While Nuclear Winter was making his debut, Adam Thacker was reclaiming his investment. The matrix inquiry had geolocated his power pad at an address which Adam determined was a research lab called Direct Data Assessments, a technology analysis contractor that worked exclusively for a subsidiary of a subsidiary of what was ultimately Aztechnology.
Certainly he had no qualms about harming their operations. Normally there would be weeks of observation and planning, watching news feeds and stock fluctuations to determine when the building would be at its most vulnerable. Scheduled maintenance was always the best in-road to a corporate building... Be untouchable. Be invisible. No one wanted to look at the ones making the world turn. Lie your way in, because power comes from lying.
But such methods relied on his power pad to spoof and imitate credentials and disable security systems, and the pad was the very thing he was trying to get. This had to be low-tech, this had to be old-fashioned.
He had walked up to Direct Data Assessments intending just to case it, get the lay of the land, see what the volume of traffic was like, the quality of clientele, the uniforms of the security and of the contractors going in to work. All the first steps to a successful deception, a profitable theft.
Yet as he stood on the sidewalk looking up at the building, feeling people stream around him meeting the ghosts of their future selves and leaving behind their echoes, a jagged bitterness that Adam Thacker had felt bubbling in him his whole life started to bubble up.
He was sick of deception, sick of pretending. Sick of being the thief when the real thieves were the ones running the rigged tables, holding all the cards and pissing on the people with nothing. He could steal orichalcum for the rest of his life and it would never make a difference to the rest of the world.
Yeah, this would be real, real low tech. Real loud, real old-fashioned. Time to tell the truth, and get back what was his.
From the perspective of the staff and security, as they would later recount it, a man marched into the lobby and immediately attracted attention by stepping through the metal detectors and triggering an audible alarm, implying the presence of so much metal that he was either entirely cybernetic or carrying an arsenal under his thin red jacket with the white sleeves. When personnel approached him telling him to stop he took a long, slow look around the lobby without any apparent concern for the tasers being drawn by the guards.
When one of them raised it into a firing position and ordered him to get on the ground, that's when the magic started. The man--later positively identified on the footage from the surveillance cameras--moved with a shocking speed only possible through state of the art technology or the most powerful magic on the market. He dodged the taser darts by a kilometer and closed the distance to the guard in what witnesses described as the blink of an eye, cocking him across the chin and then socking him in the stomach so hard it lifted the man off his feet, after which he dropped to his knees holding his stomach.
What followed was a demonstration of what a thoroughly magic-assisted person could do if they set their mind to it. Contrary to what criminal pathologists typically understood the obvious mage also had no trouble accessing terminals when he needed to open a door and also knew his way around the wiring of automated turrets in the higher security area, the gunfire from which he was able to dodge as easily as he avoided manual shots from armed guards.
Eventually characterized as "a one-man shadowrunner team attacking a street-facing building in broad daylight," he made his way to the second-highest floor of Direct Data Assessments and broke into an unverified models locker holding a single customized commpad that so far the company had been unable to access.
An Aztechnology response team was on the scene within twenty-one minutes of the metal detector alarm going off but when they rushed the corridor that the unverified models department was in, the intruder was nowhere to be found.
Bafflingly, security footage reviewed from just before the incident showed the suspect exiting the building from its front door... twenty-one minutes before he walked through it and set off the alarm. It should have garnered more attention but an hour later someone turned an investment company's building into a radioactive tomb.
= = =
"Hey hey, burned away! In the night on fire and the sunless day! Haw haw, rule of law! Biggest lie you ever saw!"
Brandt waved his hand to get Diana's attention. He asked, "What do you see out here?"
His partner scanned the crowds beyond the light-tape, scanned the ranks of officers inside the buffer zone, scanned the building they were keeping people away from. Swallowed audibly, no doubt unsettled by the green glow from inside. It was awfully unsettling.
"A terrorist attack," Diana said carefully, "People terrified, and too curious. Us, trying to keep order. Succeeding, so far."
"All correct," Asher said, looking down the street at nothing in particular, hands in his coat pockets. "You've got your eyes out for emergencies. Anything peculiar. Good habit in a peacekeeper."
"But you think I'm missing something," Diana guessed, crossing her arms.
Across the street at the back of the milling crowd the woman with the battered guitar continued to strum it, singing at a volume just barely audible beneath the din.
"Small wars here, and big crimes there... Make such a fine excuse! To put your life in the hands of the Man, who will never turn you loose!"
