempt at a palace coup was barely fifty years ago by that conspiracy of telepaths in the Empire's own hierarchy- the Intelligence Command had to purge most of their own sensitives after that, and we're still barely back to a tenth of what the Empire had available a century ago and those who remain being much less experienced... and much less trusted...
  
  But no, it's actually worse than that! This world has suffered prior incursion attempts! That 'Hzeel' race that hit this place a generation ago has made my entire job at least an order of magnitude more difficult, because that gave every military high command on this planet over twenty of their years to work on contingency plans against further alien invasions. One of the things that makes the average conquest go as smoothly as it does is that we're an Outside Context Problem even to the average interplanetary culture, let alone a planetbound one... but this cosmic madhouse has been hit so often by so many oddities that nothing is out of context to them.
  
  Maker and Breaker both preserve us, even the Conqueror has attempted one of its rare Assiatic incursions here! Out of all the things we could have walked into unawares, it had to be that! If we'd known that one before we invaded we would have brought a full detachment of the Order of the Infinite Star! As is, I'm stuck invading a world that Tyrannon already knows a route to and I have barely any mystical specialists at all. And yes, this world has so successfully resisted the Conqueror that we haven't yet needed to fight so much as one of his Emissaries... but that's cold comfort, because if that monstrosity hit this place and bounced-
  
  Admiral Helmuth clasped his hands somewhat more tightly behind his back, then forced his tense muscles to relax. No. I am a flag officer of the Dimensional Empire. I am the man responsible for the success of a First Incursion into a new universe. I hold the lives of millions of Legionnaires in my hands. Doubt is a vice for those who lack duty.
  
  He looked up at one particular island just offshore of one of the planetary continents.
  
  But if anywhere could tempt me to doubt, they could. Their "United Kingdom". Out of all my insurgency hot zones, they're by far the worst of them. What kind of people concoct a scheme to preserve their government that involves their ruler deliberately abdicating his position to become an outlaw? What kind of government uses concealment methods that involves falsifying their own official archives even to their own rulers?!? Disinformation is one thing, but deliberately deceiving withholding information from your own chain of command and your highest-level national archives? What, were they entrusting a Supernova-level national survival contingency to be administered entirely on the honor system?
  
  And yes, honor compels me to admit that a strategy of 'If we are so insane that even we could not rationally predict ourselves, our enemies certainly can't hope to.' does have a certain effectiveness going for it. Great Britain has barely a fifth of the United States' population crammed into a fortieth of the surface area, and yet they've given me more headaches. Even that shuttle incident wasn't as bad as having that datacore compromised- let alone us taking so long to find out it was compromised. At least we got the wreckage of the shuttle back, after all, even if that one interstellar transmission went out. Fortunately there's been no response yet.
  
  But Great Britain... A cyberkinetic so powerful that some of my hackers are convinced it's another artificial intelligence. Multiple teleporters. A network of thousands and thousands of kilometers of tunnels underneath their capital city, so insanely extensive that I could send two planetary assault divisions down there and they'd need an entire week just to find each other and buried so deep I'd have to practically crack the tectonic plate in half to reach them with a bombardment-
  
  A bombardment I can't even use, because scourging is worse than useless under such conditions. Right now the tithe of para-normals of this planet that we haven't confined yet are fighting like cornered rats. But if I start massacreing their families, their countrymen, then they'll turn into psychotic cornered rats. My opening bombardments were intended to suggest to the people down there that they really wanted to yield while they still had something left to lose, and as far as the governments of the planet were concerned it mostly worked. But for all that most jurisdictions down there had had enough basic sense to place para-normals under government registration, they had yet to come to their senses and place them under strict government control. So even a successful psy-op that neutralized the vast majority of conventional military forces by panicking their rulers into a quick surrender has yet to stop their bands of seditious fanatics. They'll hardly get less fanatic if I start feeding them more martyrs. A mere ten thousand or so civilian casualties and they're already fanatic enough as is-
  
  The whole concept behind their resistance is almost poisonously beautiful, in its own twisted fashion. The very level of anarchy, the actual lack of formal organization, is precisely what has made it so effective to date. But any culture that could even conceive of such an concept of warfare, let alone willingly execute it, would have to be as unstable as anti-matter.
  
  No, the Empire certainly cannot afford to let any trace of this culture survive. At best we'll need to do an almost total history erasure over the next two generations before allowing larger-scale Imperial integration. Stability is more important than anything. That is why we deliberately channel technological development. Why we categorize things into the separate levels of the Knowledges. Why the sort of education that lets one plan on how to best destabilize and disrupt a large distributed society is only allowed to the people who have already proven their desire to preserve civilization rather than break it. Why individual galactic economies are still engineered to be largely self-sufficient instead of requiring excessive interdimensional trade to be be viable, despite the loss of revenue that entails. Nothing is more important than engineering the Empire to be as eternal as possible. On this planet, 'eternal' is just another word for 'until we get bored'.
  
  Admiral Helmuth shook his head slightly, side to side. The motion was too small for any of the bridge officers behind him to see, so the lapse was forgivable-
  
  But even so, that conservatism is why I now feel like I am barely treading water here. My men are well-trained, well-equipped, and well-led, but they have never seen anything like this before. I have barely seen anything like this before, and this is my ninth planetary invasion. I am proud of everything we have been able to accomplish so far, bu-
  
  The twinkling of a ship arriving via dimensional drive in the cleared zone of space adjacent to the partially-constructed Reality Gate drew Admiral Helmuth's eye, and he inwardly tensed again. Is this it?
  
  "System Admiral." the urgent voice of Helmuth's signal officer broke into his thoughts. "A flash priority transmission has arrived for your eyes only! ... and sir, it bears the Imperial Seal."
  
  "Acknowledged." Helmuth replied tonelessly, and reached out and pressed the proper control on his command terminal. A privacy field sprung up around him, the hologram-and-force-field combo making it impossible for any others to either overhear or lip-read the upcoming conversation.
  
  Helmuth tensed, his finger poised over the button that would begin playback of the message that the courier ship had brought. The Imperiatrix's Regard, he thought nervously. That right that any officer at the rank of System Admiral or higher, or any civilian official of equivalent seniority, had to send a communication directly for Her Radiant Majesty's attention. A right that was virtually never used, because if the Imperiatrix disagreed with the urgency of the message then the best you could hope for was a career that dead-ended on a desolate asteroid somewhere. Still, that right always existed and always would, against the rarest chance that a situation would arise where no lesser urgency would suffice-
  
  His finger pressed the button.
  
  "System Admiral Helmuth." Isvatha V'Han's recorded voice began. "We have received your message, and We agree with your precis."
  
  Helmuth's explosive sigh of relief was almost audible outside the privacy field.
  
  "Your invasion should never have been launched with only a standard complement of troops. The one thing that Dimensional Admiral Axolgan did correctly was appoint an officer of your experience and demonstrated ability to command the effort. But although the mass transfer limitations precluded sending a substantially larger force, your chain of command was severely derelict in giving you only a standard incursion force to operate with. While operational considerations preclude casual scourging - the high genetic diversity of this planet is one of the most important resources we hope to eventually exploit from it - you should have had a planetary landing force comprised almost entirely of veterans and elites, not just line troopers and garrison units. You may rest assured that the officers responsible for this misjudgment will be receiving new assignments to positions elsewhere in the Empire, ones that are much better suited to their talents.
  
  "Due to the extreme range you are operating at and the limitations of dimensional transit without a stable double-ended connection, you must remain in place until you can construct a Reality Gate. Substantial reinforcements are already being assembled, but until the way is open you cannot be sent another fleet. However, you will be immediately reinforced to the best extent possible under the current limitations. A pair of troop transports will arrive as soon as Our engineers can prepare the transit. They will augment your command with two divisions of Red Lion elites, a specialist complement of analysts and intelligence staff with experience in dealing with similar planetary cultures, a detachment from the Order of the Infinite Star... and last, but certainly not least, several of Our own Imperial Guard."
  
  Admiral Helmuth drew a shocked gasp at that. The Imperial Guard?
  
  "As We are pleased with the progress you have made so far despite the operational handicaps you have operated under, you will remain in command of the fleet. All of the reinforcements will be incorporated into your command as well, to be deployed at your discretion.
  
  "Use them well. And bring Us victory."
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Short interlude today, been leading up to it for a whlie. So, those of you who were wondering how shit got this fucked up? Well, now you know.
  
  The psionic conspiracy actually is from the 6e Book of the Empress, with most of the Imperial version of psi-corps all getting together and going 'Hey, we can conspire in ways nobody else can eavesdrop on, read minds, and control minds, so why don't WE take over?' as one of the few forms of major internal subversion the Empire is still vulnerable to. It was a possible plot seed to be used in a campaign, but I moved it into recent history and used it to explain why the Imperial intelligence dudes haven't sent in mind readers yet.
  
  As for the Empire and the Tiers of Knowledge and shit like that, that's not from the sourcebook, that's me riffing it. I'm not going to write an entire Imperial society textbook, but I think you can guess at the outlines from the context. Basically, it's a very conservative culture that gets by on having a long enough experience at things that their playbook already covers 99+% of everything, and having just enough flexibility that big course corrections can be made... by the very few people who are allowed to. Think the Vilani Empire from Traveller and GURPS Interstellar Wars, that's where I'm getting a lot of it.
  
  As for the next chapter, that's still on hold while I get used to post-surgical recovery and figure out how much it's going to involve. Also, I could use a breather.
  
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  Ever since the revelation of the Reality Gate and the effective countdown clock that the fate of Earth was subject to, morale had been a definite case of "It could be better".
  
  Given that he'd spent over fifty years being Britain's most legendary superhero Sir Gareth's leadership had been trusted enough for us to not lose all hope when he had announced that we still had options to play. But the fact remained that we hadn't made a general announcement of exactly what idea we were working on - we couldn't have - had had understandable effects on everyone. Especially given that with the latest information we'd gotten from the Revered Elder, we'd just discovered that our original proposed tactic wouldn't work.
  
  The better strategists among us had known almost from the start that simply defeating this particular incursion wave, or even simply destroying this particular Reality Gate, wasn't remotely enough. For as long as the Dimensional Empire had sufficient reserves and transport capacity to move them here, they could simply try again. And Earth couldn't possibly hope to defeat an entire interstellar, let alone intergalactic or interdimensional, polity in a contest of attrition. We were outnumbered by more orders of magnitude than it was comfortable to really think about. The only thing that had kept us in the fight at all so far was their current transport bottleneck, a problem the Empire was rushing to solve as fast it could.
  
  Victory in war ultimately boiled down to one of two things - removing the enemy's will to continue fighting, or removing their ability to continue fighting. The first option was completely off the table - to the best of our available knowledge Istvatha V'Han was a megalomaniac, and she certainly wasn't suffering any personal losses from the ongoing conflict. If feeding multiple armies into the meat grinder was something she felt necessary to assuage her wounded pride, then we had to assume she wouldn't hesitate to feed them. You couldn't win a stubbornness contest with an obsessed lunatic. And we had to presume that her Empire - and particularly her military - was strongly loyal and without any easy opportunities to foster internal division, because if it hadn't been then she would have had too much trouble at home to be in an expansionist mode. A superhero Earth was hardly the sort of target a dictator picked for a 'short, victorious war' to help prop up an unstable political situation, after all. So going off of available intelligence, our evaluation was that that she would have the will to keep pushing this war until she won no matter what it cost her, and that her troops would obey their orders. And sure, maybe we were wrong but right now that really didn't remotely look likely enough for us to bet the fate of mankind on it.
  
  And with 'removing the enemy's will to fight' off the table, that left the option of 'removing the enemy's ability to continue prosecuting the war'. Since destroying the Empire's army as a whole was ludicrously impossible, and likewise with depleting their economy, that meant our only option somehow removing their dimensional travel network's ability to reach us. Which is why ever since we'd found out what their dimensional travel system was we'd been working towards the goal of somehow either sealing Earth's dimension against further incursions or damaging the Imperial Reality Gate network to where it was no longer able to sustain a reality gate connection against us.
  
  A problem that had just become insurmountably more difficult with the latest extradimensional intelligence the Revered Elder had obtained for us from third-party sources.
  
  "The Dimensional Empire's dimensional transport network is a mesh topology? Not a directed acyclic graph?" Dr. Goldwing said in horror.
  
  "I believe I follow, but could we have a more explicit explanation for the less technical of us?" Sir Gareth asked stolidly.
  
  "It's network engineering terminology." I explained. "A tree - or 'directed acyclic graph' - is like a phone switchboard, or more accurately, multiple switchboards in a daisy chain. Two 'end user' nodes have to go through a switchboard in common to talk to each other. If they're both linked to different switchboards, the switchboards themselves have to negotiate a route between them. Cut a wire, everybody on opposite ends of that wire can't talk to each other until it's reconnected."
  
  "But a mesh topology is entirely different. Instead of a discrete network of fixed connections, it's more like... like a wireless hotspot. Every single wireless-capable device can directly talk to any other device in range, and can arbitrarily alter which device they wish to communicate with." Dr. Goldwing explained. "The practical upshot is, so long as there is any functioning Reality Gate left in the Dimensional Empire it can potentially connect with any other Gate. Presumably they have a gate-address directory and a preset transport schedule to minimize collisions, but the network is capable of almost any degree of ad hoc reconfiguration at need. Very high fault tolerance."
  
  "So less World of Tiers, more Stargate SG-1." Partisan replied, and then continued off our expressions. "What, I read science fiction!"
  
  "Well, that reduces the number of single-point failure sources in the Empire to just one." Jane said firmly. "Isvatha V'Han." She drew the edge of her palm across her neck.
  
  "I'm entirely on board with the sentiment, but we cannot be the first lot of partisans to have thought of that one. Or the first billionth." Partisan said. "Given how long she's been at this over how vast a scale and she still hasn't been killed yet, the bitch almost certainly lives on a fortress world at the heart of her Empire surrounded by more starfleets than I've had hot dinners. With a Praetorian Guard that has seen every possible method of assassination all the way from plastic knives right on up to the bloody Death Star a million times each by now, and which vets every single visitor to her sanctum right on down to DNA tests and mind reading."
  
  "We have barely two months to finish both conceiving of and executing a solution, off of what will inevitably be incomplete data, and with a minimal staff." Sir Gareth agreed. "So we must be prepared to triage less than likely possibilities at the outset. Very well, barring late-arriving intelligence suggesting it is actually possible we shall concentrate on the only two possibilities we have left - somehow amplifying the dimensional transport limitation currently preventing Admiral Helmuth from receiving substantial reinforcements to the point that even constructing a Reality Gate on our side of the womrhole will not aid him, or receiving sufficient galactic reinforcements to overwhelm the Invaders by main force and also bottleneck and crush any secondary incursion force they send. In light of that, we will for the present concentrate our efforts on furthering the idea of our American cousins re: eventually forcing Helmuth to deploy a secondary Reality Gate on our surface, as that would substantially increase the odds of achieving the first objective." He paused and took a steadying breath. "And now, the next item on our agenda is-"
  
  After the command group had finished discussing the day's agenda we scattered to our tasks, and I stayed behind to talk to Sir Gareth in the privacy of his office.
  
  "Sir, there are actually two possible single-point failure sources in the Dimensional Empire." I opened without preamble.
  
  "So there are." he agreed softly. "But the second one seems even less practical to strike at than the first."
  
  "I have an idea." I replied.
  
  "I have doubts." he admitted, equally as frankly. "Even if we could..." he sighed, looking terribly old again. "Would you accept our victory at the cost of dooming uncounted numbers of worlds other than ours?
  
  "Dooming them to what?" I replied. "If we thought Imperial rule would ultimately be better for any civilized world, we wouldn't be fighting."
  
  "There is of course that." he agreed. "But it seems terribly autocratic, of us, to make a decision that would affect the fate of so many others without the slightest figleaf of consent or legitimacy. We can hardly hold a referendum among the population of Earth given the circumstances, but our actions here at least are merely an extension of our already existing mandates - to defend our nations, and our world, against threats and invasion." He spoke softly, as if to himself. "But to arrogate to ourselves the right to affect the future of the Dimensional Empire in such a fashion? Once before in my life I assumed that because I had achieved so much that was right and good with my life, and so repeatedly proved my honor and valor, that I could not ever fail to make a proper choice. That even the sins and errors of my youth no longer could affect me because I had long since proven that I had risen above them, and would certainly never act in such a flawed fashion again." He looked up from his reverie to focus on me again. "And I was so horribly, horribly wrong. No ruler can be ideal at all times, and no sovereign should ever act without humility."
  
  "V'Han believes she can, and does." I replied. "So regardless of what else might or might not happen, she can't be allowed to continue ruling."
  
  "Fiat justitia ruat caelum." Sir Gareth sighed. "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall?"
  
  "I don't really want to either!" I burst out suddenly. "The idea of taking responsibility for such a large decision horrifies me! But..." I shook my head. "What can we do, when both choices have so much potential to go wrong, and we don't know which one is right?"
  
  "We pray." Sir Gareth eventually replied. "And then..." his voice firmed. "We keep our promise."
  
  
  
  "An even fifty of them." Partisan said tightly. "The Invaders rounded them up this morning, and are busy holding them on the Palace lawn of all places." He shook his head disgustedly. "They just made the announcement on all public channels, the mass execution is scheduled for 1400 hours."
  
  "Three hours from now." Sir Gareth shook his head. "Just enough time to allow us to assemble and make hasty plans, but not enough for a serious reconaissance first. This could not be a more obvious invitation to a trap than if they hung out an advertising banner."
  
  "Especially since they could have just shot them all first and then announced it." Partisan agreed glumly.
  
  "You cannot be suggesting that we just write them off, sir?" Firewatch cried.
  
  Sidestep chimed in. "She's right! We might as well just be sodding Project Armour if we're that cold!"
  
  "That's the second layer of the trap." Dr. Goldwing agreed. "If we go, we're heading straight into what is obviously a preprepared ambush. If we don't go, Blackhall loses all legitimacy in the eyes of the British people because we just abandoned dozens of civilians to die."
  
  "A guerrilla movement can't survive for long without grassroots support." Partisan said. "Somebody up there finally opened his counterinsurgency manual."
  
  "Valid observation, and one that makes another data point that Intel's been noting much more ominous in hindsight." Netcat chimed in, and with a nod the picture on the screen refocused. "The past several days, the Invader patrols in London haven't only increased but we've been noticing new unit insignia." A close-up of one soldier revealed not only slightly different armor and gear, but a shoulder flash that we hadn't seen on Invader troops before - a snarling red carnivore, rampant. "New unit moving in and suddenly new tactics and a more sophisticated awareness of insurgency situations?"
  
  "Great." Firewatch moaned. "So now we're at that point in that American 'Red Dawn' movie where the Spetsnaz show up."
  
  "Either that, or the Invaders are finally soliciting advice from local quislings such as Ironmaster." Sir Gareth said.
  
  "There is an additional factor." Captain Masane chimed in. "To the best of our knowledge, none of the charges the Invaders announced against those people are false. They are not doing a mass execution of random civilians. Each person there has actually been involved in Resistance activities, however peripherally."
  
  "Spotting from rooftops, passing messages, maybe stashing some stuff? That gets you shot in the face now?" Yeoman swore viciously. "They weren't even worth interrogating, they were so low-level! How'd the Invaders even find them, anyway?"
  
  "Presumably the communications vulnerability that we only found out about very recently and that we are still not entirely finished closing." Captain Masane said. "But yes, the Invaders have taken enough care setting this up that we cannot even get propaganda value out of their deaths. They would simply use it to further fortify their own message about how rebellion is sternly punished but cooperation is rewarded."
  
  "Expectations again." Brown Fox agreed. "Joe and Jane Public might be sad but they won't be all shocked if a Resistance fighter gets shot. That's what's supposed to happen if the Gestapo nicks you, innit? Only means you should be more careful not to get involved yourself."
  
