“You sure you got the right deets?”
The pale skin of her arm was marred by something dark and splotchy. She picked at it, the mark consuming her focus more than the holographic image being projected above the terminal at her desk. The silhouette of the shadowed visage filled the view, and would have shown her just as shrouded in both shape and behavior. The tiny artificial intelligence powering the concealment didn’t care how well she paid attention, it was set to ignore her boredom and distraction, or mouthed expletives she didn’t dare voice to a few more sensitive contacts.
“I got 'em, don’t worry.”
This one was far from sensitive, giving Daiya plenty of time to pick at her skin. It wouldn’t lift for her nail, or the rub of a licked tongue, so she contented herself by just frowning at it. Not much she could do until the call was over, and at some point that was going to demand her attention. A wave of her hand brought up the message her contact sent her, pausing to wait for the decryption scripts to run first before its contents could be verified as clean and ready to view.
“See, now I have to,” the young shadowrunner put in, still bored by the wait involved. Numbers slowly crawled up her screen as the terminal did the hard work of crunching the encryption into something anyone could read, not that it would share much with her. Two centuries of computing, and none of the techheads could just make a simple loading bar that didn’t suck. “No one says ‘don’t worry’ without a reason to worry about.”
“You’re thinking too hard about it.”
Daiya shook her head, hoping that motion would translate out to the avatar of herself on the contact’s end. For her part, she didn’t even know if this one was a man or woman. They were just one of the few who had seamlessly accepted a change in personality after she’d picked through which of Holloway’s old resources to continue persuing. Others had needed…far more convincing. “That’s a new one. Peeps are usually telling me I’m not thinking hard enough.”
A second later, the young shadowrunner caught a breath in her throat. Sharing too much information could let her own identity slip, and even being the Pink Widow couldn’t protect her from the level of confidentiality being violated. Some craft Seccer might see it as a point of pride to bust down her door and drag her off in chains, for that matter. The knot in her stomach hardly loosened when the stoic contact made a casual remark in return.
“First time for everything.”
“Yeah, and it’ll be the last time if you’re feeding me shit.” With her playful mood evaporated, it was lucky timing for her that the screen flipped over to a loaded layout of the documents, fluttering in like a pack of cards. Daiya blew out a breath, less relief than it was to steel herself for the reading. There were no automated assistants for this one, not unless the teen really wanted to get caught. Just her own eyes and instinct to flip through the pages, sorting out the videos and clips to check later.
“It’s solid intel, I swear on my mother’s grave.”
From everything Daiya was seeing, her contact was speaking the truth. All except for the grave part, anyway. The cache of equipment, the radio frequencies, the schedules, it was all there. A little lacking in anything more than the names on the scheduled crew, but what more than made up for it left the young shadowrunner speechless. For only a moment, it was almost hard to think with all the silence now. “Her grave? I thought she got turned into dust and mixed with bread flour.”
Dust is what they’d be themselves if this password she was reading in these files was wrong.
The amusing snort on the other side gave Daiya a grin of her own to wear. She was almost sad their silhouettes would never reflect it, and the knot in her stomach gave a lurch. She ignored it. “Pretty sure I had a bite of your mother in my morning toast.”
“Fine, fine, you can come kill me yourself if this doesn’t work out.” Daiya could have sworn she heard the resignation in the remodulated voice coming through. That hit was too close to home, for both of them. If her contact had any idea who they were talking to, really, it would have been in poor taste. Even worse than the ground-up dead rumored to be in their every meal.
“You won’t even have to, guess that’s the beauty of this.” Daiya pulled out her mobile and touched a few of its controls, before looking back up at the screen. It was an odd gesture, there was nothing familiar to look at there, somehow it just felt right to look into the silhouette’s “eyes.” More human, almost. “Mohs on the way, thanks.”
“Got 'em. Good luck, take care of yourself out there.”
The contact winked out without a chance to respond, but she didn’t need it. What the young shadowrunner was going to need was a lot of guts for this one. Even if it was just an unmanned installation, Darkwire had never taken on the city’s weaponry MegaCorp directly, not while she’d been with them. And for her part, courage was only one of the ingredients needed to pull off this job correctly.
For a teen who had been born on the moon, she didn’t even own a spacesuit.
As she bounced to the beat later in Silkscreen, Daiya kept an eye on the other Shadowrunners who showed up. It was risky, meeting all in person like this, but not one of them needed to say a word. Only listen as their headphones were switched to a channel filled first with static, and do their best to keep up with the movement of the crowd as a voice spoke over the headphones, delivering the words she’d written out earlier for the Darkwire Prophet to speak.
[!silkscreen]
Attention @Darkwire, the future has spoken.In three hours, a HER ground-based receiver will go dark, blind to all. That silence is ours for the taking.
You will brave the conditions of the surface, full vacuum kits required. Data lines buried deep are exposed here to be cut into and spliced. Under our direction, they will speak to a new master, and register to HER as nothing more than lunar noise.
Speak the passwords. Align the splice to the new frequencies. Follow instructions. You will find these already known to you through the whispers of my voice to your neuroport.
Be the ghost. Do not tarry. Leave no trace. When the future has come to pass, NextGen will pay the prophet’s due.