"I wouldn't say you're missing something," Brandt explained. "What you're failing to employ is your imagination."
Diana pursed her lips. "I don't recall that being a category on the Academy exam."
"It wasn't," he confirmed. "It's hard to teach in a classroom. How often do you see street musicians here in San Francisco?"
She looked across the street and Brandt spoke. "Don't look at her. Think of the answer."
Doing as ordered, Diana looked the other direction down the street. "They're far more common here than they are in Seattle," she remarked. "The Free State has a reputation for cultural enrichment."
"It does," Brandt agreed. "Well-earned. How many of them play without a hat or case in front of them in the event some charitable SINner wants to throw them a C-bill because they like the song?"
Now she was picking up on it. "Why come to play to a crowd without any intent to capitalize on it?"
"Might be," Asher theorized, "A musician that was an enemy of corporations doesn't want money."
"Trade your freedom and rights away, for their sworn security... Trash the Earth and spoil the waters for a sound economy!"
"And," Brandt added at last, "How many of them sing songs about nuclear weapons?"
"Was it war or 'just pollution' that ate a hole in the sky? Watch our bosses run for cover and leave us here to die!"
Diana turned her head to look straight towards the musician. "Are we going to arrest her?"
"No," Brandt said firmly, "We're just going to ask her a few questions. Far as we know she hasn't committed a crime. We're going to make our way slowly across the street and then converge. Got me?"
"Understood," Diana said. Asher wasn't so sure.
His doubts proved well-founded when after getting across the street, instead of waiting for Brandt to do the same, Diana called out to the musician while still thirty steps away. "Hey you! Hold it right there!"
Fuck. Diana would be a good detective, the day she dropped the beat cop behavior. And of course the musician rabbitted immediately, clumsily getting to her feet and starting to sprint away from the approaching Diana with guitar in one hand.
There was nothing for it. Asher darted around a gawking ork in a white button-up shirt and started after the street guitarist, aiming to cut her off and taking in details as he did so. Thin brows, neck-length brown hair contained mostly by a hijab, pattern of movement suggesting little in the way of regular physical activity but plenty in the way of desire not to be questioned. Adrenaline could do some game-changing things.
He followed her into an alleyway, between what he'd later ascertain was a warehouse for designer feng-shui furniture and a repair facility for solar panels. When Asher had gained on her he drew his Warhawk and pointed it down the alleyway, shouting at his fleeing quarry's back. "Halt! Stop, damn it!"
She didn't stop and Asher swore, lowering the gun to sprint more vigorously. The suspect broke from the alleyway onto Sansome street and fled over the road without looking. A grey car screeched to a stop just soon enough to keep from hitting her and Asher had to leap over its hood to keep up, gun in hand.
When they hit the other alley, this time between a gym full of oblivious exercising SINners and a currently closed seasonal museum, Asher was within tackling range. He gave one more command to stop and when it went unheeded he readied to throw himself forward.
That was when someone threw a metal trash can from an open bay door, striking Asher in the head as he passed. Brandt went down instantly, his gun clattering to the ground.
The next few minutes were perhaps forgivably blurry for him. Holding his head, Brandt got to his knees just in time for someone's booted foot to hit him in the shoulder, putting him onto his side against the gym's exterior brick wall before hitting him in the ribs with enough force to crack two of them. He braced himself for further impact but instead there were hurried steps away, and the scrape of the Warhawk being picked up off the ground. A second later the street musician cried out.
"Liam, don't!!"
What followed was two muted clicks, a grunt of frustration as the attacker realized the gun wasn't loaded and then the sound of a brief struggle, the firearm clattering back to the ground.
"No one is supposed to get hurt!" The musician. The man--based on his build--responded hotly in a breathless voice.
"Pigs get the rope, Nova! He's one of them!"
Through the blood over his eyebrows Brandt couldn't quite make out their faces--one wrapped in the hijab, the other heavily bearded and unkempt with glasses emerging from his face jungle--but could see that the musician was trying to pull him away.
"It doesn't matter!" she said, "He's a metahuman being! Come on, before more come!"
Reluctantly the man let himself be pulled away, pointing with one finger in Brandt's direction. "You're gettin' off easy, asshole!"
Still holding his head Brandt slid down the side of the gym wall and watched them get smaller down the alleyway. Before they were gone Diana came into his view, her pistol in both hands. She glanced once at the fleeing suspects, seemed to consider taking a shot, then turned away to drop to Brandt and start checking him over.