  "So we must rescue these people." Sir Gareth said. "And given the possibility that there could be knowing or unknowing plants among them, we cannot even shelter them down in the tunnels. Brown Fox, we have already had you and your people working on safehouse arrangements for use in the event of. The 'event of' has now arrived. We will need you to immediately arrange quarters for all those we can rescue that do not expose our larger network. Fortunately, London is a very large city."
  
  "Too right there." he agreed.
  
  "Sidestep, you and Microman will have to do a hasty recce. Please remember, they will be expecting a pre-battle reconaissance. You cannot get too far in, because having either of you captured will be worse than having no battlefield intelligence at all. But we need at least a rough approximation of what we might be walking into."
  
  "Yes sir." she answered quickly while Partisan grunted.
  
  "Everyone else, assemble in full battle order in the mess hall in ninety minutes for the pre-mission briefing. The Invaders will be expecting us to take as much time as possible, so we must get inside their decision loop. It may be the only advantage we have. And Netcat, I will need a secure channel to Blackhall Two immediately after this meeting." Sir Gareth nodded at us all. "Very well, dismissed."
  
  Jane was called in to see Sir Gareth about half an hour before the briefing, and didn't come back. When I went to go find him I found his office empty, but my enhanced senses caught some murmuring in the adjacent room where he kept his bunk. I caught him just finishing whispering some kind of prayer to himself as he strapped an antique sword belt on over his body armor.
  
  "You're coming with us, then?" I asked him as he turned to face me in the doorway.
  
  "All hands on deck." he replied calmly. "And to answer what I surmise to be your question, your wife will not be deploying with us on the Palace rescue but will instead be aiding Blackhall Two with his particular task today." He shook his head. "Need to know."
  
  "Very well." I agreed reluctantly. "But I actually came to tell you that Partisan and Sidestep just got back. They're waiting in the intel room."
  
  "Right." he agreed. "Let's see what they found."
  
  "Sodding bastards are all set up here, here, and here." Sidestep opened, pointing at the map. "We've got at least two gunships lurking nearby at the London Mews."
  
  "Sniper teams are set up on rooftops all along the A3214," the shrinking android Microman continued. "Their riflemen are in fully camouflaged positions and have apparently been in position since before dawn. Fortunately I am essentially impossible to detect without significantly augmented senses and was able to thoroughly reconnoiter each rooftop."
  
  "In addition to the detachment they normally keep at the palace and the platoon of those red-shouldered ones guarding the prisoners, they've got at least two platoons more in reserve and lurking out of sight." Sidestep said.
  
  "Executions are set up to happen in the Palace garden right in front of the Queen's gallery. We go there, all the snipers have got clear fields of fire, the gunships likewise, and a company of them are hitting us on several axes." Partisan agreed. "Even with Blackhall Two's lot joining in, this is not good odds."
  
  "Blackhall Two is separately tasked." Sir Gareth disappointed him. "And you are correct, we need force multipliers. We will need to call the levy."
  
  "Christ." Partisan swore. "We've had veterans and holdouts stashing weapons we nicked from the armories by the score, but if we call them out we're waiting at least another hour for them to assemble."
  
  Sir Gareth shook his head. "I already summoned them immediately after the meeting, in anticipation of something like this." He outlined his plan briefly, and then the command group hastily reworked it some more. Then we discussed contingencies.
  
  "The plan is as follows." Sir Gareth began when we reached the assembly. "The Invaders have apparently mustered approximately a company of their special forces troops, plus two gunships' worth of tactical air support, as an ambush force in addition to what is publicly known to be their Palace security. Regardless of what approach route we use all possible routes end here, where the prisoners are. As you can see, in addition to their immediate guards they are vulnerable to sniper fire from their long riflemen inserted here, as well as heavy weapons fire from the emplacements here, here, and here." he pointed at the map. "And we will also be vulnerable as soon as we advance into the open. So this is our plan."
  
  "Blackhall is not merely our superheroic element alone." Sir Gareth explained. "Part of the coordination and command work we have been doing here is organizing cells of troops, armed and equipped from various stockpiles and drawn from currently serving and former British military personnel. They will be our own force multiplier and hopefully unknown to the enemy. Partisan will be our liason to them and exercise field command."
  
  "The opening phase of the battle will be Sidestep and Wild Man as a covert insertion team. Five minutes before jump-off they will engage the snipers on these rooftops, and then leave their rifles for chosen men already waiting for the all-clear. We propose that when the battle begins the sniper fire they will be expecting will instead be providing covering fire for us. Likewise, these designated marksmen will engage the heavy weapons emplacements covering that side of the Palace."
  
  "Netcat, yourself and Firewatch will be the first overt move of the battle. At jump-off you will neutralize the gunships at the Mews. Paralyze their ignition systems long enough for Firewatch's armor to cripple them. After you are done, move to rendezvous with Team Two immediately."
  
  "Team One will be under my personal command, and will approach the prisoners from the one route they are not covering - from within the Palace itself. We will enter the palace via a secure underground tunnel that I know of and proceed immediately to the garden exit. Our job will be to defeat the immediate guards and break open the prisoner compound. We will then cover their escape while they extract along this route. Team Two, under Doctor Goldwing, will safeguard the rescuees and get them to the extraction points that Brown Fox is having arranged here, here, and here.
  
  "Partisan, when the jump-off starts the irregulars will have to come in on this axis and start an open-field infantry battle with their reserves. As attempting to suppress teleporters is futility incarnate we will need you to focus on speed and shock instead. Put down as many as you can, maximize confusion and chaos for the rest."
  
  "And lastly, but certainly not least, it is entirely possible - probable, even - that what we have noted is not the entirety of the enemy's trap." Sir Gareth finished flatly. "And in that instance, I - or whoever is seniormost should I already be out of action - will, if necessary, signal a retreat." He shook his head. "I wish no false heroics! I intend for us to fight for as long as the situation is salvageable, but if it does go beyond salvage then we must withdraw. Do not attempt any heroic defiance. Do not think 'If we simply try a little harder...'. Trust me, I intend for us to remain resolute well past the point beyond which a prudent person would have retreated anyway. So if I signal for us to scatter, then that means the situation has gone so far south that remaining will be suicide." He stared us at all. "We are performing this rescue today because it is the right thing to do, and because we must try. But that is what we must do. We must try. if we succeed, as we so earnestly hope to do, then that will be our triumph. But if we try and fail..." He let that sink in and continue soberly. "Then we have failed... but failure or not, we will still have a planet we must save." He paused for a brief, dramatic moment. "Is there anyone here who is not entirely clear on this concept?" Another breathless pause. "Anyone?"
  
  One full minute of silence feared to be broken by anyone.
  
  "Then let us be about it." Sir Gareth finished calmly.
  
  
  
  Neutralizing the snipers went without a hitch, and Partisan's old SAS acquaintances moved in to take charge of the sniper posts we'd just cleared. They hadn't had much experience with Invader weapons yet but given that Invader anti-materiel rifles were line-of-sight light-speed heavy beam weapons and they were shooting over a range of only a couple hundred meters, we didn't anticipate them missing very much. Sidestep got me back into position just in time to rendezvous with Sir Gareth's team, and at T minus zero on the dot we heard the sounds of explosions from the Mews signifying that Netcat's team had just hit their targets.
  
  "Give them just enough time to turn around, and... now." Sir Gareth said calmly, and we kicked open the doors and charged directly into the Palace gardens to catch the Invader's prisoner guards in the rear.
  
  We weren't taking prisoners, nor were they. Yeoman's first barrage of trick arrows left them seeing spots and smoke, and then he got down to work taking down priority targets with arrows that infallibly found even the slightest gaps in their armor. Silver Shadow, the young lady with the force fields I'd met on my first night, darted out in front to deliberately draw enemy fire and then used her power of damage reflection to shred straight through the Invader formation with their own volley. Blazon, the armored man who'd been with her that night, had enough strength to throw tanks when he summoned his enchanted armor and could essentially ignore laser blasts. Microman revealed how he'd got his name as he unleashed an arsenal of shrinking tricks worthy of Ant-Man or the Atom to utterly disrupt enemy formations. And Sir Gareth, although he hadn't taken the field as Beaumayn for years, cut through the enemy ranks like he was Cohen the Barbarian in a Discworld novel. For all that he wasn't as strong or as fast as he'd been in his prime he still somehow was always wherever the enemy wasn't shooting, and whatever enchantments were on his magic sword were potent enough that Invader body armor slowed his blade down exactly as much as an equivalent volume of thin air. And I, of course, was as arbitrarily skilled as I needed to be, that icy overdrive allowing me to match Sir Gareth's skill and more as I used the Invaders' own weapons to methodically remove any threat to the prisoners and then myself.
  
  The sounds of a small-scale war erupted from the west as the Invader troops posted over there were suddenly taken under fire by our non-superhuman Resistance soldiers, who were bringing everything from squad automatic weapons to anti-vehicle rifles to grenade launchers to the party.
  
  "Prime Minister?" I heard one of the prisoners cry, astonished, as Sir Gareth slashed through one of the poles sustaining the 'energy fence' around them. I noted Invader anti-material rifles flashing from the rooftops across the street as our designated marksmen finished up with the Invader support weapons that had been sited overlooking the prisoner compound and started taking down stragglers. We immediately started herding the freed prisoners out towards the extraction route as quickly as we could-
  
  "They're coming from your southwest!" Partisan's voice came over our radios as two Invader grav tanks charged directly at us. Silver Shadow grunted in pain and went to one knee as the main gun of one of the tanks almost overloaded her shields, but still managed to reflect the shot right back into it and it went up in a fireball. A pair of Javelin missiles from some of our military backup shot over the treeline, homing in on the other tank, but both were vaporized by the tank's point defense. Blazon fearlessly stepped into the line of fire as it swiveled its gun to bear on the prisoners who even now were still in the open and frantically running for safety, and while his armor withstood the shot the tank knocked him back all the way across the veranda and through the Palace wall.
  
  "Oh no you don't!" Firewatch shouted as her plasma bursts began to rake the tank's side, and its turret swivelled to rapidly start tracking her through the air. Apparently the main guns could lock onto even high-speed targets-
  
  - and then the tank erupted in a giant fireball as Sidestep used Firewatch's diversion to teleport in directly on the rear deck behind the turret and then immediately teleport out again... after having left behind a captured Invader satchel charge on a two-second fuse.
  
  "Get down!" Sir Gareth called, and those of us who weren't invulnerable all dropped as a withering crossfire of energy rifles hit us. The Invaders' 'Red Elites' had arrived, and they'd expertly blinked into positions all throughout and behind the low garden walls and shrubbery where they had us in interlocking fields of fire while we couldn't immediately see them. And worse yet, they'd learned from watching us beat up what I now realized had been sacrificial bait.
  
  "Regroup at the garden wall!" I shouted, frantically waving everyone over to the right flank. Regular jumptroopers were bad enough, but these guys had to have either a ton of experience or else outright cybernetically augmented reflexes given how fast they were blinking and firing. If we didn't put a solid obstacle on at least one side of us so we could focus fire in return, they'd chew us to pieces-
  
  "Bloody hell, these bastards are jumping around like fleas!" Partisan swore as even our sniper fire proved able to tag only a few of them. Sidestep didn't even dare to try and jump into the middle of the maelstrom, and Firewatch had had to land and star fighting alongside us as armored infantry when several of them proved to have shoulder-fired SAMs. The special forces had arrived indeed, and they'd used our attacks on the prisoner guards to get a good look at exactly what they were dealing with before they'd jumped. Silver Shadow could be almost entirely neutralized as anything but a fast bare-handed skirmisher by simply not shooting at her. They were targeting Blazon - who'd only just managed to dig himself out of the wall - with specialized entangling weapons of a kind that seemed well-suited to dealing with his strength. Sir Gareth's nigh-invincible melee advantage was dealt with by simply denying him the opportunity to melee, turning him into an above-average rifleman at best. Microman was being hit with some kind of gravitic weapon intended to slow him down. Yeoman was blinded with a dazzle beam of some kind, and-
  
  My brain suddenly put together the significance of their lack of surprise at anything we'd done and all their specialized gear. These 'Red Elites' had had battlefield drill and specialized gear for dealing with superhumanly strong people in the open. They hadn't even hesitated at dealing with a flying person who shot energy beams, or someone who had force fields.
  
  These troops, or at least the men who had trained them, had had experience at fighting metahumans. Enough to have already long since come up with and trained with specialized gear and tactics for the job, much like UNTIL agents would have. And that meant-
  
  "They're herding us! GET AWAY-" I started to yell, as the wall we'd been rushing towards to take cover against burst open as the hulking giant lizardmen tore through it like it was tissue paper and hit Blazon hard enough to send him ragdolling right over the outer wall of the Palace compund.
  
  The Dimensional Empire had encountered worlds with superhumans before. And that, of course, meant that they'd the opportunity to recruit superhumans of their own.
  
  "Attention all enhanced rebels!" a computer-translated voice said with proud arrogance as an Invader in sleek power armor took off to hover menacingly over us, while their reptilian strongman flanked by a blue-green woman flaring with red energy fields, a small gray-haired humanoid with shadow tentacles, and a pink-skinned humanoid in advanced body armor with an energy shield and sword. "We are officers of the Imperial Guard! Surrender immediately and you will be allowed repentance through servitude! Continue your resistance and you will face summary judgement!"
  
  All enemy fire stopped as several more platoons of Red Elites materialized out of thin air all along the perimeter of the battlefield and nearby low rooftops, aiming heavy weapons and specialized counter-superhuman gear of various varities directly at us, while the ones we'd been skirmishing with tactically blinked out to re-enter formation with them.
  
  "What, precisely, does 'repentance through servitude' encompass?" Sir Gareth asked reasonably.
  
  "You're the leader of these rebels, aren't you 'Blackhall Prime'?" the power-armored Invader said as he postured in mid-air about twenty feet away from Sir Gareth. "We knew this would draw you out, and so it has."
  
  "Yes, yes, but I would very much appreciate an answer to my question." Sir Gareth replied urbanely.
  
  "You would be inducted into the Imperial Guard, as is required by Imperial law for all those with useful enhanced abilities." their leader asked.
  
  "It can't just be one squad of you lot for a whole giant Empire!" Yeoman called.
  
  "Of course not, you fool." the leader sniffed arrogantly. "Do you think you're the first world to have an enhanced population? We are as familiar with such a situation as we are with anything else. And we have recruited so very many like you."
  
  "Thank you, that was what I wished to know." Sir Gareth said calmly. "Along with the observation that as numerous as your Empire may be, its superhuman recruitment is still such that they could not easily send enough of you to overwhelm us with numbers. Case Omega!" he finished-
  
  -and as all of our people hunched down and Silver Shadow extended her forcefield to deflect what was about to happen away from the friendlies, I clapped my hands with more strength then I'd ever dared use before.
  
  The shockwave from my blow erupted outward from me like an exploding truck bomb, to be only barely deflected by the Palace wall. All of the Imperial Guardsmen save their strongman were sent sprawling, and the woman with the force-fields and the shadow-mage were left limp and bleeding on the ground. The company of Red Elites surrounding us was sent flying as well, as trees were knocked down halfway to the perimeter wall of the Palace compound and even one of the burning grav tanks flipped over.
  
  "Strewth!" I heard Firewatch mutter as I unleashed my power on a truly superheroic scale for the first time. Half the squad of Imperial Guardsmen was already incapacitated, the remainder barely able to reset, and only their strongman was still in the fight as he bull-rushed directly at me. In the interests of giving everyone else the maximum amount of time to get clear I planted my feet and let him hit me with his best haymaker, a shot that didn't even make me flinch, before I used one of Samson's favorite grab-and-punch holds to put him on the ground. I deliberately pulled my shot to avoid killing him - not that he didn't have it coming, this being war, but I could already pick up that one of the things keeping Earth in the fight at all was that we weren't a sufficient reinforcement priority for V'Han to send large detachments of superhumans at us. That sort of huge concentration of rare resources wouldn't be merited even for a difficult conquest. Only for one that was doing things like, oh, actually killing enough Imperial Guards casually enough to enrage their comrades to volunteer to come here in large numbers. Even when you were escalating on a large scale you still had to be careful not to escalate wildly, after all.
  
  I tossed away the lizardman's unconscious body as the power-armored man started to get to his feet, only for Sir Gareth to reach him first and slice away the top of his helmet with a blow of positively exquisite precision. With his armor's neural interface disabled and the top of his head exposed, Sir Gareth had no problem knocking the enemy leader unconscious with a hammerfist to the top of his skull. He effortlessly slung the man into a carry and turned to leave.
  
  "Wild Man, cover our retreat! Everyone else, follow me! Guard the prisoners as we withdraw!" he nodded, and with valuable prisoner in tow the rest of the squad moved out smartly to escort the people we were rescuing to rendezvous with our second squad and scatter into London. What was left of the Red Elites who were stlll combat capable started to stagger to their feet and ready their weapons, and the surviving Imperial Guardsmen began regrouping around the man with the shield-and-sword combo.
  
  And so, as I faced off alone against all the remaining Imperial forces while the remainder of the team finished the mission, I sighed and cast away yet another one of the restraining bolts I'd borne for so long. This wasn't a job for a shadowrunner any longer, but a superhero.
  
  All right, then. I thought to myself resolutely as I focused my magic inwards and my feet lifted from the ground. It's time to fly.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Shorter chapter than some recent ones, but I just hit a dramatic breakpoint and I didn't want to pad anything that came before. Besides, I'm not really figuring out a clever way to write the upcoming super-battle besides 'I hit them and they all fell down'. I'll need to work on that, but I'm still just getting back in the groove.
  
  In other news, recovering from having a hole drilled in your thigh like they were taking a core sample isn't really painful, and it's not at all infected, but I still seem to be tired more and sleeping longer. And it's not the meds as I'm not on any, just sterile dressings impregnated with that silver gel stuff. I guess even (relatively) minor healing is still a metabolic drain. Either that or I'm just pooped.
  
  And yes, by 'Imperial Guard' we meant Shi'ar Imperial Guard. Not that Gladiator's showing up any time soon, but the Invaders are certainly stepping up their game. Such a pity for the Empire that Blackhall had a total cheat card to play. Without the Unconquerable dude, Blackhall would have been right proper fucked here.
  
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  The Imperial Guardsman with the wrist-mounted energy shields, who I mentally labelled 'Captain Invader' for convenience's sake, also proved to be mixed with more than a bit of Batman as he managed to nail me square in the eyes with an acid grenade before I'd risen twenty feet. I'd deliberately been making my takeoff as slow and dramatic as possible to fix the Invaders' attention on me as much as possible, because my assigned role in Case Omega was to draw as much of the opposition as I could onto the nigh-invincible guy to let the others continue on with the mission.
  
  So I enjoyed the micro-instant of dismay that flickered across the 'Captain's' face as his hydrofluoric acid bomb affected me like so much rain, and then gave him a point for quick thinking as he barked a quick command into his headset while simultaneously using a dazzle bomb to ninja vanish. I would have followed up on that except my enhanced senses picked up on a volley of railgun projectiles heading directly for both me and the Palace behind me, having been fired from a platoon of grav tanks just clearing the cityscape horizon several blocks outside the perimeter we'd searched.
  
  The world shifted into slow motion as I flew out in a sweeping semicircle over the Palace gardens and reached out and plucked each of the hypersonic ultradense slugs out of the air. I then did another fast semicircle, on a wider loop, and tore directly through each one of the four floating tanks with a flying Superman punch before heading back. My desire to not have a supersonic boom collateral most of Buckingham Palace and my magic-based flight allowed me to selectively ignore the physics involved, and the world resumed its normal speed as I came to a halt hovering directly in front of the 'Captain'. He'd used my distraction to not only snatch up his two most seriously wounded teammates but ninja-vanish them into the nearby bushes, and I'd needed a few more seconds of ultraspeed searching to find him. Not that I minded - the longer I dragged this out, the more time the others had to escape.
  
  The 'Captain's' jaw almost dropped as he looked up to see me suddenly looming over him and the four railgun sabots tinked to the ground directly in front of him. I crossed my arms dramatically and stared down at him. "Your move, champ."
  
  The blue-skinned woman who'd been flaring with energy had just regained consciousness from whatever her teammate had injected her with, and her eyes flared arc-white as a storm of telekinetic force tore into me and tried to render me down to my component molecules. My first blow at her was deflected by the Captain's wrist-shields, which turned out to be kinetic damage reflectors similar to Silver Shadow's own force-field. The shadow-manipulator immediately followed up on what he'd expected to be a moment of distraction for me by blacking out every physical sense I had, from sight to sound to even pressure waves.
  
  I opened my astral perception and noted that the shadow-manipulator's powers were magical. Not Qlippothic, thank God, but he was essentially a Darkforce mage from Marvel comics. But that meant a simple strong burst of magical light from me would solve several problems at once, and so I tanked right through their combined assault and shattered the shadow-mage's attempts to bind and blind me while simultaneously leaving them all staring at sunspots-
  
  Except for 'Captain Invader' here, who'd had flare compensation in his helmet and immediately leapt to the attack with augmented strength and speed of his own and a skill worthy of Sir Gareth. I deliberately let him have the leaping aikido-style grab-and-throw with which he tackled me out of the air and flipped me around to send me sprawling, and then he heaved and rolled clear as the other two shook off their momentary flash-blindedness and the telekinetic flung a round dozen plasma grenades she'd snatched from nearby fallen soldiers at me, while the shadow-mage wrapped me in a layer of solid shadow to tamp the detonations right up against my skin-
  
  Ah, no. The judo assault and then the grenades had merely been intended to be distractions while the shadow-mage had done a battlefield removal to send me to the Darkforce dimension. Well, that certainly would have been a pain in the ass... for someone who hadn't already been bounced across half the multiverse, repeatedly astrally quested to the Yetziratic planes, and had learned the technique for a basic material-to-astral gate at Stonehenge.
  
  I'd appeared directly adjacent to the shadow-mage on my exit, because I'd used the lingering trace of his magic signature to find the trail back to the material realm in the first place. It had been only a very basic and nearby pocket dimension, after all. So I immediately subdued him on my arrival, then tanked through the telekinetic's best assault and punched her out as well, and turned around just in time to fist-catch the haymaker of the giant lizard-man, who'd managed to finally shake it off and get back in the fight. Deciding that turnabout was the best play I gave him a battlefield removal similar to what he'd given to Blazon, punching him well up into the skyline on a trajectory that should put him somewhere into the Thames at least halfway to Canary Wharf. And during all this I'd manage to lose track of their super-commando again, to have him suddenly drop onto my back and clamp his legs around my waist while he did his best to take my head off with a super-tensile garrotte-
  
  -to absolutely no avail. I simply rocketed a thousand feet up into the air and reached back to pull him off of me like he were a misbehaving kitten, dangling him at arm's length as we both were skylined against London. A quick glance down with my telescopic vision confirmed that the rest of the team wasn't running into anything they couldn't readily deal with, as the distant encircling ring of combat vehicles and heavy weapons emplacements situated around the Palace was both out of position to stop people who knew the back alleys and undercity tunnels far better than the Invaders did and all busy aiming their heavy and long-range weapons upwards at me right now.
  
  "You don't understand." I said to the 'Captain' as he glared defiantly back at me. 'Earth is not your planet.'"
  
  "That's what we said." he answered me bravely via his translator. "But the fact that I am here tells you what the Empire's answer was. As defiant as you are, as skilled and powerful as you have proven yourself, you simply do not know what you are truly facing!"
  
  "So you are mamelukes." I agreed, referring to the Turkish slave-soldiers of the old Caliphate. "We'd known that was a possibility ever since we determined that the superhumans of ours you were rounding up were being imprisoned, not exterminated. Do they condition your minds, or just use hostages and other mundane controls?"
  
  He shook his head from side to side. "I am not an overconfident braggart like Steelgrave was. Gather your own strategic intelligence." He sighed. "Or make the wiser choice and refuse to let your pride doom you. Whatever horrors you are imagining the Empire will bring, your fear is misplaced! The Imperiatrix will grant you peace, stability, prosperity! And you personally and your teammates will be feted and honored! An Imperial Guardsman may be subject to orders, but are you not already part of your own planet's forces? Do you not already have a loyalty? You do not have to betray your world, merely understand that you genuinely serve its best interests by reaching the best accommodation with the Empire that you can! And power such as yours could request a great accomodation indeed! Do you not understand?" he begged me. "To obtain the willing service of one as powerful as you, the Imperiatrix would reward you with privileges beyond imagining!"
  
  "Would she let the Earth go free if I joined her?" I asked him. "Abandon her plans of conquest for it entirely? Has she ever made such a bargain before?"
  
  "I... I do not know." he admitted reluctantly. "I have not myself heard of any such case, and I certainly do not have the authority to offer such a thing myself. But it could be possible." He looked downcast. "If only I had had sufficient power to make my own world's fate valuable enough to bargain for. Still, I have done my duty to my people as best I can by earning for them what mercy my own modest abilities were worth."
  
  "I honestly don't know if the greater tragedy would be if you genuinely believed what you just said, or if you didn't." I said after a shocked pause. "But either way, the answer is no. Have you got a parachute in that thing, or can I put you back down without your own troops friendly firing you?"
  
  He actually smiled at that, if sadly. "You are an honorable foe, alien. So I deeply regret... that this is not a multiverse that rewards honor. Rain Fire!" he suddenly barked into his microphone-
  
  -and as soon as my blood chilled at hearing those words I looked up, up, up, up through the atmosphere, to see the V'Hanian battlecruiser parked directly above London charge its weapons.
  
  I released my grip on the 'Captain', allowing him to start his skydive over London as I sped into the sky so quickly that to his eyes I had vanished. Even with everything I could do to selectively damp my physical effects I still imagined that the energy signature of my takeoff was visible on sensors halfway around the world. And the crew of the battlecruiser didn't even have time to react as I tore directly through the ship lengthwise at over eighty-five percent of the speed of light, instantaneously vaporizing the entire vessel as it it had been made of tinfoil.
  
  In the space of a second more I cold-bloodedly gave the same treatment to every other one of the dozen-plus starships in direct Earth orbit, shredding Admiral Helmuth's entire near-orbital picket as effortlessly as if they'd been so many Christmas tree ornaments. I came to a halt several hundred miles directly over Antarctica, my trajectory up until now having circled the Earth something like a crazed electron rapidly spinning around a nucleus.
  
  As I looked down at the Imperial prison camp for superhumans they'd constructed there, I raised an eyebrow as I realized what Blackhall Two's 'other tasking' had been. Immediately after the orbital escalation had been necessary I'd followed through to the logic that an immediate massive distraction would be necessary for the Imperial forces - and particularly the remaining Imperial Guardsmen - would be necesary to hopefully head off an immediate scorching. However, I'd understimated my fellow heroes. Sir Gareth and other Resistance leaders around the world had already decided that if the Empire was focusing its primary effort for a trap against one of the world's most troublesome Resistance group in London, that would be the perfect time to enact the mass breakout plan that had already been in the works for a while. So every long-range teleporter and other such useful transportation power had all come together with as many action cells from around the world as everyone from Blackhall Two to the Sentinels to the People's Champions from Russia to China's own Tiger Squad to- well, quite a lot of people really. Even the Revered Elder himself was there, the breakout apparently having decided to solve the problem of how to evacuate thousands of captured superhumans by shoving them all through a dimensional portal to another nearby plane.
  
  I nodded respectfully at the people who were getting on with their jobs just as we'd all been getting on with ours, smiled to myself at my orbital-telescopic-vision view of Frosty in action, and then headed right back to London. I returned in time to have still caught the 'Captain' before he'd hit the ground, but as it turned out he really did have a parachute in that rig of his - and once it had become obvious that the orbital bombardment he'd called down wasn't going to actually land, he'd deployed it. So I did one last sweep of all the deployed grav tanks and troops - not pulling my punches because unlike many of the Imperial Guard the Red Elites were all volunteers, but not deliberately going out of my way to finish off every last one either - and headed back down into the undercity of London.
  
  Because I really needed to talk to Sir Gareth again, and soon. Everything had just changed.
  
  
  
  "I cannot see where you had any choice, but if anything will move Helmuth to hasty action than this will." Sir Gareth agreed. "Already the main thing deterring further orbital bombardments is the simple fact that any ship that moves into position to execute one is vulnerable to destruction by you."
  
  "What are you getting out of this 'Steelgrave' guy you captured?" I asked.
  
  "We sent him to the Americans." Sir Gareth replied. "Diadem is one of the most powerful and experienced telepaths on Earth, she'll readily enough drain him of anything useful that he knows. And once we've finished tapping what must of a certainty be a highly valuable intelligence source, we can plan our next move."
  
  "Do I have time to have a nervous breakdown first?" I moaned, throwing myself into a chair in front of his desk and burying my head in my hands.
  
  "You have never exercised such power before?" he asked me softly.
  
  "No." I said, looking up at him. "And now that I know I can do things like this, I have to make these kinds of choices every day."
  
  "No you don't." he surprised me firmly. "You are mentally conflating deliberate lack of action with deliberate malicious action. That is a mental trap that creates villains out of heroes, the belief that because one potentially had the power to intervene in a situation then one must inevitably own the outcome of a situation."
  
  "You, of all people, are advocating irresponsibility?" I said, still not believing what I was hearing.
  
  "Alexander, you are not even thirty years old yet." he said tolerantly. "So it's understandable that even though you have left adolescence well behind you still think like a younger man in some ways." He paused and explained. "You are of course correct in saying that taking no responsibility for outcomes of events that were affected by your actions is negligence at best, if not depraved indifference. It is clearly an incorrect extreme. But the opposite - assuming personal responsibility for every outcome that follows after a choice of yours, however unanticipated or remote - is also an incorrect extreme. No one can assume unlimited responsibility without also assuming a burden of unlimited guilt, and that is a burden that not even a god could carry and remain sane. Certainly no man, however exalted, could hope to." He looked at me gravely. "Earlier today you had occasion to be present for one of the very rare occasions on which I spoke about past regrets aloud. Know that one of the chief causes of that regret was when I made the very same mistake that I am cautioning you not to. The belief that you have the power and the responsibility to dictate all outcomes, that you are so mighty or wise that you are beyond the reach of the law of unintended consequences- you told me that such a belief is what must have led Istvatha V'Han down the path to become what she now is. I now return to you your own advice."
  
  "You're saying that I should keep doing what I've always done? Pretend to be lesser than I am?" I tried to understand.
  
  "No, I am saying that you should avoid the negative example of the only person before you that you knew to bear this power." Sir Gareth reassured me. "All-Wings' failure was that she lacked humility. And I do not mean in the sense of self-effacement, but in the willingness to admit that there were still things she could neither predict nor control." He paused and continued more gently. "Do not be afraid of yourself when you are not entirely certain of what the right thing to do is. Doubt may be painful, but it is far less tragic than hubris."
  
  "And when the situation doesn't have time to allow for doubt?" I replied.
  
  "The heat of battle?" Sir Gareth replied reasonably. "You are a veteran combatant; you already know the answer."
  
  "I suppose I do... or at least, enough to muddle on with for now." I conceded. "And speaking of, what do we do now?"
  
  "I hold a hasty council with the other senior Resistance leaders around the world and we pool what assets we now have available and see what new opportunities we can pursue. The cyber-interface devices that your wife Catherine and young Charlotte have been working on are proving entirely useful for secure communications, we'll have the first full round-table hookup online that we've had since the first week of the invasion." he replied, getting up from his chair.
  
  "Comms center it is, then." I followed him out of his office, and by the end of the hour we'd finished arranging the hookup.
  
  "Bozhe moi, General Somerset, you could have told us that you had your own secret Vanguard ready to deploy!" Tokamak, the leader of the Russian national superteam demanded from his viewscreen, one of several in the comms center that were each displaying one of the parties to this conference.
  
  "On what we didn't know up until recently were only partly-secure comms?" President McDonnell replied. "I'm sure that would have ended well. And we all had our hole cards that we didn't want to turn over unless we absolutely had to, you know that."
  
  "Be that as it may, we now have options that we did not before." Lin Hu of the Tiger Squad responded. "The Revered Elder says that within two days the magical tracking tags that the Empire had placed upon the rescued superhumans will all be removed and the dispersal of them back to Resistance sites back around the world will be complete. We will have dozens of times the striking power we had already."
  
  "And also a substantial decrease in flexibility and coordination." Sir Gareth said. "So we could not deploy all of this new power at once without a large set-piece battle."
  
  "Which we were already building towards." President McDonnell replied. "Is your new big gun capable of making it through the defense gauntlet around the Reality Gate?"
  
  Sir Gareth nodded to me, and I stepped forward and picked up a headset so that they could hear me talk. "Vanguard didn't know what he was flying into, sir, and had made no special preparations. I do, and we can use the benefits of everything from Dr. Amazing's technology to cloaking magic to make me a stealth missile."
  
  Or I could just tank the entire starfleet on my face, but Sir Gareth and I had agreed that even if I had to reveal myself as a major-league heavy hitter to the world I still didn't have to quite advertise that I had essentially no known upper limit to my powerscaling. The planet was already receiving a frightening enough experience from V'Han, after all. I didn't want people to start being as frightened of me.
  
  "So as soon as we're ready for the final kickoff, that's it then." President McDonnell replied satisfactorily. "God damn does it feel good to have the momentum on our side for once."
  
  "Don't hold the victory parade just yet." Tokamak cut in. "One orbital bombardment was already ordered today against London. The only reason Helmuth is holding off is because he doesn't want to lose more battlecruisers, but as soon as we bring our super-army into the open he'll use his entire fleet if need be to guard the backup Reality Gate he has to deploy planetside. Before we can enact the final phase, we need something to counteract that."
  
  "Are there any indications yet that galactic aid will be sent?" Sir Gareth asked.
  
  "No." President McDonnell said. "We haven't even been able to confirm that they received it."
  
  "This is Diadem." a new channel cut in. "I just finished preliminary interrogation of the prisoner, and we already have several key items. First up, our prisoner - 'Shadivan Steelgrave', his name is - was one of the tech geniuses on the Imperial Guard and an Imperial weapons designer as well as a battlesuit trooper. He wasn't anywhere near as much of one of the greatest geniuses in the Empire as he thought he was or else he wouldn't be on frontline duty anywhere, the egotistical twit, but he was still a regular contributor to their military R&D. And while he didn't know how Reality Gates worked, he did know a key fact about their cybernetics control. They don't use Imperial military computer firmwiring. They can't, or else they'd need to cut new navigation chips for every gate in the network any time they added any single gate anywhere. The problem would be absurdly unworkable that way. So while it's obviously the most secure cybernetwork in the Empire, the Reality Gate network is still a network. It's RAM-based, it uses standard read-write memory and active on-the-fly path reconfiguration, and it can potentially be hacked. So once we make them deploy a Reality Gate planetside where we can capture it, then we'll have access."
  
  "You said several facts?" Sir Gareth inquired mildly.
  
  "The second fact actually ties in to the question you just asked. The Empire has conventional FTL travel as well as dimensional travel, and had spent several months using cloaked scouts ahead of their main attack wave. One of the first things Admiral Helmuth did after our planet looked like it wasn't going to be a short victorious war was send diplomatic envoys to the nearby interstellar powers. Their orders were to say whatever it took to delay and confuse any response for the several months it would take to finish constructing their Reality Gate. So while the Champions' SOS has likely left them with some awkward explanations to make, we're probably not going to get any help until we can get another message out." Diadem continued.
  
  "But having been relieved of the necessity of getting an Imperial insystem ship for the Reality Gate attack, we can now shift focus to re-establishing interstellar communications." Lin Hu said. "Does this 'Steelgrave' possess knowledge of how to build such a system?"
  
  "He does." Diadem confirmed. "Dr. Amazing is already working on options. Can the Tiger Squad capture another grav-com device to help speed up the work?"
  
  "Easily." Lin Hu agreed. "We shall begin efforts at once."
  
  "A friendly starfleet of our own would certainly aid in the final assault, as well as deal with another question we had not yet successfully answered - notably, how to force Helmuth's fleet go back through the gate before we close it. We certainly don't want the entire expeditionary force still trapped on our side when we finish barring the door." Sir Gareth agreed.
  
  "So those are the three main steps remaining before endgame." President McDonnell summed up. "Obtain galactic aid. Organize and prepare as many of our rescued superhumans as possible for large-scale combat. And finish the cyberweapon we're buliding to use against the Reality Gate network." He took a deep, satisfied breath on the viewscreen. "We've made a lot of progress this week."
  
  "Despite our losses." Diadem said sadly, referring to the fact that they hadn't found Vanguard in the prison camp. Nobody really wanted to think about where he was right now or what was probably happening to him, even if we were pretty sure we already knew.
  
  "Regrettably true, but we must concentrate on the matters at hand." Sir Gareth said compassionately. And so, after some more discussion, the meeting finally adjourned.
  
  The awestruck glances and silent reverence that people were all looking at me with now made go hide right in my quarters. Cat and Jane soon enough found me there, and we sat down for one of the few quiet moments we'd been able to all have together for days.
  
  "I'm not sure that I want to stay here anymore." I opened without preamble. "I mean, after the war's over."
  
  "I don't blame you." Jane said. "You had to reveal yourself like that, given the situation, but-" she shook her head. "It would be like my father having to reveal his full power in public. Even if it couldn't be avoided, he'd almost certainly want to fake his death and go hide for a century afterwards."
  
  Cat pulled me close and let me cradle my head on her shoulder. "Most people wish to be more powerful, more important... just more. But you've never really wanted that, have you?"
  
  "I'm not even sure what I want anymore." I agreed. "Except for you two."
  
  "And we aren't going anywhere." Jane said reassuringly. "But..." she exhaled meaningfully. "Your instincts are right. Which they usually are, come to think of it. All of this has come at us in way too much of a rush. We all need time."
  
  "Time to sit down and really process." Cat agreed. "And figure out who we're going to be now that we're not really shadowrunners anymore. I hadn't thought of it that way, but Jane's right. God, was Lofwyr's ritual and meeting Dunkelzahn really less than a month ago?"
  
  "Let's not forget that we still owe Jane a honeymoon." I joked weakly.
  
  "Oh trust me, I haven't forgotten that." she teased back. "Maybe the Revered Elder will know a peaceful dimension somewhere."
  
  "My favorite novelist once wrote a scene where the love interest was looking at the protagonist and envying him when she saw that he had the power to just wave all ordinary problems out of his path... and then pitying him when she realized that only meant that every problem he ever had was one he couldn't solve without great effort or sacrifice." I said.
  
  "Is that all we are, the 'love interests'?" Cat tried to joke, only for her smile to fall flat at my wince. "Ouch. Sorry."
  
  "That's the other reason why it might be best to change worlds." Jane agreed sagely. "Anybody who wants to kill you now is going to be throwing nukes at you."
  
  "And to think that people actually wish to be isekai'ed and given massive cheat powers." I sighed. "That only works when the author is cooperating."
  
  "Well, if you don't like the rules, then change the game." Cat agreed. "And you know what we achieved today better than most. If Sir Gareth thinks the war could be over in a week or two..."
  
  "I'm not saying I'm unhappy we came here." I reassured them. "I don't want to imagine the dire straits this place would have been in if we hadn't arrived. And not just my own powers - everything Cat's done with communications and intel, everything Jane's magic has helped with, the just-in-time advance warning we brought-"
  
  "That reminds me." Cat said. "I've been working on something, and it's just about ready-"
  
  "Weren't you going to do your first Resonance Realms dive since we'd arrived in this world tomorrow?" I asked her. "To help try and figure out how the Resistance could re-initialize HUGIN?"
  
  "Yes, but that's not what I meant." Cat said impishly. "I've got to go change. Jane, make sure you get photos."
  
  Jane smiled evilly and held up a cell phone to start filming the expression on my face. Nonplused, I began to wonder what the heck kind of outfit Cat thought she could possibly shock me by changing into, given that I'd seen her in every possible state of dress or undress. There had even been that cosplay in Los Angeles-
  
  -and then I jawdropped when, after a couple minutes, Cat walked back into the room... wearing Firewatch's power armor.
  
  "What?" I gasped.
  
  She popped the helmet off and held it under one arm, smirking at me. "Nice, isn't it?"
  
  "Wait, has something happened to Charlotte?" I asked her concernedly.
  
  Cat leaned in to kiss me on the cheek. "And you are such a dear that that's the only question you think to ask. And the answer is, I'm helping her and Dr. Goldwing convert Steelgrave's suit for her use. The Dimensional Empire built some good gear, and we made damn sure there weren't any trackers or spyware or malware in it. All she's got to do is fit a spare helmet on it and she's suddenly rocking several times the firepower that she was before. Honestly, we were lucky Steelgrave was so busy posing that he never actually got into the fight. That suit had some heavy hardware. I'm amazed Sir Gareth's magic sword cut through it so easily."
  
  "Tell me about it." Jane nodded. "I'd really love to get a closer look at that blade, but he keeps it very close to his vest."
  
  "I'm sure that it took Firewatch months if not years to really learn how to use her armor." I pointed out to Cat practically. "Aren't you going to need training?"
  
  "Actually, yes." Cat admitted. "But not as much training as she did, because unlike her I can technomantically jack right into the suit and wear it as easily as a set of clothes. What I'll need to learn how to do is fly in it and fight from the air, but that's why the jets are disabled right now. I've got enough infantry experience that I can go from being a rifleman to a heavy weapons trooper a lot more easily than I could adapt to suddenly being a low-altitude strike aircraft, and I'll save learning the rest for after the war. But I can still get a lot closer to the frontline now, which is definitely going to come in handy for the final assault."
  
  "Did you get what you needed from the Revered Elder?" I asked Jane obliquely.
  
  "I did." she agreed. "And he agreed with Sir Gareth. It's drastic, but it has to be done."
  
  "Then I suppose the only thing left is for me to agree with it too." I said quietly. "But I'm not sure that I can."
  
  "This is all way over my head." Cat said into the silence. "I can't even begin to wrap my head around this kind of problem. But know what I can tell you." She knelt down to put our gazes level and continued passionately. "I will share your pain. I will grieve with you, or for you. I will always love you. And whatever you decide to do or not to do in this upcoming battle, I will never judge you."
  
  "And I as well." Jane agreed quietly. "You might have evolved beyond our power now, but you will never go to a place where we can't still touch your heart. Not unless you deliberately choose to." She laid a gentle hand on my shoulder. "Which would be a really stupid idea by the way, so, y'know, don't." she finished cheerfully.
  
  The corner of my touch couldn't help but twitch up at that, regardless of my mood. "Thank you."
  
  "Jane, take him to bed while I peel myself out of this tin can so I can come join you." Cat said as she rose from her kneeling position. "It's back to the battle front tomorrow, so let's not waste this chance."
  
  "Don't need to tell me twice." Jane agreed forcefully, and then she pushed me right back onto the bunk and started to straddle my hips.
  
  
  
  "A parley offer?" I asked Sir Gareth, astonished. When he'd called me into the command center the next morning I certainly hadn't expected this.
  
  "HUGIN broadcast it for 'Blackhall One' on channels known to be compromised." Sir Gareth said. "System Admiral Helmuth wishes to speak to 'the new champion of Earth'. Alone."
  
  "I'm assuming he thought up a suitably clever arrangement for how this can happen without putting himself at risk?" I said. "Or even convincing me that there is any reason I should show up at all?"
  
  "As for the former, the offer is for you to show up alone at the site of the former prison camp in Antarctica." Sir Gareth said calmly. "Whereupon you will find a communications relay set up for your convenience. There will be no other Invader trooper present within fifty miles, and finding any there will be considered valid grounds for you to wave off the meeting."
  
  "I've already shown that I'm really hard to orbitally bombard, and nothing else can reach me that way unless he leaves a command-detonated nuke at the site." I shrugged. "Which won't do anything except let him get another benchmark for how unkillable I am. Likewise, he exposes himself to no personal risk. So okay, he really does want to talk. What about?"
  
  "His Beaumayn wannabe made you an offer yesterday he didn't have the authority to make." Partisan said coarsely. "Three guesses he debriefed that convo to his chain of command just like you did, and Helmuth thinks that it wasn't a bad idea."
  
  "... fuck." I swore. "If he really does offer to leave Earth alone in return for my enlistment- no." I said. "They'd never keep their side of the bargain once they had me."
  
  "Worse yet, they would keep it." Captain Masane said. "At which point you would be either complicit in future atrocity or else a planet full of hostages would live under threat to make you comply."
  
  "I'll be honest, I'm surprised none of you are tempted." I said frankly.
  
  "By which you mean that you are afraid that several others among the surviving leaders of Earth - particularly the other politicians - might be tempted." Sir Gareth agreed. "Quite. I know them better than you, and at least some of them would be so very tempted to cling to the false hope present in this offer." He shook his head. "Which is why I do not intend to tell them."
  
  "You can do that?" Captain Masane said, turning incredulously to him.
  
  "When the cooperative effort began we quite naturally all swore our word of honor to each other that none of us would attempt to cut a separate deal with the Dimensional Empire." Sir Gareth said equably. "So unless I reconvene the worldwide council and solicit their vote, I could not accept any offer from the Empire even if I wished to. And, of course, given the time consumed and the risks involved in a full council meeting, it is entirely up to my judgment whether a matter is important enough to pass along to them." He shrugged. "Having determined that to the best of my knowledge this Imperial offer is both insincere and a trap, obviously I will not weary them with the details."
  
  "General, that's you splitting more hairs than a cross-eyed barber." Partisan said incredulously. "Which isn't to say that telling the Empire to go clog-dance in a mine field isn't the only answer the bastards deserve, but even you don't have the brass to get away with that!"
  
  "And yet it is what we will do, because we can do nothing else and still remain true to ourselves." Sir Gareth said. "Alexander, go to the parley and see what Admiral Helmuth has to say. Draw him out if you can, but do not overextend yourself. And inform him that you do not have the authority to commit to any terms, and that in no case will you seek any parole nor special favours from the enemy."
  
  "And if he threatens more bombardments in the event I refuse?" I said.
  
  "Then explain to him the poor logic in confronting an invulnerable man with the power to destroy starships and then removing everything he has to fight for, while still leaving him a clear foe to fight against." Sir Gareth said coldly. "And in the event he is still so lost to reason as to fire anyway, you will immediately destroy the Reality Gate and all the transports large enough to potentially hold one of the backup planetary Gates, and then destroy the rest of his starfleet as much as you can."
  
  "You're gambling with the lives of everyone on Earth, sir." I said.
  
  "We have been doing nothing but since the day we began fighting." he replied. "And that is why we must remain resolute; nothing less than victory will allow us to stop gambling."
  
  "How do you do it, Sir Gareth?" I asked him plaintively.
  
  "Do what?" he asked me mildly.
  
  "Be so... certain." I replied. "Know what to say, what to do, when nobody else does."
  
  "Experience." was his only reply. "You'd best be getting on, it's almost the hour."
  
  "Yes sir." I replied, and headed out towards the surface. Behind me, my enhanced hearing couldn't help but pick up a conversation.
  
  "General, you just put the weight of an entire world on that lad's shoulders." Partisan said.
  
  "Not I, but God, Major." Sir Gareth said kindly. "But I have every faith that he can carry it nonetheless."
  
  Well, I'm glad one of us does, I thought as I left.
  
  I arrived at the site in Antarctica without incident, to see a giant arrow melted in the snow and ice pointing to a small prefab shed. I didn't have X-ray vision, so I had to open the door to find out if there was a giant anti-matter bomb in there waiting for me or not. As it turned out, all there was was a small portable generator and a small gray machine with a control panel on top. An incongruous Post-It note - an actual one from an Earth drugstore - was taped adjacent to one of the buttons with a notation saying "Press Here".
  
  Pressing the button made the device boot up and a small cylindrical force field snap to around me. My instant of panic was suppressed when I realized that the force field wasn't remotely solid enough to block solid matter but was merely some type of privacy barrier. A hologram projector sprang to life and the image of a man in a white-and-gold uniform with shoulderboards each bearing an elaborate winged badge surmounted by three stars and several rows of 'fruit salad' on his chest stared back at me. He had the same blue-green skin, dark hair, and slender humanoid appearance that the telekinetic on the Imperial Guard squad I'd fought had had.
  
  "I am System Admiral Helmuth of the Imperial Legions, expeditionary force commander of the Dimensional Empire's fleet of assimilation to this world. How would you prefer to be addressed, and what is your rank?"
  
  "My call sign is 'Wild Man'." I said. "I am the primary field operative, but not the commander or deputy commander, of the Blackhall resistance cell of the United Kingdom."
  
  "And yet you are, to the best of our ability to determine, the most powerful man in your world." Helmuth replied matter-of-factly. "So why do you not rule?"
  
  "Our grasp of political science has gone a bit beyond 'the tribal chief is the one with the biggest club'." I said.
  
  "As has ours." he agreed. "Well beyond, in fact. So having established that you do not claim a mandate to power based on your raw might alone, it logically follows that you are willing to submit to the rule of others. And with that having been established, the question then inevitably becomes 'Why is the thought of Imperial rule so intolerable to you?'"
  
  "If you did any pre-invasion research of us at all, then you know at least something of our planet's history of war and conquest. There are still living ethnic and national populations on this world who remember what it was like to be the victim of invasion, of colonialism, of outright conquest by violence. Just as there are others who remember it was like to be the conquerors. The survivors see you as more of the same. The ex-conquerors see their own historical sins reflected in a vastly larger mirror, and recoil from its ugliness." I replied.
  
  "You misunderstand me, Wild Man." Helmuth replied. "I did not ask why your people, or your governments, or your commanders found Imperial rule so intolerable. I asked why you found it so intolerable, on a personal level. Yesterday several hundred soldiers and over fifteen thousand Imperial sailors died by your hand. My soldiers and sailors." His lips firmed in a line of distaste. "Surely you did not take all their lives merely on a whim?"
  
  "The population of London alone is over eight million people, and your sailors were about to burn them all. Or does 'Rain Fire' not ring a bell? Do you truly order such things so often that you can't even recall one as recently as a day ago?" I spat back. "You want to know why the thought of bending the knee to your Imperiatrix so distasteful? Because if I did, then I'd be burning cities at her order." I shook my head. "That your Empire doesn't even teach its military the difference between war and murder is one of the most damning things I could possibly say about it."
  
  "Do you know what is worse than murder, Wild Man?" Admiral Helmuth said passionately. "Chaos. Watch the display."
  
  His hologram winked out and images of planets began to fill the air instead. Worlds that had destroyed themselves with global thermonuclear bombardments, with kinetic strikes, with plagues. Zombie apocalypses. Hellscapes where demons that the caption helpfully informed me where the servants of Tyrannon rampaged through burning streets of what had once recognizably been modern industrialized worlds. Recorded non-Imperial news footage of mass starvation, of ethnic cleansings, of all of man's inhumanity to man.
  
  "Oh, it's the Chapter Black tape." I said wearily. "The compilation of sapients' inhumanity to sapients on such a scale that it overwhelms the mind with horror and makes the viewer believe any measure, however extreme, is justified to combat it." I looked at Admiral Helmuth. "Let me guess, they made all the midshipmen watch this in History and Moral Philosophy class?"
  
  "How did you know-?" Admiral Helmuth asked me, momentarliy shocked before he regained his composure. "I see your interrogation of Shadivan Steelgrave was quite successful, then." he said distastefully.
  
  "No, I just read science fiction." I replied. "Brainwashing is not a thing unknown on this planet. You're trying applied cognitive dissonance on me, to make me believe that I must either accept the Empire's methods of fighting chaos or else that I choose to be a servant of chaos." I shook my head. "It doesn't work like that. That's a false dichotomy. The truth is that even if chaos must be fought, that doesn't necessarliy mean that your way of fighting it is the only way. Or even the best way."
  
  "Hear my offer before you reject it." Admiral Helmuth replied firmly. "If you pledge your loyal service to the Imperiatrix, we will withdraw all fleets from your dimension."
  
  "And have them charging back in the instant I do anything she doesn't like. Six billion hostages to be executed a tithe at a time, as a trade for one nigh-invincible slave." I shook my head. "Please understand that I do your sovereign credit when I believe that she would never offer a trade she did not think would profit her in the end."
  
  "A valid point." Admiral Helmuth replied. "But how can you, who see yourself as a hero of 'freedom', so selfishly refuse to take the best chance this world you fight for has to retain its freedom simply because it would cost you personally?"
  
  "It would cost far more people than just me." I retorted.
  
  "But what if it didn't?" Admiral Helmuth asked me. "What if we truly were sincere? You know at least something of the potential of magic, of super-science, of enhanced powers and abilities in general. What if suitable truths were proven, bindings were laid, and possibilities for treachery all expunged? What then? Would you still refuse the Empire, Wlid Man? Or would you do what was best for others, rather than most preferable for yourself?" He shook his head. "Can you truly say that you have always been such a perfect icon of integrity? How many more must die for your pride?"
  
  I spoke slowly, every word feeling weighted with lead. "Earlier in the war, I witnessed one of the finest men I've ever met having a crisis of faith. So I asked him what a man could do, when he faced a decision where each possible choice held so much potential to go so horribly wrong and he couldn't be certain which one was right? And do you know what he said?" I didn't give Helmuth a chance to answer. "He said we should pray for guidance. And then, that we should keep our promises."
  
  "If you feel that your oaths forbid you from surrendering without permission from your superior officer, you may go and consult with them." Helmuth offered after a pause. "This communicator will still be awaiting you here upon your return."
  
  "My superior and I already discussed this contingency before I came here today." I told Helmuth. "And their answer - and my own answer - is no."
  
  "Then every death that occurs from this point on is your responsibility-" Helmuth began.
  
  "That's terrorist logic." I cut him off icily.
  
  "What did you say?" he immediately replied, shocked to his core.
  
  "I said that in the end you proved to be nothing but a gods-damned terrorist." I snarled. ''This is your fault! I had to kill those innocent people because you didn't give me what I wanted! You made me do this!" I falsetto-mocked him. "Every two-bit anarchist and subversive in our planet's history has said the same damned thing! 'Force for order', hah! " I replied.
  
  "Not a single word of that is true, you- you barbarian!" Helmuth thundered.
  
  "Then prove me wrong." I said. "Stop killing people who don't want to be ruled by you. Stop taking by force what isn't yours. If your Empire was truly so wonderful in the long run, people would beg to join it. Every sapient race bandwagons on winners, and your Imperiatrix is immortal." I shook my head. "You'd think that she'd already have proven over the long run that her way was superior and all others inferior, if it really was. But have you seriously never wondered why you've spent so much of your career shooting at people who haven't shot at the Empire first?"
  
  "You, who cling to defiance in the name of duty, will in the same breath demand that I abandon mine?" Helmuth raged. "And accuse me of hypocrisy?"
  
  "Aren't you you clinging to your duty just because you'll lose your position and privileges if you don't?" I shot back. "Or because the Imperiatrix will have you shot for treason? The former makes you a mercenary and the latter a conscript, but neither one makes you an honorable man. But I gain nothing and lose out on a lot of promised rewards by refusing the Empire, and it's not like anyone on my side could seriously threaten me if I disobeyed orders." I stared levelly at Helmuth. "So don't even try to say that I'm a hypocrite. You really want to know what I think of your offer? To quote one of the great religious leaders in our history - 'Here I stand. I can do no other.'"
  
  "And is that your final answer?" Admiral Helmuth said.
  
  "No, this is." I said. "Scorch my planet and you still won't kill me. And then you'll be facing an indestructible man. Who has already proven he has the power to destroy entire squadrons of your ships. And who will have nothing left to fight for, but one clear target left to fight against. Do you understand me?"
  
  "You are not invincible, even if you believe you are." Admiral Helmuth replied. "And even if I fall, the Empire never will."
  
  "There's only one way to find out, isn't there?" I replied, and then I left the silent ruins of the communicator behind me as I flew away.
  
  So, that was it then. The die was cast.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: When I started the Dimensional Empire arc I hadn't anticipated it would go in some of the directions it has. Right now I feel like a man running to get out in front of a parade so I can try to pretend I'm leading it. And while I had some idea as to where we'd go next after this, I am now realizing that I have no idea where to go next after this. Plans have changed.
  
  And Alex is realizing that yes, he cannot live at an epic peak all the time without risking going all All-Wings. But hey, even if the Big D isn't available for mentor duties anymore Sir Gareth is also here to give good advice.
  
  'Shadivan Steelgrave' is actually an NPC from Mutants & Mastermind's "Freedom City" setting, not Champions, but good God people, populating a superhero universe with NPCs is hard. I steal from everywhere. Likewise, the 'ordinary versus extraordinary problems' is a reference to Lois Bujold and the Miles Vorkosigan novel "Komarr", just as Cat's reply is a modified version of Cordelia's dialogue to Aral in "Shards of Honor". Look, she's just really stealable from, okay?
  
  And "Here I stand. I can do no other." is of course a reference to Martin Luther. Not that I'm Protestant, but it's still an epic turn of phrase.
  
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  The better you got to know him, the more you realized that Shadivan Steelgrave was really a disgusting individual.
  
  He'd been the leading superhero tech genius and powered armor hero of his own home planet, much like Tetsuronin was on this world or Iron Man had been in the Marvel universe. However, unlike either gentleman - neither of whom could be accused of being humble - Steelgrave had been in it solely for the ego boost and the rewards. He'd chosen the path of fighting for the legitimate authorities because he'd run the numbers on being a supervillain and had decided that it was the option less likely to pay the best dividends for him. Just as he'd run the numbers when the Dimensional Empire had arrived and had immediately decided that his best option was to cut a deal. He'd used his status as one of his world's pre-eminent superheroes as an express ticket to command rank in their equivalent of Blackhall and had then immediately delivered them all into the Empire's hands. He'd justified his actions as earning the best deal for his homeworld that he could, thus being its 'true defender', but mostly he'd just been looking out for himself. But the 'political reliability' he'd shown as being a willing convert to the Empire rather than a reluctantly press-ganged servant such as Warmaster Keldaris - the super-commando I'd fought in London - had been why he'd been squad leader of the Imperial Guard detachment we'd fought instead of Keldaris.
  
  And that same expediency was now leading Steelgrave to spill his guts to the Resistance, once Diadem had figured out what made him tick and pointed out that his only chance of living out a normal and healthy lifespan was to do his very best to make sure that Earth won. The Empire certainly wouldn't have him back on anything remotely resembling as good a set of terms as he'd originally enjoyed after his failure... and if we let him go back after leaking to Imperial intelligence that all of his cooperation up until now had been voluntary instead of telepathically extracted, he'd have been facing immediate execution. And he knew it, which is why a prosperous retirement on an independent world beyond the reach of the Empire suddenly looked like a great idea to him. Granted, Earth would probably be dealing with an obnoxious new tech supervillain inside of a few years, assuming he didn't end up an even more obnoxious new tech billionaire instead, but that was a problem for future Earth. For right now, present Earth needed what we were getting from him.
  
  "You know, I could guarantee a better chance of success if you didn't make me work with such a series of black boxes." he sniffed dismissively as we stood in Dr. Amazing's current lab, which was buried almost a quarter-mile underneath the bedrock somewhere in the American Southwest. Apparently the United Kingdom wasn't the only nation that had all sorts of fun doomsday bunkers and black sites left over from the Cold War.
  
  "Please." Netcat eyerolled at him. "We both know that if you knew exactly how this hack was going to work, you'd just trade it back to the Imperiatrix for a free pardon and a promotion. No, your job is just to educate us more on what we'll be going up against. We'll figure out how to beat it."
  
  "For that matter, I don't know exactly how she's doing it either." Dr. Amazing offered politely.
  
  "You're not going to." Netcat said. "What we're reconstructing here is one of the nastiest digital doomsday weapons anyone's ever heard of. I'm already wincing at several of the upcoming social consequences of technology I've already given Earth. Forget the apocalyptic cybersecurity upheaval alone, there's also things like simsense abuse, privacy concerns, the potential for a ubiquitous surveillance state-"
  
  "Our wireless mesh technology was already evolving towards those latter two on our own." Dr. Amazing corrected her politely. "And it's fascinating to hear reports of how another culture already evolved and adapted to speculative technologies such as this over the course of several generations. Hopefully we can learn from the examples of others before we provide more depressing examples of our own."
  
  "Ah, so you were not native to this dimension either." Steelgrave pontificated. "No wonder the strategists' calculations kept going off course."
  
  "What page are you on, Shad?" I observed snarkily. "Because we already got there."
  
  "Hrmph." he sniffed. "The next simulation run is ready. Let's see if your little virus can do anything other than messily die this ti-" His jaw dropped as the simulation ended, Netcat's cybernetic terror weapon having already rampaged through a reconstructed approximation of the most advanced Imperial cybersecurity that Steelgrave could help design like a starving velociraptor through a rabbit ranch. "How in the name of the Collapse did that happen?"
  
  "The Resonance happened." Netcat said proudly, before she sighed. "Although I'm damn near verging on the Dissonance with what I'm doing here."
  
  "What we're doing here." I reassured her. "I ramped up to help you reconstruct most of this just working from the outlines you'd already studied, remember?"
  
  "I know." Netcat sighed. "And I certainly can't think of a more deserving target to unleash it on. But-"
  
  "But it's time to do something more cheerful." Dr. Amazing said. "Recovering Director Eckhardt from that prison camp allowed us to finally find out where HUGIN's backup files were. Anybody here want to help me reconstruct a non-lobotomized version of him on the base server cluster?"
  
  "I suppose it might be an amusing diversion-" Steelgrave began to smarm, only for his expression to fall flat as I loomed up behind him.
  
  "Not you." I said flatly. "You get to go to the afternoon debriefing session. Have fun with the good doctor, honey." I said goodbye to her as I marched him out.
  
  It had been several days' worth of tense standoff since the Battle of London. Helmuth had tried to move a new picket into Earth orbit once, and I'd deliberately flown back up at a slow enough speed for them to see me coming to give them a chance to wave off. I'd then dodged rather than tanked his attempt at long-range space bombardment and the anti-matter hyper-missiles that several of his dreadnaughts had followed up with, so as to leave them with the impression that while I was extremely tough to kill I wasn't invulnerable enough to actually risk the massed fire of most of his fleet. For now, we wanted him to think that the situation was a stalemate.
  
  The Empire had also revealed a recently acquired mystic capacity. While they didn't seem to have any super-mage comparable to the Revered Elder, or even to other superhero mages a step down from him such as Witchcraft, Dweomer, the Iron Imam... or my wife, for that matter... the same reinforcement ships that had brought the Imperial Guard detachment must also have brought some adept-level practitioners of magic, and ones experienced in group ritual sorcery. Obviously they hadn't been here earlier or else they'd already found our magical tracking tag on Mrs. Tompion - who, thank God, we'd recovered unharmed and who had been positively ecstatic to be reunited with her granddaughter - but now that they had arrived, only our own paranoia about magical tracking tags had prevented the Empire from using any of the prisoners we'd rescued to follow us home.
  
  But what was more surprising was when long-range magical teleportation had become much riskier to use shoftly after the Battle of London. Apparently the Imperial mystics had spent almost a full day working a powerful group ritual that was intended to make magical teleportation far more 'obvious' when in use. They'd stirred up the near astral with a resonant force that made the 'echoes' of magical transportation temporarily sound much louder, and were obviously taking turns on watch to try and track us that way. It was quite a brilliant idea, and if they'd brought those mages in from the beginning of the invasion we'd have been right proper fucked.
  
  Sadly for the Invaders, by this point we'd been fighting them for enough weeks to have enough captured teleport harnesses to fill warehouses with, as well as local tech geniuses capable of reverse-engineering them. Sidestep's defecting from Project Armour to Blackhall had been another stroke of luck, because although obviously it was several tech levels behind Imperial circuitry the basic operating principles of her teleport suit utilized the same quirk of physics that the Dimensional Empire had built their tactical teleport technology with, meaning that her gear - and her own experience in building and maintaining it - made the perfect Rosetta Stone by which to translate Imperial teleport tech into something Earth could use. Capturing Steelgrave had been the last piece of the puzzle needed, because he was of course thoroughly familiar with common Imperial technology and military engineering. Which is why, only shortly after we'd lost the ability to safely use long-range mystical transport, we'd been making up for that with long-range fixed-point-to-point telegates. We could already begin to see that the tech level of this Earth was going to end up strange even by superhero earth standards after the Invasion was over.
  
  And so the Empire's ground battle slowly fell further and further behind. They'd lost command of the orbitals, and while we'd deliberately not interfered with shuttle movements to and from the ground so as to avoid sending their ground garrisons into starving cornered rat mode, the fact remained that less than two million Imperial troops were now stuck on a world with billions of angry humans glaring at them, and that more and more they couldn't hope to control any territory not immediately within weapons range at the time. We had home field advantage, we knew all the nooks and crannies of a world they'd barely explored, and we could now covertly move troops and supplies from any base we had to any other so long as someone made the trip the first way around to lay a telegate. And while magical transport was more difficult and risky enough it still wasn't impossible. For all the chaff they'd raised in the near astral the Imperial mystics still didn't have much of a hope of either tracking or intercepting people like the Revered Elder, even if his great age meant that he had to conserve his strength and save bigger efforts only for short bursts.
  
  So even though Helmuth had to at least suspect that we knew about the timing involved with the Reality Gate - after all, he knew that we'd captured Steelgrave alive - we acted as though we hadn't, and thus kept him from panicking completely by letting him believe that for all the setbacks we'd given up he still ultimately had the upper hand. So long as things remained in a stalemate, then eventually he'd win. It was perhaps the last great belief that Helmuth could cling to, and so we allowed him to.
  
  RIght up to the point where we didn't need him to any longer.
  
  
  
  "So, are you ready?" Firewatch asked me eagerly on the morning of the big day. Earth had been under siege for approximately six weeks by this point, with less than a month to go before the primary Reality Gate would finish construction, but everything was finally in place.
  
  I turned away from her awestruck glances and sighed. "Could you please not look at me like the second coming of Vanguard?"
  
  "But you are." she said, impressed. "You're the only reason Earth is still in the fight at all! Well, you and Sir Gareth-"
  
  "Charlotte." Jane said quietly. "Alex has never done anything like this before."
  
  "You just got these powers?" Firewatch said, surprised.
  
  "I've had them for several years." I corrected her. "But the Battle of London was the first time that I really did anything that Sir Gareth or Dr. Goldwing or you couldn't have done." I sighed. "Remember, the world I was on before I came here was a lot lower powered overall. I'd never met anything there I couldn't defeat without having to ramp up too high. I didn't even know what my upper limits were. And then-" I looked at her. "This all happened. I'm doing what I have to do, but-" I shook my head. "You've been a superhero long enough to see how great power sometimes causes great stupidity. And while I've known for a while I could potentially do powerful things, actually doing them for the first time-" I sat down on a nearby bench and slumped. "The heart takes a long while to catch up to the head sometimes."
  
  She sat down next to me and gave me an exasperated yet compassionate look. "Well, yeah. That's called being human."
  
  "And it's a skill I really don't want to lose." I agreed. "Did you ever know Vanguard well enough to find out anything about how he adjusted to being... well, sort of a demigod?"
  
  "No, only met him in passing a few times, and usually only while a huge scrap was going on." she admitted. "But yeah, he was born with his powers. One of the first and still the most powerful mutant known. So it's something he had to adjust to all the while he was growing up, I imagine, even if he didn't start manifesting his abilities until puberty."
  
  "While I just woke up and had them one day." I said. "While being dumped into another world entirely, to boot."
  
  "That's certainly something to look into." she said. "Have you been?"
  
  "Where would you start on something like that?" I shrugged. "Even the Revered Elder hadn't heard of anything like this before. And the one person I met who ever had still had no idea where the other case involved got their powers. As far as anyone still alive knew, she might well have been born with them."
  
  "What, no common factors between you and them at all?" Firewatch analyzed.
  
  "They weren't even the same species." Jane said. "Alex is human, they were a dragon."
  
  I blinked. "Wait, now that she's phrased it like that... there are two common factors. First off, both known cases happened on the same world."
  
  "-you're right." Jane said wonderingly. "We only just started dimension travelling, or I'd already have noticed that. It's absolutely, completely beyond the bounds of coincidence that that is a coincidence. Not unless people with your power are common enough in the dimensions to pop up everywhere, but not even a vast dimension-spanning Empire that has conquered millions and millions of worlds for mlilenia seems to have a page in their playbook for you."
  
  "You said two things in common." Firewatch thought out loud. "What's the other?"
  
  I looked at Jane. "Both myself and the prior Unconquerable fought the same arch-nemesis." I finished gravely.
  
  "Spirits." Jane turned pale and sat down. "So..." she shuddered. "Obviously you're not of the Horrors, but-" She winced. "Okay, if the only way we can find out more about what's going on with you is to talk to the Great Hunter again, then I move that we can live with not knowing!"
  
  "Horrors?" Firewatch asked us. "Tyrannon style mystic stuff?"
  
  "Worse." I answered her. "Ask the Revered Elder or other mystics around that tier about what 'the Qlippoth' is if you want to know more. Which you probably don't."
  
  "Unless they're an immediate danger, no." Firewatch agreed. "We've got enough to deal with already, and you don't have a grandmum who's a witch without learning that you don't go curiously poking into mystic stuff unless you are one. Not unless you don't have any other choice."
  
  "Wise choice." Jane agreed.
  
  "It's been a real pleasure to get to know everyone here, you more than most." I complimented Charlotte. "Which is why I'm sad to say that after the battle is over..." I chewed my lip. "Me, Cat, and Jane will probably be moving on. Because I can't imagine staying here, on a world full of billions of people who are starting to see me as some kind of savior space god." I shook my head violently.
  
  "I think I understand." Charlotte agreed sadly. "It would be like if I suddenly plugged into a Cosmic Whatever and started going around like I was a starship dreadnaught in a dress. Say goodbye to ever being able to just take the suit off and go down to the corner for a fish and chips." She sighed. "Pity. I was really looking forward to having you as a teammate. Permanently, I mean."
  
  "But sadly, Miss Tompion, I am married." I deliberately misunderstood her.
  
  "Yeah, and I'm gay." she threw back cheerfully. "So there you are, twice out of luck!"
  
  "Oh, so it wasn't my imagination that you and Sidestep have been-?" Jane teased her, to Charlotte's incandescent blush.
  
  "Jemma's not-!" she denied, before continuing more embarrassedly. "It's just... it turns out that we've got a lot in common, you know? It's a real pity that she ended up on the other side."
  
  "Well, she's not there now." I pointed out practically. "So unless you think she's going right back to villainy after the war's over-"
  
  "Colin's still stuck in Blackhall Two so I haven't had a chance to try pitching him on the idea of recruiting for her the New Knights." Charlotte admitted. "But it's not like she's got a lot of prospects outside the super life, even with a clean record. Reputation sticks even if the rap sheet doesn't, and Ironmaster's made enemies in most every tech company in Western Europe."
  
  "Dr. Goldwing's right here," Jane pointed out, "and she'd be a natural fit for the London Watch. And if you weren't both on the same team then it would be even easier for you, because you wouldn't have to worry about fraternization rules."
  
  "Now why didn't I think of that?" Charlotte facepalmed. "Thanks, you're a life-saver!"
  
  "How's the new suit coming along?" I changed the subject.
  
  "I've just about got the kinks out of it." she said. "Steelgrave's still whining about getting it back, the berk. Hah, as if! Maybe we'll return his property to him after the war's over and his pardon's actually signed - in pieces - but we are like hell trusting him with so much as a bent pencil until after the Empire's gone." She shook her head. "I'll have to build myself a new one after it's all over, of course. This is just an emergency measure, in the long run it's always best to stick with things you know how to build and maintain yourself. But I've learned a lot helping reverse-engineer this stuff, so the next model's still going to be a very nice upgrade."
  
  "Speaking of, Cat and your old suit?" Jane asked her.
  
  "Oh, she's fine." Firewatch assured us. "I got the specs all downloaded in her head, and Alex knows enough engineering to back her up there. You shouldn't have any problem being totally self-sufficient with it or whatever new suit you custom-fit for her from it wherever you go from now on, so long as you can find parts. As for fighting in it? I'd still want her to get more practice before trying to do any air-to-air combat or tactical air support in it, but she's an entirely competent ground-fighter and she can fly well enough to get around outside of fights."
  
  "So, it's all over today but the shouting then." I agreed.
  
  "Yeah." Firewatch said, standing up and sealing her armor helmet. "Come on. Briefing's about to start, and everyone's already here. But before we go, just one more thing-"
  
  "Which is?" I said.
  
  "Off what you said about your power being some sort of 'Unconquerable' mystic avatar thing." Firewatch said. "Look, 'Wild Man' was a good call-sign for a commando and black ops specialist but it just doesn't work when you're flying out to take on an alien starfleet with your bare hands. So me and several of the others were already trying to brainstorm a new one to give you before we went out to introduce you to all the other heroes today, and not coming up with much. But if being Unconquerable is what you really are - and isn't that a good omen for us! - then now I know exactly what new code name you could take. Invictus."
  
  "Too pompous." I immediately disagreed.
  
  "Well I like it." Jane agreed firmly. "It's got that nice classical resonance. 'Wild Man' was originally a teammate's joke anyway, you know that. And you know Cat at least as well as I do, Alex, so which one is she more likely to vote for?" she grinned lopsidedly at me.
  
  "... never get married, Charlotte." I said to Firewatch portentously. "And if you do, then never go crazy enough to let yourself be outnumbered."
  
  "Oh you know you love it, you just won't admit it." Jane poked me cheerfully as we all headed down to the briefing room.
  
  We were several of the last to arrive in the assembly hall. The long-range telegates had been busy today, as heroes from all around the world had been assembling. We were all currently in 'Green Mountain', the massive underground redoubt that President McDonnell had been using as his command post throughout the war, and we were just one of several musters that were currently taking place around the world at this time.
  
  "Good morning." Diadem, who was the acknowledged commander of the North American hero contingent and also acting as the briefing officer, greeted us from the podium. Sir Gareth, who'd been informally selected by his peers as overall field commander for today's operation, stood nearby.
  
  "Today is the day we liberate the Earth." she said proudly. "Our best scientists have reconstructed HUGIN and constructed a cybernetic superweapon that can disable the Imperial gate network from ever reaching Earth again. All we need to do is get them a Reality Gate to plug into. And it will be our job to get them one."
  
  "Step one of the plan relies on our new trump card Invictus." she continued, and I sighed inwardly as everyone craned their head in their seats to look at where I was sitting front row center. "Both Dr. Amazing and the Revered Elder will be using their best gear and enchantments to help get him through the Imperial defenses on the far side of the Moon so he can succeed where Vanguard was taken unawares. Once the main Reality Gate is scrap, Helmuth will have no choice but to move in his transports and hot-drop one of the backup gates planetside."
  
  "Before someone retorts 'And he'll bring his entire fleet to do it!'," she continued briskly, "I'll reveal a piece of information that up until now we've been keeping very close to our vest." She smiled widely. "Two days ago we finally got through on interstellar channels." She turned to where the Champions, a local superteam from Millennium City (formerly known as Detroit) were sitting to look at their large, metallic strongman. "Ironclad, the Perseid Empire is bringing in their fleets, and two alien races called the Se'ecra and the Mon'dabi are coming with them. After the battle, if you wish, you'll be able to go home."
  
  The roar of applause from everyone drowned out Ironclad's heartfelt sobs of relief and almost cut off her next remarks. "So as soon as the primary Reality Gate under construction is scrap, that will be the signal for three battle groups currently on station in interstellar dark space two light-years away to hot-jump straight into the inner system. Helmuth won't have a chance to formulate a leisurely response - he'll have to deploy as many of his frontline combatants as he can on the battle line to screen his remaining transports as they go for an emergency drop on Earth. Once he's between the hammer and the anvil, only immediate reinforcements from home will save him. And he'll know it."
  
  "Do we know where he'll deploy the planetary gate?" an someone called out form the crowd.
  
  "No." Diadem said. "Helmuth will be in a rush, and picking any spot of flat ground he can find for it on the fly. But that's why we've changed our op-tempo over the past week and made almost no use of mystic teleportation at all. We've done everything we can to make it look like all our Resistance groups have been thrown back to local operation only by their magical teleport interdiction. Hence all the harassment and panic. We'll have him thinking that if he picks a geographically isolated enough spot then he'll have enough hours to get his backup Gate up and running before more than a few scattered defenders - if any - reach wherever he is."
  
  She grinned wickedly. "When what will actually happen is that he'll be facing the single greatest concentration of superheroes that's ever been seen on Earth. Even more than mustered for the Hzeel Invasion or the Battle of Destroyer Island.." The big viewscreen flicked on with logistical diagrams and photos. "The Revered Elder will not be with us in the main assault, but that'll be because wherever the Dimensional Empire sets up they'll be using as many of their remaining adepts as possible to interdict the sight. And that much magical interdiction will tell him exactly where to go. His job will be to use that targeting fix to magically transport in the main teleport beacons that we've been constructing. Every single one of you will have a long-distance teleport harness built on the Invader model. And when the signal goes up, every one of us, from all three of the main concentration points on the globe, will all blink in at once and hit the ground shooting."
  
  She continued gravely. "This one's going to be all or nothing, people. One final throw of the dice, with nothing held back. We won't know what we're dropping into except for very last-minute intelligence at best, and we won't have any lines of retreat. If we can break the Imperial defenders on the gate and capture it intact - and never forget, we will need it intact - then we win." She lifted her chin proudly. "And if we can't, then we're all dead."
  
  "Invictus, are you are ready?" SIr Gareth asked me, and I stood to attention.
  
  "Ready, sir!" I theatrically replied.
  
  "Once you've taken out the gate, you're a strategic reserve." Diadem said to me. "Back up the space battle if you can, but be ready to drop back Earthside the instant I call you. Everybody else, split up into your assigned teams and we'll have your team leaders do the more detailed briefing. Then it's just sitting and waiting on ready-five until Helmuth gives us a drop point to go for."
  
  "Then I'll escort you to the launch point." Sir Gareth announced, and myself, Netcat, and Frosty all left the hall with him. We rode up in an elevator to the surface, and stepped out to breathe the chill spring air of the Rocky Mountains.
  
  "How peaceful it all looks." I couldn't help but observe.
  
  "And may it continue to look this peaceful in days to come." Sir Gareth said, as both my wives hugged me and wished me luck. "Alexander, before you go, one last thing." He smiled and drew his sword. "The enchantment on this blade defeats any armor and cuts any metal. Regardless of what technology or mysticism the Dimensional Empire may have shielded the Reality Gate with, even if they have by some incredible stroke of misfortune evolved a countermeasure to you they will still not have anticipated this." He handed the blade to me hilt-first. "I'll see you at the battle groundside, you can give it back to me then."
  
  "Not going to give him the scabbard too?" Cat joked.
  
  "The last time I fought for the fate of the kingdom and failed to bring the scabbard with me, I lost." Sir Gareth replied to her. "So please forgive me for not wishing to tempt fate twice."
  
  Jane suddenly went bolt upright in realization and grabbed my wrist to peer closer at the archaic runes engraved into the sword blade. "Take me up." she translated, whispering in awe, before turning my hand over to peer closely at the runes on the other side. "Cast me away." She stared accusingly at Sir Gareth. "This is Excalibur!" she exclaimed, and both Cat and I inhaled in shock.
  
  "Yes, but please don't tell anyone." Sir Gareth asked her quietly. "People would make such a dreadful fuss over the whole thing."
  
  I looked at Sir Gareth as penetratingly as I could, examining his mystical aura as I hadn't since the first day I'd met him. With my further education in matters mystic since then, I realized that his augmentations weren't merely something akin to being a physical adept but also resulted from... a spirit pact? No, something like that, but not with another spirit, I realized. It was as if when he'd awakened to his gifts as a young man at the Battle of Dunkirk his soul had been augmented by contact with... his soul? A two-souled man who was yet ultimately the same soul in both lives? But if he were a reincarnated soul who bore Excalibur, then that meant-
  
  Major General Sir Gareth Somerset, Victoria Cross, Knight Companion of the Garter, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, at one time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom... and who in a prior life had been Arthur Pendragon, King of Britain and Grand Master of the Knights of the Round Table, nodded back at me respectfully.
  
  Of course. I'd stood there in Blackhall's first big meeting and heard him say with my own ears that he could potentially have claimed the throne for himself, but he didn't think it his proper place - any longer, I finally realized. And he'd originally awakened to his powers at Dunkirk - which immediately before the boat-lift had been England's single darkest moment of the war that had itself been immortalized as England's darkest hour. And even though he'd never revealed himself as a king reborn, he'd still eventually come to rule England again as Prime Minister. Merlin's prophecy had been fulfilled in every exact literal detail, and literally no one had noticed.
  
  And as had just become apparent, Sir Gareth must have gone to considerable effort to arrange for that to happen. No wonder he'd used the coincidence of his first name in this life and the young age at which he'd manifested to take up the iconography of Sir Gareth Beaumayn. Any suitably sensitive mystic would have possibly been able to detect his reincarnation and his connection to the ancient magics of Camelot... but by claiming the mantle of the most junior knight of the Round Table, it was the perfect Purloined Letter to keep anyone from realizing that he had in fact been the first among them.
  
  "Go with God, my friend." he blessed me. "And may He be with us all on this day."
  
  I bowed to him, at a loss for words. And then, with sword in hand, I flew into the sky.
  
  Because if I was going to be the champion of an entire planet today, then at least I'd do this thing in style.
  
  
  
  The stealth gear that Dr. Amazing had built for me wasn't quite up to dealing with the globe of warships anchored so tightly around the Reality Gate that they each had several hundred percent overlap on their detectors. The stealth spells that the Revered Elder had cast on me likewise were gradually eroded away by the multiple layers of detection spells and auguries that the amassed Imperial mystics had been working on. So I barely got halfway in before I took the full force of every Imperial starship that could bring its guns and missiles to bear in an exquisitely synchronized broadside. No wonder Vanguard had been taken out, if this had been the sort of firepower he'd flown into unawares.
  
  But sadly for the Dimensional Empire, I wasn't Vanguard. And so I horrified Admiral Helmuth and all his men as I tanked enough firepower to buckle a continental plate and kill off an entire planet on my face and flew straight through it. And I nodded to myself as I detected one last-ditch effort on final approach... a magical spacewarping-and-illusion combo field keyed to me and me alone that would have ensured that any last-ditch charge I made against the Reality Gate would be undetectably curved off to one side and miss, But with Excalibur in hand I didn't even need to ramp up to defeat this effort, and the fleet firepower cut out as I flew close enough to the incomplete Reality Gate that they risked hitting their own space installation shooting at me. I deliberately let the magical field grasp me and subtly deflect me aside, allowing Helmuth the hope of false victory... but Excalibur, too small for his sensors to detect, continued on my original flight path where I'd thrown it. And it cored directly through one of the giant superconducting loops on the containment vessel for the primary power plant, and I let the magical distortion field swoop me neatly through a ballistic curve to resume my original flight path on the other side and let Excalibur's hilt neatly smack into my hand-
  
  -as the detonating power core behind me took out the 800-meter wide incomplete Reality Gate like a miniature Death Star explosion.
  
  I could only imagine the mounting expression of horror on Helmuth's face as his number one option for re-establishing a stable dimensional link to the Empire was vaporized. And several light-seconds away from Earth, several stealthed probes of the Perseid armada would be registering that explosion as soon as the lightcone crossed them. Immediately after that, the starships of several of the regional galactic powers - all that could be mustered in time - would enter the Solar System to pull Helmuth's fleet out of position. My job would be to support the fleet, but also to keep any last-ditch bombardment vessels from going at Earth. But that latter shouldn't be too much a danger- Helmuth couldn't orbitally bombard the place he was going to hot-drop his backup Gate on without destroying it too, and the heroes wouldn't teleport in to give him a target until he'd already deployed the gate. And for all his ruthless amorality, Helmuth was too competent a commander to devote any firepower away from the primary point of effort during a desperate battle. The odds were overwhelming that he'd save all of his warships to shoot at our interstellar reinforcements with, just as he'd deploy all his remaining ground combat reserves to reinforce the secondary Gate's planetary landing.
  
  As neither killing Helmuth - someone had to be left alive to order the surrender to us when the time came, and best that it be someone with unbroken continuity of command and almost certainly steadier nerves than any of his subordinates - or destroying the ship the backup Reality Gate was on was part of the plan, I didn't start tearing into the dreadnaughts and troop transports present. Instead I left the Moon behind me and took up station in cislunar space, waiting for-
  
  I looked away from the expected arrival site of the reinforcing starfleets to see a lone individual flying directly at me through interstellar space, his face set in a rictus of rage and wreathed in terrible energies from the Imperial tech hastily bolted onto - or implanted within - his body. I hastily conjured a temporary sword belt and scabbard of mystical energy and strapped it on, snugging Excalibur into the sheath and fastening the straps tight around its hilt. I was definitely going to need my hands free for this-
  
  The brainwashed, possibly cyborg'ed Vanguard slammed into me at a high enough fraction of the speed of light that I had to deliberately allow the hit in order to keep him from nuking half of India with the shockwave of him hitting atmosphere. I felt my skin burn with the energy of whatever was wrapped around his hands.
  
  His next attempt to haymaker my head off was dealt with by judo-throwing him into the moon, and then I noted with horror that his merely touching the lunar surface had set off a multi-megaton nuclear detonation at his impact point. My enhanced mind put together all the data I'd observed so far and realized that he'd been rigged with a magnetic suspension field that was charged with particles of anti-matter. Every blow he laid on me or that I laid on him would release a measured dose of anti-particles into the field to more violently enhance the reaction. And if main reservoir of anti-matter implanted in his body were broken open or detonated-
  
  I focused some magical energy into a skin-tight force field around me to prevent further contact and charged to the attack. Vanguard and I clashed again and again, his greater experience at this level of super-combat countering my superior martial arts technique. The meatball cyber-surgery the Empire had done to him had charged him up with all sorts of deflector field generators, kinetic damage reflectors, the anti-matter damage shield, and a set of metabolic boosters that I began to realize were burning him up from the inside out. They'd turned him not just into a brainwashed living weapon but one that was literally destroying himself with the force of how much they'd overcharged him. A last-ditch desperate attempt to counter me.
  
  A quick magical mind probe revealed that right now Vanguard's mind was set in an illusion of battling his greatest enemy. No wonder Helmuth had wanted the parley with me - if I'd taken the deal than he'd have won, but even if I hadn't then he'd still walk away with enough high-resolution audio-visual footage of me that Vanguard's mind could be reconditioned so that the recognition of my face and voice could be re-keyed to memories of some sort of Darkseid-wannabe that he'd fought in the past. And just for the added motivation, they'd then thrown in false memories that I'd done things to Vanguard's family and friends that would made the Joker vomit. Oh, and just to be absolute bastards about it the Imperial cybernetics team had also put an EEG monitor on Vanguard's brainwaves. Any lapse from his berserk state - such as by, oh, me or Diadem snapping him out of the mind control - would immediately detonate the anti-matter bomb.
  
  I mourned at how ultimately pointless it all was. A suicide-overcharged Vanguard could have handily beaten even an equal to him to death in short order, but wasn't going to do a single goddamned thing versus me. They could overstrain every cell in this man's body until they all exploded and not even ruffle my hair. They could cram enough tech into him to make him a space battleship and that wouldn't do the job. Not even the anti-matter was getting it done. Earth's mightiest hero - until I'd come along - could do absolutely nothing in battle against me except die. But no amount of force that I could exert, however great, would be able to save his life.
  
  But then again, Admiral Helmuth's problem wasn't - I couldn't even call it a faliure of imagination, really. It had taken a lot of imagination to set up a trap this elaborate and depraved, even if he'd likely have preferred to set Vanguard to hunting me down without losing the Reality Gate first. No, Helmuth's problem was that there were things that he simply didn't understand, that nobody had ever taught him.
  
  Such as the simple fact that if you were trying to save people, then main force wouldn't always be the best tool for the job.
  
  I deliberately gave Vanguard the clinch, and then lowered my field to slap my bare hand directly against his chest. Ignoring the bite of the anti-particles and the horrid blisters that they began to raise on his skin, I pumped enough magical energy to shake a city into the most powerful healing spell I could imagine.
  
  Vanguard screamed in agony as his instantly-regenerating flesh tore and healed and tore again, as every bit of the Imperial cybernetics they'd implanted in him was violently ejected from his body. The instant the main anti-matter reserve was free of his skin I immediately hauled us both away from it as quickly as I could, outracing even the lightspeed front of the blast-wave itself. Freed of his terrible burden I let the man go limp in my arms, all of the gross damage that had been done to him knitting and healing underneath the impetus of my magic. The illusion on his mind broke with the removal of the neural chips that had been constantly jamming it into his brain, without my even having to do anything further, and with the unconscious and healing Vanguard cradled in my arms I turned towards Earth. I landed outside a randomly-selected county hospital somewhere in the midwestern US - I didn't want to lead any orbital observers back to any of the Resistance hideouts, so any small city without an immediate Invader presence would do for now - and handed the comatose Vanguard off to the emergency room attendants. Between my magic and his powers he'd heal just fine so long as he had a comfortable bed, and this was all I had time to do for him before I had to get back in the battle.
  
  The primary Reality Gate was gone. Our reinforcements were here. All the heroes of Earth were ready and waiting.
  
  Your move, Helmuth.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: And it's finally time for the endgame!
  
  I would like to credit poster Taliesin for so accurately calling ahead of time what I had been foreshadowing all along (note the references in Blackhall part 1 and Battle of London parts 1 and 2 in particular) as to who Sir Gareth really was. Because yes, he's a reincarnation of King Arthur. He was born Gareth Somerset in this life and he still is, but he's also got all the memories of his past life plus the sort of mystic boosts that you get in a superhero universe's version of Camelot.
  
  And no, strictly speaking Alex didn't need the sword to get the job done. But NPCs do not always have total knowledge, so Sir Gareth offered it anyway. And if Alex has been offered something that precious then he's hardly going to be so rude as to refuse to use it, now is he?
  
  And yes, Suicide Bomber Brainwashed Vanguard. To steal a phrase from the Fifth Doctor, the Dimensional Empire find it disturbingly easy to justify themselves.
  
  One of my regrets is that in a first-person story like this there's a lot of side-stories going on in the background that I simply don't have the time to tell, let alone the camera focus. You could get an entire fanfic out of Sidestep's redemption arc and her growing romance with Firewatch - the thematic opposites of the working-class girl who only ever got opportunities offered from the wrong sorts of people versus the wealthy third-generation legacy heroine, their shared bonding over technology, Sidestep's growing realization that just because she was a bad guy did not mean she was bad guy, etc, etc. But I reduce it to a couple paragraphs of indirect mention because that's all I've got opportunity for and I'm already putting out an insane amount of words as is. And multiply that by all the other characters I've got floating around out there in this giant superhero epic. God, even Sir Gareth only got a lot of the development he did because he's Alex's mentor figure for this new phase of his life.
  
  Still, I'm glad at least some people are still enjoying it. And now all I've got to do is finish freeing the Earth from an alien invasion... and then take a break while I figure out where the hell I can possibly go from here.
  
  Oh, and lastly, I've redone some of the chapter numbers and titles for the Dimensional Invasion arc because having it all be one giant seven-plus part chapter kind of defeats the entire point of having titles and numbers. And now that I'm finishing it, I've got a better idea of where to put the breakpoints. And so...
  
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  Halfway between Earth and the orbit of Mars, the sky erupted with ships.
  
  The flashes of hyperspace transition filled a region of space over a million miles wide like sparklers on the Fourth of July. The Perseid fleet was in the vanguard, flanked by the Se'ecra on the left and the Mon'dabi on the right. Helmuth was actually outnumbered in ship hulls, although he had more capital ships against the lighter fleets Earth's new allies had sent.
  
  We'd only gotten an outline of the interstellar diplomacy involved in getting them here, but the Se'ecra apparently were the dominant species of a multi-planet species called the Conjoined Civilizations Republic, while the Mon'dabi ran a loose alliance of worlds called the Mon'dabi Federation. The Perseid Empire was actually uneasy rivals to them both, but was more of a constitutional monarchy now in practice than the old Empire it had used to be. We'd called the Perseids first as they were the only species we actually had a Perseid native - the stranded and star-lost Perseid scout known as 'Ironclad' of the Champions - to help us communicate with, but upon hearing both the situation and the odds against them the Perseids had actually called in the two neighboring polities they were in a cold war with to propose a tripartite alliance for the purpose of keeping an existential threat to them all out of the Milky Way galaxy before they really got in. Which said at least some good things about Earth's odds of peacefully coexisting with them in the future.
  
  At any rate, the Imperial tech level looked to be only incrementally and not vastly superior to the ships that had arrived here. Which only made sense, because the Dimensional Empire hadn't had any pressure to substantially drive naval R&D in centuries at least. Their tech was extremely polished, but it had been a long long while since they'd had any evolutionary pressure at all. While those of us 'younger races' had had to scramble like hell just to keep up with each other. Still, Helmuth had an advantage in tonnage even though he had a disadvantage in numbers, and also had somewhat superior firepower and shields. Even with surprise, our allied starfleet was still attacking at a disadvantage - particularly since Helmuth was on the defensive.
  
  And while I could destroy that entire Imperial fleet if I really tried, I really didn't want to make myself that indifferent to that kind of mass slaughter. In addition to being under specific orders not to reveal that kind of power without absolute necessity. Earth was making a premature and rather hectic First Contact with the Milky Way's interstellar galactic community as is, the last thing we needed to do was induce some kind of panic reaction at Earth allegedly having the power to vaporize entire starfleets.
  
  So I hung down low in the ionosphere and magically masked my signature. Hopefully Helmuth would think that I'd died or at least been seriously injured by that final anti-matter explosion from the bomb they'd put inside Vanguard and that I'd just barely removed in time, so he wouldn't consider my lack of joining the fight in space suspicious or worry about my intercepting-
  
  My head snapped up as I saw the flashes of starships micro-jumping in barely a light-second away from Earth, only to relax as I saw that they were several squadrons of Se'ecra destroyers. Given that I was going to be fighting in space today I'd made sure to study the pictures that we'd been sent by our new interstellar allies so we could tell their ships from the Imperial ships.
  
  "Attention all Imperial forces. Know that the Conjoined Civilizations Republic, in alliance with the Mon'dabi Federation and the Perseid Empire, acts to prevent the barbarity of attacking a pre-spaceflight world with orbital bombardment. Any Imperial ship that attempts to contest Earth orbital space will be summarily destroyed without quarter."
  
  Shit! Didn't we tell them that the entire point of the plan was to make Helmuth do a planetary landing-?
  
  I closed my eyes and drifted in space while my astral self projected over to the CCR squadron. I quickly found which one was the command ship and materialized my astral form to visbility and audibility on the bridge. Which was manned by... giant insects, apparently.
  
  "I am Invictus, of the Earth defense forces. Can you understand me?"
  
  "Our translator software has been calibrated with the language files the Perseid provided." the bug at the center console greeted me. "I am Commodore Thak'kra of the Republic Navy. What need brings you to me?"
  
  "We need Helmuth to land that planetary Gate where we can capture it, something that can't be done for as long as your ships are here." I told the Commodore. "Were you notified?"
  
  "Yes." the Commodore surprised me. "We are intended as a feint, to keep System Admiral Helmuth from growing overly suspicious. If he must fight his way through us to reach Earth, then he will not suspect that we actually wish him to do so."
  
  "That will teach me to offer unsolicited advice to an expert at his own craft." I complimented the commodore. "And with the orbitals defended against last-minute bombardment, I can rejoin the ground battle."
  
  "Let us each fight the battle they know best, and good fortune to us all." Thak'kra agreed with me, and I withdrew my astral projection and got back to work.
  
  Helmuth proved slightly cannier than expected and used a thrust of his lighter units at the Se'ecra as cover for sending several heavy troop transports down at Earth, to do planetary landings at several widely scattered spots around the globe. However, only one of the three ships had a coterie of lesser mystics onboard shielding the vessel from magical teleporting, and that was the one on track to land in the Maldives. A quick check of the other two ships to verify that the Gate wasn't on either of them, and we now knew where it was.
  
  The Maldive archipelago. A location on the Earth's equator, so as to make a slightly easier landing and departure orbit for spaceships using the gate. An isolated island chain over 400 miles southwest of the southern end of India, so a place with zero local Resistance activity, almost no military, and a long ways to travel for any of Earth's defenders. Across an open ocean where you can easily see them coming and shoot them down. For a man having to do this on the fly, this wasn't a bad choice at all.
  
  Such a pity we were one step ahead of you, Helmuth. His ships wouldn't even be on the ground for minutes, meaning that all I had to do was pass the word back to Command and the Revered Elder could have the teleport pylons in place before they even landed. Helmuth deployed all his remaining Imperial Guard supers, an entire brigade of Red Elites with armor support, and several companies of combat engineers. The Planetary Gate, all eighty-plus meters tall of it, had already been assembled and in the cargo hold the entire time and it was just a matter of lowering it to the ground with construction-crane-sized anti-gravity pods, setting up a fusion generator, and plugging it in.
  
  And then the very air blazed with the auras of over two thousand salvaged Imperial jump-harnesses being run at full overload, as the amassed superheroes - and more than a few villains and neutrals - of an entire planet all came together like a fist.
  
  The battle was sheer chaos. Imperial energy blasts and railgun slugs flew everywhere, and the atmosphere was saturated with pulson bolts, plasma beams, bullets, grenades, rockets, missiles, even arrows and throwing stars, in reply. Over there I saw a giant silverback gorilla with a backpack-powered laser minigun tearing through a platoon of Imperial soldiers. Next to him was a woman in a purple body stocking throwing spells out of a Doctor Strange movie. Power-armored heroes of every variety flew through the sky or tromped heavily across the ground, including one scarlet mecha the size of a three-story building. What appeared to be a blonde Norse goddess with a two-handed sword was busy cleaving through the main gun of an Imperial grav tank before back-flipping off of the turret to do a diving dropkick on the same big lizardman I'd fought at the Battle of London. There was even a guy in a crazy fox-themed costume shooting a ping pong ball gun at the imperial troops and somehow still knocking people out with it.
  
  And there were hundreds more fights as crazy or crazier going on all around us, and for all their discipline and skill the Imperial troops were simply too confused and split up to do more than fight as desperate individuals. We'd taken them completely off guard and then dropped them into a storm of chaos, and they simply never had a chance to get set at all.
  
  I took a moment and hurriedly looked around until I saw the familiar sight of a distinguished silver-haired gentleman in camouflage battledress punching his way through a squad of Red Elites with his bare hands, and flew over to Sir Gareth with Excalibur drawn and held out to him hilt-first.
  
  "Excuse me sir, I believe you dropped this!" I grinned at him, and he reached out and clasped his hand around the hilt.
  
  "Ah, just in time." Sir Gareth greeted me amiably, and I power-bolted the Imperial soldier about to shoot him in the back just as he lunged forward to skewer the one coming up behind me with an energy mace. Then we nodded to each other and got back to work. I blew a kiss to Cat and Jane as I flew over where they were busy being back-to-back badasses against an entire team of Imperial spellcasters, and since they were handily defeating their opposition left them to it with confidence as I took up position at the front of the lead wedge, and started hammering our way closer and closer to the Reality Gate.
  
  "Objective secure!" Diadem called away, the remaining Sentinels falling in around the command cell of Blackhall as we anchored the point. The Imperial troops redoubled their offensive, desperate to keep us from destroying their only way home, and Dr. Amazing and the Revered Elder both had to drop everything else they were doing and put up the most powerful wide-coverage force field they could to keep their stray shots from hitting the Gate.
  
  "In position!" Netcat said, her and Frosty coming up to one of the primary gate control panels. Frosty nodded and portal'ed out from there, to come back almost immediately carrying a large bulky satcom unit that we'd built ahead of time. Netcat nodded and started technomancing the control panel, overriding the security measures and allowing her to splice it into the network.
  
  "I am in contact with the Imperial Gate Network!" HUGIN said through the transmitter. "I am experiencing considerable resistance!"
  
  "Echo Mirage, come in now!" Netcat transmitted, and a hand-picked crew of dozens of hackers from all around the world - military SIGINT specialists and NSA types, talented civilians, even several talented gray hats and black hats - all plugged into their new cyberdecks and joined the attack, giving the Imperial cyberdefenses not one but multiple AI-level opponents in cybercombat all attacking directly through a primary node, with the vast capacity of HUGIN reinforcing all their efforts.
  
  "It's working!I" Netcat cried happily. "The Imperial intrusion countermeasures are layered thick enough that it makes Zurich-Orbital look like a pocket calculator, but none of it's on the AI level! There isn't even anything equivalent to semi-autonomous knowbot technology back home. All we need is time and we'll chew right through the ice!"
  
  "Then make the call." Sir Gareth said calmly, and the communications panel on the main control station started to glow. Within a minute, the hologram projector lit to reveal System Admiral Helmuth.
  
  "You!" he glared at Sir Gareth.
  
  "I am Major General Sir Gareth Somerset, call sign 'Beaumayn', acting as field commander of the Terran united forces." he introduced himself. "System Admiral Helmuth, we are currently in possession of your only functioning gate terminus. You cannot land another on Earth, and you cannot recapture this one before we destroy it."
  
  "I have an entire planet available for-" Helmuth began, only for his face to collapse into a stricken panic as I stepped within camera range of the holo-transmitter.
  
  "No you don't." I said to him. "Nothing can land on or take off from Earth without our permission."
  
  "This is Fleet Admiral Katasan of the Perseid Empire, Grand Commander of the allied fleets currently defending Sol III." a new voice broke in, as the Perseid commander was cut into the circuit. "I see our Terran allies have accomplished their end of the plan. Well done, warriors!"
  
  "System Admiral Helmuth, with one single act we can destroy your Reality Gate and trap your forces in this star system with no line of retreat." Sir Gareth said evenly. "You would be able to save perhaps one or two of your ships and only the smallest fraction of your forces by using non-Gate assisted dimensional transit. And while you currently have a slight advantage in forces in this star system, we have an entire galaxy potentially available to reinforce us later and you do not. We call upon you to spare your forces needless destruction."
  
  "So you can enslave us and steal all our technology? Go to the Breaker, primitives. We will die like soldiers, and hopefully we will take your insolent flyspeck of a planet with us!" Helmuth spat.
  
  "You misunderstand, System Admiral. We are not demanding your surrender, we are proposing an immediate cease-fire, followed by a supervised withdrawal of all your remaining forces from our solar system back through the Gate. We will then destroy the Gate after you are all safely home," Sir Gareth continued inexorably. "And then you will never invade our universe again."
  
  All of us present could almost see Helmuth's brain do the calculations. He knew that we knew that the Dimensional Empire could simply try again years later, once the dimensional fabric had stabilized enough to permit another long-range transit to Earth's dimensional axis without the added stability afforded by an operating Reality Gate at both ends of the equation. But he also knew that if we forced him to fight to the death then even with all of our forces and myself we still risked losing large chunks of the Earth's population and would take a terrible toll in lost men and ships. So forcing the Empire back through the gate with this kind of stand-off, and then relying on the vigilance of the galactic community to bottleneck any further invasion fleets in Earth's solar system, would be a rational move on our part. And for all that his own career would be in the dumps for his failure, V'Han was immortal. She could easily try again decades or centuries later, after any possible vigilance on Earth's end would long since be gone, and in the meantime his sacrifice of his own career, his accepting being relieved in disgrace rather than honorably dying in battle, would preserve the lives of his men.
  
  We almost felt guilty taking advantage of our opponent's virtues - twisted and misapplied as they were - to manipulate him into doing exactly what we wanted, but Helmuth was simply too good an officer to make a stupidly stubborn choice when offered a smarter one.
  
  "All Imperial ships, cease fire immediately." System Admiral Helmuth ordered reluctantly. "All troops on Earth, cease firing and withdraw to laager."
  
  "Alliance fleet, cease fire and withdraw to standby positions." Fleet Admiral Katasan immediately ordered.
  
  "All Resistance forces, the cease-fire is now in effect." Sir Gareth broadcast on all channels, and the din of battle slowly faded around us.
  
  "Now what?" Helmuth spat.
  
  "You will not be allowed to bring the bulk of your fleet to Earth." Sir Gareth said. "We have your surviving engineers and sufficient technical knowledge of our own to open the Reality Gate. You will be allowed to use your large troop transports and/or your warship's lifeboats to enter Earth atmosphere and make the transit back home. Any attempt to move forces through the Gate to Earth immediately voids the truce and will have us scuttle the Gate. Any attempt on your part to attack or leave forces behind will do likewise."
  
  "I demand the right to destroy my ships and purge all classified databases rather than allow you to capture them." System Admiral Helmuth countered.
  
  "In return for which, anything that we have already taken possession of prior to the truce remains fair spoils of war." Sir Gareth replied.
  
  "I could hardly stop you from doing that anyway." Helmuth fumed quietly, before continuing with leaden resignation. "Very well. I accept your terms."
  
  It wasn't quite as easy as that, and we had to actually teleport out some of Helmuth's senior officers to convince several particularly stubborn ground garrison commanders that we hadn't hacked the Imperial comm channels. As we'd had control of the Reality Gate throughout we dealt with the problem of the reinforcements on the other end of the gate waiting to rush us by simply syncing our gate to a different Imperial navy fleet depot, one that hadn't been assembling for further Earth-side operations, and sending Helmuth's men back to there. Even then he'd had to invoke his authority as expedition force commander, backed up by the Imperial Warrant that V'Han herself had apparently given him along with the Imperial Guard and Red Lion reinforcements he'd received, to keep the Imperial commander on the other side from ruining the whole thing. Because we hadn't been kidding when we'd said that we'd crash the wormhole ourselves rather than allow the Empire to reinforce through it.
  
  But despite the tense Mexican stand-off, the truce held, and the next few hours apparently saw nothing except the slow, steady withdrawal of all Imperial troops from Earth and the surrounding space. Helmuth's warships detonated out in the void one by one, in giant flares of anti-matter/matter interactions as their power cores deliberately breached, and wave after wave of lifeboats, troop shuttles, and supply and transport ships slowly floated down into our atmosphere and then through the vortex we'd carefully opened up and was gone.
  
  The very last shuttle to pass through was Helmuth's own pinnace, and before he transited the Gate he landed and, accompanied by a small honor guard, he tromped on over to see us. "You understand that I make no promises that eschew retaliation." Helmuth said with stiff honor. "The Empire will return to punish you all for your insufferable insolence."
  
  "As soon as it will be able to, yes." Sir Gareth agreed with him coolly, as our combined glares and gloating smirks all hit Helmuth like a wave. "Have you anything further to say before we conclude?"
  
  "Your world has never been able to bring itself peace, and neither have your only slightly less barbaric star-faring friends." Helmuth shook his head. "Why could you not stop questioning the Imperiatrix's grace and benevolence?"
  
  "We weren't questioning it, Admiral." I burst out, pushed beyond all endurance. "We were denying its existence."
  
  Sir Gareth curled one corner of his lip amusedly. "My young friend speaks for me in every particular."
  
  "The Empire is Eternal." Helmuth chanted formally. "And I pray only that I will live to see all of your comeuppance." he spat behind him as he turned to reboard his shuttle.
  
  "Don't pray too hard." Netcat murmured softly, and all two thousand of us present watched with bated breath as the last Imperial presence in Earth's solar system floated into the wormhole above us and disappeared.
  
  "All is in readiness, Netcat." HUGIN said. "The energy surges of the past several hours of continual Gate transits have provided perfect cover for Echo Mirage's slow penetration of the Imperial Gate Network. All that remains is the final element."
  
  I placed a reassuring hand on Netcat's shoulder as she stepped up to the control panel and prepared to jack herself in. She'd spent several days using her Resonance and sprites to augment the big coding project that the most brilliant minds of this Earth had all worked upon. Between them all, working from a framework of everything Netcat had been taught about the events in question in her university and military SIGINT studies back in Shadowrun and with her Resonance to supply key parts that were beyond the reach of conventional software engineering, they'd been able to produce a divergent evolution of the most devastating digital terror weapon ever known. Several dozen of the most brilliant hackers on Earth, augmented by the Echo Mirage technology and with the inside knowledge of Imperial cybersecurity procedures that Steelgrave had given us, had made enough of a breach into the depths of the massed data network formed by the meshed wormhole buses of all the Reality Gates in the Empire to deploy it. And now all it needed was one technomancer to initiate it.
  
  "Execute." Netcat thought firmly into the system with all of her mind, and Ragnarok went live.
  
  The Jormungand virus that had caused the Crash 2.0 back on Earth-Shadowrun had been an unholy mixture of the pre-Technomancer otaku's version of the Dissonance, viral worm code, cascading IC routines, and VI-level semi-autonomous knowbot code. Its purpose had been to flood the global Matrix with Dissonance, the corrupt and toxic version of the Resonance, and render it unusable forever. As a non-Dissonant technomancer Cat couldn't use or program Dissonant code, and simply coming up with even a vague analogue of some of the things that Jormungand had done in a Resonant version had made her shiver. Still, we hadn't needed to drive the Reality Gate Network into howling storms of cybernetic madness the way Jormungand had so savaged the original Matrix on Earth-Shadowrun that the only solution had been to reengineer the entire thing almost from scratch.
  
  We just needed to crash the whole damn thing.
  
  The Echo Mirage team had spent all the time that the soldiers and sailors of Helmuth's fleet had been transitioning through in first penetrating the dozens and dozens of layers of code defenses that kept the cybernetic side of the Reality Gate network from being hacked through a gate terminus at all. Fortunately for us, while the defenses were entirely thorough and competent they also hadn't been seriously tested in God only knew how long and so between the sheer stealth capable to Shadowrun deckers running maximum masking and sleaze utilities and the complete lack of anticipation of this particular attack, they'd made it through without sounding any alarms. At that point it was only the work of less than an hour to seed Ragnarok 'program eggs' into the core architecture of dozens of gates around the Dimensional Empire, concentrating most particularly on the Reality Gates serving high-end government and fleet nodes... in other words, the ones it would be most critical to keep in operation.
  
  Because that was the true diabolical nature of Jormungand, and hence of Ragnarok. Not only did it flood the wormhole network's control circuits with nigh-unstoppable cybernetic daemons, but even if the Imperial cyberneticians managed to crash one it would merely respawn at the nearest 'program egg'... only worse, because the adaptive nature of the cascading IC meant that every time you killed it, it would come back nastier than ever and adapted to whatever had defeated it last time. This is why no amount of normal countermeasures or deckers had been able to stop the Crash 2.0, and why it had continued on and on until each and every hardware cluster hosting a 'program egg' had been physically isolated from the network and destroyed.
  
  And unlike Jormungand, which had spent the bulk of its power on polluting the Matrix with more and more Dissonance wells, Ragnarok followed only three simple commands.
  
  First off, it would stealthily seed more 'program eggs' at semi-random across as much of the Gate network as it could reach, and so on in nigh-infinite recursion.
  
  Second off, it would do everything possible to lock out every other user and programmer other than itself from the network.
  
  And finally, it would run every Reality Gate it infected at maximum overload and in destructive resonance with 'neighboring' gates, spreading outward in a fractal pattern over the entire network, until every Reality Gate had not only physically destroyed itself but done so in a matter that would obsolete every pre-existing dimensional navigation benchmark the Dimensional Empire had ever computed for itself. They would literally have to rebuild and recalibrate the entire Reality Gate network from scratch, laboriously re-exploring and re-anchoring every single new universe back to the core network... and they couldn't even begin that job until the estimated several centuries' worth of dimensional turbulence we'd have stirred up would have faded.
  
  The Empire had been engineered by geniuses with millenia of time to work in to withstand almost every imaginable calamity, with contingencies piled on top of contingencies. But the very dimensional travel system that underlaid everything they did suddenly becoming semi-sentient and actively malevolent was a disaster beyond imagining. It would be as much of a horrifying Outside Context Problem to them as the Crash 1.0 and 2.0 had been to Earth-Shadowrun, only worse. The Revered Elder had worked with us to make sure that the dimensional storms we were about to raise would not affect the mystic balance of the multiverse, or magical dimensional travel. The Dimensional Empire's unique Assiatic-based method of technological dimension theory was a two-edged sword; it meant that it could ignore magical interdiction and jamming, but the same applied in reverse. So V'Han might still be able to personally travel the dimensions if she knew enough magic or had a sufficient mage on tap... but the ubiquitous, mass-produced, capital-scale mass transfer that the Empire had literally been built upon would be gone.
  
  Every individual galaxy in the Dimensional Empire would be cut off from every other one. Lower-ranking civil service officials wouldn't be able to receive orders or issue reports. The Imperial Legion chain of command would fall apart, with every Galactic Admiral now an independent sovereign - and it hadn't escaped us that the two rebellions that had come closest in the past to unseating the Dimensional Empire had been a long-term psionic conspiracy among its bureaucrats and a military coup by one of its seniormost military officials. As galactic economies in the Empire had been designed to be largely self-sufficient - hell, most individual planets except for the newest colonies were still able to feed and sustain their own populations during an emergency, the Imperiatrix wasn't an idiot - we wouldn't be causing mass starvation or apocalyptic collapses. But the effects would still be immense.
  
  Being unaging, V'Han would still be alive centuries from now when the dimensional resonance storms finally faded and the D-travel science she'd so painstaking perfected could begin to work again. But she'd done her work too well in making sure that no unaging rivals to her could exist anywhere in her Empire, and she'd be a generations-old legend by the time anyone outside of whatever galaxy she was currently trapped in would ever actualy see her again. And so the myth of her unfailing immortal wisdom, the whole 'Empire was Eternal' ethos, would have been smashed like a Faberge egg dropped from orbit.
  
  In one stroke, one rebel planet aided at the end by several local interstellar starfleets had shattered the oldest, largest, and most powerful empire in the history of creation.
  
  Because what else could possibly happen, when the people finally saw a Goddess bleed?
  
  
  
  We stuck around for the clean-up, of course. And that meant sticking around for the celebrations.
  
  We managed to escape being given All The Medals by the simple expedient of pointing out we didn't actually have valid citizenship anywhere at the time we'd done the deeds that earned those medals. So while Captain Masane finally got to process our immigration paperwork like he'd originally promised to on the night that the Empire had invaded, we at least ducked the awards ceremonies. The informal thanks and honors, however, still piled high enough to choke a Great Dragon.
  
  And on a more sober note, we'd also had funerals to attend. For our victory had not been without casualties. And while most of the dozens of heroes and thousands of soldiers and irregulars who'd fallen both at the Battle of the Gate or in any one of thousands of skirmishes around the globe had been unknown to us, several of them had been teammates or friends.
  
  Lt. Colonel John "Partisan" Grayson, Victoria Cross, was laid to rest in his native London, having died of wounds suffered in the final assault on the Reality Gate. He'd lingered long enough to say goodbye to the rest of Blackhall, and to receive the news of his reinstatement and final promotion from Sir Gareth himself, but his award for valor had been granted posthumously. James "Yeoman" Dennison, the brash archer on the London Watch who'd argued against resisting the Invaders on Blackhall's first night, had deliberately exposed himself to counter-sniper fire in order to snipe several Imperial combat engineers before they could finish destroying the Gate controls before we could capture them intact and had died before he'd hit the ground.
  
  And the Revered Elder, whose true name had long since passed out of living memory, had exerted his magic to the utmost in the battle - knowing all along as he did so that his elderly heart would not be able to take the strain.
  
  "God, I feel like such a fraud." I said softly as we stood over the humble grave in the Bhutanese mountaintops. The service had long since concluded and the mourners had scattered, leaving just us few behind.
  
  "Because you, unlike all the rest of us, are not vulnerable to death when you go to war?" Sir Gareth asked me, equally as softly.
  
  "How else?" I said. "I can't get credit for valor when I'm not risking anything."
  
  "Not being at physical risk is not the same as not being at risk." Sir Gareth said. "I know full well that the weight of the decision we made is immense. And that for the rest of our lives we will imagine the sheer amount of people in the former Dimensional Empire who are forever cut off from their home worlds, the epic dislocations that have occurred, and ask ourselves 'Was it worth it?'" He shook his head. "And even being certain that the answer is 'Yes. Yes, a generation of suffering now, however widespread, still weighs less than an eternal blight upon the freedom of the multiverse.' will not make it seem any lighter." He turned to look at me. "Do you consider that 'nothing'?"
  
  "Of course not." I was forced to agree. "But-" I shook my head. "That's the real reason I refused the medals, you know. There might or might not have been moral courage in what I did, but that's the only kind of courage I really can have now. Valor is defined as courage in the face of danger, and nothing is really dangerous to me. Except perhaps me." I finished ruefully.
  
  "Me personally, I just didn't want to be publicly praised for creating a bigger Crash than anything a million Ex Pacises and Winternights all put together could have dreamed of doing." Netcat said. "Even if, yes, it had to be done."
  
  "And I was mostly just a support caster on this run." Jane said. "No medals for me, thanks."
  
  "They're giving me one, and all I did was fix stuff and blast things." Firewatch said.
  
  "As well as me, and I simply sat in a prison camp for several weeks." Mrs. Tompion chimed in.
  
  "Did you know the Revered Elder for very long?" Jane asked her.
  
  "Oh for decades, off and on." Mrs. Tompion said. "Work as a defender of the magical community for long enough and eventually you'll all start showing up at the same events."
  
  "Never met him, except on the last day." Firewatch said. "But somebody had to help grandmum here."
  
  "He was one of the very, very few people who came to know me as well as you do." Sir Gareth said to me meaningfully. "And a much younger Gareth Somerset found him a helpful mentor at a time when I needed one."
  
  "I'm sorry - again - for your loss." I said.
  
  "Don't be." Sir Gareth replied calmly. "He knew even before he set out that day that he wouldn't be coming back. He'd already known for quite a long time, as had I. We just hadn't known why, not until the day finally drew close." He looked up meaningfully at the sky. "It's hardly the common way to do things, of course, but for people who get touched as deeply as he and I have been by certain forces... well, sometimes you just know."
  
  "Not you too, sir?!?" Firewatch cried, alarmed.
  
  "Not in the way you think, Charlotte." Sir Gareth said gently. "Unlike the Revered Elder I don't know how long I have before the day of my death. But I have had auguries for quite a while that my last war would also see my last day on Earth."
  
  "I don't understand." Jane said, shaking her head. "Unless...?"
  
  "Precisely." Sir Gareth agreed. "It's much the same reason you three are departing." He turned to the Tompions, elder and younger. "I've already said my goodbyes in private to the several people I absolutely could not depart without saying them to, but I'm afraid I'm sticking you with the unpleasant duty of making my excuses to everyone else. The older I've gotten, the more I despise making a fuss of things."
  
  Firewatch's next outburst was cut off by her grandmother squeezing her arm. "Just listen to him, dear, and he'll tell you."
  
  "The Dimensional Empire can't use any of its dimensional travel tech for centuries, or any close variant of it." I explained. "Not their Reality Gates, not their dimensional scout ships, not temporary slip-gates, not anything based on the same underlying principles. But even though none of those 'Order of the Infinite Star' adepts they had were individually much more powerful than your grandmother when she was younger, and many not even that powerful, the simple fact that that many of them could be gotten together for one expedition means that magic was a commonly practiced and understood thing in the Dimensional Empire."
  
  "They can't possibly rebulid an Empire just with what little that individual spellcasters can do, and we don't scale up on an industrial scale at all like their machines would." Mrs. Tompion agreed. "But they entirely could still do things like, oh, put together a dimensional revenge squad."
  
  "Or a dimensional revenge battalion, perhaps." Sir Gareth observed mildly.
  
  "And who, more than anyone else, would they be likely go for revenge on?" Netcat agreed. "Us three - me and Alex in particular - for having been the two biggest superweapons in the Empire's defeat, and Jane for being married to us. And Sir Gareth, for having been the field commander and the man who faced down Helmuth at the end."
  
  "So if you don't want dimensional terrorist anti-matter nukes going off in London trying to kill us. then we need to not be there." I agreed. "It needs to be publicly known far and wide that none of us are even in this dimension anymore. So while we'd already at least halfway decided to continue our dimensional journey after the war was over, after we figured this part out we'd definitely decided to be continuing it."
  
  "And as for me, I was more than approaching the age at which one should retire anyway." Sir Gareth said. "That I won't be taking that retirement on Earth was a bit of a surprise for me, but one that I can readily enough adapt to."
  
  "But where'll you be going?" Firewatch asked, sniffling.
  
  "Oh don't cry, dear. Lyonesse isn't that far away dimensionally. I even took you there once as a girl, don't you remember?" Mrs. Tompion reassured her. "I'm sure he'll still be available for visits."
  
  "We're going a bit farther than that, I'm afraid." I said. "After all, we're still a very long way from home. And we've still got some things left to explore. So for us, at least, I'm afraid this will be goodbye."
  
  "But first, I get my honeymoon." Jane said firmly. "I'm assuming that this Lyonesse place is nice and peaceful?"
  
  "Very much so." Mrs. Tompion affirmed, and Sir Gareth nodded as well.
  
  "Sounds good to me!" Netcat said. "So, how do we get there?"
  
  "Jane dear?" Mrs. Tompion said. "Do you feel up to another group casting?"
  
  "Ready when you are." she nodded, and with a flourish of a magical portal we were away.
  
  
  Author's Note: And so our time in Earth-Champions draws to a close, and I still have no idea where we go from here. So they take a bit of a dimensional vacation while I work on figuring that out.
  
  BTW, yes, the rationale our heroes have for leaving right away is both true on the face and an excuse they are partly using to not stick around and do something they find vastly uncomfortable (that is, be publicly celebrated for having killed the Dimensional Empire). Remember that one thing being true doesn't always mean the other thing is automatically false, and that the best rationalizations for doing things you want to do anyway are the ones that actually have validity.
  
  On a meta level, I feel like the pacing of this arc just up and galloped away out from under me towards the end. I feel like a guy whose horse bucked him off in the middle of putting the saddle on. Things took on a momentum of their own and my usual tight feel for the narrative seemed to unravel. Still, I'm not unhappy with the storyline or how it ended. I am definitely learning more about my limits as a writer, though.
  
  At any rate, yes, there was a whole huge 'Endgame' style battle that I barely described. You really can't describe something like that, not for pages and pages and pages. I have no idea how people who write comic book novels do it. Oh wait, mostly they don't either. Even Worm didn't actually put the details of Endbringer battles on stage.
  
  As for the shock value of killing people off at the very end... to quote David Weber, war stories where nobody you like dies are not military fiction, they are military pornography. However, given the op tempo of Blackhall's operations there really wasn't much chance for anyone to die earlier - they were fighting very smart and picking their times and places for maximum cheating, and the one trap the Empire actually sprang on them successfully was immediately crushed by Alex in maximum damage mode. The Battle of the Gate was the first battlefield they deployed on that was an extended full-scale assault out in the open, and over a scope where even Alex couldn't win the whole thing single-handed without people still being shot at elsewhere outside of his immediate span of control, and so this is where people died.
  
  Lastly, here remembers that one of my original objectives in doing this story was to try and gradually ease myself into the idea of writing lewds? Because I barely do. I've gotten dozens of chapters in before I realized 'hey, the last time we did anything really spicy was with that hot tub back in chapter 14'. I guess it's just not for me.
  
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  "And I pledge to do my absolute best for you, as you have always done your best for the corporation, so that we may move forward from this tragedy and return Ares Macrotechnology to the position it has always deserved to be in; the foremost provider of security, stability, and the tools to help ensure continued prosperity in the world. I thank you all for your confidence in me, and look forward to taking the reins my namesake originally held as your Chairman of the Board and CEO."
  
  I smiled inwardly to myself at hearing the young Nicholas Aurelius simultaneously remind all those present that the Ares megacorporation had originally been founded by his grandfather and subtly snub the prior incumbent of the seat he had just ascended to. Still, that had been a decision for a prior decade, and one that recent evidence had required him to review. Mountainshadow had always been the more brilliant of us two, but ironically the one least able to exercise a proper suspicion of the possible motives of others even as he simultaneously placed too little faith in the ability of mortal institutions to exercise good judgement of their own initiative.
  
  Which is why we'd had to arrange for the death of Damien Knight, the man my brother had helped wrest control of Ares away from the elder Aurelius in the first place. Our action had been prompted when our audit of Nadja Daviar's various malfeasances had turned up the disturbing revelation that Knight, in his hubris, had committed Ares to an insanely risky course of research into insect spirits. Multiple ages of the world had proven via painful and repeated experience that the invae simply could not be safely invoked, controlled, or assimilated over the long run; they were second only to the Horrors as a tool that was inevitably destined to eventually turn in the wielder's hand. And yet Knight had made the error of seeing them as simply another opponent that he could outmaneuver, or perhaps even to one day attempt to assimilate into himself in the delusion that he could control them. In hindsight it was entirely obvious that showing the man a glimpse of a world of immortals and elder powers that he could never hope to live among or wield himself had driven Damien Knight mad with envy, and so it was with some regret at his error into placing the man into a role beyond the ability of his spirit to withstand that my brother had arranged for his death.
  
  As we had yet to publicly reveal Mountainshadow's return to the land of the living - nor would we until after several other ploys we had set in motion reached a suitable stage, which we anticipated them doing within the next several months - it had fallen upon me to take up the role of Ares' latest board member, my brother and I having pooled our vast wealth to be in position to seize a suitable percentage of shares in the market frenzy touched off by Knight's death in a "tragic airplane crash". Meanwhile, we had arranged for the twelve percent of Ares originally held by my brother via 'Gavilan Ventures' to indirectly fall into the hands of the younger Aurelius as he leapt to take his own advantage at his rival's sudden demise, which along with the percentage of stock he'd managed to acquire on his own merits and the strength of his family name as the grandson of Ares' founder made him the obvious candidate for the next chairman and chief executive officer of the AAA megacorporation.
  
  The bulk of my brother's wealth had been divested into the Draco Foundation trust that was to have been administered by Nadja Daviar as his 'executor', so that it would be in position to revert to him if and when his original plans for his eventual return from the void beyond had come to fruition. Prince Ehran had been entirely willing to cooperate with us in ensuring that the faithless grave-robber met justice at the hands of her fellow immortal elves, a gesture they were entirely willing to agree to lest her grave betrayal of a Great Dragon risk the truce that had held between the dragons and the elves since the dawn of the Sixth World. I was currently serving as my brother's 'executor', with everything neatly arranged and ready to hand back to him as soon he was officially alive again.
  
  Now the actual bequests that had been made in my brother's will would still stand and not revert to him - for all that he had not actually perished he had legally been declared dead and his will put through probate, and so those transactions had been made in all good faith and the legal transfers of title would still be validated. So the twenty-two percent of Ares my brother had directly owned, as opposed to the twelve percent he had owned through the 'Gavilan Ventures' shell, would remain with Arthur Vogel as my brother's will had specified. Of course, ample room would still exist within all those bequests for leverage via lawsuits, public opinion campaigns, negotiations, and stock market gambits, given the complex and conditional nature of most of them and the oft-disappointing amounts of graft, fraud, and embezzlement that had occurred at the hands of Daviar and others of her ilk. And every single piece of that financial tapestry could be made to serve another goal of ours, both old and new.
  
  I had almost forgotten how satisfying a good, old-fashioned legal intrigue in the courts of the Younger Races could be when executed with skill. It had been a long, long time since my days as the kingmaker of Throal.
  
  I circulated amongst the guests at the post-board-meeting reception with my characteristic cool dignity, albeit with a slightly more approachable tone than my usual wont in acknowledgement of my new role as a megacorporate 'player' and not merely the harsh and forbidding sovereign of Denver. I traded a thin smile of not-challenge with Stone-Diver, also in his own humanform and attending as a distinguished megacorporate guest in his persona as a board member of our rival AAA megacorporation NeoNET, and then inwardly raised an eyebrow as he deliberately crossed the room to seek me out.
  
  "Ghostwalker." he addressed me politely, the etiquette of the situation allowing us to address each other by our common use-names - after all, those were the names that the mortals surrounding us knew us by and that were printed upon our invitations to this reception.
  
  "Celedyr." I acknowledged him in turn. "It fares well in Boston, then?" I made the de rigeur small talk that the situation demanded.
  
  "Well enough." he agreed, the subtleties of his posture making it plain to both of us that he was playing to the audience around us. "I was just wondering at your sudden entry into the AAA ranks, when I had thought your interests lay primarily in another form of empire-building."
  
  You know full well that the Conclave agreed the Loremaster's return was not to be publicly revealed until his chosen moment, Stone-Diver. I sighed inwardly to myself. "Well, when my brother's executor turned out to be such a faithless creature it was my clear duty to step forward and ensure that his estate was maintained as he would have wished it." I heard the sharp intake of breath from one of the nearby guests as I 'idly' confirmed the long-standing rumor that I was Dunkelzahn's brother while simultaneously re-affirming his 'death'.
  
  "Of course." he agreed urbanely. "I was just wondering if it had truly been his intent that another of us arise to challenge Gold-Master in his chosen sphere of dominance, or if that were your own idea."
  
  "I recall rather conspicuously avoiding challenging him upon our last meeting." I replied dryly, and with a tilt of his head too insignificant for any of the younger folk around us to perceive Stone-Diver acknowledged the touch. "I wish him nothing but good fortune in his future endeavors." I continued to heap on the coals.
  
  "The gracious diplomat, as always." he replied with a touch of irony and... disappointment? We made the usual polite formulas of farewell to each other and moved on.
  
  So, my brother's gesture of forbearance at not formally censuring or penalizing Gold-Master for any of his actions galls at him just as we knew it would. After all, one of the purposes of punishment is to clearly delineate when the malefactor has been punished, and 'paid their debt to society' as it were. But a debt that is never invoked can never be repaid, and so the shame would linger indefinitely. And thus Gold-Master reaches out to ambitious ones like Stone-Diver, sending them to try and draw me into offering an insult that would allow him to begin to reframe himself as the wronged party and eventually be in a position to demand recompense and forbearance. Such a pity we've seen that one before.
  
  I sighed to myself at the reminder of why I had always found dragon politics to be far more tedious than mortal politics. At least with the Younger Races each new generation would bring new surprises, but an opponent often became wearily predictable after the first ten thousand years or so.
  
  "Ghostwalker." I returned my attention to the party in time to see Nicholas Aurelius coming up to greet me. "I thought you'd appreciate my personally bringing you the news. The Corporate Court has just finished ratifying all of the relevant transactions; as of ECSE market close today you are officially the single largest stockholder in Ares after myself, at twenty-four percent."
  
  "And if I recall correctly, you were yourself positioned solidly in the plurality at twenty-nine." I acknowledged him. "Leaving us two and Arthur Vogel as Ares' new ruling triumvirate, with all other board members and minor shareholders relegated to the remaining twenty-five."
  
  "Exactly." he agreed. "Will you be in Detroit for long? I would entirely welcome a chance to have you and Arthur in for a quiet, personal discussion."
  
  "I have no pressing business for the remainder of the weekend." I nodded back to him. "My assistant Mr. Whitebird can coordinate my availability with your staff, whenever is most convenient for you."
  
  "Glad to hear it!" the vigorous young man in his 30s affirmed, and we politely shook hands and continued on our respective ways.
  
  As no one expected a Great Dragon among humans to do more than the minimum necessary cocktail-party chat for purposes of diplomacy, I was able to escape to the balcony deck less than ten minutes later. Although I had no personal security attending this function with me - after all, I hardly needed any - the simple fact of my presence ensured that I was given a respectfully wide berth as I stood on the top of the Ares corporate tower in Detroit, looking up at the barely-visible stars amongst the urban skyblaze.
  
  Is it done? my brother's dragonspeech came softly to me, as his astral form flickered into visibility - for me, at least, even if no one else here other than possibly Stone-Diver could have perceived it through his Masking - alongside me. His astral barrier spell rose and merged with my own, to give us privacy against even that contingency.
  
  It is. Ares is now in play for us, and the younger Aurelius will not fall into Knight's errors and envy because as far as he knows my participation here is solely for motives equaling Gold-Master's or Stone-Diver's. I thought back.
  
  Because unlike with Damien, we are not either arousing his resentment by attempting to play him as a pawn nor his impossible envy by showing him immortality and powers that he, as an un-Awakened human, can never even hope to aspire to. Far-Scholar sighed. I blame myself for his death, even though he died at our hands. It should never have been necessary to kill him.
  
  No brother, it should not have. I ruthlessly agreed with him. But even though you may have misjudged the limits of his temperance and wisdom, it was his still willing choice to betray not merely you but all of mortal existence. If even anonymous shadowrunners know the existential treason that is treating with the invae, a scion of his prominence has no excuse.
  
  Yes, but it is still necessary to mourn our foes. my older brother reminded me as he had many a time. After all, compassion for those we like is easy. It is maintaining that state of mind even towards those who disappoint us that is hard.
  
  True enough. I agreed with him. Still, it goes well on your end?
  
  It does. he agreed. The Orange Queen is in position to take advantage of the recent shake-ups among Horizon that the Kincaids so ably caused, and I have just finished negotiations with Buttercup. With inroads to Horizon, Evo, and now Ares, that is a full third of the Corporate Court that we will have under our influence. Which is more than enough to ensure that even if they realize its existence in time, Project Archimedes will still not be interfered with until it is too late for the 'Powers That Be' to stop.
  
  And the elves? I inquired.
  
  Remain the elves, as always. my brother replied amusedly. Still, with both Ehran and Caimbuel solidly in our corner, Surehand is pragmatic enough to follow their lead... particularly since the more material profits involved do not primarily motivate us, and can thus be lavishly shared at need. The Blood Queen will of course act against us both due to her bigotries and out of sheer contrariness at her longtime rivals doing otherwise, but as you know even better than I do a sufficiently predictable opponent is almost as good as an ally.
  
  And, of course, the forces of darkness are still in massive disarray between the Great Banishing having destroyed every Horror-Marked cultist and blood spirit in our sphere and the destruction that was so recently visited upon the Black Lodge. So the major unplanned variable on our horizon is Gold-Master. In light of which... I rapidly brought him up to speed on tonight's interactions and their likely meaning.
  
  So, he seeks to ally with Stone-Diver. And through him, Richard Villiers and NeoNET. Far-Scholar acknowledged. So long as it remains merely corporate competition, we will confine our responses to being within those rules both written and unwritten. In fact, you should allow Gold-Master some small victories there - provided that we can both afford them and you can guarantee that he does not realize you are 'taking a dive'. The current cage of informal shame we have him restrained within galls him enough; were he to realize that we were actually showing him charity then he might well entirely lose his composure.
  
  And I agree with you that to slay him would be a tragic waste indeed. I acknowledged. Fortunately, provided we do not push him entirely over the mental brink we can rely upon the very relentlessness of his competence to hold him back from any actions that would require us to destroy him. He knows full well he cannot hope to Challenge either of us, let alone both of us. I took a brief refuge in a recitation of the obvious.
  
  Indeed, we are both Mother's children in that regard. my brother sighed with melancholy.
  
  Something troubles you? I asked him.
  
  A lie of omission, that I told several months ago. he replied.
  
  Not to me, I hope. I jested. Of course we had each deceived each other before, in various things, but even brothers competed with each other. I still trusted him absolutely to never lie to me about anything significant, and he likewise placed similar trust in me.
  
  No, to Alexander, and Catherine, and Jane. he confessed. I had told them the truth about Lofwyr's binding upon Alexander, and how long it would take to fade. I did not tell them that I had the power and knowledge to break it myself.
  
  So you ensured they would be absent from the world for several decades at the minimum... when they could have returned immediately? I asked him, mildly shocked at what I had just heard. I cannot believe you would do so out of malice or greed, or be unable to see what a useful ally that one as unconquerable as our mother had been would be. So what compelled you?
  
  Fear. he confessed to me soberly. We have never spoken of those tragic final days before... you had never asked me, and I had thought you never wished to know-
  
  And I still do not. I agreed. But for you to raise the topic at all means that you think I need to know. So what occurred in Mother's final days that I was not aware of?
  
  Before she took her own life, she told me why she was going to. he shocked me to my core by replying.
  
  TELL ME! I demanded. Did you think that- I restrained my anger. No, my brother was correct. I had been adamant that I did not wish to discuss that topic in any way, shape, manner or form, and he had only been respecting my wishes to avoid doing so. Although I was not unaware of how his mind worked, and knew that he would have disregarded those wishes and told me anyway... if he had thought I needed to know. Which I obviously hadn't for all the intervening millenia, so why now?
  
  Again, my lie was one of omission. Despair did indeed move her hand to claw at her own throat, but not only despair. There was also fear. And love. he said, as the astral barriers held tightly around us thickened to such an extent that out of all things that had ever walked this Earth, only All-Wings - or Alexander Kincaid - could have breached them.
  
  Love? But- With that final piece of data, my mind deduced the most likely conclusion. Of course. Neither one could suffer the other to live.
  
  Correct. my brother nodded soberly. If Mother had not died, then the Great Hunter would have returned again, and again, and again, until one of them was finally dead. Two such nigh-invincible entities, so fundamentally incompatible in ethos, could not indefinitely share the same multiverse. And for all that our elder brothers and sisters were already lost, we were still alive. What mother could possibly bear to have such a cataclysmic battle occur where her children would be consumed within it?
  
  None that we were ever familiar with. I agreed. And as a dragon, to leave the Earth's manasphere that we are dependent on would have meant perishing anyway. So without the option of moving the conflict safely away from us, she ended her life on her own terms so as to delay that final battle indefinitely. But whatever mysterious power had made our mother unconquerable eventually returned, embodied in a human of all entities.
  
  A human who Gold-Master was entirely correct in deducing would need to be exiled from this world to keep the Great Hunter from ever returning to it, even if he did not fully understand why. my brother sadly agreed. And one whom I ensured would not return here, not until the unresolved matter between the Unconquerable and the Dark One is finally resolved.
  
  But you did not remotely have the time to prepare him for such a battle! I said. What fate befalls the multiverse, befalls us all, if he loses? I asked urgently.
  
  I am as certain as I can be of anything that he will not be defeated. Far-Scholar reassured me soberly. I just pray that whatever price he pays for that victory, it is one he can accept.
  
  
  
  Author's Note: Yes, I was stalled on this for a very long time. But my finally admitting to myself that I was never going to resume writing my other story freed up something in my brain long enough for me to at least work out an interlude and some foreshadowing.
   As for the actual story? Don't expect another update soon; I'm still stuck on where would be a good place to go next. Ironically, I already know a lot of what I want to do after I get there, at least regarding character development and themes (which are the main driving force of this fic, because as the Big D just lampshaded it's certainly not the dramatic tension of wondering if our protagonist will win the next fight). But hey, it's not dead yet, and I don't intend it to be, so enjoy!
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